by Mike Bond
The guard would wait till the last moment before he fired. Till she crossed the ruined orchard at the top, full silhouette. Giving her time to think about it, turn back.
Steadily up the steps cut in the clay hill, no houses now, splintered lemon stumps, her footsteps whispering, the sun's red crescent up out of the towering Shouf, spilling like dusty lava down through wracked pine forests and smoky ruined villages. Not looking back she passed the crest, beyond the guard's field of fire, round a blasted tractor, a ruined almond orchard with demolished stone walls and the carious upjutting jaws of a burnt house. Someone had dragged olive boughs to the path to cut up for firewood. There was the stench of death, human or animal, she couldn't tell. She went in dawn's light down the far side of the hill into the outskirts of Beirut.
“THIS WILL BE THE LAST TIME,” Beverly said. She took a sip of her coffee and it left a creamy mark on her upper lip. Neill forced down the annoyed urge to wipe it away. Let her look how she looks.
“I've tried, too, Bev,” he said softly. His leaving made everything here seem easy, made him feel affection for it all. With the back of a finger he wiped the milk from her lip. All was packed, the kids already gone, no reason to linger but for some moment of clarity that never came.
He put his dishes in the dishwasher, went upstairs, brushed his teeth, took a leak, as if marking territory for the last time, he thought, and came down with his bag over one shoulder.
“I said I'd take you to the airport,” she said.
“You've got clients this morning.”
She fingered half a caress down his temple and cheek. “Thank God you're going...” She gave him her reluctant half-shy smile, the one to make him feel guilty for her having to smile. For her having to overcome the sorrow of living with him.
He kissed her, thinking of when their kisses might have meant something. The house felt dusty, full of ashes and chill; he couldn't breathe he was so anxious to leave, the knot in his stomach something he could nearly reach inside and tear out.
“Remember how you always said, Neill, we have to choose between being kind and winning? See, you've proved yourself wrong: you've done neither.”
He went down the front steps into the early morning street and turned toward Earls Court station, across Cromwell and right at the corner into Hogarth Road, glancing back at the traffic.
A taxi slowed but he waved it on. Another, a red one, came idling up and stopped beside him. He glanced into the back, opened the door and got in beside a short stocky balding man in a gray suit and mac. The man held a black hat, The Times, and a briefcase on his lap. The driver turned into Earls Court and continued past the station. The small man opened his briefcase, raising its lid so the driver could not see inside it. “Came in last night. Bloody perfect.”
Inside the briefcase was a photo of a dark-bearded man, high forehead, clear expression, narrow deepset eyes, thick long nose, sharp lips in a wide mouth. A straight-ahead, fear-nothing face. Staring toward the camera but not seeing it, not squinting despite the sun in his face. Behind him, out of focus, a clay brick wall.
“What if this guy didn't blow the Marines' barracks, the French paratroopers?”
“That's what we'd like to find out.”
“I still don't understand why you've got the hots for him –”
“You let us worry about that. Just get to see him.”
“Us?”
“You don't have to be British to serve the Queen, Neill. We appreciate what you've done, over the last twelve years...”
“Screw the Queen, Adam. I do it for the money.”
“That's an honorable motive, too. We respect that.”
“If I see him, I'm doing it my way.”
“Then we can't back you up.”
“Even after twelve years, Adam, I wouldn't depend on you.”
“Nor we on you.”
“That's a bloody lie!”
Freeman sat back in the taxi seat with a pricked stiff face. As if, Neill thought, I could ever hurt them. “What I meant,” Freeman said, “is I don't know how far we can leverage for you.”
“First time you want you'll drop me dead. We both know that.”
“And you'll drop us too, any time you want.”
“Everybody shafts everybody, Adam. What are you getting at?”
“It's two stitches up under your arm. Nobody will ever see it or know it's there. Soon as you come back we take it out.”
“Until then, every second, you know where I am –”
“Most of the time we couldn't care less. But if you're in trouble we can be there.”
