Holy War

by Mike Bond

  She eased the pin out of one grenade and placed it softly on the ground. One man farted, another laughed. “I'm a happy married man,” said a third. “I wouldn't even look at his sister.”

  “Now we know you're a liar. To have said happy and married in the same sentence.”

  “For someone who complains so much about his wife, Sylvain, you're always ready to go home.”

  “Who wouldn't be when you're the alternative?”

  Holding down the lever of the first grenade she took a second from her pocket, pulled the pin with her teeth and spat it quietly on the ground. A grenade in each hand, she inched on hands and knees toward the voices.

  “I have to admit,” one was saying, “Muslims cook the best lamb.”

  “So why are we killing them?”

  “Because they're killing us, remember?”

  She reached the last jumble of concrete before the open doorway, their voices five yards beyond. Fighting down her fear she released one lever, then the other.

  One second plus one makes two. Two seconds plus two makes three. Three plus three makes four. Four plus four and you always have an extra half a second and she threw one far and one near and dived behind the broken concrete.

  A clatter of steel, a yell. The air sucked in, glared white and the boom threw her up and smashed her down among flying chunks of steel and concrete in the first grenade's enormous roar that grew and grew, crushed through the hands she'd clasped over her ears down into her skull, her heart, her soul. Great pieces of concrete were smashing down as the second grenade blew, cleaner, hot steel ringing off the shuddering walls. She tried to roll to her feet but couldn't.

  Something warm and wet on her neck made her reach up for the wound but it was only a piece of one of the men. Chunks of ceiling kept ticking down. None of the men was moving; their guns were smashed. She stumbled through boiling dust and smoke out the back door of the warehouse into what could be Rue Hussein, she couldn't tell. In the moonlit rubble she could not discern where the Roman arch had been, the square where the old stone houses had grown together like ancient married couples, like old trees.

  She could hear nothing, as if at the bottom of the sea, new pain shooting through her ears with every pulse. Mohammed's men would surely be angry that she'd used the two grenades. Four hours late too. Lazy, cowardly slut, they'll have given up on you. She crossed the street and entered the darkness of battered houses on the far side. In four years she'd never been caught; don't start now.

  “You can stop now,” a voice whispered, behind her.

  “Right now!” said another.

  “Please, sirs, I'm hurrying home –”

  “Hah! Abdul, it's a wench!”

  “Lucky you didn't kill her!”

  A match scraped, flared toward her.

  8

  “I’M A MOTHER.” She forced down the quaver in her voice. “Trying to get home.”

  In the light of the match she saw a red dirty hand, a smudged candle stub. “Keep your arms up,” the other one said, “mother.”

  “I must get to Rue Hamra. My father –”

  “He can wait. No doubt he's had a few pieces too in his life.”

  “What are you? Israelis, Syrians? I'm carrying a child!”

  “Was it a nice fuck – the one that knocked you up?”

  In the greasy candle light she couldn't find their faces, only shapes, one against the wall, the other closer. She reached for a grenade. “Get undressed,” he said.

  “I can't.”

  “We'll teach you what a big one feels like. Two of them.”

  The muzzle he shoved against her was short and hot, an Uzi's. “Either we do it nice,” he said, “or we do it nasty. One way you live, one way you don't.” His fingers brushed her breast, traveled downwards. She pushed the hand away. “Watch it, mother,” he said softly.

  “Please...”

  He tugged her hair. “I'm running out of patience.”

  “I'll lie down in darkness, over there. You, by the wall there – you come first.”

  She undressed in the darkness, laying the grenades and her clothes to one side.

  “Where are you, chicken?” he whispered. He had a soft young beard and hard hands. “You're not pregnant!”

  “It was a pillow, I didn't want this.” She was shivering so hard she feared she'd throw up.

  “Hurry!” the other whispered.

