“I’m sure you have,” Basma agreed promptly. “They ship it out in every form. Brains, tongue, heart, kidneys, liver, as well as all the usual cuts, prime rib, steaks and so on, all the way down to hot dogs and Vienna sausages. If it isn’t tinned or wrapped in plastic, it’s frozen.”
We began to joke about becoming vegetarians, describing the best salads we could remember having, and we kept at it until we were comfortably settled with drinks in Number One, which was supposedly the better of Oranien’s two topless joints. It was expensive but otherwise all right. That kind of bar, where the music was loud and the women occasionally distracting, was just what Basma and I needed, since our excursion into the south end had left us in no mood for serious conversation. We drank until the place closed, by which time we were both unfit to drive, so we left the rental car parked where it was and hired a taxi.
I wasn’t surprised when Basma got out of the cab with me at the hotel. I didn’t know exactly where he lived but I assumed it was in the neighborhood because we’d met in the beer garden and we always said good night outside the hotel.
“Would you like to have a nightcap in my room?” he asked me as the taxi pulled away.
“No, thank you very much. I couldn’t take one more drink.”
“Are you sure? I have a bottle of Teachers, pretty good stuff, and I live right there, across the street.” Basma pointed vaguely to the first or second building on the opposite corner. “Come on, one more.”
“No, really, thanks, but I’m going to fall down and pass out, and I’d rather do that in my bed than on your floor.”
Basma shrugged. “Okay. See you tomorrow.”
“Sure, good night.” I turned away, but then stopped and looked back at him. “Hey, you know what? Your building is one of the ones those ghost soldiers raided.”
“Don’t be telling me such things,” he said from the middle of the street. “I don’t want to know that.”
“Why? It’s just ghosts, and history. Right?”
“Never mind that.”
Basma wagged a finger at me and kept going. I made it upstairs, locked my door, and even managed to get my clothes off before spinning dizzily into sleep. It was nearly noon when I opened my eyes again. The first thing that came to me was how nice it felt not to have another hallucination, nightmare, or ghostly apparition to brood about. I’d been truly out of it, and I’d slept straight through, unbothered.
On the negative side, however, I felt terrible the moment I stood up. I took a long shower, which made me feel cleaner but did nothing for my head, and I was going to get some food when I remembered the rental car. I didn’t want to pay another day’s charges but it was already late. When I got to the car I found a parking ticket under the wiper blade. I shoved it in my pocket, wondering if I could safely tear it up or if the vaunted Oranien police would catch up with me before I flew out next week.
The car rental agency wanted me to pay for the second full day, naturally, since I was well over an hour past the deadline when I finally got there. I had no luck arguing until I pulled out my Vogue credentials, at which point the manager suddenly became obsequious and sympathetic. No problem: no extra charges.
Then I got some much-needed food into my stomach. I went back to my hotel room, tore up the parking ticket, and fell asleep again on the bed while trying to read the Herald Tribune. It was after four when I dragged myself down to the beer garden. I held off on the alcohol, cautiously sipping mineral water while I waited for Basma. An hour later I began to wonder if I was wrong. We had agreed to meet in the usual place at the usual time, hadn’t we? Maybe he had business to attend to elsewhere and I’d misunderstood him in the boozy fog last night. I wasn’t disappointed or annoyed, because I really wanted a break from Basma’s company, for one evening anyway. I stayed a little longer, out of courtesy, and then returned to my room. He’d know where to find me if he turned up later. But he didn’t, and I had a very welcome early night.
The next day I felt great, and I did what I had really wanted to do all along. I sat in the shade in the beer garden, reading Simenon. I had breakfast there, followed later by more coffee, then lunch, and, in the middle of the afternoon, lemonade and a plate of watermelon chunks. By five o’clock I’d knocked off both Maigret novels in the volume, and I allowed myself a glass of cold Bolero beer. It was a very pale lager, but I was beginning to develop a taste for it.
