Mao II - Don Delillo [40]
“She wasn’t the trouble. You were the trouble.”
“Either way,” Bill said.
Charlie’s face was broad, with a healthy flush, the windburn that fills the mirror behind the yacht-club bar. Thin pale hair cut short. The custom suit. The traditional loud tie that preserved a link to collegiate fun, that reminded people he was still Charlie E. and this was still supposed to be the book business, not global war through laser technology.
“Those years seem awfully clear to me. And they keep adding on. New things come back all the time. I find myself recalling scraps of dialogue from 1955.”
“Be careful, you’ll end up writing this stuff down.”
“If I live and live and live, boringly into my middle eighties, I wonder how much I’ll be able to add to the pleasure of those memories, the intense conversations, all those endless dinners and drinks and arguments we all had. We used to come out of a bar at three a.m. and talk on a street corner because there was so much we still had to say to each other, there were arguments we’d only scratched the surface of. Writing, painting, women, jazz, politics, history, baseball, every damn thing under the sun. I never wanted to go home, Bill. And when I finally got home I couldn’t sleep. The talk kept buzzing in my head.”
“Eleanor Baumann.”
“God yes. Fantastic woman.”
“She was smarter than both of us put together.”
“Crazier too, unfortunately.”
“Strange-smelling breath,” Bill said.
“Fantastic letters. She wrote me a hundred amazing letters.”
“What did they smell like?”
“For years. I have years of letters from that woman.”
Charlie sat parallel to his desk, legs extended, his hands joined behind his neck.
“I was glad to hear from you,” he said. “I talked to Brita Nilsson when she got back and she wouldn’t tell me anything except that she passed on my message. Took you a while to call.”
“I was working.”
“And it’s going well?”
“We don’t talk about that.”
“Took you a month. I’ve always thought I understood precisely why you went into isolation.”
“Is that what we’re here to talk about?”
“You have a twisted sense of the writer’s place in society. You think the writer belongs at the far margin, doing dangerous things. In Central America, writers carry guns. They have to. And this has always been your idea of the way it ought to be. The state should want to kill all writers. Every government, every group that holds power or aspires to power should feel so threatened by writers that they hunt them down, everywhere.”
“I’ve done no dangerous things.”
“No. But you’ve lived out the vision anyway.”
“So my life is a kind of simulation.”
“Not exactly. There’s nothing false about it. You’ve actually become a hunted man.”
“I see.”
“And that’s what we’re here to talk about. There’s a young man held hostage in Beirut. He’s Swiss, a UN worker who was doing research on health care in the Palestinian camps. He’s also a poet. Published maybe fifteen short poems in French-language journals. We know next to nothing about the group that has him. The hostage is the only proof they exist.”
“What’s your involvement?”
“I’m chairman of a high-minded committee on free expression. We’re mainly academics and publishing people and we’re just getting started and this is the crazy part of the whole business. This group takes a hostage simply because he’s there, he’s available, and he apparently tells them he’s a poet and what is the first thing they do? They contact us. They have a fellow in Athens who calls our London office and says, There’s a writer chained to a wall in a bare room in Beirut. If you want him back, maybe we can do a deal.”
“Buy me lunch, Charlie. I’ve come all this way.”
“Wait, now listen. I’ve been talking to the chap in Athens whenever I can reach him. On and off for weeks. Sometimes his phone rings, sometimes I hear an oceanic roar, sometimes he’s there and sometimes he’s not. We’ve finally agreed on a plan. We want to have a news conference, small and tightly controlled. Day after tomorrow in London. We talk about the captive writer. We talk about the group that has him. And then I announce