Blood Rules

by John Trenhaile

  Colin heard himself say again, “Shoot me.”

  People were staring at him as if he’d gone mad. Slowly, one by one, they sat down. Colin’s head pounded with a deadening kind of ache, as if somebody were knotting and twisting whatever vessels and muscles and veins lay behind his eyes. He could still see the gunman, nobody else, just the hijacker at the end of the cabin, but he could not feel his legs or his arms or any part of himself except his heart, which was threatening an all-out strike. His eyes floated in the cabin, disembodied but functional. He was alive, when he knew he couldn’t be.

  “Shoot me.” He understood. Lord God of hosts, let me stand in for Isaac. Shoot me, not my son. Shoot me.

  His head began to clear itself of congealed blood. He wheeled around toward the front of the plane. The aisle was empty. Nothing, no one, now separated him from Robbie, who stood facing him at the point where economy gave way to business class. Beyond the bulkhead, Colin could just see Selim. But that was not what held his attention. Behind Robbie, with one hand resting on his shoulder, stood Leila.

  Mother and son stared down the aisle at Colin. The expression in their eyes was the same: curiosity and wonder. His son and ex-wife both understood this moment. They had explored it with him, as hypothesis, times without number. What would you do? they had always wanted to know: How would you react, if it was your turn to make the choice of him-or-you?

  Now they knew. Robbie was smiling, grinning, crying, all at once. Leila, too, was smiling, though hers was the bitter smile that acknowledges error to the inner self. A loser’s smile.

  The plane stayed absolutely silent. Row upon row of passengers gazed at the woman with her hand on the boy’s shoulder, not understanding what it was they witnessed. But they seemed to know that if they waited, the truth would out. Seconds ticked by, weaving themselves into one minute … two.

  “She’s my mother,” Robbie suddenly exclaimed; and the hand tightened on his shoulder until its knuckles were white. “This is my mother.” He swallowed hard, choking back tears. “She’s going to ask them if my friend Tim can go home. Because … because, you see, he’s very sick.”

  He spoke the last word in a dying fall, as if conscious that he’d said either too much or not enough. He tried to twist around to look at Leila, but her grip on his shoulder stiffened, making him stare at her hand instead. His smile faded. Colin watched his son’s confidence drain away with the abruptness of the last grains of sand disappearing down the neck of a timer.

  When Leila addressed herself in Arabic to the hijacker at the rear of the cabin Colin knew she was admonishing the man for having panicked and aimed at Robbie. He wheeled around. Her henchman stood there without any discernible expression on his face. Not by the merest flicker of a muscle did he betray his true relationship with this woman. Colin knew that she had chosen her words with the utmost care, so that even if any of these passengers understood Arabic they would still not divine the truth.

  Now Leila turned to Selim and her face broke into a delightful smile. She spoke to him in a low voice, wheedling, promising, understanding. After a while he nodded, a trifle impatiently, perhaps: he would agree to almost anything as long as it meant the end of this prattle; that was the message his face conveyed. When he spoke a few clipped sentences, Leila translated.

  “He says the sick boy may leave next time the helicopter comes. But no one else may leave.”

  For a moment the deadly silence continued. Then, with complete suddenness, the passengers began to clap. Colin had never heard anything like it: you could not single out the pair of hands that began it, for all of them came together at once. They were cheering. Some lifted their hands above their heads to applaud, as if a great diva had come among them. And throughout it all Leila continued to stand there with one hand on Robbie’s shoulder, blushing a little, a tight, embarrassed smile on her face, while Robbie let the tears course down his cheeks, tears of gratitude, tears of pride that his mother should be the one who set Tim free.

  She gave him a little push. Robbie ran down the aisle to fling himself into his father’s arms. Colin buried his face in the boy’s neck, unable to speak. When he raised his head again, the curtain at the far end of the aisle once again sealed off the cabin.

  “Oh, Dad…. ”

  While Robbie was still trying to find words, a new sound added itself to the commotion around them: helicopter rotors.

  “Come on, son. Better get Tim up front.”

