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MIKE BOND

HOLY WAR

ALSO BY

MIKE BOND

Saving Paradise

Tibetan Cross

The Last Savanna

House of Jaguar

CRITICS’ PRAISE FOR MIKE BOND’S NOVELS

Holy War

“Mike Bond does it again – A gripping tale of passion, hostage-taking and war, set against a war-ravaged Beirut.” − Evening News

“A supercharged thriller set in the hell hole that was Beirut…Evokes the human tragedy behind headlines of killing, maiming, terrorism and political chicanery. A story to chill and haunt you.” − Peterborough Evening Telegraph

“A profound tale of war, written with grace and understanding by a novelist who thoroughly knows the subject…Literally impossible to stop reading ...” − British Armed Forces Broadcasting

“A pacy and convincing thriller with a deeper than usual understanding about his subject and a sure feel for his characters.” − Daily Examiner

“A marvelous book – impossible to put down. A sense of being where few people have survived. The type of book that people really want to read, by a very successful and prolific writer.” − London Broadcasting

“A tangled web and an entertaining one. Action-filled thriller.” − Manchester Evening News

“Short sharp sentences that grip from the start … A tale of fear, hatred, revenge, and desire, flicking between bloody Beirut and the lesser battles of London and Paris.” − Evening Herald

“A novel about the horrors of war … a very authentic look at the situation which was Beirut.” − South Wales Evening Post

“A stunning novel of love and loss, good and evil, of real people who live in our hearts after the last page is done…Unusual and profound.” − Greater London Radio

Saving Paradise

“Bond is easily one of the 21st Century’s most exciting authors … An action packed, must read novel … taking readers behind the alluring façade of Hawaii’s pristine beaches and tourist traps into a festering underworld of murder, intrigue and corruption … Spellbinding readers with a writing style that pits hard-boiled, force of nature-like characters against politically adept, staccato-paced plots, Saving Paradise is a powerful editorial against the cancerous trends of crony capitalism and corrupt governance.” – Washington Times

“Bond’s lusciously convoluted story provides myriad suspects and motives … Bond skillfully adds new elements to the mystery, including several energy corporations and no less than three femmes fatales … In the end, readers may find it nearly impossible to guess the killer, but they’ll enjoy the trip. A complex, entertaining whodunit.” – Kirkus Reviews

“Within the first page, I was hooked … From start to finish, I never put it down.” – Bucket List Publications

“A wonderful book … quite powerful … going to create a lot of discussion.” – KUSA TV, Denver

“A fascinating book.” – KSFO, San Francisco

“Saving Paradise is one heck of a crime novel/thriller and highly recommended!” – Crystal Book Reviews

“You’re going to love the plot of this book.” – KFVE TV

“He’s a tough guy, a cynic who describes the problems of the world as a bottomless pit, but can’t stop trying to solve them. He’s Pono Hawkins, the hero of Mike Bond’s new Hawaii-based thriller, Saving Paradise … an intersection of fiction and real life.” – Hawaii Public Radio

“A wonderful book that everyone should read.” – Clear Channel Radio

“Mike Bond’s Saving Paradise is a complex murder mystery about political and corporate greed and corruption … Bond’s vivid descriptions of Hawaii bring Saving Paradise vibrantly to life. The plot is unique and the environmental aspect of the storyline is thought-provoking and informative. The story’s twists and turns will keep you guessing the killer’s identity right up until the very end.” – Book Reviews and More

“A very well written, fast-paced and exciting thriller.” – Mystery Maven Reviews

Bond “incorporate(s) a lot of the reality of wind turbines and wind energy hype and fantasy into Saving Paradise along with a very spectacular character, former Special Forces veteran Pono Hawkins ...” – Chris DeBello, Issues and Ideas, WNNJ-FM

“A fast pace thrill ride that I think a lot of my mystery junkie readers would love … The descriptions of Hawaii are beautiful and detailed.” – Romancebookworm’s Reviews

“Saving Paradise is an absolutely fabulous book … a wonderful book.” – Art Zuckerman, WVOX

“An absolute page-turner” – Ecotopia Radio

“Saving Paradise will change you … It will call into question what little you really know, what people want you to believe you know and then hit you with a deep wave of dangerous truths … Saving Paradise is a thrill ride to read and pulls you in and out of plots until you don’t know who to trust or what to do any more than the character. You trust no one, you keep going, hoping not to get caught before figuring out what is happening. Mike Bond is not only an acclaimed novelist, but an international energy expert and a war and human rights correspondent that has lived and worked in many war torn areas of our world. His intellect and creativity dance together on the pages, braiding fiction into deeper truths about ourselves, our nature, our government, our history and our future.” – Where Truth Meets Fiction

Saving Paradise is a rousing crime thriller – but it is so much more. Pono Hawkins is a dedicated environmentalist, a native of Hawaii who very much loves the islands but regrets what they have become. Pono is a thinker, a man who sees a bigger picture than most, and Mike Bond deftly (and painlessly) uses the character to instruct the reader in Hawaiian history from an insider’s point-of-view. Saving Paradise is a highly atmospheric thriller focusing on a side of Hawaiian life that tourists seldom see. – Book Chase

Tibetan Cross

“A thriller that everyone should go out and buy right away. The writing is wonderful throughout, and Bond never loses the reader’s attention. This is less a thriller, at times, than essay, with Bond working that fatalistic margin where life and death are one and the existential reality leaves one caring only to survive.” − Sunday Oregonian

“A tautly written study of one man’s descent into living hell … Strong and forceful, its sharply written prose, combined with a straightforward plot, builds a mood of near claustrophobic intensity.” − Spokane Chronicle

“Grips the reader from the very first chapter until the climactic ending.” − United Press International

“Bond’s deft thriller will reinforce your worst fears about the CIA and the Bomb … A taut, tense tale of pursuit through exotic and unsavory locales.” − Publishers Weekly

“One of the most exciting in recent fiction … an astonishing thriller that speaks profoundly about the venality of governments and the nobility of man.” − San Francisco Examiner

“It is a thriller … Incredible, but also believable.” − Associated Press

“Murderous intensity … A tense and graphically written story.” − Richmond Times-Dispatch

“The most jaundiced adventure fan will be held by Tibetan Cross … It’s a superb volume with enough action for anyone, a well-told story that deserves the increasing attention it’s getting.” − Sacramento Bee

“Intense and unforgettable from the opening chapter … thought-provoking and very well written.” − Fort Lauderdale News

“Grips the reader from the opening chapter and never lets go.” − Miami Herald

A “chilling story of escape and pursuit.” − Tacoma News-Tribune

“This novel is touted as a thriller – and that is what it is … The settings are exotic, minutely described, filled with colorful characters.” − Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Almost impossible to put down … Relentless. As only reality can have a certain ring to it, so does this book. It is naked and brutal and mind boggling in its scope. It is a living example of not being able to hide, ever … The hardest-toned book I’ve ever read. And the most frightening glimpse of mankind I’ve seen. This is a 10 if ever there was one.” − I Love a Mystery

The Last Savanna

“Tragic and beautiful, sentimental and ruthless, The Last Savanna is a vast and wonderful book.” – NetGalley Reviews

“Mike Bond takes readers into a literary safari of Africa’s elephant poaching war with The Last Savanna, a novel that expertly captures the ravenous, chaotic and frustrating battles raging across the continent … Bond, who himself hiked and extensively explored Africa as a human rights journalist, leverages his first-hand experience to craft a novel that reads authoritatively and paints a vivid picture of life in the savanna … Bond’s knowledge of the Swahili language, local culture and even the wildlife result in what may be one of the most realistic portrayals of Africa yet … The novel is not for the timid, featuring intense descriptions of battle injuries, shocking portrayals of the emotional state of men at war and fully exploring the survival instinct of animal and human alike … Bond’s specialty in producing thrillers that editorialize human weakness and bring to light pressing world problems shines in The Last Savanna. Dynamic, heart-breaking and timely to current events, Bond’s latest book is a must-read.” – Yahoo Reviews

“An intense and emotional story about the African wilderness … masterfully done … so many characters and themes that come into this, it’s amazing … Beyond being a romantic thriller, the elements of survival and the nature of both an animal and man itself really came together … The Last Savanna is intense, beautiful and completely captures the powerful emotion in this story. I was blown away, and it taught me a lot about the dangers and mysteries of Africa.” − RealityLapse Reviews

“A manhunt through crocodile-infested jungle, sun-scorched savannah, and impenetrable mountains as a former SAS man tries to save the life of the woman he loves but cannot have.” − Evening Telegraph

“A powerful love story set in the savage jungles and deserts of East Africa.” − Daily Examiner

“Pulsating with the sights, sounds, and dangers of wild Africa, its varied languages and peoples, the harsh warfare of the northern deserts and the hunger of denied love.” − Newton Chronicle

“A gripping thriller from a highly distinctive writer.” − Liverpool Daily Post

“Exciting, action-packed … A nightmarish vision of Africa.” − Manchester Evening News

“The imagery was so powerful and built emotions so intense that I had to stop reading a few times to regain my composure.” − African Publishers’ Network

“An unforgettable odyssey into the wilderness, mysteries, and perils of Africa … A book to be cherished and remembered.” − Greater London Radio

“The central figure is not human; it is the barren, terrifying landscape of Northern Kenya and the deadly creatures who inhabit it.” − Daily Telegraph

“An entrancing, terrifying vision of Africa. A story that not only thrills but informs … Impossible to set aside or forget.” – BBC

“The thrill of the chase when the prey is man – the only decent prey.” − The Times

“Mike Bond’s The Last Savanna is shot through with images of the natural world at its most fearsome and most merciful. With his weapons, man is a conqueror – without them he is a fugitive in an alien land. Bond touches on the vast and eerie depths that lie under the thin crust of civilization and the base instinct within man to survive – instincts that surpass materialism. A thoroughly enjoyable read that comes highly recommended.” − Nottingham Observer

House of Jaguar

“A riveting thriller of murder, politics, and lies.” − London Broadcasting

“Five Stars … Excellent story, every page takes the reader rushing forward. Horrific ending, strong images last long after finished reading.” – NetGalley Reviews

“Tough and tense thriller.” − Manchester Evening News

“A riveting story where even the good guys are bad guys, set in the politically corrupt and drug infested world of present-day Central America.” − Middlesborough Evening Gazette

“A thoroughly amazing book … Memorable, an extraordinary story that speaks from and to the heart. And a terrifying depiction of one man’s battle against the CIA and Latin American death squads.” – BBC

“Vicious thriller of drugs and revolution in the wilds of Guatemala, with the adventurer hero, aided by a woman doctor, facing a crooked CIA agent. The climax is among the most horrifying I have ever read.” − Liverpool Daily Post

“House of Jaguar is based upon Bond’s own experiences in Guatemala. With detailed descriptions of actual jungle battles and manhunts, vanishing rain forests and the ferocity of guerrilla war, House of Jaguar also reveals the CIA’s role in both death squads and drug running, twin scourges of Central America.” − Newton Chronicle

“Not for the literary vegetarian – it’s red meat stuff from the off. All action … convincing.” − Oxford Times

“Bond grips the reader from the very first page. An ideal thriller for the beach, but be prepared to be there when the sun goes down.” − Herald Express

for Jude, Lucas, and David

God is well able to effect his purpose,

but the greater part of men do not understand.

−Koran, XII

Ye lust, and have not: ye kill,

and desire to have, and cannot obtain:

ye fight and war, yet ye have not.

− James, IV

Time’s short your life’s your own

And in the end we are just dust n’ bones.

− Guns N’ Roses

Beirut was a paradise when I first arrived there as a very young man. The golden sun and brilliant sea, the ancient streets, the hubbub of cultures, the food and wines, the tanned and sensual young women, the perfume of many million flowers, the pine hills and cold white peaks, all imbued it with a near-sacred substance. This, I felt, is a place where all peoples come together, vibrant with history, wisdom, lust, and delight.

It was soon a battlefield of smashed buildings and bloody streets, its Phoenician treasures blasted, its forests and vineyards burned, its people huddled in bombed-out basements or sniping at each other from shattered windows, hating, killing, raping, pillaging. I survived by luck, by tricks, even in dark places where discovery was death. Everywhere I lived is gone, every good friend is dead. I refuse to let them die, to see it gone, without a testament, a memory.

As the years went by, broken-hearted by Beirut, I tried to understand – why do we war? Now, after having covered wars on three continents, I can find no answer beyond the experience itself. What I mean is this: only when we have lived war do we hate and know it well enough to make it stop. For in every country, every city, neighborhood and family, Beirut is waiting.

If everyone could live Beirut, I thought, we might war less. If I could tell one small true story of Beirut, let the reader fear the bullets, crouch beneath the thundering bombs in airless cellars as the concrete floors come crashing down, see loved ones die, grope for passion and belief amid terror and death, that it might make a difference.

Every book must be a failure because it fails to say so much. Today fiction withers because it is too literary, and ceases to be relevant. But if we are to learn we must do so through the heart, not through the mind – a book that does not touch the heart conveys no experience at all. If readers turn away, we need look no further than ourselves.

Like many people I still live Beirut every day, every night, and will probably the rest of my life. I have tried in Holy War to tell its story.

1

THE TROUBLE’S Sylvie, Yves decided. How she's never happy with what I am, what I'm doing. Wants me home.

He stretched in his army cot, twisting his back to let the muscles flex up and down his shoulder blades. Shards of sharp blue through the sandbagged window. Another lovely day in the lovely Levant. Red-golden sun through the pines, the green hill sweeping down to the sea. Incense of cedars, salty cool wind, warm earth; promise in the fragrant air, the buzzing insects, the gulls crying over the waves.

Off duty. Luxury of nowhere to go and nothing to do. Nowhere to go but a sandbagged perimeter and sentried corridors, maybe a quick trip to town in an armored car, the machine gun nervously scanning, the driver watching through the hot slit for an RPG, some mad kid with a Molotov. Vive la France, damn you, for sending us here...

He rolled out of his cot and ambled down the corridor to the WC. Why do all urinals smell like Beirut? Ask the philosophers, he decided, the ones with all the answers. Yawning, scratching his overnight whiskers and under his arms, he wandered to the officers' mess, found a dirty cup and rinsed it, clamped fresh espresso into the machine, drew up and pulled down the handle, two streams of black gold dribbling into the cup.

Makes you feel better already. He filled the cup to the brim and stood by another window, peering through chinks in the sandbagged concrete blocks at the day growing bright blue. Sylvie would still be in bed, the Paris light gray through the blinds. He imagined waking beside her, her lovely sleepy smell, the roughness of her morning voice, the smoothness of her skin.

In Normandy, Papa would already be out in his garden, watering, picking on the weeds, Mama taking fresh brioches out of the oven, Papa coming in with a handful of onions and leeks, taking up his coffee cup in his big fist. André on maneuvers somewhere, playing at war. Trying to get stationed back here, where there's plenty of war. But none for La France, for the Multinational Force, impartially observing the slaughter. The United fucking Nations: you want to murder each other, we'll pay to watch.

He made a second cup, loitered back to his cot and slipped into his thongs, tossed a towel over his shoulders and headed for the showers. A thunderclap cracked, the floor lurched, shivered, the thunder louder. Christ, we've been hit, he thought, dropping the cup. He raced to his cot, snatched his FAMAS, the explosion shaking the sky, men yelling now, down below.

The earth was shaking, an earthquake; he raced up the stairs to the roof, smashed into a sentry coming down. “It's the Marines,” the sentry screamed. “A bomb!”

From the roof he couldn't see the U.S. Marines' compound to the south, just a great billowing dark cloud. He raced downstairs to the radio room. Chevenet, the communications chief, was crouched speaking English then listening to the headset as he loaded his rifle. “A truck,” he said, “somebody drove up in a truck. The whole building. The whole fucking building!”