Where was Basma? I had a sudden guilty flashback to our drunken parting. I’d teased him about the ghost soldiers, as he thought of them, and now it occurred to me that I might have annoyed him. Perhaps that was why he was staying away. What you do when you’re drunk always seems much worse when you reconstruct it later. I was tired of sitting there, but once again I stayed on for another hour or so, until it was obvious that my Lebanese friend was not going to put in an appearance.
I went looking for him a little while later. I started with the corner building diagonally opposite the hotel. Inside the unlocked screen door was a small entry foyer with a tile floor and a rickety wooden table. The inner door was locked, so I rang the bell, and kept ringing it for nearly five minutes before a heavy-set, middle-aged woman answered.
“I’m looking for Mr. Basma,” I told her.
“He go.”
“When do you expect him back?” She shrugged and shook her head at this. “Well, can I leave a message for him?” I took out a pen and a piece of paper I’d brought for that purpose. But the woman continued to shake her head.
“He go,” she repeated emphatically.
“Isn’t he coming back?”
“Men come. He go with men.”
Simple enough, and the end of the story as far as she was concerned. I wasn’t ready to give up, however.
“What about his things?”
“What.”
“Things. Clothes, belongings.” Most people in Blanca can speak English because the local dialect is one of those clotted, homegrown curiosities of limited use, like Afrikaans. But this creature’s English seemed marginal at best. “His possessions, his personal—his things, dammit.”
“Gone.”
“When did he go?”
“Yesterday.”
“Can I see his room?”
“Room?”
“Yes. Basma’s room. Please.”
“Yes, yes. Come.”
It took a while to get there, because the woman moved only with difficulty. She showed me into the front room on the first floor. It was a dreary little place with a couch, a couple of chairs, a table, a hideous wardrobe, and a single bed. There was a small bathroom and, behind a plastic curtain, an even smaller galley kitchen. The few items of furniture were old and worn, the walls faded and unadorned, the carpeting thin as paper. I went to the window and looked out at the park and the quiet streets. I looked at the balcony and window of my room in the hotel across the way.
“Nice view,” the woman said.
I nodded absently. There was no doubt in my mind that Basma was gone for good. The room had been completely stripped of all personal items. What was there was what you got when you rented a very modest furnished room.
“Three hundred crown,” the woman said.
“What?”
“Three hundred crown. One month.” She waved her hand in a gesture commending the room to me. “One hundred U.S. dollar.”
“No.” I hurried away.
That night I slept by the balcony window in my room. I used the big armchair, and stretched my legs out on the coffee table. It was not a comfortable arrangement, but it wasn’t unbearable, and I wanted to be there. It seemed important not to miss the apparition, if it should occur again.
I tried to read for a while, but I could no longer keep my mind on the words. Basma wouldn’t have left so suddenly without saying good-bye, I told myself. From what the woman had said in her skeletal English, he had been taken—and that surely meant taken against his will. But by whom, and why? It seemed highly unlikely that his Lebanese enemies would come suc
h a distance to exact revenge, and he’d been so insistent in cautioning me about the Blanca police that I couldn’t imagine he’d ever set a foot wrong here. Certainly not in the realm of politics. But Basma was an entrepreneur, so it was not impossible that he’d gotten involved in some shady deal that had landed him in trouble with the authorities.
Could I help him in any way? He had been good company, a friend. He hadn’t tried to con me. He’d been a useful guide to the city. It seemed wrong just to shrug it off mentally and forget about him. But I couldn’t think of anything to do, other than ask the police about him—and I was reluctant to do that.
It was dawn when I awoke to the sound of car doors slamming. The first thing I saw was a silver Mercedes with black-tinted windows, parked at the corner across from my hotel. The car’s yellow hazard lights were flashing. Four men wearing sunglasses and linen suits entered Basma’s building. While they were inside, a van with the similarly darkened windows pulled up behind the Mercedes and waited. A moment later the four men reappeared, with a fifth man in their custody—he wasn’t even handcuffed, but it was obvious he was their prisoner. I stood up, swung the window open, and stepped out onto the balcony.