  The first finished, facing away as he pulled himself to his feet, stepped back to his gun. The other came forward, knelt, sliding down his pants, his gun loose in the crotch of his arm as he took in her body, leaning his belly down on her. With the heel of her hand she snapped his head up hard, snatched the gun, rolled out from under him and shot the other three times, hearing the bullets smack, then shot this one on the ground, the bullet bouncing back up through his head. He kept squirming so she shot him again between the eyes but he wouldn't stop, even when she leaned down and shot him through the back of the neck.

  The air stank. She crouched in a corner to urinate. Animals, she swore. All of us.

  THIS IS NOT SO BAD, Neill thought, not realizing it was a dream, stepping into the next street where there was nothing but one house far out on the smashed burnt landscape. In a rubbled square stood a wooden shed with a sign that said Bill. He wandered the dirty streets of Beirut, astonished to remember so much. So many houses were gone. He went to the post office with a friend who then met a black girl and left with her, and Neill found a French 10-franc piece on the floor and put it on the counter and the clerk bit into it to see if it was real.

  He gave money to a Muslim and a Christian boy in a blown-down street. In a building full of old people and wounded, a wrinkled ancient couple lay naked on a bed in the heat; Neill went downstairs to the desk and recognized the place as a hotel he'd used to make calls back to the UK, years ago.

  On the upstairs screened veranda he sat beside a woman in black garters and green underpants with a tattoo on her arm. “I've been shooting tomato juice,” she explained. Three men came in. One had a stack of heroin syringes up under both sides of his Levi jacket. He handed her one then another and she injected them into her neck. She must have shot all the veins in her arms, Neill thought. When the last syringe was empty, the man wiped the bloody needle on Neill's knee. The heroin, Neill wondered, did it come from the Bekaa?

  Something stood behind Neill but he didn't see it till the last moment: Death smiling down, no escape. He thought he'd left the door open and started to get up, but it was just another dream. It was because of these damn dreams that he couldn't sleep.

  He switched on the lamp, thinking if Inneka's got lamps on both sides of the bed then she must have another guy. From the yellow light a skull leaped at him with jaws bared – no, this wasn't a dream, just the skull on Inneka's desk, seedy in the malarial light, jaw downhung in disappointment. Her little memento mori.

  On the ceiling the streetlit shadows of the last sycamore leaves leaped and lurched in the wind. Through the barely open window came the rumble of a car's tires down the wet bricks of Prinsengracht, of clamoring leaves and jostled branches, hiss of cold air over water.

  The quilt rustled as Inneka snuggled her back tighter against him. A spray of rain hit the window, as if thrown from a bucket. The leaf and branch shadows lunged harder, writhing against themselves like men being torn apart. His armpit was sore; he pulled his arm from under her head and moved it down between them.

  Rain clattered on the roof tiles. Centuries of rain falling on these tiles, he thought, these crooked tall houses stooped like old men. This room of stone, beams, and leaded glass had once been a hayloft where sixteenth-century kids and lovers rummaged. He tried to imagine how they'd looked, felt, acted. Their loves, doubts, and pains. Whom they killed and how, and how they died. How they made love, each time, all of the
m.

  He felt Inneka's warmth settle against his arm, thought of this attic swallowing the two of them also in its silent history.

  There was no reason to lose his nerve about this trip. Nothing to fear, nothing he'd be doing that was as dangerous as driving across London. He'd either get to talk to Mohammed or he wouldn't. Give it his best shot. If he did, he'd have a good series for the paper and fifteen thousand from Freeman. But if it fell through – the thought gave him a shiver – he could still come back, pick up where he'd left off. Beverly's client meetings and the kids busy with homework, and every article he wrote exactly the same. Politics – men in gray suits, hapless craven argumentative souls like filthy mirrors casting back a tainted version of all they see.

  His mouth felt dry and he thought of getting a drink of water in the bathroom; even the pipe-warm, bleached taste would be great. At dawn would be the chilled station, the train swinging across flat Holland in gray cold rain, from Europe's northern coast up its great river through its cold mountain heart toward the sun.

