“I’m so sorry.”
Azizza shrugged. “They are Sunni, of course. Like most Palestinians. Like me.”
Celestine, a Shiite, nodded and went on eating her salad. Down the road, Sunnis and Shiites, all believers in the one God, all children of the Prophet, were slitting each other’s throats. It had not always been thus. The real people in Beirut used to care a damn sight more what their neighbors got up to in bed than which church, if any, they attended.
“There were still thousands of Palestinians in Tripoli, in those days. The Syrians protected them. The Sunnis protected them too, for a while. I stayed more than a year. Winter came. Then the Syrians changed their minds, decided to shell the F’listin out of Tripoli, after all. The Ba’athists joined them. I don’t know, I don’t understand these things.”
“The Ba’athists, yes. And by that time, of course, the Sunnis hated the Palestinians too.”
“Some did, not all. Najib didn’t hate them. He used to call that pig Arafat ‘Abu Ammar.’ The boy worshiped the PLO. One night, he went missing. He’d gone to the refugee camp at Badawi, it turned out later. We waited. Najib never came home. One night, two nights. On the third day, Kemal and Yasmin went down to the town, to try to find him. They left the two girls with me and took the boys. By nightfall, none of them had come home. I got someone to take care of the children and went down to the Islamic Hospital. They had bodies there in plastic bags, thick gray plastic bags. They’d rigged up a generator in the courtyard, so that you could see to identify the corpses. I didn’t dare look. I went into the hospital. But when no one there knew anything about my family, then, you see, I had to go back to the courtyard.”
She faltered. Celestine poured wine into the one glass that Azizza had brought and pushed it across the table without a word.
“They were all there. Father, mother, four boys. Lying side by side in bags, each bag the same.” Now Azizza’s voice had steadied to a quiet monotone. “They’d been shot. All except Najib; they’d cut his head off.” She paused. “No one warned me. When I opened his bag, his head … fell out.”
She swallowed. The sound was echoed in Celestine’s own throat; it seemed to travel all the way down into her gut.
“Then a man saw what I was doing. He came over to me. He said, ‘Are they yours?’ As if—as if, you know, they were dogs.” Her voice had turned savage. “When I said yes, he said, ‘I saw it. I was there when they did it to the eldest boy. He couldn’t say tomato right.’ I looked at him. I didn’t understand. He said, ‘Some guys had set up a roadblock. Ba’athists. They were testing everyone who went near the F’listin camp. You had to say tomato, in Arabic."’
“Bandouran,”
Celestine murmured under her breath.
“That’s how we say it,” Azizza agreed. “But the F’listin say it differently. They can’t say
bandouran,
they say
bandoura
instead. And Najib had spent so long with the Palestinians, he spoke like them. It must have come out wrong, because he was frightened.” She paused. “He was only fifteen!” she cried. “But they cut his head off, just the same.”
Celestine watched helplessly while Azizza fumbled inside her clothing and brought out a photograph. When she pushed it across the table, Celestine expected it to be a family snapshot. It wasn’t. The monochrome photo showed a pretty young girl smiling shyly into the camera, her cheekbones pushed up high by a brilliant smile and her eyes almost closed against the sun.
“I found it in Najib’s shirt,” Azizza whispered. “Next to his heart.”
She burst into tears. Celestine sat there in the last of the candlelight and she thought, Robbie is fourteen now. Will he live to be fifteen? Will he carry a girl’s photo next to his heart before he dies?
“What had happened,” she asked softly, “to the others?”
Azizza swallowed back her tears, took a moment to compose herself. “Kemal and Yasmin and the rest? They were riding on a bus, to the hospital. The Syrians machine-gunned it. That’s all.”
“They never knew what had happened to Najib?”
Azizza shook her head.
“Thanks be to Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.” For a long time after that the two women sat in silence.
“Why were you in the house today?” Celestine asked at last.
“Oh"—Azizza wiped her eyes, first the right, then the left–"I come here sometimes, after work. To remember—”
“Better times.”
