Holy War Read online

  He made a second cup, loitered back to his cot and slipped into his thongs, tossed a towel over his shoulders and headed for the showers. A thunderclap cracked, the floor lurched, shivered, the thunder louder. Christ, we've been hit, he thought, dropping the cup. He raced to his cot, snatched his FAMAS, the explosion shaking the sky, men yelling now, down below.

  The earth was shaking, an earthquake; he raced up the stairs to the roof, smashed into a sentry coming down. “It's the Marines,” the sentry screamed. “A bomb!”

  From the roof he couldn't see the U.S. Marines' compound to the south, just a great billowing dark cloud. He raced downstairs to the radio room. Chevenet, the communications chief, was crouched speaking English then listening to the headset as he loaded his rifle. “A truck,” he said, “somebody drove up in a truck. The whole building. The whole fucking building!”

  Yves sprinted down the corridor and down the stairs. “Battle stations!” he screamed. “Battle stations!” Pumping a round into the FAMAS he dashed across the lobby into the parking area. Dark smoke filled the sky. “They hit the Marines!” he yelled to the sentries at the gate. “A big truck!”

  A Mercedes truck, the kind used to collect rubbish from the embattled streets of Beirut, geared down and swung into the parking lot, snapped the gate barrier and accelerated toward him. A ton of plastique he realized as he fired from the waist exploding the windshield but the driver had ducked, the truck's grille huge in Yves' face as he shot for the engine now, the distributor cap on the right side, the plugs, the fuel pump. It was too late, the truck would have them. His heart broke in frantic agony for the men inside, the men who would be trapped, crushed to death, the Paras, fleur de la France, his beloved brothers. The universe congealed, shrank to an atom and blew apart, reducing him to tiny chunks of blood and bone, never to be found.

  2

  “IT’S YOUR LAST NIGHT, Neill – please let's not fight?” Beverly poured the noodles into the strainer and dumped the strainer into a bowl. “Can you get the butter?”

  Her close-cropped round head made him think of an eel peering from its hole. Waiting to sink her fangs. “It's just three weeks.” He spoke carefully, not letting the whisky slur his tongue, upbeat at the end. “Good to put a little distance between us.”

  She took the butter from the refrigerator. “There's been no lack of that.”

  He turned as if to hold her in his arms, opened the freezer door and took out the ice cubes. Everything you say, he told himself, she turns right back on you. He twisted the ice cube container and popped some into the low octagonal glass. She spun round. “There's wine with dinner.”

  He poured in extra Knockando, for what she'd said. “What I mean is we'll have a little time to see how it's like, living alone...”

  “I'll hardly be alone with two teenagers to cook and clean for, to drive around and worry about when they're not here and try to run my own office at the same time.”

  Under their feet the ground rumbled, a District Line train slowing for Earls Court Station. He took a sip. “And slip Timothy a quick fuck when you can.”

  “And you! With that Dutch bitch!”

  “Hardly, in darkest Beirut.”

  “You'll find somebody there. You always do.”

  He tossed back the whisky and put the glass in the sink. “There's no point, Bev. We can't keep this up.”

  She came close, took his elbow. “For all the years we've had, Neill, let's not take it out tonight on the kids? Let's have a quiet evening and then in the morning you can go and we'll see what happens when you get back? Please?”

  “You know they damn well don't care whether I go or stay.”

  “Yes, they do. They'd rather you go.”

  “Thanks.”

  “The way you've been, can you blame them?”

  “I blame you.” The phone was ringing. “Imagine, some day we could've been buried side by side.”

  “We have been!” she snapped.

  “Mum!” Edgar called. “Phone!”

  Neill opened a bottle of wine and took it into the dining room. “Yes,” Beverly was saying in the living room, into the phone. “Yes, yes.”

  “You didn't put out wine glasses,” he said to Edgar.

  “Sorry.” Edgar bent to the buffet, took out a glass.

  “Two,” Neill said. “Since when doesn't your mother drink?”

  “Sometimes.” Edgar put a second glass on the table. “Mostly with you.”

  He smiled at Katerina. “See how he is, your brother?”

  She glanced back at him. “No wonder.”

  “That's it, don't you see? No wonder at this magic life of ours!”

  The children looked at him. Beverly sat and began serving the peas, the noodles. “This case...”

  “That's why I'll never be a lawyer,” Katerina said. “You see what she has to go through?”

  Neill sat back. “You mean me, or her job?”

