But why do we like to make others suffer?
He'd risen to his knees. A few rounds whined down the street, twanged off a façade. In a collapsed building somewhere someone was screaming. With a faraway whoosh a Mirage was climbing after a bombing run. The man stood, clenching his gut, stumbled bent over in a circle, looking for his way. He fell, got up and continued down Rue Weygand toward the Green Line.
At the end of the street the glowing carcass of a tank lit up the dark stumps of buildings on Place des Martyres. Tracers were trading tiny yellow and red fires, like electrons, Rosa thought, back and forth. A shell hit a building, a red-white flash and contorted black smoke boiling up. The man staggered boldly out into Martyres, stumbled over something, straightened, and fell down.
He lay flat and unmoving in the red glare of the tank; she couldn't tell if he'd been shot or had just died. Maybe he was resting. Anyway she couldn't chance it.
She backtracked to the first row of standing buildings and turned south. She'd go down Rue Basta and cross at the Museum, hide the gun before she went across and get another on the Christian side. From a corner she glanced back but could not see Mohammed's outpost. Rockets were still coming over, a big recoilless rifle hitting near, 155s in Martyres now. Even if she reached the Life Building it might be too late, and she'd lose him. No, she decided, Mohammed would never be so stupid as to let the Christians kill him.
13
THE RECEPTION ROOM was bigger than his parents' Normandy farm, a three-story ceiling with crystal chandeliers and a double staircase spiraling down from a gallery where a few guests ambled arm in arm. There were Louis XIV chairs and settees and ancient Persian rugs on the polished herringbone oak, Renaissance tapestries on the stone walls.
The whole place curdled André's stomach. Over the heads of well-dressed silver-haired men and hard-smiling jeweled women he looked for Monique but couldn't see her. Her kind of place, really. Her husband would eat it right up.
Hammurabi, as broad as he was tall, held court on center stage, an eager flock around him. Humans just like roaches, André thought; a little excrement pulls them right in. A little money.
Walid Farrahan, code-named Hammurabi in French secret service files, had plenty of that. Every war is fought primarily for profit, and Hammurabi had always been one of the first to shove his face into the trough. Fancy receptions in his Marais mansion to which company presidents and members of Parliament and ministers and ambassadors from nearly every country came scurrying by the hundreds, to clasp his great hard paw and beg for the tools of death.
And for the really lucky there were the soirées intimes in the mansion's back rooms, the saunas and spa rooms, the swimming pool on the roof. A French citizen now, Hammurabi was, they couldn't throw him out. Even if they wanted.
“Ah, the Legionnaire,” Hammurabi rumbled out of his great chest when André forced his way through the throng. “My office told me. Enjoying yourself?”
“Of course.”
Hammurabi waved a sausage finger at the others. “Give us a moment?”
Magically they vanished. “I'm leaving in a few days,” André said. “I don't want to promise anything I can't do.”
Hammurabi fondled a piece of metal round his neck, beneath his tuxedo – a huge diamond-studded cross. “My staff has already confirmed you.” He squeezed André's arm. “See how fast we work? When you get to Beirut and have your order, cable it through with payment. Normal procedure,” he smiled. “Don't worry, my dear Legionnaire, you'll have your scramblers.”
“Conforming to specs?”
“A laser-guided bomb works on very simple principles, as you know. I wouldn't offer you scramblers if they didn't work, would I?”
WATCHING FOR MINES Rosa crossed over the shattered crest of Beirut on Rue Basta and down to the Museum, stored the AK47 in the side-street ruins of a store called Anita's Gifts. There was less war here, just the constant whiffle and swish of things going over, the rattle of guns and thump of mortars. There was a line of overturned buses across Avenue Abdallah Yafi with two armored cars and at least one tank lurking in caves in the rubble, their snouts pointing into the street, and machine guns and rockets in the windows behind. Beyond the shell-shocked intersection, on the Christian side, it was the same.
Behind the overturned buses was a space with gleaming concertina wire and sandbagged positions with fifty calibers. A mujihadeen checked Rosa's papers and spoke on the radio while she sat quietly on a sandbag and it seemed as if the whole cool heavy night weighted down her neck and shoulders. She let it wash over her, told herself she would do this one last thing and no more. It would be enough and if it weren't, she'd tell them she'd given up.
The mujihadeen came back. “You really need to go?”
“My father's in a basement by the Sacre-Coeur.”
“There's surely people there...”
“The building's empty. He's confused, doesn't understand, won't leave.” She looked down, at the mujihadeen's dirty yellow-blue running shoes, how they wouldn't stand still on the ground littered with empty cartridges and cigarette butts.
“They're animals,” he said, “over there. Shot a Palestinian girl last night. Twenty-three, going over to look for food.”
“She looked up into his fair, troubled eyes. “You remind me of my brother.”
“How was he?”
“Very sweet.” She stepped round him past the barricade and down the middle of the wide, bludgeoned avenue. Now she was in Christian rifle range, a Muslim woman rushing toward them with a bundle of something.
She was almost running but it took forever, lugging the loaded bedspread, tripping on chunks of stone, shreds of metal, a dead cat, broken bricks.
The blasted chassis of a car crouched against the Christian curb like a chastised dog. The muzzles of the Christian guns followed her to the first line of smashed cars and concrete. Behind this barricade were Phalange who checked her papers and looked into the bedspread. The captain, younger than the others, with a burn scar across his cheek, took out the clock.
“It was my mother's,” she protested.
“You know I can't let it through.”
“It's for my father, to give him a sense of time.”
“Better having no time these days.”
“That's why he's so mixed up.”
“My mother won't eat,” he said, “because she's afraid we're running out of food. Things are hard but we have food ... but she won't eat.”
“Make her exercise. We spend all day crouched in our basements –”
“If she'd just go up to Jounié. She has a sister there.”
“Can you lend me a flashlight? They took mine.” She pointed behind, at the Muslim lines.
He sucked in a breath. “I can't.”
“Please? As soon as I've seen my father I'll bring it back. And pick up my clock.”
“What about my batteries?”
“I'll charge your batteries.”
“How soon?”
She smiled, seeing his face light up. “Two hours?”
He unbuckled the flashlight from his belt. “I'll be here.”
She climbed the steep street past the Hotel Dieu Hospital and the Hotel Alexandre. It was so strange to see the buildings undamaged, cars in the streets, the fighting almost distant like a summer storm.
She went down l’Indépendence and across to Fouad Chehab at Tabariss. Now the guns were louder and she