Suddenly the second policeman, who all this time had been talking on the telephone, put down the receiver and cried out, ‘There was a bomb thrown in the suk. At ten thirty this morning.’
He turned to Sarah and smiled. She smiled back. Looks of relief appeared on the faces of Alan and Georgette. Even the inspector softened. Pulling up a chair and sitting down, he leaned towards her. ‘Now Mademoiselle,’ he said gently, ‘please tell me what happened.’ Poor little creature, he thought protectively. What great eyes, like a frightened gazelle, hurled from one scene of bloody violence to another—Dhat Rhas, the suk, the shooting in Rue Zahle. She had probably been the fellow’s mistress, but you couldn’t expect a woman to admit to her indiscretions. Perhaps it would be better to ignore that aspect of the question. Interesting as it was.
So Sarah told them her story from the moment of her meeting with the Syrian. More coffee was brought in to her, for now that it had been established that she had been exposed, not only to gun fire, but to high explosives as well, everyone was treating her with the utmost consideration.
She discovered quickly that she had only to put her hand to her forehead and close her eyes for a moment and the inspector would withdraw any question that she did not care to answer, and replace it with another. He seemed, now, to believe her or, at any rate, to suspend disbelief. Or perhaps he felt that if she was lying, he was not going to contest her right to do so. Everything was going well and this atmosphere of solicitous tenderness persisted until it was discovered that one part, at least, of her story could not be supported. The young police officer, who had again been on the telephone, announced that no one had reported the loss of a handbag to the police.
‘But that was why we went to the café,’ Sarah said, ‘to ring up the police. He was talking for about ten minutes. He asked for my name and address, and I wrote them down on a pad …’ She broke off. How fruitless arguing. Now if Lebanon had been a British Mandate instead of French—but what with French muddle and Arab obstructiveness it was a wonder anything got done. Sarah was feeling aggressively Anglo–Saxon that morning. Disaster had thrown her back upon the shores of her own nationality, where everything, however dull, seemed dependable and safe. She felt a fleeting pity for the Lebanese, who, however happily situated and richly endowed, could not count on the blessings of an English police force.
‘There must be a record somewhere, unless they didn’t bother.’ She looked up plaintively. ‘Can I go now? I’m very tired and I haven’t had any lunch.’
Yes, she was allowed to go, but she was not to leave the country; she was not to leave Beirut. They wanted her address—she gave them Nadea’s. And, as she had no passport, they wanted someone to vouch for her identity.
‘Nadea Raziyah can vouch for me. I’ve known her all my life. We went to school together.’
‘Who is this woman? I do not know her,’ said Inspector Malouf who, having failed to trace any report of the missing handbag, had become suspicious again.
‘You don’t expect to know everyone, do you? She runs a school. She’s Jordanian. She’s a very keen social worker. Many important people know her. The president’s wife—’
‘It seems to me,’ said Inspector Malouf, becoming quite angry, ‘that you know nobody but Jordanians and Syrians. These people are trouble-makers, refugees from Palestine come into our country. We open our hearts to them. What do they do? They listen to the voices of people who would murder our leaders and plot against us. How is it that you only know Jordanians who throw bombs in the suks and Syrians who smuggle arms over our borders and train rebels to fight us?’
Sarah shrugged her shoulders. She knew many Lebanese. Her neighbours in Dhat Rhas, for instance, old Maronite families who claimed to be able to trace their ancestry back seven centuries, beyond the long sluggish years of the Ottoman Empire to the time of Saladin when the Crusaders built castles along the coast and on the mountain passes. But unfortunately, they and everyone she could think of except Nadea, knew her as Madame Gautier, and she did not feel inclined to entertain Inspector Malouf with an account of her life with Marcel.
She watched the two policemen get into a car and drive away. Outside Rue Zahle the excitement had not appreciably subsided. Quite a few people stood about in groups discussing the assassination and staring at the bullet marks on the pavement. Others crowded about the spot where the Syrian had been lying. At either end of the street policemen had been stationed.
