“Didn’t your bomb maker Colonel Hisham disappear at about the same time? Was his name on any of the casualty lists?”
Prosser hesitated for an instant and felt his face flush. No one had heard anything about the colonel in the two months since Abu Khalil had offered to contact him. Over the ensuing weeks, Prosser’s thoughts had turned again and again to that contact. In his reporting he had deliberately omitted mentioning Abu Khalil’s plan to seek out Colonel Hisham—and to kill him, if circumstances warranted it—in exchange for a sizable bonus.
“I did the same kind of check for Colonel Hisham that I did for Abu Khalil,” Prosser replied, “except that I focused mainly on the house organs of Saiqa and the other Syrian-backed groups. So far nothing has turned up.”
“Did you ask the Cyprus walk-in whether he’d ever heard of Colonel Hisham?”
“I asked, but the name didn’t ring a bell. He’d heard of the al Ghawshah family but not our man.”
“Well, no news is good news. With any luck at all, Colonel Hisham is buried under the rubble in Fakhani, courtesy of the Israeli air force and American technology.”
“Ed, I saw Maroun this morning,” Prosser responded. “You’re not going to like what he had to say.”
“Let me guess. He’s not still on that kick of his about Bashir and the Israelis invading West Beirut, is he?”
“It’s not—” Prosser began and then checked himself. “Well, actually, he is. Except that now he’s thinking of doing something about it. He says he wants to pack it in and emigrate to the States.”
“I hope you were able to dissuade him, for God’s sake.”
Prosser tossed his head back and clicked his tongue in the negative, just as he would do if he were conversing with an Arab. “I thought it would be a better idea to listen first and let him vent his frustrations a bit. This isn’t the first time Maroun has felt discouraged. Usually he pulls out of it in a week or so. I said I’d look into it and see what we could do.”
“Whatever you do, Con, don’t let him get away from us. Give him a raise if you think it will help. If it doesn’t, put him off till next year at the earliest. We just can’t afford to lose a reliable reporter like him right now. What with the deadline coming up for Israel to hand the Sinai back to the Egyptians, who knows? Maybe the Israelis will cook something up in Lebanon aimed at provoking Egypt into scuttling Camp David so they can keep the Sinai. All I know is that whatever the Israelis do in Lebanon, Bashir will be in the thick of it, and we need Maroun to help us keep tabs on him.”
“All right, then, Ed. How much are you prepared to pay him to stay? I don’t imagine anything less than another five or six hundred bucks a month would make much of an impression.”
“Tomorrow morning write up what Maroun told you and ask Headquarters to authorize five hundred a month plus another ten thousand bucks to be paid next June if he stays. If Maroun is serious about making the move to the States, he’ll need the extra cash.”
“One more thing, Ed. Maroun had some other bad news. According to Phalange intelligence, Colonel Hisham is alive and kicking. He’s been convalescing in a Syrian hospital for the past couple months from some kind of injury, but now he’s back in the explosives business. Only now he’s sending his car bombs into West Beirut instead of East Beirut.”
Prosser paused to gauge Pirelli’s reaction before offering more. “Phalange intelligence thinks he’s still working for the Syrians,” he continued. “But it could be for the Libyans or the Iranians, for all they know.”
“If he’s not going against the Phalange anymore, who the hell is he going against?” Pirelli asked.
“Nobody seems to know.”
“Damn,” Pirelli muttered under his breath. “This is the kind of trouble we can do without. Con, you need to get on top of this right away. I want you to find out whatever you can about the colonel from Abu Ramzi and from the rest of your sources. Write up whatever you collect in ops format only. We’re not going to disseminate one word about Colonel Hisham until it’s been confirmed from at least two independent sources. Are you meeting any agents tonight?”
“Nope. I’ve got a dinner date. My next agent meeting isn’t until tomorrow night.”
“You mean to say that you still go out on these streets after dark for fun?” Pirelli replied in mock surprise. “You must be out of your cotton-picking mind. I suppose spying doesn’t provide enough excitement for some people.”
