I have a little over $200 in my pocket and no way to leave here, no way to get out of Lebanon even if they were to agree to let me go. I don’t want to show these men any sign of panic or fear as an indication that I am not being truthful. I must make them believe I had no part of the deal. Yet at the same time I can’t call Mohammed
a liar.
“This is all a misunderstanding,” I tell Tamer. “But we can fix it. Abu Ali knows in the past I have always paid for my goods. Let’s make this shipment. Then, when I get back to America, I give my word I will do everything possible to find out what happened to the other shipment, whether it arrived safely and got into the country and was sold. And I will see that these men get paid.”
Tamer translates. More questions and further discussion. “Do you know where Pierre lives? Or his partner?” he asks. “They are the ones responsible for the last shipment?”
“Yes, that’s right. Pierre and whatever the other guy’s name is. They live in Miami and Boston, I think. I’m not sure. But I will find out.”
Will I? Can I find them? I have no idea. Probably not. The Wizard is an expert at disappearing. But at this point I’m willing to say I’ll do just about anything to put this trip back together and get out of Lebanon alive and with my goods.
“He is your friend…?” Tamer says, more a question than a statement.
“No. I don’t really know him. I bought some phony ID from him. I told Mohammed and Nasif. He stole my briefcase, Tamer. He’s no friend.”
“Mr. M. told them he is your friend.”
“I figured as much. But that’s not the case.”
Tamer nods, translates. One of the men shouts something and they all laugh. Then more serious conversation. The men look at me as if I can provide them with an answer. “Has Mohammed heard anything from him?” I ask. “Do we even know if the load made it into the States?”
No one knows the answer to that. More conversation, some angry, heated words. It is obvious some of the growers as well as Abu Ali have lost patience with Mohammed. Aside, Tamer asks me if I know Abu Ali’s son, the Captain.
“I know him well. He stays at my ranch in Texas.”
Tamer and Abu Ali have a short conversation between themselves. “He can find anyone,” Tamer says, smiling now. “He’s a badass… crazy motherfucker.” Tamer and Abu Ali confer once again. “You know, it’s not so much the money,” Tamer goes on, speaking quietly to me. “Of course that hurts. But we can always make more money. These guys just hate getting fucked. It’s their pride, their dignity. Something must be done. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. This is how we are. We must have revenge.”
Abu Ali and the others come up with a solution. They urge me to take ten kilos of “the other, the white” to make up for the money lost on the load they sent to the Wizard’s people in Miami. Somehow I knew this was coming. Why else hold the meeting in a junk lab? “What am I going to do with ten kilos of heroin?” I say. “Even if I agree to take it, I wouldn’t know where to sell it. Heroin is not my business. Hashish is my business.”
“I will sell it for you,” says Tamer. “My people will pick it up in New York or Jersey and cash it out in a couple of days. I’ll get the money back to Abu Ali, and he pays these men. You never have to touch the stuff.”
I pretend to give this plan some consideration. I said to myself I would do anything to get this trip back on track. Should I take the junk? They certainly make it sound easy. What the fuck? Why not? Meanwhile, everything inside me is shouting, No! No, no… don’t do it. You may be a criminal, Stratton, an outlaw your entire adult life. And, yes, there is money in that white powder. Big money. Certainly it is easier to smuggle than pot or hash.
I have heard and listened to all of the arguments for getting into the heroin business. Including the most reasonable argument of all: you can get just as much time if you get caught smuggling pot or hash as you can if you are caught smuggling junk. Cannabis and its byproduct hashish are Schedule One narcotics, according to the government, in the same category as heroin. The government makes no distinction between these two illegal substances. So why should I?
But I stopped adhering to the edicts of my government a long time ago. Just because those fools don’t know the difference between junk and pot, I do. You don’t put pot in a needle and stick it in your arm. You don’t get strung out on pot any more than you get strung out on coffee or Pepsi. You don’t die from smoking it, no matter how much you smoke. It won’t turn you into a desperate junkie willing to sell out friends, family, yourself, everything you believe in to get that next fix. But it is all illegal, all criminal. Finally, for me, it all comes down to one consideration: If I make this move, if I agree to let them put ten kilos of heroin in with my load and turn it over to Tamer, how will I feel about that? How will I feel about myself?
