Dynamite Fishermen (24 page)

“If your information is good, the ten thousand is yours, Abu Khalil. And here, take this and buy the colonel a good bottle of whiskey or a box of Havana cigars.”

Prosser tore the end from an envelope of Lebanese currency and counted out two piles in his lap. “This one is for Colonel Hisham’s cigars. And this one is to buy something for yourself, in honor of your promotion.”

Abu Khalil’s eyes flashed with avarice as he pocketed the money. Then he made a hard left onto rue Abdel-Aziz and started back toward the American University and the Corniche.

“That’s all for tonight, Abu Khalil. How about if we meet again Friday, by the Lighthouse Pharmacy at a quarter past nine? Do you think you can reach the colonel before then? We don’t have much time, I’m afraid.”

“I will do my best. If I do not come Friday, wait for me Saturday at the same place.”

At that moment Prosser noticed they were retracing the route that had been taken up rue Abdel-Aziz by the terrified Gulf Arab and his pursuers earlier that day.

“Abu Khalil, did you hear anything about a shooting this afternoon in the Hamra district? I was stuck in traffic not far from here just before lunch when I saw a Gulf Arab being chased down the street by gunmen. It was the damnedest thing. They must have shot at him at least twenty or thirty times in broad daylight, and nobody seemed to care.”

“He may have been one of the three Iraqi diplomats assassinated this afternoon,” the Arab replied coolly. “Two were shot while waiting in their car on rue Hamra in front of the Piccadilly Cinema. The third fled on foot, but his body was found in the Zeitouné district about an hour later. Our security section believes that Iranian intelligence and Syrian military intelligence were responsible. The three were all Iraqi intelligence officers.”

“Oh,” Prosser replied, crestfallen. “I’m sorry to hear that. I was rather hoping that the man I saw had escaped.”

They turned left onto rue Bliss. In the distance Prosser could see a line of cars stopped at a roadblock manned by a Syrian army patrol. “Checkpoint ahead,” he said, pulling a three-by-five index card from his shirt pocket. “It will be better if I get out here. On this card are some more questions about Colonel Hisham. Copy them in your own handwriting before you go home, and then throw the card away.”

Abu Khalil nodded.

“Good luck with the colonel, Abu Khalil. And for God’s sake, be careful.”

Chapter 18

Wednesday

Parked cars, each one covered with a dullish coat of salty dew, lined both sides of the cobbled street. Prosser pulled into the driveway of one of the three hotels opposite the YWCA residence and climbed out of the Renault to wait for his passenger.

As he stretched his limbs in the cool morning air, he heard the distant call of a
muezzin
summoning the faithful to morning prayers. The call came from the Ain Mreissé mosque, barely a city block from the American embassy, and was instantly recognizable as the same scratchy recording he had heard dozens of times from his office. He turned his attention to the broken line of shadows cast across the upper stories of the pale stuccoed buildings on rue Rustom Pacha and tried in vain to follow the line’s imperceptible downward creep.

The glow of a burning cigarette caught Prosser’s eye as he waited for Rima to emerge from the building. The orange light drew his attention to a sandbagged bunker at the corner of Phoenicia Street, just opposite the faded and peeling wooden façade of a long-abandoned Cantonese restaurant. There, under an overhanging piece of corrugated tin, a helmeted Syrian sentry bent down to check the progress of a pot of tea he was brewing over an electric hotplate wired to a streetlamp.

Phoenicia Street had once formed the heart of West Beirut’s nightlife district, with scores of restaurants and nightclubs only a few steps from the city’s premier hotels: the St. Georges, the Phoenicia, and the Holiday Inn. The district’s heyday had ended with the civil war’s Battle of the Hotels in the winter of 1975, which left all three hostelries nothing more than burned-out shells, fit for use only as artillery and sniping platforms for the Palestinian and Lebanese Muslim militias.

