Dynamite Fishermen (Beriut Trilogy 1)

by Fleming, Preston

  “No.”

  “You are certain of this? He entered the building not long after you did. We have asked all the tenants about him and have checked some of the empty apartments, but no one has seen him leave.”

  Prosser shrugged.

  “You are alone here?”

  “I already said I am. Why, is there some problem?”

  “Perhaps. The concierge called us because he had suspicions about the man we are looking for. We need to speak to him.” He paused and looked Prosser in the eye as if to challenge him. “If you see him, you will contact us, no?”

  “Certainly,” Prosser replied. “May Allah give you strength.”

  The visitor nodded and gestured for his comrades to follow him up the stairway to the next floor.

  Prosser returned once more to the bathroom door and knocked lightly. “It was the same bunch,” he said. “Nasserists, by the looks of them. The concierge must have called them for help.”

  He gestured for Abu Ramzi to take a seat. Fighting back the panic that threatened to shut down all ordered thought in his brain, he attempted to think out loud of a means to escape. “Look, my friend,” he began, momentarily surprised at his own self-possession. “The way I see it, we have two choices in trying to get out of here. Either we march down to the lobby together, or you could try to make your exit through the window while I stay here. It seems possible that you could lower yourself from one balcony to another without anyone seeing you. Of course, they might have somebody covering the outside of the building, but my guess is that they’re all in the lobby or out in front. Still, if it were up to me, I would go downstairs together and try to convince them I misunderstood their Arabic. What do you say?”

  Abu Ramzi cracked open a pistachio and popped the kernel into his mouth. He appeared unruffled, even amused, by the visits of the young militiamen. “The matter is not important,” he replied, taking another pistachio. “I have experience with boys like these. Let us finish our discussion quickly so that I will not be late in returning to my unit. Then we will leave together, as you propose.”

  Twenty minutes later Prosser tore out the pages of his notebook containing his notes and watched them swirl around the sides of the toilet bowl before disappearing down the drain. By now he had memorized the high points of the debriefing and could reconstruct the rest. Next he cleaned off the table, closed the windows, and switched off the fan. Before they stepped out into the hallway, he quizzed Abu Ramzi once more on the time and place for their next meeting. Then they rode the elevator to the ground floor.

  As they emerged Prosser spotted the concierge standing across the foyer with the two camouflage-clad fighters who had earlier knocked on his door. The two civilians who accompanied them approached from the left, where they had been lurking at the foot of the stairs. Their rifles were held waist-high with muzzles leveled at Prosser and Abu Ramzi. The concierge identified Abu Ramzi to the militiamen as the man in the blue pullover he had seen entering the building.

  “So now you are together,” the civilian declared triumphantly, as if he had known it from the start.

  “Together?” Prosser repeated in Arabic, as if slow to comprehend. “Of course we are together.”

  “But when I asked you before, you said you were alone,” the Lebanese retorted, taken aback by the contradiction. “Twice you said it. Now you claim this man was with you?”

  “Excuse me, but I do not understand what you are saying,” Prosser lied. “Speak slowly, please.”

  The others stared at him, momentarily bewildered. He felt as if his heart had stopped beating and would not resume until the lead militiaman spoke again. But before he could answer, Abu Ramzi stepped forward to address the man in a confidential tone. Within moments, the older officer’s air of relaxed authority began to deflate the youth’s self-importance. Soon the young militiaman stopped asking questions and found himself answering them instead. He listened to the Palestinian with eyes averted, his replies reduced to monosyllables.

  Although Prosser could not make out much of what Abu Ramzi said—Abu Ramzi put his arm around the militiaman’s shoulder and spoke earnestly into his ear—it was clear that his worst fears were not to be realized. In less than two minutes of one-sided conversation, the Palestinian had maneuvered the young militiaman into apologizing for the apparent misunderstanding and inviting the two visitors to stay for a glass of tea.