Sarah was so absorbed in the scene that several moments passed before she noticed how quiet it was in the office. Since the departure of the police nobody had said a word. She glanced up and caught Alan Crawe staring at her with a worried expression that seemed to be habitual. Sarah wondered why. Quickly, and with a look of embarrassment, he turned away.
He thinks I’ve been lying my head off, she thought with surprise. Well, I don’t care. Let him think what he wants to. But she felt oddly forlorn and eager to get to Nadea, who would believe anything that friendship and loyalty demanded.
She got up and said in a formal voice, ‘I must go now. Thank you. You’ve been very kind.’
‘I’ll take you,’ said Alan. ‘My car’s just outside.’ She turned to say goodbye to Georgette, but the telephone was ringing and Georgette had gone to answer it.
In silence they walked down the pavement to the car, a large cream vehicle, with ‘Anglo–Lebanese Travels Ltd’ inscribed on its door. They had just reached it when Georgette appeared in the doorway of the agency. ‘Alan! Alan!’ she cried.
‘One moment, wait for me,’ he said to Sarah and turned back. Georgette, in a flurry of full petticoats, ran to meet him and, clutching his arm, lifted a pale frightened face. Sarah saw Alan take her hand and bend over her while she talked. She seemed terrified. Suddenly she bowed her head and burst out weeping. He put an arm around her shoulders and together they went back into the travel agency.
Sarah got into the car and waited. What had happened? Something to do with the telephone call? The incident barely touched her curiosity. She felt numbed by the continual attack of events and something, moreover, told her that sobs and cries of ‘Alan! Alan!’ came not infrequently to the lips of this tiny, doll-like girl; from the way she had lifted her eyes to his face it was evident that she had cast him in the role of her protector and probably rehearsed him in this part as often as circumstances would allow.
A few moments later he returned and got into the car beside her. ‘Is anything wrong?’ Sarah asked.
‘No, just a silly mistake.’
But he looked troubled and did not speak to her again, except to say goodbye when he dropped her off at Nadea’s apartment. And no sooner had she closed the car door and stepped back than the car shot off around the corner.
C H A P T E R 5
Sarah was an only child. When she was twelve her mother had died, and her father, who at that time had just retired from the Colonial Office to take up fruit growing in Hampshire, sent her to boarding school. Here it was that she met Nadea Raziyah.
Nadea was the daughter of wealthy Jordanians; she had been a beautiful, animated, intelligent child, and Sarah had been instantly attracted to her. When she was quite young, she had formed a preference for the unusual, romantic and outlandish, and Nadea, in that company of demure English schoolgirls, seemed to be all of these. The very fact of her having come from a hot, distant land provided an irresistible appeal for Sarah, who felt she had been born in the wrong country and craved the sun—resenting its frequent absence as though she had been deprived of a birthright. She listened to Nadea’s descriptions of the burning hills of Judea and Moab and determined that one day she would visit them.
Their friendship had lasted throughout their school days and beyond. When, at the age of eighteen, Nadea had returned to her troubled country they had exchanged fervent vows to write to each other, to visit one another, to keep their friendship alive at all costs. And so it had turned out. They had exchanged letters. Nadea had paid a visit to England when she was twen
ty-four and, two years later, scraping together the last of the money that her father had left her, Sarah had flown to Beirut where Nadea was running a kindergarten for Jordanian children. She had rented an apartment in Rue Jeanne d’Arc and here Sarah had stayed with her until the advent of Marcel. It was to this place that she was now returning.
Nadea lived in one of the few old Turkish houses in Ras Beirut that had somehow escaped the current mania for reconstruction—a beautiful, two-storeyed building set back in a garden planted with eucalyptus, fig trees and oleanders. Like all the old houses in Beirut, it was constructed from blocks of dressed stone; and an outside staircase protected by delicate wrought-iron railings led to the upper storey, where, in front of the triple–pointed window that constituted its most striking architectural feature, a verandah jutted out, supported from beneath by corbelled stone brackets.
Mr and Mrs Hanouche, who owned the house and lived on the ground floor, said that it had been built late in the eighteenth century by Venetian architects brought into the country by the Emir Bechir. But this, if it were true, which was not altogether likely, for houses continued to be built with a certain Italian feeling long after the time of the Emir Bechir, did not prevent them from expressing a desire to have it pulled down and replaced by a concrete building that would compete in modernity with the blocks of flats surrounding them. Times were changing, they said, and there was no denying this.