Some of Phoenicia Street’s restaurants and nightclubs reopened their doors during the brief honeymoon of the Arab Deterrent Force’s peacekeeping mission during 1976 and 1977, but the stability lasted little more than a year. The renewal of heavy fighting in 1978 between the Christian militias and the Arab Deterrent Force’s largest contingent, the Syrian army, convinced most club owners to close their doors for good.

By early 1980, when Prosser arrived in Lebanon, fewer than ten establishments remained open for business along the entire length of the famed street. Three or four restaurants managed to survive by serving a loyal clientele of foreigners and affluent Lebanese, but the few bars that held on did so only by catering to the grosser appetites of Syrian occupation troops, local militiamen, and the criminal underworld.

Prosser had visited one of these bars, the once-celebrated Stork Club, in the company of a vanload of Marine Security Guards during his first week after arriving in the divided city. He had found the nightclub shabby and unexpectedly dull, but a place where a visiting foreigner could still catch a glimpse of pre–civil war Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East. The bar was all teak and brass, the floor black and white marble, and the walls still covered with autographed glossy photographs of European and Middle Eastern celebrities of decades past.

The marines frequented the place because of the club’s exceptionally alluring bartender: a tall, slender, black-haired Irishwoman in her late twenties, with a ready wit and a smile that could melt most any man’s heart. She had quit her job as a Middle East Airlines air hostess two months after the civil war ended, intending to get in on the ground floor of Beirut’s commercial rebirth by opening an Irish-style pub with her Lebanese boyfriend. When the business venture fell on hard times—the country’s economic recovery had failed to materialize—she closed it and found work at the Stork Club as a cocktail waitress. Her boyfriend disappeared a week later, leaving her to pay off the trade creditors.

To her young admirers in the Marine Security Guard detachment, the Irishwoman always managed to put on a cheerful face, bantering easily with the toughest of them and gently turning aside their amorous propositions. Prosser supposed she represented an unattainable goal for many of them, as the average age of a marine guard was just over twenty years.

Not many weeks after Prosser’s first and final visit to the Stork Club, the U.S. ambassador declared it off-limits to American embassy personnel after a brawl between four marines and six or seven drunken Syrians that ended only when the proprietor emptied nearly a full magazine of his antique Schmeisser submachine gun into the ceiling. The last news Prosser had heard of the club was that the same proprietor had imported a troupe of Thai prostitutes on a 120-day contract to work the place as bar girls, and that not long afterward the lovely Irish bartender had boarded a flight for London.

Prosser turned away from Phoenicia Street in time to see Rima al Fayyad exit the lobby of the YWCA with a handbag in one hand and a small embroidered pillow in the other. Although she had applied makeup to her tanned face, the circles under her eyes gave evidence that she had not slept long or well. He opened the passenger door and greeted her in Arabic. She returned the greeting in a husky voice.

“You look as if you need more beauty rest,” he said as he took his seat and started the engine. “Was the shelling that bad last night?”

“No, only badly timed,” she answered with a trace of a smile. “They did not begin using their heavy weapons until two o’clock, and by the time the cease-fire was restored, my nerves were too badly frayed to go back to sleep.”

“It’s a miracle how anybody can get a decent night’s rest so close to the Green Line. There must be a wicked echo between these buildings.”

“Over time one becomes accustomed to everything but the heavy mortars and artillery. Still, if you have no objection, I think I will sleep for a short while. Will you wake me when we get through the port crossing? From there I can show you the way to the Peugeot garage.”

The only reason he had come to rue Rustom Pacha so early on a weekday morning was to give Rima a ride to East Beirut, where she was to pick up her Peugeot subcompact from the dealer’s service department following some routine maintenance. From there she would go on to work at the Ministry of Housing while Prosser pressed on to the far northern suburb of Antélias.

Without waiting for Prosser’s reply, Rima tilted back her seat, stuffed the embroidered pillow between the window and the raised headrest, and folded her arms against her chest to sleep. Prosser leaned over to kiss her on the cheek and received only a gentle murmur in reply.

