by Mike Bond
“If I blow myself to kingdom come, my ghost is going to make life very hard for you.”
Romeo shifted his toothpick. “Plenty of ghosts after me already. One more won't hurt.”
“You truly know this stuff? It's wired right?”
“I've spread Muslims all over Beirut. They call me the Candy Man – divide 'em up into little pieces, just like candy, for the birds to eat.” Romeo took the toothpick out, poked it into André's chest. “You park this mother in front of his HQ, get yourself some distance, a good viewpoint, pull up the antenna on your transmitter, wait for that fucker to come downstairs, and press this pretty little orange button. The transmitter will send a signal to the receiver wired to the blasting cap embedded in the RDX – you know all that.”
“I know all that.”
“If you get in trouble, set your transmitter, like I showed you, to automatic. Then even if you're not there, anybody touches the car, it blows.”
“Damn shame,” André repeated, not knowing exactly what he meant. He saw the Boulevard St. Germain in Paris, imagined walking down it hand in hand with Anne-Marie. Soon this would be over. For her too.
Both sides knew him at the Museum now; he had no trouble crossing. “You gotta be a gun runner,” an Amal kid said, in crippled French.
“I work on one side,” André said, “and I'm in love on the other. What would you do?”
“I don't believe in love,” the boy answered.
André followed Basta toward Mohammed's HQ, driving slowly, watching in the mirror for cars behind. The Ford swayed a bit, down on its springs. He felt bad about the car, as if this were a betrayal, somehow, of the car, of the man who had sold it to him. The Ford was old and out of shape but had never failed him and now he was going to blow it to shreds to kill another human because that human had killed another human, and so on.
He eased to a stop where a mujihadeen was directing traffic. A big Mercedes truck thundered to a halt inches behind his bumper. Its engine was out of tune, its massive grille vibrating – could the noise alone set off the plastique?
The mujihadeen waved him on. André slowly pulled away, the truck rattling impatiently behind him; he shifted into second, the truck pulled out and rumbled past, its passenger scowling down at him. Maybe they're carrying explosives too, he thought, everyone here seems ready to blow everyone else away. You could say it's Muslims against Christians, Druze at Israeli throats and vice versa, but if anybody wins, in weeks they'll be tearing at eachothers' throats. Down to the last two men, and when it's all over one of them will stand bloody over his brother's body. And say I won.
He imagined Mohammed eating, taking a shit, smiling, not knowing death was hours away. He drove down Capucines and parked three blocks from Anne-Marie's apartment.
She came to the door with wet hair in a towel. “There's water!” she said. “I've washed my hair!”
He ran his fingers under the towel through her lovely hair. So strange, he reflected, to be excited because water runs out of the tap, but he'd become a little that way too, delighted with a few leaves of lettuce or a piece of beef. He kissed her; she pulled back. “There's coffee, too,” she added.
He kissed her again.
“No,” she said, “there isn't time...”
He felt a surge of anger toward this school that kept her from him, kept her in Beirut, these little Muslim children. “Just a quick one.”
“No!” She ducked under his hand and turned back into the kitchen. She's seen through me, he thought, feeling the horror of guilt again. He saw Rosa naked pulling him down on the bed, felt anguish and desire. I've lost you, he said to Anne-Marie, almost aloud.
“I'll be home at five.” She was briskly rubbing her hair. “I'll feed you something good.” She came forward, kissed him, her lips wet with spatters from her hair. “Then we can make love all night.”
“I've seen Haroun.” Just the name made her recoil but he pushed on. “He's sending a new delegation of Beirut citizens to Paris, to ask for help.” He was saying anything that came into his head now. “Help for peace. He asked me if you'd go.”
Her face sharpened. “You know I can't!”
“I said I'd try to convince you.”
“Haroun – what’s he know about peace? He's a murderer! He was one of those behind the Shatila killings, he murdered little children, old women – two thousand of them!”
“You're misjudging him, he wants peace.”
