by Mike Bond
As soon as he got home he'd have it out, the transmitter under his arm. And deal with the paper. If they were going to be like this he'd take another job, go back to teaching. The thought of tiers of expectant faces in the lecture hall depressed him. Coming in with so much hope. It's because they're so young and horny, he realized, still believing in the future.
He capped the whisky and slipped the bottle back under the pillow. Nicolas and Samantha were strict enough Muslims not to like heavy drinking. A little wine was fine; maybe they were right?
It wasn't really Scotch, but some Egyptian concoction, in a bottle labeled “Highland Grouse, Ten Years Old Fine Whiskie” and sold at the price of the real stuff. But it had the active ingredient. He went out and closed his door, couldn't find his wallet in his pocket, went back inside and saw it on the desk. “Active ingredient, Hell!” he said, went downstairs and out the back into bright day.
He bumped into a man with a sack of potatoes or something, begged his pardon, and turned toward Rue Hamra. Spot of coffee, couple of rolls, just the thing. No shelling. Lovely clear day and no killing. What's wrong with these people?
He chuckled at the thought, aloud. A woman passing turned to look at him, a bundle of clothes and pots and pans on her head. “No shelling,” he explained, pointing at the sky. She went on, flat feet slapping the pavement, a small mangy black dog trotting after her.
The Café de Paris was closed so he went to Movenpick. Two men sat at different tables. One had a New York Times. “That a new one?” Neill said in English.
The man glanced up. “Two weeks ago,” he said in a heavy accent.
“I'll buy it from you, when you're done.”
“Missing home?” The man had a wary, beaten air. “Here, take it.”
A white Mercedes stopped outside and a man got out and entered the café, nodded at Neill, came over. “He wants to see you.”
“Who?”
“Same as before – you don't recognize me?” He was winded, sweaty, one of Mohammed's men.
“Let me eat.”
“We have to go. You'll eat there.”
“I've got nothing to write with.”
The man felt him for weapons. “We've everything you need.”
As Neill stepped into the rear of the white Mercedes another mujihadeen came up from behind and got in the other side, forcing him to the middle. One pulled out a black hood. “Same as before.”
The car moved away from Rue Hamra, over the crest of Ras Beirut and downhill. There was sun on his right knee, so they were heading south, toward the airport. The car was bouncing, moving fast, the two men beside him sweating. He made a joke in Arabic but no one spoke.
They stopped. The front passenger got out. Flies were bumbling and buzzing against the rear window. The engine idled, unevenly. Inside the black hood the air was thick with his hot breath, the whisky.
A shell screamed over and crashed into distant buildings with a great crack, making the Mercedes quiver. First of the day, Neill thought.
The front passenger returned. The car lurched forward, ducked round something, and purred in low gear down a hillside of narrow streets, the muffler echoing off near walls of houses.
“Why are we in Shatila?” Neill said. No one answered.
The car braked, turned, accelerated, stopped. One man pulled him out and another grabbed his other arm and they walked fast across a resounding low space like a parking garage, down forty-one steps past a room where a radio was playing “Yours was the hand I sought”, and into an echoing room with a bare concrete floor. Neill yanked off the mask. “Next time he can come to me!”
“There won't be a next time.” Mohammed came into the room in a white robe. One side of his face was dark, as if bruised; he walked bent over. He sat, motioned for Neill to do the same. “You thought we wouldn't make the connection when you planned this?”
“Planned what?”
“Whom did you tell where to find me?”
Neill stood. “Absolutely nobody. I told you –”
“Don't yell.”
“I bloody will goddamn yell if you say crazy things!”
Mohammed turned to one mujihadeen. “What did you find?”
“No guns, transmitters, anything. Just clothes and a few books and writing materials, some notes of Damascus and here, something about a woman with her face on fire.” The mujihadeen turned to Neill. “A bottle of whisky under the pillow.”
“And there's nothing on him?” Mohammed said.
“We checked him good. But he keeps throwing out an echo.”
“Echo?”
“On the receiver.”
With a grimace, Mohammed stood. “Go through his clothes, whatever. Find it.” He turned to Neill. “You fingered me. That's all right. Part of the game.”
“That's nuts!”
“We're going to have a serious talk with you. You might think about explaining now, save us all the pain.”
46
“T HERE’S NO WAY,” the fireman said.
New shells were coming in and André waited for them to hit. With each one the earth shuddered. “But I can hear them knocking.”
“People are buried in basements all over Beirut. They're knocking but we can't find them.”
A Mirage, nearing. The fireman snatched André arm and yanked him down behind a truck. The Mirage went over, the building shaking. “Fuckers!” the fireman said.
“Give me a shovel then.”
The radio was squawking. More Mirages were coming in, in sequence; the earth began to tremble. André imagined the pilots in their warm shielding cockpits in the crystalline sun, toy streets of the smoldering city below.
“We're out of shovels – we can't buy them, can't find them. We're digging with our hands.”