  Selim materialized beside them. He got everyone back into their seats—everyone, that is, except Colin and Robbie, who were ordered to carry Tim to the forward door. Father and son gently brought the unconscious boy to the inflatable safety ramp and prepared to slide him down it.

  “Get well!” Robbie said. Suddenly he bent forward to squeeze Tim’s hand. “Ultimate experience, man!” he cried, as the boy’s inert body went slowly down to the ground.

  Robbie continued to watch while men from the chopper carried Tim away, but to Colin, eyeing his son’s profile, the humid, hot evening was redolent of other memories, other times. Before, in Beirut, that terrible summer, he had learned only that he was prepared to sacrifice others in order to save Robbie. He knew now that he could even sacrifice himself if he had to.

  The helicopter rose into the air, hovered there a moment, and turned east for the sea. Robbie threw up his arms in a dramatic wave of farewell.

  “Thirty-sixth level of experience!” he cried. “You’re a Dungeon Master now, man. You are.” His voice sank to a whisper, his arms fell to his sides. “You are…. ”

  To Colin, watching his son’s face crumple, that summer of 1974 suddenly seemed like yesterday.

  JUNE 1974:

  BEIRUT, LEBANON

  IT was the encroachments he resented, the invasions into personal time that seemed to go with the territory of parenthood. He would come home of an evening to find that Leila had other mothers in the cottage: there they were, sitting around drinking tea and discussing the awfulness of their leisured lives. Leila had long ago abandoned her plans for a higher degree, but in her case it didn’t matter: there was always the subsidy from Lebanon to eke out Colin’s income as a lecturer. The other mothers suffered a lot from their inability to find work of a kind and at a level commensurate with their undoubted middle-class abilities. Colin would stand in the hall, listening to their inane, chattery bitching, and he would quake with rage.

  He knew Leila wanted a child; she had conceived on their honeymoon. He knew she wanted to devote the early years to Robbie, without the distraction of work; he had complied. But he had not bargained for her neglect of him. For the absence of meals on his return from work. For lack of sex. For coming a perpetual second in the daily race with his own son.

  It was hard to find a word to describe what Leila felt for Robbie. Love? Worship? Adore? These verbs did not go far enough to describe the idolatrous devotion she lavished on their child. If they had come to her and said, “Either you or Robbie must die,” she would have seized a knife joyfully and plunged it into her own heart before she would let them touch a hair of that precious head.

  Sometimes Colin found his wife’s passion for Robbie bordering on the sick. But maybe that was another kind of sickness—jealousy.

  It was June 1974, Robbie was four years old, and Colin had been looking forward to a particular day, circled in red on the calendar, for months. Say rather, a particular moment: he had this vision of settling back in his seat on the red-and-white Middle East Airlines jumbo jet with a jumbo gin and tonic in his hand and four weeks of self-indulgent hedonism to look forward to. Tickets paid for by Feisal, Leila’s father; an apartment of their own in the center of Beirut; servants on call night and day; a car at their disposal… oh, there’d been no end to the blandishments, but all it had taken to persuade him was Leila’s assurance that buried somewhere in the package was the certainty of sometimes being together and alone.

  She wanted that every bit as much as he did, she assured him. She’d missed the se
x, the pleasure of a glass or two of wine by the fire, the weekend walk, hand in hand. Not to have to worry if Robbie woke in the night from a bad dream, because the girl could soothe him while Mummy and Daddy slept: oh, yes! Pure, unadulterated pleasure. To lie abed in the morning, smelling the bougainvillaea outside their window while they made love; to swim in a tiny bay only she and a handful of her friends knew about, with a bottle of champagne chilling two fathoms down … how these things had beckoned them on to June and that red-circled date in the diary.

  How stupid, then, that they should quarrel on the eve of departure; and, bearing in mind their destination, how appropriate that, like all their quarrels, it should be over something utterly stupid.