A few years ago Mr and Mrs Hanouche used to spend their summer evenings on the flat roof sitting under a trellis of bougainvillea and vines, and looking down over the roofs of other houses similar to their own, to the blue sea beyond. Now, stucco and concrete soared high around them, and their house crouched at the bottom of a deep shaft of masonry. From their roof they commanded a fine view into the flat opposite—a view of untidy rooms, and tumbled bedclothes, and of a fat man who was rarely seen wearing anything but pyjamas and hung over the verandah all day drinking Turkish coffee and eating sticky Arab sweets. The block of flats on their left, which had only recently gone up, had been taken over by the officials of minor embassies who annoyed them by throwing melon rinds and empty wine bottles into their garden. On the other side a vacant block planted with peach trees separated them from the next building and allowed a little sun and fresh air to penetrate their windows, but this small field was an unlovely place heaped with uncollected garbage and rubble left lying around by road menders.
Tidiness is not, as Mr and Mrs Hanouche could hardly fail to observe, a Lebanese virtue, and though the people of Beirut are enthusiastic in putting up and pulling down, they are tardy in clearing away. The city displays at all times an air of opulent disorder with more than a touch of squalor about it. Squalor, not of poverty, but such as one might find in the room of a pampered child where expensive toys are left scattered about and broken. Twelve-storey apartment buildings are put up as a way of tax avoidance and left unfinished; garbage litters marble foyers; lifts fail to work; and hardly a Cadillac is without dents in its mudguards.
One is tempted, when first confronted by this expensive sluminess, to think of the Lebanese as irresponsible people, but this would be far from the truth. No nation that had maintained such a precarious foothold in history could be anything but shrewd and capable, and perhaps it comes back in the end to that Lebanese genius for taking things lightly.
Sarah climbed the stairway leading to the upper floor and rang the doorbell. A servant opened the door and led her into the main rooms, where she found Nadea entertaining visitors.
The big, cool room with its three pointed windows and tiled floor reminded Sarah of a church. Forty years ago Mr and Mrs Hanouche had furnished it with low divans covered in old woven rugs of dim, rich colours, an enormous black cupboard inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a Madonna in a niche, some small carved tables and two excessively sentimental pictures. These things remained, and Nadea had only added some indoor plants and an embroidered sampler.
The four people occupying the room were sitting on the divans drinking Turkish coffee and talking excitedly, but they all, as Sarah entered, fell silent and turned to look at her. Nadea darted to her feet.
‘Sarah! I was just thinking about you, Isn’t that strange? I was thinking how you must meet my friends, and now you have saved me the trouble of fishing you out of Dhat Rhas.’ And grabbing Sarah by both hands she dragged her across to the divan.
She was a tall, strikingly handsome young woman, slightly aquiline of feature, her eyes wonderfully dark and brilliant under low straight brows that lent to her face a sullen cast when she was in a bad humour and a touch of savagery when in high spirits. Sarah could see that she was thoroughly worked up about something. Her eyes flashed; a faint flush tinged her olive cheeks; her very hair, hanging in a dark cloud on her shoulders, seemed to sparkle with excitement. She talked so quickly it was almost impossible to follow her.
‘Sarah, these are the Thornes, Nigel and Margaret, I knew them in London. I told you about them, don’t you remember? You were away somewhere. Now they’re doing a tour of the Middle East. Margaret was simply overpowered by Jerusalem. They were just saying they ought to get out while the going’s good, but they’ll be all right. The Lebanese won’t let anyone touch their precious tourists, you can bet your life!’
Sarah, dimly aware that there was some implication in Nadea’s excited greeting, but too weary to bother about getting to the bottom of it, sat down.
Left-wing intellectuals, she decided, looking at the Thornes and wishing that Nadea had been on her own. Nigel Thorne was tall and thin with bony wrists that stuck out from coat sleeves some inches too short for him, and a narrow, nervous face that looked at once hard and innocent. His wife was a pale, skinny creature with blonde hair and a crumpled, worried expression. She looked absurdly young, and yet old at the same time, as though she had withered up a little in late adolescence, but had not got beyond it.