“Only if he's losing, and he's not lost hard enough. Not yet. Never would I go on any mission of his! Who am I anyway? A nobody! What good can I do?”
“You're misjudging you too. You're a perfect example of why we need peace – lost your husband, parents, friends...”
“So have we all!”
“And it isn't just Haroun,” André improvised, “there's bishops, government people.”
“Bishops!” She spat out the word. “I may be a Catholic but they're the ones who started this, those horrible priests in their monasteries. It's because of them I've given up the Church!”
He sat on a kitchen chair. “Anne-Marie, please. Please go.”
She knelt before him, hands on his. “Dear darling what's the matter?”
This was the moment he could tell her, about Rosa, the explosives sitting in the Ford, waiting for Mohammed. He got up, brushed past her, looked out of the window. Sun was pouring into the street; it frightened him. “Nothing!”
Again she took his hands. “Whatever it is, please darling tell me. It doesn't matter – if you'll say.”
He saw Rosa's mouth round his cock, her compact lithe writhing body beneath him. The bite she'd made on his shoulder was like a tattoo. How could he make love now with Anne-Marie? “Nothing,” he repeated. “Don't be silly.”
A truck rattled down the street. If he was going to have Mohammed it would have to be soon. At the door he took her in his arms; even this seemed false. “I'll be back when I can.”
“I know you will darling. Don't worry, I'll be here.”
The stairwell echoed with his footsteps. The hangman's tattoo, he thought, not knowing what it meant. He went out into the dawn-bright street that smelled of rubbish, sewage, explosives, death. Yes, he remembered, it's the death drumbeat of a hanged man's feet. I've seen it. He went up the hill in the warm sun, got into the Ford and drove it to Mohammed's street and parked it in the shade, up the hill from the HQ. There was no way anyone could come up from the HQ without passing it.
He called the dog out; strangely, it lingered, did not want to come. “Come!” he insisted, slapping his thigh. With the transmitter in his pocket he climbed the rest of the block to the crest of the hill and found a vantage point in a gaping rocket-shelled kitchen. The wallpaper, he noticed, was the same as Anne-Marie's.
Warm sun poured down the eastern hills; it was going to be a lovely day. The dog restless at his side, he sat back in the shadows, watching the Ford.
59
ROSA WENT DOWN the bright morning street, Kalashnikov slung loose over one shoulder, toward Mohammed's HQ. She'd seen Suley again but he wouldn't warm to her, stayed cold and rigid, fixing her with his close-knit black eyes, the tendons standing out like steel cables beneath the skin of his arms, the huge Magnum on his hip like she imagined he would be. Don't you have pity for anyone? she'd asked, thinking of herself, and he'd said no more than a viper under my boot. Why, do you? Truly if we're to win, she'd thought, he's what we need. But winning wasn't it, somehow, it wasn't what she wanted, not with him. I'm getting soft for him, she realized, just like Mohammed is for me.
From his rocket-blasted kitchen window André watched her go down the street. The Ford gleamed its valiant faded blue; he imagined it sucking in and blasting out in incandescent heat and orange flame, doors and roof flying; she was ten yards from it, eight, five, one –
Your sperm is still ali
ve inside her, he told himself, don't be crazy, wanting to kill her … He put aside the transmitter, hungry to push the orange button, wondering why. It's Beirut, he decided. Just drives us mad.
Rosa continued down the street, watching pigeons pirouetting in the blue sky, thinking of Suley Al-Nazir and what he would do if he had a piece of Beirut and the southern suburbs, like Mohammed. He wouldn't let the Israelis sit there, that was sure. Wouldn't let them run their Centurions in and out, playing traffic cop and big boy on the block, blowing up every little thing that displeased them.
Mohammed was sleeping when she reached the seventh floor of his command post. She pushed her way through the acolytes and radio men and a clump of filthy mujihadeen being debriefed after last night's shelling down by the Phoenicia, smudged with blast debris and spattered with the blood of their comrades.
“I've been up all night,” Mohammed rasped, rubbing his eyes. “But it's nice to see you. Been up two nights straight, come to think of it.”