Yves sprinted down the corridor and down the stairs. “Battle stations!” he screamed. “Battle stations!” Pumping a round into the FAMAS he dashed across the lobby into the parking area. Dark smoke filled the sky. “They hit the Marines!” he yelled to the sentries at the gate. “A big truck!”

A Mercedes truck, the kind used to collect rubbish from the embattled streets of Beirut, geared down and swung into the parking lot, snapped the gate barrier and accelerated toward him. A ton of plastique he realized as he fired from the waist exploding the windshield but the driver had ducked, the truck's grille huge in Yves' face as he shot for the engine now, the distributor cap on the right side, the plugs, the fuel pump. It was too late, the truck would have them. His heart broke in frantic agony for the men inside, the men who would be trapped, crushed to death, the Paras, fleur de la France, his beloved brothers. The universe congealed, shrank to an atom and blew apart, reducing him to tiny chunks of blood and bone, never to be found.

2

“IT’S YOUR LAST NIGHT, Neill – please let's not fight?” Beverly poured the noodles into the strainer and dumped the strainer into a bowl. “Can you get the butter?”

Her close-cropped round head made him think of an eel peering from its hole. Waiting to sink her fangs. “It's just three weeks.” He spoke carefully, not letting the whisky slur his tongue, upbeat at the end. “Good to put a little distance between us.”

She took the butter from the refrigerator. “There's been no lack of that.”

He turned as if to hold her in his arms, opened the freezer door and took out the ice cubes. Everything you say, he told himself, she turns right back on you. He twisted the ice cube container and popped some into the low octagonal glass. She spun round. “There's wine with dinner.”

He poured in extra Knockando, for what she'd said. “What I mean is we'll have a little time to see how it's like, living alone...”

“I'll hardly be alone with two teenagers to cook and clean for, to drive around and worry about when they're not here and try to run my own office at the same time.”

Under their feet the ground rumbled, a District Line train slowing for Earls Court Station. He took a sip. “And slip Timothy a quick fuck when you can.”

“And you! With that Dutch bitch!”

“Hardly, in darkest Beirut.”

“You'll find somebody there. You always do.”

He tossed back the whisky and put the glass in the sink. “There's no point, Bev. We can't keep this up.”

She came close, took his elbow. “For all the years we've had, Neill, let's not take it out tonight on the kids? Let's have a quiet evening and then in the morning you can go and we'll see what happens when you get back? Please?”

“You know they damn well don't care whether I go or stay.”

“Yes, they do. They'd rather you go.”

“Thanks.”

“The way you've been, can you blame them?”

“I blame you.” The phone was ringing. “Imagine, some day we could've been buried side by side.”

“We have been!” she snapped.

“Mum!” Edgar called. “Phone!”

Neill opened a bottle of wine and took it into the dining room. “Yes,” Beverly was saying in the living room, into the phone. “Yes, yes.”

“You didn't put out wine glasses,” he said to Edgar.

“Sorry.” Edgar bent to the buffet, took out a glass.

“Two,” Neill said. “Since when doesn't your mother drink?”

“Sometimes.” Edgar put a second glass on the table. “Mostly with you.”

He smiled at Katerina. “See how he is, your brother?”

She glanced back at him. “No wonder.”

“That's it, don't you see? No wonder at this magic life of ours!”

The children looked at him. Beverly sat and began serving the peas, the noodles. “This case...”

“That's why I'll never be a lawyer,” Katerina said. “You see what she has to go through?”

Neill sat back. “You mean me, or her job?”

Beverly's hand undulated through the plates and glasses, caught his. “We made a deal...”

“I made no damn deal. I never made a damn deal that I couldn't say what I think.” He took a forkful of meat, chewing gristle, turned on Edgar, this son, he thought, I love who hates me. I didn't always drink, my son, I didn't always hate your mother. “What do you think?”

“It's not worth saying,” Edgar said, “what I think.”

“Even with me?”

Katerina stopped chewing. “Especially with you.”

He smiled at her. “Et tu, Brute?”

“Now, don't pick on your father,” Beverly said. “He'll be gone three whole weeks, and if the news desk takes all his articles maybe when he gets back we can go up to the Lake District, unwind together.”

“That, Mother,” Katerina answered, “is impossible.”

“Promise to study?” he said to Edgar.

“You were the one,” Edgar said, “who told me school was like what that caste does in India – maiming their children young so they'll always be able to earn a living. As crippled beggars.”

“That's true.” Neill rubbed his head, imagined the gray hairs growing silently, ruthlessly. “I said that.”

“You say lots of things.” Katerina tossed him her best smile, one she practiced in the cloakroom mirror before going out to that nauseous little creep with the curly Afro and the earring. Trying to slip his puny prick into my daughter. Go ahead, he told her silently, with his eyes. Go ahead and see what you get.

The phone rang and in a single fluid motion Beverly was up and after it.

“It's just a circus,” Neill said. “We play the clown, the tightrope walker, you name it. In the end the audience goes home.”

“What is?” Edgar said.

Beverly returned. “Just Timothy.”

“Just Timothy.”

“Same case, different argument.”

Château Lascaze, the bottle said, 1981. He emptied it and scanned the buffet for another. “In October, 1981 where were we? Does anybody remember? When these grapes were plucked from the sun –”

“School,” Edgar said.

Katerina nodded. “School.”

“I must've been bent over my desk at The Times, pounding out my daily thousand pointless words, beside Quilliver and his bloody cigarettes and graveyard cough – you know, they've found passive smoke's more cancerous?”

“Because it isn't filtered,” Edgar said.

He smiled at Beverly. “That was long before Timothy. What in heavens, my dear, had you to do back then?”

She made a show of thinking. “October’81. That wretched accident case. Woman lived but her husband didn't. Nine months of plastic surgery. Sued the drunken driver in the other car and lost.”

“Long, sure hand of the law. Rewarding the guilty. Justifiably flailing the innocent.”

“She said the strangest things. They reanimated her in hospital, dead but they brought her back. Said she'd risen up out of her body and traveled down a tunnel toward the light, but decided to return. Do you suppose –”

“Journalists aren’t supposed to suppose.” He went to the kitchen and brought back another bottle.

“Neill,” she whispered.

“Even if you did care I wouldn't –”

“Don't have so much, Neill.”

From his pockets Neill extracted a Swiss Army knife, opened it and uncorked the bottle. “Long swift arm of the law. Furious fist of timorous Timothy.”

“You're never serious. Except when you're talking about yourself. Your deep problems of love and death.”

Across the table Katerina yawned. Edgar rose like a butler who'd momentarily forgotten himself and sat at table with his masters. “The dishes call.”

Neill poured a full glass, raised it to the light. “Don't answer.”

“Afterwards can I go and play music?” Edgar said. “Just till midnight?”

“Be on the last Tube,” Beverly said.

“And you?” Neill turned to Katerina.

“Going to Max's. We have a calculus assignment.”

And fiddle his liverish prick, he said for her. See the Crusader departing for the Holy Land, shunned by his own kind. “Whatever happened to the time-honored idea of figuring things out for yourself?”

“She does better over there,” Beverly said.

“With his own place,” Katerina added, “why would he want to come here?”

“Nothing left,” Neill smiled at Beverly, “but for you and me to have our quiet evening at home.”

“I've got to work on that case.”

They carried the dirty plates into the kitchen, loaded the dishwasher and turned it on. It started with a self-satisfied hum. To be so inanimate, Neill thought, so free. Please God, where are we? These stars we travel through, this universe of magic and sorrow, what is it? We this amalgam of cells and dreams, this falseness.

Upstairs in the bathroom he poured the last of his wine into the toilet, felt guilty and drank the dregs. Just don't understand. Dear God, I just don't. Right away the answer came to him: all that counts is wrath.

Love doesn't matter? he asked.

No, came the answer, it surely doesn't. Drink no more.

But what would that change? What else do you have?

He took a leak and flushed the loo, the red and yellow liquid sucking down. Every drop of the Thames goes through nine people, says the National Rivers Association, between the Cotswolds and the Channel. Drinking piss, we are, cradle to grave.

Clasping the empty glass to his chest he wandered back down the corridor with the blue-red Persian runner that Bev had paid good money for, to the head of the stairs. At forty-two he shouldn't be afraid of tripping down the stairs. Trick is to have each foot well posed. Like each question posed but never answered. Dear God, if I could only understand.

THE DOOR SWUNG open, damp urine odor rushing out, no light. Broken glass underfoot, tinkle of a bottle cap. Smell of corpses beneath the rubble.

It was a long low cellar with a gaping window at the back. Footsteps clattered into the alley behind her; Rosa ducked into the cellar, shut the door. The men dashed past, three or four, frightened, gasping. One tripped on debris and fell with a crash of metal then ran onward, wailing.

Streets away a Kalashnikov barked; death seeking someone. A whoosh and wham of shells against the next hill. A scream – no a ricochet; anguished metal hunting a home in flesh.

More men ran into the alley, panting, halted, clink of steel on steel. A crackle of Hebrew on the radio. “Damn you,” she said, pressed herself back into the corner of the cellar, beside the window, reached under her raincoat into the sack round her waist and took out a grenade.

A rocket swooshed over. The ground shivered, a roar split the night. Chunks of wall and ceiling pattered down, one punching her shoulder.

Bullets whacked and crashed into the alley, an M16, uphill. Galils chattered back, someone called out, Israeli. Again the Galils roared, the noise deafening through the street door. A man was moaning, as if he'd had the wind knocked out of him. Another whispered, Israeli, then harsher, louder. Ahead, the Galil spat more bullets down the alley. She bent over her sack of grenades, trying to cover them, fearing the noise would explode them.

Sounds of choking, ripping cloth, someone speaking fast in Hebrew about a medic in five minutes and a recoilless rifle; she couldn't understand.

A spent round pinged down into the street. Stab of light under the door, fifty-caliber bullets hammering off distant walls.

The Israelis broke the door and dragged the wounded man into the cellar. They shut the door and snapped on a flashlight. One tall and broad-chested, on the floor, gut shot. Another trying to compress the wound while a third held the light, tearing open a medical kit.

Her heart was beating so hard she couldn't hear what they said. Steps thumped across the ruined floor overhead – more Israelis taking up positions. No. The Israelis in the cellar were silent, holding their guns, listening. The wounded man's legs began to quiver and another put a hand over his mouth, shut off the flashlight.

She took a deep, silent breath. Two grenades clicked together in her sack; she held her breath; the Israelis didn’t hear.

A shell came down sighing and smacked into the next street, the earth shook, staggered, a building began to fall. In the roar Rosa crawled quickly through the window, over a tile roof that had fallen in one tilting piece, then down the next alley, listening, moving ten feet and listening again. A Mirage came in low and dropped napalm, the sky bright as a hearth, wind roaring through the streets toward the seething flames, the screams, the wail of metal, stone and flesh bending, breaking, melting. So this is Hell, she thought, running up the narrow street under the boiling red clouds, her sack of grenades clasped tight to her belly.

3

NEILL WOKE WITH HIS STOMACH AFIRE. There was a distant, nearing rumble. A 747, the first United from New York. In that plane the passengers would be waking, stretching, gathering their things after a night over the Atlantic. Not the same as the first time he had crossed fourth class in the SS Statendam, a kid of seventeen deserting Cleveland for the London School of Economics and a world of excitement and anticipation.

The plane passed over rattling the glass. What if he'd stayed in the States – how could it have been worse than this? What would he have become, an editor on some local paper, chasing down dog-bite stories, living in some split-level suburban slum? He'd have never gone to Beirut, Czechoslovakia, all those other places, have never met Bev.

He got up and closed the window. “I was going somewhere with Jonathan Tremaine,” Beverly mumbled. “In his Austin Healey. The wind was blowing our hair.”

“Good old Jonathan.” Neill got back into bed, wondering if in the dream she'd slept with him. A 707, a charter maybe, crisped over, closer to the Thames, landing lights blinking as it crossed the window.

Without Bev he wouldn't have had the kids. He thought of them sleeping in their rooms above the ceiling. If he never came back would they miss him? They'd grow up fine without him. Or is even a lousy father better than none? Edgar already had too much of the world on his broad young shoulders. And the boys like sharks round Katerina – a fatherless girl is always easier to screw. Even if they don't think so they need you. More than you give.

But you always feel like this before you go. A total coward, always have been. Admit it. You may be a world-jaded journalist but you've hated or feared or been bored by nearly every moment of it.

And aren't kids better with a father who does what he wants, instead of one who's always afraid? He noted the triumphant smile of peace on Beverly's sleeping face. Would that I could. He raised his knees but the knot in his stomach wouldn't go away. Beverly a believer in twenty-year cycles. Ready to slip from him to the next. He sat up, feet cold on the carpet, rubbing his stubble. Can I shower without waking her?

A SHELL SCREAMED over like a siren, Syrian from the hills, aimed here, coming down louder, louder, shaking the night, shuddering the earth, shrapnel shrieking through the streets.

Beneath her raincoat Rosa cradled the sack of grenades closer. “You're crazy,” the Christian guard said.

He had a scar down one cheek, under the stubble. It cut into his lip and in the early morning light made him seem petulant. She adjusted her weight. “He's still in there, my father. Rue Lebbos –”

“We've cornered some Shiites there. You can't go in.”

“He's blind. I have to get him out.”

He tipped up her chin with his rifle, watching her eyes. “There is no more Rue Lebbos.”

“He's in a cellar.”

“They've all caved in. There's no one there any more, sister.” He glanced at the round belly beneath her raincoat. “Bring us new life. Forget the old.”

He seemed kind, despite his scar, maybe not one of the Christians that murdered the two thousand Palestinian women and children and old people here in Shatila last year. She pushed round him, over the broken concrete. “You'd treat your father so?”

He pointed the rifle at her belly, nudged the muzzle up to her face, tapped the trigger as he swung the muzzle up and the bullets spattered over her head off the wall and up into the sky. Chunks of clay fell down on her head and shoulders. “It's for your child, sister, that I didn't shoot you. Perhaps I still will.”

“Shoot me, then.” She turned and walked between the broken houses, tensed for the bullets to bore like rods of fire through her belly, spine, and brain, the grenades blowing up and spreading her in tiny chunks of flesh and bone.

A shell roared down and slapped the next street, shrapnel singing off the buildings. She ducked, straightened slowly, walking still, cradling her belly of grenades beneath the raincoat, the rush of her breath and hustling footsteps and the clicking of the grenades loud in her ears.

The guard would wait till the last moment before he fired. Till she crossed the ruined orchard at the top, full silhouette. Giving her time to think about it, turn back.

Steadily up the steps cut in the clay hill, no houses now, splintered lemon stumps, her footsteps whispering, the sun's red crescent up out of the towering Shouf, spilling like dusty lava down through wracked pine forests and smoky ruined villages. Not looking back she passed the crest, beyond the guard's field of fire, round a blasted tractor, a ruined almond orchard with demolished stone walls and the carious upjutting jaws of a burnt house. Someone had dragged olive boughs to the path to cut up for firewood. There was the stench of death, human or animal, she couldn't tell. She went in dawn's light down the far side of the hill into the outskirts of Beirut.

“THIS WILL BE THE LAST TIME,” Beverly said. She took a sip of her coffee and it left a creamy mark on her upper lip. Neill forced down the annoyed urge to wipe it away. Let her look how she looks.

“I've tried, too, Bev,” he said softly. His leaving made everything here seem easy, made him feel affection for it all. With the back of a finger he wiped the milk from her lip. All was packed, the kids already gone, no reason to linger but for some moment of clarity that never came.

He put his dishes in the dishwasher, went upstairs, brushed his teeth, took a leak, as if marking territory for the last time, he thought, and came down with his bag over one shoulder.

“I said I'd take you to the airport,” she said.