The other woman nodded.
“You said you worked not far away?”
“Yes. After the … after that night, I brought my two nieces, the ones who survived, back to Beirut. Your money was useful; thank you.”
“Even though it didn’t always arrive.”
“Oh, it did, once I came back south.”
Celestine’s astonishment must have shown, for Azizza smiled wanly. “Do you remember Chafiq Hakkim?”
“I’ll say! My banker, what a rogue.”
“I work for him. You used to send the money through his bank, you see. My first day back in town, I went to the bank to tell them I’d left Tripoli, and he saw me. He asked after you, of course. And one thing led to another.”
“I remember his wife was always trying to steal you away to work for them when she was alive. Does he pay you well?”
“Well enough. And he makes sure your money comes through, no matter what. He has twelve identity cards,
twelve!
I’ve seen them laid out on his dressing table, each one in a different religion, and some of them even in a different name. Can you believe that?”
Celestine thought of her own three passports, one of which had enabled her to enter Lebanon that very day, and smiled. “Go on,” she said.
“Old Chafiq’s the same as he ever was. Women, wine, and hashish.”
“And money. Banker Hakkim always had money.”
“He’s never short.”
“And is he still good friends with my beloved son?” Azizza snorted with laughter. “Oh, they’re the closest of buddies.” Then her face clouded. “That’s how I heard about the plane. They were talking about it.”
Celestine leaned forward eagerly. “Saying what?”
“Sorry, I don’t know. I just overheard Hakkim say a few words on the phone. ‘Feisal, swear to me they’ll never find out in Jerusalem,’ he said. And there was something about Yemen and the plane, which is how I knew what had happened when it came on the news a few hours later.”
“This was
before
it came on the news?”
“Yes. Hakkim knew what was going to happen before it happened.”
“And he definitely mentioned Jerusalem?”
“I’m sure of that. I think he was saying that the Israelis would monitor the videos and perhaps find out from them—”
“Videos? Wait a minute, what videos?”
“There’s a helicopter going to and fro, between the plane and an Iranian ship. They expect to have the first film tomorrow, early.”
Celestine had exhausted herself to that strange state where you want to talk more and can think of nothing to say. She sighed. “Izza, is there anything here I could sleep on? Anything that hasn’t been defiled?”
“I can find you something, don’t worry.”
“Then I need to sleep. And later I must speak to Hakkim. Let’s see how much dear Chafiq thinks he owes me, hmm?”
“Less than
you
think,” Azizza said darkly.
Celestine rose, stretched. “Meaning?” she said with a yawn.
“Feisal married off one of his nieces to Hakkim, a year after his first wife died. Chafiq’s family now.”
“What?”
Celestine froze in mid-stretch, turning a horror-stricken face to Azizza. “Tell me you’re joking!”
But instead Azizza pursed her lips as if unsure how far to go. “I’m sure he’s got everything riding on this hijack,” she said quietly. “And he’s in; you’re out. So you be careful, Celestine.”
“G
IVE
me the lowdown, Selman; give me the facts.” Andrew Nunn stepped into the shower and raised his voice over the rush of water. “Give me a beer, why don’t you?”
Selman Shehabi rummaged around in the fridge and brought out a Heineken for the Englishman, apple juice for himself. They were staying in the same hotel that Leila Hanif had patronized some hours before. Shehabi had arrived first, but since his journey involved only a short hop across the Persian Gulf from Baghdad, this was hardly surprising. Andrew Nunn had been hauled out of Jakarta, put on a company plane, and dumped at Bahrain International Airport after a ten-hour flight with one stop for refueling. He was tired, he was travel-stained, he was not in the best of tempers.
Nunn finished his shower and turned off the water. “Why am I here?” he shouted through the connecting door, as he dried himself. “Why have you brought me here?” These were the words of a man in the hands of the secret police—which was how he felt.
“Who else should we call?”