  Abu Ramzi declined the invitation with a relaxed wave of his hand and wished the militiamen farewell, shaking hands with all four of them on his way out. Prosser did the same and then followed Abu Ramzi into the long late-afternoon shadows. As they approached the corner, Abu Ramzi turned to Prosser with a triumphant gleam in his eye.

  “It was not so difficult as I expected,” he said with evident self-satisfaction. “They received a complaint from a neighbor about an armed stranger entering the building with a foreigner and were obliged to investigate. A routine incident.”

  “What on earth did you tell them?” Prosser asked, taking a deep breath for the first time since heading down the stairs into the lobby.

  “Perhaps it is better not to discuss it,” the agent said with a wry smile.

  “Don’t give me that, Abu Ramzi. What did you say?”

  “You will not be insulted?”

  “Of course I won’t be insulted. Why should I? Out with it, Abu Ramzi.”

  “I said you were an American spy working for the Palestinian Resistance, and that they should forget they ever saw you or I would have each one of them arrested and thrown into solitary confinement until you were safely out of the country.”

  “Damn it, Abu Ramzi. I knew I shouldn’t have asked.”

  Chapter 5

  Prosser let the door close behind him while his eyes adjusted to the darkness inside. The place seemed unusually silent as he moved past the empty bar, except for a familiar Charles Aznavour ballad filtering through from somewhere in the distance. The Pagoda restaurant, located on the ground floor of a middle-class tenement not far from the beaches of Ramlet el Baida in West Beirut, had seen a steady decline in its business since the outbreak of civil war. Although it was still a regular haunt of European and American expatriates, rarely had Prosser ever seen more than three or four of its dozen tables occupied at once.

  As he passed the bar he wished a good evening to the middle-age proprietor, a frail, birdlike Chinaman who looked up from the drink he was mixing long enough to grin obsequiously and point the way toward the dining room. Prosser advanced past ornately carved wooden tables and lacquered screens whose shabbiness was only partly masked by the half-light.

  Boisterous laughter and raised voices reached his ears as he approached through a narrow hallway, and welcoming calls of “Late as usual,” “It’s Prosser—open another bottle,” and “Find the man a chair!” greeted him as he entered the room. From the flushed cheeks of the participants and the plentiful array of wine and beer bottles on the table, he guessed that the party had been under way for the better part of an hour.

  During that time, Prosser had been sitting in a parked car about a mile and a half to the east, debriefing a junior lieutenant in the Amal militia on arms deliveries to Amal and the other Lebanese Shiite militias. But his tardiness appeared to have passed unnoticed. He had not missed dinner, so it seemed, judging from the absence of any food on the table other than shallow bowls of olives, nuts, and raw carrot slices passing from hand to hand.

  Prosser scanned the assemblage for familiar faces and then headed for the nearest empty chair, which was across the table from Harry Landers and the U.S. embassy’s chief security officer, Don Davenport. To their right, at the head of the table, sat the guest of honor, a rookie State Department bodyguard who had just finished his ninety-day assignment on the ambassador’s protective detail and would be leaving the next morning for Washington. The others at the table were nearly evenly divided between Lebanese and American nationals, with nearly all of the latter being employed by the U.S. embassy in one capacity o
r another.

  To Prosser’s immediate right sat a plain-looking woman of about twenty-five whom he was certain he had never seen before. As his eyes acclimated to the dim light, he noted that she looked prettier than she had seemed at first glance, having a perfectly oval face dominated by dark, almond-shaped eyes and long chestnut hair that fell over her bare, tanned shoulders. Though by no means tall, her figure was erect and superbly proportioned. Judging from her self-assured demeanor, precise manner of speech, and understated dress, he guessed she was from a wealthy Lebanese family and might have been educated in France or Italy. While he pondered how best to introduce himself to her, the security chief tapped a fork to the side of his wine glass and took the floor.

  “I just want you all to know,” he announced over the voices of those at the opposite end of the table who ignored him, “Conrad here is the only representative present tonight from the political section. I don’t know what the hell the others are doing tonight, but you can always count on Conrad to turn out for a party.”