“You've got clients this morning.”

She fingered half a caress down his temple and cheek. “Thank God you're going...” She gave him her reluctant half-shy smile, the one to make him feel guilty for her having to smile. For her having to overcome the sorrow of living with him.

He kissed her, thinking of when their kisses might have meant something. The house felt dusty, full of ashes and chill; he couldn't breathe he was so anxious to leave, the knot in his stomach something he could nearly reach inside and tear out.

“Remember how you always said, Neill, we have to choose between being kind and winning? See, you've proved yourself wrong: you've done neither.”

He went down the front steps into the early morning street and turned toward Earls Court station, across Cromwell and right at the corner into Hogarth Road, glancing back at the traffic.

A taxi slowed but he waved it on. Another, a red one, came idling up and stopped beside him. He glanced into the back, opened the door and got in beside a short stocky balding man in a gray suit and mac. The man held a black hat, The Times, and a briefcase on his lap. The driver turned into Earls Court and continued past the station. The small man opened his briefcase, raising its lid so the driver could not see inside it. “Came in last night. Bloody perfect.”

Inside the briefcase was a photo of a dark-bearded man, high forehead, clear expression, narrow deepset eyes, thick long nose, sharp lips in a wide mouth. A straight-ahead, fear-nothing face. Staring toward the camera but not seeing it, not squinting despite the sun in his face. Behind him, out of focus, a clay brick wall.

“What if this guy didn't blow the Marines' barracks, the French paratroopers?”

“That's what we'd like to find out.”

“I still don't understand why you've got the hots for him –”

“You let us worry about that. Just get to see him.”

“Us?”

“You don't have to be British to serve the Queen, Neill. We appreciate what you've done, over the last twelve years...”

“Screw the Queen, Adam. I do it for the money.”

“That's an honorable motive, too. We respect that.”

“If I see him, I'm doing it my way.”

“Then we can't back you up.”

“Even after twelve years, Adam, I wouldn't depend on you.”

“Nor we on you.”

“That's a bloody lie!”

Freeman sat back in the taxi seat with a pricked stiff face. As if, Neill thought, I could ever hurt them. “What I meant,” Freeman said, “is I don't know how far we can leverage for you.”

“First time you want you'll drop me dead. We both know that.”

“And you'll drop us too, any time you want.”

“Everybody shafts everybody, Adam. What are you getting at?”

“It's two stitches up under your arm. Nobody will ever see it or know it's there. Soon as you come back we take it out.”

“Until then, every second, you know where I am –”

“Most of the time we couldn't care less. But if you're in trouble we can be there.”

“You blind bastards couldn't rescue the PM from the Royal Loo. You don't even dare show your ass in Beirut since the Hez came.”

Freeman smiled, a teacher tolerating the tantrum of a child. “We've decided that if you want to go through with it, we need you wired.”

“I'll go without you. Do my interview with Mohammed for the paper and leave.”

“I can't imagine you giving up ten thousand that easily.”

“So that's what you're saying? No transmitter, no money?”

“Imagine how we'd look if you got into trouble.”

The taxi swerved round a bicycle, a girl in a brown suit and long black scarf. “Whatever happens,” Neill answered, “you're clean. You know that or you wouldn't be here.”

“It takes about five minutes and you're on your way. You won't even feel it. By the time you reach Amsterdam you'll have forgotten all about it. But it could save your life. Do it for us.”

Neill watched the traffic, the grim dirty fenders and windshields, sheets of the Telegraph windscattered along King's Road, the wind-wrenched boughs and muddy grass behind the curb, the sense of living on decay. How good it would be, he thought, to start anew. “Once and for all, Adam, tell me who us is?”

“I do and I'll be out of a job and in prison. Official secrets, all that.”

“Just between me and you, Adam? After all these years –”

“There is no between you and me.” Freeman nodded at the taxi roof. “We're on record.”

Neill stared out of the window, seeing nothing. “Fifteen thousand.”

“It isn't a money thing, Neill. For this protection, we should ask you to pay.”

Neill smiled. See, there is a God, for only a God would have invented us. “Fifteen thousand, instead of the original ten. If you want to follow me around, that's what it's going to cost you.”

“I'll speak to them.”

“No speaking, Adam. I want your agreement, now. Half sent now and a half later.”

Freeman checked the locks on his briefcase. “We've always tried to bend over for you, Neill –”

“Don't say that, Adam. Makes you sound like a fag.”

Freeman snorted, turned away. Neill could not find him in the mirror. Beside Neill a Mini throbbed, dark-haired girl inside, red scarf, red lips; beyond her and around them cars, trucks, and buses floated in a writhing gray sea that had risen up and stained the buildings, the morning sky. Under the Albert Bridge the Thames was dirtier than the sky. Dirty as our lungs, Neill thought.

At Gatwick they went into a locked hospitality suite. Inside was a short slender balding young man with gold rims and a dark beard. “This is Dr. Kane,” Freeman said. It was a narrow room with a yellow-green convertible couch, a self-service bar, and a window with closed curtains of yellow and white acrylic.

Dr. Kane opened his black briefcase. “I need you to strip to the waist and lie down on the couch. We'll have you back on your way in a sec.”

4

“THE MORE I GET TO KNOW YOU,” Monique said, “the less I know.”

André lay back, watching her, the espresso cup in her hand, the strap of her silly nightgown across her arm, her hair all tousled, a sleep crease shadowed by the morning sun down her cheek. She shook back her hair. “You're always disappearing.”

Since Yves' death everything irritated him, even Monique. “I don't go anywhere. I've told you that.”

“You shack up with somebody?”

“They were training exercises – cowboy stuff. Preparing for the day Corsica attacks France.”

She finished her coffee, leaned out of the bed to put the cup on the floor. “When we decide to, it won't do any good to be prepared –”

“I've quit the Paras. The biggest danger I face now is probably your husband.”

NEAR THE RUINS of the prison and the Université Libanaise some merchants had set up shop in rubble-walled shacks with tin roofing. A man was selling pens from a paper bag. Another had spread lemons, oranges, peppers, and eggs in the sun under half an awning; a cat sat in a shred of stone window, its yellow tail hanging down.

“Hey, young mother!” the fruit man called, “I've got meat!”

“What meat?” Rosa said.

“Goat, mother! Came through Israeli lines. Come, have a look!”

She followed him into the shade of the half-awning, where a stringy black foreleg hung. He waved at the flies. “It's dog,” Rosa said.

“Where are you going?”

She glanced at his eyes, troubled and brown, in creases of dirty skin. Druze, down from the Shouf. Lost everyone too, have you? She nodded toward the smoky southern heights of Ras Beirut. “What do you hear?”

“Hezbollah still has the southern side and Amal the north. There's Palestinians trying to fight their way out of Hamra. When they're not shooting each other, Hezbollah and Amal are killing the Palestinians. Christians are shelling from the east, Syrians from the hills, Druze from the Shouf, and Israelis from the south.”

“Nothing new, then.”

The creased eyes dropped to her belly. He held up the black foreleg. “Young mother like you, needs her meat.”

THE DAMP AIR at Schiphol Airport made Neill's underarm hurt even more. It had been five stitches, not two, up under the hair. Liar. The stitches rubbed when he walked and tugged when he carried his bag, and the lump under the skin was swollen like a nodule. He stopped at a bar for a quick gin to swallow down two of the Klaricid Kane had given him, “so there'll be no infection,” and two Paludrine for the malaria he had first caught at nineteen in Beirut, and that came back with any quick change of climate, any new exposure. He downed a second gin and caught a taxi to Prinsengracht.

Number 39 was a four-story house one room wide leaning over the root-fissured brick pavement, propped up by narrow houses on each side, and facing across the sycamore crowns and brick street, the leaf-dirty cars, and the cold canal to another façade of other tall grim houses. He punched a code into the door, opened it, climbed to the top floor and let himself in.

The long thin apartment was bathed in near-sepulchral light. Too calm – the goldfish coasting slowly in their bowl, the shiny kitchen counter, the fine rugs and polished floors, Amsterdam's saline sky through diamond-paned windows. “Inneka!” he called, but no one answered. He left his bag by the bed and went downstairs and along Reguliersgracht over the double humped bridges where two canals met, toward Rembrandts Plein and the river, the wind at his back.

THE PRIEST was droning on and André's glance wandered to the pale limestone walls downcast with sun, the stained stone bleeding its slow calcium rot, the time-gnawed lion and human gargoyles on the column crowns, stone faces that had leered down on so many centuries of humans reaching up for God, sneering for centuries at the same human hunger, pain, and sorrow. Is that hatred in their eyes, he wondered, or only irony?

The gray midmorning Normandy light spilled through the faded glass, streaking the pale walls. This imitation, he thought, of the first temples at this ancient curve of the Seine, hallowed rock beneath the oaks, the eye following their columns upward to the arched leafy boughs and the azure of a ceiling you could take for Heaven, if you wanted.

This church at Les Andelys that Richard the Lionheart had built after he came back from the Holy Land and prison in Dürnstein, after he'd built Château Gaillard on the limestone promontory above – two years to build the castle then two months for the church, the castle incorporating the most advanced military defense techniques he'd copied from the Saracens in the Holy Land. Like Richard, André realized, like his brother Yves, now he too was leaving Normandy for the Holy Land. But not to defend it.

Richard taught that to serve the cause of vengeance is to serve the cause of God: build a church or castle, it's all the same. Richard came back from Lebanon with the secrets of Saracen defensive architecture, but they didn't save him. Yves came back in shreds in a black box. Who am I avenging, really? And how will I come back?

Bread and wine into body and blood, every word so sharp that everyone inside this church hears it with a single heart, one mind, for these few moments. He saw the crewcut rugged soldiers in the far pews, some bored, some in conscientious attention to the priest whose words washed over them like so many words over so many souls over eight hundred years inside these same stone walls. The children sucking thumbs and wheedling, old people rapt or diligent in prayer, the priest's prayer now for Pierre Duclair, the sports teacher, forty-three, with a wife and four children, fallen dead on Tuesday as he waited for medicine at the chemist, the priest's prayer for all those hungry and despairing, his admonition to see the scorned beggar at the roadside as Christ, and André made a mental note that this was foolishness because if you did you'd soon be a beggar yourself – but then wouldn't you be like Christ?

A woman in front of him, with three kids, young and pert with short blonde hair curled over her ears, a pretty young body despite the kids. Beyond her another, a little older, tall and slim, hardly any breasts, with a composed ravenous look – which would he spend the night with, if he could?

He chose the young blonde, thought of croissants aux amandes and a café crème to break his fast, after Communion. He could meet Monique at Le Central, but she wouldn't want to with Hermann coming home; at lunch today there'd be fine St. Emilion to go with the lamb, Papa bringing up an armful of bottles spiderwebbed and dusty from the cave – the way they painted the church walls in the twelfth century, you could still see it, frail and dim, the reds last longest, color of wine, color of blood, or is it just that everything turns to that?

The Host in the priest's hands in the mordant light, boys passing each other in the Communion line with quick glances of complicity, coming and going round him the people he'd grown up with, the couples of his early youth now older and tenuous, the girls he'd been a boy with now with girls of their own, lines of worry and comprehension graven in their faces – it was all there for him, hadn't he understood it, at the moment of the Host, the full mystery and miracle of life?

Filing into the street, there was a patter of tires on cobblestones, rain soft as a woman shedding silken clothes, a sad hunger for vengeance and the dry taste of the Host at the back of his throat.

5

AT A CAFÉ by the river Neill bought a 25-guilder bag of Afghani grass and sat smoking on the terrace with a cappuccino. Across the street cars were lined along the canal, parking meters spaced among them like guards among prisoners on a work detail. On the far side of the Amstel rose the stone gingerbread and brick of the Hotel de l’Europe; everywhere cars, bicycles, and trucks were fleeting back and forth as if seeking somewhere to go, people hustling past, the tall slender women with beautiful chiseled faces and red lips set off by their blonde hair; he smiled, imagining their cool long naked skin.

The grass was chunky and sticky and didn't roll easily, the smoke sweet and powerful down into his lungs out into his blood, putting all in perspective, Bev and Freeman and Inneka and the newspaper and the kids and this trip and his forty-two years crowned with no success, no future. It didn't matter, your future, if you could understand this, live fully in this.

Across the street policemen with two trucks were towing away first a gray Toyota then a red Lada. One tall bearded cop had a key that opened the Lada's door instantly. Oh to have a key, Neill thought, that opens everything. A few passersby watched half curiously, a man in a tan beret complaining quietly and rancorously. On the radio a man was whining over some woman's desertion:

And if you leave me now

You'll take away

The very best part of me

A tall slender black man, athletic, passed by with a smaller dark-haired white man – a laughing young-hearted couple. How can I look down on that? Neill thought. Then a blonde girl in a camelhair coat, black high heels, black foam pads on wires over her ears. “You don't have to be alone,” sang the café radio, a husky woman's voice.

Two girls sat at the next table, drinking espressos and smoking hash from a clay pipe. “Hey!” one of them said, and he looked up, but she was calling a young long-haired guy on the pavement who smiled and came over, kissed them and sat down, his hand on one girl's thigh, smoking their hash. I'm the kind of graying soft-faced man, Neill realized, that nobody notices. He caught his reflection in the café's side window: soon an old man, ripe for defeat.

The joint was too resiny and kept going out; he relit it, inhaling the sweet smoke through his nostrils, tasting it. The CIA had shipped Afghani weed like this to Europe to help pay for weapons to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan. Like everyone in Lebanon was selling opium and hash to pay for their weapons.

Through the smoke everything seemed clearer, the blue Jaguar that had parked where the Lada had been towed away, half up on the pavement, the wet leaves on the dirty stones, the rail beyond and the Amstel River gray slate, an orange houseboat chugging up it, the Hotel de l’Europe primly awaiting a change of season, the weary houses, wet streets beneath damp clouds.

For a moment he'd been happy just to let the game of life go on around him.

BY AFTERNOON IT WAS SUNNY and the dew had dried out of the garden. They set the long wooden table on the stone patio, with wine and salad and bread, lamb and potatoes and peas, André's mother not wanting to sit because then there'd be thirteen at table. “Don't be silly,” he said. “You think we'd eat without you?”

She waited till the others, his sisters and their husbands and children, had filed through the kitchen to the patio. “You're going again, aren't you?”

“Just a little while, Mama. Down south.”

“Your father knows but he won't tell me.”

How savage age is, he thought, seeing her lined face, the pallid flesh and dark worry under the faded eyes. “Papa doesn't know anything because there's nothing to know.”

“You've resigned your commission.”

“You know why, Mama. Because they did nothing. After the bombing.”

He saw that the word hurt her and regretted it, took her hand, her skin cold, the flesh bony. When we get old, he thought, the sun doesn't warm us anymore.

“It's because of Yves you're going back,” she said. “But there's nothing you can do, mon cher, cher fils. And instead of losing one of you now I'm going to lose you both.”

“YOU COULD HAVE LEFT me a note,” Inneka said.

“I thought you were gone all afternoon,” Neill answered. “So I –”

“I just went down to Shopi to get you some beer! I get back, wait two more hours before you come. I could have been at work today, for all the good it does!”

“I'm sorry, Inneka.”

“I don't care you're sorry!” She slapped a hairbrush down on the sink. “How do you think I ever want to build a life with you, when I never know where you are?”

Neill followed her into the bedroom, realized what he was doing and stopped, went instead to the window, tucked aside the curtain, watching the umbrellas like black toadstools diagonally cross the street. A gull bobbed on the canal, something white in its beak.

“It's after two,” he said. “In eighteen hours I have to be at the station.”

She came into his arms and they stood there, swaying slightly, silently.

Even when I do think of her, he realized, it's still for me.

