by Mike Bond
Mohammed brushed plaster chunks from her shoulders. “That was Amal, from Shatila. A mistake –”
One of the guards relit the lantern, throwing the room into jagged boiling shadows. Somewhere overhead a machine gun fired, then a Kalashnikov, a long, rattling salvo. “Shooting at nothing!” she fumed. Another shell was dropping; they keep coming, she thought, like homeless children, like hunting dogs. “Don't you care?” she screamed. The shell fell like a dying airplane into the next street, knocking her to her knees, new plaster tumbling. He said something she couldn't hear over the waterfall rumble of a building collapsing. It takes so long, she thought, for a building to fall, like a man dying.
Mohammed was brushing plaster from her shoulder again, and she sensed suddenly how much he did care that this was happening, that the way to make him gentle was to hurt him. A bullet sang off the window frame into the room, seeking flesh. “You're going to lose us all,” she said.
“Kill the light!” he called.
“We'll have to move down a floor,” a guard yelled. “The other side.”
“Can't see from there.”
“He's in the Life Building over there, your sniper,” Rosa shouted.
“We can't get him from here!” Hassan snarled. Bullets punched through the wall, fifty caliber, and she dove hitting her head on chunks of plaster. The bullets had crossed right through, in the front walls and out the back; she lay gripping a gun then realized it was a piece of the gilded frame.
She followed them down the dark plaster-piled stairway to the next floor. They were smashing open a door to a back apartment. The wood splintered and gave. An enormous bang knocked her to her knees, the floor wobbling.
“Just a rocket, up there,” Mohammed said calmly, as if he'd found the simple answer to a complex problem. “Lucky we moved.”
The new apartment was well-furnished. Like an archaeological dig, Rosa thought, a tomb not yet looted. “Damn!” Hassan said, lighting the lantern.
More mujihadeen were coming down from the upper stories. “They've located you,” one said to Mohammed.
An old man came running up the stairs and into the room, knelt before Mohammed. “Cut that out,” Mohammed snapped.
The old man stood, panting. “Hekmatyar says send a hundred men. Fifty rocket grenades. Or we can't hold all night.”
“Tell him to pull back now. To Soutros Soustani.”
Another rocket hit upstairs and the old man clasped his ears. Rosa shoved him aside, yelled at Mohammed, “I'll shut your snipers up. Give me a gun!”
“My son's there,” the old man said, “with Hekmatyar.”
“He'll pull back now. To safety.”
Rosa snatched Mohammed's arm. “You're abandoning the Green Line?”
“I don't have the men to hold it.”
“Put the wounded here?” someone called.
“Basement!” Mohammed yelled. Another rocket smashed through the upstairs and out the back, exploding in air, pieces howling down.
“Who's on the roof?”
“Dead!”
“Who's upstairs?”
“None.”
“Got to go!” someone was saying, over and over. “Go!”
Rosa shook Mohammed's arm. “Give me a gun!”
“The basement,” someone yelled.
“No!” Mohammed thundered through the plaster dust and echoing explosions. “I want an outpost here!”
She snatched his beard in both hands and shook it. “Do you want to kill those snipers?”
“Quiet!” he snapped.
“It's Christians in the Life Building,” she seethed, “with antitank rockets and a fifty caliber! Give me a gun, and I'll get them!”
“You?” Hassan was coughing from the dust. “You?”
“If I get them,” she said to Mohammed, “will you follow my plan?”
Another rocket hit and he pushed her down. “Go back to Mount Hermon, Rosa! Leave us to fight.”
WET COBBLES HISSED AND RATTLED under the tires, a cat's eyes flashed from beneath a parked Citroen, a big dog bent over a trash can – then André saw it was an old man. “You're going to kill yourself with those cigarettes,” he said to Monique.
“Can't stop,” she said.
“If someone said stop or they'd shoot you, wouldn't you stop?”
“You always think one more won't hurt you.”
He pushed the button to open her window a crack, to suck her cigarette smoke out. “Funny it's what we love that kills us.”
