Читать книгу Mike Bond Bound - Mike Bond - Страница 41

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FOR TWO HUNDRED dollars the Syrian would drive Neill from Damascus at least across the border to Masnaa. Perhaps even to Sofar, only thirty kilometers from Beirut. Depending on the Syrians and Israelis, maybe all the way to Hazmiye – “only an hour's walk from the Green Line”.

The road climbed from Damascus through the barren brown ramparts of the anti-Lebanon past rows of dusty mud and concrete villages with plastic bags stuck everywhere on brush and fences, dead dogs and rusty cars on both sides of the road. There were only Syrian soldiers at the border and for fifty dollars they let him pass.

Down into the Bekaa's broad incandescent green the road slunk like a tan snake. There were Syrian tanks in the wheat fields, artillery dug into the orchards, the smell of death, a burnt armored personnel carrier on its side in a ditch. Up from the Bekaa into the foothills of Mount Lebanon whole villages lay in ruins, shell-blasted, uprooted orchards, toppled trees and pylons, ramshackle shattered houses with gaping roofs and shocked black-eyed windows.

Like heroin or sex, did violence intensify with social contact? Is it a disease, he wondered, whose carriers increase faster than they die till finally, like all plagues it flowers and fades, slowly gathering its forces to rise again?

The road swung round a curve and dipped to the right past a smashed villa in a grove of burnt cypresses by a bullet-stitched wall. Flames soared black and orange from a bus lying on its side, bodies spread like petals round it, a woman running toward him, her head on fire.

The taxi driver braked hard. “Far as I go.”

Neill leaped out of the taxi tearing off his jacket and threw it over the woman's head but she fought it, punching him, screaming. He yelled with pain and yanked back his hand where something had melted and burned on it and would not go out when he held it against himself. He fell to the ground trying to smother it and the woman, screaming, fell over him and more of her fire got on him. It's gasoline, he thought, and ran for the taxi. He pulled a blanket off the back seat and threw it over her but she kept burning, smoke and flames shooting up through the blanket.

“No!” the driver screamed. “My blanket!”

The fire on Neill's hand had gone out but the pain was impossible. The woman was trying to crawl, wailing. “They're not all dead,” someone yelled, running by.

“Look out, mines!” another called.

“Help!” Neill pleaded. “Help me with this woman!” A great slam of thunder knocked him down. He lay holding his head then slowly stood, before him the skeleton of the bus writhed in red heat. Something else had blown, a bomb maybe, a gas tank. He couldn't find the woman and stumbled from the heat.

Someone was shaking him. “Two hundred dollars!” It was the taxi driver. “Two hundred dollars!”

Neill sat on the ground and tried to find his wallet. It was in the pocket of the jacket he'd put on the woman. He stood but couldn't see her. The driver threw his suitcase at him. “I told you no good!” he screamed in English. “Too far!”

Here was his jacket. Charred down the back and collar. He found the wallet and gave the driver four fifties. More fifties fell out but he stuffed them back. “No extra?” the man shrilled. “For this danger?”

Underbrush was on fire, crackling, thick white smoke contorting in the still air with the black-orange clouds from the bus's burning tires and diesel. People were dragging bodies along the ground and laying them side by side. If that bus hadn't gone through, Neill thought, it would have been us hit that mine. He felt off balance and realized he was carrying the suitcase, put it down, remembered it was his, and picked it up again. “Don't know where...” he said to a man running by who kept going, didn't even look at him.

A fire truck came screaming and winking its red light. Men ran with a hose but nothing came out. People were gathering round others sitting on the ground. A woman passed Neill, her hands upraised.

“We were just going to Aley, my wife and me,” a man was weeping.

Neill walked through the bullet-splintered cypresses and climbed the bullet-spattered wall and over the shoulder of the hill. Beirut spread out below in a jumble of filth and smoke, a vast human excretion aside a crystalline sea. There were brass cartridge casings in the tall grass. You'll step on a mine, he thought, watching the ground.

“I’LL DO IT his way,” André said. “I'll blow him up.”

“You'd die for it?” Haroun popped an olive in his mouth. “Like that kid who blew up your brother?”

“It was Mohammed who blew up my brother.”