  Prosser raised a hand to acknowledge the introduction and then resumed his search for an empty wine glass.

  A knowing laugh came from one of the Lebanese guests on his right. “Ah, everyone knows what the political section does,” declared an elegantly dressed Lebanese three seats away. “But, maalesh, that is not a concern among friends,” he added with a broad wave of the hand. “And are we not all friends here tonight? Ahlan wa sahlan, Conrad, habibi!” The speaker was an inebriated Husayn al Fayyad.

  “Wa ahlan fiik,” Prosser replied graciously, ignoring the speaker’s opening gibe.

  He turned to the woman beside him and held out his hand. “I’m Conrad Prosser,” he greeted her with his most engaging smile. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  She turned and looked at him with curious and intelligent eyes. She took his hand and let her eyes linger a moment in his after he released her. “No, but I am pleased that we do now. My name is Rima al Fayyad. Excuse me, would you be so kind as to repeat your family name?”

  “Prosser. Conrad Prosser. It’s German. My grandparents came to America from Germany after the First World War.”

  “Ah, Germany, very nice,” she said with an approving nod. “My brother, Husayn, lives in Germany. He works in Stuttgart as an engineer.”

  “Let me guess, for Mercedes-Benz?”

  “Yes, how did you know?” she asked with unaffected curiosity.

  “To tell the truth, Husayn and I met last night. But it wouldn’t have been a difficult thing to guess. Stuttgart is where their main factory is. Out of any ten engineers in Stuttgart, I would expect nine must work for Mercedes.”

  “You seem to know Germany well.”

  “I used to, anyway. I spent a summer in Hamburg as a schoolboy and went back later to study at a German university for a year. I still manage a stop in Frankfurt now and then on my way back and forth to the States, but not often enough. After living in Middle East for a couple of years, it’s nice to go to a place where everything works the way it’s supposed to. You know, trains on time and all that. No offense, of course.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You have lived in other Arab countries, then? You must tell me, which of them did you like the most?” She shifted her chair to face him more directly.

  “Lebanon, hands down. I studied Arabic for a while in Tunis and was posted to Saudi Arabia for a couple years, but compared to North Africa and the Gulf, Lebanon is paradise.”

  “Ah, you have studied Arabic? Then we must speak bil arabi.”

  “When I joined the diplomatic service, that is all I did for nearly two years,” he continued in his best formal Arabic. “In fact, I spend an hour every morning with a tutor to learn new words. It would be a hopeless task to find out what’s happening here if I had to rely only on those Lebanese who speak English.”

  “Then you must be very well informed. Your Arabic is excellent.”

  “Thank you,” he replied, reverting to English. “Would you mind repeating that to my tutor? Her name is Huda, and she’s sitting right over there.”

  “By Allah, you are Huda’s student? Our families live not more than fifty meters away from each other in Tripoli. She has spoken of you many times, but until now I did not connect you to her.”

  “Nothing too derogatory, I hope.”

  “Ah, habibi, what she said about you I cannot tell.” She cast a playful glance at him and looked away.

  At that moment, Husayn al Fayyad reached over the person to his left and touched his sister’s arm. “Aha,” he interrupted. “So Mr. Prosser speaks Arabic and works in the political section. Be careful what you tell him, Rima, or he will put it in your file at the CIA.”

  As the remark had been made in a reasonably good-humored tone of voice, Prosser let it go. Rima would not. “Why do you speak such nonsense, Husayn? It is a dangerous thing these days to call someone a spy, even in jest. You do not know whose ears it may reach.”

  After delivering the rebuke, she did not wait for a response, but instead leaned forward and began a conversation with the woman seated opposite her brother, a chubby-faced Libanaise in her late twenties with a pageboy hairdo and heavily made-up eyes whose buxom figure did ample justice to her strapless cocktail dress. Typical of Lebanese women, she had come far more elegantly dressed than the occasion demanded.

