Legends (12 page)

The following afternoon the battered Ford that had transported Dante to the Bekaa three weeks earlier threaded its way through a tangle of secondary roads in the direction of Beirut. The bodyguard, sporting baggy khakis and cradling a Kalashnikov with notches cut into the stock for each of his kills, sat up front bantering in Arabic with the driver, a coal-black Saudi with matted dreadlocks. Dante, wearing a coarse brown Bedouin burnoose, a black-and-white checkered kaffiyah and dark sunglasses, shared the backseat with Abdullah, who climbed out of the car at each Syrian checkpoint to wave, with an imperious snap of the wrist, the letter bearing Dr. al-Karim’s seal and signature in the face of the soldiers who were (so Abdullah swore) completely illiterate. Dante, lost in thought, stared through his reflection in the window, barely noticing the dusty villages with the swarms of barefoot boys playing soccer in the unpaved streets, the crowded open-air souks with giant dish antennas for sale on one side and donkeys and camels tethered to a nearby fence, the tiled butcher shops with young boys fanning the flies off the carcasses hanging from hooks. At the outskirts of Beirut, the Ford passed through the first of the militia barricades but (as Abdullah explained in halting English) the pimply gunmen there, though literate, were more interested in the twenty-dollar bills folded into Dr. al-Karim’s letter than the letter itself or the passengers in the car.

With the presence of the Syrian army, the warring factions that had slaughtered each other in the streets of Beirut since the mid 1970s had more or less gone to ground; Muslim and Christian emissaries were rumored to be meeting at Taif, in Saudi Arabia, to formalize the cease-fire accord but armed militias still patrolled the city, which sprawled like a mutilated virago at the edge of the Mediterranean, its shell-ridden buildings mute testimony to the brutal fifteen-year civil war. As the sun dipped into the sea and darkness enveloped Beirut, the whetted crack of distant gunfire reverberated through the city; Abdullah, visibly edgy, muttered something about old scores being settled before the formal cease-fire came into effect. Careful not to stray from the Muslim-controlled areas of Beirut, he guided the driver to the port area and deposited Dante on a corner opposite the burnt-out shell of a neighborhood mosque. A narrow street angled off down hill toward the docks. “We will wait for you here,” Abdullah told Dante. “Please to be returned by the hour often so we can be returned to the camp by the midnight.”

On the narrow street, broken neon lights sizzled over a handful of bars that catered to the seamen from the ships docked at the quays or tied to giant buoys in the harbor. Waving cheerfully at his keepers, Dante skipped down the sidewalk and, ducking to get under a broken neon tube dangling from its electric cord, shouldered past the thick rug that served as a door into the first bar, set up in a mercantile building that had been gutted by a direct hit from a mortar. The charred rafters that held up the jury-rigged sloping roof had been whitewashed, but they still stank from the fire. Dante found a place at the makeshift bar between two Turkish sailors holding each other up and a Portuguese purser wearing a rumpled blue uniform.

“So now, what will your pleasure be?” the barman called, a distinct Irish lilt to his gruff voice.

Dante punched a hole in the cigarette smoke that obscured his view and spoke through it. “Beer and lots of it,” he called back, “the warmer the better.”

The bartender, a thick man with a shock of tousled rusty hair spilling over his eyes and a priest’s white shirt buttoned up to his neck, plucked a large bottle of Bulgarian beer from a carton at his feet. He flicked off the metal cap with a church key, stopped the throat of the bottle with the ball of his thumb and shook the beer to put some life into it, then set it on the counter in front of Dante. “And will your lordship be wanting a mug to drink from?” he inquired with a laugh.

“Do you charge for it?” Dante asked.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, why would we want to do that? You’re paying such an outrageous price for the goddamned beer, we supply the mug at no extra cost to yourself.” He slid a freshly washed mug down the bar to Dante. “Now what ship did you say you were off?”

“I didn’t say,” Dante shot back. “It’s the H.M.S. Pinafore.”

The smile froze on the bartender’s face. “H.M.S. Pinafore, did you say?”