‘And this is David Green who is travelling with them,’ said Nadea.
‘Hi.’ The young man who delivered himself of this greeting was a tall, soft-looking individual of a uniform colour, a pale dull dawn, all over—shaven hair, eyes, skin and light-weight suit providing variations only in their differing textures.
Sarah nodded at him resentfully. Why did Nadea always surround herself with dull tourists? You couldn’t get near her these days for the stray Americans, French and English that she picked up, well, heaven knows where; she loved nothing better than dragging them off to look at her precious kindergarten or entertaining them at lavish luncheon parties and subjecting them to tirades against the Jews.
Ignoring the visitors, she turned to her friend. ‘Can you put me up for a day to two? I’m filthy and destitute. I lost my money and my passport in the French suk. Someone threw a bomb—’
‘The bomb! My God! Sarah darling, were you there? Of course! You can have my bed. I’m going to Amman tonight. I must say,’ she said, addressing the Thornes, ‘we do seem to be turning things on for you: the police at Sofar; bombs in the suk; the Egyptian ambassador murdered under our very eyes.’
‘Who?’ cried Sarah.
‘Do you mean to say you haven’t heard?’ Nadea was getting more and more excited. ‘The Egyptian ambassador has been murdered by government agents. It happened just down here in Rue Zahle, only half an hour ago. I knew there’d be trouble as soon as that so-called American aid mission turned up. There’ll be war. The British will come back like a shot into the canal, and that’ll bring the Russians in, and that’ll bring the Americans. Why these damned people can’t mind their own business and leave us alone—’
Everyone looked extremely grave except Nadea, to whom the prospect of these disasters was not, apparently, entirely unpleasing.
Sarah, forgetting her weariness, leaned forward. ‘Nadea! Where did you hear all this?’
‘It’s true, I tell you!’ cried Nadea, her eyes glazed with the intoxication of impending calamity. ‘Everyone knows it. He was shot down in Rue Zahle. The police let the murderers
get away.’
‘For God’s sake, Nadea,’ said Sarah furiously. ‘Don’t be such a fool and calm down. Use your head. Would the Lebanese be likely to shoot down the Egyptian ambassador? They’re trying to live with the Egyptians, heaven help them, they’re in a very delicate position, what with the refugee camps and Nasser whipping up all the Moslems. It’s the very last thing they’d do.’
‘They say the Syrians did it,’ cried Nadea excitedly. ‘There was a woman with them too. They nearly got her. Everyone knows about it.’
‘Everyone, who’s everyone?’ shouted Sarah. ‘You’re an educated woman, but when it comes to this sort of thing you’ll believe anything. You listen to that demented twaddle on Radio Cairo: three million Chinese marching over Asia to help their Arab brothers—’ She broke off. That had been unkind, taunting Nadea with past foolishness; during a time of recent crisis she had so fallen under the spell of Egyptian propaganda as to believe in miracles. But for some reason it made Sarah furiously angry to hear Nadea declare that the Syrian had been the Egyptian ambassador. Everyone, it seemed, cast the Syrian in the role they wanted him to play. Why did Nadea want him to play this one? ‘I know a man’s been killed,’ she said flatly. ‘But he wasn’t even Egyptian to begin with.’
‘How do you know?’
Everyone was looking at her, and it was strange, but she was suddenly reluctant to explain again that she had known the Syrian, and how it was that she had come to know him. I’ll tell Nadea when we’re alone, she thought. But perhaps she would not even do that. Perhaps she would not tell anyone else at all. Her brief friendship with the Syrian had suddenly become very personal. She did not want people smirching it with their suppositions and disbelief.
‘I was going past Rue Zahle on my way here,’ she said. ‘The police were there; they don’t even know who he was. There were the wildest rumours. It’s just Beirut. And you hysterical Arabs,’ she added spitefully. And then to change the subject, ‘Have you got anything for me to eat? I’m famished.’
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