“Sometimes I think it's the reverse: we kill what we love.” She took a last drag on the cigarette, tossed it out of the window. “You ever think where you want to be when you die?”
“Buried?”
“I want to be in Corsica, a rocky hill high over the sea. I told Hermann that, but he couldn't give a damn – thinks we're all going to live forever.”
He turned into Rue Etienne Marcel, shifted into second, letting the car snap them back, slid his hand up her short skirt, the lovely silky thigh perfect against his palm. “I like the sea.”
She put her hand over his. “You'd be buried there?”
“Down with the fish and octopus, the sharks, flesh of their flesh.”
A taxi shot out of a side street and he braked hard, the Alpine sideskidding. Should have switched the rear tires, he reminded himself angrily.
“That's it, isn't it?” She pointed up at a crooked tower over the narrow twisting street. “The tour de Jean sans Peur?”
“He built it with a fortified room at the top, to spend his nights.”
“Who'd he kill? I forgot.”
“His cousin, the Duke of Orleans, in the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois.”
“Imagine, never daring to sleep, for fear you'll be knifed to death.”
“He was killed anyway, by the Armagnacs.” He geared down, hit the high beams. “Has to be here.” On one side of the next street, tall leaning stone façades, on the other a wall two stories high with a great red carved door. André pulled up on the paved drive, and sounded the horn and the door swung open.
Inside, cars were parked in a broad cobbled square lit by the tall windows of a great house with a double curving stone staircase. “Whatever you do,” she said, “don't say who I am.”
12
THE MAP WAS BLOODY and torn across Shatila, Rosa noticed. Where they'd slaughtered so many. For an instant war seemed insane, like facing a mirror and smashing your image till you bleed to death. Here at Rue Weygand the map was worn by many fingers having moved across it, fingers seeking ways out, ambushes, corners, dead ends, ways to get caught and ways not to, the brutal business of death. How far can that rocket reach? How long can he breathe with a 7.62 through his lungs?
“It's a firestorm,” the boy was saying. He was dirty and thin, a tail of keffiyeh over long curly blond hair, a Christian cross chained to his neck in case of capture. He couldn't stop his lips from shaking; he kept pinching them with his fingers, and the tears were streaking his cheeks, making him seem even younger. Every time he started to talk his lips would shiver and the tears ran.
“You don't have to go back,” Mohammed said.
A rocket came down clattering over by the Serail, only half blew. “Send us more men.”
“There aren't any.”
“Here?” The boy glanced round. Bullets drummed into the front wall; upstairs someone fired back.
“I have ten men for a command that should have fifty,” Mohammed said. “Every man I take from here risks losing a hundred elsewhere.”
“I understand.”
Mohammed hugged him across the shoulders, pulling him close, touched his forehead to the boy's temple. “Go quickly and carefully.” He stood back. “Look at me!” When the boy glanced up, Mohammed looked straight
into his eyes. “I order you not to die.”
The boy glanced down as if contrite.
“And tell Abou Hamid,” Mohammed said, “to pull back to Riad Solh, except for the one building that makes the L at the corner. Tell him no matter what don't lose it. Retreat to it if you have to, but don't lose it.”
“If we do, we can't get across –”
A bullet snapped overhead but Mohammed did not duck. “Keep the three buildings around it – you'll see, there's three in a box. They're all stone with small windows. If you keep the upper stories you can sweep the streets and nobody's going to come in, and until they get the Israelis or the Americans on you you're OK. Keep the M60 on the top floor of the building on the right and one Katyusha the next floor down in the middle. Two riflemen at least in the place on the left, one top, one middle.”
A man with a bandaged head came in, winded from the climb. He hugged Mohammed and the boy, one guard.
'Go on,” Mohammed told the boy. “Tell them no rock 'n roll.”
“Full automatic? We don't have the ammo.”
“Do you want to speak to Al-Safa?” the radio man called.