  Because his room in college was being redecorated he’d taken to giving his last tutorials of the term at home, during the mornings, while Robbie went to play school and Leila was usually out doing something, he didn’t know what, except that it wasn’t cooking or cleaning the house. The college that employed him was all-male, but because Colin had become rather fashionable in the academic world after his Ph.D. thesis, “The Element of Intention in Murder by Recklessness,” had been published in book form, a number of “undergraduettes” had been farmed out to him. One of them was a beautiful, sultry dimwit called Fiona Bolingbroke, who made scant secret of her desire to pick more of Colin than his brains. He ignored her, not because he didn’t fancy her but because the high road to ruin was clearly marked, in big letters,sex WITH STUDENTS. Also, because he yearned to believe in something, and the option of a stable, faithful marriage was at least handy even if it was no longer as attractive as of yore. And to round it off, students came to tutorials in pairs, almost as if they too realized where safety lay.

  A week before the Raleighs were booked to fly to Beirut, Fiona’s partner fell sick, leaving her unchaperoned in Colin’s house the one day of the year Leila chose to come back early from whatever it was she did in the mornings that wasn’t cooking or cleaning. Leila took a long look at the dreamy expression on the face of the girl draped across the sofa she and her husband had chosen together at a Heal’s sale and walked out, banging the door behind her. The echoes lasted a long time.

  The summer of 1974 still witnessed an uneasy peace in Lebanon, although anyone arriving in the bullet-pocked terminal building of Beirut airport that June could have read the signs and known that civil war was not far off. Colin kept a tight grip on Robbie’s hand until they were out in the sunlight, and there, in front of them, stood parked the two BMWs that were to form an indispensable part of life over the next few weeks.

  The speed and efficiency of the operation took his breath away. Hands reached for his luggage, his son, his wife, himself; they were in the car with the closing of doors and rapid acceleration taking place simultaneously; then they were racing along a dead-straight road as if they were either royalty or escaping from the police. The Raleigh family traveled in the back of the first car, with a man who kept shouting into a walkie-talkie sitting next to the driver. The interior was deliciously air-conditioned and Colin at last sat back, allowing himself to relax, while he tried to get some feel for Beirut.

  “Corniche Mazraa.”

  He started. Leila had said very little to him for the past seven days, and it was longer than that since he’d heard her employ such soft tones. They were speeding along a broad boulevard, heading for the sea. He saw endless palm trees, the occasional square with people sitting out beneath sunshades, red tiled roofs, attractive villas interspersed with hideous concrete monstrosities, some half built, many more half destroyed. The place it reminded him of most was Yugoslavia, with its mini-skyscrapers: predominantly Mediterranean, like Italy or Spain, but with a hint of something heavier, more sensual in the architecture: a Serbian influence, or Turkish maybe. Then they were turning right into a broad street where imposing pillared façades announced plush shops, the best kind of restaurants, secretive banks, opulent homes. The sense of being “east” was quite gone; everybody he saw looked European.

  “Hamra Street,” Leila said. “Beirut’s Bond Street.”

  Colin felt her take his hand. The sight of their two hands nestling together in Robbie’s lap after so long a separation filled him with happiness. Suddenly she said, in an artificially high voice, “Welcome.”

  He leaned over Robbie to kiss her cheek. “Thank you,” he said quietly.

  Robbie threw himself onto his mother, burying his head in her breast, and Colin and Leila shared their first rueful smile in many days, once again parents instead of merely two people who shared responsibility for a child. Colin knew all the fashionable theories about “bonding,” knew that he and Robbie had yet to forge that vital, metaphysical link between father and son. But here, in Beirut, anything was possible.

  The car turned off Hamra Street—everywhere he looked the signs seemed to be in French—and threaded its way through a web of narrower residential streets until at last it descended a ramp beneath a high, modern apartment building. They rode to the top floor in a fast elevator. The doors slid open to reveal four men standing by a huge picture window half a football field away, but the quartet was already moving quickly forward; speed, Colin realized, was the watchword in Beirut, and before he knew it the leader of the four, a tall, slim Arab, was staring into his eyes; then he reached out to embrace Colin, patting his back affectionately while he kissed him first on the left cheek and then on the right. No token salutations, these, but warm, solid pressures of the lips, flesh to flesh, man to man, before the Arab stepped back enough to be able to hold Colin at arm’s length and say, “I am Feisal Hanif. Ahlan wa sahlan; my home is your home; welcome to our home.”

