“He wants them all to die, the unbelievers: O prophet, stir up the faithful to war –”
“And that on the international level it could impede his arms shipments and cause him trouble consolidating his gains.”
Neill shuddered, a premonition somehow. “Suppose it’s true, what Arafat said?”
“What, that there’ll never be peace in the Middle East even without Israel?” Tomás shrugged: it’s obvious.
The bar had filled; to leave they had to squeeze past women in tight leather skirts and men in dark suits, two men in motorcycle jackets, Neill holding his breath against the smoke. A cold wet wind was coming down the sidewalk; looking up he could see an early star.
17
LARNACA SMELLED of diesel, orange blossoms, and sea. The road was uneven and it was hard not to trip on the Roman paving blocks half-covered with old asphalt that glistened with dampness off the sea, with trickles of light from the port.
Across from the port and up a side street was a whorehouse and a bar with people laughing and singing, another street of missing cobbles and drooping façades, dirty windows of anchors and ropes, food and drink, women and sex. Whores, sailors, merchants, children, dogs, trucks, braying cars, and donkeys in the streets, flocks of teenage boys arm in arm, harsh music and Madonna, excrement and bay smells, crude oil, charcoal, diesel and dust.
André started to cross, a horn blared and he jumped back, swearing as a little white car churned past, a cold feeling inside him. You could have died. Looking the wrong way. This insane driving on the left.
Watching both ways he crossed and turned up Nikiolatis. After a block it passed a cemetery and turned to dirt, with low warehouses on both sides, people passing to and fro in the semi-darkness. Everywhere was the sweet addictive perfume of orange blossoms, the fruit fallen on the street and crushed by cars, the wind hissing in the tall palms.
Halfway up was a café with three steps down into a wide low room with a fire at one side, the air thick with rank tobacco smoke and raki, spiced with basil and garlic from a lamb stew cooking on the fire. Three men sat smoking at one table, two at another. The other three tables were empty. No one looked up. He went to the bar, feeling tensely out of place in his leather jacket.
No one paid him any attention. Then one of two men at one table got up and came to the bar. “You shouldn't come here,” he said in English.
“The anchor man –”
“No matter what you want, he sent you to the wrong place.”
“I'm going to Somalia, I need protection.”
'Go home. That's the best protection I can give you.”
André went back up the three stairs, feeling foolish. A dry dusty smell was coming down from the hills on the evening wind. Never should have come down here alone, he told himself. Never do this yourself.
“What you want?” a voice called. A man on crutches, one-legged, came out through the strollers. “I get you anything you want.”
“Like what?”
“You from Brooklyn?” The man looked up at him. “I'm Butch. Once I was to Brooklyn.”
“I'm not from Brooklyn,” André said.
“Looking for women? I can get you. Looking for a little smoke? I can get you.” He kept step beside André, swinging his single leg forward on his crutches through the crowd.
“Ta bo taa go shaarn,” someone said, passing – Norwegians maybe, tall blond men shouldering their way, mixing into other tongues, Arabic, Greek, Spanish. We all come to Larnaca, André thought, like rats running from everywhere else.
“Where you from, Butch?”
“Me?” The little man was suddenly quiet. “Beirut. But I don't go there anymore.”
“What side you on?”
“Me? I didn't care. Just stepped on a mine.”
“You know anything about guns?”
“I can get you. You want a hundred? A thousand? I get you the best deal. Don't talk to any of these other guys here, they're cheats. I'm the only one here with a license. You wanna see?” He slowed, propped on his crutches. Behind him a Coca-Cola sign glistened on the pavement. There was a corner kebab stand with a sticky counter and bowls of oranges, the smell of burnt fat and paprika.
“What kind you got?”
“You tell me what you need. We find it.”
“Just a sidearm. Good caliber. Some ammo.”
After three blocks they turned left, back toward the sea, down a narrow alley lit by the reflections of the port lights off the low clouds. He made Butch go first. There was a fishing boat up on dry dock and a garage at the end of the alley. A blotch of white came toward them. It was a man in a white T-shirt and trousers rolled to his knees. “So what you want?” Butch said to André.
“I'm going down south, need something fast and strong.”
Butch translated into Greek. They went into the garage. The man in the T-shirt tugged a cord that lit a bulb in the ceiling. The walls were bare concrete blocks. He led them through a door into a little room with a sink and water jug at one end. It smelled of urine from the sink and of rotting dirt from under the sink. “We wait here,” Butch said.
André went back outside. A searchlight was shifting under the heavy, bruised clouds. Someone was singing in another street, another language.
“Hey! Pal!” Butch called. André went back inside. The man carried a heavy burlap bag into the room with the sink, and eased it off his shoulder onto the floor. He opened it and let the guns slide out.
“Jesus!” André said, reaching down to lay them on top of the burlap, out of the dirt – an Uzi, pre-war, a Makarov, beat up, boxes of cartridges, an engraved Browning .38, a new Daewoo feeling off-balance in his hand. Then he saw it, his hand automatically going for it, the Israeli Jericho in its brown camouflage, but he pushed past it as though not noticing, not wanting to draw the man's attention. He picked up a Mauser – no, a Merkuria. “How'd you get this?” he said.
Butch asked the man, who reached down a spindly long-nailed finger. “That one,” André said, pointing to the Merkuria.
“He says it came off a ship,” Butch said. “In Larnaca everything comes off a ship.”
“How much?”
Another translation. “Three hundred Cyprus pounds,” Butch said. “Five hundred dollars.”
André riffled through the others, held up the Browning. “Seven hundred dollars,” Butch translated. He pointed to the Jericho. “Why you not want this?”
“Don't like Israeli guns.”
“They are the best.”
“This Merkuria, I'll give you four hundred.”
Again the translation. “No,” Butch said. “He need four fifty.”
The man spoke again. “He say hurry up,” Butch translated. “We have troubles with the police, they're looking for guns.”
“These others, they're too much. How much that Israeli piece?”
“It's nine hundred, the Jericho. Comes with two types of bullets, he says.”
The man dug in the sack and brought out two boxes of Fiocchi 9mm parabellums. He took a bullet from each and André saw one was a shotshell and the other a slug. Now he wanted the gun very badly, to rescue it from this seamy squalid hole with this man who didn't understand that it had been the personal weapon of a professional, one who mixed shotshell and slugs in the same magazine, one to maim and one to kill, whose finely