by Mike Bond
“You care more about God than man.”
“Of course.”
“That’s still caring for yourself. Your private reverie of God.”
“I need you to help make peace. I've sent people to others in Hezbollah, to the Palestinians, the different Christians, the Syrians. Will you go and see Karam Al-Nazir, set up a meeting?”
“If I won't?”
“Peace is just another way, remember, to win a battle.”
“Not when it makes you lose.”
“IT’S A PROMISE we made, my brother Yves and I. If ever one of us got killed the other would avenge him. Just a kid thing. When I was eleven and he was eight.”
Anne-Marie tugged back her hair; the gesture made her seem infinitely lovely, infinitely removed. “And you're going to stick to this, something you said when you were a kid?”
“You'd break your word?”
“From back then? If I had to, yes!”
His body ached not to leave her. Without you, Anne-Marie, I can't even breathe. “You've got this commitment to teach these kids – that you won't walk out on.”
“But mine is for life. Yours causes death. And each new death causes more death.”
“Don't lecture me!”
She looked into his eyes and he realized hers were filled with tears, and felt agonized shame. “Every war,” she said, “is rooted in past wars. Every murder comes from past pain.”
“Suppose this person who killed my brother kills many others unless he's stopped?”
“There's no just war.”
Why are we arguing? he wondered. Why, when in minutes I'll be gone? He tried to hold her but she moved away. “We're paying,” she whispered. “Beirut, you and me. No crime goes unpunished. Especially the crime of justice.”
He stopped at the door, took her hands. “I'm going to miss you terribly. Think of you all the time.”
She smiled. “Silly.”
“You be careful, tonight, tomorrow.”
She looked up into his eyes, sad and angry. “I just go to school and back. Look for food. Nothing else.”
“I'll be back in two days. Sooner if I can.”
Her anger melted; she threw her arms round him. “Don't go! Please don't go!”
He saw Christian St. Honoré's silly little school smock sailing in the wind. Christian'd lost something that André found – what was it? Was he, André, just going through with this now because he'd told them, Christian and the bright boys at Matignon, that he would? Not for Yves?
He waited till she closed the door and slid home both bolts, then went down the three dark flights out into Rue de France, turned and looked up at the gray silent building, her shuttered curtained windows. Already it felt too long without her; he imagined a 240 hitting her building, boring down through three floors before it exploded on hers, the building coming down on what was left. Get her out, he told himself, thinking of all the people in Beirut who wanted to get out and couldn't.
The sun was setting through oily smoke of fires in the port, the distant crackle of Kalashnikovs like a carnival somewhere, over the next hill. Three F-15s pulled out of a dive, wings flashing sunlight over sprays of flame and plumes of white smoke. Somebody down there, he thought, burning alive.
He stopped at the street off Basta. Shadows were falling over the ruins, cold and windy, rats scurrying down the dark basement stairs ahead of him. He thought of himself dead under the slab, rats gnawing his leg. He crawled under the slab and knocked, listened, knocked again, but nothing came back.
He crossed the spine of Beirut down to the Museum. There were no Palestinians on the Muslim side, only Amal, who yelled at him in Arabic then let him through. The same captain was on the Christian side. “How's your family?”
“We got stuck in a basement together.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Not your fault. You told me watch out.”
He climbed the Rue Hotel Dieu and round the Franco-Arab High School and down to his street. A few cars were circulating like fish with glowing eyes in submarine canyons. Shells were firing from the Mountain into the Shouf. Everybody, he thought, hates everybody.
His hotel still stood uneasily beside the cavity of its neighbor, splinters of floors like black spider webs against the gray walls. A dark low shape streaked downhill toward him, hit before he could pull the gun – the dog, the crazy dog, licking him and whimpering, trying to crawl up into his arms.
He knelt, hugging it, rubbing its neck, feeling the spine and ribs through the thin coat. “I'm going to have to fatten you up again, aren't I? Where have you been?”
