Читать книгу Mike Bond Bound - Mike Bond - Страница 21

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.”