The Company We Keep (27 page)

Damascus, Syria:
DAYNA

A
s we pull up in front of Sheikh Hamad’s mansion, I tilt my head to get a better look. This can’t be it, I think.

The house is a monstrosity, a prison blockhouse with a wedding-cake façade. There are three stories of it, cracks everywhere, masonry crumbling off, pieces hanging in the dry bushes, piles of dirt from digging the foundation but never hauled away. There’s not a tree or even a shrub to protect the house from the steady, hard desert wind. The nearby houses are all new too, some half built. Few look occupied.

Qasem, a businessman and the sheikh’s friend, and Bob get out,
leaving Qasem’s wife, Leila, and me to wait in the car. Bob tries to push open the cast-iron front gate, but it’s bolted closed and locked. There’s no bell. Bob pounds on the gate, but the house is as still as a stone. Qasem and Bob walk around the side to see if there’s another entry. It’s then that I see someone moving in a window. I open the car window and call Bob and Qasem to come back around front. Another few minutes go by before a head pokes out the door, but it pulls back and closes. Finally a man in ironed Levi’s, a plaid shirt, and cowboy boots comes out. His shirt misbuttoned, he looks as if he’s just woken up, even though it’s eight in the evening. He shakes hands with Bob and Qasem through the gate while a servant slips around him and unlocks the latch.

The man turns and sees Leila and me in the backseat of the car and walks toward us, squinting as if he can’t imagine who we are. I get out of the car to introduce myself. He shakes my hand. “Sheikh Hamad. You’re very, very welcome to my home.” He turns to go inside the house, and we all follow him. The servant relocks the gate behind us.

Inside the foyer, the sheikh stops abruptly as if to nail down a thought. “No, wait,” he says. “First come out into the garden to see my new barbecue.”

Outside on the terrace, he points to a giant barbecue with six separate grills, lighted by bare bulbs on a string hanging between two poles. A half-dozen marble tables with marble benches surround it. “Next time we will grill,” the sheikh says. “When the house is finished and I can invite all my friends. A party.”

I notice a man in an apron and chef’s toque grilling at his own barbecue in the house next to the sheikh’s. The sheikh nods at him, and the man waves back. “Do you know who that is?” the sheikh asks Bob, dropping his voice to a whisper. “It’s General Khuli.” Bob asks if it is “the same” General Khuli. The sheikh replies, “Yes, that’s him.”

In the eighties, General Khuli masterminded an attempt to
blow up an Israeli El Al plane flying from London to Tel Aviv. The explosive device was planted on an unwitting, pregnant Irishwoman.

“Shouldn’t he be in hiding somewhere?” I whisper to Bob.

Before Bob can answer, the sheikh takes us back inside, into what he calls his
diwan
. The only furniture consists of two identical burgundy divans pushed up against midnight blue damask walls. Little stars woven into the fabric twinkle in the chandelier’s light. A huge, hand-woven Persian silk carpet occupies the center of the room.

We sit in the corner, the four of us along one wall, the sheikh along the other.

“Problems, problems,” the sheikh says. “I have more than I care to tell you. You won’t believe what happened to me two days ago.” He slumps in his seat, tousling his hair in an untamed tuft.

“The evening started so pleasantly. I wanted to be by myself, a night on the Golan Heights to think things over with a
sheesha
. A frigid wind picked up, and I told the driver to move the pipe into the van. Just as I settled down in the backseat, the van was suddenly engulfed in flames. This foolish man had carelessly let a spark escape. The van burned to its rims, everything ruined.”

The story’s funny, I suppose, but I find the sheikh a sad figure. How many friends could he have, living in exile like this? Bob told me there are a lot of people after his money, con men and corrupt Syrian officials. I’m sure he grotesquely overpaid in building this soulless house, and filling it with its mismatched furniture.

As the evening proceeds, the sheikh becomes more agitated, getting up every fifteen minutes, only to come back with his hair in spikes, his eyes redder.

At one point he leaves the room and comes back grinning, nearly ecstatic. “We must buy a bank together!” Bob plays along and asks how much capital we will need. The sheikh turns to Qasem, “How much do we need?” Qasem says a minimum of $20 million. “We’ll find it!” the sheikh says.

It’s a little after eleven before the sheikh finally leads us into dinner. I stop in the doorway, not knowing what to say. A twenty-foot banquet table sits covered with gold platters, towering mountains of lamb and saffron rice, at least twenty different bowls of things like quail eggs, caviar, and sweetmeats. The sheikh is delighted and claps his hands like a child.

Beirut, Lebanon:
BOB

T
he taxi drops us off in front of the Albergo Hotel, a restored Ottoman mansion in the old Christian Beirut suburb of Ashrafiyah, and we run to the door with coats pulled up over our heads against sheets of frigid rain. The hip Italian restaurant inside is packed with young Lebanese out for a fun night. We don’t see Qasem and Leila until they wave to us from a table. Qasem’s in a suit, Leila all in cream, with a pair of large teardrop diamond earrings.

