“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 them.
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