Читать книгу Mike Bond Bound - Mike Bond - Страница 16

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.