“You blind bastards couldn't rescue the PM from the Royal Loo. You don't even dare show your ass in Beirut since the Hez came.”
Freeman smiled, a teacher tolerating the tantrum of a child. “We've decided that if you want to go through with it, we need you wired.”
“I'll go without you. Do my interview with Mohammed for the paper and leave.”
“I can't imagine you giving up ten thousand that easily.”
“So that's what you're saying? No transmitter, no money?”
“Imagine how we'd look if you got into trouble.”
The taxi swerved round a bicycle, a girl in a brown suit and long black scarf. “Whatever happens,” Neill answered, “you're clean. You know that or you wouldn't be here.”
“It takes about five minutes and you're on your way. You won't even feel it. By the time you reach Amsterdam you'll have forgotten all about it. But it could save your life. Do it for us.”
Neill watched the traffic, the grim dirty fenders and windshields, sheets of the Telegraph windscattered along King's Road, the wind-wrenched boughs and muddy grass behind the curb, the sense of living on decay. How good it would be, he thought, to start anew. “Once and for all, Adam, tell me who us is?”
“I do and I'll be out of a job and in prison. Official secrets, all that.”
“Just between me and you, Adam? After all these years –”
“There is no between you and me.” Freeman nodded at the taxi roof. “We're on record.”
Neill stared out of the window, seeing nothing. “Fifteen thousand.”
“It isn't a money thing, Neill. For this protection, we should ask you to pay.”
Neill smiled. See, there is a God, for only a God would have invented us. “Fifteen thousand, instead of the original ten. If you want to follow me around, that's what it's going to cost you.”
“I'll speak to them.”
“No speaking, Adam. I want your agreement, now. Half sent now and a half later.”
Freeman checked the locks on his briefcase. “We've always tried to bend over for you, Neill –”
“Don't say that, Adam. Makes you sound like a fag.”
Freeman snorted, turned away. Neill could not find him in the mirror. Beside Neill a Mini throbbed, dark-haired girl inside, red scarf, red lips; beyond her and around them cars, trucks, and buses floated in a writhing gray sea that had risen up and stained the buildings, the morning sky. Under the Albert Bridge the Thames was dirtier than the sky. Dirty as our lungs, Neill thought.
At Gatwick they went into a locked hospitality suite. Inside was a short slender balding young man with gold rims and a dark beard. “This is Dr. Kane,” Freeman said. It was a narrow room with a yellow-green convertible couch, a self-service bar, and a window with closed curtains of yellow and white acrylic.
Dr. Kane opened his black briefcase. “I need you to strip to the waist and lie down on the couch. We'll have you back on your way in a sec.”
4
“THE MORE I GET TO KNOW YOU,” Monique said, “the less I know.”
André lay back, watching her, the espresso cup in her hand, the strap of her silly nightgown across her arm, her hair all tousled, a sle
ep crease shadowed by the morning sun down her cheek. She shook back her hair. “You're always disappearing.”
Since Yves' death everything irritated him, even Monique. “I don't go anywhere. I've told you that.”
“You shack up with somebody?”
“They were training exercises – cowboy stuff. Preparing for the day Corsica attacks France.”
She finished her coffee, leaned out of the bed to put the cup on the floor. “When we decide to, it won't do any good to be prepared –”
“I've quit the Paras. The biggest danger I face now is probably your husband.”
NEAR THE RUINS of the prison and the Université Libanaise some merchants had set up shop in rubble-walled shacks with tin roofing. A man was selling pens from a paper bag. Another had spread lemons, oranges, peppers, and eggs in the sun under half an awning; a cat sat in a shred of stone window, its yellow tail hanging down.
“Hey, young mother!” the fruit man called, “I've got meat!”
“What meat?” Rosa said.
“Goat, mother! Came through Israeli lines. Come, have a look!”
