Holy War

by Mike Bond

  Neill scanned the animated crowd, the smoky misted windows. “Maybe that freedom of the press isn't all it's cocked up to be. There was political control over you but we have commercial control over us – and, finally, there isn't too much difference. You ever see our Tory press during an election?”

  “You were the best teacher we had. When we started to build something new, what we learned from you helped us get beyond who we were, to the event itself, how to tell it.”

  You can like someone, Neill realized, without hoping they understand you. “So tell me, about Beirut. When'd you get back?”

  “What's today – Thursday?”

  “Friday.”

  “Three weeks ago.”

  “And?”

  Tomás splayed spindly fingers round his glass, craned his neck. Why are all Slovaks bald, Neill wondered. He looked around at nearby tables, decided this wasn't true. “I went through Damascus,” Tomás said. “Got stopped at the border then went further north and got through on a Syrian Army truck headed for Baalbek. It's all Hezbollah now, up there.”

  “I always thought of it as Heliopolis, City of the Sun. And now it's just another military outpost.”

  “That's what it's been, most of the last three thousand, five thousand years. Guarding the most fertile valley in the Middle East.”

  “So how'd you reach Beirut?”

  'Got this crazy man to drive me down to Zahlé in his old Mercedes. The whole way I wanted to lie on the floor, duck the bullets, but I couldn't, with him driving. Wouldn't have been fair. We never got hit.”

  Neill drained his stein, caught the waiter's eye. “I don't want to put up with any of that. Too much of a coward.”

  “Then go home. It's not the time, Beirut.”

  “As I said on the telephone, if I can talk to Mohammed, get his position out in the open...”

  Tomás reached across, took Neill's hand. “No matter how bad the war makes you feel, you can't change it.”

  Neill waited till the waiter left. “I tried Michael Szay today.”

  “That bastard.”

  “He's given me good leads, in the past.”

  “What's he say?”

  “Told me to get lost. That I'll never reach Mohammed.”

  Tomás fiddled with his glass, scratched his skull. “Why don't you ask Layla?”

  It stung like a dentist's probe on a dead tooth – the reminder of past pain. How could it, after all these years? “I probably couldn't even find her. If she's with Mohammed I'd have to locate him first. If she's still with her family, down in Saida, they're behind Israeli lines and I can't get in.”

  “Go see her brother.”

  “Hamid? He's the one who did us in, way back then.”

  “He's still in Beirut. Has an office on Mahatma Gandhi. Number 21.”

  “He's a goddamn snake.”

  Tomás was silent a moment. “Crazy, what happened to her. To you both.”

  Neill shrugged. “So what's the latest?”

  “Damascus says they're going to stay and the Christians are begging for arms. The Israelis will fight the Syrians on the Green Line and that will be the final solution for Lebanon.”

  “How do you read Mohammed?”

  Tomás lit another cigarette, dropped his lighter, and fished for it under the table, and Neill could see down the back of his neck, under the brown wool collar, the long thin black hairs. “He's about forty,” Tomás said. “Very driven, very cold. Yet strangely open-minded, in a way – wants an Islamic Lebanon but isn't too doctrinaire. Some people say he's in it for the power, others say he actually cares.”

  “Should I try getting through Damascus?”

  “The Syrians may let you go as far as Masnaa, somewhere like that. After that you'll have to deal with field units and they may shoot you first and then ask you where you're going. After that you have to deal with Hezbollah. And they aren't going to let you anywhere near Mohammed. They don't even admit he exists.”

  “Maybe with the Syrians I can go down the coast.”

  “One way or the other you'll have to pass through Hezbollah. And now, if he's cut off like they say, you've got to pass through the Christians and Hezbollah to get to Mohammed, and by then the Syrians and Israelis will have shot you.” Tomás smiled, bringing down his empty glass. “You'll be able to excise a lot of guilt.”

  “Guilt, the gift that keeps on giving –”

  “That's the virtue of religion and patriotism: they allow us to do evil without guilt.”

