Emile called to me as I turned onto my street. He was with Mustapha and Bedrosian, as well as a couple of other ex-schoolmates. Emile had textbooks under his arm and was wearing an AUB sweatshirt over a buttoned shirt, and I hated him for it. Bedrosian and Mustapha were wearing blazers and trousers, like they were going to a business meeting. A September chill had fallen on the city; I could feel it through my denim jacket and T-shirt. I hadn’t slept well; the joys of sharing a small bed were limited without the sex. I fought the urge to run, deciding to sweat instead. I mustn’t lead them to where I was staying, not with a cadre hiding there. I didn’t have time to think as they crossed the road towards me. I could see mischief in Emile’s green eyes.
‘Are you on your way to class?’ he asked, taking in my dishevelled appearance and lack of books. I’d not prepared an answer for this obvious question. By his smile and the giggles of the others around him, I suspected they knew by then that I wasn’t enrolled, but they wanted to hear me say it.
‘I’m going to university in Copenhagen,’ I said. I was pleased with this inspired thinking and it had the desired effect of wiping the smirks off their faces.
Emile, however, hadn’t finished. ‘When are you going then? Surely they’ve started already.’
‘No, no, they start much later there. I’m going in a week or so, once everything has been finalised.’ I looked up and down the street, hoping for a gunfight or car bomb.
‘So which university are you going to?’ asked Bedrosian, whose father, I recalled, did a lot of business in Copenhagen.
I searched my memory for the name of a university, frustratingly difficult despite the fact I’d lived there as a child and my mother had lectured there. Bedrosian and Emile exchanged satisfied smiles as they sensed victory.
‘Copenhagen University of course, idiot,’ I said, banking on the fact that such a place existed. The smiles disappeared and we stood there for a bit, each waiting for the other to leave.
‘Where are you off to now?’ Emile asked, shifting his interrogation. ‘You don’t live round here, do you?’ Some members of his group were getting bored and started to drift off, telling him they were going to be late for lectures.
‘You’re going to be late,’ I said. I pointed past him to the others and he turned to go, Bedrosian and Mustapha in his wake. To give them time to disappear before I headed towards the apartment I decided to get some breakfast. I started to cross the road to the café on the other side of the road when Bedrosian came running back towards me.
‘I almost forgot,’ he said, wheezing with the effort of jogging. ‘Three of your father’s friends came looking for you yesterday.’ He caught his breath. ‘They were outside the cafeteria, seemed to know that we knew you. Wanted to know if we’d seen you.’ He looked at me and sucked air through his moustache, which was growing over his top lip.
‘Did they give their names? What did they look like?’ I asked, trying to control the panic in my voice.
He looked into the middle distance to show that he was remembering.
‘They didn’t give names.’ He looked round to the receding figures of his mates, turned to go, then stopped. ‘So what do you want me to tell them when they come back today? They said they’d come back.’
‘Nothing, for God’s sake.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Tell them I’ve gone to Copenhagen.’
‘But you haven’t gone yet.’ His chubby face was screwed up in puzzlement.
‘Tell them I’m going soon. No, don’t tell them anything.’
He shook his head, either in disgust or pity. ‘I don’t know what sort of shit you’re mixed up with, Ivan. You were always, I don’t know, odd.’
I gave him my best smile.
‘Listen man, I hope things turn out all right for you in Copenhagen, if that’s where you’re really going.’ He turned to go. I watched his broad back, saw the others waiting at the bottom of the road. He stopped, put his hand to his forehead and turned round.
‘Oh yeah. One of them has a bad eye, looks out at an angle …’
I was gone before he was finished.
My clandestine lodger didn’t seem worried by my story, insisting that I calm down. This was probably why he was a cadre, because of his ability to think under pressure. He asked me to concentrate: did Nabil know where I lived? No, he’d never been here, but could have followed me after the drop. No, if he’d known where I lived they would have been here already, why bother going to the AUB? What would my classmates tell them? Nothing useful. They didn’t know I was here. Who did know you were here? Could Nabil have got to any of them and tracked you that way? I didn’t think so, he didn’t know who my acquaintances were, I didn’t think. We worked through the possibilities. The cadre needed to get a message to Najwa. I left him to write something down, went to the kitchen where I saw he’d done all the washing up, cleared out the fridge, even washed the floor. His socks and underwear were hanging on a line he’d rigged across the kitchen. When I went back into the sitting room I saw that that too had been tidied, the coffee table had been cleared. I’d been too wired before to even notice when I’d come in. Something was missing from the table, apart, that was, from all the filled ashtrays and empty bottles. Empty bottles. That’s what was missing: my Chianti bottle, carefully sculpted over the summer, had disappeared from the table. He was still writing so I went back into the kitchen. There was a small balcony off the kitchen, big enough for two people to stand on, where he’d put all the bottles. They were all neatly arranged by colour. My bottle was there, but had been stripped of its wax. I took it into the sitting room. My hands were shaking.
‘Why did you take the wax off my bottle?’ My voice was shaking too. He was putting his letter into an envelope and sealing it. I held the bottle up as evidence of his crime. He laughed, which made me shake even more.
‘What the hell is the matter with you, Ivan, are you ill?’ he said. ‘Do you know what is going on here? Calm yourself, man.’ He took the bottle from me and put it on the table. He put the envelope in my clammy hand. ‘Take this to Najwa and make sure you’re not followed.’
I didn’t move. He made a fist and pounded the table. ‘Damn you, man, act like your father’s son and pull yourself together.’ He took off his large-framed glasses, rubbed his eyes for a long while then looked at me. His eyes looked smaller without his glasses. ‘Forgive me, Ivan. I’m tired.’ The guy’s troubles were greater than mine. ‘Are you going to be OK?’ he asked.
