Bride of a Bygone War (13 page)

“Radios, radios, radios. Is that all you care about, Fadi? Don’t you care that your old friend Elie is here to see you for the first time in nearly two weeks?”

“Of course I care,” the voice continued in a tone that suggested exactly the opposite. “So long as you brought the radios. Did you?”

“Not only radios, but an expert from America to show you how to use them,” the major boasted. “Fadi, meet Wali. He will be working with us to help modernize our equipment.”

“
Marhaba. Kiifak
,” Lukash said in greeting.

By now Lukash’s eyes were adjusted to the light. He saw that he was in a small L-shaped room with windows on the long side facing to the west. Both the glass and the metal frames of the windows had long since been destroyed by gunfire directed at the militiamen within. Even the shapes of the holes were distorted; narrow loopholes punched through the cinder-block wall for laying down defensive fire had become nearly oval from the steady erosion of thousands of incoming bullets during five years of fighting. A half dozen other fist-size apertures marked where rocket-propelled grenades and antitank rounds had penetrated the wall.

“Wali, Captain Fadi is a captain in our Special Forces and specializes in commando operations.”

Fadi took his eyes away from his own loophole long enough for Lukash to see his face. It was broad and flat, with widely spaced eyes and a roguish smile, and covered by a trimmed full beard flecked with premature gray.

“So, an American expert,” Fadi noted with irony. “During the Events we had several foreign experts with us. None lasted longer than a month. They knew a good deal about weapons and tactics, of course, and offered us advice on every possible subject, but very little of their advice was suited for the kind of war we faced. They wanted to teach us the tactics of Korea and Vietnam when what we needed to learn were those of Algiers, Berlin, and Stalingrad.”

“I don’t claim to be a military expert, Fadi. But I do know a little about radios, and there are none better than these,” Lukash proposed, perhaps a bit too eager to please. “They’re the latest secure-voice handhelds from Motorola. You can send a man anywhere in the city and talk to him as if you were on the telephone, and not even the Russians will be able to follow what you’re saying. If you have a few minutes, I’ll show you how to key in the daily cryptographic tapes and how to set them up.”

“Wait, wait, not so fast, my friend,” Fadi answered. “You Americans work too hard. First we will drink some tea.” He approached the window and shouted to someone outside to brew a fresh pot. “Come, let us go into the command post. I have something to show Elie.”

With Lukash close at his heels, Captain Fadi led the way back down the stairs into the darkness and then through ten more meters of blackness to an open trap door. They emerged into a courtyard with a granite fountain in the center, a colonnaded walk on four sides, and in each corner a giant earthenware vessel containing a live evergreen.
 

Lukash’s eye was attracted immediately to the ornate tiles on the floor surrounding the base of the fountain.

“Fantastic, eh? We bring water every day from the Collège Sacré-Coeur.”

“This fountain actually works?” Lukash asked.

“Not the fountain. We bring the water for the
arz
,” Captain Fadi replied.

“The cedars,” Major Elie translated. “Fadi is a fanatic about cedars. He joined the Guardians of the Cedars militia when he turned fifteen. Now he is a Phalangist, of course, but I think he would fight harder to defend those bloody trees than he would to defend all of Achrafiyé.”

“Over here,” Fadi interrupted. “Take a look through this.” He had moved across the courtyard and was standing in a trench dug along the far wall, eyes glued to a pair of twenty-power naval binoculars mounted atop an aluminum tripod. The binoculars were crammed into a narrow aperture in the limestone wall the size of a paving brick. Within easy reach of the binoculars, a bolt-action rifle with a hefty match-weight barrel hung from a hook by a leather shooting sling.

As soon as Lukash lowered himself into the trench, Fadi moved aside to let him look through the massive binoculars. “What do you see?” Fadi asked with the eagerness of a schoolboy.

“It looks like a pile of sandbags that somebody ripped open with a knife.”

“No—to the left, about ten meters.”

“A cinder-block hooch with sandbags across the entrance. Oh, now I see it. There’s a dummy in tiger-striped camouflage fatigues propped up in a chair.”