I can’t go there. I’ll be a hypocrite, a phony, a liar to myself. All my life, since I was old enough to know what it meant, I railed against hypocrites. The teachers, the cops, the politicians, the suburban parents where I grew up who smoked cigarettes and told us kids it was wrong, many of them booze hounds, adulterers. Priests and Cub Scout leaders diddling little boys. The many liars, bigots, cheats. And cowards. Without the guts to stand up for what they profess to believe. Now I’m going to become one of them? Different perhaps but still the same. No. Do what you say and say what you do. Be who you believe you are.
Going against my principles is what got me in trouble in the first place.
I get up from the table, choose my words carefully. “Tamer, tell Abu Ali and these men I respect them. I understand their position and I sympathize with them. Nobody likes to get ripped off. But I must respectfully decline to handle the other, the white. Because, first of all, it is not my business. But more important to me, in a word, I do not want the karma that comes with it.”
Tamer smiles. Khalid also smirks. Karma? Fucking hippie. Is there even a word for karma in Arabic? It’s from Sanskrit, but there must be a comparable concept in Islam.
I bow slightly. Abu Ali stands. We embrace, kiss. The heroin cooking downstairs smells… good! I almost change my mind.
Fuck it, take the junk! Who cares? It’s an ugly, cutthroat world. People are savages. There is no afterlife. It’s all just shit anyway. If people want to kill themselves, destroy their lives sticking needles in their arms, so what? That’s their business. How is it any worse than gorging yourself on junk food and dying of a heart attack? It doesn’t matter how you die—or how you live. Nobody gets out of here alive.
No, no, no… go home. Empty-handed if need be. It does matter. We answer to a higher power, even if only within ourselves. Life is not all just shit. It means something. Or, at the very least, we invest it with meaning if we follow what we believe. Don’t break weak, Stratton. Be a fucking man.
Khalid stands with me, and we start from the room.
“Just a minute, Rich,” Tamer calls to me.
I look back half expecting him to pull a gun and say: You are taking the junk or you leave here as a corpse. Tamer speaks to Abu Ali, and then he walks outside with Khalid and me. “Go on,” he says to Khalid. “I’ll take him.”
“Where?” Khalid asks.
“Meet us in town.”
Where indeed? I don’t even know where I’m going. Back to Abu Ali’s villa? Back to Beirut? I have no money. Mohammed is going to shit when he hears about this. Somehow, this fat, greedy prick will convince himself this is all my fault and I am wrong for not taking the heroin, wrong for letting the Wizard steal my briefcase, wrong for allowing him to rip them off even if I had no part in it. There is some kind of twisted Levantine logic at work here, I know it is how Mohammed’s mind works. How am I supposed to explain this to Sammy? He’s going to go nuts. I neglected to tell him about the stolen briefcase, didn’t want to admit it and worry him. I’m wondering if maybe the Arabs will allow me to take the couple of tons we have already prepared and try to salvage this trip. Certainly it won’t be the payday we
anticipated.
There is an infallible reasoning to living in the moment, I tell myself. It is the smuggler’s creed: You are not out until the game is over. Anything can happen. The past is finished. Life goes on. It is all about the next twenty minutes. Where do I go from here? Wherever these next few steps take me. Because you never know what lies around the next corner. Death or deliverance.
Tamer walks me to his car, the new Mercedes. And we drive off. “You hungry?” he asks.
“I could eat.” That’s one thing about me: I can always eat. Nothing interferes with my appetite. And drink. Booze is my friend. Shuts up the worrywart living in the left side of my head. And fuck. Never too scared or too depressed to eat, drink, and fuck.
We dine at a restaurant in Baalbek. “Let me see what I can do,” Tamer says as we eat.
“This is not negotiable, Tamer.”
“I understand. You made that clear. Bad karma.” He smiles. “How much hash do you want?”
“As much as I can get. As long as it’s good. All Number One or Zahara. I can’t sell commercial. The market is flooded with—”
“I know all about it,” Tamer says. “You have a secure way to get it in the country?”
“Yes. Very secure.”