I nodded.
‘Good man,’ he said.
I took a long route to Najwa’s, stopping at Samir’s place just to throw off anyone behind me as well as getting something to eat. Samir wasn’t there but Faris was, sitting at the table at the back with two of the men I’d seen him in here with before. They looked like they were having a meeting, judging by the serious expressions and haze of cigarette smoke. This time I left him to it; I had my own clandestine affairs to worry about. More and more I felt that I had no control of events unfolding around me, like I was floating helplessly down a river towards a waterfall. Faris joined me at the counter, where I was waiting for a fried vegetable sandwich.
‘Have you seen Samir?’ he asked. His jawbone was moving rhythmically under his shaved skin. His aftershave was fresh on.
‘No, not since last night. Why, what’s wrong?’
Faris just shook his head, told me to tell Samir, if I saw him, that he needed to talk to him. I sat at a small table looking out onto the street, watching the people walk by. ‘Act like your father’s son,’ the man had said. Here, everyone was their father’s son or daughter, known literally as son or daughter of so-and-so, and remained so until they had offspring of their own when they became father or mother of so-and-so. He’d managed to make me feel ashamed. Whenever I was told not to forget who my father was I knew I was being told that I didn’t measure up to him. I ate my sandwich and tried to concentrate on the present.
Najwa was surprised to see me, and didn’t look that pleased, although to her credit she covered it up well. Not quickly enough that I didn’t see her glance over my shoulder to see if I was alone, that I hadn’t led Nabil and his cronies to her. I gave her the letter and went out onto the balcony to sit at the table. I smoked a cigarette and looked out to east Beirut until she called. Abu Hisham was there, still in his pyjamas. He must have been in the bedroom when I’d arrived. We went over the same ground I’d been over with my lodger; I couldn’t find anything to tie Nabil back to my apartment.
‘Just to be safe we should move him out,’ Abu Hisham said. ‘His classmates can tie Ivan back to his street, so we should assume that the dog Nabil will do the same.’
‘Maybe it’s safer to leave him where he is,’ said Najwa. ‘Since they could be watching the street, they could spot him leaving.’
‘No, it’ll only be a matter of time before they find the right building. There are enough people with a grudge against us to provide this information for nothing, never mind if they start waving money about.’
They put together a plan for evacuating the lodger. Other things needed to be organised, not least where he was to go next and who was to take him in. I wasn’t privy to this part of the conversation but was sent back to explain the plan to the cadre, as he was to leave late that night. I walked past the entrance to my apartment building twice: the first time I was suspicious of someone standing inside the entrance (who turned out to be a resident waiting for an elderly relative to descend the stairs) and the second time I was spooked by someone sitting in a car on the opposite side of the road (who was subsequently joined by his wife and kids for whom he was waiting). Realising that I was probably attracting more attention walking up and down outside the building I darted inside.
Later that afternoon I couldn’t find Bob in the TeleNews offices so I headed across the road to the Commodore. The lobby was full of Lebanese drivers waiting to transport their journalists to film the departure of the French paratroopers, the last of the multinational force to leave. He wasn’t there either so I went to the bar where I found Stacy, sitting at her table with her yellow pad and menthols. I went and sat down opposite her. She looked genuinely pleased to see me, her smile like an injection of good feeling. The smile quickly disappeared, however, when I asked about Bob.
‘Bob could be anywhere,’ she said. Her drawl was raspy from too many Kent Menthols. She retied her ponytail. ‘He could be anywhere in this hotel, or in any other hotel for that matter,’ she said with a short bark of a laugh.
I said nothing. I noticed a packed suitcase by her chair. She took a Kent from the packet and I managed to light it for her without setting fire to anything else. She arched her back and stretched her neck to blow smoke at the ceiling. This made her T-shirt tighten against her chest. When I raised my eyes she was looking at me and smiling.
‘How old are you, Ivan?’
‘Eighteen.’
‘Eighteen. You must have a girlfriend, right?’
I hesitated – did Eli count as a girlfriend?
‘I can’t believe a good-looking boy like you hasn’t got a girlfriend or two?’
I smiled but inwardly winced at the word ‘boy’. I knew that she wouldn’t say something like that if she thought of me as a serious proposition. Maybe she was right, maybe I was still a boy.
‘Don’t become like the rest of them, will you?’ she said, serious all of a sudden. She crossed her arms on the table and leant forward to look intensely into my eyes. I had to move my gaze to the table in embarrassment.
‘Naw, I don’t believe you will.’ She picked up her pen.
‘Bob’s a fool,’ I said, blushing as hard as I could.
She smiled and leant forward and I thought, hoped, she was going to kiss me. But she didn’t, she just tapped my fingers with her pencil.
‘Thank you, young man. Now go away, I have to file my final piece on this city in an hour.’
‘What’s it about?’ I asked, looking at her neat handwriting. I wasn’t genuinely interested but just wanted to prolong our conversation and make the people in the bar think there was something between us.
‘It’s about some Jewish women living in Sabra, who married Palestinians before 1948. They came with them in the exodus. I’ve managed to track six of them down.’
I stood up and pointed at the suitcase. ‘So where are you going?’
‘I’m flying home for a few days then I’m going to Nicaragua. It’s where the next story is.’
I wasn’t even sure where Nicaragua was but I wanted to go with her, carry her bag for her, sharpen her pencils, light her cigarettes. She smiled her devastating smile and waved me away. I never saw her again.