Dynamite Fishermen (9 page)

“I have done what I have done, sister,” he replied darkly. “But even so, there can be no justification for America to continue evading its responsibility.”

“And is your answer for the Americans to intervene again, as they did when they brought us the Syrians in 1976?” Rima asked. “Think carefully, my brother, for the next time they intervene it may be the worse for us.”

“It cannot be any worse than what we face now.”

“Oh, Husayn! You are impossible,” Rima groaned. “Enough of this! Let us talk of something else. I will hear no more of politics tonight.”

As they spoke, the guest of honor removed the insipid Joe Dassin love song that had been playing on the restaurant’s antiquated hi-fi stereo and replaced it with a puerile Euro-rock disco tune. Harry and the British visa officer rose to dance. Rima accepted Prosser’s offer to do the same and they remained on the dance floor for the slow dance that followed.

“Please do not be offended by Husayn,” Rima said as soon as Prosser’s arms were around her. “My brother is very dear to me, but he has become so irritable lately that I hardly know what to do. And when he drinks he hardly seems to realize what he is saying. Forgive him; he should not have spoken to you as he did.”

“Don’t give it another thought, Rima. Disagreements about U.S. foreign policy come with the job. Occasionally they are good sport, but usually we just hear the same complaints over and over again.”

“Do you enjoy arguing about politics?”

“Not exactly. But in this line of work I have to talk politics with all kinds of people. And not everybody sees things exactly our way. But then I suppose life would be awfully boring if they did.”

He drew her closer and felt the swell of her breasts pressing against him. She responded by sliding her hand around from his shoulder to the nape of his neck. After that she said nothing for nearly a minute.

“Did you drive your car here tonight?” she asked suddenly.

“Yes. Can I offer you a lift?” he asked with a half smile.

“You could take me to the YWCA residence, if you don’t mind leaving early. I must wake up very early tomorrow.”

The request was made so casually that he wasn’t sure what lay behind it. “Your brother won’t be offended if he sees me take you home?”

She shook her head and smiled absently. “It’s none of his affair. Besides, Husayn is always one of the last to leave, and he is a terrible driver after he has drunk too much wine.”

“I promise I’ll go very slowly.”

“With you, that is not necessary.”

Rima caught his eye and Prosser thought he detected color rising to her cheeks. “We’ll leave in a moment,” he answered, taking a step back. “Just give me a second to find out who to pay for our share of the bill.”

“Never mind the bill. Husayn will settle it for all of us.”

“For fifteen people?”

“Why not? These are Husayn’s friends. He will go out with them again, and when he does they will pay. Over time it all becomes the same. I expect he would be offended if you insisted on paying your share.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Most certainly,” she replied.

“If you say so, but I feel I should at least thank him.”

“
Maalesh
…I will tell him tomorrow.
Yalla
, we go.”

Theirs was the only car on the road as they passed Raouché’s darkened sidewalk cafés and began the gradual descent to the seaside corniche. A humid, salt-laden breeze blew through Prosser’s car window as the Renault slowed for the curve opposite the white cliffs of Pigeon Rock. From the moment they left the Chinese restaurant, they had seen no other vehicle on the coastal road except an off-duty taxi and a pair of Syrian armored cars. Even the popular Scotch Club, a favorite haunt of well-heeled Lebanese merchants and Western journalists on expense accounts, was shuttered for the night.

“It seems awfully quiet for a Thursday night,” Prosser remarked as they descended onto the Corniche. “A month or two ago these clubs and restaurants would have been turning customers away in droves.”

“These past few weeks people have been frightened by the car bombs. But they will come out again before long. We Lebanese quickly grow tired of staying at home.”

“And you?” he asked.

“I cannot bear staying in, not for a single night. If I wanted to die of boredom, I could live with my mother in Tripoli or my older sister in Bahrain. I prefer Beirut, even with the car bombs.”