Prosser laughed. “You ought to come along sometime, Ed. There’s more nightlife in Beirut than you might think. Harry and I can make another dinner reservation if you’d like to join us. Hell, we’d even fix you up with a date.”
“No, you go on ahead without me. I’d just slow you young bucks down,” Pirelli answered. As Prosser turned to leave, the station chief fetched the basket of outgoing messages from the top of his safe and sat down for one last hour of work.
* * *
Rima rose straight up out of the water behind him, lifted herself onto the swimming pool’s concrete deck, and was out of his reach before he could turn around. “You lose; take off your clothes,” she giggled, using an American idiom Prosser did not recall having taught her.
He watched her move across the deck toward the chairs where they had left their clothes, her naked breasts outlined dimly against the whitewashed walls. The sun had gone down an hour ago, and they had the rooftop pool all to themselves.
“Are you ready for another?” she asked as she poured a whiskey sour from a thermos into an ice-filled plastic tumbler.
“Why not?”
She poured a second drink and brought it over to him. As his eyes followed the sideways movement of her hips, he felt cool jets of fresh water swirling around and between his thighs and he shivered.
Rima sat facing him at the edge of the pool, her shapely calves dangling in the cool water. He ignored her offer of a whiskey sour and instead ran his palms over her thighs from knee to hip and back again. He took the tumbler only when she started to dribble its contents over his head.
“I thought you wanted to swim,” she teased. “Have you changed your mind?”
“Oh, I do want to swim,” he insisted. “But I was thinking that first it might be nice to, well, unwind a little. You know.” He leaned forward and nibbled at the flesh just inside her knee.
“Stop it,” she cried out as she pressed her knees together. “I think you should unwind by swimming.”
She drew her legs up as if to back away from the edge and then froze. “Did you hear that, batta,” she whispered. “Somebody is trying to unlock the door.”
“That will be Harry. I gave him a key and told him to meet us up here for a swim before dinner.”
At that moment the door swung open and a young woman emerged onto the rooftop deck. Harry was right behind her, and their silhouettes merged into a single shadow against the pale backdrop of the wall.
“Relax; it’s just us kidnappers,” Harry greeted them.
“Come on in, and lock the door behind you,” Prosser called out across the rooftop. “And be sure to leave the key in the lock.”
Rima slipped hurriedly back into the water as Harry approached.
“Not bad for government housing,” Harry commented as he dropped his canvas beach bag onto a chaise longue. “Doesn’t anybody else come up here at night?”
“They would if they could,” Prosser replied, “but the landlord locks the door at sunset. The concierge and I are the only others who have keys.”
“Baksheesh,” Harry ventured.
“I tried it, but it didn’t work. Fortunately, I happen to know a little about locks.”
Harry turned to his guest. She was a slender, athletic young woman with long legs and high, well-rounded breasts that swelled against the oversized white T-shirt she wore over her bathing suit. Prosser’s eyes opened wide in the semidarkness to take in the sight of her.
“Layla, I’d like you to meet Conrad Prosser and Rima al Fayyad.”
Rima and Pro
sser both spoke up at once and then broke into laughter. There was something familiar about those dark, round eyes and that mocking smile, Prosser thought, as Layla came closer.
“Good evening,” Layla greeted them. “But if I am not mistaken, Harry, Conrad and I have already met. Were you not at Harry’s party on the night when the people in the building opposite us threw sticks of dynamite from their balcony?”
“Now I remember,” Prosser answered with a smile of recognition. “You and Harry talked at some length about visas. Tell me, did he ever give you what you wanted?”
“That and more,” she replied with a giggle and a sidelong glance at Harry. “And as you can see, I returned from the trip.”
“I expect your return made Harry doubly happy, then.” Prosser turned to the vice consul and gave an approving nod. “Say, why don’t you cool off in the pool while I pour you both a drink. Believe me, if you’ve never had one of my whiskey sours, you’re in for something special.”
Harry stripped down to his bathing suit while Layla arranged her towel, kit bag, and purse neatly on a vacant deck chair. Prosser climbed out of the water to fill two more tumblers from the thermos bottle.
