I was sitting in a coffee bar watching the entrance to the building opposite where the cadres were meeting to discuss whatever cadres needed to discuss when in hiding. I was trying to make my coffee last as long as possible but had to leave after the waiter came up for the second time in three minutes to ask whether I wanted something else. I had no more money so I took to the street, watching, but not sure what for: suspicious cars full of men in sunglasses, jeeps full of armed troops screeching to a halt outside the entrance, someone leaving a large suitcase against the door. Najwa had given me a walkie-talkie, to be used only in an emergency. Unfortunately it was of military specification rather than one for clandestine use by agents of the state, or agents without a state – a hefty thing with a long aerial, intended for the rigours of battle. I had to put it in a carrier bag found in her kitchen when it wouldn’t fit the small inside pocket of my denim jacket. If it came to it and I had to take the damn thing out I might as well jump up and down shouting, ‘I’m here, come and get me!’
Half an hour and a Red Cross nutrition bar later I had exhausted my window shopping, which was limited to a handful of places, and caught the shopkeeper’s eye as I stood outside an Islamic bookstore for the fifth time. The bookstore sat between a closed record shop displaying a copy of Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ in the window and the stationers where I used to get the lined notebooks specified by school.
Turning to look up the street to check the entrance to the building I was horrified to see John and Asha walking towards me. They hadn’t seen me so I decided to cross the road, causing an old taxi to screech to a halt against my legs, bumper touching denim. The driver started leaning on the horn as if it would blow me out of the way and simultaneously stuck his head out of his window to let me know, in a screeching voice, how stupid I was, being descended from a donkey. Naturally enough, the commotion attracted the interest of passers-by, who initially kept a respectable distance in case weapons were drawn. I saw Asha and John waving at me, attracted by the commotion, and I stood frozen in the street as the traffic built up. An orchestra of horns had started and, realising that I was no longer holding the plastic bag, I desperately rooted around on the ground for it, retrieving it from under the front bumper of the taxi, now revving its engine ready for the Grand Prix circuit that was Beirut. Asha and John joined me on the street, John giving the taxi driver some Glaswegian invective to match his Lebanese abuse. The crowd – now that a small Indian woman and blond man had entered the fracas and no gunfight had broken out – joined in. Being a spectator was never enough in Lebanon; everyone had an opinion to give and blame to apportion. Eventually the crowd was manoeuvred to the pavement and the traffic started to move, horns blaring parting shots. People started to drift away, the entertainment now over, and I was left with John and Asha asking me what I was doing here.
‘I’m just waiting to meet some old school friends,’ I said, pointing to the coffee shop in the belief that its existence made my story more credible.
‘We’re going to Samir’s restaurant for lunch, to try some of his renowned falafel,’ Asha said, showing me her perfectly formed teeth.
‘Obviously you haven’t been there before,’ I said. My eyes darted to the secret meeting location. For all I knew the cadres could have left in the commotion and I could be sitting here for hours waiting for them to come out. Worse still, an assassination team could have entered the building while I was busy being run over outside. I wished Asha and John would leave. This was an unwelcome leakage of one compartmentalised bit of my life into the other. I saw John glance at my carrier bag, a question (I was sure) starting to form on his lips.
‘Ah, I can see one of my friends,’ I said quickly, looking over their shoulders. ‘I’d better be going. See you later?’ I started to cross the road, more carefully this time, and looked back to see them watching, probably curious to see what my mysterious friends looked like. I stopped on the other side and shouted to them: ‘Don’t eat Samir’s secret sauce.’ They laughed and, to my relief, started to walk off. I went back into the coffee shop to see the same waiter standing before me, arms crossed.
‘What, now you have some money?’
Having given the walkie-talkie back to Najwa and had lunch with her and drunk some coffee, she confirmed that one of the cadres would be staying with me in a couple of days. She wouldn’t tell me who it was ‘for my own good’ and asked me whether there had been any suspicious callers or ‘anything like that’. I couldn’t think of anything in particular, everything looked suspicious at that point. A group of young men standing on the street made me wonder what they were up to (they were probably the same men who stood there during the siege, except now they were unarmed). Seeing two men sitting in a car made me cross the road in case they were a snatch squad. Ever since I’d heard that Nabil (or Lazy Eye, as I still thought of him) had turned out to be an informer, the whole appeal of this secret existence seemed less attractive to me. The glamour, such as it was, had gone. This wasn’t John Le Carré: as I recalled, Smiley’s people hadn’t wandered around with huge walkie-talkies or without enough change to buy coffee.
I consoled myself on the way to Samir’s falafel place with thoughts of Eli and myself in bed the night before. We had slept in our underwear, me careful to hide my arousal by moving my hips away from her as we lay ‘like spoons in a drawer’, as she put it. Unfortunately, every time I moved she would grind her buttocks back into my groin. Eventually I managed to make things subside by thinking of Youssef’s wound being dressed and mentally stripping my Tokarev. That morning I had left her sleeping so I wouldn’t have to explain where I was going. I’d found Liv naked in the kitchen again and, to her amusement, had fetched a robe for her to put on: there was only so much I could take.
