that. Just get to see him.”
“Us?”
“You don't have to be British to serve the Queen, Neill. We appreciate what you've done, over the last twelve years...”
“Screw the Queen, Adam. I do it for the money.”
“That's an honorable motive, too. We respect that.”
“If I see him, I'm doing it my way.”
“Then we can't back you up.”
“Even after twelve years, Adam, I wouldn't depend on you.”
“Nor we on you.”
“That's a bloody lie!”
Freeman sat back in the taxi seat with a pricked stiff face. As if, Neill thought, I could ever hurt them. “What I meant,” Freeman said, “is I don't know how far we can leverage for you.”
“First time you want you'll drop me dead. We both know that.”
“And you'll drop us too, any time you want.”
“Everybody shafts everybody, Adam. What are you getting at?”
“It's two stitches up under your arm. Nobody will ever see it or know it's there. Soon as you come back we take it out.”
“Until then, every second, you know where I am –”
“Most of the time we couldn't care less. But if you're in trouble we can be there.”
“You blind bastards couldn't rescue the PM from the Royal Loo. You don't even dare show your ass in Beirut since the Hez came.”
Freeman smiled, a teacher tolerating the tantrum of a child. “We've decided that if you want to go through with it, we need you wired.”
“I'll go without you. Do my interview with Mohammed for the paper and leave.”
“I can't imagine you giving up ten thousand that easily.”
“So that's what you're saying? No transmitter, no money?”
“Imagine how we'd look if you got into trouble.”
The taxi swerved round a bicycle, a girl in a brown suit and long black scarf. “Whatever happens,” Neill answered, “you're clean. You know that or you wouldn't be here.”
“It takes about five minutes and you're on your way. You won't even feel it. By the time you reach Amsterdam you'll have forgotten all about it. But it could save your life. Do it for us.”
Neill watched the traffic, the grim dirty fenders and windshields, sheets of the Telegraph windscattered along King's Road, the wind-wrenched boughs and muddy grass behind the curb, the sense of living on decay. How good it would be, he thought, to start anew. “Once and for all, Adam, tell me who us is?”
“I do and I'll be out of a job and in prison. Official secrets, all that.”
“Just between me and you, Adam? After all these years –”
“There is no between you and me.” Freeman nodded at the taxi roof. “We're on record.”
Neill stared out of the window, seeing nothing. “Fifteen thousand.”
“It isn't a money thing, Neill. For this protection, we should ask you to pay.”
Neill smiled. See, there is a God, for only a God would have invented us. “Fifteen thousand, instead of the original ten. If you want to follow me around, that's what it's going to cost you.”
“I'll speak to them.”
“No speaking, Adam. I want your agreement, now. Half sent now and a half later.”
Freeman checked the locks on his briefcase. “We've always tried to bend over for you, Neill –”
“Don't say that, Adam. Makes you sound like a fag.”
Freeman snorted, turned away. Neill could not find him in the mirror. Beside Neill a Mini throbbed, dark-haired girl inside, red scarf, red lips; beyond her and around them cars, trucks, and buses floated in a writhing gray sea that had risen up and stained the buildings, the morning sky. Under the Albert Bridge the Thames was dirtier than the sky. Dirty as our lungs, Neill thought.
At Gatwick they went into a locked hospitality suite. Inside was a short slender balding young man with gold rims and a dark beard. “This is Dr. Kane,” Freeman said. It was a narrow room with a yellow-green convertible couch, a self-service bar, and a window with closed curtains of yellow and white acrylic.
Dr. Kane opened his black briefcase. “I need you to strip to the waist and lie down on the couch. We'll have you back on your way in a sec.”
4
“THE MORE I GET TO KNOW YOU,” Monique said, “the less I know.”
André lay back, watching her, the espresso cup in her hand, the strap of her silly nightgown across her arm, her hair all tousled, a sleep crease shadowed by the morning sun down her cheek. She shook back her hair. “You're always disappearing.”
Since Yves' death everything irritated him, even Monique. “I don't go anywhere. I've told you that.”
“You shack up with somebody?”
“They were training exercises – cowboy stuff. Preparing for the day Corsica attacks France.”
She finished her coffee, leaned out of the bed to put the cup on the floor. “When we decide to, it won't do any good to be prepared –”
“I've quit the Paras. The biggest danger I face now is probably your husband.”
NEAR THE RUINS of the prison and the Université Libanaise some merchants had set up shop in rubble-walled shacks with tin roofing. A man was selling pens from a paper bag. Another had spread lemons, oranges, peppers, and eggs in the sun under half an awning; a cat sat in a shred of stone window, its yellow tail hanging down.
“Hey, young mother!” the fruit man called, “I've got meat!”
“What meat?” Rosa said.
“Goat, mother! Came through Israeli lines. Come, have a look!”
She followed him into the shade of the half-awning, where a stringy black foreleg hung. He waved at the flies. “It's dog,” Rosa said.
“Where are you going?”
She glanced at his eyes, troubled and brown, in creases of dirty skin. Druze, down from the Shouf. Lost everyone too, have you? She nodded toward the smoky southern heights of Ras Beirut. “What do you hear?”
“Hezbollah still has the southern side and Amal the north. There's Palestinians trying to fight their way out of Hamra. When they're not shooting each other, Hezbollah and Amal are killing the Palestinians. Christians are shelling from the east, Syrians from the hills, Druze from the Shouf, and Israelis from the south.”
“Nothing new, then.”
The creased eyes dropped to her belly. He held up the black foreleg. “Young mother like you, needs her meat.”
THE DAMP AIR at Schiphol Airport made Neill's underarm hurt even more. It had been five stitches, not two, up under the hair. Liar. The stitches rubbed when he walked and tugged when he carried his bag, and the lump under the skin was swollen like a nodule. He stopped at a bar for a quick gin to swallow down two of the Klaricid Kane had given him, “so there'll be no infection,” and two Paludrine for the malaria he had first caught at nineteen in Beirut, and that came back with any quick change of climate, any new exposure. He downed a second gin and caught a taxi to Prinsengracht.
Number 39 was a four-story house one room wide leaning over the root-fissured brick pavement, propped up by narrow houses on each side, and facing across the sycamore crowns and brick street, the leaf-dirty cars, and the cold canal to another façade of other tall grim houses.