“Would you like to test your aim?” Fadi invited. “I myself zeroed the rifle this morning. All you have to do is aim dead-on and squeeze.”

Lukash picked up the rifle, worked the bolt to slide a round into the chamber, and slipped his arm through the sling. The rifle was heavy in his hands and the action as stiff as it needed to be to fire a tight shot pattern at five or six hundred meters. “Which slot should I shoot from?” he asked.

“Use this one, over here,” Fadi answered. “Lean across the sandbags and shoot before I count to five. If the Syrians see us opening the slot, they’ll aim for the reflection of your scope, so fire quickly.”

Lukash rested his chest and his left elbow on the coarse burlap and wrapped the leather sling around his wrist so that there was a fixed angle between his upper arm and forearm. He tried to peer through the telescopic sight, but all was dark until the firing loophole opened.

“Ready?” Fadi asked.

“Open up,” Lukash replied.

Lukash found himself staring at a gargantuan Sony logo covering the third and fourth stories of an office building that he recognized from many hours of wandering five years earlier through the streets around Martyrs’ Square and Place Etoile. He lowered the rifle into place and moved the upright aiming pillar of the telescopic sight minutely to the left until the dummy came within view. There could be no mistaking it.

“Three...four...Wait! A Land Rover is moving across the square at two o’clock. Range is fifty meters beyond zero. Look for the driver and lead him by half a car length. Hold your aim steady about ten centimeters above his head…Now go ahead, blast him!”

Lukash swung the muzzle the width of the square and spotted a Land Rover speeding to the south, veering erratically from side to side in a serpentine pattern. He set the upright pillar of the telescopic sight level with the Land Rover and followed it, then he led the vehicle until the tip of the pillar was half a car length ahead of the driver’s head and ten centimeters above it. He felt his fingertip squeeze the trigger. Suddenly a thunderclap erupted and the recoil of the muzzle blast punched his shoulder hard. He lost sight of the square for a moment, and by the time he lowered the rifle muzzle far enough to see it once again, the Land Rover was gone.

“Perfect kill against the mannequin, but you hit the wrong target,” Fadi observed drily. “Too bad. If you had tried, you could have taken the driver.”

“Maybe so,” Lukash answered in a conciliatory tone. “Anyway, I’m just an observer here. I’m not at war like you guys.”

“Well, at least you made Elie happy,” Fadi replied with a glance toward the major. “He hates that mannequin. He thinks the bastards who set it up are baiting him because his father-in-law owns the building where the dummy sits. As if the Syrian peasants over there were capable of such subtlety. But, then, Elie has always taken the war far too personally.”

“If by that you mean I will not make a sport of war,” Elie rejoined sharply, “then perhaps I do. As for Fadi, he never takes anything personally. The past five years have been a sort of field exercise for him. Eh, Fadi?”

“Why not? And now we have entered the final round, my friends. Phalange against Syrian army. Whoever wins the next event takes home the grand prize.”

“Don’t listen to his nonsense, Wali,” Elie replied, shaking his head and smiling. “Fadi is a brilliant street fighter but completely unreliable for anything else. And don’t believe that nonsense about a father-in-law, either. I have never even been engaged.”

“The devil, you say! You are practically married,” Fadi roared. “You won’t even look at another girl. And don’t think for a minute she doesn’t know it.”

“Congratulations, Major Elie,” Lukash ventured. “Who is the lucky girl?”

“Her name is Muna,” Elie answered, blushing. “She has not yet agreed to marry me, but I hope that soon she may.”

Chapter 6

Walter Lukash looked down at the half-filled grocery cart. In it were a half dozen liter packs of long-life milk, two boxes of corn flakes, a kilo of sugar, a baguette, a foil-wrapped brick of butter, a jar of instant coffee, a jar of English marmalade, and a tin of Danish butter cookies. All were essential: he would need breakfast food regardless of how long he stayed in Beirut. Pirelli and the ambassador had told him it would be two years. But the more he thought about it, the more impossible it seemed.