Dante filled the mug, swiped away the foam with the back of a forefinger and, tilting back his head, drank off the beer in a long gulping swallow. “Ah, that surely transforms the way a man sees the world,” he announced, starting to fill the mug again. “H.M.S. Pinafore. That’s what I said.”

Accepting this with a brisk nod, the bartender made his way to the far end of the bar and, blocking one ear with the tip of a finger, spoke into a telephone. Dante was halfway through his second bottle of Bulgarian beer when the woman appeared at the top of the broken wooden steps that led to what was left of the offices on the upper floor of the mercantile building. A sailor buttoning his fly trailed behind her. The woman, wisps of long dark hair falling across a face disfigured by smallpox scars, was wearing a tight skirt slit high on one thigh and a gauzy blouse through which her breasts were as visible as they would be if she’d been caught walking naked through a morning haze. All conversation ceased as she came across the room, her high heels drumming on the wooden floorboards. She stopped to take her bearings, spotted Dante and installed herself at the bar next to him.

“Will you buy me a whiskey?” she demanded in a throaty murmur.

“I’d be a horse’s ass not to,” Dante replied cheerfully, and he held up a finger to get the bartender’s eye and pointed to the woman. “Whiskey for my future friend.”

“Chivas Regal,” the woman instructed the bartender. “A double.”

Dante authorized the double with a nod when the bartender looked at him for confirmation, then turned to scrutinize the woman the way he’d been taught to look at people he might one day have to pick out of a counterintelligence scrapbook. As usual he had difficulty figuring out her age. She was Arab, that much was evident despite the thick eyeliner and the splash of bright red on her lips, and probably in her forties, but exactly where he didn’t know. It occurred to him that she must be Christian, since Muslims would kill their women before they’d let them work as prostitutes.

“So what would be your name, darling?” Dante asked.

She absently combed the fingers of one hand through her hair, brushing it away from her face; two large silver hoop earrings caught the light and shimmered. “I am Djamillah,” she announced. “What is your name?”

Dante took a long swig of beer. “You can call me Irish.”

“From the look of you, you have been at sea for a while.”

“What makes you think that?”

“You’re dying of thirst, I can see that from the way you gulped down that disgusting Bulgarian beer. What else are you dying of, Irish?”

Dante glanced at the bartender, rinsing glasses in a sink just out of earshot. “Well, now, Djamillah, to tell you the God awful truth, I haven’t been laid in a month of Sundays. Is that a predicament you could remedy?”

The Portuguese purser, sitting with his back to Dante, could be heard snickering under his breath. Djamillah was unfazed. “You are a direct man,” she said. “The answer to your question, Irish, is: I could.”

“How much would it set me back?”

“Fifty dollars U.S. or the equivalent in a European currency. I don’t deal in local money.”

“Bottoms up,” Dante said. He clicked glasses with her and downed what was left in the mug, grabbed the half-empty bottle of beer by the throat (in case he needed a weapon) and followed her across the room to the stairs. At the top of the stairs she pushed open a wooden door and led Dante into what must have once been the head office of the mercantile company. There was a large desk covered in glass with photographs of children flattened under it near the boarded-over oval windows, and an enormous leather couch under a torn painting depicting Napoleon’s defeat at Acre. A dozen sealed cartons without markings were stacked against one wall. Locking the door behind them, Djamillah settled onto the couch and, reaching through a torn seam into the cushion, produced a folder filled with eight-by-ten aerial photographs. Dante, settling down alongside her, used his handkerchief to grip the photographs and examined them one by one. “These must have been taken from high altitude,” he remarked. “The resolution is excellent. They’ll do nicely.”

The woman offered Dante a felt-tipped pen and he began to draw arrows to various buildings in the camp and label them. “The recruits, nineteen fedayeen in all, live in these two low buildings inside the perimeter fence,” he said. “Explosives and fuses are stored in this small brick building with the Hezbollah flag on the roof. Dr. al-Karim lives and works in the house behind the mosque. It is easily the largest in the village so your people won’t have a problem identifying it. I don’t know where he sleeps but his office looks out at the mosque so it must be ” he drew another arrow and labelled it “K’s office” “here. I bunk in with a family in this house in the village.”

“What kind of security do they have at night?”