Faris was with two men I hadn’t seen before in Samir’s café, huddled together at a back table, one that Samir saved for his ‘special’ customers. I noticed that the two men leant towards Faris to listen or talk to him, not the other way round. I guessed they held him in some respect. I couldn’t see Samir so I walked towards Faris’s table. As I approached he got up and met me half way, drawing me to the counter by the elbow. He smelt of tobacco and aftershave.
‘Buy you a sandwich?’ he asked with a bit too much enthusiasm, not his usual laid-back self.
I explained that I’d eaten, that I was looking for Samir.
‘He’s gone to the airport, some of the foreigners are leaving.’
This information filled my head with thoughts of Eli being driven to the airport. I accepted an ice-cold bottle of Coca-Cola from Faris.
‘Who are your friends?’ I asked, nodding towards the group at the table.
‘Just some brothers from the organisation,’ he said. He looked at me as if to gauge my reaction. ‘We’re just friends now, of course.’
We both laughed at this but I got the feeling that more questions would be unwelcome. Faris’s use of the word ‘brothers’ rather than ‘comrades’ betrayed his political allegiance, although none of that mattered any more, I hoped. My own connections, by default rather than any informed choice, were on the comrade side, but habit prevented me from revealing anything to Faris. There was a time when internecine fighting between various factions of the PLO was a serious business and many so-called martyrs were created as a result, their posters (produced by printers who must have worked overnight) pasted onto the camp walls for a short while until they were covered over by the latest victims. The Israeli invasion had united everyone in the PLO and the Lebanese Left, creating a grandly named Unified Command. Given my circumstances, though, and my experience with Lazy Eye, I kept quiet.
At the Commodore Hotel I found Bob’s Hollywood girlfriend Stacy in the bar, sitting alone and scribbling on a yellow pad, a cold Amstel and a packet of Kent menthols on the small table beside her. There were a couple of men standing at the bar, openly checking her out, wanting her to notice them looking at her. It reminded me of the time my mother had taken me and my brother to a beach south of Beirut, away from the cosmopolitan beach clubs of the city where bathers in bikinis were the norm. A group of men had gathered in the dunes behind us, watching my ultra-blonde and pale mother in her bikini as she lay there, oblivious. I had felt simultaneously embarrassed and protective, wanting to run away and to stay, and ultimately relieved when she became aware of what was happening and got dressed. Remembering the incident made me wince and I glared at the men as I passed them, embarrassed for Stacy. I blushed when she greeted me.
‘Doesn’t that bother you?’ I asked, nodding to the bar. She glanced at the men as if noticing for the first time, then looked back at me. She laughed as she fiddled with her ponytail.
‘You’re an angel, Ivan, you really are.’ She leant forward and lowered her voice. ‘To be honest, it’s the ones that tell me I’m like a sister to them that bother me.’
I laughed and couldn’t think of anything more to say. I asked her if she knew where Bob was.
Bob was stooped over the editing console in the suite at TeleNews, putting together a story on cluster-bomb victims, which he said was a waste of time.
‘People in the West don’t want to see too much reality over dinner. All the gory stuff gets edited out in London or New York.’ He copied a clip of Youssef’s wound being changed onto his master tape. ‘I think if they showed the real effects of war we wouldn’t have it any more. Soldiers would desert when they saw the kind of injuries they were going to suffer. The bomb manufacturers would close down. The whole fucking insalata would stop!’ He lit a cigarette, shook his head. ‘Well, maybe it wouldn’t stop the weapons manufacturers,’ he said smiling. ‘Those guys would probably pat themselves on the back and buy each other beers if they saw this.’ He pointed at a frozen shot of an uncovered, newly created stump where a hand used to be.
I wondered what sort of person became a weapons designer and came up with the idea of a cluster bomb. I must have wondered it aloud.
‘The cluster bomb was designed to injure, not kill,’ said Bob. ‘Some nerdy fucker, probably an Ivy League graduate, came up with the bright idea that if you injure rather than kill someone on the battlefield then they have to be helped, so you reduce the enemy by two or three rather than just one.’ He tapped the side of his head to indicate either the intelligence or madness of such logic. ‘Of course it’s mainly civilians that get fucked.’ He ran the video and the shot panned back from the stump to reveal the face of a teenage girl with glazed eyes; it was like something inside had been switched off.
‘I think what we need’, said Bob, standing up and stretching, ‘is the company of a beautiful woman.’
‘She’s in the bar,’ I said without thinking. Bob hooted loudly, thumping me on the back. I smiled, pleased that I’d made him laugh. We got to the hotel to find Stacy deep in conversation with one of the men I’d seen standing at the bar earlier. She was laughing at something he was saying but I couldn’t tell whether it was genuine or polite. Bob’s smile disappeared and without even slowing down he swivelled on his heels and headed straight back out of the hotel, leaving me standing in the lobby. I was at a loss to understand why and left before Stacy saw me.