Mao II (16 page)

The bomb experts arrived and then the press bus and some publishing people, more detectives, and Bill sat in the back of the unmarked police car while Charlie huddled with different groups making new plans.

About an hour later the two men sat under the vaulted skylight in a dining room at the Chesterfield, eating the sole.

“It means a day’s delay. Two at the most,” Charlie said. “You definitely ought to change hotels so we can move quickly once we’re set.”

“You showed presence of mind, taking that protective stance,”

“Actually that’s the recommended air-crash position. Except you don’t do it standing up. I knew I was supposed to lower my head and lock my hands behind my neck but I couldn’t place the maneuver in context. I thought I was on a plane going down.”

“Your people will find another site.”

“We have to. We can’t stop now. Even if we go to the bare minimum. Fifteen people in five rowboats on a secluded lake somewhere.”

“Anybody have a theory?”

“I talk to an antiterrorist expert tomorrow. Want to come along?”

“Nape.”

“Where are you staying?”

“I’ll be in touch, Charlie.”

“Rowboats are not the answer, come to think of it. Isn’t that where they got Mountbatten?”

“Fishing boat.”

“Close enough.”

Bill knew someone was looking at him, a man sitting alone at a table across the room. It was interesting how the man’s curiosity carried so much information, that he knew who Bill was, that they’d never met, that he was making up his mind whether or not to approach. Bill even knew who the man was, although he could not have said how he knew. It was as if the man had fitted himself to a predetermined space, to an idea of something that was waiting to happen. Bill never looked at the man directly. Everything was a shape, a fate, information flowing.

“I want to talk about your book,” Charlie said.

“It’s not done yet. When it’s done.”

“You don’t have to talk about it. I’ll talk about it. And when it’s done, we can both talk about it.”

“We were nearly killed a little while ago. Let’s talk about that.”

“I know how to publish your work. Nobody in this business knows you better than I do. I know what you need.”

“What’s that?”

“You need a major house that also has a memory. That’s why they hired me. They want to take a closer look at tradition. I represent something to those people. I represent books. I want to establish a solid responsible thoughtful list and give it the launching power of our mass-market capabilities. We have enormous resources. If you spend years writing a book, don’t you want to see it fly?”

“How’s your sex life, Charlie?”

“I can get this book out there in numbers that will astound.”

“Got a girlfriend?”

“I had some prostate trouble. They had to reroute my semen.”

“Where did they send it?”

“I don’t know. But it doesn’t come out the usual place.”

“You still perform the act.”

“Enthusiastically.”

“But you don’t ejaculate.”

“Nothing comes out.”

“And you don’t know what happens to it.”

“I didn’t ask them what happens to it. It goes back inside. That’s as much as I want to know.”

“It’s a beautiful story, Charlie. Not a word too long.”

They looked at dessert menus.

“When will the book be done?”

“I’m fixing the punctuation.”

“Punctuation’s interesting. I make it a point to observe how a writer uses commas.”

“And you figure two days tops and we’re out of here,” Bill said.

“This is what we’re hoping. We’re hoping it doesn’t continue. The bomb was the culmination. They made their point even if we don’t know exactly what it is.”

“I may need to buy a shirt.”

“Buy a shirt. And let me check you in here. Under the circumstances I think we ought to be able to find each other as expeditiously as possible.”

“I’ll think about it over coffee.”

“We use acid-free paper,” Charlie said.

“I’d just as soon have my books rot when I do. Why should they outlive me? They’re the reason I’m dying before my time.”

The man stood by the table waiting for them to finish the exchange. Bill looked off into space and waited for Charlie to realize the man was standing there. The table was large enough to accommodate another person and Charlie handled introductions while the waiter brought a chair. The man was George Haddad and when Charlie called him a spokesman for the group in Beirut the man made a gesture of self-deprecation, leaning away from the words, both hands raised. He clearly felt he hadn’t earned the title.

“I’m a great admirer,” he said to Bill. “And when Mr. Everson suggested you might join us at the press conference I was surprised and deeply pleased. Knowing of course how you shun public appearances.”