It bothered him that the dog could never tell him where it had been. He stood, spine feeling exposed, and glanced behind him, seeing nothing.
48
“GUY LIKE YOU PISSES HIS PANTS at the first taste of pain.”
Neill watched the toggle switch under the man's left hand. Up meant more and down meant less. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't make the man keep it down. “How does a moral criminal, an infidel like you,” the man edged the power up, “dare carry the Koran?”
“Because it teaches –”
The man spat into Neill's face; it got into his mouth and eyes, ran down his chin. “We wouldn't take you!”
“The Prophet says –”
“You killed a Warrior of God!” the man screamed. “You tried to kill Mohammed!” He was red-faced, the veins at his temples rigid. For a moment it seemed an act, as if he'd smile, then he smashed Neill hard in the mouth, a thick fist with a heavy ring. Pain roared into Neill's eyes and he saw the red darkness up inside his skull, pain shooting down his neck, his arms. “Stop!” he screamed, spitting blood. “I didn't hurt him!”
The man stood there shaking his hand, glanced at the Rolex on his left wrist. “It's nearly four a.m. How long do you want this to go on?”
“Please, I've told you! I'm on your side!”
The muscular hand with the hard ring came up and smashed into his mouth again. “Only God is on our side.”
THE DOG GROWLED low and steady, paws up on the windowsill, banging its muzzle against the glass. André rolled out of bed and snatched the Jericho, tripping over a shoe as he snaked across the room to the darkness beside the window and the glass smashed into his face and he thought he'd broken it till he heard the gun's crack! as the bullet whistled past his ears, whacked into the ceiling, and he thought, shit, it'll kill somebody, diving flat, the desk tumbling. He scrambled for the door knocking down the dog and yanked it open, jumping back but no one fired. He went fast and silently down to the first floor and ran to the back, trying to keep from panting. He could hear nothing. Upstairs the dog was whimpering. That's good, he thought, they'll think they got me.
Silently he edged round the lounge which stank of old stained couches and tobacco, dirty tiles underfoot. With horror he saw the front door was wide open.
He dashed out through the door and spun round to fire but no one was there. He sprinted down the alley expecting the great thud of a slug in his back but none came. He ducked round the alley, waited. Far away a truck was starting, gravelly-voiced; a shell passed overhead weeping like an angel. Sweat fell off his brow to the ground. He shivered.
Daylight was creeping wet and misty into the alley, hushing footsteps in the next street, the tinsel of voices through a half-opened window. Cold stung his bare legs, his feet against the chilled ground. He thought of Anne-Marie asleep in her warm bed, his absence beside her. If they killed him he'd lose her. Forever.
With the pistol against one thigh, he edged back up the alley, using rubbish bins, a burnt Fiat, a pile of sand for cover. From across the street he could see the front door was still open, dark inside. The sidewalks were empty, open, another street rising to the left past the garden behind his building, from where the gun had
fired.
If it was just one gunman, who fired once and ran?
Why?
Again he thought of Anne-Marie, how he'd let everything drop because of her. You almost died, he thought. And every second could be your last. If you get out of this you're going to do what you came for.
A dark shape sliding out of the door made him raise the gun but it was the dog running toward him, crouched low, tail down. He felt one-handed, patted its nose; it licked his hand and he pulled the hand away. Still no motion out on the street, just a distant hum of traffic.
Again he wanted to go forward but the thought of Anne-Marie held him back, almost tugging his shirt. A screech of metal made him swing to shoot but it was only a shutter rising on a window across the alley. An old Peugeot barked its way down the street, kicking up dust and smoke, a skinny bearded man at the wheel. Out of the unshuttered window a boy stuck his head and whistled. Another shutter rolled up, someone whistled back. The boy saw André standing there in his underwear, saw the gun, ducked from the window.
