beamed house with a plume of smoke and dropped down a steep bouldered slope into a forest.
From Gaillon he took the A13 over the rolling half-forested Normandy hills. There were no cars and he let the Alpine out to 250, till it wanted to fly, the front end planing, the broken line a solid blur, the car vibrating ecstatically, the wind roaring like an engine. The glove box fell open, a flashlight tumbling out, papers. A truck flashed past, “Barboizon & Fils – Démenagements”, a faraway jet was a twist of foil in the early sky. Again he let the Alpine back off, down to 200, 180, 150 – there was traffic now, a 735i came up and he dropped it back then slowed and let it pass, its driver choleric and fleshy, a cigarette drooping from his lips.
9
THE DOGS TRACKED the bitch along l’Avenue des Français toward the rubbish dump where the Hotel Normandy had been. She'd seen them and was running now, through a façade of brick and down an alley – but that was wrong because a building had fallen in at the end, and she had to scramble up the rubble and swing round to face them at the top.
They came bounding down the alley and she saw a way out along a slim standing wall, ran across it knowing they'd gain, across a wide square of blasted cars and truncated palms, houses of blackened windows, into a shop with no door, no one to run to, under a hole at the back and across a collapsed building up the trunk of a fallen tree to another wall. One of the dogs snatched her back foot but she pulled free, ripped at his muzzle, dove off the wall and squirmed under a burnt car, the others trying to reach her but she hunched up in the middle and they couldn't get her till one shoved far in and grabbed a front paw. He dragged her out and they tore into her, ripping, crunching up her bones.
The big black thin male dragged away one shoulder, others fighting over ribs, legs, intestines, brains, scraps of skin, smears of blood. They circled the big male, worrying at him, and each time he snapped at one, another darted for the meat; he caught one across the neck and it squealed away but another feinted in. He snatched the meat and dashed back down the alley, the others alongside snatching at the meat; he ducked into a stair corner and dropped it, faced them.
They were three across in the narrow stairway – the young Belgian shepherd male and two red females, the rest behind. Growling, teeth bared, he backed tight into the corner, realized he shouldn't and tried to move forward but one red bitch had edged closer and if he went for her the others would have his neck. He leaped over them but one got him by the scrotum, the Belgian shepherd by the jaw, dragging him down – he couldn't shake it loose. The others were at his belly now, his groin, his thighs, pulling him down under their tearing weight and he was trying to protect his belly but they rolled him over and tore out his throat, snarling and ripping at each other for pieces of him.
A human came out of the building and the dogs backed away, snarling, dragging pieces of meat. A female human. It stepped round the big male's body, and the young Belgian shepherd male circled closer, sniffing for a wound, but this human was healthy, with only the smell of sex and fear about it.
ROSA KEPT GLANCING BACK but after a block the dogs stopped following. The ground crackled beneath her feet. An AK47 snapped nearby, shocking under the early hot sun. Now there was a jet, far away, the crunch and rumble of artillery in the Shouf. She wondered who was shelling whom, and why.
Rue Chateaubriand was blocked so she turned up an alley where the yellow-bricked Phoenician wall still stood waist high. At the top a gray Mercedes sat in the driveway of a wrecked house. There were four Hezbollah in the Mercedes and others in a broken apartment building behind the house. The plane buzzed closer and one of the men in the apartments fired at it. A man in gray shirt and sunglasses got out of the Mercedes. “You're late.”
“I've got a message for Mohammed.”
They drove fast, dodging the rubble and barricades, uphill toward the Grand Serail, stopped at a truncated building on Rue de France. In one room bodies lay bandaged among sandbags. There was a little room of medical supplies, a radio room and then the captain's office.
“Mohammed doesn't see messengers,” the captain said. “That's my job.”
“I got through their lines and know how to get out. We can build a supply line – I must tell Mohammed.”
He had a nice smile, this captain. His beard was clipped away from his lips, a scar ran across his forehead and another between two right-hand fingers, his camouflage shirt was dark with sweat. “We need you and the others to keep coming through the infidels with your bellies full of grenades, Rosa – that's your job.”
He gave her his playboy smile again and she decided maybe she didn't like him. His hands were too big, his nose was wrong: you couldn't trust him. “If I can speak to Mohammed about how to get outside, come at them from behind, cut them in two –”
“A woman's writing strategy now?”
“You could find your way in here, with a sack of grenades?”
“I can't act pregnant.”
No, she certainly did not like this squalid little man, his sharp beard and pointed chin. That was the trouble with militia – the killers ruled, the sordid ran behind. “You'd do just fine, being pregnant,” she sneered, “if you half tried.”
THE TRAIN TILTED into a curve, naked poplars running along a ditch, pigeons casting away from bare furrows under a wet wind, distant rain slanting against a sky of cotton wool. Geese and sheep huddled in a flooded field, God hanging dead over endless cemeteries, trains of rain-shiny new cars on the sidings, camouflaged hunters afoot in mean, close-cropped fields. There were hedgerows, copses, orchards, yellow and blue snub-nosed Dutch trains, nuclear power plants, empty warehouses with broken windows and rusty galvanized roofs, brown stolid rivers, a yellow derrick with the name “Verhagen” in a grove of soggy, chilled birch. Why, he wondered, do the top leaves always cling the longest?
That was the best of Islamic teaching, it clung to fundamental decencies, to an ancient branch of life: take care of the poor, the disinherited, alleviate corruption, simplify and purify our souls...
But the Koran left nothing unanswered, even that which had no answer. The prophet Mohammed received inspirations to questions posed by himself or others; these inspirations, the suras, became a rigid structure of belief learned by repetition, whose challenge was punished by death on earth, eternity in Hell.
The Crusaders went to the Holy Land to deliver it from this heresy, to slaughter the infidels. Those who came back brought the techniques of cathedral architecture, which led to the Gothic enlightenment and the principles of advanced castle construction, which led to a more advanced rate of slaughter. They also brought rattus rattus, the black rat, which in turn brought the Black Plague: God's way, Neill had always thought, of punishing the Europeans for the sin of Christianity.
A rusty railroad engine huddled in brush on an abandoned siding. How many lives had it carried back and forth across Europe? What did they come to, each of them?
Three American men were talking loudly in the seats ahead, trading dirty gay jokes in the mistaken impression no one could understand English, or perhaps not even caring. One was being teased about curling his eyebrows. “You go to Paris to make money,” he said. “Like Tokyo. The catalogues, fashion shows, magazines, even TV. Madrid too – you can make money there, though not as much as in Paris.”
“Do you really curl your eyebrows?” another said.
Ubiquitous greenhouses flitting by, amid grimy cities and prim little towns with patches of muddy green between them. “Have to have the clothes,” the first added. “Have to have the clothes.”