ROSA COULD NOT CROSS Rue Madame Curie in the open before dark, and the route she'd planned to take behind the old houses had been hit by Israeli 500-pounders.

A rumble at the far end of Rue Alfred Nobel grew louder through the shelling, the singing inwhistle of Katyushas, the mortars' irregular rattle and thud making the ground pulse like a heart. With a prehistoric roar a Syrian T-34 ground up the hill of ruined houses, its turret gun swinging down Rue Nobel as its treads shuddered and clanked toward the mound where she hid, and all the greatest fears she'd ever had came to one, the great crushing treads, the engine's throaty snarl coming toward her, but if she got up and ran they'd surely shoot her. She had to stay, stay in this hole as it crumbled in the tank's nearing vibration. She had to use the grenades, that would stop them, but the sack wouldn't untie and she should have thought of it earlier. Thrashing the earth the tank passed her by, concrete and steel crunching and writhing under its great steel paws, its sour exhaust in her face. It halted, swung its gun uphill.

They're looking for me, she thought, hearing the rumble of a second tank, a louder higher engine. It swung over the top of the hill and down the flattened street behind her and she darted up and across Rue Madame Curie hoping maybe they wouldn't see her, for a half-fallen building was blocking them. The tank's snout came round the edge of collapsed stones as she leaped into a well, smashing down some kind of stairs that broke the grenades loose when she fell. I'll die now, she thought, scrambling down the stairs after the grenades, they'll explode and me with them. She found the sack and there were three, five, six, seven – they were all there, the thirteen grenades. Holding her breath, she felt for the pins – all there. If they hadn't been it would already have been too late.

Loose stone banged down as the tank neared, shuddering the earth. She scrambled feet first down the stairs into the blackness – it was a courtyard, not a well, this earth above and around her the debris of houses. Fumbling along a wall, she found a window, barred, then a door to smash open and here was an open corridor, chunks of ceiling and something – dishes? – on the floor. Chairs, furniture in the way but she scrambled over them as with a white wham a grenade went off in the courtyard and a wall cascaded down between her and it. The tank overhead ground into gear and rumbled away.

Plaster and rock clattered down around her, the air thick with dust. Her ears roared, deafened. Bent over the grenades, she held her breath as long as possible then tried to breathe through her veil. When the air cleared and things stopped falling she tied the grenades up again under her raincoat and peered round her in the shallow darkness. Along one wall was a buffet with dishes and crystal, along the next a coat rack with a man and a woman's long coats and children's jackets. In the middle of the room was a wooden table, set with six plates, silverware, and glasses, all covered with dust.

6

THE GRENADE the tank crew had thrown into the courtyard had imploded the front wall of the living room and the facade of the other floor had dropped in on it. Rosa could find no way out. She felt her way back through the dining room to the kitchen but the next building had fallen in and filled the back door and windows. Her watch said 19:21; already she was late. She put the sack of grenades on the table and began to dig a hole through the rubble blocking the courtyard.

Every handful of rubble she pulled aside only made more tumble down. But cool air was coming in and she scrambled up to it – a fistful of night. She pulled and punched at it, forced the hole wider, slid back down for the grenades and squeezed out through the hole, went down into the courtyard then carefully up its stairs to the gap she had earlier thought was a well. Beneath this opening she listened. There was no sound of the tanks, of footsteps, bullets, or shells. For a moment there was no sound at all, no rifle or mortar anywhere, nothing but the night. Then one round hissed down. No bang: a dud. Or a delay. She tried to decide where it had landed.

A flare burst, half-lighting the street and across it a stairway. Without thinking she crossed the street and climbed the stairs, the light shifting up the steps as the flare fell. The flare died and darkness leaped out at her from the head of the stairs as she caught a glimpse of a vast low room of hunched machines.

She stepped into the room. No sound. Slowly then faster she walked down the aisle alongside the machines. They were like huge animals sleeping, making her afraid to wake them.

Another long low room to the right, then a corridor climbing beyond, then stairs to a dark passage; beyond it a broken door, another dark room.

Wind came through the broken door and chilled her back. She could just see the rectangle of greater darkness that was another door beyond. In between was dark shadow, lumpy, rubble maybe, from the roof through which the tiles had fallen, leaving only a few rafters with splintered crosspieces, a skeleton's ribs black against the sky.

Toward Ras Beirut a machine gun opened up, throaty bursts like migraine jolts, then a long twisting fusillade, answered by the metallic chatter of Kalashnikovs, the hot spat of Galils. She imagined the bullets smashing and clattering through shattered walls and piles of concrete, snatching innocent flesh by hazard, tearing and splattering it.

Someone came through the door behind her and stood, panting.

Whoever it was hadn't seen her. Or he'd seen her and was waiting. To see what she'd do.

She twisted round silently to face him, sinking to her knees to drop her profile from view. He hadn't seen her because he was just standing there. Now he was looking around – she saw the dark shadow of his head move. Automatic rifle in his right hand, smell of burnt oil and powder. Pale shirt, stink of his sweat, cigarette breath. Surely he must smell her too?

He coughed softly, his head moved, and he spat spraying her face. He lunged on ahead, down the corridor into the night.

When his footfalls had cleared the room ahead she followed, toeing her way in and around the smashed concrete, along a path many feet had hardened. Before the next door she halted, expecting him to be there. But he'd gone on, a stripe of moonlight skidding off his shoulder. Twenty yards ahead now, moving fast.

Three more rooms, rubble, splintered beams, starlight, silence, the quiet of roaches and rats, of all that feed on corpses. She imagined them eating, the little shreds of flesh, flesh that had made love, had held children and danced to music, then felt the chill of death.

Ahead a sudden scuffle, a gasp, grunts, three men at least, a voice: “Calm down, brother! Tell us, what religion are you?”

The man in the pale shirt kept gasping, trying to gain time to decide if these men who had grabbed him out of the darkness were Christian or Muslim, Druze or Hezbollah, Sunni or Shiite, Maronite, Syrian, Palestinian or Israeli.

“Answer right and I kiss you,” one of them said. “Answer wrong and you die.” The others closed up behind him, one's shape blocking the corridor. Rosa edged back into the rubble of the room, knelt down, reached under her raincoat and untied the sack of grenades.

“Just going to Rue Hamra,” whispered the man in the pale shirt. “Please, brothers.”

“What religion?”

“Truly, brother, I don't care about religion.”

“One last time, brother, before I shoot. What religion?”

“Allahah akbaar,” the man sighed.

Clink of pistol cocking. “Recount the faiths.”

“Do not hurt. Do not lie. Do not steal.”

“Which of those are you doing tonight?”

“I was just going to Rue Hamra. My family –”

“You are truly a Muslim, brother?”

“Truly.”

“You're in luck, brother: so are we.”

Rosa took three grenades from the sack, laying them side by side on the ground. She retied the sack tight around her abdomen, put a grenade in each pocket and took the third in her hand.

“Allah be praised,” the man in the pale shirt kept repeating. His voice was shivering. The other men were joking with him now, about his being almost shot for a Christian. “Those pigs!” he said, “eat their own children's entrails.”

“How do you know, brother?” one of the men laughed.

“Because I've made them do it.”

“Really, now?” One voice took interest. “Tell us.”

“No, not really. Just joking...”

“It is a joke, really,” another put in, softly. “The joke is that we're Christians.”

“And you're a filthy little Muslim,” said the first questioner, “who sucks his own cock.”

“Please, brother, oh God, please! I'll help you – I've got money –”

“Open his legs!” one said.

The man was screaming then moaning through something, then choking. “See!” one laughed. “I told you Muslims suck their own cocks!”

“That's homosexuality,” another said. “You know the sentence for that.”

“Certainly.” There was a sharp, three-shot burst.

Beretta parabellum, Rosa decided, 9 mm, Israeli issue. Thus perhaps truly Christians. No way could she go back up the shattered corridor without them seeing her shadow cross the opening where the roofs had fallen in. Stay here and sooner or later one of them would light a match, a flashlight, and see her. Or circle round, to take a piss, run right into her.

The grenade was a hard perfect weight in her hand. But even then could she be sure? Should she move back into the rubble by the wall of the room and wait for them to leave? She put down the grenade, cupped a hand over her wrist and slipped back the sleeve to check her watch: 21:42.

She felt behind her with her toe for a clear place in the broken concrete, stopped when it made a slight hiss against plaster and cement dust. She found another place for her foot, further back, slowly shifted her weight and moved a step backward.

7

RAIN STREAKED the windows. Holland is the only place on earth, Neill thought, where the rain comes down sideways.

In Beirut there’d be no rain now. The wind down from the hills, pine and lavender, the cafés on Rue Hamra full of espresso and cigars and sweet liquor and sex, the sounds of traffic, music, laughter.

No, Hamra's barricaded and bombed. And the only people who go out become the dead ones on the pavements.

“You've been married nineteen years,” Inneka said. “No one else I know, but for my parents, their generation, has stayed married so long. How are you going to explain divorcing to Edgar? Even worse, to Katerina?”

“They'd barely notice if I went.” He slid his hand slowly up the curve of her waist. So smooth, he thought, nothing stops you.

“I refuse to be the one who makes that happen. If you're going to break from her, do it for yourself, not me.”

“I'm crazy,” he let his hand fall, “to be thinking of going from one of you to the other.”

“You're the one you have to learn to live with, darling.”

They dressed in the hesitant glow of the streetlight through the window; he couldn't find one sock till she put on the lamp. “We'll have to go all the way to Rembrandts Plein,” she said.

The rain had cleared, white clouds dashed across the moon. Wind cut up Prinsengracht, ruffling the black canal, sharp as a knife at his neck. She wrapped her coat tighter, hugging his arm as they walked. “You should've worn trousers,” he said.

A bell tinkled coming up behind them on darkened Keizersgracht by the Advent church, making him jump up on the pavement. “Just a bike,” she said.

It was a black rattletrap ridden by a girl in a long blue wool coat who took the bridge across Reguliersgracht, parked the bike and went into the Coffeeshop African Unity.

“It's because you don't want to go on this trip,” Inneka said. “That's why you're so jumpy.”

The Rhapsody on Rembrandts Plein was still open. At a chilled table on the terrace they ate Greek salad, tournedos and spaetzle. The couple at the next table were arguing gently in Italian, under the Motown on the café stereo. On the pavement an electric sign of a woman in blue, a gray cat, and a red-labeled black bottle of instant coffee: “Sheba. Een teken van liefde.” The sky had lifted, the moon's light slinking down the slate roofs, the wind chasing scraps of paper and dust around their ankles. On the far side of Rembrandts Plein flashed a red neon sign, “La Porte d’Or – Live Music”, and he realized he'd been thinking of going in there as if it were a place where he could forget everything, as if there'd be a truth there. A secret.

A trolley ground past, absurdly painted. “Damn graffiti,” she said.

“This used to be a nice town.”

Behind them three dealers were talking low in French, one with great wide hairy ears. “Seventy balles,” another said, “I'd take that.”

“We should try seventy-five,” great ears said.

The first pointed at a car outside. “Look at him, turning round in the street!”

“Like Paris, do whatever they want.”

The third raised a finger. “Je veux dire un truc, moi. Let me say something.”

“But he's not so great. He hustles sometimes but then he just lets himself go...”

“Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, still on your side,” sang the stereo.

“That's four thousand balles each.” Great ears held up his cigarette, shrugged. “Not so bad.”

The third raised his finger. “Moi, je veux dire un truc.”

Going down Reguliersgracht, the canal kept catching the moon, its reflection ducking under the bridges. Cars passed furtively like hunted animals. Inside the tall peaceful living room windows, books stood seriously on shelves, pictures hung meaningfully on white walls, and people dined under crystal chandeliers at long tables, all talking animatedly. What, Neill wondered, do they have to talk about? What can they believe?

Outside a girly bar a kid in jeans with torn knees, a cloth cap, and holey coat was playing a beaten white Strat hooked to a twenty-watt Peavey, the wind so cold his fingers were blue, his caved-in junkie face all caught up in the music that soared out of the black box as the blue fingers raced up and down the strings. A shorter man in a white jacket came round with a cup.

“Amazing,” Neill said.

“My student,” the man in the white coat said.

Neill dug out his change. Three guilders. “All I have.”

The man nodded peremptorily, moved toward another couple. “He's amazing,” Neill repeated.

Inneka tugged herself closer to him as they walked. Why am I so nervous? Neill asked himself. Is it about this trip, like she said? He should've given more money to the guitarist – it'd been a lie, about the three guilders; he had guilder notes in his wallet. He could have given him five guilders, even ten. You don't hear that every day, someone so connected to God. To hear someone play like that. It was as if it was a lesson, a test, to see if you were willing to pay for what you get.

“Why do you keep turning round?” Inneka said. “What are you afraid of?”

TEN TO MIDNIGHT but the men hadn't left. Four of them, Rosa had decided. With M16s and handguns – Christians hiding in a deserted factory while Beirut raged around them and their brothers battled to their deaths.

One of the Christians kept too far apart, a sentry – she couldn't be sure to get him with the first grenade, he might have time to dive among the rubble, and then it'd be his rifle against her grenades. She should have disobeyed Walid, brought a pistol. But a pistol in this darkness was like having a flare to show people where you are.

If she used two grenades there'd only be eleven left, and Mohammed's men would be angry. But if she waited any longer the grenades might be too late. Then she'd never get to see Mohammed.

She eased the pin out of one grenade and placed it softly on the ground. One man farted, another laughed. “I'm a happy married man,” said a third. “I wouldn't even look at his sister.”

“Now we know you're a liar. To have said happy and married in the same sentence.”

“For someone who complains so much about his wife, Sylvain, you're always ready to go home.”

“Who wouldn't be when you're the alternative?”

Holding down the lever of the first grenade she took a second from her pocket, pulled the pin with her teeth and spat it quietly on the ground. A grenade in each hand, she inched on hands and knees toward the voices.

“I have to admit,” one was saying, “Muslims cook the best lamb.”

“So why are we killing them?”

“Because they're killing us, remember?”

She reached the last jumble of concrete before the open doorway, their voices five yards beyond. Fighting down her fear she released one lever, then the other.

One second plus one makes two. Two seconds plus two makes three. Three plus three makes four. Four plus four and you always have an extra half a second and she threw one far and one near and dived behind the broken concrete.

A clatter of steel, a yell. The air sucked in, glared white and the boom threw her up and smashed her down among flying chunks of steel and concrete in the first grenade's enormous roar that grew and grew, crushed through the hands she'd clasped over her ears down into her skull, her heart, her soul. Great pieces of concrete were smashing down as the second grenade blew, cleaner, hot steel ringing off the shuddering walls. She tried to roll to her feet but couldn't.

Something warm and wet on her neck made her reach up for the wound but it was only a piece of one of the men. Chunks of ceiling kept ticking down. None of the men was moving; their guns were smashed. She stumbled through boiling dust and smoke out the back door of the warehouse into what could be Rue Hussein, she couldn't tell. In the moonlit rubble she could not discern where the Roman arch had been, the square where the old stone houses had grown together like ancient married couples, like old trees.

She could hear nothing, as if at the bottom of the sea, new pain shooting through her ears with every pulse. Mohammed's men would surely be angry that she'd used the two grenades. Four hours late too. Lazy, cowardly slut, they'll have given up on you. She crossed the street and entered the darkness of battered houses on the far side. In four years she'd never been caught; don't start now.

“You can stop now,” a voice whispered, behind her.

“Right now!” said another.

“Please, sirs, I'm hurrying home –”

“Hah! Abdul, it's a wench!”

“Lucky you didn't kill her!”

A match scraped, flared toward her.

8

“I’M A MOTHER.” She forced down the quaver in her voice. “Trying to get home.”

In the light of the match she saw a red dirty hand, a smudged candle stub. “Keep your arms up,” the other one said, “mother.”

