“I could have told him, ten years ago. Anyway, give him my love.”
“He sends his, and Mother too. To Francine also.”
“Where you staying?”
“In the city.”
“You could be here. What, you're afraid I have too many enemies?”
André laughed. “Fuck your enemies.”
“Some of them, probably. You want some coffee, a drink? You staying for dinner?”
“Some of them what?”
“Must be fine young things, worth fucking. Hundreds of them.”
“Of course I'm staying for dinner.”
Haroun sat back, a cowboy boot propped up on a low table. He had, André realized, a certain heartiness that comes from frequent killing.
An Arab girl came in with two cups of Turkish coffee on a brass tray. “You're wasting your time, mon cher,” Haroun said when she'd left.
“What's she doing here?”
“Nadja? We've known her family for years.”
“When you get it, that's how it's going to be – some stupid mistake, like her.”
Haroun nodded his chin at André: be quiet.
“She's your enemy!”
“No one's anybody's enemy. We're all friends who kill each other.” Haroun nodded his chin again: pay attention. “You're wasting your time with this Mohammed.”
“What if he died?”
“You're thinking then we could split the Druze and Amal and Hezbollah and keep the Syrians at bay? But it won't happen. If I've learned anything from this war it's have no expectations. You shouldn't either.”
“I'm checking terrain, options. Nothing's decided.”
“Nothing's even possible.”
“Wait and let's see.”
Haroun dipped a sugar cube into his cup, watching the coffee rise up it. “If he could be reached, don't you think we wouldn't have done it by now? You think we're that maladroit?”
“Your mistake was thinking Arabs would fight for you.”
“That's water under the bridge. We're clean now, tough. With nowhere else to go.”
“And fooling yourself if you think you can win. You had all Lebanon and now you've just got half of Beirut and a piece of coast and hills. And they can shove you off that.”
“That's just talk.”
“France won't come in, Emil. All the bright boys at Matignon are sucking up to Khomeini these days. He's got more natural gas, apparently, than you.”
“He's a flaming asshole. I can hardly compete.”
“That's how it's going to be decided.”
“Then he'll pull his pecker out from under their noses and they're going to be grabbing at nothing.”
“History hasn't taught them that yet.”
Haroun laughed raspily. “History doesn't teach a goddamn thing.”
29
FOR TWO HUNDRED dollars the Syrian would drive Neill from Damascus at least across the border to Masnaa. Perhaps even to Sofar, only thirty kilometers from Beirut. Depending on the Syrians and Israelis, maybe all the way to Hazmiye – “only an hour's walk from the Green Line”.
The road climbed from Damascus through the barren brown ramparts of the anti-Lebanon past rows of dusty mud and concrete villages with plastic bags stuck everywhere on brush and fences, dead dogs and rusty cars on both sides of the road. There were only Syrian soldiers at the border and for fifty dollars they let him pass.
Down into the Bekaa's broad incandescent green the road slunk like a tan snake. There were Syrian tanks in the wheat fields, artillery dug into the orchards, the smell of death, a burnt armored personnel carrier on its side in a ditch. Up from the Bekaa into the foothills of Mount Lebanon whole villages lay in ruins, shell-blasted, uprooted orchards, toppled trees and pylons, ramshackle shattered houses with gaping roofs and shocked black-eyed windows.
Like heroin or sex, did violence intensify with social contact? Is it a disease, he wondered, whose carriers increase faster than they die till finally, like all plagues it flowers and fades, slowly gathering its forces to rise again?
The road swung round a curve and dipped to the right past a smashed villa in a grove of burnt cypresses by a bullet-stitched wall. Flames soared black and orange from a bus lying on its side, bodies spread like petals round it, a woman running toward him, her head on fire.
The taxi driver braked hard. “Far as I go.”
Neill leaped out of the taxi tearing off his jacket and threw it over the woman's head but she fought it, punching him, screaming. He yelled with pain and yanked back his hand where something had melted and burned on it and would not go out when he held it against himself. He fell to the ground trying to smother it and the woman, screaming, fell over him and more of her fire got on him. It's gasoline, he thought, and ran for the taxi. He pulled a blanket off the back seat and threw it over her but she kept burning, smoke and flames shooting up through the blanket.
“No!” the driver screamed. “My blanket!”
The fire on Neill's hand had gone out but the pain was impossible. The woman was trying to crawl, wailing. “They're not all dead,” someone yelled, running by.
“Look out, mines!” another called.
“Help!” Neill pleaded. “Help me with this woman!” A great slam of thunder knocked him down. He lay holding his head then slowly stood, before him the skeleton of the bus writhed in red heat. Something else had blown, a bomb maybe, a gas tank. He couldn't find the woman and stumbled from the heat.
Someone was shaking him. “Two hundred dollars!” It was the taxi driver. “Two hundred dollars!”
Neill sat on the ground and tried to find his wallet. It was in the pocket of the jacket he'd put on the woman. He stood but couldn't see her. The driver threw his suitcase at him. “I told you no good!” he screamed in English. “Too far!”
Here was his jacket. Charred down the back and collar. He found the wallet and gave the driver four fifties. More fifties fell out but he stuffed them back. “No extra?” the man shrilled. “For this danger?”
Underbrush was on fire, crackling, thick white smoke contorting in the still air with the black-orange clouds from the bus's burning tires and diesel. People were dragging bodies along the ground and laying them side by side. If that bus hadn't gone through, Neill thought, it would have been us hit that mine. He felt off balance and realized he was carrying the suitcase, put it down, remembered it was his, and picked it up again. “Don't know where...” he said to a man running by who kept going, didn't even look at him.
A fire truck came screaming and winking its red light. Men ran with a hose but nothing came out. People were gathering round others sitting on the ground. A woman passed Neill, her hands upraised.
“We were just going to Aley, my wife and me,” a man was weeping.
Neill walked through the bullet-splintered cypresses and climbed the bullet-spattered wall and over the shoulder of the hill. Beirut spread out below in a jumble of filth and smoke, a vast human excretion aside a crystalline sea. There were brass cartridge casings in the tall grass. You'll step on a mine, he thought, watching the ground.
“I’LL DO IT his way,” André said. “I'll blow him up.”
“You'd die for it?” Haroun popped an olive in his