  A sheepish Husayn al Fayyad then turned toward Prosser, shrugged, and assured the American in grammatical but oddly inflected German that he had meant no harm.

  “No offense taken,” Prosser replied in German, pleased that Husayn seemed to feel more at ease with him now. He wondered whether Husayn might be in need of a best friend, in Pirelli’s sense of the term. Husayn’s militia contacts might be useful, he mused, even if he didn’t intend to stay in Lebanon longer than was necessary to settle his father’s estate.

  While Husayn summoned the restaurateur to bring two more bottles of Chateau Musar, Prosser listened to Harry Landers regale the young woman on his left, a newly arrived visa officer at the British embassy, with lurid tales of the breakdown of order in Lebanon and the exploits of Beirut’s legendary thieves. One gang, Harry claimed, had recently carted away a section of the country’s international telephone cable to sell as scrap metal, interrupting international telephone and telex service for a week. Another ring had destroyed the municipality’s entire store of computerized tax records with the idea of saving their patron, a large property owner, from having to pay taxes on his commercial real estate holdings.

  Harry had just begun to describe how Palestinian militiamen had systematically looted the safe deposit boxes in the city’s downtown banks during the early days of the Lebanese civil war when the restaurateur’s Austrian wife arrived with the first platters of food. All discussion ceased as she unloaded the domed serving platters and passed them around the table. More platters arrived minutes later; another half hour passed before they lit their first postprandial cigarettes.

  Husayn, one of the first to finish eating, could scarcely wait for Prosser to lay down his fork before accosting him with a pointed question about American policy toward Lebanon’s Sunni Muslim minority. Since Husayn seemed likely to take a partisan view on the issue, Prosser offered the official State Department line that U.S. policy was to show no favor to any faction, but rather to support Lebanon’s lawful, if weakened, central government.

  Husayn gave a bitter laugh. “Was it not your Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who invited the Syrian army into Lebanon in 1976?” he asked, his voice tinged with sarcasm. “The Lebanese have spent five years under Syrian occupation while America sits idly by and claims neutrality vis-à-vis the Lebanese factions. All we ask is for America to help us regain our independence. Not until Lebanon is free of Syrian and Palestinian occupation will our people be at liberty to make peace with each other.” The faraway look in Husayn’s eyes hinted that he had spoken more to vent his frustration than to convince his audience.

  Poor Henry Kissinger is taking a real beatin
g in Lebanon these days, Prosser thought. “I understand what you’re saying, Husayn,” he replied politely, “but you overlook the fact that the Lebanese parties had already been at each other’s throats for years before Kissinger came along. If you ask me, the Lebanese will still be fighting each other long after Henry the K is dead and forgotten. Anyone who expects that evicting the Palestinians and the Syrians will instantly solve Lebanon’s domestic political problems is living in a dream world.”

  By now Harry and the British visa officer had begun to follow the exchange with growing interest. Rima, who sat between Prosser and her brother, listened but held her tongue.

  “My dear friend,” Husayn continued with more than a trace of condescension, “I doubt that you can comprehend how we have suffered at the hands of the Palestinian militias and the Syrian army. But in my view, America should start acknowledging its fair share of responsibility for Lebanon’s suffering.”

  At this, Rima, who had been listening with mounting indignation, lost her composure. “And by what right do you talk of suffering, Husayn?” she challenged her brother. “You were in Munich when the Syrians invaded and in Stuttgart throughout the occupation. When have you taken a stand against the Syrians? You cannot expect America to do for Lebanon what we fail to do for ourselves.”

  “I have done what I have done, sister,” he replied darkly. “But even so, there can be no justification for America to continue evading its responsibility.”

  “And is your answer for the Americans to intervene again, as they did when they brought us the Syrians in 1976?” Rima asked. “Think carefully, my brother, for the next time they intervene it may be the worse for us.”

  “It cannot be any worse than what we face now.”