in darkness. The salt-stench of the effluent pouring into the sea from the buried river in Ain al Mreisseh where the fishermen gather for pickings rich.
Leon was good at running quietly. He saw and skipped the patches of gravel, leaped scars on the road that would audibly reveal his footfalls. Scared, knowing that running, as well as standing still, made him a target for a chancer on a moped with a handgun making the most of the conflict. Along the waterfront he ran east, past the Hard Rock Café to St. George’s, past the Hariri assassination rubble and holes, the cordoned-off hotel, then Downtown, to the Place des Martyrs and to the Christian East, and to his father.
Leon Elias’s sister was killed in front of him because, his father would later say ad nauseam, she was too good, she was too strong, she had too much potential, the sun was white as her skin, the sea her eyes, and so forth, and everyone knew her and Leon knew his father felt, she was just like me.
She was killed by three Christian assassins in the street outside Makhlouf’s, while inside Leon crouched behind a plastic chair pathetic, holding her chicken shawarma. Killed for her strength. Abu Keiko’s hair went white overnight and now around his mouth the fringes of his beard and moustache are yellow with nicotine. He repeats himself, tells people, almost gleefully, his hair went white “in one second.” But Leon was there; it took the terrible day and a night. Leon was also there when his uncle Joseph came to the old house, saying he knew the men who had done it. They were from the newly released Bcharrean Christian warlord Ja’ja’, were hired by him or loyal to him. Leon’s uncle knew who the men were, or said he did and seemed to, and he brought the SIG Sauer for his father to conduct his reprisal. Abu Keiko slowly shook his bent white head.
Keiko in militia fatigues sitting in the road outside Makhlouf’s, the same age Leon is now, dragging herself backward on the heels of her palms away from the puddle and rags that was her foot, screaming at it. Neither his uncle nor his father looked at Leon; they knew, he knew, they all knew. What would or could Leon do? Leon wouldn’t, Leon couldn’t. But old ex-militia man Abu Keiko said there would be no reprisal. We are Christian, he said, and here in my heart is love.
Across the road from Abu Keiko’s security post at the rich Kuwaitis’ apartments opposite the Place des Martyrs, Leon has watched his father talk about her to the Lebanese Army soldiers who all “know” him and “knew” her and gather and sit and smoke in the glow of his charisma, bored on the overnight details. His papa always has his nunchaku tucked in his belt (three-times jujitsu champion of Lebanon during the civil war; when? who remembers; who knows now) and he never sits down unless alone (like he’s protecting the soldiers). He makes the arms-akimbo gesture when Leon knows he’s saying, “She was stro-ong.” The soldiers nod soberly and look at Abu Keiko’s knees. Leon’s father’s post is only two blocks from Makhlouf’s where she was killed. The soldiers love him like a mad old grandfather; they know him, as Abu Keiko is fond of saying, and he knows them.
But they don’t see his coldness or his true oldness, they don’t hear his screams at Leon’s mother at night or feel his steel; although they might know what in the past he was capable of, what he has done. The balaclavaed assassin walked directly down the middle of the street as Keiko tried to drag herself away and he fired the weapon down at her barely looking and continued walking to his car and did not slow nor slacken his pace. The final shot that killed her was defined in the inquest as “a direct penetrating injury to the heart.” Ja’ja’ called for it in that terrible year because, like Abu Keiko had been back in 1989, she was with his rival, the Christian general Aoun, newly returned to Lebanon from his fifteen years of Parisian exile, and his Free Patriotic Movement party, the FPM. A lieutenant in the Lebanese Army, she had been favored and rising and her influence had been growing in the neighborhood. Ja’ja’ had perhaps tried to recruit her and been refused.
Leon’s father makes US$400 a month as a security guard. Ja’ja’s men came to Abu Keiko two years after Ja’ja’ had his daughter murdered and offered him that much a week to work for him. Abu Keiko had told Leon that Ja’ja’ asked and that he’d turned him down. Leon didn’t believe his father for a long time, that Ja’ja’ would make that offer, but now it seems so ridiculous, so coarse and cruel, of course it must be true.
Ja’ja’ funds surgeon’s training in heart bypasses at the Orthodox hospital. Hezbollah provide heart pills and blood. Of the Hezbollah, Leon’s father likes to say, “They are for the people and I love them.” But he has a bypass, and has Ja’ja’s money in or near his heart, even so.
Between their two massifs Leon is what is known as a losing stream. What you see is what is left of him. In the words of his hydrogeology text: Secretive, irregular, branching. Perched in the epikarst; lost in the swallow holes. Coursing through the karst aquifers of the anti Lebanon, I deplete as I run.
Up in Hamra, but that far east already was impossible, surely?—so close, maybe farther, with the echoes it was too hard for him to tell—he could hear the automatic gunfire thickening, clotting, periods without pause..... .. .. .. . . . ...... ... ...............
Tout Beirut may have been calling, but not him with only two U.S. dollars’ credit on his cell phone and only a few thousand utterly deflated Lebanese pounds in his pocket. The newly restored Downtown was empty. There were only the Lebanese Army APCs and soldiers reinforced at all the spokes of the wheel of new streets and unfinished alleys leading to the pristine Place d’Etoile and the Serail, the wheel’s diameter a ring of rolled-out razor wire.
He slowed to a walk and greeted the first soldier he saw.
“What’s up? It’s Hezbollah? Amal?” Leon said as he came near.
The soldier stared at his face for a little too long. Then he shrugged amiably, hitched his M16 and boredly made two fists, sparring with one another.
Leon nodded as if a little skeptical or just cool, and walked past him. The U.S.-made Vietnam-era APC was mounted with a massive but ancient Russian antiaircraft gun and parked sideways forming a gate in the middle of the street’s razor wire barrier. The three soldiers sitting around the big weapon looked down on him silently.
The empty boulevard ahead gently dipped and rose. The concrete barriers were pitted and paint streaked with old fights and accidents. They had been moved from the sidewalks to the parking bays, narrowing the road to a single lane. There was the fundamental-sounding clump of an RPG, which told him that what was happening had spread, and was in more than one neighborhood, stretching west-east but back in the city. The further he got from the sea the closer the sounds became. At the Place des Martyrs, the Green Line of wasteland-crumbled concrete began, the blocks of dead yellow grass littered with rubble and trash up to the car parks. The Green Line known thus not for any UN ruling, but for the quiet explosion of growth in the streets in the war. A hundred meters wide and nine kilometers long dividing the promontory between east and west, sniper deadly no man’s land: a silent forest forming around the skeletal buildings. Under Hariri the remains—the old theaters, the machine gun nests, the tunnels and shops and blood-soaked stone and canvas—were bulldozed into the sea at the terminus of the Green Line to form the foundation of the new marina-corniche. No man’s land reclaimed now lying doubly deserted in the aftermath of Hariri’s death, and diffidently guarded by Leon’s friends, with their law degrees, their marketing diplomas.
The gunfire shifted emphasis and pitch. Either the open areas were amplifying the sounds or the fighting was genuinely closer. It was less cracking than popping now, and there were no cars anywhere. No movement and little light, and above him the low poison-green clouds came in softly in strips like ragged sand dunes in a desertified sky over the wasteland to Mount Lebanon.
Leon felt a sick sort of relief approaching