“Basma.”
I had spoken to myself, barely whispering the name in stunned disbelief. But the five of them stopped immediately and looked up at me. Basma looked terrified. I thought I recognized one of the other men. I was so shocked and frightened, however, that I took a step back involuntarily and stumbled. I had to grab the window frame to catch my balance. Then the scene was finished, gone as if it had never happened, and I was looking down at an empty street corner.
I sat on the bed and lit a cigarette. My hands shook, my head clamored. The smoke was like ground glass in my throat, but I sucked it in deeply, as if trying to make a point with my own pain. I’d been so many miles, seen so much of the world, the best and the worst and the endless in between, but now for the first time in my life I felt lost.
Then I became angry with myself. My feelings didn’t matter in this situation. Basma was the one in trouble, and I had to try to help, or at least find out what was happening to him. For all I knew, I was the only friend he had in Blanca. I didn’t want to—it scared the shit out of me to think about it—but I had to do something. And now I knew where to start.
They came into the beer garden at four o’clock that afternoon, as they had several times during the past week. The woman was beautiful as ever, cool and formidable. The kind of woman you would fear falling in love with, but love to watch. It was her man, however, who fascinated me. The man in the linen suit. Basma had warned me about them. I was pretty sure the man was the officer on horseback I had seen twice. I knew he was one of the men I had seen take Basma away.
Dreams, nightmares, hallucinations, ghosts. Take your pick. But maybe the simplest, truest explanation was that I was in the middle of a breakdown, caused by the collapse of my marriage and my abrupt flight to this miserable place. It made sense, and I hesitated, clinging to my own weakness. But I was there, Basma was gone, and that man in the linen suit was very real. I got up at last and approached him.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m sorry to intrude, but I wonder if I could speak to you for a moment.”
“Yes. Please.”
He gestured for me to take a seat. They looked as if they had just been waiting for me to come, which made me feel even more uncomfortable.
“I’ve seen you around here almost every day since I arrived—I’m on vacation—and the thing is, I can’t find a friend of mine. He seems to have disappeared. His name is Basma, he’s Lebanese, and he was living in the corner building across the street. Do you know him?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Can you suggest how I might find out about him?”
“Go to the police.”
They seemed to regard me with an impossible mixture of curiosity and disinterest. I was getting nowhere.
“He seemed to think you were a policeman.”
At last, something. The barest flicker of an eyebrow, then the man smiled, as if at some silly misunderstanding. The woman was keenly attentive now, and it was hard not to return the all-consuming look in her eyes.
“I work in the government,” the man said. “I am not a policeman. But you are a visitor here. Let me ask some people I know about your friend for you. Of course, I cannot promise you anything.”
“I understand.”
“Are you staying here?”
“Yes.” I gave him my name and room number and told him I would be staying five more days. “Thank you for your help. I’m sorry to trouble you.”
“No trouble.”
Later I felt disgusted at how deferential I’d been, all but groveling for a scrap of information. The man knew Basma, knew the whole story far better than I did; he was a primary player. “Thank you for your help.” But how else could I have handled it? It would have been crazy to confront the man and accuse him of arresting Basma. It would have been absurd to tell him that history replays itself every morning on that street corner, and that I’d seen what he and his colleagues had done.
So the possibilities for action on my part were extremely limited. I’d done what I could. I began to think that I should let it go, that it was just one more thing in my life to put behind me. Basma was rotting in some filthy jail cell, if he wasn’t already a ghost. In any event, nothing I could do would make the least difference. I might try to write about Basma and Blanca, something political with teeth in it—but not here, not until I was safely back in New York. I’d never done anything like that before.