THEY CUT THE TRANSMITTER out of him with a razor. There was so much blood he thought they'd cut an artery, but it subsided, drooling down his ribs. His hands and shoulders were numb, his bare skin freezing. “They said it was for my own good, to save me if something happened.”
“Who's they?”
“I never knew. Thought it was MI6.”
“You've been working all these years for them and you never knew? You consider yourself a journalist? A man?”
“This is nuts. I want my consul.”
The man laughed, took up a canvas chair and sat on it in front of Neill, settled his maroon sports coat comfortably round his shoulders, put one white Adidas up on a frilly cast-iron table where a cassette recorder turned steadily. “Let's go through it all again. From the start. Every single act and word. Between you and them.”
“If they're MI6, you expect I'll tell you?”
“You don't care, you're American. Anyway, they lied to you, then kissed you off for a chance to hit Mohammed. God arranged that another man should die. Salim Drahad – you must remember his name. You're his executioner.”
He was so thirsty. Couldn't breathe. “Three times we've gone through this.” His voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else, an old man's.
The interrogator's black chest hairs stuck out of his blue shirt under the maroon coat. He had a worried lawyer look. His lean high-cheeked face had perhaps two days' beard; his gold wire-frame glasses seemed to pinch his nose. The ceiling bulb gleamed on his bald head with the few strings of dark-gray hair patched across it. With a thumb and forefinger he pinched his lips; his mouth was incredibly small.
“Freeman's always been the one,” Neill said.
“Freeman.”
“And this Dr. Kane who did it. At Gatwick.”
“What else have you done for them? Who else have you betrayed?”
“I just made reports. I keep telling you but you won't listen!”
The cassette recorder clicked as the tape ended. The man
held up one finger. A mujihadeen put in a new tape. Neill couldn't remember if it was the fourth tape or the fifth.
“Tell us again. About the reports. This time leave nothing out.”
“It was every trip to eastern Europe. They wanted to know who the good dissidents were, the ones we could trust –”
“We?”
“I assumed the country – Great Britain –”
“Great Britain? That started World War One so it could sack the Ottoman kingdom and take over Arab oil?”
“See it how you want.”
“Who else did you do ‘reports’ on?”
“I didn't do reports on people. They were on places, the mood of a place. Prague in eighty-two – that kind of thing.”
“And here?”
“I've interviewed lots of people.”
“Tell us about them. We know most of them, but you don't know which ones. You leave one of them out, and we'll shoot you.” He leaped out of his chair and screamed, spit spraying, into Neill's face, “Right away! We'll shoot you!”
“I can't remember everyone I've spoken to in fifteen years.”
“In Palestine.”
“Just finding the ones who want peace.”
“How many do you suppose you've reported on? Those who want peace?”
“Just a few.”
“Six? Ten? Fifty?”
Neill shook his head. When he turned to the right he could see a valley with distant rounded elms and split rail fences and a broad shallow stream down the middle with brindled cows on the near side.
“Do you know where they are now?” the man said. “These Palestinian lovers of peace?”
“The Middle East's a dangerous place.”
“Keman Fahul blew up two days after you interviewed him.”
“That was the Druze! You know that!”
“Hamrani died in an ambush, Kaffez was gunned down in a parking lot. Besmíl – you know what happened to him. His family's still grieving. As are we all. Al Fahz and Sallem – blown up in Tunis. You talked to them all.”
“You blame me? You want a revolution, then you're going to get killed!”
“Not by your friends. Not anymore.” The man held up the little silver transmitter. “They think you're right here, your friends. But they don't know we've found you.” He waved the transmitter. “Now it's going to go somewhere and wait. When your friends come they'll be sorry.”
THE KNOCKING WAS FAINTER but hadn't died out. André tried to climb down into the other basements but they were blocked. He ran outside and saw a man coming down the pavement with a tablecloth full of things. André asked him to come down but the man didn't speak French. Some Palestinians were patrolling the street and André waved them over but they didn't speak French either. One of them handed his rifle to another and followed André down the stairs and through the hole in the cellar wall. André knocked on the floor. He waited, trying to quiet his breath. The Palestinian said something. “Sshhh!” André said, and there it was, tick tick, steel on concrete.
The Palestinian lay with his ear on the floor. He took a knife from a sheath on his arm and tapped the shaft on the floor, the same rhythm as the distant knock. “They don't know SOS,” André said, forgetting the Palestinian didn't speak French. The Palestinian yelled up out of the basement and the others came down and listened. They argued, pointing different ways. One left and came back with a stethoscope.
They knocked again but there was no answer. For half an hour they knocked, but there was never any answer.
THEY SHOVED NEILL into a little dark room with a draught under the door. His underarm stung and the smell of blood was nauseating. He'd let Freeman convince him, when he hadn't wanted to. Why do you do what you don't want, he silently screamed at himself. Why don't you listen?