  “So where do you stand on all this, these days?”

  “It never changes. The Israelis have no choice, they have to fight. In all my years in the Middle East I’ve never met a Moslem who agrees with Israel’s right to exist. Not one.”

  “Me neither,” Neill said. “We will drown the Israelis and their children in the sea seems to be the general approach.”

  “And the Holocaust taught them not to rely on anyone but themselves, that at any time the whole world can turn against them.”

  “As it always does. The last time even America and Britain sent them in their ships back to die. We wouldn’t bomb the rail lines, stop the camps…”

  “And I'm tired of the Palestinians fussing over what they never wanted till they lost it. I'm tired of people with long memories, people with ‘love for the land’. Even back ten thousand years, the forest tribes of central Europe – we'll never stop fighting over territory. I'd like to live on the moon for a while, the dark side of the moon, so I wouldn't have to look down on this.” Tomás switched back to English. “Like Arafat once told me, ‘There'll never be peace in the Middle East as long as there's Israel. And there'll never be peace in the Middle East even if there is no Israel.’”

  “Shit, that unshaven little fucker. The people in the camps, Gaza, the Territories, barefoot in human muck holding up his photo!”

  “The smart ones all got out, became camera merchants in New York or rug sellers in London or leaders of international guerrilla movements.”

  “Everybody's has to have a pope. If we could all just have the same one.”

  “When was the first Muslim schism? Within days of the Prophet's death! Even his own family couldn't agree.”

  “Most wars begin in the family.” Neill tried to see through the bar's steamy windows, couldn't tell if it was raining. “Tell me what to say,” he drained his glass, dropped a hundred koruna note on the table, “so they let me see him.”

  “Just like you said: tell them he's getting a bad deal in the press. That it doesn't help the cause of Allah to have so many people unfairly turned against him.”

  “He wants them all to die, the unbelievers: O prophet, stir up the faithful to war –”

  “And that on the international level it could impede his arms shipments and cause him trouble consolidating his gains.”

  Neill shuddered, a premonition somehow. “Suppose it’s true, what Arafat said?”

  “What, that there’ll never be peace in the Middle East even without Israel?” Tomás shrugged: it’s obvious.

  The bar had filled; to leave they had to squeeze past women in tight leather skirts and men in dark suits, two men in motorcycle jackets, Neill holding his breath against the smoke. A cold wet wind was coming down the sidewalk; looking up he could see an early star.

  17

  LARNACA SMELLED of diesel, orange blossoms, and sea. The road was uneven and it was hard not to trip on the Roman paving blocks half-covered with old asphalt that glistened with dampness off the sea, with trickles of light from the port.

  Across from the port and up a side street was a whorehouse and a bar with people laughing and singing, another street of missing cobbles and drooping façades, dirty windows of anchors and ropes, food and drink, women and sex. Whores, sailors, merchants, chi
ldren, dogs, trucks, braying cars, and donkeys in the streets, flocks of teenage boys arm in arm, harsh music and Madonna, excrement and bay smells, crude oil, charcoal, diesel and dust.

  André started to cross, a horn blared and he jumped back, swearing as a little white car churned past, a cold feeling inside him. You could have died. Looking the wrong way. This insane driving on the left.

  Watching both ways he crossed and turned up Nikiolatis. After a block it passed a cemetery and turned to dirt, with low warehouses on both sides, people passing to and fro in the semi-darkness. Everywhere was the sweet addictive perfume of orange blossoms, the fruit fallen on the street and crushed by cars, the wind hissing in the tall palms.

  Halfway up was a café with three steps down into a wide low room with a fire at one side, the air thick with rank tobacco smoke and raki, spiced with basil and garlic from a lamb stew cooking on the fire. Three men sat smoking at one table, two at another. The other three tables were empty. No one looked up. He went to the bar, feeling tensely out of place in his leather jacket.

  No one paid him any attention. Then one of two men at one table got up and came to the bar. “You shouldn't come here,” he said in English.