Shehabi’s mild, melodic voice, almost feminine in pitch, belied his true nature. He was highly valued by the appalling regime he served because of his many years’ experience in outwitting foreigners, particularly westerners; he’d studied at the Sorbonne, could speak four European languages, had survived a staff officer’s course at Sandhurst. He was a member in good standing of Iraq’s Ba’ath Arab Socialist Party, Saddam Hussein, President, and a brevet major in the Republican Guards presently seconded to the 7th Basra regiment, stationed in Fao on the Arab River. At least that was the story, though Nunn had no time for it. Shehabi was related by marriage to the foreign minister, was unassailably powerful. As such, he rated a page in Nunn’s “little black book” and a certain measure of genuine personal respect.
Nunn came back into the living room with only a towel around his portly waist. As he picked up the glass of beer he grinned at Shehabi, sitting in an armchair with his fingertips steepled in front of him, and mentally murmured,
This
time.
But no, Major Shehabi did not smile. Nunn had been trying to force those rubbery-looking lips into an expression of amusement for over ten years now. He’d long ago promised himself a new Burberry as a reward for making Shehabi smile, but unless something broke soon he was going to have to throw out his existing raincoat and just get wet.
The annoying thing was, he smiled at other people, some of them European. That galled. Nunn couldn’t think what he was doing wrong.
“Cheers,” he said, raising the glass. “Hope I won’t embarrass you if I pull on some clothes, old chap.”
As he meandered around the adjacent bedroom, pausing to rummage in his suitcase or stand in front of the mirror to skate two silver-backed brushes across the top of his head, he wondered what the Iraqi made of him. Selman Shehabi, with his trousers an inch too tight around the paunch and a couple of inches too short in the leg; how did he perceive Andrew “John Bull” Nunn?
As Nunn sat on a stool in front of the dressing table and pulled on his socks he calculated, ruefully, that his companion knew a damn sight too much about him altogether.
“A plane is hijacked,” he called through the connecting door. “There is reason to believe (a) that it was done by Leila Hanif, working for cash down, full twelve-month warranty, plus limited edition souvenir brochure thrown in, (b) that Hanif, or whoever, knows all anyone needs to know about flying, and (c) that the South Yemeni government was caught on the hop. How am I doing?”
“Impeccably. Continue.”
“Impeccably be … buggered.” Nunn clicked his teeth, peering closer at the object he was holding. “Why doesn’t anyone darn socks any more?” he muttered. Then, more cheerfully, “What’s this got to do with me?”
“You are the foremost loss adjuster in the world. I testify to that.”
“Well, thank you, Selman. It’s good to know the fan club’s still intact.”
For some years Nunn had headed up his own Lloyd’s syndicate; done rather well, actually. Then he’d been chatting to this fellow at Ascot, one thing led to another, next thing he knew he’d gone into a business that had always fascinated him. Become a private dick, in fact. Because he sort of knew everybody by then, and had a bit of luck, he’d scored some spectacular successes in his first eighteen months with the new outfit, and from then on it had been roller-coaster stuff. Last fiscal year, for instance, his show had billed clients for eight million plus U.S. dollars; year before, however, a paltry two hundred and seventy-eight thousand. All that would have been in Shehabi’s file long before Nunn had bailed out the Iraqi government over an explosion on one of their rigs. The syndicates had cried war-exclusion clause; he’d proved it was an accident—well, he hadn’t really proved anything, he’d just used the old brain box and spoken a few choice words in the right ears, after which he’d been in tight with all the Arabs, particularly those with a decent single-malt scotch locked up in the embassy safe.
Shehabi knew about these claims for the simple reason that he’d dealt with Nunn as principal over them. He probably also knew that Nunn had a Queen Anne manor house in Gloucestershire, a town house overlooking Regent’s Park, two racehorses, a Porsche 944 and a Bentley Turbo, a French wife he no longer cared much about and whose indiscretions he tolerated, benignly, on his by now rare sojourns in England. There’d been a time when he had loved the two houses and put all his spare energy into them, but since his son Michael had grown up and moved away they no longer held quite the same fascination for him. Major Shehabi was paid to know about things like that, too.