“But living at the YWCA…isn’t that also a bit, well, tame?”

“Of course it is, but it is also respectable, and it has very good security. And I can come and go as I please without anyone bothering me.”

They passed the pebbled beaches of the Bain Militaire and rounded the bend by the Renaissance Tennis Club, less than a kilometer from their destination. They were now on the best-lit and most heavily patrolled stretch of the Corniche road, at the northwest extremity of the Ras Beirut peninsula.

Seventy meters ahead, just west of the Riviera Hotel, Prosser spotted a helmeted sentry peering out from behind a shoulder-high sandbag barrier. The soldier kept his eyes trained on the car as it pulled to a halt at the checkpoint. At the moment the car stopped, a gaunt lieutenant wearing the maroon-and-green camouflage fatigues and maroon beret of Syria’s Special Forces emerged from the shadows with an AK-47 rifle slung across his hip. Two teen-age soldiers wearing oversized helmets, the steel rims of which covered their eyebrows, observed them from atop an armored troop carrier.

“
Hawiyyatak
,” the Syrian growled. “
Carte d’identité
.”

As the Renault bore Lebanese civilian license plates instead of diplomatic ones, Prosser expected that the lieutenant had mistaken him for a Lebanese. He lowered his window halfway and handed the man his diplomatic identity card. “
Diplomasi
,” he declared.

Without looking at Prosser’s card, the officer stepped back and peered into the car, gesturing for Prosser to turn on the overhead reading light. When the Syrian saw Rima, his eyes narrowed in disapproval. Stepping forward, he rapped on the window with his knuckles and demanded her papers. Rima fished her identity card out of her purse and handed it across.

The expression of hostile suspicion on the young Syrian’s face hardened when at last he examined Prosser’s diplomatic identity card. Without a word, he turned on his heel and carried the two documents over to the troop carrier, where he barked out a command. Suddenly the soldier sitting behind the carrier’s swivel-mounted machine gun swung the barrel around and aimed it at Prosser’s chest. The other soldier, a tall, ruddy-faced corporal, followed the lieutenant back to the Renault. Suddenly Prosser had the sensation that the skin on his chest had become extraordinarily sensitive, and he imagined that he could feel the exact spot beside his right nipple where the machine-gun barrel was trained. He resisted the urge to scratch.

The Syrian officer muttered something under his breath, and in the stillness Prosser heard the adjective “
Muslim
” inflected with a feminine ending.
So that’s it,
he thought.
The Syrian read in Rima’s papers that she was a Muslim and objected to her fraternizing with a Western infidel.
He watched the lieutenant hold the two identity cards close to his face and examine them with obvious distaste.

“Where are you going?” the Syrian officer demanded at last in Arabic. The way his baggy uniform hung on his scrawny frame made him appear ridiculous and undermined his effort to intimidate.

“To Ain Mreissé,” Prosser answered.

“Where in Ain Mreissé?”

“Rue Rustom Pacha.”

The Syrian hesitated. Then he tried a different approach. “From where do you come?”

“Now, Lieutenant, you know that I am a diplomat and have a right to pass. If you are finished looking at my foreign ministry card, may we go?”

“You may be a diplomat, but the woman is not,” the officer snapped. “She is a Lebanese and a Muslim. You are not married?”

“Excuse me, Lieutenant, but I don’t understand what you want from us,” Prosser interrupted. “Is there something wrong with our papers? Because if there isn’t, we would like to go.”

The young Arab paused, looked once more at Rima, then slowly and grudgingly handed back the identity cards. As Prosser had hoped, the Syrian was neither quick enough to think of a pretext to detain them nor brazen enough to hold them without one. Prosser immediately started to raise the window, but the Syrian, evidently taking belated offense at the idea of being brushed off so lightly, laid his hand across the window’s edge.

“Why do you foreigners remain where you do not belong? Lebanon is for Arabs, not for foreigners. You are not welcome here.”