“The Al-Nazirs want to meet on middle ground, west of Baabda. They said they'll call and give us an area and then we pick the site. That way nobody can ambush the other.”
He rubbed his face, his beard; this irritated her intensely. “They won't betray us?”
She let her nails sink into her palms, shoved her Kalashnikov further aside. “No chance.”
He rubbed his hands together. She slid slightly back, out of reach. His odor was foul in the dirty, closed-in, sandbagged room. “You still don't like it, do you?” he said.
“I think we get more with terror than kindness.”
“We've had ten years of terror. What has it brought us?”
She forced herself forward, knelt before him. “Please, Lord, give up this foolishness of peace.”
He shook his head, looked into her eyes. She wanted them to burn him but he didn't flinch. “You killed the doctor,” he said, “when you didn't need to.”
“They would have recognized you! You'd have been executed, or spent the rest of your life in some Christian hellhole. I rescued you.”
“Allah would have preferred to give me up, rather than him. That I know.”
“How soft you get! Dreaming of peace and Allah's love for infidels!” She stood. “You've been eaten from the inside out, Mohammed. All that's left is shell!”
With long fingers he was combing out his beard. She snatched up her gun, started for the door. “If I have, Rosa, it was you.”
“Hah! Just like you, blaming a woman for what you're not.”
HOW STRANGE, Neill thought, at a time like this how every moment becomes precious. Nothing’s alien, not the ants with their constant trail across one edge of the floor, touching feelers as they pass, not the sparrows or the flakes of peeling blue paint down the wall, or the flat metallic taste of the water that first had given him diarrhea but now seemed familiar, impossible to imagine otherwise. We need so little to live; we spend so much effort trying to be happy when it's actually so easy.
Remember, he told himself, that what seems simple now will once again be impossibly complex back in the real world. How, if I get back, can I keep this with me?
He remembered the little boy so clearly now, the one hidden inside him all these years. The bruised little boy had learned to lie for safety, never to be himself since to be himself would bring down rage, had learned never to trust women because his mother had never protected him, to hate men because his father had hated him, had used booze to lie to himself about his pain. And because he lied to others he lied to himself and therefore did not understand the world or himself because he saw neither clearly, neither correctly.
He’d not been the kind of person who brings joy to others' lives – too preoccupied with grave questions of death and purpose, forgetting that everyone has the same questions, the same fears, hears the same executioner's boots coming down the same corridor. All we have, he realized, is love, sex and laughter in the face of death.
Chittering and chattering, the sparrows took off and landed in the eaves above the flue hole. He had managed to widen the hole, left his little tribute of rice and lentils every day, which they would now take from his hand. Still he had the feeling they did it out of kindness, as if conscious of his fate.
All along, Neill saw, he had been trying to live his life to the full, to reach some imaginary point of completeness. He had not realized, all these years, that he'd already reached it: to live your life completely is simply to have and love a family, to pass on, in joy and understanding, the magic gift of life.
BY MIDAFTERNOON the sun had swung round to pour into André's blasted kitchen, and he sat sweating with heat. Truly spring was here. A bullet twanged over the housetops, then a rattling salvo, and it seemed so strange to want to kill when everything was coming to life. He thought of all the bodies rotting in their graves, people who had laughed and sung and worried about money and made love and had all the time in the world. For what had they died? When they could have been alive in this warm Beirut afternoon with the smell of honeysuckle and lavender and the sun sinking into old stone.
When he and Anne-Marie got back to France he wouldn't have to think of this, nor would she. Beirut would be behind them.
The sun grew motionless in the blue clear sky. As he waited, the buildings, the hills with their lacerated streets, tilting power poles, chunks of cars and stone and crippled trees, the redolent shifting sea with its crests of aquamarine and white – all seemed to be waiting too, as if the moment were eternal, and nothing would ever happen, ever change.