I slept well that night and did very little the next day. I took a couple of short walks, but mostly hung around the hotel reading and relaxing. The government man and his beautiful woman did not put in an appearance. Then I enjoyed another peaceful night, free of dreams and ghosts. It was so pleasant to idle away afternoons in the beer garden, sipping iced tea and nibbling slivers of cold melon. I was glad that the man in the linen suit failed to show up for the second day in a row.
I did think about Basma at odd moments, but in my line of work I meet so many people, all over the world. Already he was slipping away from me. And I had calmed down enough to realize I would never write that article. I wasn’t equipped to do that kind of thing properly. Tourism was my beat, not politics or ghosts or disappearances. To hell with Blanca. Maybe it was a surrender of sorts, but by admitting these things to myself I felt I was on the way to a full mental recovery, and that had been the whole purpose of the trip in the first place.
That evening I intended to find a new restaurant, have anything but steak for dinner, and then scout a few bars. I was in the mood for serious female contact at last. It was a little past seven when I stepped out of the hotel. At that instant the silver Mercedes braked sharply to a halt and the man in the linen suit jumped out. He came right at me. I was determined not to let this nasty little hood intimidate me anymore.
“Do you want to see your friend?”
“Yes. Where is he?”
“I will take you.” He gestured toward the open car door. “Please. It is still light.”
I was aware that the other people on the street all stood motionless, watching. Calmly, at my own pace, I walked to the car and sat down inside. I was in the backseat, between the man I knew and another fellow, who ignored me warily. I was not surprised to see the beautiful young woman in the front seat, along with the driver. She glanced at me once, then looked away. We raced through the center of the city. We were heading south, I knew that much. I asked a few questions, but the only answers I got were vague and unsatisfactory.
The driver never slowed down. If anything, he pushed the car a little faster when we reached the crowded working-class district. People and animals sometimes had to jump out of the way at the last second to save themselves. I could sense the others in the car trying not to smile. We passed the factories, the slaughterhouses, the tenements, the stockyards, the grim processing, canning, and fr
eezing plants. We ripped through the sprawling shantytown and continued beyond the point where Basma and I had ended our exploration. Finally we were on a dirt road, crossing a vast scrubby wasteland. We had gone a couple of miles when I saw that we were approaching a cluster of vehicles parked with their headlights on, pointing in the same direction.
They walked me to the edge of a long ditch, about eight feet deep. It was dusk, not yet too dark to see, but spotlights had been hooked up to a generator to illuminate the scene. It was all so bright it hurt my eyes. Perhaps a dozen other men stood about, smoking, talking quietly, taking notes and photographs. When my eyes adjusted, I forced myself to look carefully.
There were a lot of bodies in the ditch, I would say at least twenty. All the same: hands tied behind the back, the back of the head partially blown away, bloating features. I noticed the swarming insects, the ferocious smell. I stood there for a while, staring, but so help me I could not put together a single thought. A couple of men wearing goggles and masks were getting ready to spray the ditch with some chemical.
“Can you identify that person?” the man in the linen suit asked me, pointing to a particular corpse. “There.”
“Yes, that’s him.” In spite of the puffed face, parts of which had already been nibbled at by animals, I had no difficulty picking out my late friend. “That’s Basma.”
“I am sorry,” he said casually. “A terrible way to die.”
As if there were any good ones.
“Why did this happen to him?” I asked. “He was a harmless little man, a foreign guest in this country. Why should they”—I almost said “you” but managed to avoid it—“do this to him?”
“Come here, please.”
He led me back to the car, where the young woman waited. She looked smart as ever, this time in a tropical pantsuit with a white blouse open three buttons deep. The man nodded to her. She reached into a briefcase I hadn’t noticed and handed him something. He held it up for me to see.
“Did you do this?”
I could feel the blood vacating my cheeks, then rushing back as I tried to muster a sense of embarrassed contempt. He had a large rectangle of cardboard, on which were pasted all the torn pieces of my parking ticket.
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