Mohammed took the phone. “Allah!” He turned to the boy. “I'll be there at midnight.”
“Don't come –”
“Tell them to pull back,” Mohammed said into the phone.
“We lost the fifty caliber,” the bandaged man said.
“You what?” Mohammed put down the phone.
“A mortar. We don't know whose. Three more men gone; we're down to two magazines each.”
“Like I told Emmaus, no full automatic.”
The man snorted. “You really think those poor kids are going to be into a paradise of solid pussy, where you're sending them?”
A rocket screamed into the floor upstairs and after the explosion there was a long roaring sound like oil catching fire and with a great shrug the floor above them fell outwards. “You heard me,” Mohammed said. “I told them to pull back.”
“To that building that makes the L,” the man said. “And where the hell are they going to pull back to from there?”
Another rocket blew out the ceiling and people were leaning out of the windows to escape from the fumes but the Christians in the Life Building saw them and raked the windows just as Rosa ran screaming at them. “Get down! Get down!” And now there was another to add to the pile of thin young men who lay in the corner uncomplaining, dressed in their own blood.
“Get that sniper!” Rosa screamed.
“More sandbags!” someone was yelling down the stairs. “Bring up more sandbags!”
It was the radio operator who'd been hit, half his head taken off, like a biology textbook, she thought, “Look inside your brain”. But now they couldn't send messages and Hassan ran downstairs to get the girl off the machine gun in the street who knew the signals.
Skidding on blood, Rosa ran into a bedroom. There was a canopied double bed and two dressers with a crucifix high between them. She tore the spread off the bed and swept the snapshots off the dressers into it, some clothes from the drawers, silk scarves, an alarm clock, a pair of heels, tied it all up tight. Bullets were hitting the front of the building like rain, singing up and down the stairway like lost birds. She took down the crucifix, broke it in two, shoved half in the bag and half in her gown.
Back in the living room people were stacking sandbags against the front wall. An AK47 stood against a wall beside a stack of 30-round magazines. Its stock was split and had been wrapped carefully with black tape. Rosa set it to single and crossed halfway to the sandbagged window, aimed across the smoky darkness at a shred of window in the hulk of the Life Building, fired a shot, thought she saw a spark ten feet high, to the left. She backed away and stood rubbing her shoulder where the splintered stock had punched it.
She took one extra magazine. Mohammed was talking into the radio, gave her a surprised look as she left. She went down the seven sets of stairs to the front hallway and stopped ten feet from the door. The hallway was a vaulted dark tunnel to the shallow darkness of the street; something lay on the floor – rubble maybe, or a person. No, just sandbags, two of them, broken.
She crept nearer the door. A chunk of glowing metal fell into the street, writhing and twisting. In its light she saw a burnt car on bare rims, behind it a tall façade with sky through its windows. A rocket hammered overhead, stone crashing and crunching into the street.
Her hands were shaking, her thighs shivering, the rifle kept sliding off her shoulder. She felt as if she'd throw up any moment. She started back up the stairs but forced herself to turn round, go down to the door, look out. Men were running down the street, one with a rocket on his shoulder – fedayeen. She ducked into the hallway, waited till they passed, and edged forward to the door.
More footsteps – a fast shuffle, uneven. Dogs, she worried. No, a single man, bent over, leaving a black trail on the street. Bearded, dirty, head uncovered, unseeing, stumbling, clenching his stomach. Shia? Amal or Hezbollah? Palestinian? Just another refugee?
If she followed him he’d attract snipers before she did. Head down, she stepped into the street holding the bedspread of trinkets loosely over the AK47. The man wobbled and weaved down the hill between the narrow burning buildings, his trail of blood glinting. The way it was spurting and slacking, it had to be an artery, an artery in his gut.
He fell over a pram lying sideways in the street and writhed, shrieking. She ducked into a doorway. If anyone was going to shoot him, they'd wait now, let him suffer. Watching him grovel sideways, in a circle, she was suddenly shocked by this idea of suffering: we like to make others suffer. That was war. That was its purpose.