He couldn't find the answer, could see every moment of the last taxi ride with Freeman: a girl riding a bicycle, her long black scarf up round her chin, a paper cup wind-bounced along the curb, the taxi's worn leather, frayed stitching, the driver saluting another on Albert Bridge. Freeman's fleeting hand on his knee, a benediction: “Go easy, Neill. That's what you must not forget: go easy.”
Into this good night. The dark, in pain, waiting for what might be the end.
They wouldn't do that. They won't shoot you.
Freeman was just what Neill did to pay for Amsterdam. Money. When he could have been at home with the only family he'd ever have. In the mosque in Damascus he'd promised to get better every day and look what he'd done.
They wouldn't shoot him. The paper would help, the government, the same government he was always cursing. Will you really stoop to that? he wondered. He had to stop this worrying, just wait. They were going to beat him again but maybe not as badly.
The ceiling was so low he couldn't stand, walls at his elbows and back. No handle on the inside of the door, just a metal plate. He felt along the walls, the low ceiling. The floor was straw sticky with used diesel oil, concrete underneath. A little air came through a square duct high in one corner. Faint light came through the crack under the door. Squeezed down on his knees with his face hard against the oily straw, all he could see through the crack was a span of dusty brown and white tiles like farm fields seen from a plane, the horizon a white, scuffed baseboard. His underarm hurt; he sat on the upended bucket. A sick shiver ran up him, greasy. Malaria.
He'd been this stupid all his life. Always would be. Had to learn to live with that. If he was going to improve his life, what better time than this? If you're not happy, what good is it to be free?
“You'll never be happy,” Beverly had said, “till you find the boy inside you. The one you hate.”
He saw Freeman's strained face and small eyes, the cultured smirk. “What I meant,” Freeman had said, “is I don't know how far we can leverage for you.”
“First time you want,” Neill had answered, “you'll drop me dead.”
47
ANDRÉ WATCHED Anne-Marie cut the baguette, the lovely way her wrist turned. “I don't like you crossing the Line,” she said. “Why not stay here?”
“I have to check my place, see some people. Find my dog.”
“I'm sure he's gone, poor pup.” She put the slices of baguette in the straw basket and brought it to the table.
He reached out and tickled her navel through a gap in her blouse. She slapped his hand and went back to the sink, brought over the steaks. He thought of her navel, bumpy and hard, how once she'd been connected to her own mother there.
“I keep hearing them,” he said, “signaling us in the cave.” He could feel the air going in and out of his lungs, the fresh air. “Do you?”
“All the time.” She knelt on the dirty kitchen floor, her head on his knees.
“We're eating steak and drinking wine. And they're down there trapped and dying.” He looked down at the steak in its pool of seared blood. “I just don't get it.”
They stood and clung to each other, two halves of a whole, each trying to shield the other's pain. “All the years we might live,” she said, “we'll never live through it.”
She was long and close in his arms, and he thought this is how it would be if you have her all your life, always this reservoir of good faith, this sharp kindness, the rough throaty accent that made him love to hear her speak. “Come with me to France.”
She leaned back, smiled. “And turn into a prostitute? That's what happens to Lebanese girls who go to Europe.” She tickled his waist. “Already you are eating too much. Feel this?”
“That's muscle.”
“That's fat! You think just because I'm some stupid Arab girl I wouldn't know? Why would I go back to France with someone like you?”
“Because I love you.”
“You'll always be jealous, thinking I loved my husband more.”
&n
bsp; “Do you?”
“Now still, but maybe not always. Why are you smiling?”
“I love the sound of your voice.”
“If I make you a tape, will you leave me alone?”
“I'm never going to leave you alone.”
No one else, he realized, matters. Not the people like Christian St. Honoré who like you as long as they need you, the people who like you till it's time to kill you. People like Monique who only like you if they can screw you, people like her husband who like you only if they can find a way to screw you.
Her body part of his, as his of hers. It's better you're a widow, he thought. For in some strange way I've been a widower too, and never knew.
“IF YOU WANT TO UNIFY THE ARABS, attack Israel,” Rosa said.
“They'd crush us,” Mohammed said. “It's not the time.”
“For you it'll never be the time.”
“In 1982 they came to southern Lebanon, and we had no hatred for them. And they blew up our villages and killed our children, although we were at peace. Don't say, Rosa, that I don't care about Israel.” He let his hand sink into her shoulder, feeling the lithe muscle under the taut skin. “You saved my life, gave me the chance to learn from death. You don't know how much I've learned.”
“They've just tried to kill you and you want to talk peace! Without your help, we can't win!”
He sat back, hand on his knee, looked out of the window at the gathering night, tucked his djellabah tighter. “It's all tied up in death. My father's death, which took me to Yammouné, the doctor's death after he'd saved me from the Christian whose brother died, the deaths of my three men on the trail up out of Yammouné, the deaths of all our people in these last weeks of attacks. The mujihadeen who died yesterday because he caught the bullet meant for me. My standing on that land mine, and you came and built the wall of stones –”
“I didn't do it for you, Lord, I told you that, I did it for Palestine!”
“It was certain death. Standing there, I made a promise to God...”