“I must get to Rue Hamra. My father –”

“He can wait. No doubt he's had a few pieces too in his life.”

“What are you? Israelis, Syrians? I'm carrying a child!”

“Was it a nice fuck – the one that knocked you up?”

In the greasy candle light she couldn't find their faces, only shapes, one against the wall, the other closer. She reached for a grenade. “Get undressed,” he said.

“I can't.”

“We'll teach you what a big one feels like. Two of them.”

The muzzle he shoved against her was short and hot, an Uzi's. “Either we do it nice,” he said, “or we do it nasty. One way you live, one way you don't.” His fingers brushed her breast, traveled downwards. She pushed the hand away. “Watch it, mother,” he said softly.

“Please...”

He tugged her hair. “I'm running out of patience.”

“I'll lie down in darkness, over there. You, by the wall there – you come first.”

She undressed in the darkness, laying the grenades and her clothes to one side.

“Where are you, chicken?” he whispered. He had a soft young beard and hard hands. “You're not pregnant!”

“It was a pillow, I didn't want this.” She was shivering so hard she feared she'd throw up.

“Hurry!” the other whispered.

The first finished, facing away as he pulled himself to his feet, stepped back to his gun. The other came forward, knelt, sliding down his pants, his gun loose in the crotch of his arm as he took in her body, leaning his belly down on her. With the heel of her hand she snapped his head up hard, snatched the gun, rolled out from under him and shot the other three times, hearing the bullets smack, then shot this one on the ground, the bullet bouncing back up through his head. He kept squirming so she shot him again between the eyes but he wouldn't stop, even when she leaned down and shot him through the back of the neck.

The air stank. She crouched in a corner to urinate. Animals, she swore. All of us.

THIS IS NOT SO BAD, Neill thought, not realizing it was a dream, stepping into the next street where there was nothing but one house far out on the smashed burnt landscape. In a rubbled square stood a wooden shed with a sign that said Bill. He wandered the dirty streets of Beirut, astonished to remember so much. So many houses were gone. He went to the post office with a friend who then met a black girl and left with her, and Neill found a French 10-franc piece on the floor and put it on the counter and the clerk bit into it to see if it was real.

He gave money to a Muslim and a Christian boy in a blown-down street. In a building full of old people and wounded, a wrinkled ancient couple lay naked on a bed in the heat; Neill went downstairs to the desk and recognized the place as a hotel he'd used to make calls back to the UK, years ago.

On the upstairs screened veranda he sat beside a woman in black garters and green underpants with a tattoo on her arm. “I've been shooting tomato juice,” she explained. Three men came in. One had a stack of heroin syringes up under both sides of his Levi jacket. He handed her one then another and she injected them into her neck. She must have shot all the veins in her arms, Neill thought. When the last syringe was empty, the man wiped the bloody needle on Neill's knee. The heroin, Neill wondered, did it come from the Bekaa?

Something stood behind Neill but he didn't see it till the last moment: Death smiling down, no escape. He thought he'd left the door open and started to get up, but it was just another dream. It was because of these damn dreams that he couldn't sleep.

He switched on the lamp, thinking if Inneka's got lamps on both sides of the bed then she must have another guy. From the yellow light a skull leaped at him with jaws bared – no, this wasn't a dream, just the skull on Inneka's desk, seedy in the malarial light, jaw downhung in disappointment. Her little memento mori.

On the ceiling the streetlit shadows of the last sycamore leaves leaped and lurched in the wind. Through the barely open window came the rumble of a car's tires down the wet bricks of Prinsengracht, of clamoring leaves and jostled branches, hiss of cold air over water.

The quilt rustled as Inneka snuggled her back tighter against him. A spray of rain hit the window, as if thrown from a bucket. The leaf and branch shadows lunged harder, writhing against themselves like men being torn apart. His armpit was sore; he pulled his arm from under her head and moved it down between them.

Rain clattered on the roof tiles. Centuries of rain falling on these tiles, he thought, these crooked tall houses stooped like old men. This room of stone, beams, and leaded glass had once been a hayloft where sixteenth-century kids and lovers rummaged. He tried to imagine how they'd looked, felt, acted. Their loves, doubts, and pains. Whom they killed and how, and how they died. How they made love, each time, all of them.

He felt Inneka's warmth settle against his arm, thought of this attic swallowing the two of them also in its silent history.

There was no reason to lose his nerve about this trip. Nothing to fear, nothing he'd be doing that was as dangerous as driving across London. He'd either get to talk to Mohammed or he wouldn't. Give it his best shot. If he did, he'd have a good series for the paper and fifteen thousand from Freeman. But if it fell through – the thought gave him a shiver – he could still come back, pick up where he'd left off. Beverly's client meetings and the kids busy with homework, and every article he wrote exactly the same. Politics – men in gray suits, hapless craven argumentative souls like filthy mirrors casting back a tainted version of all they see.

His mouth felt dry and he thought of getting a drink of water in the bathroom; even the pipe-warm, bleached taste would be great. At dawn would be the chilled station, the train swinging across flat Holland in gray cold rain, from Europe's northern coast up its great river through its cold mountain heart toward the sun.

Bratislava then Beirut. If he was lucky, people in Bratislava could tell him the best way into Beirut. The way to find Mohammed. What was the old saying – about the Mountain coming to Mohammed? Couldn't remember. In Bratislava there'd be Michael Szay – he was selling guns to Mohammed, Freeman had said. And there was Tomás. If anyone in the press knew where to find Mohammed, Tomás would be the one.

Beirut. Like Amsterdam once so innocent and light, now ready to kill you so quickly. Even if you get to see Mohammed, he told himself, there's no way he'll know about Freeman. You're just a journalist, in and out.

Nothing to be afraid of.

The clock on the dresser said 4:44. His underarm felt so damn sore. Burnt out. He'd sleep on the train. No one would be following. Not here.

“I always knew if Bev got in touch with her feelings she'd realize she didn't want to be with me,” he'd told Inneka.

“You always said the unexamined life's not worth living,” she'd answered.

PRINSENGRACHT was slippery with mist off the canal. Gripping his arm like a hostage's, Inneka walked beside him to the corner up to Vijzelstraat, her raincoat tight over her bathrobe, her leather boots half-zipped, her hair straggly and damp. “There's going to be a taxi right away,” she said, “and I'll never have time to say how much I love you but I get mad because you're never here and I love you so much I get angry because she has you all the time and doesn't love you and I –”

“She loves me.”

“Not like I do!” Inneka caught a heel in a crack between the bricks, yanking his arm. “Sometimes it's a month I don't see you! It doesn't even bother you.”

“Sure it does. I'd rather be with you.”

“You have her. I have nobody!”

“Like I said, you should have somebody, I wouldn't mind. I'm not afraid I'm going to lose you.”

“You bastard, I hate you –”

“I meant I love you.”

“You don't even understand what you mean.”

Down wide wet Vijzelstraat dawn was breaking over the disconsolate trolley wires and vapid windows, the loitering rubbish bins, a solitary high-tailed black cat stalking an alley. The bag tugged his stitches. It would give them time to heal, the train. “Nothing I do I understand – you want me to understand this?”

“All the things I said – we make them worse.”

“Let's just have what we have while we have it.”

“I fear for us.” She clutched him harder.

“We'll stop if you want. But I think life's too short, too rough, not to do what we can, what we want. I want to keep seeing you. I don't want to grow old and die not seeing you.”

“We have all eternity, Neill, to be apart.”

THE BITCH nosed the puppy but it didn't move. It was cold and she knew it was dead but she kept pushing its rigid chilled body in a dusty circle. She trotted with it in her jaws across the ruins of Bab El-Edriss to a place where stolen vehicles had been parked in the blasted ruins of a goldsmith's shop, and laid it among four others.

From a crest of a collapsed apartment building further up the Rue du Patriarche a pack of dogs watched her go back down through the ruins. She stopped to sniff where once someone had defecated, but it had already been eaten. She loped round the corner into Avenue des Français, glancing back once. A large thin black male trotted after her; the others sniffed the wind and followed.

ANDRÉ TOOK THE BACK ROAD toward Paris, letting the car slide through the dew-wet curves, beech leaves slick on thin macadam, thinking should've changed the back tires, tread's too slick. A doe bounded through an apple orchard over leaf-yellow ground, pushed low by the hunters; there was a furl of silver from a roadside stream, trout there if you had the time, a stretch of dairy barns, beams and straw. The engine was hard and hot now, hungry for it, snarling into the curves, baring its teeth as it tore out of them, roaring into the high gears, into the blur of life. You're going to kill yourself, he realized and backed it down through the gears, against the engine's banshee wail of disappointment. The road swung round a low beamed house with a plume of smoke and dropped down a steep bouldered slope into a forest.

From Gaillon he took the A13 over the rolling half-forested Normandy hills. There were no cars and he let the Alpine out to 250, till it wanted to fly, the front end planing, the broken line a solid blur, the car vibrating ecstatically, the wind roaring like an engine. The glove box fell open, a flashlight tumbling out, papers. A truck flashed past, “Barboizon & Fils – Démenagements”, a faraway jet was a twist of foil in the early sky. Again he let the Alpine back off, down to 200, 180, 150 – there was traffic now, a 735i came up and he dropped it back then slowed and let it pass, its driver choleric and fleshy, a cigarette drooping from his lips.

9

THE DOGS TRACKED the bitch along l’Avenue des Français toward the rubbish dump where the Hotel Normandy had been. She'd seen them and was running now, through a façade of brick and down an alley – but that was wrong because a building had fallen in at the end, and she had to scramble up the rubble and swing round to face them at the top.

They came bounding down the alley and she saw a way out along a slim standing wall, ran across it knowing they'd gain, across a wide square of blasted cars and truncated palms, houses of blackened windows, into a shop with no door, no one to run to, under a hole at the back and across a collapsed building up the trunk of a fallen tree to another wall. One of the dogs snatched her back foot but she pulled free, ripped at his muzzle, dove off the wall and squirmed under a burnt car, the others trying to reach her but she hunched up in the middle and they couldn't get her till one shoved far in and grabbed a front paw. He dragged her out and they tore into her, ripping, crunching up her bones.

The big black thin male dragged away one shoulder, others fighting over ribs, legs, intestines, brains, scraps of skin, smears of blood. They circled the big male, worrying at him, and each time he snapped at one, another darted for the meat; he caught one across the neck and it squealed away but another feinted in. He snatched the meat and dashed back down the alley, the others alongside snatching at the meat; he ducked into a stair corner and dropped it, faced them.

They were three across in the narrow stairway – the young Belgian shepherd male and two red females, the rest behind. Growling, teeth bared, he backed tight into the corner, realized he shouldn't and tried to move forward but one red bitch had edged closer and if he went for her the others would have his neck. He leaped over them but one got him by the scrotum, the Belgian shepherd by the jaw, dragging him down – he couldn't shake it loose. The others were at his belly now, his groin, his thighs, pulling him down under their tearing weight and he was trying to protect his belly but they rolled him over and tore out his throat, snarling and ripping at each other for pieces of him.

A human came out of the building and the dogs backed away, snarling, dragging pieces of meat. A female human. It stepped round the big male's body, and the young Belgian shepherd male circled closer, sniffing for a wound, but this human was healthy, with only the smell of sex and fear about it.

ROSA KEPT GLANCING BACK but after a block the dogs stopped following. The ground crackled beneath her feet. An AK47 snapped nearby, shocking under the early hot sun. Now there was a jet, far away, the crunch and rumble of artillery in the Shouf. She wondered who was shelling whom, and why.

Rue Chateaubriand was blocked so she turned up an alley where the yellow-bricked Phoenician wall still stood waist high. At the top a gray Mercedes sat in the driveway of a wrecked house. There were four Hezbollah in the Mercedes and others in a broken apartment building behind the house. The plane buzzed closer and one of the men in the apartments fired at it. A man in gray shirt and sunglasses got out of the Mercedes. “You're late.”

“I've got a message for Mohammed.”

They drove fast, dodging the rubble and barricades, uphill toward the Grand Serail, stopped at a truncated building on Rue de France. In one room bodies lay bandaged among sandbags. There was a little room of medical supplies, a radio room and then the captain's office.

“Mohammed doesn't see messengers,” the captain said. “That's my job.”

“I got through their lines and know how to get out. We can build a supply line – I must tell Mohammed.”

He had a nice smile, this captain. His beard was clipped away from his lips, a scar ran across his forehead and another between two right-hand fingers, his camouflage shirt was dark with sweat. “We need you and the others to keep coming through the infidels with your bellies full of grenades, Rosa – that's your job.”

He gave her his playboy smile again and she decided maybe she didn't like him. His hands were too big, his nose was wrong: you couldn't trust him. “If I can speak to Mohammed about how to get outside, come at them from behind, cut them in two –”

“A woman's writing strategy now?”

“You could find your way in here, with a sack of grenades?”

“I can't act pregnant.”

No, she certainly did not like this squalid little man, his sharp beard and pointed chin. That was the trouble with militia – the killers ruled, the sordid ran behind. “You'd do just fine, being pregnant,” she sneered, “if you half tried.”

THE TRAIN TILTED into a curve, naked poplars running along a ditch, pigeons casting away from bare furrows under a wet wind, distant rain slanting against a sky of cotton wool. Geese and sheep huddled in a flooded field, God hanging dead over endless cemeteries, trains of rain-shiny new cars on the sidings, camouflaged hunters afoot in mean, close-cropped fields. There were hedgerows, copses, orchards, yellow and blue snub-nosed Dutch trains, nuclear power plants, empty warehouses with broken windows and rusty galvanized roofs, brown stolid rivers, a yellow derrick with the name “Verhagen” in a grove of soggy, chilled birch. Why, he wondered, do the top leaves always cling the longest?

That was the best of Islamic teaching, it clung to fundamental decencies, to an ancient branch of life: take care of the poor, the disinherited, alleviate corruption, simplify and purify our souls...

But the Koran left nothing unanswered, even that which had no answer. The prophet Mohammed received inspirations to questions posed by himself or others; these inspirations, the suras, became a rigid structure of belief learned by repetition, whose challenge was punished by death on earth, eternity in Hell.

The Crusaders went to the Holy Land to deliver it from this heresy, to slaughter the infidels. Those who came back brought the techniques of cathedral architecture, which led to the Gothic enlightenment and the principles of advanced castle construction, which led to a more advanced rate of slaughter. They also brought rattus rattus, the black rat, which in turn brought the Black Plague: God's way, Neill had always thought, of punishing the Europeans for the sin of Christianity.

A rusty railroad engine huddled in brush on an abandoned siding. How many lives had it carried back and forth across Europe? What did they come to, each of them?

Three American men were talking loudly in the seats ahead, trading dirty gay jokes in the mistaken impression no one could understand English, or perhaps not even caring. One was being teased about curling his eyebrows. “You go to Paris to make money,” he said. “Like Tokyo. The catalogues, fashion shows, magazines, even TV. Madrid too – you can make money there, though not as much as in Paris.”

“Do you really curl your eyebrows?” another said.

Ubiquitous greenhouses flitting by, amid grimy cities and prim little towns with patches of muddy green between them. “Have to have the clothes,” the first added. “Have to have the clothes.” One made a farting sound with his mouth; they laughed. Rain loud as hail struck the train roof, the window

ANDRÉ LEFT THE ALPINE on Boulevard des Invalides near the Musée Rodin, and crossed against the light, Napoleon’s gold-domed crypt afire with sun. He turned into the courtyard at 57 bis Rue de Varenne and took the elevator to the third floor, to a bright office with rooms along one side looking down into the courtyard.

“You don't even speak Arabic,” St. Honoré said.

“But I know Beirut. And it doesn't matter they've got him surrounded, he'll get away. I know where he'll go.”

