“You don't need to say that.”
“I don't have any friends like that. I wish I'd known him. I wish you had him still.”
“If he was here, he'd dig right down, get us out.”
“What happened to him?”
“A car crash. In the rain. Hit by a truck. Going up to Dora for some meeting.”
One of the girls was weeping almost silently; the other joined in. “Don't let them,” he said.
“Why not? Why can't they feel what they feel? It's such an awful death.” She too started to cry. “It's such an awful death...”
“After we go to the Casino we'll drive up the coast –”
She halted through her tears. “It's bad luck, saying that.”
“It's good luck. Showing God we want to live.”
“Have you ever been to Byblos?”
“When I was a boy. I remember ruins and cliffs going down to the sea.”
“With the golden Phoenician city and the Crusader castle and wild poppies and the water so warm and sweet in the bay ... André, it's the loveliest place on earth. If we ever get out, I swear it, we'll go there.”
“And we'll make love in the tall grass going down to the sea, Anne-Marie. I swear that too.”
“You shouldn't say that.” For a moment she was silent. “Yes, maybe you should.”
“I promise you, Anne-Marie. I promise God. If we get out, we'll do that.”
“What are you like?” she said. “Are you tall?”
“Two meters. Almost.”
“I'm one eighty. I was two centimeters taller than my husband, even in flat shoes.”
42
THEY CAME QUICKLY when they came – bulldozers shaking the earth, the concrete slab creaking over him. She kept hammering the wall and stopping and hammering and stopping, and someone hammered back.
A shovel or pick, clanking the earth. Every time they stopped, she hammered. Every time they started again they were closer.
“Tell them,” André called, “not to shake this slab.”
There was the rat-tat-tat of a jackhammer and the nearer clank of shovels, then something crashed down on the slab making him yell out and the air was full of dust and he realized he could see. Gray grainy light making him blink.
“André?”
“Can you see?”
She was calling out in Arabic, the same word, over and over. The noise stopped. A voice, a man's voice, coming down a tunnel from far above.
“Please!” André couldn't help himself. “Please get us out.”
“They're coming!” she called. “I've told them not to shake the slab. They're going to dig in from next door.”
MOHAMMED’S MUJIHADEEN came to Nicolas and Samantha's back door and took Neill, sleepy and cold with a black hood over his head, to another car, not a Mercedes but a smaller, jolting sedan with an importunate whining engine. They drove across early morning Beirut, the streets already loud with trucks, car horns, boys hawking papers –”Jumblatt declares truce!” Strange how it goes on, he thought, in the middle of the war. Like new cells growing while you die of cancer. The farmer plowing his field. A jet went over, low, he couldn't tell which kind. Never, he realized, have I felt so bad. It's going to kill me, Beirut. Breaking my heart.
They walked him up fifty-nine stairs and down a long corridor that turned twice. They stopped and knocked. “Who's that?” a man beyond the door said.
“Your grandmother, dinkhead!”
The door opened and they shoved him into a room with a carpet and the smell of coffee. There was a short-wave radio receiving in the background but he couldn't understand it. Someone snatched off the hood. The lights were bright. He rubbed his eyes. There were a lot of mujihadeen with Uzis. They led him down a corridor to another room where a lean, balding man with a full beard, dressed in a white robe, sat on cushions in the corner. The two mujihadeen who were with him got up and left. “Sorry to wake you so early,” he said. “Can we get you coffee or tea? Some bread?”
“Coffee and bread. Might as well be sleepy with a full stomach.”
“Sir down. We have half an hour.”
“You're?”
“The one you've come all this way to see.”
“You don't look like your picture.”
“They're all mistaken, the intelligence agencies. Even yours.”
“I don't deal with MI6, the CIA –”
“I hear from Michael Szay in Bratislava that perhaps you do. He warned me to avoid you.”
“I asked him to find you because I hope to tell your side to the West. Michael doesn't want that.”
“Why not?”
“He likes selling you guns. He likes the war the way it's going.”
“Everybody uses Lebanon to get something for himself. Britain, France, you...” Mohammed tried to settle himself on the sofa. “So tell me. Where do you think this war's going?”
THE RESCUERS BROKE through the next basement and jacked up one side of the concrete slab an inch so André could slide out. He tried to stand and fell down. “Get her.”
“We're fine,” she called. “Don't worry.”
They tried to jack the floor up higher but it was pinned by debris above. Someone wrapped him in a blanket and gave him hot sugared tea and bread. They dug a trench out of the floor with the jackhammer but could go no further because the hose wasn't long enough. André crawled back under the slab, past the place he had been pinned, but could not reach her. The concrete was rough like sandpaper and cold as the bottom of the sea. He was sure it was going to fall on him.
“Anne-Marie!” he called. She did not answer. Someone came in with another length of hose and a short skinny crippled man dragged the jackhammer further under the slab.
“He's going to shake it down on us,” André said. The others were shoving pieces of plank on top of each other to hold up the slab.
The jackhammer chattered, the hoses hissing, the generator in the street outside revving and dying down. The jackhammer noise stopped, the slab shivered, slid lower. Voices echoed under the slab, hers, the jackhammer man's. They grew louder, Anne-Marie's voice coming toward him, and he took her hands as she crawled out from under the slab, a tall, pretty, short-haired woman squinting in the generator lights, two little girls behind her.
A camera flashed. “That's forty-two today!” someone said in French, slapped André's shoulder. The jackhammer man came sliding out, dragging his tool and hose.
“Thank you,” André said to him. “Thank you, God!” He knelt and Anne-Marie with him. Hugging each other and the two little girls, they wept and prayed in French and Arabic to God and Allah for their salvation.
“YOU DENY bombing the American Marines?” Neill said.
Mohammed's eyes turned on him. Exactly like a hawk's, Neill decided. A blue-eyed Shiite hawk. Something else for Freeman to chew on.
“A month before the American and French barracks were bombed,” Mohammed said, “do you remember what happened?”
“Let's see, that was October eighty-three. In September?”
“In