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 he didn't see it till the last moment: Death smiling down, no escape. He thought he'd left the door open and started to get up, but it was just another dream. It was because of these damn dreams that he couldn't sleep.
He switched on the lamp, thinking if Inneka's got lamps on both sides of the bed then she must have another guy. From the yellow light a skull leaped at him with jaws bared – no, this wasn't a dream, just the skull on Inneka's desk, seedy in the malarial light, jaw downhung in disappointment. Her little memento mori.
On the ceiling the streetlit shadows of the last sycamore leaves leaped and lurched in the wind. Through the barely open window came the rumble of a car's tires down the wet bricks of Prinsengracht, of clamoring leaves and jostled branches, hiss of cold air over water.
The quilt rustled as Inneka snuggled her back tighter against him. A spray of rain hit the window, as if thrown from a bucket. The leaf and branch shadows lunged harder, writhing against themselves like men being torn apart. His armpit was sore; he pulled his arm from under her head and moved it down between them.
Rain clattered on the roof tiles. Centuries of rain falling on these tiles, he thought, these crooked tall houses stooped like old men. This room of stone, beams, and leaded glass had once been a hayloft where sixteenth-century kids and lovers rummaged. He tried to imagine how they'd looked, felt, acted. Their loves, doubts, and pains. Whom they killed and how, and how they died. How they made love, each time, all of them.
He felt Inneka's warmth settle against his arm, thought of this attic swallowing the two of them also in its silent history.
There was no reason to lose his nerve about this trip. Nothing to fear, nothing he'd be doing that was as dangerous as driving across London. He'd either get to talk to Mohammed or he wouldn't. Give it his best shot. If he did, he'd have a good series for the paper and fifteen thousand from Freeman. But if it fell through – the thought gave him a shiver – he could still come back, pick up where he'd left off. Beverly's client meetings and the kids busy with homework, and every article he wrote exactly the same. Politics – men in gray suits, hapless craven argumentative souls like filthy mirrors casting back a tainted version of all they see.
His mouth felt dry and he thought of getting a drink of water in the bathroom; even the pipe-warm, bleached taste would be great. At dawn would be the chilled station, the train swinging across flat Holland in gray cold rain, from Europe's northern coast up its great river through its cold mountain heart toward the sun.
Bratislava then Beirut. If he was lucky, people in Bratislava could tell him the best way into Beirut. The way to find Mohammed. What was the old saying – about the Mountain coming to Mohammed? Couldn't remember. In Bratislava there'd be Michael Szay – he was selling guns to Mohammed, Freeman had said. And there was Tomás. If anyone in the press knew where to find Mohammed, Tomás would be the one.
Beirut. Like Amsterdam once so innocent and light, now ready to kill you so quickly. Even if you get to see Mohammed, he told himself, there's no way he'll know about Freeman. You're just a journalist, in and out.
Nothing to be afraid of.
The clock on the dresser said 4:44. His underarm felt so damn sore. Burnt out. He'd sleep on the train. No one would be following. Not here.
“I always knew if Bev got in touch with her feelings she'd realize she didn't want to be with me,” he'd told Inneka.
“You always said the unexamined life's not worth living,” she'd answered.
PRINSENGRACHT was slippery with mist off the canal. Gripping his arm like a hostage's, Inneka walked beside him to the corner up to Vijzelstraat, her raincoat tight over her bathrobe, her leather boots half-zipped, her hair straggly and damp. “There's going to be a taxi right away,” she said, “and I'll never have time to say how much I love you but I get mad because you're never here and I love you so much I get angry because she has you all the time and doesn't love you and I –”
“She loves me.”
“Not like I do!” Inneka caught a heel in a crack between the bricks, yanking his arm. “Sometimes it's a month I don't see you! It doesn't even bother you.”
“Sure it does. I'd rather be with you.”
“You have her. I have nobody!”
“Like I said, you should have somebody, I wouldn't mind. I'm not afraid I'm going to lose you.”
“You bastard, I hate you –”
“I meant I love you.”
“You don't even understand what you mean.”
Down wide wet Vijzelstraat dawn was breaking over the disconsolate trolley wires and vapid windows, the loitering rubbish bins, a solitary high-tailed black cat stalking an alley. The bag tugged his stitches. It would give them time to heal, the train. “Nothing I do I understand – you want me to understand this?”
“All the things I said – we make them worse.”
“Let's just have what we have while we have it.”
“I fear for us.” She clutched him harder.
“We'll stop if you want. But I think life's too short, too rough, not to do what we can, what we want. I want to keep seeing you. I don't want to grow old and die not seeing you.”
“We have all eternity, Neill, to be apart.”
THE BITCH nosed the puppy but it didn't move. It was cold and she knew it was dead but she kept pushing its rigid chilled body in a dusty circle. She trotted with it in her jaws across the ruins of Bab El-Edriss to a place where stolen vehicles had been parked in the blasted ruins of a goldsmith's shop, and laid it among four others.
From a crest of a collapsed apartment building further up the Rue du Patriarche a pack of dogs watched her go back down through the ruins. She stopped to sniff where once someone had defecated, but it had already been eaten. She loped round the corner into Avenue des Français, glancing back once. A large thin black male trotted after her; the others sniffed the wind and followed.
ANDRÉ TOOK THE BACK ROAD toward Paris, letting the car slide through the dew-wet curves, beech leaves slick on thin macadam, thinking should've changed the back tires, tread's too slick. A doe bounded through an apple orchard over leaf-yellow ground, pushed low by the hunters; there was a furl of silver from a roadside stream, trout there if you had the time, a stretch of dairy barns, beams and straw. The engine was hard and hot now, hungry for it, snarling into the curves, baring its teeth as it tore out of them, roaring into the high gears, into the blur of life. You're going to kill yourself, he realized and backed it down
