himself. Is it about this trip, like she said? He should've given more money to the guitarist – it'd been a lie, about the three guilders; he had guilder notes in his wallet. He could have given him five guilders, even ten. You don't hear that every day, someone so connected to God. To hear someone play like that. It was as if it was a lesson, a test, to see if you were willing to pay for what you get.
“Why do you keep turning round?” Inneka said. “What are you afraid of?”
TEN TO MIDNIGHT but the men hadn't left. Four of them, Rosa had decided. With M16s and handguns – Christians hiding in a deserted factory while Beirut raged around them and their brothers battled to their deaths.
One of the Christians kept too far apart, a sentry – she couldn't be sure to get him with the first grenade, he might have time to dive among the rubble, and then it'd be his rifle against her grenades. She should have disobeyed Walid, brought a pistol. But a pistol in this darkness was like having a flare to show people where you are.
If she used two grenades there'd only be eleven left, and Mohammed's men would be angry. But if she waited any longer the grenades might be too late. Then she'd never get to see Mohammed.
She eased the pin out of one grenade and placed it softly on the ground. One man farted, another laughed. “I'm a happy married man,” said a third. “I wouldn't even look at his sister.”
“Now we know you're a liar. To have said happy and married in the same sentence.”
“For someone who complains so much about his wife, Sylvain, you're always ready to go home.”
“Who wouldn't be when you're the alternative?”
Holding down the lever of the first grenade she took a second from her pocket, pulled the pin with her teeth and spat it quietly on the ground. A grenade in each hand, she inched on hands and knees toward the voices.
“I have to admit,” one was saying, “Muslims cook the best lamb.”
“So why are we killing them?”
“Because they're killing us, remember?”
She reached the last jumble of concrete before the open doorway, their voices five yards beyond. Fighting down her fear she released one lever, then the other.
One second plus one makes two. Two seconds plus two makes three. Three plus three makes four. Four plus four and you always have an extra half a second and she threw one far and one near and dived behind the broken concrete.
A clatter of steel, a yell. The air sucked in, glared white and the boom threw her up and smashed her down among flying chunks of steel and concrete in the first grenade's enormous roar that grew and grew, crushed through the hands she'd clasped over her ears down into her skull, her heart, her soul. Great pieces of concrete were smashing down as the second grenade blew, cleaner, hot steel ringing off the shuddering walls. She tried to roll to her feet but couldn't.
Something warm and wet on her neck made her reach up for the wound but it was only a piece of one of the men. Chunks of ceiling kept ticking down. None of the men was moving; their guns were smashed. She stumbled through boiling dust and smoke out the back door of the warehouse into what could be Rue Hussein, she couldn't tell. In the moonlit rubble she could not discern where the Roman arch had been, the square where the old stone houses had grown together like ancient married couples, like old trees.
She could hear nothing, as if at the bottom of the sea, new pain shooting through her ears with every pulse. Mohammed's men would surely be angry that she'd used the two grenades. Four hours late too. Lazy, cowardly slut, they'll have given up on you. She crossed the street and entered the darkness of battered houses on the far side. In four years she'd never been caught; don't start now.
“You can stop now,” a voice whispered, behind her.
“Right now!” said another.
“Please, sirs, I'm hurrying home –”
“Hah! Abdul, it's a wench!”
“Lucky you didn't kill her!”
A match scraped, flared toward her.
8
“I’M A MOTHER.” She forced down the quaver in her voice. “Trying to get home.”
In the light of the match she saw a red dirty hand, a smudged candle stub. “Keep your arms up,” the other one said, “mother.”
“I must get to Rue Hamra. My father –”
“He can wait. No doubt he's had a few pieces too in his life.”
“What are you? Israelis, Syrians? I'm carrying a child!”
“Was it a nice fuck – the one that knocked you up?”
In the greasy candle light she couldn't find their faces, only shapes, one against the wall, the other closer. She reached for a grenade. “Get undressed,” he said.
“I can't.”
“We'll teach you what a big one feels like. Two of them.”
The muzzle he shoved against her was short and hot, an Uzi's. “Either we do it nice,” he said, “or we do it nasty. One way you live, one way you don't.” His fingers brushed her breast, traveled downwards. She pushed the hand away. “Watch it, mother,” he said softly.
“Please...”
He tugged her hair. “I'm running out of patience.”
“I'll lie down in darkness, over there. You, by the wall there – you come first.”
She undressed in the darkness, laying the grenades and her clothes to one side.
“Where are you, chicken?” he whispered. He had a soft young beard and hard hands. “You're not pregnant!”
“It was a pillow, I didn't want this.” She was shivering so hard she feared she'd throw up.
“Hurry!” the other whispered.
The first finished, facing away as he pulled himself to his feet, stepped back to his gun. The other came forward, knelt, sliding down his pants, his gun loose in the crotch of his arm as he took in her body, leaning his belly down on her. With the heel of her hand she snapped his head up hard, snatched the gun, rolled out from under him and shot the other three times, hearing the bullets smack, then shot this one on the ground, the bullet bouncing back up through his head. He kept squirming so she shot him again between the eyes but he wouldn't stop, even when she leaned down and shot him through the back of the neck.
The air stank. She crouched in a corner to urinate. Animals, she swore. All of us.
THIS IS NOT SO BAD, Neill thought, not realizing it was a dream, stepping into the next street where there was nothing but one house far out on the smashed burnt landscape. In a rubbled square stood a wooden shed with a sign that said Bill. He wandered the dirty streets of Beirut, astonished to remember so much. So many houses were gone. He went to the post office with a friend who then met a black girl and left with her, and Neill found a French 10-franc piece on the floor and put it on the counter and the clerk bit into it to see if it was real.
He gave money to a Muslim and a Christian boy in a blown-down street. In a building full of old people and wounded, a wrinkled ancient couple lay naked on a bed in the heat; Neill went downstairs to the desk and recognized the place as a hotel he'd used to make calls back to the UK, years ago.
On the upstairs screened veranda he sat beside a woman in black garters and green underpants with a tattoo on her arm. “I've been shooting tomato juice,” she explained. Three men came in. One had a stack of heroin syringes up under both sides of his Levi jacket. He handed her one then another and she injected them into her neck. She must have shot all the veins in her arms, Neill thought. When the last syringe was empty, the man wiped the bloody needle on Neill's knee. The heroin, Neill wondered, did it come from the Bekaa?
Something stood behind Neill but