Like a cockroach picking its way daintily through trash, a yellow Fiat ascended the street, nosing this way and that among haphazard piles of concrete and stone, fallen trees and lampposts, an exploded rusted truck. There were four men in it but he could not make out their faces. Ten yards before the Ford, the Fiat stopped.
The Ford sat silent and blue in the sun-bright street. The Fiat's driver got out and moved a piece of metal from the road. He was wearing sunglasses and a cowboy hat. He got back in his car and shut the door; a moment later the door's sharp thud reached André. The Fiat continued up the hill and stopped under André's window.
Trying to see yet not be seen, he leaned out then ducked back. The driver and three other mujihadeen got out of the Fiat. They all had rifles and one had a radio. A rocket went over, whistling, missed the port and blew a funnel of water upward in the bay.
Someone was coming up the street – a portly man with his veiled wife and a little boy behind. Not now, André prayed to Mohammed, don't come now. Sounds echoed from below as the four mujihadeen started up the stairs. André drew the Jericho and backed against the kitchen wall.
The portly man and his wife and son passed the Ford and continued up the hill. The four mujihadeen were on the floor below, still climbing. The dog began to growl. André glanced at the transmitter; if they got him, next thing they'd do was check the Ford. Maybe Mohammed would be with them. He switched the little orange button to automatic.
The mujihadeen went past Andre's apartment and climbed to the next floor; he could hear their footsteps overhead. They wanted, he realized, a guard post overlooking Mohammed's HQ. He could hear them talking and laughing, one sang a bit of song, over and over, till another yelled at him.
He had a sudden feeling of total aloneness, as if these four men who shared this gutted half-burned building with him were not members of the same species as he, not even of the same universe and being.
A woman and two children were ascending the street. The two children, girls, kept skipping ahead, toward the Ford, and the woman beckoned them back. They ran back to her and she took each girl's hand firmly in her own. They won't touch the Ford, he told himself, tried to move the orange button back from automatic, then remembered Romeo had said once on automatic you can't go back.
The woman neared the Ford. She was tall and walked quickly;
something familiar about her, the girls too. Anne-Marie.
60
ANNE-MARIE AND THE GIRLS were ten feet from the Ford. “No!” he screamed, but over the thud of artillery there was no way she’d hear. She saw the Ford, pointed to it, moved toward it. She went round the driver's side, pointing again, waving the girls closer. “No!” he raged, half falling out of the rocket hole. There was no time to run downstairs; he fired the Jericho again and again, hoping to hit the street, drive her to safety but it was too far. Her hand touched the door handle and the car seemed to crouch, recede to nothing, became a white-red flash, pieces flying everywhere, bouncing off the buildings, far up into the sky, its roar thundering up the hill, the stairs shaking as he ran down them screaming, yelling, crying, falling and running on, the mujihadeen clattering down behind him, yelling at him. Someone was firing at him as he ran down the middle of the street but he did not care, thinking kill me, please kill me. The Ford was a crushed remnant of incandescent metal in the middle of the street. He fell to his knees, arms raised, choking and screaming, fell over a chunk of corpse he thought was her but it was too small, was one of the girls.
There were pieces of her everywhere, on a splintered tree, sprayed across the pavement. In the gutter blood ran like a spring. He tore at his throat, his face, searched frantically for her pieces, a finger wedged with splintered glass, a shred of bloody hair against the pockmarked street.
He found the Jericho and pointed it at his head and fired but it was on safety; he pushed the safety off and the bloody gun slipped from his hand. Blind with tears, he could not find it. “Anne-Marie, Anne-Marie,” he wailed, found the gun but someone kicked it from his hand. “Kill me!” André screamed. “I did it!” But the mujihadeen simply stepped back and nodded for him to stand; other Hezbollah were running up. He lay over the pieces of Anne-Marie's body trying to staunch the blood.
Someone kicked him in the ribs. People were yelling, hands grabbed him, dragged him along the street clasping her torso. A rifle butt smacked his head, another. There was a marble lying in the gutter; he scrambled for it, could not reach it. It was her eye, staring up at the sun.