Lukash stopped at the end of the aisle and removed a case of German pilsner from a partially unloaded pallet. Turning up the next aisle, he found a six-pack of quinine water and dropped it alongside the milk—then a cellophane-covered box of English water crackers, a jar of salted almonds, a foiled block of Westphalian pumpernickel, and three bottles of Moët White Star Brut—before steering the cart to the checkout area.

Perched atop a stool behind the cash register sat a fortyish woman whose beehive coiffure, thick mask of makeup, and sleeveless black dress would have been more appropriate at a Phoenicia Street nightclub. “Four hundred sixty-five lira, twenty piastres,” the woman announced before tearing the sales tape from the register and handing it to him.

“Wait a second. I think I have a twenty-piastre coin in here somewhere,” he replied in Arabic as he counted out the bills and fished for the coin among the keys in his trouser pocket.

“Maalesh,” the woman answered, brightening at his use of Arabic.

Lukash began packing his purchases into a cardboard carton but stopped short when the woman called out for one of the teenage packing boys in the rear of the store.

“Let the boy do it,” she told him as if he were breaking a house rule. “Give him your car keys and he will put the boxes in the boot. What kind of car is it?”

“A silver BMW, parked in front of the patisserie next door.” He handed her the keys, still fastened together by a chrome paper clip from Pirelli’s desk.

“
Yaa, walad, vite, vite
,” she repeated for the benefit of the three schoolboys arguing heatedly over which one would earn the foreigner’s tip.

Lukash accepted his change and stuffed the crisp banknotes into his wallet while the boys went on with their dispute. “As long as I’m waiting, would you mind if I take a look at your telephone directory?” he asked the woman, offering her his most charming smile.

She smiled in return and then cocked her head lazily toward a tiny office behind him. Inside, a row of gray metal file cabinets towered over a plywood desk piled high with European-style two-ring loose-leaf binders. “It’s by the desk somewhere. Look underneath the telephone. If not, try the bottom desk drawer.”

Lukash thanked her and entered the office. He found a glossy catalog from a Danish wine and spirits merchant on the edge of the desk, along with two similar catalogs from competitors in Trieste and Malta. He peeked under sheaves of invoices, inventory printouts, and correspondence until he was certain that the telephone book was not hidden among the clutter on the desk. Then he ran his eyes along spines of volumes lined up in the waist-high bookcase behind the desk and soon spotted the old phone directory on the second shelf, its tagboard cover torn off at the spine.

He opened it to the K’s. There were dozens of entries for “Khalifé,” spelled at least four different ways, and two entries for “Khalifé, César.” One carried a business address near Place des Martyrs, now in the heart of the city’s bombed-out no-man’s-land, and one an address in the Khalifé family seat of Beït Meri. Lukash called the second number and heard a strident rapid-fire buzz that indicated the number was out of service. He closed the telephone book and then reopened it and scanned the first few pages for a publication date. He found it on the back of the third page: March 1974.

Lukash stood in the doorway and held up the telephone book in one hand. “Do you have anything more recent? This directory is more than five years old.”

The woman shrugged. “It was the last one. The Events, you know...” She let her words trail off, and then rallied. “Of course, they haven’t replaced the Parliament since then either. Or repaired the streets. Or replaced the street lamps. Believe me, there’s a lot to be done after five years of hell.”

Lukash gave the woman a sympathetic smile, then ducked back inside the office to return the directory to its shelf. Yes, indeed there was much to be done. How much he didn’t know yet. And it frustrated him that he wasn’t even sure where to begin.

* * *

A white Mercedes sedan waited at the taxi rank, a twenty-year-old warhorse that had somehow survived the hazards of five years of civil war with its gleaming finish intact and no more dents and scratches than if it had spent the war years in a garage. The sedan’s silver-haired driver swept grit from its broad hood with a feather duster and waited for his next fare to appear. Lukash waved the driver off while he advanced a few paces beyond the line of taxis and gazed toward the west.