“How strange,” Prosser replied calmly. “I see you are wearing a Syrian uniform, not a Lebanese one. So it would seem that you are also a foreigner here.”

At that the young officer’s lips began to sputter, but he was unable to articulate a reply before Prosser shifted into first gear and let out the clutch.

“No, it is
you
who do not belong here!” the Syrian fulminated as the car began to move. “You foreigners are spoiling our Lebanon! I warn you, go before it is too late for you!”

Prosser looked back with disdain and closed the window. As the car pulled away from the checkpoint, he saw the young officer’s eyes following him with a baleful glare.

He turned to Rima. After a moment’s consideration, he realized that it had been quite stupid for him to have provoked an armed Syrian sentry and that he would never have done it if Rima had not been in the car. He was thinking of how best to apologize for having put her in danger when she interrupted him.

“The arrogant fool! Did you hear him dare to call Lebanon
his
country?”

“Perhaps he flunked geography.”

But Rima was not amused and Prosser was uncertain whether her lingering irritation was directed more toward him or the Syrian.

Prosser turned off the Corniche and threaded through the narrow back streets of Ain Mreissé to rue Rustom Pacha. But when they reached the YWCA residence, they found the front door shut and the windows darkened.

“It is past curfew,” Rima said, “but usually the concierge will unlock the door for us at least until midnight. What time is it now?”

“A quarter before twelve.”

“He is probably asleep. Wait here; I will see if anyone will answer the bell.”

She went to the door and pressed a button. A half minute later she pressed it again. After three more attempts she returned to the car.

“No one answers,” she said with a remarkable lack of concern.

“Of course, you’re welcome to stay at my place, if you like,” Prosser volunteered. “I could bring you back in the morning on my way to work.”

“You would not mind?” she asked, almost too casually.

Prosser grinned. “Not at all.
Ahlan wa sahlan
.”

She turned to face him with a demure smile. “You are not shocked that I would spend the night with you?”

“Why should I be?” he said with a laugh. “Besides, right now you don’t seem to have much choice.”

* * *

Prosser let Rima enter the apartment first; then he switched on the overhead lamp in the foyer and locked the apartment door behind them. In addition to two heavy deadbolts—one at chest level and one just above his knees—iron support arms were mounted on opposite sides of the door to hold an inch-thick chromium-steel weightlifting bar that was propped up in the corner of the entranceway. He laid the bar across the support arms.

“You are expecting someone?” Rima inquired archly, looking askance at all the hardware.

“Just force of habit. Actually this door wouldn’t stop an old woman with an umbrella. It’s hollow. Listen.” He rapped on the door with his knuckles, and it sounded as if he were knocking on an empty cigar box.

“Awhile back I tried to get the embassy’s General Services Department to install a metal door like the ones the Germans and the Danes have. They laughed at me.”

The couple advanced into the living room. Three potted frangipani trees flanking the glass doors to the balcony filled the apartment with their rich perfume. From the center of the space, Rima surveyed the apartment and its contents—new American-made furniture from the embassy warehouse, framed Bartlett engravings of nineteenth-century Lebanon and the Holy Land, a matching pair of Syrian brass trays inlaid with silver, and Tunisian reproductions of ancient Roman mosaics—before moving onto the terrace.

“What a difference it makes being so far above the city,” she observed dreamily. “Everything seems so calm and untroubled. Why, there’s the great wheel of Luna Park, and the Bain Militaire, and out there the lights of Jouniyé—from here, one could imagine Beirut as a united city once again.”

They both looked down at the Corniche. A two-ton troop truck with a dozen drowsy Syrians sitting in back moved slowly past the Sunrise Hotel.

“During the daylight hours, there’s no better place for just watching life go by,” Prosser observed. “I love to come out here first thing in the morning and catch the city as it wakes up.”

Rima pointed out to sea, somewhere beyond the Riviera Beach Club. “Do you see the ship’s lights?”