  “The anchor man –”

  “No matter what you want, he sent you to the wrong place.”

  “I'm going to Somalia, I need protection.”

  'Go home. That's the best protection I can give you.”

  André went back up the three stairs, feeling foolish. A dry dusty smell was coming down from the hills on the evening wind. Never should have come down here alone, he told himself. Never do this yourself.

  “What you want?” a voice called. A man on crutches, one-legged, came out through the strollers. “I get you anything you want.”

  “Like what?”

  “You from Brooklyn?” The man looked up at him. “I'm Butch. Once I was to Brooklyn.”

  “I'm not from Brooklyn,” André said.

  “Looking for women? I can get you. Looking for a little smoke? I can get you.” He kept step beside André, swinging his single leg forward on his crutches through the crowd.

  “Ta bo taa go shaarn,” someone said, passing – Norwegians maybe, tall blond men shouldering their way, mixing into other tongues, Arabic, Greek, Spanish. We all come to Larnaca, André thought, like rats running from everywhere else.

  “Where you from, Butch?”

  “Me?” The little man was suddenly quiet. “Beirut. But I don't go there anymore.”

  “What side you on?”

  “Me? I didn't care. Just stepped on a mine.”

  “You know anything about guns?”

  “I can get you. You want a hundred? A thousand? I get you the best deal. Don't talk to any of these other guys here, they're cheats. I'm the only one here with a license. You wanna see?” He slowed, propped on his crutches. Behind him a Coca-Cola sign glistened on the pavement. There was a corner kebab stand with a sticky counter and bowls of oranges, the smell of burnt fat and paprika.

  “What kind you got?”

  “You tell me what you need. We find it.”

  “Just a sidearm. Good caliber. Some ammo.”

  After three blocks they turned left, back toward the sea, down a narrow alley lit by the reflections of the port lights off the low clouds. He made Butch go first. There was a fishing boat up on dry dock and a garage at the end of the alley. A blotch of white came toward them. It was a man in a white T-shirt and trousers rolled to his knees. “So what you want?” Butch said to André.

  “I'm going down south, need something fast and strong.”

  Butch translated into Greek. They went into the garage. The man in the T-shirt tugged a cord that lit a bulb in the ceiling. The walls were bare concrete blocks. He led them through a door into a little room with a sink and water jug at one end. It smelled of urine from the sink and of rotting dirt from under the sink. “We wait here,” Butch said.

  André went back outside. A searchlight was shifting under the heavy, bruised clouds. Someone was singing in another street, another language.

  “Hey! Pal!” Butch called. André went back inside. The man carried a heavy burlap bag into the room with the sink, and eased it off his shoulder onto the floor. He opened it and let the guns slide out.

  “Jesus!” André said, reaching down to lay them on top of the burlap, out of the dirt – an Uzi, pre-war, a Makarov, beat up, boxes of cartridges, an engraved Browning .38, a new Daewoo feeling off-balance in his hand. Then he saw it, his hand automatically going for it, the Israeli Jericho in its brown camouflage, but he pushed past it as though not noticing, not wanting to draw the man's attention. He picked up a Mauser – no, a Merkuria. “How'd you get this?” he said.

  Butch asked the man, who reached down a spindly long-nailed finger. “That one,” André said, pointing to the Merkuria.

  “He says it came off a ship,” Butch said. “In Larnaca everything comes off a ship.”

  “How much?”

  Another translation. “Three hundred Cyprus pounds,” Butch said. “Five hundred dollars.”

  André riffled through the others, held up the Browning. “Seven hundred dollars,” Butch translated. He pointed to the Jericho. “Why you not want this?”

  “Don't like Israeli guns.”

  “They are the best.”

  “This Merkuria, I'll give you four hundred.”

  Again the translation. “No,” Butch said. “He need four fifty.”

  The man spoke again. “He say hurry up,” Butch translated. “We have troubles with the police, they're looking for guns.”

  “These others, they're too much. How much that Israeli piece?”

