“Too bad there's no electricity,” Haroun said, coming back. “I'd play you the new Pavarotti, Lucia di Lammermoor. Only heard it twice since Francine got it for me.” He spat another pit, drained his Suze and set his black holster belt into his hips. “Anyway, you jokers hear that kind of shit all the time, up in Paris.”
“I never go to the opera.”
“Story of a girl in love with this guy, but her parents make her marry another one, some lord. So on their wedding night she kills him, goes mad.”
“That's why I never go to the opera.”
“Speaking of opera, Paris is pissed.”
“What did they say?”
“They want you out. Head or feet first. Just thought I'd tell you.”
“Did you tell them I was here?”
“You crazy? But somebody will.”
André got up. Out of the corner of his eye he caught the girl moving in the kitchen, flash of chestnut hair, the aura of lamb and spices. “I never should have told them I was coming. See what I get for being straight?”
“You should get out of it, mon brave. Like Paris wants.”
“That's what they told me. Can't you see? They're just establishing distance?”
“Ex-commando runs amok – is that the message?”
“I have a line to these scramblers Mohammed could use.”
“He's got no money. Anyway, he's lying low for some reason. Hasn't been seen for a week.”
“I'll find a way to reach him. But then I'll need matériel. I can't just walk in on him with a little Jericho from Larnaca.”
“Nice gun, that. But you won't need matériel. Because you're never going to reach him.”
“I'm losing faith, Emil, in your desire to kill Mohammed.”
Haroun glanced up at him and André had a sense of being caught in mirrors, through a swing door. “I'm beginning to think you need Mohammed alive,” André added. “As if he's the only guy dirty enough to make you look good.”
“We're the brains of this country. All that keeps it from being just another filthy overpopulated dysfunctional Muslim nation.”
“All that hash you're selling in France – are you getting it through him? Out of the Bekaa?”
“How would you have us pay for weapons?” One foot over a knee, Haroun ran a fingertip down a stitch in his boot. “Of course Mohammed's good to have. But he draws too many people. When we don't squeeze him it makes us look weak and ineffective.”
“You've been trying to look like that ever since Sabra and Shatila. That's where you lost this war.”
“We did that as a favor.”
'Kill two thousand old people, women and children? It lost you the war.”
“It'll never end, this war. No one ever wins or loses, everybody's getting too much out of it.”
“Except the ones who die.”
“So far, they haven't counted.” Haroun tucked his stomach tighter into his Wyoming belt. “We Christians,” he leaned forward, “we have two, maybe three kids, care for them. Send them to the best schools, all that. Muslims, they have ten, twenty kids, throw them out on the streets to sell Chiclets, then say it's not fair, you Christians have all the advantages.”
The girl passed in the background, from the kitchen down a hall, tall and willowy, and André wondered if Haroun was screwing her, his big hairy pungent chest in her face. Would he be sweet, affectionate? Not like when he killed the four teenagers caught with Uzis, shooting three in the face, stopping to ask the last, “Why aren't you afraid?”
“Because I have no need of substance,” the boy had said.
But the boy's corpse had been hard to kill, kept jerking up its knees. And André had gone with Haroun and the Phalange back into the fight for the Shouf hills, crossing the Nahr Barouk in darkness, its chill rattling over the stones and sparkling with stars, the smell of high explosives and burnt earth, and André had knelt to drink from the river, wondering what the boy had meant, to have no need to be.
“You'll never get Mohammed,” André said, “unless you let me do it.”
Haroun swung down his foot, leaned forward, a man getting down to business. “Let you?”
“The only way is a vehicle. To take out his building. At least a thousand pounds.”
“We don't have a Tehran connection.”
“You can find plastique anywhere. I could buy C-4 in Paris but I couldn't get it down here.”
Haroun spat another pit. “He's the one with all the high explosives. Buy it from him.”
30
MOHAMMED stood in the door, blocking the night. “Snow's coming.”
“It's better,” she said. “They can't see us.”
“We can walk right into them. Or they can follow our tracks.”
“The snow will hide our tracks.”
“Until it stops. Then we've got an arrow pointing at us.”
“Next thing you're going to tell me,” she snapped, “is Mektoub: it is written!”
“I didn't say that.”
“But you think it! You say I have no faith but see how you waste yours. The Koran was never so precise. Those are your fears, your strictures.”
Outside there were no stars, just the cold blanket of clouds hugging the earth. She closed the door behind them: I'll be who I will.
Another truck came grinding up the road, gearing down nastily, spitting noise and fire. How easy, Mohammed thought, to throw a grenade down on those forms huddled in the back. War's not hard at all; killing's easy, it's getting along that's hard. Rosa brushed past him down the hill and he sensed her litheness beneath the coat and nurse's uniform, her smooth, scented body. We're out here in the dark, he thought, with no path.
Each time he slipped and fell going down the gravelly damp slope it drove wild pain through his chest. She floated below, never slipping, never looking back. His hands were gloved in rime. Up the canyon the wind came full of ice.
The road was slick with freezing mist. If trucks came up now, he thought, it would be so easy to hit them. She went down the far side of the road into a ditch of broken rock and then up through the sparse cypress and already he was panting and his chest felt as if someone was twisting an arrow in it. The land was so steep he had to grab roots and outcrops to pull himself up. How she hates me, he thought, hating her.
The snow came down in soft fat flakes that made her scarf glisten, got in his mouth and eyes, slicked the lichened rocks. He followed her up out of the cypress, where the slope eased to a flat high ridge and the snow thickened. His arms and head were light and his legs felt disconnected.
The slope flattened to the broad belly of a ridge of chipped stone and boulders that vanished and reappeared in the driving snow. Her shape flitted before him like an angel's – the Arabs had thought angels were daughters of God, till the Prophet called them infidel.
Face down, he bumped into her. “From here on,” she said, “stay in my path. My line of travel exactly.”
The