“No, thanks,” Coffey said. “I have enough trouble retaining all the goddamn information I’m supposed to learn. I’m getting old, y’know.”
“You’re thirty-nine,” Katzen said.
“Not much longer,” Coffey said. “I was born forty years ago tomorrow.”
Katzen grinned. “Well, happy birthday, counselor.”
“Thanks,” Coffey said, “but it won’t be. Like I said, I’m getting old, Phil.”
“Don’t knock it,” Katzen said. He pointed toward Sanliurfa. “When that place was young, forty was old. Back then most people lived to be about twenty. And not a healthy twenty at that. They were plagued by rotten teeth, broken bones, bad eyesight, athlete’s foot, you-name-it. Hell, today the voting age in Turkey is twenty-one. Do you realize that ancient leaders in places like Uludere, Sirnak, and Batman couldn’t even have voted for themselves?”
Coffey looked at him. “There’s a place called Batman?”
“Right on the Tigris,” Katzen said. “See? There’s always something new to learn. I spent a couple hours this morning learning about the ROC. Helluva machine Matt and Mary Rose designed. Knowledge keeps you young, Lowell.”
“Learning about Batman and the ROC aren’t exactly things to live for,” Coffey said. “And as far as your ancient Turks are concerned, with all the planting and sowing and irrigating and rock-hauling those people did, forty years old probably felt like eighty.”
“True enough.”
“And their life’s work was probably the same job they’d been doing since they were ten,” Coffey said. “Nowadays we’re supposed to live longer and evolve, professionally.”
“You trying to say you haven’t?” Katzen asked.
“I’ve evolved like the dodo,” Coffey said. “Stasis and then extinction. By this time in my life I always thought I’d be an international heavy hitter, working for the President and negotiating trade and peace accords.”
“Ease up, Lowell..” Katzen said. “You’re in the arena.”
“Yeah,” Coffey replied. “The nosebleed seats. I’m working for a low-profile government agency nobody’s ever heard of—”
“Low-profile doesn’t mean lack of distinction,” Katzen pointed out.
“It does in my end of the arena,” Coffey replied. “I work in a basement at Andrews Air Force Base—not even Washington, D.C., for God’s sake—brokering necessary but unexciting deals with grudgingly hospitable nations like Turkey so that we can all spy on even less hospitable nations like Syria. On top of that, I’m roasting in the freakin’ desert, sweat running down my legs into my goddamn socks, instead of arguing First Amendment cases in front of the Supreme Court.”
“You’re also starting to whine,” Katzen said.
“Guilty,” Coffey said. “Birthday boy’s prerogative.”
Katzen pushed up the back of Coffey’s felted wool Australian Outback hat so it covered his eyes. “Lighten up. Not every useful job has to be a sexy one.”
“It isn’t that,” Coffey replied. “Well, maybe just a little it is.” He removed the Outback hat, used his index finger to wipe sweat from around the band, then settled the hat back on his dirty blond hair. “I guess what I’m really saying is that I was a law prodigy, Phil. The Mozart of jurisprudence. I was reading my dad’s statute law books when I was twelve. When all my friends wanted to be astronauts or baseball players, I was thinking it’d be cool to be a bail bondsman. I could’ve done most of this stuff when I was fourteen or fifteen.”
“Your suits would’ve been way too large,” Katzen deadpanned.
Coffey frowned. “You know what I’m saying.”
“You’re saying you haven’t lived up to your potential,” Katzen said. “Well, ditto, ditto, and welcome to the real world.”
“Being one disappointment among many doesn’t make it sit any better, Phil,” Coffey replied.
Katzen shook his head. “All I can say is, I wish I’d had you at my side when I was with Greenpeace.”
“Sorry,” Coffey said. “I don’t hurl my body off ship decks to protect baby harp seals or stop six-foot-six hunters from setting out raw meat to draw out black bears.
“I did both of those once,” Katzen said. “I got my nose broke doing one and scared the hell out of the harp seal doing the other. The point is, I had these pro bono slackers who didn’t know a porpoise from a dolphin. What’s worse was they didn’t give a shit. I was in your office when you negotiated our little visit with the Turkish ambassador. You gave it everything and you created a handsome piece of work.”
