‘That means nothing. You’re only guessing.’
‘Listen, Madame, the government has said nothing. They are silent. There was no mention of this murder on the Beirut news; this evening the papers are censored. Accusations have been brought against them; they do not defend themselves. Why? Because they do not need to. This silence would be dangerous to them if they did not have a card up their sleeve.’
It’s just an idea he has; he doesn’t know anything, thought Sarah. But he had sown a hope in her mind that would not be stifled. It sprang up and prospered.
After Professor Adib had gone Sarah left the shop and stood for a moment on the pavement wondering what to do. Outside the gate of the American University students stood about talking excitedly and small boys had abandoned their usual occupations of selling postcards and chewing gum to throw stones at passing cars. The scene was further enlivened by a traffic jam—a car, trying to turn round in the middle of the narrow street had got stuck in front of a tram and there was no room to pass on either side, for the road had been torn up down one side of the tramline and was in the process of being repaired, as usual.
Sarah crossed the road, passed through the university and entered the quiet shade of the garden. She used to walk here often in the evenings when she had been living in Rhas Beirut, and made her way now to a seat that commanded a view down the terraced slope to the sea beyond.
There were few people about. Two suntanned girls played tennis on the court below and students strolled along the paths between the lawns. Sarah was hardly conscious of them. They seemed effaced by trees and flowers, and she could barely hear the thud of tennis balls for the shriek of cicadas.
The sun, falling westward over the sea, struck the face of the hill, flushing the warm stone of the university buildings. Oleanders planted on the terraced hillside foamed in extravagant pink clouds at Sarah’s feet, and hibiscus blooms, nodding against the sky, filtered the light like stained–glass through their crimson petals.
Sarah sat alone on the garden seat. Her mood had changed at the moment of entering the garden. She was suddenly happy and, looking about her at the bronze red pine needles scattered on the pathways and the eucalyptus blossom hanging in hazy clusters, felt such joy she might never have seen such loveliness before. A cricket began singing on a shrill, incessant note, right under her foot. She listened and felt she could feel the earth vibrating. She stamped her foot and silenced not only the cricket, but the cicadas in the pine trees over her head, which at once fell utterly still.
The quiet sounded strange, a gap had opened in the afternoon. Then in the intense silence she heard a footstep. She turned to look back over her shoulder.
A man stood directly behind her, looking at her with an expression of grave attention. She almost cried out.
He came a step nearer and nervously licked his lips. ‘I want to speak with you. Don’t be afraid,’ he said in a low voice.
He was a short, rather stocky man, around fifty. Good-looking in his youth, probably, but now he had lost most of his hair and his features had become square and heavy; one would guess that rich food and heavy living had coarsened him. But his nose, which was narrow and aquiline, and his eyes, which had so startled her, leant distinction to his face.
He gave a quick, apprehensive glance behind him and slipped into the seat at Sarah’s side. She could not imagine what he wanted with her, and after that first, devastating flash of recognition, had realised that he was a stranger, but it did not occur to her to move away.
‘Please understand,’ he said, speaking in a low agitated voice, ‘I have nothing to do with this. I wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t—well we won’t go into that … But I don’t want you to think that you can make any demands on me. I’m a respectable citizen leading a decent honest life, and all I’m interested in is keeping my family in reasonable comfort and security. This kind of thing is extremely dangerous to me and I undertake it only with the greatest reluctance. Do you understand?’
‘I don’t understand at all.’
‘I’m explaining to you that you must not assume you have an ally in me. I am neutral, Mademoiselle. He should never have asked this of me; he knows how I feel. I am a family man with children and responsibilities. And being Syrian I have to be careful. They think we are trouble makers, and they have good reason. I have to move with great caution, my reputation is precious to me—’
He broke off when Sarah turned and stared at him earnestly. ‘Please, don’t look at me, Mademoiselle! Look straight ahead!’
‘Why? Is someone watching us?’