“Where, pray tell?”

André smiled at St. Honoré's silly envy of a desk man for those who come home with blood on their hands. “It's a waste to tell you; he'll break through one sector, slip round it and get them in the backs.”

“The Israelis'll bomb him to the stone age.”

“They've been trying for two years. Look at the result.”

“Same as yours will be.”

“I'm one man, Christian! I can weave right into that crowd.”

“With your blue eyes and fluent Arabic.”

“I know enough people and you know it.”

“So how’s Haroun going to help you?” St. Honoré leaned further back in his chair, as if obeying the dictate never to act interested unless you need to. “He's got Palestinians and Hezbollah and Druze and Amal and every other kind of Arab under the sun crawling down his throat. Just because you were with him before isn't going to bring you much.”

“That's how you decide who to revenge?”

“The President and the Palestinians, they're hot right now.”

“Hezbollah's not the Palestinians.”

“Iran's making overtures. Foreign Affairs is wrapping up that billion-dollar reactor debt. The Iranians are moderate now.”

“You know they did it, Christian! Everyone knows!”

“That's the trouble with you military guys, you're hung up on truth. Do you understand the place we're in – la France? We burn over twenty billion francs of natural gas a year. A third of it comes from Russia, another third from Algeria – both unstable. Any day now we could lose two-thirds of our supply. Literally overnight. We have to diversify.”

“And you think Iran's more sure?”

“Iran has seventeen trillion cubic meters of natural gas, the world's second largest reserves.”

André thought of St. Honoré when they'd been little, at Institut Suffren. When St. Honoré’s mother drove up every morning in the big white Porsche and made him lift up his little tablier and piss on the tree outside before he went in to school. Running across the Champs de Mars, skinny knees, tablier caught in the wind. The Fields of War – how long since I've thought of it like that?

“The Government’s negotiating a pipeline deal with the Iranian National Gas Company,” St. Honoré said, “that could eventually supply one-third of our national need, at two billion francs a year cheaper than the Russians. Against that, André, how much do you think your brother's death should weigh?”

“Forty-seven French paratroopers died when Hezbollah blew those barracks, not just Yves.”

“France has always required her young men to lay down their lives – whenever she wants. The Government would argue, in the long run, that even Yves' death was for the good of France. When we're called, we don't get to choose how we might die.”

Again André thought of St. Honoré's little black tablier sailing in the wind. St. Honoré'd lost something, and he, André, had found it. But he couldn't remember what it was. “When were you ever called, Christian?”

St. Honoré was listening to traffic on Rue de Varenne. “We go back a long way, mon cher. But I don't ask you to like me. I just ask you to understand that your plan gets no sympathy here. In fact, if you go ahead with it, we're going to get badly in your way.”

“You'd tell him? Via your bedmates in Tehran?”

“He's overstepped his bounds, this Mohammed. Other people out there want him. The Russians, maybe, surely the Israelis, the Americans. But not you. We don't want la France mixed up in this.”

André felt sweaty, as if he'd been driving too fast. “If la France doesn't care about Yves, screw la France.”

“Unless you drop this idea, we have to do what it takes to stop you.” The phone buzzed; St. Honoré's hand fell on it. “All the way from the top, mon cher, the rule right now is don't piss off Hezbollah.”

André shrugged, stood. “I didn't come to ask your advice. I came to tell you.” He smiled. “So you don't shoot me by mistake.”

“If and when we shoot you,” St. Honoré smiled back, “it won't be by mistake.”

10

ASYRIAN 240 came over the Green Line, caught people running; a machine gun coughed, tracers darting among the runners. Three bodies lay in the street, one dragging itself backwards till the machine gun coughed again.

Rosa backed from the window. “Despite being surrounded, you seem to have lots to eat.”

One of the men crouched round the fire turned, mouth full of bread and lentils. “You've got plump enough yourself, on the outside.”

A round cracked across the ceiling. Mortars thudded, one, two, three, onto the roof.

“We're going to break out soon,” one said.

“He's got a plan,” another answered, chewing. “The people outside, they'll break in.”

“If you believe that,” Rosa said, “I've got another story for you.”

“And you think he'll listen to you?”

She returned to the window, edging her face round the frame, thought of a sniper's bullet hitting her head, how hard it would feel. Darkness had fallen on the Green Line, shrapnel wailing through the streets, sound of a chopper – no, two – beyond the Israeli lines, the metallic plaint of a buoy out to sea. Then she remembered that all the buoys had been sunk, and whatever the sound was it wasn't out there to save lives.

She heard a rush and patter in the street below. Fearing an attack she glanced down quickly and saw dark shapes, low, fast. She ducked back, against the wall, breathless. Dogs. The ones she'd seen – when? This morning?

She wanted to glance out again but it was too dangerous now; if there was someone out there with a night scope, next time she looked out he'd get her. That's how bad this situation had become, she realized; even an attack here seemed possible. While Mohammed awaited the word of God.

AN OLD MAN in a thin djellabah crouched on the cold concrete quay of Duisburg Station, selling cassettes from a packing crate, AC/DC on a black JVC beside him,

You're only young

but you're gonna die.

I won't take no prisoners,

won't spare no lives.

“Where do you get them?” Neill said.

The man glanced up, surprised by the Arabic, the European face. “Wholesale.”

“They're illegal copies.”

The man looked up and down the quay, shrugged. “Surely not.”

“Where you from?”

The man watched him. “Sidon.”

'"Poor Saida, so close to Israel, so far from God ..."'

Despite himself the man smiled. “There are many viewpoints.”

In a station café Neill ate steak and onions and drank Kaiser Pils till his train was called. A single compartment, first class, the window streaked with rain as the train meandered the bombed medieval memories of Cologne and followed the Rhine canyon south through the soft rolling Rheinisches Schiefergebirge, forests and castles on their crests, steep swathes of grapes below, past Koblenz, the ancient roots of European reason, the Odenwald, and he had again the sense he'd had in Inneka's bedroom, of the generations upon generations who had lived here. Like the sense of all the lives the rusted locomotive had towed across Europe. Here in these German hills, it seemed, was lost the ancient reason for man. Houses flitted by, singular and ephemeral as souls. There was no reason and no rule, no reason for man, falling in space, reaching for anything.

What was he reaching for, with Bev? With Inneka? They were going to die too, maybe before him. He was contorting his mind with worries about who to love, who to live with, for nothing. So that he didn't have to think about death.

He closed the window, took up the Arab newspapers he'd brought in Duisburg Station, and began to read them carefully.

PASTIS IS THE PARAS as much as the bullets themselves, André thought, watching its golden trickles down the inside of his father's glass. The hard friendships, the smoldering anger, the fun. “Michel!” his father roared. “Encore deux!”

“Got to go, Papa.”

“One more? Come on, mon fils, it does us good!” His father grinning his broad-jawed silvered teeth, chubby cheeks curling up into his eyes. “Leave these women alone, for God's sake!”

“Don't cast stones.”

His father tilted his pastis glass, contemplated it. André thought of the Red Indians, how supposedly they had learned the art of silence. How right his father had been to teach it, a soldier's gift. “I've known Haroun thirty years,” his father said. “Never had a reason not to trust him. But I've never learned who you can trust, for sure, until it's too late.”

“I don't trust anybody, Papa.”

“You saw your friend?”

“He's not my friend.”

“They're so in love with political solutions, those boys at Matignon.” His father drained the pastis, smacked his lips – it made him seem a huge gregarious bear with a silver crewcut, gray-bristly cheeks and merry little black eyes. “People who've never been to war, you never can tell what they'll do. How they'll decide to prove their courage.” He raised his glass and nodded at Michel. “No matter how many other people’s lives it takes.”

Michel refilled their glasses and laid a pack of Gauloises on the counter. André's father tore it open and lit one. “Such shit –”

“Don't smoke them then.”

“This pastis. Not like the old stuff,” he raised high his glass like a scientist examining a test tube. “The old stuff, it made your veins sing.” He put the glass down. “All those herbs crushed together – the essence of Provence, basil, rosemary, thyme, anise, sage – ah!” He smacked his lips. “This!” He raised the test tube again, downed it, wrinkling his lips. “La merde! Factory-made! La nouvelle France – Arabs, niggers, drug addicts, pederasts, thieves.”

André glanced down the bar. “See you, Papa.”

His father laid a fifty franc bill beside the empty yellow glass. “Coming with you.”

Outside the early darkness was damp and fresh, the pavements filled with people hurrying home with children and handbags and briefcases and bread and bags of vegetables and fruit and cheese and wine. “Nobody on the other side,” his father said, “is going to believe your story, once they tie you to Haroun.”

“He's just a point de départ.”

They came to Emile Zola, a taxi splashing through the crosswalk. “Start saving now for your burial expenses,” an electric sign said. “Spare your family.” His father was short of breath, hissing through his nostrils, trying not to show it. “I told your mama if there's one chance in a thousand of losing you, I wouldn't want to take it. And I don't.”

“It's not Oran, Papa. Not Hanoi. I know Beirut.”

“I knew Oran. That didn't keep me from losing two hundred men there. Each with a family and dreams. And another twelve hundred wounded. A lot of them ruined for life.”

André nodded. “And just like Beirut, we took a beating and ran away. When we were the stronger! Killing our own brave men for nothing.”

“Nobody wins all the time, even the strong. We're lucky to win at all.”

“You don't believe that.” André embraced him, his father's bristly cheeks against his own.

His father seemed to be chewing something far back inside his mouth. “Let me know, what happens.” He turned and walked toward the métro entrance, suddenly a bowed-over burly man who hesitated at the stairs, looked back and nodded, a wink perhaps, André couldn't see, and stepped down into the teeming maw as into a freshly turned mass grave.

11

“YOU? LEADING MUJIHADEEN?” Mohammed said.

“You'd be leading them,” Rosa answered. “I just know the way to safety.”

“I don't care about their safety. Nor do they.”

“If they're dead, how can they fight?”

Static rose and fell on the radio, the operator bent over it as if praying, Rosa thought, awaiting the Word. Four mujihadeen were playing cards on a piece of cardboard set on a broken box. Like rodents, Mohammed's fingers burrowed into his gown, joined. “She fears for your safety, Hassan!” he called to the guard at the door.

Crunching a pistachio shell in his teeth, Hassan looked straight at Rosa, back to Mohammed, spat the shell.

She curled her lip. “I want to win.”

Mohammed's head tilted back, shadowed in the yellow lamplight, his blue eyes seeming to look down his face, his full beard, to hers. “Win?”

Long and pale-whiskered in his white gown, he looked both taut and empty of everything, as if not really there – only the maroon pillows on which he sat, the torn carpet littered with cartridge casings, the guard picking his teeth with a broken match, a European country scene in a shattered gilded frame hanging sideways on the graffiti-covered wall.

“We had a picture like that, when I was a girl,” she said. “Of a woman walking a path toward a straw-roofed cottage, with purple hills behind. Made you feel warm, going home.”

He yawned, covering his mouth. “And?”

“It was in our farm at Ramalla. Where my mother and father moved in 1950 after we escaped from Beersheba. Then in 1967 we escaped to Nablus, and the mule died, and then to Zababida where we had to live in a tent camp and my father caught tuberculosis. Then they moved us across the Jordan to another camp where both my sisters died, and then to Tiberias where my father dug a farm out of the rocks and boulders, but they took that away and chased us across the Golan and up the Jebel ech Cheikh to Mount Hermon where my father and mother died, in Ain Aata, when the Israelis bombed us. And you ask me what it means to win?”

“God grant peace to the souls of your family,” Mohammed said mechanically. “What was it like, in Ain Aata?”

“Everyone made us feel outsiders. Going home from school the boys hit me with rocks.”

“There were too many of you, coming up from Palestine.”

“If I have to tell you what winning means ...” She paused, a shell coming like a distant train's whistle, something that could take you somewhere, far from it all. For a very long time it came no nearer, wailing in mid-sky, then dived at them shrieking, seething metal louder than a comet rushing down; she rolled over on her side clutching her head as the building shuddered and heaved in the roar of falling concrete in the next street, plaster crashing down.

She sat up, head covered, held her breath till the ceiling stopped falling. Bullets cracked along a wall, plaster flying. Another shell was screaming down; her ears were blocked with plaster dust, she couldn't hear; the shell fell a few streets away, the building shuddering anew like a crazed dancer. “You should be ashamed!” she yelled. “To let them shell us like this!”

Mohammed brushed plaster chunks from her shoulders. “That was Amal, from Shatila. A mistake –”

One of the guards relit the lantern, throwing the room into jagged boiling shadows. Somewhere overhead a machine gun fired, then a Kalashnikov, a long, rattling salvo. “Shooting at nothing!” she fumed. Another shell was dropping; they keep coming, she thought, like homeless children, like hunting dogs. “Don't you care?” she screamed. The shell fell like a dying airplane into the next street, knocking her to her knees, new plaster tumbling. He said something she couldn't hear over the waterfall rumble of a building collapsing. It takes so long, she thought, for a building to fall, like a man dying.

Mohammed was brushing plaster from her shoulder again, and she sensed suddenly how much he did care that this was happening, that the way to make him gentle was to hurt him. A bullet sang off the window frame into the room, seeking flesh. “You're going to lose us all,” she said.

“Kill the light!” he called.

“We'll have to move down a floor,” a guard yelled. “The other side.”

“Can't see from there.”

“He's in the Life Building over there, your sniper,” Rosa shouted.

“We can't get him from here!” Hassan snarled. Bullets punched through the wall, fifty caliber, and she dove hitting her head on chunks of plaster. The bullets had crossed right through, in the front walls and out the back; she lay gripping a gun then realized it was a piece of the gilded frame.

She followed them down the dark plaster-piled stairway to the next floor. They were smashing open a door to a back apartment. The wood splintered and gave. An enormous bang knocked her to her knees, the floor wobbling.

“Just a rocket, up there,” Mohammed said calmly, as if he'd found the simple answer to a complex problem. “Lucky we moved.”

The new apartment was well-furnished. Like an archaeological dig, Rosa thought, a tomb not yet looted. “Damn!” Hassan said, lighting the lantern.

More mujihadeen were coming down from the upper stories. “They've located you,” one said to Mohammed.

An old man came running up the stairs and into the room, knelt before Mohammed. “Cut that out,” Mohammed snapped.

The old man stood, panting. “Hekmatyar says send a hundred men. Fifty rocket grenades. Or we can't hold all night.”

“Tell him to pull back now. To Soutros Soustani.”

Another rocket hit upstairs and the old man clasped his ears. Rosa shoved him aside, yelled at Mohammed, “I'll shut your snipers up. Give me a gun!”

“My son's there,” the old man said, “with Hekmatyar.”

“He'll pull back now. To safety.”

Rosa snatched Mohammed's arm. “You're abandoning the Green Line?”

“I don't have the men to hold it.”

“Put the wounded here?” someone called.

“Basement!” Mohammed yelled. Another rocket smashed through the upstairs and out the back, exploding in air, pieces howling down.

“Who's on the roof?”

“Dead!”

“Who's upstairs?”

“None.”

“Got to go!” someone was saying, over and over. “Go!”

Rosa shook Mohammed's arm. “Give me a gun!”

“The basement,” someone yelled.

“No!” Mohammed thundered through the plaster dust and echoing explosions. “I want an outpost here!”

She snatched his beard in both hands and shook it. “Do you want to kill those snipers?”

“Quiet!” he snapped.

“It's Christians in the Life Building,” she seethed, “with antitank rockets and a fifty caliber! Give me a gun, and I'll get them!”

“You?” Hassan was coughing from the dust. “You?”

“If I get them,” she said to Mohammed, “will you follow my plan?”

Another rocket hit and he pushed her down. “Go back to Mount Hermon, Rosa! Leave us to fight.”