He nods knowingly. “So they tell me. You never lost a load. How long will it take you to sell it?”
“If it’s good, the money will start to flow within a week or two after we take delivery in the States. We’ll cash out in a couple of months.”
Tamer nods. “I will speak to them. They need the money.”
“I’m not taking the junk.”
“You said that. I respect what you say. Every man must have something he will not do… a line he will not cross.”
“What’s yours?” I ask.
Tamer smiles. Nice teeth, I’m thinking. He’s a junk dealer but I like the guy.
“Good question,” he says. “I guess… I don’t fuck my friends.”
KHALID WAITS FOR us outside the restaurant. Before returning to the villa, I ask him to take me to the temple complex of Bacchus and Jupiter, the fantastic ruins rising up like a dream landscape from the hill in the middle of town. Khalid has no interest in fallen temples, he leaves me to wander alone among the ruins. He stays by the car to watch the gaggle of tourists, mostly Beirutis, some young women with exposed heads who have come to Baalbek in small buses, and who pay to ride the tired, leathery camels tethered in the parking lot.
The war has all but eviscerated Lebanon’s foreign tourist industry. The ruins are empty. I have visited this site on previous trips to Baalbek, perhaps even in other lifetimes. I’m drawn here as if by some unseen force, utterly fascinated by this enigmatic, sacred place and how and why it came to be one of the wonders of the ancient world—an obscure religious center well inland, difficult to get to, and with no political or trading significance. The temples at Baalbek were known as a place of oracular divination, a place where kings and conquerors, mystics and magicians came seeking elucidation of the present and a vision for the future. If it worked for them, perhaps it would work for me.
It is late afternoon, the golden hour. I sit on one of the massive slabs of cut stone and face the setting sun. The light is refracted through the columns. Time stands still. I let my mind go, enter the infinite, let the mystery captured in the stones take me higher even than my beloved al-Kayf—though, truth be told, when you smoke as much as I do you never really come down. There is a fundamental truth cast in these stones, an understanding of the meaning of life I must fathom to free my mind from the petty cares and woes of mere time-captured existence. Who cares about this hash trip? Why am I always obsessing about getting over on the Man? So what if I’m facing a shitload of time back in the States? There is no such thing as time. And who cares if the cops and judges are a bunch of assholes and hypocrites? What’s that got to do with who I am? The government may be in the hands of a gang of conspirators—nothing new there. None of that matters; it is not important. Mere details. There is a secret locked in the giant rose granite columns rising from a foundation of limestone megaliths. Understand the truth fixed forever in the temples and platforms and sculptures harkening back thousands of years before Jesus Christ walked the earth, and this truth was foreseen and will still be here long after I am gone, long after Bernie Wolfshein and DEA, CENTAC, the American government, and these stupid, asinine laws cease to exist and are forgotten, these stones will still be here.
The place is a riddle in stone, compelling and humbling. There is no known explanation for how the original temple came into being, no written history left by the people who quarried and placed the gigantic foundation stones that lie beneath the Temple of Jupiter and the Great Court at the base of the temple. Long before the Phoenicians arrived here and built their temple to the god Baal, and thousands of years before the Romans conquered the lands of the Old Testament and built their temple of Jupiter on the same spot, some tribe of prehistoric, highly evolved artisans and engineers managed to cut, transport, and lift and precisely arrange unwieldy, colossal blocks of stone weighing hundreds of tons. They labored to build a temple to honor a god before all others. And then they disappeared without a trace.
Except for their mighty works, the stones. One stone, known as the Stone of the Pregnant Woman—the single largest piece of cut stone in the world—still lies partially buried and attached at the limestone quarry a quarter of a mile from the temple complex. It’s as though the mysterious masons dropped their tools and fled before they could finish the job. To quarry, transport, and lift these stones is a feat that is beyond the engineering abilities of any recognized ancient or contemporary builders. It daunts me to contemplate how mere humans were able to cleave and shape and move and elevate these stones. But the greater mystery is what inspired them, what faith in what gods or almighty God motivated them and gave them superhuman strength?