‘How can I tell? You are known to the police. And to others. You were with him. I had to choose between a meeting place like this and going openly to your house, which would have been even more incautious. So I followed you here. As it is, heaven knows, there may be unpleasant repercussions for me.’
Sarah sat staring straight ahead into the oleanders, as he had commanded. A bird with a curved bill sipped honey from their flowers. How small it was, how exquisite, its bill like a thin metal probe, its bright eye … For a moment, looking at the bird, and tense with happiness, she forgot what they were talking about. ‘Who are you?’ she murmured.
‘That is irrelevant. Have I been talking for nothing?’ he broke out angrily. ‘I’ve told you, I was forced into this against my will, even tricked, you might say. The whole point is, Mademoiselle—who are you?’
She could not resist turning again to look at him. ‘Don’t you know?’
He too seemed to be losing his cautiousness for his eyes rested for a moment on her face. The expression in them was curious; he seemed almost afraid of her and surprised and admiring, as though she were dangerous, but at the same time admirable. ‘You must tell me.’
Sarah, staring into his eyes, felt a rush of emotion. They were so alike. He must be an elder brother, she thought.
‘Sarah Lane.’
‘And your address?’
‘5 Rue Jeanne d’Arc.’
He nodded. ‘Can you prove this? An identity card, a passport?’
‘No, I can’t, you see I lost my passport this morning. ‘There was—’
‘Yes, yes, I know. It is difficult. I shall have to trust you.’ He seemed to relax slightly. He leant back in the seat and crossed his legs, though he still did not look at her. ‘You probably think me over-cautious, Mademoiselle, and I don’t mean to be ungracious, of course. When Raschid rang me this morning I thought—you will excuse me if I confess what I thought but after all it was a natural supposition—there is some explanation. But what would you have thought under the circumstances? He put it in such a way that I naturally supposed it to be a personal matter. To put it brutally, the termination of a relationship. Consolation, as it were. I perfectly understood that he would want someone else to act for him—no scenes, no tears. Most young women would be only too happy, but their pride nevertheless demands that they indulge in unpleasant recriminations. Well, now, it was no more than an hour later when I heard of this dastardly attack that I realised I had been quite mistaken. But Raschid wanted me to be mistaken, that is the point, and this makes me angry. But I promised and I must keep my word or he’ll never forgive me. There, there it is.’
‘But I don’t—’
‘I don’t want to know what you’re doing. I don’t want to know anything about it.’
Sarah looked down at the bundle of money that he had put in her hands. She had never held so much money in her life before. While he had been speaking tears had surged into her eyes; now they ran down her cheeks. ‘But I can’t take this,’ she sobbed, ‘I’ve done nothing!’
‘I don’t known anything about that,’ replied the man at her side, looking at her curiously, as though her distress puzzled him.
‘It was only thirty pounds—what I lost in my bag—and even if you count in the air ticket. I did nothing at all. I just sat for an hour.’
He did not move; he sat silent. Sarah turned to look at him and found him staring a
t her with an expression of scorn and loathing. She was so startled her tears dried.
‘Ah! Mademoiselle!’ he said with bitter reproach. ‘When a man is helpless and can only trust in his friends—’
‘But he’s dead!’
Their eyes met. Sarah’s blue and imploring, his angry and hard. ‘So that is the line you are going to adopt,’ he said slowly. ‘I understand.’ He got up and without another word to her began to walk hurriedly away.
‘What must I do?’ she called after him.
He did not reply, but she knew he had heard her for he shook his head quickly back and forth, throwing her question, her plea, away from him. A moment later he had disappeared around a bend in the pathway.
She sat, staring down at the notes in her hand, and then opened her handbag to put them inside.
Sarah had not until that moment examined the interior of the bag that Colonel Ahmed had given her that morning. She had imagined it was empty; there had been no point in opening it. The hundred Lebanese pounds that Nadea had lent her Nadea herself had put into the bag. So it was now, for the first time, that she saw the two letters.
The first was addressed to Mr Emile Khalife, Chakra. The second to herself. She opened hers and began to read.
