Legends

“Sounds foreign to me,” Leroy was saying. “Don’t like foreigners, don’t like the languages they talk. Don’t know why foreigners don’t learn American. Make the world simpler if everyone talked American, is how I see it.”

Lincoln couldn’t resist baiting Leroy. “You want them to talk American with a Texas drawl like you or a clipped Boston accent like John Kennedy?”

Leroy took the question seriously. “Don’t matter none to me. Any American beats out a foreign language, hands down.”

Near midnight, as the girls began to drift over to the bar to settle up what they owed for the rooms they’d used, the fat Arab boy who’d been doing the jigsaw puzzle in Ciudad del Este burst into the bar. He was still wearing the shoulder holster with the plastic grip of a toy gun jutting from it. Spotting the two Americans in the rear booth, he padded over on his Reeboks and thrust out a folded note. Leroy read it and raised his eyes and cried out excitedly, “Bingo, Lincoln. Daoud is waiting for us behind the bar.”

Daoud’s coal black Mercedes was idling in the shadows at the street end of the alley when the two Yankees, the one with the cane limping along behind the short American in cowboy boots, came around the side of the Kit Kat and settled into the backseat. The fat Arab boy slid in next to Daoud in front. “Where are you taking us?” Lincoln asked, but Daoud didn’t bother to reply. He gestured to the driver and the car lurched past the halal butcher shop on the corner into the poorly lit main drag and headed in the direction of the Little Dipper and Polaris, hanging in the night sky over the rooftops. Twenty minutes out of Foz do Iguaçú the paved road abruptly gave way to a rutted dirt track and the driver had to slow down to keep the passengers from hitting their heads against the roof of the car. In the headlights, Indians leading donkeys piled high with burlap sacks could be seen stumbling through the pitch darkness. “In the outback,” Leroy told Lincoln, “lot of smuggling goes on during the night.” After one particularly rough bump Daoud flung an arm over the shoulder of the fat teenager and said something to him in Arabic. The boy said, “Inch’Allah.”

Lincoln leaned forward to ask the Egyptian if the boy were his son. Daoud turned his head only slightly and said, “He is the son of my son.”

“And where is his father?”

“His father, my son, was killed in the attack on the American Marines at Beirut Airport in 1983.”

Lincoln reminded himself he was living deep in a legend; that he ought to be commiserating with the Egyptian. “It must be a source of great sadness to have lost your son—”

“It is a source of great pride to have given a son to the jihad. Along with my son, two hundred and forty one American marines and sailors lost their lives in the Beirut attack, after which your President Reagan lost his nerve and disengaged from Lebanon. Every father should have such a son.”

An hour and twenty minutes out of Foz de Iguaçú, the headlights of the Mercedes picked up the first of two road blocks. Soon after the second one, located beyond a sharp curve in the track, the car slowed to give three armed men with red-and-white checkered kaffiyehs over their faces time to drag open a chain-link gate. One of the guards said something into a walkie-talkie as he waved the Mercedes through. The driver headed downhill toward a group of wooden army barracks set in what looked like a dry river bed and pulled up before a structure that was lower and wider than the other buildings. On a flat rise behind the barracks, in a dirt field illuminated by floodlights powered by a gasoline-driven motor whose put-put was audible in the still night air, a dozen men in khaki fatigues were practicing penalty shots against a goalie outfitted in a yellow Hertz jumpsuit. When one of them scored, Lincoln could make out the other players taunting the guardian.

Daoud’s grandson darted from the Mercedes to pull open a narrow door in the side of the building. The young Pakistani whom Lincoln had seen dancing at the Kit Kat with Leroy’s jailbait hooker stood in the corridor inside the door, an Israeli Uzi with spare clips taped to the folding metal stock tucked under an arm, his finger on the trigger. He tensed when he saw the two Americans and muttered something to Daoud, who translated. “He wants to know if you are armed.” Lincoln, laughing, reached under his shirt behind his back and pulled the small-caliber automatic from the holster worn high on his belt so that it would disappear into the shrapnel wound. The Pakistani took the automatic and waved the party through.