The Syrian sentry, still brewing his tea at the corner, waved the Renault through the checkpoint with his cigarette in hand and watched it until it disappeared around the corner in the direction of the port. Prosser was apprehensive about using the port crossing so soon after the previous night’s cease-fire violations in the downtown commercial district, but he reassured himself with the knowledge that both the embassy’s security officer and Radio Lebanon had pronounced the port crossing open to traffic at seven o’clock this morning. Still, he would have preferred to wait until another hour had passed and another hundred motorists had preceded him.

As Prosser drove farther east through Zeitouné and Minet el Hosn, he noted with interest that the Nasserist checkpoint at the Normandie Hotel was unmanned, as was the next checkpoint two blocks ahead. At the edge of the no-man’s-land a Syrian lieutenant gestured from his bunker for the Renault to stop, but seeing that its driver was a foreigner, he waved Prosser through without bothering to ask for identification.

Just past the bunker, the coastal road formed a “Z” with rue Allenby, turning right for a single block before heading east again for the final two hundred meters to the port entrance. This block, Prosser had been told repeatedly, was one of the most dangerous sniper-ridden stretches of road in the city. For five or six seconds the Renault would be exposed to scores of sniper and artillery positions extending all the way north to the Place de l’Étoile, in the heart of the devastated former business district.

Opposite the spot where the car would turn east to leave the real-life shooting gallery there was another Syrian checkpoint, atop which sat a dummy wearing a Syrian officer’s uniform riddled with bullet and shrapnel holes. Prosser sometimes wondered whether the dummy had been put out to warn the passersby or to aid the snipers to zero in with their telescopic sights.

He started off down the straightaway at a carefully calculated angle, accelerated into third gear, and then swung the car around the bend and past the uniformed dummy without detecting shots in his direction. As he neared the Lebanese army checkpoint just inside the port’s perimeter fence, he slowed down and glanced at his passenger.

Rima sat up straight in her chair and regarded Prosser with surprise and amusement. “Do you always take this section with such speed?” she asked.

“Only when there’s no other driver on the road and the Syrians conspicuously don’t set foot outside of their bunkers.”

“If you thought it dangerous, why did you go forward at all?”

“Only because going back might have been worse,” he replied. “At times like this, I’d rather risk a crash by driving at full speed than give the damned snipers a second shot.”

He shifted into second gear and threaded his way between the two rows of red-and-white-striped oil drums flanking the port’s western gate and then screeched to a stop at a newly whitewashed Lebanese army bunker. Unlike the rest of the port, this spot was free of litter and wrecked cars and was shielded against snipers firing from the south and west by a makeshift wall of empty shipping containers stacked four high. Farther on, another wall of containers protected the wharves and landing slips.

A pair of slow-moving sentries wearing the olive drab uniforms of the Lebanese army rose to their feet from a bench immediately behind the bunker and approached the Renault. The elder of the two, a corpulent sergeant of about thirty without a helmet to cover the sizable bald spot on the crown of his head, gestured for Prosser to roll down his window and hand over his identification papers. When he saw the American’s foreign ministry card, he cut his inspection short and waved the car forward.

Just before he raised the window, Prosser heard the distinctive crack of a rifle bullet passing overhead at supersonic speed, then another, then two more. Rima heard them, too, and pointed silently toward the wisps of dust where the projectiles had hit the roofline of a warehouse some fifty meters to the west.

“Hey, what’s going on here?” Prosser demanded of the sentry in Arabic. “Why are you waving us forward if you can see that snipers have the road covered?”

“They do not have it covered,” the sergeant contradicted him in a bored tone of voice. “They are firing too high. It is safe to go, believe me. Go—yalla.”

But Prosser was unpersuaded. “If they aren’t sniping, just what the hell are they doing?”

Another sharp crack broke the silence.

“There they go again,” Prosser insisted. “Look, over to the left.” He pointed to another wisp of plaster and concrete dust where a bullet had slammed into the wall. “This is insane.”