The Only Café

by Linden MacIntyre

  “Why am I doing this?” Cyril said aloud as he raced along the Lake Shore toward the centre of the city.

  Even sitting in the shadows Nader wasn’t hard to find. It was a section of King Street that was busy only in the daylight hours, during lunch-time or right after work. In the evening it was deserted.

  “Yo.” Nader was smiling. He had a glass of Coke in front of him. He slid the pint of beer across to Cyril. “Thanks for coming.”

  Cyril started laughing and realized he couldn’t stop. He laughed and laughed. Thanks for coming? Nader was studying his wristwatch. You must be kidding.

  “You are such an asshole,” Cyril said.

  Nader frowned, said nothing. Cyril drank half the glass of beer in a single gulp.

  “Nader, what did you say to Megan that freaked her out?”

  He raised his eyebrows, studied his glass for a moment, then laughed. “We can talk as you drive,” he said, and stood.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Not far.”

  In the car, Cyril struggled to contain his anger. Nader’s call and his panicky response had aborted what could have been the best opportunity he’d ever get to learn the story of his father’s flight from Lebanon, the crisis that had consumed him in the spring of 2007. Cherry Beach had been his last chance.

  “You fucked up what was probably my last shot at the truth, my friend. Thanks a lot.”

  Nader was nodding as Cyril seethed, staring straight ahead, rubbing at his jawbone. His hand was resting on the shaft of the golf club. He picked it up.

  “And this was for what?”

  Cyril said nothing.

  “Maybe you were going to hammer the truth out of him.” Nader laughed. “Somehow, I don’t think that would have worked with this guy.”

  “He thought that I still had something he wanted. I was that close,” Cyril said. “It was worth the risk.”

  “He thought you had what?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Finally, the truth. It doesn’t fucking matter.”

  “What? You’re saying the truth doesn’t matter?”

  “I’m sick of talking about truth,” Nader said. “We’ve been talking about truth for three thousand years and we still don’t know what we’re talking about.”

  “So, what did you say to Megan?”

  “Something like that, that we waste a lot of precious time on abstractions, like The Truth.”

  “Come on.”

  “I’m serious.” He shook his head and sighed. “So what else have you learned about our friend Ari?”

  “Just that he went by the name Charon back in the seventies and eighties. Maybe even more recently. And that he and my dad were involved somehow in the Sabra and Shatila massacre. But you knew that all along. Right?”

  “Very good. How did you find that out?”

  “In my father’s diaries Hughes found a note that was written in Hebrew. Dated September eighteenth, 1982. Signed Charon. I showed it to Ari and he admitted he wrote the note to let my father enter the Shatila camp. For what reason I’m not sure. He’s up front about it. I was hoping he’d tell me more tonight at Cherry Beach.”

  “You were impressed by his candour?”

  “To tell you the truth, yes…”

  “Where’s the note?”

  “He has it.”

  Nader laughed. “You gave it to him, right?”

  “Yes. I was at Cherry Beach to get it back. He was going to fill in the background.”

  “Of course he was.”

  “You’re saying he was setting me up.”

  “So why did you take the golf club if you didn’t suspect that yourself? Come on.”

  “So you’re saying I’m gullible.”

  “Candour, out of context, always works. He got what he wanted. He thought you had something else incriminating? He was going to get that, too, one way or another.”

  Silence.

  “Maybe he was on the level,” Cyril said.

  Nader laughed. “Maybe you were about to have a serious accident. Like your dad.”

  Cyril sighed. “Okay, let’s say he did it. How would he have been able to find exactly where Dad was?”

  “Good question, Cyril. And the answer is obvious.”

  “And it is…?”

  “That Ari is part of something larger than we will ever get a handle on.”

  They drove in silence. Nader hefted the golf club then dropped it into the back seat.

  “What about you?” Cyril asked.

  “What about me?”

  “Do you know how many people are looking for you? Do you know why?”

  “They’re idiots and they won’t find me.”

  “Hughes? Suzanne?”

  Silence.

  “The police?”

  Silence.

  Cyril broke the silence. “So what now?”

  “All things will be revealed.”

  “And in the meantime?”

  “In the meantime, I will disappear. And, in the short term, so will you. It’s necessary, for both of us.”

  “Come on.”

  “Trust me. There must be somewhere you can go, somewhere nobody knows about. Maybe back to the East Coast. That would be poetic, wouldn’t it.”

  “And what about him. Ari, Charon? If he’s so fucking dangerous.”

  “He’ll be taken care of. You’ll get a message when it’s safe to surface.”

  “What does that mean—taken care of?”

  “Cyril. There’s a war on. Forget about Osama and nine-eleven, the Arab Spring. We’re at war. It’s been coming for a hundred years and it could last another hundred. And here’s a scoop: The people we call the bad guys? They’re gonna win. As things are beginning to unfold, they can’t lose. There are a billion people listening. To them.”

  “It’s too big to be a story. That’s what you were trying to tell Savage.”