He was clean-shaven, a tall man in his mid-forties, hair gone sparse at the front of his head. He had moist eyes and appeared sad and slightly hulking in a drab gray suit and a plastic watch he might have borrowed from a child.

“What’s your connection?” Bill said.

“With Beirut? Let’s say I sympathize with their aims if not their methods. This unit that took the poet is one element in a movement. Barely a movement actually. It’s just an underground current at this stage, an assertion that not every weapon in Lebanon has to be marked Muslim, Christian or Zionist.”

“Let’s use first names,” Charlie said.

Coffee came. Bill felt a stinging pinpoint heat, a shaped pain in his left hand, bright and slivered.

Charlie said, “Who wants to stop this meeting from taking place?”

“Maybe the war in the streets is simply spreading. I don’t know. Maybe there’s an organization that objects in principle to the release of any hostage, even a hostage they themselves are not holding. Certainly they understand that this man’s release depends completely on the coverage. His freedom is tied to the public announcement of his freedom. You can’t have the first without the second. This is one of many things Beirut has learned from the West. Beirut is tragic but still breathing. London is the true rubble. I’ve studied here and taught here and every time I return I see the damage more clearly.”

Charlie said, “What do we have to do in your estimation to conduct this meeting safely?”

“It may not be possible here. The police will advise you to cancel. The next time I don’t think there will be a phone call. I’ll tell you what I think there will be.” And he leaned over the table. “A very large explosion in a crowded room.”

Bill picked a fragment of glass out of his hand. The others watched. He understood why the pain felt familiar. It was a summer wound, a play wound, one of the bums and knee-scrapes and splinters of half a century ago, one of the bee stings, the daily bloody cuts. You slid into a base and got a raspberry. You had a fight and got a shiner.

He said, “We have an innocent man locked in a cellar.”

“Of course he’s innocent. That’s why they took him. It’s such a simple idea. Terrorize the innocent. The more heartless they are, the better we see their rage. And isn’t it the novelist, Bill, above all people, above all writers, who understands this rage, who knows in his soul what the terrorist thinks and feels? Through history it’s the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark. Where are your sympathies? With the colonial police, the occupier, the rich landlord, the corrupt government, the militaristic state? Or with the terrorist? And I don’t abjure that word even if it has a hundred meanings. It’s the only honest word to use.”

Bill’s napkin was bunched on the table in front of him. The two men watched him place the glass fragment in a furrow in the cloth. It glinted like sand, the pebbly greenish swamp sand that belongs to childhood, to the bruises and welts, the fingers nicked by foul tips. He felt very tired. He listened to Charlie talk with the other man. He felt the deadweight of travel, the apathy and vagueness of being in a place that didn’t matter to him, being invisible to himself, sleeping in a room he wouldn’t recognize if he had a picture of it in front of him.

George was saying, “The first incident was unimportant because it was only a series of phone calls. The second incident was unimportant because nobody was killed. For you and Bill, pure trauma. Otherwise strictly routine. A few years ago a neo-Nazi group in Germany devised the slogan ‘The worse the better.’ This is also the slogan of Western media. You are nonpersons for the moment, victims without an audience. Get killed and maybe they will notice you.”

In the morning Bill had breakfast in a pub near his hotel. He found he was able to order a pint of ale with his ham and eggs even though it was just past seven because night workers from the meat market were on their meal shift now. Extremely progressive licensing policy. White-coated doctors from Saint Bartholomew’s sat at the next table. He looked at the cut on his hand. Seemed to be doing nicely but it’s good to know the medics are near if you need advice or assistance. Old hospitals with saints’ names are the ones you want to go to if you have cuts and abrasions. They haven’t forgotten how to treat the classic Crusader wounds.

He took out a notepad and entered the breakfast bill and last night’s taxi fare. The sound of the blast was still an echo in his skin.

Later in the day he met Charlie by prearrangement in front of the Chesterfield. They walked through Mayfair in a lazy dazzle of warm light. Charlie wore a blazer, gray flannels and bone-and-blue saddle oxfords.

