Читать книгу Mike Bond Bound - Mike Bond - Страница 27

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.

His hands were cold. He went into a café and ordered a grog and held it but his hands wouldn't warm. The insides of his fingers were hot from the cup but when he held the tops to his cheek they felt like ice. Guys your age, he told himself, are dropping all the time now. Cardiac arrest, stroke; half vegetables wondering who their wives are screwing. Too much booze, no sleep, booze and weed, mostly booze, twenty years of wine and beer and whisky. They were painkillers, really, but what was the pain?

If you didn't have your painkiller, you might have to feel.

He wondered if this was true. If it was, if he'd been drinking all these years so he wouldn't have to feel, then he hadn't felt. The man without feelings? God that couldn't be true. Jesus if I felt any more pain I'd crack. I'd just crack.

The café smelt companionably of steamed milk and caffeine and pastries and cigarettes and slivovitz and the perfume of young women in black stockings and black leather boots. His fingers would not warm up. What, he wondered, if you could just face the pain? Feel it?

He walked up Staromestska against the morning stream of shoppers in long fur coats, bags in their hands, a red chill on their cheeks, past an unshaven man smelling of cigarettes and plum brandy. At Number 41 he took the stairs to the top floor.

Michael Szay was so tall he had to stoop in his own office. “You're wasting your time going to Beirut,” he said. “Mohammed won't talk to you.”

“This could help him, build credibility.”

“Since when do you care about his credibility?”

“I hate this war. So does everyone, except you.”

Szay sat back, watching Neill, chewing an edge of fingernail. “Meaning?”

“As long as you're making money selling weapons, God forbid it should stop.”

“Who says I'm selling to him?”

“Aren't you?”

“He's got stuff coming in from Iran, Riyadh. He takes some from the Israelis, Christians.”

“He's getting assault rifles and ammo from you –”

Szay scanned his fingertips, began chewing another nail. “Who says?”

“I've played fair with you, Michael. All along. Whatever you say goes no further. I just need a way in, someone to go through.”

Szay tipped forward, stared at Neill across his disheveled desk. “And what do I get?”

“He's your client. If he goes under, you lose. He's getting terrible copy – nobody knows what he's doing or why. All the papers blame him.”

Szay's ironic little eyes were like badgers in their holes. “He's ducking bullets, that's what he's doing. He doesn't give a shit what some London newspaper thinks.”

“I won't write about you, Michael. I never have, not even about Ethiopia, your friends in the Sudan...”

Szay cocked his head, peered down at his nails, selected a finger and began to chew along the quick. “Write what you want. Nobody reads it.”

“If you have any messages, I can pass them.”

“Won't do you any good to have messages.” Szay spat a piece of fingernail. “Since you won't get in.”

Beyond the small leaded panes of Szay's windows the rooftops of Bratislava were an immense haphazard junkyard of tiles, damp in new rain. “I'll get in,” Neill said. “I always do.”

Szay's little badger eyes rose to Neill's. “Thanks to your friends.”

“They could be yours, too –”

Szay hissed irritably. “I wouldn't have them.”

Neill stood. “You don't have any friends, Michael. I'm the closest you get. And I don't even like you.”

Szay smiled, crunching a bit of fingernail between his front teeth. “Take the Damascus road. If the Christians or Israelis cut it you're screwed. If the Syrians cut it you're dead.”

“Just give me a lead, Michael. That's all I ask.”

“You're going to end up dead on a curb somewhere. That's all the lead I'm going to give you. Or in some Hezbollah stinkhole. And your friends won't even care.”