  “Here’s reality, Cyril—the only truth worth anything is what’s happening. And the only way to know what’s happening is to be part of it.”

  “Where will you be, Nader?”

  “Pull up here,” Nader said.

  “St. George subway station,” Cyril said. “What is it about this place?”

  “From St. George station you can go anywhere in the world, Cyril. North, south, east, west. Take care.”

  He opened the car door and before he left, he paused briefly, as if he had a final thought. But then he slipped out, closed the door gently, vanished without another word.

  The policeman was rapping on the window with a flashlight. “You can’t stop here. Move on.”

  He started the car, moved slowly down the block, away from the entrance to the subway station. He parked again. He no longer knew where he was going, where he could go. He checked for messages. There were none. He called his mother.

  “Mom. I won’t be home tonight. I’ll probably be away for a few days.”

  “Away?”

  “If anybody asks, I’m overseas. I’ll touch base later and Mom—I love you.”

  “So where will you be?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Cyril. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m okay.”

  He hung up and scrolled through his contacts until he found Gloria’s number. He hesitated, but only briefly.

  “This is Gloria.”

  “Hi.”

  Silence. “It’s me.”

  Silence.

  “You’re at work?”

  “Yes. Where are you?

  “Out and about. Can I come home?”

  There was a pause that was long enough for the germination of a thought, a sensation of an idea clicking into word forms, syntax, slipping toward the tongue: Maybe this is a bad idea…sorry if I’m putting you on the spot.

  “I won’t be here much longer. Do you still have your key?”

  “No. I forgot it…”

  “Why am I not surprised? Do you mind waiting in the lobby until
I get there?”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  It was a Saturday morning. He stared out over the dismal city, rain streaking down the glass balcony door. Plants carefully arrayed along the railing were already dead. He remembered how he’d placed them there back in springtime, carefully packing the tiny shoots in the pots, visiting the gardening store and asking for advice about the most nutritious potting soil, an antidote for the boredom he’d endured before the start of his internship. And of feeling marginally improved by what he considered a small act of creativity. Now they were withered, dead from neglect as much as anything.

  The weather channel informed him that the temperature was plus-two degrees Celsius. There could be sleet. He couldn’t watch the news channels anymore. He didn’t trust what anyone was telling him. He was bored by movies. He couldn’t stand sports. Everything he saw and heard seemed false, fabricated, performed.

  He’d started reading three highly recommended novels. He’d even started writing one—the story of the past six months. The novels failed to hold his interest, but they succeeded in persuading him that he didn’t have the talent or the discipline to write one of his own. And what had really happened in the past six months? What could he say for sure? Would anyone believe him? Would anybody care? He’d slept a lot that week, far too much he knew.

  He was waiting for a signal of some kind, a sign that it was safe to face the outside world. But he realized, that Saturday morning, that he really didn’t care what anybody had to say about the outside world, the unseen perils of the present, the chaotic narratives of history as shaped by academic storytellers, the media manipulation of reality and motive, trying to explain what happens, the menace of what hasn’t happened yet, all from the sanctuary of detachment. He’d envied Gloria as she dressed for work, even though it was the weekend.

  My weeks don’t end. When was it she had told him that?

  He decided to go out, brave the sleet and whatever peril waited for him there.

  The only way to know what’s happening is to be part of it.

  But everything boils down to just one word, he thought. Power. The power to get what everybody wants: wealth, security and sex. Isn’t that what it would mean to be “a part of it”? To play the game to win a portion of the prize. Power, survival.

  He felt the chill of bitterness, the memory of abandonment, though he could never have explained why he would feel that way. It was, after all, he who had disappeared, who had turned off his phone except for swift and furtive checks to see if there was any word from Nader. Now he felt there never would be a message, that if a signal came at all it would be from somewhere unexpected, in some surprising form.

  He watched the rain pissing down. Piss, piss, piss. The wind was stirring. The weather was worsening as predicted by the cheerful weather woman in the skirt that was too tight for television. He felt sorry for her. TV makes everyone look fat. Nobody likes to look fat. Nobody fat likes to be stared at. He killed the television picture. He grabbed a coat and ball cap and headed for the elevator, turned on his telephone as he was going down. Nothing.

  About a block from the apartment building he could feel the vibration in his pocket. The display told him it was Gloria. “Hey.”

  “Just giving you a heads-up,” she said. But before he heard another word he saw the car slipping quietly along the curb, slowing to a crawl beside him. Tinted window sliding down. He killed the phone and bolted toward a shop doorway. The door was locked.

  The voice behind him, loud, authoritative: “Hey, whoa—come back here.” He thought he recognized it. Hughes?

  He bent down, walked toward the car. Hughes was frowning at him through the drizzle on his glasses. Suzanne was behind the wheel. She leaned forward, waved.

  “Jump in,” said Hughes. Cyril complied, after looking nervously up and down the sidewalk.

  “How did you know I’d be here?”

  “Elementary investigative journalism. Cherchez la femme. We located Gloria and asked her. She told us. Where were you going?”

  “Coffee and a muffin.”