Rima kept her eyes on Layla and sniggered when the woman first observed that Prosser wore no bathing trunks. Layla returned Rima’s gaze, stifled a laugh, and then quickly pulled off her bikini top and bottom, flinging them onto the deck before leaping feetfirst into the pool. Despite the loud splash and the hoots of laughter that followed, Harry didn’t notice what was going on until Prosser walked right up to him and placed a whiskey sour squarely in his hand. When at last it dawned on him that Prosser wore nothing, his first reaction was to scan the pool for Rima, who stood waiting in the shallow end, just far enough out of the water for him to see that she was topless. Layla crouched at her side, the tops of her gleaming breasts just above the waterline.
“Et tu, Layla?” he asked.
She jumped straight up out of the water with a squeal of delight.
Harry lost no time in stepping out of his bathing trunks and making toward the shallow end, where Layla awaited him. Prosser and Rima joined them, sitting at the edge of the pool with their legs in the water. Before long the two women were chattering away in an admixture of Arabic and French about their respective families, their jobs, and the YWCA residence, where Layla had lived for two years before Rima moved in.
As he labored to follow their conversation, Prosser’s mind wandered for a moment, only to be brought down to earth by the distant crackle of heavy machine-gun fire coming from somewhere beyond the Hamra district. Within seconds the crackle grew louder and was joined by the muffled pops of flak bursts overhead. In the next moment he saw scores of crisscrossing strands of red and orange tracer fire shooting across the southern sky in a colossal pyrotechnic display.
“Look behind you,” Prosser shouted to the others. “Somebody’s celebrating.”
Within moments the erratic streaks across the sky multiplied tenfold and the cacophony swelled into a continuous roar. The two couples stared into the night sky to watch the shells, rockets, and bullets race from east to west and out to sea.
“Is today some kind of a holiday?” Harry shouted over the din. “Nobody at the office said anything thing about it.”
“By Allah, I do not know of any holiday either,” Layla volunteered.
“It can’t be the start of Ramadan yet,” Harry pointed out. “Do you suppose it might be Muhammad’s birthday or the Islamic New Year or something like that?”
“Don’t ask me,” Rima demurred. “My parents were Socialists. None of us ever paid any attention to Muslim holidays.”
“Nor did we,” Layla replied with a laugh. “My father was a physics professor. Could it be a Christian holiday?”
“Nice try, but the firing is all taking place on this side of the Green Line, and Jesus stopped making the rounds in West Beirut five years ago,” Harry interjected. “Some Muslims you two are. Come the Islamic Revolution, you’ll both be in deep shit.”
They continued to watch the skies for another two or three minutes until the firing began to diminish, leaving only intermittent bursts of small arms fire and occasional shell bursts audible above the chorus of automobile horns blaring in unison along the Corniche below. Then the two women resumed their gossip about past and present tenants of the YWCA residence.
Prosser took the opportunity to float undisturbed on his back in the center of the pool and to watch the last of the fireworks while Harry climbed onto the deck and rummaged through his gym bag. After a few moments he returned to the edge of the pool with a foil-covered packet the size of a cigarette pack inside a ziplock plastic bag.
“Do you mind if we smoke?” Harry asked.
“Feel free,” Prosser replied.
“Would you like a hit? It’s Bekaa Gold, the best there is.”
Prosser turned around to see Harry removing a hand-rolled cigarette from the foil-covered parcel. “Hash?”
“Blended one to one with Marlboro. Should I bring out some more?”
“No, thanks,” Prosser replied indifferently. “I’m in training. Ask Rima, though; she smokes.” He finished the remaining contents of his whiskey sour and lowered himself into the water just as the two women came out and began drying themselves.
“You wouldn’t have believed the place where Layla and I scored this stuff,” Harry continued. “Last Sunday we drove up and down the Bekaa Valley all the way from Hirmil to Lake Qaraoun. For miles and miles you couldn’t see anything but cannabis, cannabis, and more cannabis—ten feet tall, planted in neat rows on both sides of the road. Now and then there would be a house with barely enough land cleared for a vegetable plot and a parking space, but otherwise the whole goddamned valley was covered with weed. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”
“So you harvested some?”
