Beirut Incident (5 page)

What had once served haphazardly as Charlie's work corner was now partitioned off with louvered panels and, from the evidence escaping through the openings of the partitions, vividly lit.

I raised my eyebrows, looking around. "Looks like you've been doing pretty well, Charlie."

He smiled nervously. "Well… uh… business has been pretty good, Nick." His eyes brightened. "I've got a new assistant now and things have really been going all right…" His voice trailed off.

I grinned at him. "It would take more than a new assistant to do this to you, Charlie." I waved my hand at the new decor. "Off hand, I'd say that for once in your life you've found something steady."

He ducked his head. "Well…"

It wasn't common to find a forger with a steady business. That sort of work tends to go in sudden spurts and long stoppages. What it probably meant was that Charlie had somehow gotten into the counterfeit game. Personally, I didn't care what he was doing as long as I got what I came for.

He must have been reading my mind. "Uh… I'm not so sure I can do this, Nick."

I gave him a friendly smile and sat down on one of the double-ended sofas that sat at right angles with its twin, making a false corner in the middle of the living room. "Sure you can, Charlie," I said easily.

Taking Wilhelmina out of her holster, I waved it carelessly in the air. "If you don't, I'll kill you." I wouldn't have of course. I don't go around killing people for something like that, particularly little people like Charlie Harkins. But then, Charlie didn't know that. All he knew was that I could kill people on occasion. The thought apparently occurred to him.

He thrust out a pleading palm. "Okay, Nick, okay. It's just that I'm not… well, anyway…"

"Okay." I reholstered Wilhelmina and leaned forward, my elbows on my knees. "I need a whole new identity, Charlie."

He nodded.

"When I leave here tonight, I'm going to be Nick Cartano, originally from Palermo, more recently from the French Foreign Legion. Leave me about a year or so between the Foreign Legion and now. I can fake that." The fewer actual facts people had to check back on, the better off I would be.

Harkins frowned and pulled at his chin. "That means a passport, discharge papers… what else?"

I ticked them off on my fingers. "I'll need personal letters from my family in Palermo, from a girl in Syracuse, a girl from St. Lo. I want a driver's permit from St. Lo, clothes from France, an old suitcase, and an old wallet."

Charlie looked distressed. "Gee, Nick, I can get that stuff all right, I guess, but it will take some time. I'm not supposed to being doing anything for anybody else now and I'll have to go slow and… uh…"

Again, I got the impression that Charlie was working steadily for someone else. But at the moment, I couldn't have cared less.

"I want it tonight, Charlie," I said.

He sighed in exasperation, started to say something, then thought the better of it and pursed his lips, thinking. "I can do the passport and the discharge papers, all right," he finally said. "There's enough demand for those that I've got forms on hand, but…"

"Get them," I interrupted.

He looked at me dismally for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders in resignation. "I'll try."

Some people just won't do anything unless you lean on them. I leaned on Charlie and about midnight that night I walked out of that plastic elegance into the fetid streets of the Quarter as Nick Cartano. A phone call to our embassy would take care of my old passport and the few belongings I had left in the Hotel St. Georges. From now until I finished this job, I was Nick Cartano, a footloose Sicilian with a cloudy past.

I whistled a light Italian tune as I went down the street.

I moved into the Hotel Roma and waited. If there was a stream of Sicilians pouring through Beirut on their way to America, they would be coming through the Roma. The Roma in Beirut is an irresistible attraction for Italians, as if the front desk were decorated with cloves of garlic. Actually, the way it smells, it could be.

For all my planning, however, I met Louie Lazaro by pure chance the very next day.

It was one of those flatly hot days you find so often along the coast of Lebanon. The scorching blast of the desert is there, sand dry and fiercely hot, but the cool blue of the Mediterranean lessens the impact.