WET COBBLES HISSED AND RATTLED under the tires, a cat's eyes flashed from beneath a parked Citroen, a big dog bent over a trash can – then André saw it was an old man. “You're going to kill yourself with those cigarettes,” he said to Monique.

“Can't stop,” she said.

“If someone said stop or they'd shoot you, wouldn't you stop?”

“You always think one more won't hurt you.”

He pushed the button to open her window a crack, to suck her cigarette smoke out. “Funny it's what we love that kills us.”

“Sometimes I think it's the reverse: we kill what we love.” She took a last drag on the cigarette, tossed it out of the window. “You ever think where you want to be when you die?”

“Buried?”

“I want to be in Corsica, a rocky hill high over the sea. I told Hermann that, but he couldn't give a damn – thinks we're all going to live forever.”

He turned into Rue Etienne Marcel, shifted into second, letting the car snap them back, slid his hand up her short skirt, the lovely silky thigh perfect against his palm. “I like the sea.”

She put her hand over his. “You'd be buried there?”

“Down with the fish and octopus, the sharks, flesh of their flesh.”

A taxi shot out of a side street and he braked hard, the Alpine sideskidding. Should have switched the rear tires, he reminded himself angrily.

“That's it, isn't it?” She pointed up at a crooked tower over the narrow twisting street. “The tour de Jean sans Peur?”

“He built it with a fortified room at the top, to spend his nights.”

“Who'd he kill? I forgot.”

“His cousin, the Duke of Orleans, in the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois.”

“Imagine, never daring to sleep, for fear you'll be knifed to death.”

“He was killed anyway, by the Armagnacs.” He geared down, hit the high beams. “Has to be here.” On one side of the next street, tall leaning stone façades, on the other a wall two stories high with a great red carved door. André pulled up on the paved drive, and sounded the horn and the door swung open.

Inside, cars were parked in a broad cobbled square lit by the tall windows of a great house with a double curving stone staircase. “Whatever you do,” she said, “don't say who I am.”

12

THE MAP WAS BLOODY and torn across Shatila, Rosa noticed. Where they'd slaughtered so many. For an instant war seemed insane, like facing a mirror and smashing your image till you bleed to death. Here at Rue Weygand the map was worn by many fingers having moved across it, fingers seeking ways out, ambushes, corners, dead ends, ways to get caught and ways not to, the brutal business of death. How far can that rocket reach? How long can he breathe with a 7.62 through his lungs?

“It's a firestorm,” the boy was saying. He was dirty and thin, a tail of keffiyeh over long curly blond hair, a Christian cross chained to his neck in case of capture. He couldn't stop his lips from shaking; he kept pinching them with his fingers, and the tears were streaking his cheeks, making him seem even younger. Every time he started to talk his lips would shiver and the tears ran.

“You don't have to go back,” Mohammed said.

A rocket came down clattering over by the Serail, only half blew. “Send us more men.”

“There aren't any.”

“Here?” The boy glanced round. Bullets drummed into the front wall; upstairs someone fired back.

“I have ten men for a command that should have fifty,” Mohammed said. “Every man I take from here risks losing a hundred elsewhere.”

“I understand.”

Mohammed hugged him across the shoulders, pulling him close, touched his forehead to the boy's temple. “Go quickly and carefully.” He stood back. “Look at me!” When the boy glanced up, Mohammed looked straight into his eyes. “I order you not to die.”

The boy glanced down as if contrite.

“And tell Abou Hamid,” Mohammed said, “to pull back to Riad Solh, except for the one building that makes the L at the corner. Tell him no matter what don't lose it. Retreat to it if you have to, but don't lose it.”

“If we do, we can't get across –”

A bullet snapped overhead but Mohammed did not duck. “Keep the three buildings around it – you'll see, there's three in a box. They're all stone with small windows. If you keep the upper stories you can sweep the streets and nobody's going to come in, and until they get the Israelis or the Americans on you you're OK. Keep the M60 on the top floor of the building on the right and one Katyusha the next floor down in the middle. Two riflemen at least in the place on the left, one top, one middle.”

A man with a bandaged head came in, winded from the climb. He hugged Mohammed and the boy, one guard.

'Go on,” Mohammed told the boy. “Tell them no rock 'n roll.”

“Full automatic? We don't have the ammo.”

“Do you want to speak to Al-Safa?” the radio man called.

Mohammed took the phone. “Allah!” He turned to the boy. “I'll be there at midnight.”

“Don't come –”

“Tell them to pull back,” Mohammed said into the phone.

“We lost the fifty caliber,” the bandaged man said.

“You what?” Mohammed put down the phone.

“A mortar. We don't know whose. Three more men gone; we're down to two magazines each.”

“Like I told Emmaus, no full automatic.”

The man snorted. “You really think those poor kids are going to be into a paradise of solid pussy, where you're sending them?”

A rocket screamed into the floor upstairs and after the explosion there was a long roaring sound like oil catching fire and with a great shrug the floor above them fell outwards. “You heard me,” Mohammed said. “I told them to pull back.”

“To that building that makes the L,” the man said. “And where the hell are they going to pull back to from there?”

Another rocket blew out the ceiling and people were leaning out of the windows to escape from the fumes but the Christians in the Life Building saw them and raked the windows just as Rosa ran screaming at them. “Get down! Get down!” And now there was another to add to the pile of thin young men who lay in the corner uncomplaining, dressed in their own blood.

“Get that sniper!” Rosa screamed.

“More sandbags!” someone was yelling down the stairs. “Bring up more sandbags!”

It was the radio operator who'd been hit, half his head taken off, like a biology textbook, she thought, “Look inside your brain”. But now they couldn't send messages and Hassan ran downstairs to get the girl off the machine gun in the street who knew the signals.

Skidding on blood, Rosa ran into a bedroom. There was a canopied double bed and two dressers with a crucifix high between them. She tore the spread off the bed and swept the snapshots off the dressers into it, some clothes from the drawers, silk scarves, an alarm clock, a pair of heels, tied it all up tight. Bullets were hitting the front of the building like rain, singing up and down the stairway like lost birds. She took down the crucifix, broke it in two, shoved half in the bag and half in her gown.

Back in the living room people were stacking sandbags against the front wall. An AK47 stood against a wall beside a stack of 30-round magazines. Its stock was split and had been wrapped carefully with black tape. Rosa set it to single and crossed halfway to the sandbagged window, aimed across the smoky darkness at a shred of window in the hulk of the Life Building, fired a shot, thought she saw a spark ten feet high, to the left. She backed away and stood rubbing her shoulder where the splintered stock had punched it.

She took one extra magazine. Mohammed was talking into the radio, gave her a surprised look as she left. She went down the seven sets of stairs to the front hallway and stopped ten feet from the door. The hallway was a vaulted dark tunnel to the shallow darkness of the street; something lay on the floor – rubble maybe, or a person. No, just sandbags, two of them, broken.

She crept nearer the door. A chunk of glowing metal fell into the street, writhing and twisting. In its light she saw a burnt car on bare rims, behind it a tall façade with sky through its windows. A rocket hammered overhead, stone crashing and crunching into the street.

Her hands were shaking, her thighs shivering, the rifle kept sliding off her shoulder. She felt as if she'd throw up any moment. She started back up the stairs but forced herself to turn round, go down to the door, look out. Men were running down the street, one with a rocket on his shoulder – fedayeen. She ducked into the hallway, waited till they passed, and edged forward to the door.

More footsteps – a fast shuffle, uneven. Dogs, she worried. No, a single man, bent over, leaving a black trail on the street. Bearded, dirty, head uncovered, unseeing, stumbling, clenching his stomach. Shia? Amal or Hezbollah? Palestinian? Just another refugee?

If she followed him he’d attract snipers before she did. Head down, she stepped into the street holding the bedspread of trinkets loosely over the AK47. The man wobbled and weaved down the hill between the narrow burning buildings, his trail of blood glinting. The way it was spurting and slacking, it had to be an artery, an artery in his gut.

He fell over a pram lying sideways in the street and writhed, shrieking. She ducked into a doorway. If anyone was going to shoot him, they'd wait now, let him suffer. Watching him grovel sideways, in a circle, she was suddenly shocked by this idea of suffering: we like to make others suffer. That was war. That was its purpose.

But why do we like to make others suffer?

He'd risen to his knees. A few rounds whined down the street, twanged off a façade. In a collapsed building somewhere someone was screaming. With a faraway whoosh a Mirage was climbing after a bombing run. The man stood, clenching his gut, stumbled bent over in a circle, looking for his way. He fell, got up and continued down Rue Weygand toward the Green Line.

At the end of the street the glowing carcass of a tank lit up the dark stumps of buildings on Place des Martyres. Tracers were trading tiny yellow and red fires, like electrons, Rosa thought, back and forth. A shell hit a building, a red-white flash and contorted black smoke boiling up. The man staggered boldly out into Martyres, stumbled over something, straightened, and fell down.

He lay flat and unmoving in the red glare of the tank; she couldn't tell if he'd been shot or had just died. Maybe he was resting. Anyway she couldn't chance it.

She backtracked to the first row of standing buildings and turned south. She'd go down Rue Basta and cross at the Museum, hide the gun before she went across and get another on the Christian side. From a corner she glanced back but could not see Mohammed's outpost. Rockets were still coming over, a big recoilless rifle hitting near, 155s in Martyres now. Even if she reached the Life Building it might be too late, and she'd lose him. No, she decided, Mohammed would never be so stupid as to let the Christians kill him.

13

THE RECEPTION ROOM was bigger than his parents' Normandy farm, a three-story ceiling with crystal chandeliers and a double staircase spiraling down from a gallery where a few guests ambled arm in arm. There were Louis XIV chairs and settees and ancient Persian rugs on the polished herringbone oak, Renaissance tapestries on the stone walls.

The whole place curdled André's stomach. Over the heads of well-dressed silver-haired men and hard-smiling jeweled women he looked for Monique but couldn't see her. Her kind of place, really. Her husband would eat it right up.

Hammurabi, as broad as he was tall, held court on center stage, an eager flock around him. Humans just like roaches, André thought; a little excrement pulls them right in. A little money.

Walid Farrahan, code-named Hammurabi in French secret service files, had plenty of that. Every war is fought primarily for profit, and Hammurabi had always been one of the first to shove his face into the trough. Fancy receptions in his Marais mansion to which company presidents and members of Parliament and ministers and ambassadors from nearly every country came scurrying by the hundreds, to clasp his great hard paw and beg for the tools of death.

And for the really lucky there were the soirées intimes in the mansion's back rooms, the saunas and spa rooms, the swimming pool on the roof. A French citizen now, Hammurabi was, they couldn't throw him out. Even if they wanted.

“Ah, the Legionnaire,” Hammurabi rumbled out of his great chest when André forced his way through the throng. “My office told me. Enjoying yourself?”

“Of course.”

Hammurabi waved a sausage finger at the others. “Give us a moment?”

Magically they vanished. “I'm leaving in a few days,” André said. “I don't want to promise anything I can't do.”

Hammurabi fondled a piece of metal round his neck, beneath his tuxedo – a huge diamond-studded cross. “My staff has already confirmed you.” He squeezed André's arm. “See how fast we work? When you get to Beirut and have your order, cable it through with payment. Normal procedure,” he smiled. “Don't worry, my dear Legionnaire, you'll have your scramblers.”

“Conforming to specs?”

“A laser-guided bomb works on very simple principles, as you know. I wouldn't offer you scramblers if they didn't work, would I?”

WATCHING FOR MINES Rosa crossed over the shattered crest of Beirut on Rue Basta and down to the Museum, stored the AK47 in the side-street ruins of a store called Anita's Gifts. There was less war here, just the constant whiffle and swish of things going over, the rattle of guns and thump of mortars. There was a line of overturned buses across Avenue Abdallah Yafi with two armored cars and at least one tank lurking in caves in the rubble, their snouts pointing into the street, and machine guns and rockets in the windows behind. Beyond the shell-shocked intersection, on the Christian side, it was the same.

Behind the overturned buses was a space with gleaming concertina wire and sandbagged positions with fifty calibers. A mujihadeen checked Rosa's papers and spoke on the radio while she sat quietly on a sandbag and it seemed as if the whole cool heavy night weighted down her neck and shoulders. She let it wash over her, told herself she would do this one last thing and no more. It would be enough and if it weren't, she'd tell them she'd given up.

The mujihadeen came back. “You really need to go?”

“My father's in a basement by the Sacre-Coeur.”

“There's surely people there...”

“The building's empty. He's confused, doesn't understand, won't leave.” She looked down, at the mujihadeen's dirty yellow-blue running shoes, how they wouldn't stand still on the ground littered with empty cartridges and cigarette butts.

“They're animals,” he said, “over there. Shot a Palestinian girl last night. Twenty-three, going over to look for food.”

“She looked up into his fair, troubled eyes. “You remind me of my brother.”

“How was he?”

“Very sweet.” She stepped round him past the barricade and down the middle of the wide, bludgeoned avenue. Now she was in Christian rifle range, a Muslim woman rushing toward them with a bundle of something.

She was almost running but it took forever, lugging the loaded bedspread, tripping on chunks of stone, shreds of metal, a dead cat, broken bricks.

The blasted chassis of a car crouched against the Christian curb like a chastised dog. The muzzles of the Christian guns followed her to the first line of smashed cars and concrete. Behind this barricade were Phalange who checked her papers and looked into the bedspread. The captain, younger than the others, with a burn scar across his cheek, took out the clock.

“It was my mother's,” she protested.

“You know I can't let it through.”

“It's for my father, to give him a sense of time.”

“Better having no time these days.”

“That's why he's so mixed up.”

“My mother won't eat,” he said, “because she's afraid we're running out of food. Things are hard but we have food … but she won't eat.”

“Make her exercise. We spend all day crouched in our basements –”

“If she'd just go up to Jounié. She has a sister there.”

“Can you lend me a flashlight? They took mine.” She pointed behind, at the Muslim lines.

He sucked in a breath. “I can't.”

“Please? As soon as I've seen my father I'll bring it back. And pick up my clock.”

“What about my batteries?”

“I'll charge your batteries.”

“How soon?”

She smiled, seeing his face light up. “Two hours?”

He unbuckled the flashlight from his belt. “I'll be here.”

She climbed the steep street past the Hotel Dieu Hospital and the Hotel Alexandre. It was so strange to see the buildings undamaged, cars in the streets, the fighting almost distant like a summer storm.

She went down l’Indépendence and across to Fouad Chehab at Tabariss. Now the guns were louder and she could hear the crack of individual shells against stone. The sky above the black buildings was pink, red, yellow. A rifle fired from a roof and she heard it hit on the Muslim side.

The big front gates of the Sacré-Coeur had been blasted open and there was nothing in the courtyard. She went up to the first floor and through the corridors till she found four nun's habits on knobs, stuffed one into the bedspread and went out through a side door into Youssef Hani, turning right toward the Life Building, the Place des Martyres three blocks on her left, across the Green Line, Mohammed and his men only three blocks further.

Unless they'd pulled back. If they had, it wouldn't matter what happened to the snipers at the Life Building. Mohammed would be beyond their range, beyond hers.

A Katyusha struck in the next block before she could cover her ears and the wham seemed to slice off the top of her head. She crouched on steps going down to a cellar, crying and clasping her ears till the pain dimmed. She took off her gown and put the black habit on. It was dark and confining, like wearing chains; her body couldn't breathe. She hid the bedspread under the stairway and went to Nahr Ibrahim, looking down it to the Place des Martyres where the gut-shot man had fallen, two hours ago, in the glow of the Amal tank.

Mortars were falling there now. She took the trench across Nahr Ibrahim, the habit cloying at her knees. There were Phalange in the basements going up to the Life Building and machine guns at both ends of the street. Bullets and rockets kept ricocheting down into the street. A Phalange grabbed her arm. “No more.”