“Ever wonder what happens to the ones who drive those trucks?” Haroun spat the olive pit into his hand and put it on the table. “Atoms. That's the trouble being Christians: we love life too much to be martyrs.” A Phalange lieutenant came in and Haroun left with him for a minute. The Arab girl came and lit candles at two ends of the plank table.

“Too bad there's no electricity,” Haroun said, coming back. “I'd play you the new Pavarotti, Lucia di Lammermoor. Only heard it twice since Francine got it for me.” He spat another pit, drained his Suze and set his black holster belt into his hips. “Anyway, you jokers hear that kind of shit all the time, up in Paris.”

“I never go to the opera.”

“Story of a girl in love with this guy, but her parents make her marry another one, some lord. So on their wedding night she kills him, goes mad.”

“That's why I never go to the opera.”

“Speaking of opera, Paris is pissed.”

“What did they say?”

“They want you out. Head or feet first. Just thought I'd tell you.”

“Did you tell them I was here?”

“You crazy? But somebody will.”

André got up. Out of the corner of his eye he caught the girl moving in the kitchen, flash of chestnut hair, the aura of lamb and spices. “I never should have told them I was coming. See what I get for being straight?”

“You should get out of it, mon brave. Like Paris wants.”

“That's what they told me. Can't you see? They're just establishing distance?”

“Ex-commando runs amok – is that the message?”

“I have a line to these scramblers Mohammed could use.”

“He's got no money. Anyway, he's lying low for some reason. Hasn't been seen for a week.”

“I'll find a way to reach him. But then I'll need matériel. I can't just walk in on him with a little Jericho from Larnaca.”

“Nice gun, that. But you won't need matériel. Because you're never going to reach him.”

“I'm losing faith, Emil, in your desire to kill Mohammed.”

Haroun glanced up at him and André had a sense of being caught in mirrors, through a swing door. “I'm beginning to think you need Mohammed alive,” André added. “As if he's the only guy dirty enough to make you look good.”

“We're the brains of this country. All that keeps it from being just another filthy overpopulated dysfunctional Muslim nation.”

“All that hash you're selling in France – are you getting it through him? Out of the Bekaa?”

“How would you have us pay for weapons?” One foot over a knee, Haroun ran a fingertip down a stitch in his boot. “Of course Mohammed's good to have. But he draws too many people. When we don't squeeze him it makes us look weak and ineffective.”

“You've been trying to look like that ever since Sabra and Shatila. That's where you lost this war.”

“We did that as a favor.”

'Kill two thousand old people, women and children? It lost you the war.”

“It'll never end, this war. No one ever wins or loses, everybody's getting too much out of it.”

“Except the ones who die.”

“So far, they haven't counted.” Haroun tucked his stomach tighter into his Wyoming belt. “We Christians,” he leaned forward, “we have two, maybe three kids, care for them. Send them to the best schools, all that. Muslims, they have ten, twenty kids, throw them out on the streets to sell Chiclets, then say it's not fair, you Christians have all the advantages.”

The girl passed in the background, from the kitchen down a hall, tall and willowy, and André wondered if Haroun was screwing her, his big hairy pungent chest in her face. Would he be sweet, affectionate? Not like when he killed the four teenagers caught with Uzis, shooting three in the face, stopping to ask the last, “Why aren't you afraid?”

“Because I have no need of substance,” the boy had said.

But the boy's corpse had been hard to kill, kept jerking up its knees. And André had gone with Haroun and the Phalange back into the fight for the Shouf hills, crossing the Nahr Barouk in darkness, its chill rattling over the stones and sparkling with stars, the smell of high explosives and burnt earth, and André had knelt to drink from the river, wondering what the boy had meant, to have no need to be.

“You'll never get Mohammed,” André said, “unless you let me do it.”

Haroun swung down his foot, leaned forward, a man getting down to business. “Let you?”

“The only way is a vehicle. To take out his building. At least a thousand pounds.”

“We don't have a Tehran connection.”

“You can find plastique anywhere. I could buy C-4 in Paris but I couldn't get it down here.”

Haroun spat another pit. “He's the one with all the high explosives. Buy it from him.”