But why do we like to make others suffer?
He'd risen to his knees. A few rounds whined down the street, twanged off a façade. In a collapsed building somewhere someone was screaming. With a faraway whoosh a Mirage was climbing after a bombing run. The man stood, clenching his gut, stumbled bent over in a circle, looking for his way. He fell, got up and continued down Rue Weygand toward the Green Line.
At the end of the street the glowing carcass of a tank lit up the dark stumps of buildings on Place des Martyres. Tracers were trading tiny yellow and red fires, like electrons, Rosa thought, back and forth. A shell hit a building, a red-white flash and contorted black smoke boiling up. The man staggered boldly out into Martyres, stumbled over something, straightened, and fell down.
He lay flat and unmoving in the red glare of the tank; she couldn't tell if he'd been shot or had just died. Maybe he was resting. Anyway she couldn't chance it.
She backtracked to the first row of standing buildings and turned south. She'd go down Rue Basta and cross at the Museum, hide the gun before she went across and get another on the Christian side. From a corner she glanced back but could not see Mohammed's outpost. Rockets were still coming over, a big recoilless rifle hitting near, 155s in Martyres now. Even if she reached the Life Building it might be too late, and she'd lose him. No, she decided, Mohammed would never be so stupid as to let the Christians kill him.
13
THE RECEPTION ROOM was bigger than his parents' Normandy farm, a three-story ceiling with crystal chandeliers and a double staircase spiraling down from a gallery where a few guests ambled arm in arm. There were Louis XIV chairs and settees and ancient Persian rugs on the polished herringbone oak, Renaissance tapestries on the stone walls.
The whole place curdled André's stomach. Over the heads of well-dressed silver-haired men and hard-smiling jeweled women he looked for Monique but couldn't see her. Her kind of place, really. Her husband would eat it right up.
Hammurabi, as broad as he was tall, held court on center stage, an eager flock around him. Humans just like roaches, André thought; a little excrement pulls them right in. A little money.
Walid Farrahan, code-named Ha
mmurabi in French secret service files, had plenty of that. Every war is fought primarily for profit, and Hammurabi had always been one of the first to shove his face into the trough. Fancy receptions in his Marais mansion to which company presidents and members of Parliament and ministers and ambassadors from nearly every country came scurrying by the hundreds, to clasp his great hard paw and beg for the tools of death.
And for the really lucky there were the soirées intimes in the mansion's back rooms, the saunas and spa rooms, the swimming pool on the roof. A French citizen now, Hammurabi was, they couldn't throw him out. Even if they wanted.
“Ah, the Legionnaire,” Hammurabi rumbled out of his great chest when André forced his way through the throng. “My office told me. Enjoying yourself?”
“Of course.”
Hammurabi waved a sausage finger at the others. “Give us a moment?”
Magically they vanished. “I'm leaving in a few days,” André said. “I don't want to promise anything I can't do.”
Hammurabi fondled a piece of metal round his neck, beneath his tuxedo – a huge diamond-studded cross. “My staff has already confirmed you.” He squeezed André's arm. “See how fast we work? When you get to Beirut and have your order, cable it through with payment. Normal procedure,” he smiled. “Don't worry, my dear Legionnaire, you'll have your scramblers.”
“Conforming to specs?”
“A laser-guided bomb works on very simple principles, as you know. I wouldn't offer you scramblers if they didn't work, would I?”
WATCHING FOR MINES Rosa crossed over the shattered crest of Beirut on Rue Basta and down to the Museum, stored the AK47 in the side-street ruins of a store called Anita's Gifts. There was less war here, just the constant whiffle and swish of things going over, the rattle of guns and thump of mortars. There was a line of overturned buses across Avenue Abdallah Yafi with two armored cars and at least one tank lurking in caves in the rubble, their snouts pointing into the street, and machine guns and rockets in the windows behind. Beyond the shell-shocked intersection, on the Christian side, it was the same.