We’ve come to really like Qasem and Leila. He’s earnest, but at the same time always ready with a genuine laugh. Leila, a professor, is charming, beautiful, and smart. After our dinner at the sheikh’s house in Damascus, they invited us over for dinner, and tonight we’re reciprocating.

As soon as we order drinks, Qasem looks to Dayna and Leila. “Do you two need to freshen up?” Leila takes the cue and gets up, but Dayna stays. Qasem waits a moment, then half turns in his seat to make sure Leila isn’t on her way back. “There’s this business plan I think we should mull over,” he says. He stops again, obviously considering how he’s going to put this.

“Look,” he says, moving a bottle of wine out of his way. “We will borrow ten million from the sheikh, for the bank he wants.”

“But we don’t know anything about banking,” I say.

“No, of course. That’s not the point. We take the money from the sheikh”—Qasem stops again and looks around the restaurant to make sure no one is listening in—“and not pay it back.”

“Why not the full twenty million while we’re at it?” I ask, trying to pass it off as a joke.

“You don’t understand.” He pauses again, dropping his voice to a whisper. “We borrow the money and then have him taken care of.”

I can’t hear the rest of what Qasem says because of a ripple of laughter from the next table, and it’s too dark to see Dayna’s expression—but I can imagine it. Like me, she’s probably thinking that the sheikh might be eccentric, but he certainly doesn’t deserve what Qasem seems to have planned for him.

Qasem must see the expression on my face. “It’s not my idea. It’s Badar’s. It’s crazy, no?”

Badar is a Syrian-American we all know. He’s always struck me as slippery. He was the one who sold us the cell phone that stopped working when I was in Paris meeting Carlos.

I catch sight of Leila coming back. “Don’t pay any attention to Badar,” I say. “He has a sick sense of humor.”

On the ride home after dinner, neither Dayna nor I say anything until we’re out on the terrace of our apartment. I pull two chairs together to talk.

“This doesn’t exactly sound like a good business plan to me,” she says.

I know what’s going through her mind. While we never considered going into business with either the sheikh or Qasem, the very idea that anyone would think we’d be interested in murder for profit is unnerving. We may have spent our lives in a fairly rough trade, but we’re not killers.

“This cannot end well,” Dayna says. “We need to leave here.”

She’s right, of course.

Two days later we do leave Beirut, abandoning our apartment, our furniture, and two months’ rent. As soon as we land in Geneva, I call the sheikh. He seems already to know people are plotting his murder. His driver died when the brakes mysteriously failed on the sheikh’s new van. Before I hang up, I tell him to be careful.

Like a lot of things in life, it will take time for us to see Beirut for what it’s been. Both of our lives have turned so many times over the years that it’s been hard to tell the major shifts from the minor ones. But later I’ll see Beirut as the biggest of them. I went there looking for a raw look at the “real” Middle East, one outside the bubble of the CIA. I suppose I was even looking for adventure. But what I found was more trouble, the kind that convinced me I should leave the CIA. I, of all people, should have known that adventure and trouble go hand in hand. But, apparently, I would need one more lesson.

New York City:
BOB

M
y son Robert has now been in the shower for twenty minutes, and we have to be out the door in five more or he’ll be late for school. I knock. “Hey, Slick, we gotta get going.” Having Robert living with us—he’s now twelve—has taken a bit of adjusting. He came to us when his boarding school in southern France called me shortly after we got to Geneva from Beirut. The school said it might not be the best fit for Robert; he’d fallen in with an Algerian gang. They put him on a train the next morning, and I met him at the station. With his beat-up suitcase and wrinkled blazer, he was a good match for his nomad father. Dayna, understandably feeling unmoored and in need of a real-world skill, was in the middle of applying to law school, and I took him under my wing. Better late to fatherhood than never.

Robert exits the bathroom in his towel, followed by a cloud of steam, and runs to his bedroom. He’s back in a minute, fully dressed. I don’t know how he does it. He looks at the bowl of cereal I put out for him and says he’ll eat on the walk to school. Then he goes to the cupboard, reaches in the back until he finds
a granola bar, and shoves it in his jacket pocket. He runs for the door.

“The rabbit?” I say.

He taps his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Who could ever forget the rabbit?”

When Robert first found out that a rabbit was part of his new family, he was speechless. His wonder only grew when I told him the story about the ill-starred rabbit in Beirut, and how Dayna had searched the city until she found this one in the bird market. Traveling with the creature presented certain challenges. For example, when we were all flying to New York, KLM wouldn’t allow the rabbit to fly in the cabin, worried it might escape and attack the cockpit. Dayna had no choice but to fly separately on Air France, a company that allows rabbits in the cabin. But Robert has grown fond of the rabbit and doesn’t mind that it’s his responsibility now.