“I was dealing with a country that’s got forty billion dollars of external debt, most of it to our country,” Coffey said. “Getting them to see our point of view doesn’t exactly put me in the genius class.”
“Bull,” Katzen said. “The Islamic Development Bank holds a lot of Turkish chits as well, and they expert a lot of pro-fundamentalist pressure on these people.”
“Islamic law can’t be imposed on the Turks,” Coffey replied, “not even by a fiercely fundamentalist leader like the one they’ve got now. It says so in their Constitution.”
“Constitutions can be amended,” Katzen said. “Look at Iran.”
“The secular population in Turkey is much higher,” Coffey said. “If the Fundamentalists ever tried to take over here, there’d be civil war.”
“Who can say there won’t be?” Katzen asked. “Anyway, none of that is the point. You sprinted through NATO regulations, Turkish law, and U.S. policy to get us in here. No one else I know could’ve done that.”
“So I had to cajole a little,” Coffey said. “Even so, the Turkish deal was probably the high point of my year. When we return to Washington it’ll be business as usual. I’ll go to see Senator Fox with Paul Hood and Martha Mackall. I’ll nod when Paul assures the senator that everything we did in Turkey was legal, that the soil studies you did in the east will be shared with Ankara and were the ‘real’ reason we were here, and I’ll guarantee that if the Regional Op-Center program receives further funding we will continue to operate legally. Then I’ll go back to my office and figure out how to use the ROC in ways not covered by international law.” Coffey shook his head. “I know that’s how things have to be done, but it’s not dignified.”
“At least we try to be,” Katzen pointed out.
“You try to be,” Coffey said. “You spend your career looking into nuclear accidents and oil fires and pollution. You make a difference, or at least you challenge yourself. I went into law to wrestle with real global issues, not to find legal loopholes for spies in Third World sweatboxes.”
Katzen sighed. “You’re schvitzing.”
“What?”
“You’re sweating. You’re cranky. You’re a day shy of forty. And you’re being way too hard on yourself.”
“No, too lenient.” Coffey walked toward the cooler nestled in the shade of one of the three nearby tents. He saw the unopened paperback copy of Lord Jim, which he’d brought along to read. It had seemed an appropriate selection when he was standing in the air-conditioned Washington, D.C., bookstore. Now he wished he’d picked up Dr. Zhivago or Call of the Wild. “I think I’m having an epiphany,” Coffey said, “like all those patriarchs who used to go into the desert.”
“This isn’t desert,” Katzen said. “It’s what we call nonarable pastureland.”
“Thanks,” Coffey said. “I’ll file that next to Batman, Turkey, as something to remember.”
“Jeez,” Katzen said, “you really are cranky. I don’t think being forty is what’s doing this. I think the heat’s dried up your brains.”
“Could be,” Coffey said. “Maybe that’s why everyone’s always been at war in this part of the world. You ever hear about the Eskimos fighting over ice floes or penguin eggs?”
“I’ve visited the Inuit on the Bering Coast,” Katzen said. “They don’t fight with each other because they have a different outlook on life. Religion is comprised of two elements: faith and culture. The Inuit have faith without fanaticism, and to them it’s a very private matter. The culture is the public part. They share wisdom, tradition, and fables instead of insisting that their way is the only way. The same is true of many tropical and sub-tropical peoples in Africa, South America, and the Far East. It has nothing to do with the climate.”
“I don’t believe that about the climate,” Coffey said. “At least, not entirely.” He removed a can of Tab from the melting ice in the cooler and popped it. As he poured the soda into his mouth, he squinted back at the long, gleaming van. For a moment, the despair left him. That seemingly nondescript vehicle was beautiful and sexy. He was proud to be associated with it, at least. The attorney stopped drinking and caught his breath. “I mean,” he said, panting after the long, unbroken swallow, “look at cities or prisons where there are riots. Or compounds like Jonestown and Waco where people turn into cult-kooks. It never happens during a cold spell or a blizzard. It’s always when it’s hot. Look at the Biblical scholars who went out into the desert. Went out men, stayed in the heat, came back prophets. Heat lights our fuses.”