“He just called Allah a murderer,” a voice said behind Neill, in Arabic.
“You've misunderstood,” said another. “Listen more carefully.”
“He did!” The first rapped knuckles on the table. “That's what he said!”
You've done it again, Neill thought. Kneeling before the Lada's moth-spattered headlight, the girl's gun at the back of your skull. Expecting the awful wham. “You've bloody well blown your cover!”
“Cover? What the Hell's that? I've been who I am since the day I came. The British sodding Military Attaché and I don't give a sodding damn what these ragheads think.”
Neill tossed three hundred piastres on the table and stepped into the street. Mick stood on the pavement, craning to look over people's heads. “Down there's Bab el Faraj.”
“The Gate of Deliverance.”
Mick went down the steps ahead of Neill. “Let’s try this little place I know, fabulous food. And down behind the Umayyad Mosque, in al-Qaimarriyeh, a great whorehouse.”
Here you are boozing in Damascus, Neill thought. Like the girl from Hell said. Doing every little thing wrong. Imagining English is some kind of shield when it's really a target.
“AND THERE FELL DOWN many slain, because the war was of God. That's how your book says it.”
“True believers fight for the religion of God,” the doctor answered. “That's how your book puts it.”
“Do you remember,” Mohammed turned on his elbow, head propped on his hand, “your Saint Bernard? The one you've named a dog for, because he gets people drunk in the snow.”
“It's not like that. But you can't be expected –”
“Woe to any man whose sword tastes no blood – that's what he said. And you made him a saint.”
“I didn't. And we have to stop using God as a reason.”
“You don't have a God.”
“I don't, no. Not personally.”
“So why fight for them?”
“I’m a Christian, it's my heritage. But I've seen how the Maronite bishops thirsted for this war. How they do still, while the hills of bodies rise around them...” The doctor drew his packing crate closer to Mohammed's bed, sat again. “On your side they're just as bad. These crazy imams and mullahs ranting for blood.”
“Plenty to go around.”
“That's what I've sometimes thought – war is caused by too many people, we're all crushed together, fighting for space. A detail is soon an obsession, like the disagreement between Mohammed's heirs fourteen hundred years ago that's led, now, to how many million deaths?”
“If one religion is true, then only it can be true.”
“If one religion's false, they're all false.”
“That doesn't follow.”
“We're all the same and all different, we have to follow our own paths. The Koran gives you a reason and a law for everything, so you don't matter at all.”
“It's not we who matter. It's God. Jihad is the sacred war between God and the Devil.”
“All wars are holy, because they're damned. All wars are between Heaven and Hell. And Hell always wins.”
25
ABOVE THE DISTANT WAVES a darker crest rose for an instant and was gone. Then it was back, taller, across the frothy horizon. Slowly Mount Lebanon rose from the wind-raked waves, its plunging ridges and peaks of snow and ice, then the dark rocky shoulders far below, the steep pine slopes dropping to the first high stony farms, then the white buildings, the first roads, the towns, down to the cities and ragged gray coast.
Jounié Bay was an oily flotsam of green and blue detergent containers and ketchup bottles and beer bottles and chunks of styrofoam, torn nets, vegetable crates, dead sardines and groupers, blue and transparent plastic bags, a woman's black high-heeled shoe in creamy sewage scum.
Behind the port the town rose in a horseshoe of French colonial mansions in affluent gardens and tall nondescript apartment towers jammed among the ancient terraced fields and haphazard palms, linked by inarticulate writhing streets and drooping telephone lines. There was no shell damage. But there wouldn't be here, he realized. Among the wealthy and blessed merchants of the Levant.
The Christian guards in the Customs shed rooted through his rucksack and nodded him through. The rucksack over one shoulder, the Jericho in its holster under the same arm, he trudged uphill past lounging militiamen and whores, and the feel of the crushed rock under his feet was as if part of him had always been here, that he was whole again.
Outside the port's cyclone fence taxis waited in the bright sun. It was ten dollars to the Christian suburbs, fifteen to East Beirut. “No going near the Line,” the driver said.
“Anywhere's fine. The Jesuit school...”
The dirty concrete of bare buildings everywhere. Patches of shore grass between gas stations, garages, junkyards, scraps of orchard. Tanks in a line, guns down, looking sleepy and bored. Graffiti over a tunnel, Fuck War, overloaded trucks grinding and belching up the hills, the racket of horns and bad mufflers, sometimes the hiss of the wind, the sea.
There was a burning rubber smell, smoke, a barricade of tanks at Dora, another at the river. The taxi stopped at the first steep streets of East Beirut. “Can't go up there.”
André eyed the street of gray tall buildings climbing and curving toward upper Beirut. “Nobody's shelling.”
“It's not that. The engine overheats.”
There was little damage all the way up Rue Cheikh Ghabi till it turned to Independence, but few cars in the streets and fewer people on the pavements. Many of the shops were shuttered and many windows broken. As he got closer to the Green Line, there were holes in apartment buildings and whole houses rubbled down on their foundations.
A young woman came out of the Emergency entrance of the Hospital Rizk, slender and fast-moving, lovely raven hair, a tan raincoat over a nurse's uniform and white sneakers. God if they're all like you, he thought. She ran to a white Land Rover marked Croix Rouge du Liban, yanked keys from her pocket and tried them but none seemed to fit. She took out more keys but they didn't work either. She was lithe and lovely as she bent with each key to the lock. Her black hair was nearly red in the early sun.
“Let me try,” he said, slipping the rucksack off his shoulder.
“It's nothing.” She backed into the street, glanced up and down, watching him.
“Here.” He reached for the keys and after a moment she gave them. She moved to the far side of the Land Rover as he tried the keys. One said Leyland but did not work. He showed it to her. “You've got another like this?”
“It isn't my car. They didn't tell me which key. There's been a car bomb in Ashrafiyeh, I have to get there...”
He slid his knife up the rubber edge of the passenger window and popped the button, slid into the driver's seat and tried the Leyland key but it still didn't work.
She was in the passenger seat now, her scent of orange blossoms and roses dizzying. “Thank you, please hurry,” she blurted. “I've got to get there.”
“These aren't the right keys.”
“Oh dear.”
He wanted to drown in her brown eyes. “Go and get them.”
“Somebody's taken them, by mistake.” She glanced down the street, biting her lips, fighting back tears. “This war ... Nothing ever works ... Now these people will die...”