Thoughts of home momentarily distracted Nunn. Anne-Marie, his wife, would be celebrating her birthday next week, by which time, with luck, he’d be safely ensconced in Jakarta, or “Jak,” as he preferred to think of it, once more. He must phone the gallery in Dover Street, order that little Hockney drawing she was so fond of….
But presents could wait. The burning topic of the hour was the extent of Shehabi’s knowledge. Did he know, for example—did he
really
know—how acute was the brain behind the Englishman’s shambling, Bertie Woosterish exterior? The question taxed Nunn as he shouldered his red braces over the jolly old Turnbull & Asser and picked a dark, hand-knitted tie out of the heap bursting from the suitcase like a still life of serpents. Because if he did, the brown stuff could be about to hit the fan in quite spectacular fashion….
“The trouble about your loss-adjusting theory,” he called, as he settled his double-breasted jacket into place, “is that so far no one’s requested my services.”
“They will. The airline will.”
I think so too, old chap, Nunn told his reflection in the mirror, but then I had a telex from ‘em just before I left Jak. You didn’t. Yet you know; you’re not bluffing, you actually know.
Best to come clean.
“Frankly, I did have a sort of unofficial fishing expedition come my way.”
“I’m sure you did, Andrew. Old man.”
Shehabi dangled the last two words from the end of his sentence in a manner that left it unclear whether he was experimenting with an irony that was far from innate or deliberately seeking to wound. Nunn, affecting concern over the remaining amount of his Grey Flannel cologne, disdained to speculate which.
“Although the real reason why I’ve come,” he said, “is because …”
Because you know I’ve done business with the Hanifs before, and few other outsiders have,
said the quiet inner voice he’d learned to trust over the years; but Shehabi would never own up to that and so discretion obliged Andrew to finish the sentence by saying, “Because you invited me.”
He entered the living room, spread his hands, and bowed from the waist.
“Sayid
Selman Shehabi, I am at your service.”
“Then we shall go.”
On the way down the two men said nothing. Shehabi could hardly be described as talkative by nature, whereas Nunn was disposed to curse his fate in silence. For the past six years he’d been negotiating a multiparty deal that would wrap up one of the biggest oil frauds in the history of marine insurance. A tanker went missing; did she sink or was she holed? A prime minister’s brother owned the company that owned the ship; a government owned the cargo; yet a third government, this time acting through agents that weren’t really agents at all but the third government itself in another guise, had done the deal at the other end. Generals were involved; east of Suez, they usually were. Nunn had been nursing this interesting little situation for so long now he resented being distracted from it. He had box files of it in his various offices, diskettes that accompanied his Toshiba laptop everywhere he went, skeins inside his head that would have baffled the greatest chess player the world had ever seen. It obsessed him for one good reason: when everybody’s ink was drying on the settlement document he’d drafted, which itself was now in its eighty-ninth version, he and his associates would become entitled to be paid ten million Swiss francs. In Zurich. In cash.
“I can’t tell you,” he said, as they emerged into the sunlight, its whiteness fuzzied by dust, “how thrilled I am to be here again, Selman.”
Oddly enough, this bland statement contained a kernel of truth. A certain well-connected Iraqi middleman had gone to the bottom of the ocean off the north coast of Borneo along with the aforementioned oil tanker, and this had caused not a few problems in Baghdad. For reasons too complicated to explain in less than a magazine-sized presentation, Nunn accepted that it would be as well to massage his Iraqi contacts if he wanted to see his ten million Swiss francs this side of a coronary. He needed the Iraqis. So when Shehabi phoned, requesting his presence in Bahrain as a matter of urgency, the request carried even more weight than that of the airline whose very expensive property was depreciating by the hour in the middle of a South Yemeni wasteland.
