Читать книгу Mike Bond Bound - Mike Bond - Страница 23

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.”