“Not on your life! The valley was crawling with armed patrols, and all the main roads had checkpoints every couple miles. Those folks don’t take kindly to people carting off the cash crop. No, we just happened to stop at a roadside hooch to buy something cool to drink, and before we could say ‘kiif haalak,’ the teenage kid in charge asked us whether we wanted to score some hash.”
“Right over the counter?”
“Well, there wasn’t exactly a counter, but he certainly wasn’t furtive about it. He went into the back of the hooch and came back with a cigar box full of processed hash rolled into little balls the size of golf balls. We bought three of the things for a little more than ten bucks.”
“Tourist prices, Harry. Next time you ought to try bargaining him down. For ten bucks he should have sold you the whole box. If you don’t believe me, send somebody over to the Raouché souk to pick some up for you. It’s a buyer’s market these days.”
Prosser noticed that Harry had not yet lit up his joint. “Go on; light up and enjoy yourself,” he urged his guest. “I’m going to swim a few more laps before we head out.”
He pushed off toward the center of the pool and started into a powerful breaststroke. When he finished the twelfth lap he looked up and saw Harry sitting alone, towel over his shoulders and beach bag at his feet.
“Are you almost finished?” Harry called out. “The girls have gone downstairs to change.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to hold you up.” Prosser lifted himself languidly out of the water, reached for his towel, and pulled it around his shoulders.
“By the way, I thought this might be a good time to return your hardware,” Harry suggested, lifting his gym bag onto a low table between them.
“Thanks. I almost forgot about the damned things. By the way, I appreciate your holding on to them while I was in Cyprus.”
Prosser fetched his own canvas beach bag from under a deck chair and set it alongside Harry’s. Then he removed two matte-black .45-caliber Colt semiautomatic pistols from Harry’s bag, along with six loaded magazines, and spread them out on the table. He worked the action of the first pistol, shoving the sl
ide all the way back to cock the hammer, and then inserted a magazine. Next he depressed the slide release to jack a round into the chamber and thumbed on the safety catch. He loaded the second pistol the same way.
“Are they government issue?” Harry asked when the pistols and spare magazines were tucked away inside Prosser’s beach bag.
“Are you kidding?” Prosser replied. “Headquarters is totally paranoid about issuing weapons in the field. As far as they’re concerned, if we need weapons, we shouldn’t be out here. They wouldn’t even issue a sidearm to Bill Thorson last year when he had a PFLP death threat hanging over his head. I had to bring these from the States in my checked luggage.”
“You don’t pack heat when you’re walking around town, do you?”
Prosser shook his head. “Not now, anyway. The main reason I brought them was so that I could defend myself if somebody ever came after me in my apartment. Out on the street a pistol would probably do more harm than good.”
Harry’s expression turned pensive. “You know, I manage to piss off dozens of people every day, but I’ve never worried much about somebody coming after me. It’s the car bombs that scare the living crap out of me. There doesn’t seem to be any defense against them, short of leaving the country. I heard on Radio Lebanon just this afternoon that the Syrians intercepted one this morning armed with more than fifty kilos of TNT. They caught the driver and he says the Phalange ordered him to park the thing right on Hamra Street, near the Étoile Cinema. Can you imagine? A hundred and ten pounds of bloody TNT going off in the middle of Hamra?”
“Did they say where the car was intercepted?”
“I think it was at one of the roadblocks by Galerie Semaan.”
Prosser gasped, then caught himself and gave his friend a skeptical look. “Sounds like Syrian bullshit propaganda to me. Listen, Harry, if the car came via Galerie Semaan, it could just as well have originated in Syrian-held territory as with the Phalange. If any explosives were intercepted at all, the Syrians probably captured one or their own bombs by mistake. Car bombs just aren’t the Phalangists’ style. They much prefer howitzers.”
Dynamite Fishermen (Beriut Trilogy 1) Page 24