She followed him into the shade of the half-awning, where a stringy black foreleg hung. He waved at the flies. “It's dog,” Rosa said.
“Where are you going?”
She glanced at his eyes, troubled and brown, in creases of dirty skin. Druze, down from the Shouf. Lost everyone too, have you? She nodded toward the smoky southern heights of Ras Beirut. “What do you hear?”
“Hezbollah still has the southern side and Amal the north. There's Palestinians trying to fight their way out of Hamra. When they're not shooting each other, Hezbollah and Amal are killing the Palestinians. Christians are shelling from the east, Syrians from the hills, Druze from the Shouf, and Israelis from the south.”
“Nothing new, then.”
The creased eyes dropped to her belly. He held up the black foreleg. “Young mother like you, needs her meat.”
THE DAMP AIR at Schiphol Airport made Neill's underarm hurt even more. It had been five stitches, not two, up under the hair. Liar. The stitches rubbed when he walked and tugged when he carried his bag, and the lump under the skin was swollen like a nodule. He stopped at a bar for a quick gin to swallow down two of the Klaricid Kane had given him, “so there'll be no infection,” and two Paludrine for the malaria he had first caught at nineteen in Beirut, and that came back with any quick change of climate, any new exposure. He downed a second gin and caught a taxi to Prinsengracht.
Number 39 was a four-story house one room wide leaning over the root-fissured brick pavement, propped up by narrow houses on each side, and facing across the sycamore crowns and brick street, the leaf-dirty cars, and the cold canal to another façade of other tall grim houses. He punched a code into the door, opened it, climbed to the top floor and let himself in.
The long thin apartment was bathed in near-sepulchral light. Too calm – the goldfish coasting slowly in their bowl, the shiny kitchen counter, the fine rugs and polished floors, Amsterdam's saline sky through diamond-paned windows. “Inneka!” he called, but no one answered. He left his bag by the bed and went downstairs and along Reguliersgracht over the double humped bridges where two canals met, toward Rembrandts Plein and the river, the wind at his back.
THE PRIEST was droning on and André's glance wandered to the pale limestone walls downcast with sun, the stained stone bleeding its slow calcium rot, the time-gnawed lion and human gargoyles on the column crowns, stone faces that had leered down on so many centuries of humans reaching up for God, sneering for centuries at the same human hunger, pain, and sorrow. Is that hatred in their eyes, he wondered, or only irony?
The gray midmorning Normandy light spilled through the faded glass, streaking the pale walls. This imitation, he thought, of the first temples at this ancient curve of the Seine, hallowed rock beneath the oaks, the eye following their columns upward to the arched leafy boughs and the azure of a ceiling you could take for Heaven, if you wanted.
This church at Les Andelys that Richard the Lionheart had built after he came back from the Holy Land and prison in Dürnstein, after he'd built Château Gaillard on the limestone promontory above – two years to build the castle then two months for the church, the castle incorporating the most advanced military defense techniques he'd copied from the Saracens in the Holy Land. Like Richard, André realized, like his brother Yves, now he too was leaving Normandy for the Holy Land. But not to defend it.
Richard taught that to serve the cause of vengeance is to serve the cause of God: build a church or castle, it's all the same. Richard came back from Lebanon with the secrets of Saracen defensive architecture, but they didn't save him. Yves came back in shreds in a black box. Who am I avenging, really? And how will I come back?
Bread and wine into body and blood, every word so sharp that everyone inside this church hears it with a single heart, one mind, for these few moments. He saw the crewcut rugged soldiers in the far pews, some bored, some in conscientious attention to the priest whose words washed over them like so many words over so many souls over eight hundred years inside these same stone walls. The children sucking thumbs and wheedling, old people rapt or diligent in prayer, the priest's prayer now for Pierre Duclair, the sports teacher, forty-three, with a wife and four children, fallen dead on Tuesday as he waited for medicine at the chemist, the priest's prayer for all those hungry and despairing, his admonition to see the scorned beggar at the roadside as Christ, and André made a mental note that this was foolishness because if you did you'd soon be a beggar yourself – but then wouldn't you be like Christ?
