Szay smiled, crunching a bit of fingernail between his front teeth. “Take the Damascus road. If the Christians or Israelis cut it you're screwed. If the Syrians cut it you're dead.”
“Just give me a lead, Michael. That's all I ask.”
“You're going to end up dead on a curb somewhere. That's all the lead I'm going to give you. Or in some Hezbollah stinkhole. And your friends won't even care.”
16
EVEN IN LATE MORNING the Paris métro was crowded. On the seat before André a black girl was checking her face in a cracked pocket mirror. Beside him an old unshaven Arab held the pole with both hands. On top of his bare skull were brown patches and old scabs. André checked the other faces in the car – less than half were white.
The train stopped at Chatelet and the old Arab staggered across the quai and vomited behind a bench. A girl in a Carrefour ad had lovely long legs with graffiti all over them. There was graffiti on every ad, all down the quai.
A thin black man in a yellow uniform was sweeping butts along the quai. He's come up here, André thought, to make a better life for his family. What if he had to leave France? To go back to what? Was that why Africa was failing? Because the best kept leaving?
France could take ten million Africans and it would make no difference at all to the billions in Africa. But it would ruin France. As soon as you take some away they just make more. You have to admit that's the truth. And France has never sent its people starving to another's door.
Africa's thousand children dying daily in the desert with an outstretched hand. He thought of his little brother Yves ahead on the path, sunny hair and freckles, crossing into the sumacs and down over the stream past the oaks where the young couple slept one night and we didn't know why. Yves carrying his gun up the slope of beeches in the dawn-bright dead leaves, toward the knoll where we'd tracked the boar, the ground splashed with his blood, the dog bounding back and forth, shivering, waiting for the charge.
Motorcycles and symphonies, Yves. Let neither side win. Loving to hunt but hating to kill. Under your calm kindness even you couldn't resolve that. You who always went for what you wanted like a magnet. For what you felt was right.
The only honor I have left, Yves, is in not daring to live without it. No, that's not true. Not completely.
A beautiful girl stood beside him in a long green wool coat. Fair skin and light lipstick, full chestnut hair. Oh if I could make love to you. Oh please if I could. Except I have to leave and you already have someone and you wouldn't want to anyway. If you'd make love to me and be my wife I'd stay here, he promised, wouldn't go to Lebanon.
Beneath her green coat, the dark suit, the white silk blouse, her underclothes and skin, he could feel her lovely body all along him. At the Louvre someone left a seat and the girl sat down and took a leaflet from her purse. He read it over the top of her head, a French consular form.
When she got out of the train at Concorde he started to follow her, but turned round and leaped back in the train, took it all the way to Etoile, to pick up the bus for Charles de Gaulle and the afternoon Cyprus Airways flight to Larnaca.
IN THE COMMAND BUILDING all the apartments had been pillaged, so Rosa waited till the shells slowed and ran across the courtyard to the building at the back. It too had been emptied, the furniture burned in cooking fires, one apartment used as a toilet. Shelling had started again, but on the other side. Someone was firing single shots, even spaced, in celebration. He's shot someone, she realized, that's what he's celebrating. Been waiting for hours and finally got his target. She ducked along the pavement to the next building but the stairway had been blown out and there was no way up to the apartments.
Two buildings further she found an apartment with some rice and dried chickpeas under the sink. There was no furniture, on one wall photos of an old stern man and smiling heavy woman, a new color blow-up of a young man and woman with three children and a picnic basket on a rug, behind them the nose of a blue Fiat and the stiff ridges of Mount Lebanon.
In the dirt on one side of the front steps a daisy flamed yellow in the setting sun. She thought of picking it for Mohammed. No, she decided, it's so lovely; let it live.
EACH DAY with a beginning, middle, and end. That's all I remember. No matter how different they seem they're all the same. You're in a train or a plane and you get to a new place and then you see it's the place you just left, the one you're going to next.
Neill brushed the crumbs from his sandwich off the table and into his palm, emptied them on the floor. What if I'm not an alcoholic? If all along I've been thinking I was but I'm not? What if I just love the taste? Beer came before bread, they say that now.
A couple at the next table were clasping hands, legs enwrapped. What was this crazy craving to be inside another, or have them inside you? They were staring through their cigarette smoke into each other's eyes. Thinking they're Bacall and Bogart, sucking on the tit of death.
The waiter brought another half-liter of Pilsner in a tall glass, a thick head with a tang of barley malt and the brightness of the sun. A short chubby-faced man in a red scarf came through the door and glanced around, saw Neill wave and came over. He had a pixie smile and a scar to the left of his mouth. He took off his raincoat and draped it and the scarf over the back of a chair.
“So how are you?” Neill said.
“Could be better. These are not good times.”
“When have they ever been?”
“There were times, you know, when things seemed to go well.”
“The operative word is "seemed", Tomás. We're always fucked, it's just that sometimes we don't realize.”
Tomás grinned; there seemed more black holes between his teeth than last time. “I was so pleased you were coming.”
“I was just realizing that since I last saw you I've done absolutely nothing. The more I try to fill my life, the faster it empties.”
“You've done nothing? What about that series on Camp David, on the Paris bombings? Even here at the end of the world, we saw those.”
“I'm talking about me.”
“You mean you and Beverly? Since when has that gone right?”
Neill glanced down at his glass. “Maybe never. No, that's not true.” He raised his head. “Anyway, we're each seeing other people – just sticking it out for the kids.”
“You think they don't know?”
“It's the best we can do.”
“Maybe that's not true. Maybe more important than us,” Tomás raised his shoulders in a shrug, “is our kids. Like we would die for them, step in front of a car for them, that kind of thing.”
Neill had a sharp tremor of this morning's memory, caught between speeding lanes on Staromestska. “Everybody would –”
“It's the same, then, not to leave them, not to split up. A commitment to life: you bring it into the world, you nurture it.” He raised his shoulders. “Far more important than what we journalists do, or governments, laws, analyses.”
“I sleep through all that, these days.”
“Yet you're the one who told us if society's truly an organism then we have to be its neurons.”
Neill motioned at the waiter, at Tomás. “What you having?”
“Pilsner. It's very fashionable, forty-five year old men having a values crisis.”
“Don't exaggerate. I'm forty-two.”
“Yeah, but you're precocious. Just keep doing the same fine work you've always done, and the rest'll go away.”
“Society's