  He dropped Colin with the swift deftness that characterized everything he did and turned to Leila, enfolding her in his arms for twice as long as he had devoted to Colin. “Darling,” he murmured over and over again. Colin stepped to one side, curious to see how her face hardened into a mold of politeness as she returned her father’s softly spoken greetings. Last, Feisal swept Robbie off his feet and held him close. The boy struggled for a few seconds before seeming to realize that resistance here was useless, for he went as rigid as a rabbit awaiting the snake’s fang. When Feisal put Robbie down, the boy immediately burst into tears.

  “We have so much to discuss,” Feisal said. “But now I must leave you. This apartment"—he waved his arms—"is at your disposal for as long as you want it. We are having a party on Saturday, Halib will be back from the States by then; not many guests, just the president, premier, one or two people it might be interesting for a lawyer like yourself to meet. But now you must excuse me.” He tousled Robbie’s hair and made a face that was meant to be friendly, though the little boy merely cowered away. “Business—here in Beirut, always business! So long, little guy.”

  The entourage vanished with something of the effect produced on smoke by a powerful fan, bodyguards, secretaries, and assorted henchmen all being sucked out of the room in their leader’s turbulent wake.

  Colin fixed Leila with his eyes. “The president?”

  “Franjieh?” She shrugged. “I expect so. He goes out Saturdays, but ours won’t be his only party, oh, no. He’ll do twenty, maybe more. Come here, darling…. Robbie, come to Mummy, love.” She picked the boy up and laughed, unexpectedly. “They call Franjieh the Sphinx. Know why? Because he can’t bear small talk. And yet he goes to all those parties, because he’s terrified of missing anything. What do you think of this place?”

  Colin took his first proper look around. The apartment was enormous. As you stepped out of the elevator you at once found yourself in the main living room, with its picture windows giving onto a view of the Mediterranean and a sunken, white-tiled balcony, complete with gaily colored umbrellas, chairs, and tables. This room was filled with light. All the soft furnishings were pastel in shade and contemporary in style, as if everything the room contained had been purchased on the same day and quite probably from the same exquisite shop. Colin was greatly taken with the ashtra
ys. He counted twelve of them before giving up.

  “It’s lovely,” he said, conscious of sounding lame. “But I’m worried about all these glass ornaments and lamps. Won’t Robbie—”

  “He’ll be good, won’t you, darling?” Leila carried Robbie around the room, pointing out things she remembered from the old days, so evidently this apartment hadn’t been conjured out of the air for their arrival after all. “Anyway,” she said over her shoulder, “if he breaks anything, too bad. The servants will pick up the pieces; that’s what they’re for.”

  He laughed. Only later did it occur to him that he could not recall her ever having said anything so brutal, so uncaring, before.

  That night she insisted they take Robbie with them to one of the famous fish restaurants of Raouche, even though the boy was dog-tired. At first Colin thought this was hard on their son. But afterward, when the child had fallen into a sleep so deep he scarcely seemed alive, Leila took Colin by the hand and led him to their huge bed in the master suite, and he came to realize the reason for her determination to keep Robbie up: she wanted to exhaust him so that he slept around the clock. But Leila did not want to sleep and, after a while, no more did he.

  Looking back on it afterward, he acknowledged Beirut in the summer of 74 to have been the best holiday ever, right up until the final hours. And the lovely thing was that while it was going on he almost seized the moment, almost succeeded in realizing each day’s joys as they occurred.

  Robbie came into bloom, like a flower lifting its head to the sun.

  He liked the beach, of course—he used to beg to be taken to the Pigeon Rocks, because there water-skiers skimmed through the naturally formed arches and he could watch them for hours with his wide, unblinking stare—and he tolerated the lunchtime visits to the Hotel St. Georges or the Commodore; but often he seemed happiest just mooching through the “old town,” that web of streets around Rome-elegant Riyad el-Solh Square, with his father.