On the sidewalk in front of me, hawk-visaged Bedouins, their black
abayas
trimmed with gold brocade, shouldered their way past sleek Levantine businessmen; flagrantly mustached merchants bustled by, talking excitedly in French; here and there appeared
tarbooshes,
their wearers sometimes in severely cut Western suits, sometimes in
galibeahs,
the ever present nightgown-like robe. On the curb, a legless beggar wallowed in the street's accumulated filth, wailing,
"Bahksheesh, bahksheesh,"
at each passer-by, his palms upturned in supplication and his rheumy eyes beseeching. In the street, a veiled old haridan perched high on a mangy camel that plodded along disconsolately, oblivious to the taxis dodging wildly through the narrow street, raucous horns honking in dissonance.

Across the street, two American girls were taking pictures of a Negebian family group as it paraded slowly down the street, the women balancing huge earthen jars on their heads, both men and women in the soft oranges and blues these gentle people so often affect in their robes and turbans. In the distance, where Almendares Street curves southward toward the St. Georges, the magnificent white sand beach was dotted with sunbathers. Like swirling ants on the blue glass sea, I could see two water skiers trailing their toy-like boats on invisible threads.

It happened suddenly: A taxi whipping blindly around the comer, the driver fighting the wheel as he swerved into the middle of the street to avoid the camel and then see-sawing back to miss an oncoming car. Tires screeching, the cab hurtled out of control in a careening side skid toward the beggar groveling on the curb.

Instinctively I moved, darting toward him in a headlong dive, half-shoving, half-throwing the Arab out of the path of the taxi and tumbling after him into the gutter as the cab smashed across the sidewalk and slammed against the stucco wall of the abutting building in a shrieking agony of rending metal.

For a moment, the world of Almendares Street was stunned into a wax museum tableau. Then a woman wailed, a long drawn-out moan that released her fear and seemed to echo the relief in the crowded street. I lay motionless for a moment, mentally counting my arms and legs. They all seemed to be there, though my forehead felt as if it had taken quite a thumping.

I got up slowly, testing all my working parts. No bones seemed to be broken, no joints sprained, so I moved over to peer through the front door window of the cab, jammed grotesquely against the unyielding stucco.

A multi-lingual babel swelled behind me as I ripped open the door and, as gently as I could, pulled the driver from behind the wheel. Miraculously, he seemed unscathed, only stunned. There was an ashen cast to his olive face as he leaned unsteadily against the wall, a tassled
tarboosh
improbably cocked over one eye, staring incomprehensively at the wreck of his livelihood.

Satisfied that he was in no immediate distress. T turned my attention to the beggar who lay writhing on his back in the gutter, too much in pain to help himself or, perhaps, too weak. God knows, he was as thin as any starving man I have ever seen. There was quite a lot of blood on his face, most of it from a deep gash high on his cheekbone, and he was moaning piteously. When he saw me leaning over him, however, he half-raised himself on one elbow and thrust out his other hand.

"Bahksheesh, sadiki,"
he sobbed.
"Bahksheesh! Bahksheesh!"

I turned away, revolted. In New Delhi and Bombay I have seen the living heaps of bones and bloated bellies that lie in the streets awaiting death by starvation, but even they have more human dignity than the beggars of Beirut.

I started to move away, but a hand on my arm detained me. It belonged to a short, pudgy little man with a cherubic face and eyes as black as his hair. He wore a black silk suit, a white shirt and white tie, incongruous in the heat of Beirut.

"Momento,"
he said excitedly, his head bobbing up and down as if to lend emphasis.
"Momento, per favore."

Then he switched from Italian to French.
"Vous vous êtes fait du mal?"
His accent was atrocious.

"Je me suis blessé les genous, je crois,"
I answered, flexing my knees carefully. I rubbed my head.
"Et quelque chose bien solide m'a cogné la tête. Mais ce n'est pas grave."

He nodded, frowning but grinning at the same time. I guessed that his comprehension wasn't much better than his accent. He still had one hand on my arm. "Speak English?" he asked hopefully.

I nodded, amused.

"Great! Great!" He fairly bubbled with enthusiasm. "I just wanted to say that was the bravest thing I've ever seen. Fantastic! You moved so fast, so quick!" He was quite carried away by the whole thing.

I laughed. "Just reflex action, I guess." And it had been, of course.

"No!" he exclaimed. "It was courage. I mean, that was real guts, man!" He pulled an expensive cigarette case from his inside coat pocket, flipped it open and proferred it to me.