“I talked to a Colonel Martinson or Martindale. Got it written down. One of those hard sharp technocrats whose religion is being smart. He knows all the phrases, he’s got the jargon down pat. If you’ve got the language of being smart, you’ll never catch a cold or get a parking ticket or die.”

“Was he in uniform?” Bill said.

“Too smart for that. He said there wouldn’t be a news conference today. Not enough time to secure a site. He said our friend George is an interesting sort of academic. His name appears in an address book found in an apartment raided by police somewhere in France—a bomb factory. And he has been photographed in the company of known terrorist leaders.”

“Every killer has a spokesman.”

“You’re almost as smart as the colonel. He talked about you in fact. He said you ought to get on a plane and go back home. He will make arrangements.”

“How does he know I’m here, or why I’m here, or who I am?”

“After the first series of threatening calls,” Charlie said.

“I thought I was the unannounced presence. But you told George I was here. And now this colonel with a brush mustache.”

“I had to report the names of all the people invited to the conference. Because of the phone calls. The police needed a list. And I told George actually the day before because I thought it would help. Anything that helps.”

“Why does the colonel want me to go home?”

“He says he has information that you may be in danger. He hinted that you would be worth a great deal more to the group in Beirut than the hostage they’re now holding. The feeling is he’s too obscure.”

Bill laughed.

“The whole thing is so hard to believe I almost don’t believe it.”

“But of course we do believe it. We have to. It doesn’t break any laws of logic or nature. It’s unbelievable only in the shallowest sense. Only shallow people insist on disbelief. You and I know better. We understand how reality is invented. A person sits in a room and thinks a thought and it bleeds out into the world. Every thought is permitted. And there’s no longer a moral or spatial distinction between thinking and acting.”

“Poor bastard, you’re beginning to sound like me.”

They walked in silence. Then Charlie said something about the loveliness of the day. They chose their topics carefully, showing a deft indirectness. They needed some space in which to let the subject cool.

Then Bill said, “How do they plan to get me into a hostage situation?”

“Oh I don’t know. Lure you eastward somehow. The colonel was vague here.”

“We don’t blame him, do we?”

“Not a bit. He said the explosive was Semtex H. A controlled amount. They could have brought down the building if they’d wanted to.”

“The colonel must have enjoyed dropping that name.”

“The material comes from Czechoslovakia.”

“Did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“See how stupid we are.”

“Where are you staying, Bill? We really have to know.”

“I’m sure the colonel knows. Just go ahead and arrange the conference. I came here to read some poems and that’s what I’m going to do.”

“Nobody wants to be intimidated. But the fact is,” Charlie said.

“I’m going back to my hotel. I’ll call you at noon tomorrow. Get a new location and let’s do what we came here to do.”

“I think we ought to have dinner, the two of us. We’ll talk about something else completely.”

“I wonder what that might be.”

“I want this book, you bastard.”

 

 

People stood gathered in a rambling white space set on several levels under ducts and sprinklers and track lights, chatting over silver cocktails. The walls were hung with works of living Russians, mainly large color-brave canvases, supernation paintings, ambitious and statement-making.

Brita moved through the crowd, edging sideways, drink held high, and she felt the interplay of glances, the way eyes consume their food, taking in faces, asses, tapestry jackets, raw-silk shirts, the way bodies slant involuntarily toward a well-known figure in the room, the way people carry on one dialogue and listen to another, the way every energy is directed somewhere else, some brightness nearby, the whole shape and state and history of this little hour of truth. There seemed to be some imaginary point of major interest, a shifting middle cluster of conversation, although every person in the room retained an awareness of the street beyond the plate-glass windows. They were here, in a way, for the people in the street. They knew exactly how they appeared to those who were walking or driving by, to standees on crammed buses. They appeared to float outside the world. They were only art browsers but they appeared privileged and inviolate, transcendent souls lighted against the falling night. They shared a stillness, a way of looking sharply etched. This gave the incidental scene a claim to permanence, as if they believed they might still be here a thousand nights from now, weightless and unperspiring, stirring the small awe of passersby.