“I’ve strolled around the camp after dark several times they have a roadblock, manned by two recruits and one of the instructors, stationed here where the road curves uphill to the village and the camp. There’s a bunker with a heavy machine gun on top of the hill over the quarry which is manned during the day. I’ve never been able to get up there at night because the gate in the perimeter fence is locked and I didn’t want to raise suspicions by asking for the key.”

“We must assume it is manned at night. They’d be fools not to. The machine gun must be a priority target. What kind of communications do they have?”

“Don’t know really. Never saw the radio shack, or a radio for that matter. Spotted what looked like high frequency antennas on the top of the minaret of the mosque, so whatever they have must be somewhere around there.”

“We don’t want to bomb a mosque, so we’ll have to take that out by hand. Does Dr. al-Karim have a satellite phone?”

“Never saw one but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have one.”

“When will this round of training be finished.”

“I’ve told Dr. al-Karim I needed ten more days.”

“What happens then?”

“The graduating class goes off to the front to kill Israeli soldiers occupying the buffer zone in Lebanon. And a freshman class turns up to start a new cycle of training.”

“How many instructors and staff are in the camp?”

“Including transportation people, including the experts on small arms and martial arts, including Dr. al-Karim’s personal bodyguards, four that I’ve seen, I’d say roughly eighteen to twenty.”

Djamillah went over the photographs again, double checking the distances between buildings, the location of the gate in the perimeter fence, identifying the footpaths that crisscrossed the village and the Hezbollah camp. She produced a military map of the Bekaa to see what other forces Hezbollah might have in the general vicinity of the camp. “When the raid begins, you must somehow get to this spot”

she pointed to a well between the village and the Hezbollah camp. She handed Dante a white silk bandanna and he stuffed it into the pocket of his trousers. “Wear this around your neck so you can be easily identified.”

“How will I know when to expect the raid?”

“Exactly six hours before, two Israeli M-l6s will fly by at an altitude high enough to leave contrails. They’ll come from north to south. When they are directly above the camp they will make ninety degree turns to the west.”

Djamillah slipped the photographs and the map back into the folder and wedged it into the seam of the cushion.

“Looks as if we’ve more or less covered the essentials,” Dante remarked.

“Not quite.” She stood up and began matter of factly stripping off her clothing; it was the first time in his life Dante had seen a woman undress when the act didn’t seem sensual. “You are supposed to be up here having sex with me. I think it would be prudent for you to be able to describe my clothing and my body.” She removed the blouse and the skirt and her underpants. “I have a small scar on the inside of my thigh, here. My pubic hair is trimmed for a bikini. I have a faded tattoo of a night moth under my right breast. And on my left arm you will see the scars of a smallpox vaccination that didn’t prevent me from getting smallpox, which accounts for the pockmarks on my face. When we came up here I locked the door and you put fifty dollars two twenties and a ten on the desk and weighed them down with the shell casing that’s on the floor over there. We both took off our clothing. You asked me to suck you that was the expression you used but I said I don’t do that. You stripped and sat down on the couch and I gave you a hand job and when you were erect I slipped on a condom and came on top of you. Please make note of the fact that I make love with my shoes on.” She began to dress again. “Now it’s your turn to strip, Irish, so that I can describe your body if I need to. Why do you hesitate? You are a professional. This is a matter of tradecraft.”

Dante shrugged and stood up and lowered his trousers. “As you can see, I am circumcised. My first American girlfriend talked me into having it done she seemed to think there was less chance of her catching some venereal disease from me if I were circumcised.”

“Circumcised and well endowed, as they say. Do you have any scars?”

“Physical or mental?”

She didn’t think he was humorous. “I do not psychoanalyze my clients, I only fuck them.”

“No scars,” he said dryly.

She inspected his body from foot to head, and his clothing, then gestured for him to turn around. “You can put your clothes back on,” she finally said. She walked him to the door. “You are in a dangerous business, Irish.”

“I am addicted to fear,” he murmured. “I require a daily fix.”

“I do not believe you. If you did not believe in something you would not be here.” She offered her hand. “I admire your courage.”

He gripped her hand and held it for a moment. “And I am dazzled by yours. An Arab who risks “