A woman in front of him, with three kids, young and pert with short blonde hair curled over her ears, a pretty young body despite the kids. Beyond her another, a little older, tall and slim, hardly any breasts, with a composed ravenous look – which would he spend the night with, if he could?
He chose the young blonde, thought of croissants aux amandes and a café crème to break his fast, after Communion. He could meet Monique at Le Central, but she wouldn't want to with Hermann coming home; at lunch today there'd be fine St. Emilion to go with the lamb, Papa bringing up an armful of bottles spiderwebbed and dusty from the cave – the way they painted the church walls in the twelfth century, you could still see it, frail and dim, the reds last longest, color of wine, color of blood, or is it just that everything turns to that?
The Host in the priest's hands in the mordant light, boys passing each other in the Communion line with quick glances of complicity, coming and going round him the people he'd grown up with, the couples of his early youth now older and tenuous, the girls he'd been a boy with now with girls of their own, lines of worry and comprehension graven in their faces – it was all there for him, hadn't he understood it, at the moment of the Host, the full mystery and miracle of life?
Filing into the street, there was a patter of tires on cobblestones, rain soft as a woman shedding silken clothes, a sad hunger for vengeance and the dry taste of the Host at the back of his throat.
5
AT A CAFÉ by the river Neill bought a 25-guilder bag of Afghani grass and sat smoking on the terrace with a cappuccino. Across the street cars were lined along the canal, parking meters spaced among them like guards among prisoners on a work detail. On the far side of the Amstel rose the stone gingerbread and brick of the Hotel de l’Europe; everywhere cars, bicycles, and trucks were fleeting back and forth as if seeking somewhere to go, people hustling past, the tall slender women with beautiful chiseled faces and red lips set off by their blonde hair; he smiled, imagining their cool long naked skin.
The grass was chunky and sticky and didn't roll easily, the smoke sweet and powerful down into his lungs out into his blood, putting all in perspective, Bev and Freeman and Inneka and the newspaper and the kids and this trip and his forty-two years crowned with no success, no future. It didn't matter, your future, if
you could understand this, live fully in this.
Across the street policemen with two trucks were towing away first a gray Toyota then a red Lada. One tall bearded cop had a key that opened the Lada's door instantly. Oh to have a key, Neill thought, that opens everything. A few passersby watched half curiously, a man in a tan beret complaining quietly and rancorously. On the radio a man was whining over some woman's desertion:
And if you leave me now
You'll take away
The very best part of me
A tall slender black man, athletic, passed by with a smaller dark-haired white man – a laughing young-hearted couple. How can I look down on that? Neill thought. Then a blonde girl in a camelhair coat, black high heels, black foam pads on wires over her ears. “You don't have to be alone,” sang the café radio, a husky woman's voice.
Two girls sat at the next table, drinking espressos and smoking hash from a clay pipe. “Hey!” one of them said, and he looked up, but she was calling a young long-haired guy on the pavement who smiled and came over, kissed them and sat down, his hand on one girl's thigh, smoking their hash. I'm the kind of graying soft-faced man, Neill realized, that nobody notices. He caught his reflection in the café's side window: soon an old man, ripe for defeat.
The joint was too resiny and kept going out; he relit it, inhaling the sweet smoke through his nostrils, tasting it. The CIA had shipped Afghani weed like this to Europe to help pay for weapons to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan. Like everyone in Lebanon was selling opium and hash to pay for their weapons.
Through the smoke everything seemed clearer, the blue Jaguar that had parked where the Lada had been towed away, half up on the pavement, the wet leaves on the dirty stones, the rail beyond and the Amstel River gray slate, an orange houseboat chugging up it, the Hotel de l’Europe primly awaiting a change of season, the weary houses, wet streets beneath damp clouds.