The hotel woman came down the steps, plastic bag over her arm. He wanted to call, ask her to check his room, but why would she interfere, catch the bullet meant for him? Get out, that's what she'd say. Don't ever come back.
Another face at the window, vanished – a woman's. Trucks up the alley, mufflers rattling like coal down a chute. Soon someone would pick him off, just for having a gun.
He walked straight across the street and up the hotel stairs with the whole world aiming at his back in his flimsy undershirt, his legs and feet bare, the tiles filthy and cold. What a silly way to die. The dog darted ahead up the stairs and stood grinning at the top, wagging his tail, happy to be home.
No one on the stairway and no one in the corridor except a little girl he almost shot as she came up behind him with a bag of bread. No one in his room.
He called the dog and locked the door. There was no hole in the window. It was not possible – he'd seen the shattered glass!
Could she have fixed it already, the landlady? Was it a dream? Stunned, he reached for it, lunged backward but no bullet came. He stood with his back to the wall. The dog leaped on the bed, turned in a circle, and lay down. André reached out: the glass was gone.
Already the landlady had broken the pieces out of the window frame and swept up the floor. But the bullet's angry dark mark was still in the ceiling. He backed from the window, snatched a blanket from the bed and sat in the corner, Jericho across his knees. It's going to get sold, he thought, looking at the lovely gun. It's going to get sold just like it was sold to me, to some new guy who'll wonder how the last one died.
49
ROSA had a way of sideways chewing her thumbnail, her eyes lost beyond the wall, making Mohammed wonder where she went, her face so passionless. A reserve of darkness within her that he rarely sensed, a cold hole that froze him. Then, warmed by her body, he forgot the dark behind her eyes, this watching eternally from a grave.
He'd taken this path unbehest. God couldn't be blamed. So much of him had failed – his fear of women, his passion for them. Was God tempting him, or merely bored?
“He had the transmitter,” she said. “Who cares why? Kill him.”
“Such a silly man. Believing in fairness.”
She shrugged. “He couldn't be that dumb, thinking it was just to protect him.” She peered at her thumbnail, chewed carefully on the other edge. “So kill him.”
“I pity the new Lebanon if it has no mercy.”
Again the dark look in her eyes made him shiver. “Not the new Lebanon,” she said. “The new Palestine.”
“The one you said I don't truly believe in.”
“Only women love the earth they come from. Not construction workers.”
“I was a goatherd in the hills. Don't talk to me of place.”
She watched him, head cocked, fingers playing with a thread of coverlet. “You know how I know your heart isn't tied to your land? Because if I could be in Palestine I would be. You could be in the heart of your land and you're not.”
She watched him try to slip his hand into his robe, forgetting he was naked. The hand like a furless puppy sneaked under the sheet. Somewhere inside him, she thought, lurks a coward. She stared into his eyes, saw him shiver.
He ducked down into the covers, reached out and touched her elbow. “I've never known anyone who tears me down like you do. Turns me into a child. Yet sometimes I feel more a man with you than any other place.”
She slid the covers from her waist, bent forward stretching her back, feeling the muscles tug, let go, her breasts pillowed on the sheets. “The one you have to feel a man with, poor Mohammed, is you.”
“SORRY, no coffee.”
“What is there, then?”
“Sorry, there's nothing.”
The man's craven sorrow made André want to hit him. He realized how cruel this was. “And you've got nothing to eat either?”
“Try down by the Abattoirs, monsieur. The Quarantaine.” The man's hair was dusty, his face lined with old fear, a mix of pain and desperation, his shirt smudged and burnt. “Why do you stay, monsieur? Why don't you just go home?”
“I'm here for someone who can't leave.” It seemed a good excuse till he realized the next question was why couldn't she leave – what was she doing and for whom, and how could this information be used or sold? And if someone had shot at him, why would that be? “But now she can,” he added, “in a few days.”
“May the Lord protect you till then.”