I took a cigarette, and bent to take a light from his eager fingers. I didn't quite know what he was after, but he was amusing.

"Those were the greatest reflexes I've ever seen." His eyes shone with excitement. "Are you a fighter or something? Or an acrobat? A pilot?"

I had to laugh. "No, I…" Let's see. What the hell was I? Right now, I was Nick Cartano, formerly of Palermo, more recently of the Foreign Legion, currently… currently available.

"No, I'm none of those things," I said I pushed through the throng that had gathered around the wrecked cab and the stunned driver and strode down the sidewalk. The little man scurried to keep pace.

In mid-stride, he stuck out his hand. "I'm Louie Lazaro," he said. "What's your name?"

I shook his hand unenthusiastically, still walking. "Nick Cartano. How do you do."

"Cartano? Hey, man, are you Italian, too?"

I shook my head. "Siciliano."

"Hey, great! I'm Sicilian, too. Or… I mean, my parents were from Sicily. I'm really American."

That hadn't been too hard to figure out. Then a thought struck me and I suddenly became more amiable. It was true that not every American of Sicilian background in Beirut would have a connection with the Mafia pipeline I was looking for, but it was equally true that almost
any
Sicilian in Beirut
could
possibly aim me in the right direction, either inadvertently — or intentionally. One Sicilian, it was reasonable to assume, could lead to another.

"No kidding!" I replied with my best look-at-me-I'm-a-delightful-guy smile. "I lived there a long time myself. New Orleans. Prescott, Arizona. Los Angeles. All over."

"Great! Great!"

This guy couldn't be for real.

"Jeez!" he said. "Two Sicilian-Americans in Beirut and we meet right in the middle of the street. It's a small goddamned world, you know?"

I nodded, grinning. "It sure is." I spotted the Mediterranean, the tiny little café on the corner of Almendares and Fuad, and gestured toward the beaded doorway. "What do you say we split a bottle of wine together?"

"Great!" he exclaimed. "In fact, I'll buy."

"Okay, man, you're on," I replied with make-believe enthusiasm.

I'm not quite sure how we got to the subject, but we spent the next twenty minutes or so discussing Jerusalem. Louie had just returned from there, and T had once spent two weeks there, courtesy of Mr. Hawk's organization.

We toured the city conversationally, sightseeing in the Mosque of Omar and at the Wailing Wall, pausing at the Court of Pilate and Ruth's Well, following the stations of the cross up the Via Dolor and into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which still bears the carved initials of the Crusaders who built it in 1099. For all his effusiveness, Louie had a good grasp of history, a reasonably perceptive mind and a rather blasé attitude about the Mother Church. I was beginning to like him.

It took me a while to get the conversation going the way I wanted, but I finally managed it. "How long you going to be in Beirut, Louie?"

He laughed. Life, I was beginning to gather, was just one big lark to Louie. "I'm going back at the end of this week. Saturday, I guess. Sure had one hell of a time here, though."

"How long you been here?"

"Just three weeks. You know… a little business, a little fun." He waved expansively. "Mostly fun."

If he didn't mind answering questions, I didn't mind asking them. "What kind of business?"

"Olive oil. Importing olive oil. Franzini Olive Oil. Ever hear of it?"

I shook my head. "Nope. I'm a brandy-and-soda man myself. Can't stand olive oil."

Louie laughed at my weak joke. He was the type who would always make a poor joke seem worth a laugh. Good for the ego.

I pulled a crumpled pack of Galoise from my shirt pocket and lit one while I happily set about making unexpected plans to become buddy-buddy with Louie Lazaro, the laughing boy of the Western world.

I knew Franzini Olive Oil, all right. Or at least I knew who Joseph Franzini was. Joseph «Popeye» Franzini. A lot of people knew who he was. These days he was Don Joseph, head of the second largest Mafia
famiglia
in New York.

Before Joseph Franzini had become Don Joseph, he had been «Popeye» throughout the underworld on the Eastern seaboard. The «Popeye» came from his very legitimate olive oil importing and marketing business. He was respected because of his ruthless integrity, his ritual adherence to the Mafia law of
omerta,
and his efficient business methods.