  Bratislava then Beirut. If he was lucky, people in Bratislava could tell him the best way into Beirut. The way to find Mohammed. What was the old saying – about the Mountain coming to Mohammed? Couldn't remember. In Bratislava there'd be Michael Szay – he was selling guns to Mohammed, Freeman had said. And there was Tomás. If anyone in the press knew where to find Mohammed, Tomás would be the one.

  Beirut. Like Amsterdam once so innocent and light, now ready to kill you so quickly. Even if you get to see Mohammed, he told himself, there's no way he'll know about Freeman. You're just a journalist, in and out.

  Nothing to be afraid of.

  The clock on the dresser said 4:44. His underarm felt so damn sore. Burnt out. He'd sleep on the train. No one would be following. Not here.

  “I always knew if Bev got in touch with her feelings she'd realize she didn't want to be with me,” he'd told Inneka.

  “You always said the unexamined life's not worth living,” she'd answered.

  PRINSENGRACHT was slippery with mist off the canal. Gripping his arm like a hostage's, Inneka walked beside him to the corner up to Vijzelstraat, her raincoat tight over her bathrobe, her leather boots half-zipped, her hair straggly and damp. “There's going to be a taxi right away,” she said, “and I'll never have time to say how much I love you but I get mad because you're never here and I love you so much I get angry because she has you all the time and doesn't love you and I –”

  “She loves me.”

  “Not like I do!” Inneka caught a heel in a crack between the bricks, yanking his arm. “Sometimes it's a month I don't see you! It doesn't even bother you.”

  “Sure it does. I'd rather be with you.”

  “You have her. I have nobody!”

  “Like I said, you should have somebody, I wouldn't mind. I'm not afraid I'm going to lose you.”

  “You bastard, I hate you –”

  “I meant I love you.”

  “You don't even understand what you mean.”

  Down wide wet Vijzelstraat dawn was breaking over the disconsolate trolley wires and vapid windows, the loitering rubbish bins, a solitary high-tailed black cat stalking an alley. The bag tugged his stitches. It would give them time to heal, the train. “Nothing I do I understand – you want me to understand this?”

  “All the things I said – we make them worse.”

  “Let's just have what we have while we have it.”

  “I fear for us.” She clutched him harder.

  “We'll stop if you want. But I think life's too short, too rough, not to do what we can, what we want. I want to keep seeing you. I don't want to grow old and die not seeing you.”

  “We have all eternity, Neill, to be apart.”

  THE BITCH nosed the puppy but it didn't move. It was cold and she knew it was dead but she kept pushing its rigid chilled body in a dusty circle. She trotted with it in her jaws across the ruins of Bab El-Edriss to a place where stolen vehicles had been parked in the blasted ruins of a goldsmith's shop, and laid it among four others.

  From a crest of a collapsed apartment building further up the Rue du Patriarche a pack of dogs watched her go back down through the ruins. She stopped to sniff where once someone had defecated, but it had already been eaten. She loped round the corner into Avenue des Français, glancing back once. A large thin black male trotted after her; the others sniffed the wind and followed.

  ANDRÉ TOOK THE BACK ROAD toward Paris, letting the car slide through the dew-wet curves, beech leaves slick on thin macadam, thinking should've changed the back tires, tread's too slick. A doe bounded through an apple orchard over leaf-yellow ground, pushed low by the hunters; there was a furl of silver from a roadside stream, trout there if you had the time, a stretch of dairy barns, beams and straw. The engine was hard and hot now, hungry for it, snarling into the curves, baring its teeth as it tore out of them, roaring into the high gears, into the blur of life. You're going to kill yourself, he realized and backed it down through the gears, against the engine's banshee wail of disappointment. The road swung round a low beamed house with a plume of smoke and dropped down a steep bouldered slope into a forest.