Beside this mystery, who I am and what meaning my life has seems inconsequential. Or perhaps not. The oracle that dwells in these stones whispers that my existence is part of something vast and unknowable but worthy of reverence. Then it comes to me. I understand why this place is here and why I am here to hear the oracle. If nothing is random, then I have a part in all this. The beings who cut and fashioned these mammoth stones understood that there is purpose and meaning to life.
They lived and I exist to honor creation and worship the Creator.
8
CITY OF DEATH
ANOTHER THREE WEEKS slip into eternity. The weather is beautiful, spring in the Bekaa, the air ever fragrant, and the skies have an iridescent blue untainted by the smear of pollution. Early in the morning I meditate, exercise on the balcony, and breathe deeply the scented air. I walk around the grounds surrounding Abu Ali’s villa complex, and I sit with the men in the courtyard and drink thick, sweet coffee. I scratch my balls in the loose pants and smoke bowls of hashish and talk world events.
Here I am in the thick of a conflict affecting the entire planet, yet it is the world outside the valley that seems to quake and tremble while I rest unmolested. I have only tenuous, secondhand contact with America. There is an American-made antiaircraft gun set up on a rear patio. “For the CIA planes,” Khalid tells me. Everyone is convinced that Israel, backed by America, is preparing to invade Lebanon. The hush, the lull, the quietude may only be a prelude to the chaos still to come. We visit the hash plantations. The growers are more trusting now and gradually the load is coming together. Tamer left, returned to the States. Abu Ali assures me that, “Everything will be ready.” Tamer personally guaranteed payment for the shipment. Why, I’m not sure. Nor do I know what he expects to get in return. This is vaguely troubling.
It’s an odd time for me. I feel a nagging sense of guilt, for it was my carelessness that allowed the Wizard to penetrate our network and rip these people off. Why was I even carrying a briefcase? Who do I think I am? Some straight businessman selling insurance like my old man? No, I’m an outlaw, a criminal in their eyes. A
nd criminals must be careful. Trust no one. Watch your back. Protect your sources.
I like the people of the valley—the growers, the kids and the old men, the girls and the women—and I hate to let them down. They are close to the earth and kind, generous, giving, like the land. I’m homesick, lonely, horny; and yet enjoying the irresponsibility of being completely unable to alter my circumstances. It’s like being in jail. I am, in a sense, still a hostage, a prisoner of this business. For the time being the outcome of this enterprise is totally beyond my control. This is strangely liberating. I never would have chosen to be here all this time, never would have chosen to go through this test; and yet I feel I have learned some indelible truth—from the oracle that dwells in the stones of the ancient ruins, from the people of this ancient land. If I can just remember to let go, let whatever happens happen, and trust God, because it’s not about what happens to me. It’s all about how I respond to what happens.
I could have become angry and shouted at Abu Ali and the men at the sit-down; I could have cursed them and stormed out of the room. But I kept my peace. I could have agreed to take the heroin and become a merchant of death. But I held to my beliefs. I showed respect, and Tamer saw that. Tamer believed, based on what he saw, that he could trust me. Now, and through to the end of this, I have got to remind myself constantly to maintain my integrity and trust in my values.
I sleep well here in the valley, and I have vivid dreams. One morning I have a transcendent nocturnal emission, a wet dream that is in its own self-centered way better than any lovemaking experience I have ever had with a real woman. It is as though for once the fucking and the ideal fantasy of what sex could be merge and leave me utterly satisfied with no sense of guilt or entanglement. I am riding around with my dream girl in the old 1940 Ford convertible coupe. She’s some combination of every woman I have ever loved. Anaïs, my wife, eclipses the others; she is, after all, the love of my life. But I also see glimpses of Laila, the enticing wife of Saad’s neighbor. There is a proud Arab poise to my dream woman’s carriage that only relaxes when she lies down and spreads her thighs. She has the hips of my high school love, Colleen. Val is in the contours of her rump. I could find a toe or finger to point to them all. We make leisurely love in a meadow by a stream under a huge weeping willow. The light coming through the tree’s leaves is magical green. Entering her takes me to the center of the earth and out to the far reaches of the cosmos. The orgasm is timeless. My only letdown comes when I wake to find that I am alone, and the dream-woman has dissolved in a wet spot on the sheets.
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