  “It's nine hundred, the Jericho. Comes with two types of bullets, he says.”

  The man dug in the sack and brought out two boxes of Fiocchi 9mm parabellums. He took a bullet from each and André saw one was a shotshell and the other a slug. Now he wanted the gun very badly, to rescue it from this seamy squalid hole with this man who didn't understand that it had been the personal weapon of a professional, one who mixed shotshell and slugs in the same magazine, one to maim and one to kill, whose finely crafted understanding left no room for mistake. But he must have made a mistake somewhere, or why would the gun be here?

  The mistake he'd never counted on making. And here was his gun, alone as a hunting dog without its master, its other half.

  “TEHERAN DOESN’T WANT war right now with the United States,” Mohammed said. “Nor yet against the Jews. And we can't take back Palestine because there is too much Western guilt about the Jews.”

  “You don't care if we get Palestine back!” Rosa said. “You're ready to make your separate peace. A bigger part of Lebanon for giving up Palestine, like Jew shopkeepers with a dried fish. The dried fish that once was Palestine!”

  “Israel made the deserts bloom. You're just a bunch of lazy Bedouin with no camels, good for nothing but theft and complaining.”

  “If you don't hate the Jews, why are you fighting?”

  “I do hate the Jews, Rosa. Infinitely and irrevocably. But even worse I hate the ones who put them over us. Who hadn't the courage to take them into America, into Britain. Who let Hitler kill them and then out of guilt sent the rest down here to thrust you from your homes. So you have come up here to thrust us from our own. Even together, Rosa, we don't have the strength to take back Palestine. But they can't shove us under, there's too much Muslim oil.”

  “There's none in Palestine.”

  “Palestine, poor in oil, so rich in heart.”

  “Hearts grow big from being filled with grief.”

  “Or joy. You're too young, Rosa, to be so serious. In any case, over the years Western guilt will continue to diminish, while Western hunger for oil will continue to grow.”

  “In
the meantime, we're not getting closer to Palestine!”

  “No. You must see. We keep up this pressure so we can eat Israel slowly, from within. While everyone is so preoccupied by the danger we present outside, they never notice what goes on inside. In a hundred years, I promise you, there'll hardly be a Jew in Palestine.”

  The mujihadeen with the close-cropped beard, the captain Rosa did not like, had come into the room, nodded respectfully at Mohammed, waiting for him to finish speaking. “She's downstairs,” he said. “Your wife.”

  Mohammed made a sharp face and Rosa couldn't tell if it was from anger or surprise. Walking past, he patted her shoulder. “I'll be right back.”

  Rosa stood. “I must go down also.” She followed Mohammed down the shrapnel-littered stairs, the captain going ahead and swinging his lantern. The night was quiet now, no shells going over, just the distant rattle of guns. Like peace, she thought, brushing at the sting in her eyes.

  Mohammed seemed to forget her, moving ahead with the captain into the ruins of the ground floor, where a slight woman in a black gown turned her face toward him.

  “What makes you take this risk?” Mohammed snapped. “Where are the children?”

  She held his hands, brought them to her forehead. “They're with my parents. You are well, my husband?”

  “They've backed off, the Christians. We've a brave young woman here, she attacked them alone.”

  “Kamil came.”

  Mohammed stepped back, straightened. “And?”

  “Your father...”

  “Speak, woman!”

  “He asks you to come quickly.”

  “There's no way.”

  “He wants to see you, before he dies.”

  Mohammed raised his hand and Rosa thought it was to hit his wife but it was only to run fingers through his hair. “How can I leave here?”

  “For a few days, Mohammed.” She leaned forward, touching his gown. “When he's gone you'll never have this chance again.”

  Mohammed spun round, tearing at his hair. “How?”

  “You could go up through Aley, the road's open to Sofar. From there cut through the Christians and north along the mountain into Shiite country. You could be there tomorrow night.” Again she tried to reach him but he pulled away. “It would be good for you, my husband.”