The Second Saladin Read Online Free PDF

afternoon with rum-and-Cokes at a table near a pinball machine in an empty room. He smoked half a pack of Vantages. He set the glasses before him in a neat formation. He had five of them at the end.
    He’s got to come, he thought. He’ll think it over; he’ll see it’s just as much his job as anybody’s. Ulu Beg is a loose end of a Chardy operation, no matter that Chardy was kicked out, no matter that he’s been hiding out here, playing schoolteacher all these years. He has to come, Bill thought, wobbly.
    It’s his legacy. He stood for something, all those years. He was one of the heroes, one of the cowboys, and thething about the cowboys, they never said no. Nothing was too hairy for a cowboy. They were crazy, some people said, they were animals; and lots of the staff couldn’t stand them. But when you needed a cowboy, he was there, he went in. He lived for going in; it’s why he became a cowboy in the first place, wasn’t it?
    Bill tried to convince himself. He looked at his Seiko and had trouble reading the hands. He’d had too much to drink; he knew it.
    “You okay, mister?” The waitress, looking down at him.
    “Sure, I’m fine.”
    “You better call it quits,” she said.
    “Truer words,” he said, laughing grandly, “was never spoke.”
    The traffic had gotten pretty thick and he didn’t reach Our Lady of the Resurrection until 5:15. He parked again in the visitors’ space and walked across the empty playground to the school and entered.
    He blinked in the darkness. Children’s paintings hung along the dim corridor. Speight thought them absurd, cows and barns and airplanes with both wings on the same side of the fuselage. The crucifixes made him nervous, too, all that agony up there on bland, pale green walls. He encountered a nun and overdid the smile, worried she’d smell the booze or pick up on the vagueness in his walk. But she only smiled back, a surprisingly young girl. Next he found a group of boys, scrawny and sweaty in gym clothes, herding into a locker room. They seemed so young, their bones so tiny, their faces so drawn, like child laborers in some Dickensian blacking factory. But one was bigger, a black boy, probably the star.
    “Is Mr. Chardy around, son?” Speight asked him.
    “Back there,” the boy said, pointing down the hall.
    The destination turned out to be an old gym, waxyyellow under weak lights that hung in cages too low off the raftered ceiling. They must have built this place twenty years before they built their slick glass-and-brick cathedral. One end of it was an auditorium, with a stageful of amateurish props for what would be some dreadful production. Speight saw Chardy, in gray sweats, a wet double dark spot like Mickey Mouse ears growing splotchily across his chest, with some kind of bright band, like an Indian brave or something, around his head at the hairline. He wore white high-topped gym shoes and was methodically sinking one-handed jump shots from twenty or twenty-five feet out. He’d dribble once or twice, the sound of full, round leather against the wood echoing through the still air, then seize the ball and seem to weigh it. Then the ball rode his fingers up to his shoulders, paused, and was launched, even as Chardy himself left the floor. The ball rose perfectly, then fell and, more often than not as Speight watched, swished through. Occasionally it did miss, however, and then the bearded man would lazily gallop after it and scoop it off the bounce one-handed, and turn and rise and fire again, and he looked pretty good for a man—what, now?—nearly forty. He did not miss twice in a row in the ten silent minutes Bill stood in the doorway watching him.
    At last Bill called, “You’re still a star.”
    Chardy did not look over. He completed another shot, then answered, “Still got the touch.”
    His talent with a ball was one part of the legend. During his two stateside tours—disasters in other respects—he’d torn up the Langley gym league, where