“It is we who are thrilled, Andrew. Come.” Shehabi was beckoning toward a huge black Cadillac. The hotel bell captain already had its rear door open; Nunn could feel the air-conditioning at ten paces.
“No, thanks, I’ll walk,” he said easily. “Join me?”
Shehabi shrugged. “You are right, the one-way system…. ”
Nunn knew that Bahrain’s peculiar traffic patterns could easily turn a five-minute journey as the crow flew into a half-hour tour of the island. He did not care for Bahrain. “What’s it like?” people sometimes asked him, at the club or on the golf course. “Like a condom in its wrapping,” he’d reply, “ridged all around with a depression in its middle; pregnant, if you’ll forgive the pun, with excitement, but desperately short on delivery.”
In fact, all they had to do was cut across the enormous parking lot overlooked by Leila Hanif’s suite, bearing right, until they came to the gateway of a two-story brown-pebbled building. Beside the main door was mounted a brace of large metal plates: LLOYD’S ASSOCIATION OF LONDON UNDERWRITERS, the one above proclaimed, LLOYD’S AGENCY, the other.
“Thoughtful of you,” Nunn murmured to Shehabi as the latter led the way inside. “Don’t want the embassy embroiled in this.”
They entered a large airy ground-floor room, its windows open onto the courtyard that separated this building from the street. At the end farthest from the door, directly underneath a ceiling fan, desks and filing cabinets had been cleared aside in favor of a conference table. Seeing them approach, several other men rose. Shehabi embarked on a round of introductions. No one from the Bahraini government, Andrew was thinking as he took his seat; is that the good news or the bad news? But apart from that, looking around the table he saw most of the faces he’d expected to find: MI6's resident spook, the military attaché, airline station manager. No Arabs.
Where were the Arabs?
“The airline has received a telex,” said the military man, a major in the Scots guards called Philip Trewin. Nunn liked the cut of his jib, liked the way he assumed chairmanship of the meeting without any trouble. “Six Iranian prisoners of war to be freed in exchange for the plane plus passengers. Mr. Shehabi?”
“My government does not acknowledge the existence of those named in the telex. My country has been at war with Iran for many years and has taken many prisoners, but we are not holding these Iranians.”
Stalemate, Nunn thought. Damn. Of course, Major Trewin had merely been going through the motions, wanting to show up the Iraqi position. “May I see the telex?” he inquired.
Trewin brought a sheet of paper out of his briefcase and slid it across the table to him. “Sent to London head office,” he confirmed, in response to Nunn’s murmured question.
“From?”
“Ah, that’s the odd one. From an Iranian Vosper Mark Five frigate lying off Socotra Island. Know it, do you?”
Nunn shook his head.
Trewin got up and went across to the regional map pinned on one wall. “Here,” he said, pointing. “This big island you can see southeast of Al Mukalla.”
“Who owns Socotra?”
“South Yemen.”
“Why are we not in South Yemen now?” Nunn asked. “In my experience, gentlemen, the negotiating team dealing with a hijack resembles nothing so much as a swarm of wasps. It assembles itself and hovers, waiting for the situation to crystallize; then it descends on the nearest stronghold and gets stuck in. The plane’s in South Yemen; the demand’s coming from a ship just off South Yemeni territory; why aren’t we there too?”
Before Trewin could answer, another man, sitting at the far end of the table, portentously cleared his throat. This was a strange sound, midway between a grunt and the
hoom
of a Buddhist chant.
“Ah, yes.” Trewin sounded less than enthusiastic. “Dr. Milner’s our resident Arabist, perhaps the best man to—”
“Hoom.
Have you been to South Yemen, Mr. Nunn?”
“No.”
“It’s the poorest of the Arabian countries. There’s no oil, nothing, literally nothing there. Only two percent of the land is arable. The politics are frightful. One party, communist system. Their National Liberation Front applauded the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Not amenable to reason. I know, I spent six years there.”