As the afternoon drew on and the sun, sinking lower, struck fully on the western face of Beirut, the pink, gold and white of the thickly-clustered buildings fused together into one white-hot glare. On top of the cliffs above Pigeon Rock the windows of apartment houses blazed into sheets of gold, and every now and again a light flashed like a signal out to sea, as a car on the road that mounted the cliffs caught the sun on its windscreen.
The city seemed to lose itself in this shower of light, and the mountains behind and the sea drew closer upon each other. The tall, square buildings close to the sea’s edge looked like mere extensions of the salt-white cliffs, and on the mountain slopes villages and towns hung in the dark-green felt of pine forests.
As the sun declined further, people drove out of Beirut instinctively seeking something not to be found within the crowded streets, something they encountered on the tops of cliffs watching the fishing boats return to shore, or out on the empty red sand-dunes, which, disordered and desolate under the noonday sun, now seemed mysterious and beautiful.
Sarah, possessed by a restlessness and impatience that was almost insupportable, left the university and, calling a taxi, told the driver to take her to the airport and back.
‘Slowly! Slowly!’ she cried, as they careered with screaming tyres around the Corniche and out into the open road by the swimming clubs.
The dunes burned copper red in the declining sun. Long shadows lay flung across the sand, printing as inky patches every footprint threading the ridges. Clumps of umbrella pines stood intensely still and gathered into themselves, woven into one mass by the closeness of their growth and the unity of their shadows. On the outskirts of these little forests, nomads had pitched their tents and here and there a donkey with a hairy foal trotting behind it wandered over the sand hills. And jockeys from the racecourse, who had been exercising their horses, were now riding home.
Sarah, looking out of the taxi window, saw a grey stallion dancing with arched neck under the hand of its rider. The sand spouting up hung like fire around its hoofs. It reminded her of Colonel Ahmed. Leaning forward she told the taxi driver to take her back to Rue Jeanne d’Arc.
Here, as darkness fell, she sat waiting on the verandah amongst Nadea’s ferns and climbing plants.
The cheek of it! she thought. Telling his brother that he was buying me off …
But the big gloomy clock in the hall struck seven, eight, nine, and he did not come. The long suspense, the clinging to a vain hope, had exhausted her. If I wait any longer, she told herself, I shall go off my head. I must do something. I must get help.
She did not in fact want help so much as to tell someone what had happened; to win from someone else confirmation of what she wanted to believe, for faith is strengthened mightily if another shares it.
If only Nadea were here, she thought. But Nadea was in Amman and most of Sarah’s other acquaintances had been Marcel’s friends and were unsuited to the role of confidant and protector. Moreover, she was determined against making any move that might connect her again, however tenuously, with Marcel.
At 9:30 she left the house and turned down Rue Jeanne d’Arc in the direction of the travel agency.
C H A P T E R 8
Alan Crawe lived in a fourth-floor apartment next to the travel agency. The building was designed around an open courtyard that served as a place to hang washing and a dump for rubbish and which trapped and magnified the noise of wireless sets, parties and family disputes coming from the rooms around it.
Alan had become accustomed to the noise, which in any case in Ras Beirut was inescapable, and had grown attached to his neighbours, whose lusty domestic life was daily and nightly exposed for his edification. Moreover, he had a view, which in Beirut was hard to acquire, and with the rate that buildings were shooting up, harder still to keep. By some happy chance his apartment was so situated that from his bedroom window he could look out north eastwards through the narrow spaces between buildings and could actually see the mountains; when darkness fell the lights of Aley and Broumana hung above his head like a great crowd of twinkling, intimate stars swarming too close to earth; and from his front balcony he could look across the road over unfinished roof tops to a strip of blue sea.
When Sarah rang his doorbell that evening, Alan was talking to his partner, Ishmael Qazzaz. They had spent an afternoon terrifying for the one and exasperating for the other—Ishmael in jail, Alan trying to get him out—and were now discussing their experience over a bottle of arak.