  “We need you at the office. We’ll grab something on the way.”

  “Wait. I can’t go there yet.”

  “And why not?” Hughes asked. “Last time I checked you were working for us.”

  “I’ve been told to lay low, sort of like witness protection, until I’m told it’s safe to surface. I don’t know how to explain.”

  “Who told you.”

  “Nader.”

  “We figured.”

  The car was now moving out into the traffic. “I haven’t been given the green light yet.”

  “Consider this the green light.”

  “It’s about that guy at the Only Café. Suzanne, you were right about him. Stop the car.”

  She accelerated. “He doesn’t matter anymore,” she said. “Now we can do the story and we need you to help us tell it.”

  “You talked to Nader?”

  “No.”

  “Well, where is he?”

  “Nobody knows,” Hughes said. “Best guess? He’s gone to war. Whether to fight or to cover it, we don’t know. I doubt if he knows yet.”

  “Is Nader part of our story?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “But what about Ari. Charon. What about him?”

  “We’ll explain when we get you to the office.”

  “Something happened to him.”

  “Yes.”

  “Dead?”

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  Cyril was shocked by a sudden sense of loss—his father’s killer but also the last connection to his father’s distant past. “Does anybody know who did it?”

  “It seems he had a heart attack. He lived alone. A two-room place on the second floor of a tailor shop, not far from that bar. A young guy who used to work at that café found him. Also an Israeli, we understand. I guess they knew each other.”

  Cyril managed to laugh. “A heart attack. And we’re supposed to believe that?”

  “It’s official, Cyril. It doesn’t matter what we believe. He’s dead. Cause of death, a heart attack. More important, we have our story now.”

  “Okay. But what makes it a story now when it wasn’t a week ago?”

  Hughes didn’t even turn around. “Dead people don’t sue,” he said quietly.

  “And Nader?”

  “Forget about Nader. He’s gone.”

  The wind was now aggressive, rain lashing the windows, braids of liquid distorting everything outside, the wobbly, wavy world only intermittently clarified by the rhythmic sweep of windshield wipers. All sound now the inside hum of mechanism, thunder in his head, the hiss of outside traffic.

  “You’re very quiet back there,” said Hughes.

  “Yes. Just thinking.”

  “I can imagine.”

  But the image in his mind, for no reason that he could easily have explained to them, was of a house abandoned on a hillside a thousand miles away, and of a sloping meadow long since reclaimed by skimpy juniper and stunted spruce, finally surrendering to a rocky shoreline and a sprawling endless roiling emptiness beyond. And the whitened veils of winter that increased the darkness and the loneliness. And even in the laggard spring, the howling northeast wind that, according to his mother, always stirred the dust of decades, the detritus of past lives, the ghosts of long-departed people, of bats and mice and their excretions. It would be on days like that, she’d say, you’d always dream about away.

  “You okay?” Suzanne asked. She turned slightly. He looked away. She turned the car onto University.

  “I think it finally sank in,” he said. “My dad is dead.” Silence.

  “Nader said something interesting.”

  Silence.

  “That the only way to know what happens is to be a part of it.”

  Silence.

  Hughes sighed. “He’s an Arab, Cyril.”

  “I’m as much an Arab as he is.”

  “If you say so.”
r />   A car horn, urgent. Suzanne braked and swore quietly.

  “You spoke to him?” said Hughes.

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing. He’ll figure it out, the right thing to do. And do it.”

  “And you?”

  Silence.

  “It’s all highly overrated, I think.”

  “What is?” Hughes asked.

  “What we do.”

  “I hear you,” Suzanne said.

  The rain slashed horizontally. The wipers doggedly responded. Swish. Swish. Swish. Suzanne turned on the radio. The car filled up with talk.

  “Turn it off,” said Hughes. She complied.

  Silence returned, interrupted only by the swish of wipers, hiss of traffic.

  “Pull over for a minute,” Hughes instructed.

  She signalled, edged through the traffic until she reached the curbside, stopped. They sat in silence.

  Hughes sighed. “It’s up to you, Cyril.” He was staring straight ahead. “I understand. It’s okay.”

  “Yes,” said Cyril. “Thank you.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Home.”

  “Where’s home?”

  The car windows were fogging rapidly. There was only the sound of rain spattering, the surge and splash of traffic. “Yes,” he said. He wiped the window with a sleeve, peered out. “I guess I have to figure that out too.”

  He opened the car door and struggled out. He stood for just a moment in a sudden gust of wind and rain. And then he started walking.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This work of fiction is based on real events.

  I have drawn extensively on the work of journalists who risked and occasionally lost their lives covering the civil war in Lebanon. I am indebted, in particular, to the journalism of Robert Fisk, who lived and worked perilously in West Beirut throughout the worst of the turmoil. His encyclopedic account of the war, Pity the Nation, was an indispensable source of insight and corroboration. A seminal scene, the murder of the woman at the clothesline on the morning of September 18, 1982, was inspired by his reporting of the horrifying spectacles he witnessed that day.