“My father's in that basement, by the Life Building.”

“A 240 went all the way to the basement before it exploded. There's nothing there, sister.”

“He could have moved to the next basement … the Life Building. I've got to try.”

“I've been there. It's just storage.”

“Storage?”

“You can't stay here, sister. Please.”

She pulled the two halves of the crucifix from her habit. “See what they did? They broke the tree on which the Lord died. But we will join it back together. I swear to you, on this broken cross...”

He backed away a little, watching her, slightly raised the rifle. “I can't let you in, sister. You go home now. Back up to Sacré-Coeur.”

She scanned the Life Building, the other streets coming in, all guarded. With a chuckle another rocket left the top floor, swooshing toward Muslim lines. The key to Mohammed. She backed away. “You should have more pity.”

“Don't beat a dead horse...”

She went round the corner and halfway up the back street till she found a sewer manhole but she couldn't pry it open. At the corner of Nahr Ibrahim she was back in the view of the Phalange at the Life Building but here was an open manhole with steel rungs down into moldy cold darkness. At the bottom, ten feet below the street, tunnels led off in five directions. In one direction, toward the Life Building, was a tiny distant light. Not using the flashlight, she crawled toward it. Tendrils of mud and wire hanging from the ceiling dragged across her face, snatched her hair. The sandy muck at the bottom was jammed with plastic bottles and plastic bags in clumps of twigs and broken glass bottles and again something dead – another rat, she thought. Her fingers bumped a fat, soft, short stick that she tried to pull out of the way but it was someone's hand.

She pulled back in pure terror then realized it was swollen, dead. That was the smell. And the reason why she hadn't been able to see more light was that he was blocking it.

She lay trying to catch her breath, the top of the tunnel heavy on her back, cold muck soaking her chest. She could hardly breathe, her lungs wouldn't open.

She'd have to slow her pulse somehow and calm down but she was dying from no air. She had to breathe, let the thick cold air go slowly in and out. Slowly, she told herself, feeling the blood slacken, the arteries relax. It's just a bad idea that you're dying.

She crawled closer and tried to peer round the dead man. The light was from a wider tunnel beyond him, one that angled toward the Life Building. Taking a grip with her feet and knees at the sides of the tunnel she squirmed hard against him; pushing his shoulders, his blubbery face against hers.

He wouldn't move. She squirmed backwards, inched the habit up round her hips and finally over her shoulders, and crawled forward dragging it behind her. She jammed tight against him, forcing her shoulders forward along him, her belly against his, his soft slippery flesh rolling against her, bubbling gas each time she pressed herself along him, making her hold her breath against the horrible stink. It wouldn't go away and finally she just breathed it, squeezing herself along his wet bulbous mass, pushing the air from her lungs and his to inch her way down him. She caught on his belt buckle and it was too narrow to breathe and she couldn't back up with his face in her crotch and hers in his and she realized someday someone would find them like this, two skeletons enmeshed, and the terror of it jammed her forward past his fat legs, free, gasping and free, dragging her legs away from him, down the tunnel into the light.

14

SHE SQUIRMED to the edge of the larger tunnel, lay sucking in air. There was a light up ahead, out of sight, and one far behind, barely glimmering. A black cable ran along the tunnel. She waited a few minutes longer but no one appeared and she squirmed into the larger tunnel, dirt tumbling down each time a shell hit overhead.

The light was a bulb pinned halfway up on one side. Beyond it was a wide faint corridor that led to an open chamber loud with the fighting above. Voices were coming down, boots thumping wooden stairs, a flashlight darting and stabbing. Four men came into the basement and in their light she could see a series of open-faced rooms stacked with artillery shells, rockets, jerry cans of fuel, crates of rifle cartridges. The men loaded rocket shells on wooden frames on their backs, slid tumplines up their foreheads, and climbed slowly, unsteadily, back up the stairs.

Had the dead man in the tunnel stunk also of cigarettes? It seemed that he had but she couldn't remember. She scrambled back up the lit tunnel and squeezed up to the dead man. In his shirt pocket were cigarettes but no matches. Again she squashed herself along him, wormed a hand into a trouser pocket. A box of matches that rattled when she shook it. She crawled back to the main tunnel, checked the matches in its light. Four, skinny and blue-headed in their little cardboard box.

In the main basement she unscrewed jerry cans and tipped them over, the foul liquid soaking her feet, rising up her socks, sinking into the soil and sliding out into the ammo rooms, and with each new mortar hit above she thought it was people coming down. Trying not to breathe the fumes, she lugged one jerry can back along the main tunnel, pouring it out, then up her side tunnel, squeezing past the man. She dragged the can behind her and all the way to the end, poured the rest of the gasoline down the tunnel, and climbed the steel rungs up to the street.

It was quieter, tracers departing and arriving, the skies darker. She went back down the ladder, lit a match and tossed it into the tunnel. There was quiet whuff then a hiss that slowly died out.

She did not dare to look for fear it would blow in her face. But when she did there was only darkness. She fell against the ladder, felt the sting of tears but they wouldn't come. She couldn't go down there again. It would explode any second. She'd done her best.

She opened the matches. Three. She tossed another in and it huffed and went out. She squirmed back into the tunnel toward the dead man.

It was faster this time, she kept telling herself. The man was easier to crawl past, most of the gas had been pushed out of him. The main tunnel was slippery with gasoline and she was afraid of knocking the light bulb down into it, which might blow it.

There was no one in the basement. She poured out part of another jerry can and carried it back to the main tunnel, cautious not to bump the concrete, cause a spark. She poured more gasoline in the main tunnel and the rest up the small tunnel and over the man.

This is it, she told herself. If it doesn't blow this time I'm leaving.

There was no change in the street. She lit the third match but the stem snapped and the match fell on the ground. She snatched it and tossed it into the tunnel but it had gone out.

Voices far down the tunnel. Someone yelling? She held the last match carefully, by the head, scratched it across the side of the box and tossed it in. A great tongue of flame roared out of the tunnel and leaped across the sewer main and seared the far wall. There was another roar, much deeper, growing, thundering – and again the tongue of flame lashed out, the far wall cracking. The earth shook, everything moving six inches one way – the concrete, the ladder, herself – then six inches back. Shells were going off like rocket launchers, the earth grumbling and banging. She darted back up the ladder and the whole first two floors of the Life Building were afire, trapped men screaming, pieces of the upper stories falling into flames with each new blast.

She ran to the stairwell where she'd left the bedspread, tugged the muck from her hair, changed her clothes for some in the bedspread, too large in the bust and shoulders, rinsed her hair in a puddle and tried to wash the gasoline from her hands and arms. She pulled on the habit again and went quickly back through the Christian side and down past the Hotel Alexandre and the Hotel Dieu Hospital. A Phalange truck was bringing in wounded, men wrapped in sheets. “Oh dear,” she called to a soldier. “What happened?”

He glanced at her habit. “An ammo dump. On the Green Line.”

“Oh, how I hate them!”

“Not the Muslims, sister. Accident, apparently.”

She dropped her head. “How many?”

“Thirty. So far.”

“May the dear Lord be with them.”

“All very well for you to say that, sister. These were all men with families. Wives and kids. You don't love anyone, just God, as you imagine Him to be. You're like those fedayeen over there – they think they're going to Heaven.”

“Don't criticize what you don't understand,” she snapped.

Before she reached the Christian side of the Museum she ditched the habit. Someone came out of the shadows by the big barricade and she saw it was the captain.

She handed him the flashlight. “I didn't even use it.”

“So my batteries?” He glanced up as a shell went over like a great bird, hit out in Dora somewhere. “They shoot at bloody anything,” he said.

“They think Allah's going to guide it.”

He nudged her toward the darkness, where a tank crouched.

“You'll let me through the line again?” she said, reaching her hands up round his neck. It was smooth and young and his hair was short in her fingers all the way up under his beret. Her breasts were itching to be against him and her nails wanted to rip down his back and she could feel him inside already, like he'd be, hot and hard and pumping faster and faster. She dragged him down beside the silent tank, shoving up his shirt as he tore his trousers open and she lay back and let him come in slowly then hard, deeper and deeper till she was sure he was there but he kept coming deeper and she exploded, saw the dragon's tongue of flame, heard the thunder and the screams, felt peace.

“FRÜHSTÜCK!” Knuckles hammered the compartment door; the light flickered, flashed on. The door snapped open, a steward put a breakfast tray on the foot of Neill’s bed.

He sat up rubbing the back of his neck. Dark cold shapes flitted past the window. He found his watch, put it on, forgot the time and looked again: five after six. Shivering, he drew the blankets round his shoulders, started to pour his coffee but it had not all run down through the filter, so he waited watching through the rain-beaded glass the cold, flat landscape, the few distant lights, imagined people getting up, farmers and their burly kerchiefed wives, the smell of coffee and coal fires.

It's the girl, he realized, that's why I feel so bad. He'd been with her in the dream. Ardent and slender and brown-eyed, long dark hair. Naked in the glow of the street lamp. Layla.

Was it losing her that had broken his heart? Made him such a cynical bastard who couldn't even love his wife and kids and had no friends? No, that's not entirely true. He set the filter aside and sipped the coffee.

The train's wheels wailed into a curve. And miles to go, he thought, wondering why. Something shone on the pillow and he brushed at it – a silver hair. Can't be mine, he decided, mine's not that gray. These aren't clean sheets.

But the sheets were newly washed and starched. He hadn't seen Layla for many years but in the dream they hadn't grown older, both of them beyond ecstasy to be naked together after so long missing each other, her skin, her lips, her hair, her sighs, the softness inside her, her passionate young lips seeking his. In his dream three men had broken into the room, tall and drunk, tripping over the bed and grabbing Layla. He fought them off, fought them into the hall and beat them one by one. But when he'd gone back, Layla was gone.

Blankets round his shoulders he sat drinking his coffee as Bratislava's ramparts took form against the day.

15

ROSA WAS breathing hard, a wildness in her eyes that made Mohammed want to protect and reassure her. Seeing her pretty, roundish face with its red high cheeks and olive eyes, her smooth young brow, her white teeth and red lips, her dark hair coiling down round her neck into the blush of her chest, it was hard to imagine what she'd just done.

Her breathing calmed. “Thought I'd die, that tunnel.” She closed her eyes, leaned back, air filling her lungs. “You never know what a joy it is to breathe till you can't.”

“I almost drowned once, when I was a child. Since then breathing seems almost holy.”

“What happened to the Christian snipers, on the top?”

“It was so hot up there their ammo was blowing.”

She shivered or shrugged, looked away.

“They were using the Life Building as a pivot and you took it from them, and now they've backed off their attack for fear we'll go round them. It was very brave, what you did.”

“Bravery's nothing. Only winning matters.”

He punched the side of his palm against the back of his neck, loosening the muscles, rubbed them. “You still haven't told me what you think that means.”

“Palestine.”

“And Lebanon?”

“You can tell Christians and Jews apart? After they've warred against us for how many thousand years?”

“We can't drive them all from Lebanon. From Palestine. Not yet.”

“Until they go there'll be no peace.”

“It was the French who put them over us. It'll never happen again.”

“For two thousand years – more, if you count the Romans – they've plagued us.”

“When we weren't plaguing each other.”

“And you hoped blowing up their embassy and barracks would scare them away? They have no memories, keep stepping in the same hole. Stepping on us. Even if they do leave they'll be right back, under the next politician, the next pope.”

A 155 was coming over and Mohammed waited for it to hit. “We didn't blow the American barracks. Nor the French ones, as people say.”

Her eyes seemed the pale green now of a snow river, the one coming out of the mountain at Yammouné, chunks of green ice crashing inside it. “Anyway, you wouldn't say...”

“Some day maybe I can.”

She moved closer, her smile's warmth making him shiver. “Tell me now.”

“It takes time.” He let his head drop forward, rubbing the back of his neck. “We've all spent another sleepless night.”

She bit her lip. “I can do that for you.”

“Sleep for me?”

“Don't be silly! Rub your neck. If you like. I always did it for my father. He'd follow the mule all day, pushing the plough, reins round his neck...”

Mohammed let his head rotate back, against his hand. “That was where?”

“Tiberias, the Golan, Mount Hermon – like I said.” She came behind him, making him fear for an instant. “Bend forward, let down your shoulders.”

“You crossed Beirut tonight and destroyed our enemy.” He rolled his shoulders, let them go; her fingers digging round the bone for the hurt muscle and worn tired tendons were like paradise. “Someone should be rubbing your shoulders.”

She leaned round, looking at him from the side, kneading the hard muscle at the top of his shoulder blades. “Someday maybe you can.” She unbuttoned his shirt from behind, breasts at his back, arms and wrists against his ribs, pulled it up out of his belt and slid it down his back, her hard strong fingers moving up and down the flat muscles on both sides of his spine, neck and shoulder, under the shoulder blades and up the stiff sore neck.

“I forget,” he gasped, “how heavy our heads are.”

“What a strong back you have – these muscles all across here, down here. You've done a lot of work.”

“In the hills I was a shepherd. But when I came to Beirut I worked in construction, carrying concrete.”

“Like the Palestinians do now.”

“You shovel the trough full of wet concrete and lift it up on your shoulders and carry it up to the top floor and pour it onto the slab. You start at the first floor and then on to the second, building it all the way up, the fifth, the tenth … And then you're going up twenty stories with a trough of concrete on your back, and this whole building has gone up in the sky on your back and the backs of your friends.” He stretched, pulling his shoulders forward. “Good for your back, your legs. For a while, it's even good for your head. And you can look at the building and know how it's built, and how you can take it apart.”

“What's it feel like, walking back down?”

“You can't take much time because they're paying you by the load and so you run down the steps, trying to fill your lungs and stretch your back and see the city far below down there.”

His muscles were so thick she could almost separate them, like ropes. Almost hard enough to stop a bullet.

“You have strong hands,” he murmured. “You have wonderful hands.”

His body loosened, relaxed, she had a sudden fear of losing him, but he had just drifted off to sleep in mid-sentence, and it made her want to soften her touch, stroke his brow. It was so easy, caring for a man, to make him a slave. He already had a wife, the famous Layla, Mother of the Revolution. But what man is ever satisfied with a famous wife?

NEILL STOOD in the middle of Staromestska Street, two fast lanes of cars whizzing past his back, two lanes in front, just the yellow line between his feet to keep him alive, with no cover and no way back. Cars sucked at the air as they rushed by inches from his skin, big and little, red and black and white, two-ton chunks of hurtling steel; he saw himself hit and knocked into an oncoming lane. There'd been a newspaper story somewhere, a kid's brain blown right out of his skull when he was hit by a semi.

The light turned red and the last traffic hissed through. He finished crossing as more cars roared out of the side streets like hounds wild to run him down. He jumped up on the pavement and stood in a shop doorway as the lines of cars and trucks screamed past. The shop was closed, tourist pictures of Turkey pasted on its window – crystalline blue bays, the blanched and barren hills, columns spiring toward the sun. There were personal ads for household help and selling a motorcycle and getting laid, for the bridge club of Bratislava, for underground films and lectures.

Before him was a torn poster of a great beast's skull, a man-rat staring down on a city aflame, that he had cloven in two with his huge sword. “Friday 13 March,” the poster said. “The Most Terrifying Night In Your Life. Don't Be Late.” The rest of the poster had been ripped off, and he glanced down at the dirty tile floor of the shop entryway but the torn part wasn't there. The lights had changed again and the traffic was roaring up and down Staromestska.

Why was the poster in English? Had it been? He went back to check. Yes.

Snow began to fall in lacy cool flakes; one went down the back of his neck making him shiver. You could have died, he told himself. Because you didn't pay attention. You got caught in the middle of the street because you didn't watch the light.