It was the second time that Alan had prised Ishmael from the clutches of the Lebanese police. The first of these occasions had marked the beginning of, and put its stamp upon, their friendship.
It had happened three years before in a narrow one–way street not far from the French suk. Ishmael, disregarding the one-way sign, had turned his car up the street and, finding his progress blocked by a taxi which was coming down it, had been forced to stop. He was clearly in the wrong but, feeling himself unable to give way to a mere taxi driver (and a rude one at that), had refused to back his car. The taxi driver abused him, and a crowd of onlookers collected, listened to the case for both sides and split into factions, some taking the part of the taxi driver, others—the admirers of pride and intransigence—supporting Ishmael. In the meantime a long line of traffic was piling up behind the taxi and Alan, whose taxi it was, got out and tried to reason with Ishmael.
Ishmael liked Alan on sight and thanked him for his courteous behaviour but, by now, nothing less than his honour was at stake and, to prove that he was willing to stick to his guns all day if necessary, he unfolded his daily paper and began to read it—albeit inattentively. This infuriated the taxi driver and those among the crowd who had taken his side. People shouted, horns honked. Moderates pleaded with both parties and suggested a compromise.
Could not both cars back at the same time at a given signal? But this was no longer possible for, traffic having piled up behind the taxi, there was now no place for it to back into.
At this point the police arrived and joined in the argument. They sympathised with Ishmael’s point of view and, to begin with, reasoned with him gently. He had no right, they pointed out, to be going up a down street in the first place. Most people had overlooked this point and a few onlookers changed sides, attacking Ishmael with all the virulence of converts. A brawl broke out and several people were arrested, including Ishmael.
After a few hours in jail he was set free and, on discovering that it was Alan who had engineered his release, all but flung his arms around his rescuer’s neck. This gesture of friendship from a stranger, and one, moreover, who by nature of the fact that he had been occupying the offending taxi must have felt himself on the opposing side, seemed to him to be extraordinarily touch
ing and beautiful. And so was born one of those cleaving, illogical, oriental attachments which come about, as often as not, from a mere chance circumstance, but are none the less fervent for that.
The outcome of this incident was that Alan resigned from his job in London (he had been on holiday) and joined Ishmael in the travel agency which, under Ishmael’s direction, had been running unnoticeably into bankruptcy. All his friends told him he was mad but he was young enough, at thirty-three, to face the prospect of losing all his money without grave alarm. And on the whole they had done very well.
The agency, now renamed Anglo-Lebanese Travels Ltd, revived considerably. There were the usual difficulties of working in a country where one is not a national, but when these were overcome business went ahead. By luck they secured a government contract and in a rush of optimism bought two new cars. So far, most of their business had come from airline bookings; now they started doing tours in Lebanon and between Beirut and Damascus. These were a great success, and they discussed the possibility of opening a London branch.
The two men made a good team. Alan had a flair for business; he put the chaotic accounts in order and built up a smoothly running organisation, leaving Ishmael and Ishmael’s sister Georgette to deal with their clients, for whom, he quickly found, he had little liking.
The excursions within Lebanon had been Alan’s idea. Being well read in Middle East history and interested in archaeology, he had planned them as lecture tours and hoped that they would be both enjoyable and instructive. But they had proved quite intolerable. He had no patience with his hapless charges—he derided the informed and insulted the ignorant. Finally he gave up after a particularly trying afternoon spent at Sidon with a party of Australians whose profound ignorance goaded him into terminating the tour an hour before the appointed time on the grounds that ‘the whole thing was utterly wasted on them’.
From that day Ishmael replaced him as the guide, to the relief of all concerned. Everyone liked the young Jordanian; his pleasant appearance and friendly manner inspired, if not confidence, at any rate a certain tolerant affection. Though inefficient, he was tirelessly helpful, and customers, remembering his charm and forgiving his mistakes, usually returned. Ishmael was in his element, for he loved company and going on picnics, which was what these once scholarly excursions had now become. And Alan was happy behind his desk working on his accounts, making new plans and keeping a watchful eye on his partner.
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