  From Gaillon he took the A13 over the rolling half-forested Normandy hills. There were no cars and he let the Alpine out to 250, till it wanted to fly, the front end planing, the broken line a solid blur, the car vibrating ecstatically, the wind roaring like an engine. The glove box fell open, a flashlight tumbling out, papers. A truck flashed past, “Barboizon & Fils – Démenagements”, a faraway jet was a twist of foil in the early sky. Again he let the Alpine back off, down to 200, 180, 150 – there was traffic now, a 735i came up and he dropped it back then slowed and let it pass, its driver choleric and fleshy, a cigarette drooping from his lips.

  9

  THE DOGS TRACKED the bitch along l’Avenue des Français toward the rubbish dump where the Hotel Normandy had been. She'd seen them and was running now, through a façade of brick and down an alley – but that was wrong because a building had fallen in at the end, and she had to scramble up the rubble and swing round to face them at the top.

  They came bounding down the alley and she saw a way out along a slim standing wall, ran across it knowing they'd gain, across a wide square of blasted cars and truncated palms, houses of blackened windows, into a shop with no door, no one to run to, under a hole at the back and across a collapsed building up the trunk of a fallen tree to another wall. One of the dogs snatched her back foot but she pulled free, ripped at his muzzle, dove off the wall and squirmed under a burnt car, the others trying to reach her but she hunched up in the middle and they couldn't get her till one shoved far in and grabbed a front paw. He dragged her out and they tore into her, ripping, crunching up her bones.

  The big black thin male dragged away one shoulder, others fighting over ribs, legs, intestines, brains, scraps of skin, smears of blood. They circled the big male, worrying at him, and each time he snapped at one, another darted for the meat; he caught one across the neck and it squealed away but another feinted in. He snatched the meat and dashed back down the alley, the others alongside snatching at the meat; he ducked into a stair corner and dropped it, faced them.

  They were three across in the narrow stairway – the young Belgian shepherd male and two red females, the rest behind. Growling, teeth bared, he backed tight into the corner, realized he shouldn't and tried to move forward but one red bitch had edged closer and if he went for her the others would have his neck. He leaped over them but one got him by the scrotum, the Belgian shepherd by the jaw, dragging him down – he couldn't shake it loose. The others were at his belly now, his groin, his thighs, pulling him down under their tearing weight and he was trying to protect his belly but they rolled him over and tore out his throat, snarling and ripping at each other for pieces of him.

  A human came out of the building
and the dogs backed away, snarling, dragging pieces of meat. A female human. It stepped round the big male's body, and the young Belgian shepherd male circled closer, sniffing for a wound, but this human was healthy, with only the smell of sex and fear about it.

  ROSA KEPT GLANCING BACK but after a block the dogs stopped following. The ground crackled beneath her feet. An AK47 snapped nearby, shocking under the early hot sun. Now there was a jet, far away, the crunch and rumble of artillery in the Shouf. She wondered who was shelling whom, and why.

  Rue Chateaubriand was blocked so she turned up an alley where the yellow-bricked Phoenician wall still stood waist high. At the top a gray Mercedes sat in the driveway of a wrecked house. There were four Hezbollah in the Mercedes and others in a broken apartment building behind the house. The plane buzzed closer and one of the men in the apartments fired at it. A man in gray shirt and sunglasses got out of the Mercedes. “You're late.”

  “I've got a message for Mohammed.”

  They drove fast, dodging the rubble and barricades, uphill toward the Grand Serail, stopped at a truncated building on Rue de France. In one room bodies lay bandaged among sandbags. There was a little room of medical supplies, a radio room and then the captain's office.

  “Mohammed doesn't see messengers,” the captain said. “That's my job.”

  “I got through their lines and know how to get out. We can build a supply line – I must tell Mohammed.”

  He had a nice smile, this captain. His beard was clipped away from his lips, a scar ran across his forehead and another between two right-hand fingers, his camouflage shirt was dark with sweat. “We need you and the others to keep coming through the infidels with your bellies full of grenades, Rosa – that's your job.”

  He gave her his playboy smile again and she decided maybe she didn't like him. His hands were too big, his nose was wrong: you couldn't trust him. “If I can speak to Mohammed about how to get outside, come at them from behind, cut them in two –”