André looked both ways out of the door: no one unusual in the sparse flow of passersby. It's not the unusual, he reminded himself, that kills. Checking back and circling, he went down to the port through the slippery, littered streets, found a café with no coffee but some fried fish and beans. Not a bad breakfast, he reflected, after somebody's tried to shoot you. With his bicep he clenched the Jericho, to feel it against his ribs, but it brought no peace. Like half the people here, he thought, you've got a price on your head.
This brought no consolation, that anyone can step out of the mist and kill you. He ordered more beans and put the plate down for the dog. Slowly, like lines being drawn by blind men, the shattered docks and jetties took form out of the fog, seagulls crying and wheeling over rubbish dumped by a truck into the bay.
He had a crushing sense of helplessness so overwhelming he barely knew what he felt, just empty dread. Someone had shot at him and now he had to change his base camp. He had to watch out they didn't trace him to Anne-Marie. And any time they wanted they could just slap a stick of plastique under the Ford and wait for him to turn the key.
He thought of Christian St. Honoré as a little kid at the Institut Suffren, the shy kid with skinny knees in need of a friend on the Champs de Mars. “We're going to do what it takes to stop you,” St. Honoré had said in his office full of antiques on the Rue de Varenne.
He thought of Yves but Yves seemed weary and annoyed with being dredged up for all solemn occasions like some jinni out of a lamp. “We're always just what you want us to be,” Yves said, “now that we're dead. Personally I don't give a shit about vengeance. You want to avenge me? Then kill the whole goddamn human race.”
“You know what day it is?” André asked the café owner.
“Wednesday.”
“Of the month.”
The man went into a back room and returned. “The twenty-first,” he said. “Twenty-first of April.”
She wouldn't leave till the end of June. And only if he promised they'd return in September. But if he did what he came for they could never return.
He paid and walked along the shore toward the ruined yacht harbor. Gulls were fighting over something swimming through the waves – a rat that had been dumped with the rubbish. It was hurt, swimming in circles. Each time it raised its head above water to catch a bre
ath or find the shore, the gulls dived on it, pecking its eyes. The surf tossed it ashore in a cloud of flapping wings, and it crawled, dragging its back legs, up the sand. The next wave beat it down and the gulls crowded round it, screaming and tearing.
He threw a rock at them and they pulled up, circling, shrilling. But why take the rat's side? he wondered. Didn't it kill to eat too? Don't we all?
War the nature of life. Love just a trick to keep things going. Like gulls killing a rat. Cockroaches mate too, consider it significant and beautiful. When it's only two bags of cells shuffling genes.
Do what you came for, he decided. But don't expect to know why.
A GUARD WAS PACING the corridor; his footsteps slid to a stop outside Neill's door. Neill waited but nothing happened; he bent down and looked under the door, saw part of a gray tennis shoe, then a dark black block set down on the floor beside the shoe: a rifle butt.
“I'm thirsty!” he called in Arabic, his ear against the door so when the rifle butt hit it the wham went straight into his brain. He sat on the floor holding his ear. The door screeched open and three men pulled him out into the bright corridor, pinned his arms behind him, gagged him and lashed his wrists. They yanked the hood over his eyes and hustled him along the corridor and back up the forty-one stairs, letting him trip and fall to his face then yanking him up, laughing and kicking him. “You're going to die now, spy!”
His knees smashed into something hard and someone spun him round and shoved him and he fell back, hitting his neck on a ledge – no, a car's trunk lid. They shoved him inside. “Make any noise and we'll take you out and drag you behind the car. Till there's nothing left.”
The car drove for what seemed a long time, bumping and banging over potholes; his head lay on a sharp metal bar – a jack maybe. It kept jabbing him, the spare tire’s steel rim banging his face.
He tried to hear the distant talk of the men in the car but the muffler was too loud and the wall of the trunk too thick. One wheel, the right rear, had a constant squeal, as if a rabbit or some other little animal had been caught up in it and was slowly grinding to death.