  Beverly's hand undulated through the plates and glasses, caught his. “We made a deal...”

  “I made no damn deal. I never made a damn deal that I couldn't say what I think.” He took a forkful of meat, chewing gristle, turned on Edgar, this son, he thought, I love who hates me. I didn't always drink, my son, I didn't always hate your mother. “What do you think?”

  “It's not worth saying,” Edgar said, “what I think.”

  “Even with me?”

  Katerina stopped chewing. “Especially with you.”

  He smiled at her. “Et tu, Brute?”

  “Now, don't pick on your father,” Beverly said. “He'll be gone three whole weeks, and if the news desk takes all his articles maybe when he gets back we can go up to the Lake District, unwind together.”

  “That, Mother,” Katerina answered, “is impossible.”

  “Promise to study?” he said to Edgar.

  “You were the one,” Edgar said, “who told me school was like what that caste does in India – maiming their children young so they'll always be able to earn a living. As crippled beggars.”

  “That's true.” Neill rubbed his head, imagined the gray hairs growing silently, ruthlessly. “I said that.”

  “You say lots of things.” Katerina tossed him her best smile, one she practiced in the cloakroom mirror before going out to that nauseous little creep with the curly Afro and the earring. Trying to slip his puny prick into my daughter. Go ahead, he told her silently, with his eyes. Go ahead and see what you get.

  The phone rang and in a single fluid motion Beverly was up and after it.

  “It's just a circus,” Neill said. “We play the clown, the tightrope walker, you name it. In the end the audience goes home.”

  “What is?” Edgar said.

  Beverly returned. “Just Timothy.”

  “Just Timothy.”

  “Same case, different argument.”

  Château Lascaze, the bottle said, 1981. He emptied it and scanned the buffet for another. “In October, 1981 where were we? Does anybody remember? When these grapes were plucked from the sun –”

  “School,” Edgar said.

  Katerina nodded. “School.”

  “I must've been bent over my desk at The Times, pounding out my daily thousand pointless words, beside Quilliver and his bloody cigarettes and graveyard cough – you know, they've found passive smoke's more cancerous?”

  “Because it isn't filtered,” Edgar said.

  He smiled at Beverly. “That was long before Timothy. What in heavens, my dear, had you to do back then?”

  She made a show of thinking. “October’81. That wretched accident case. Woman lived but her husband didn't. Nine months of plastic surgery. Sued the drunken driver in the other car and lost.”

  “Long, sure hand of the law. Rewarding the guilty. Justifiably flail
ing the innocent.”

  “She said the strangest things. They reanimated her in hospital, dead but they brought her back. Said she'd risen up out of her body and traveled down a tunnel toward the light, but decided to return. Do you suppose –”

  “Journalists aren’t supposed to suppose.” He went to the kitchen and brought back another bottle.

  “Neill,” she whispered.

  “Even if you did care I wouldn't –”

  “Don't have so much, Neill.”

  From his pockets Neill extracted a Swiss Army knife, opened it and uncorked the bottle. “Long swift arm of the law. Furious fist of timorous Timothy.”

  “You're never serious. Except when you're talking about yourself. Your deep problems of love and death.”

  Across the table Katerina yawned. Edgar rose like a butler who'd momentarily forgotten himself and sat at table with his masters. “The dishes call.”

  Neill poured a full glass, raised it to the light. “Don't answer.”

  “Afterwards can I go and play music?” Edgar said. “Just till midnight?”

  “Be on the last Tube,” Beverly said.

  “And you?” Neill turned to Katerina.

  “Going to Max's. We have a calculus assignment.”

  And fiddle his liverish prick, he said for her. See the Crusader departing for the Holy Land, shunned by his own kind. “Whatever happened to the time-honored idea of figuring things out for yourself?”

  “She does better over there,” Beverly said.

  “With his own place,” Katerina added, “why would he want to come here?”

  “Nothing left,” Neill smiled at Beverly, “but for you and me to have our quiet evening at home.”

  “I've got to work on that case.”

  They carried the dirty plates into the kitchen, loaded the dishwasher and turned it on. It started with a self-satisfied hum. To be so inanimate, Neill thought, so free. Please God, where are we? These stars we travel through, this universe of magic and sorrow, what is it? We this amalgam of cells and dreams, this falseness.

  Upstairs in the bathroom he poured the last of his wine into the toilet, felt guilty and drank the dregs. Just don't understand. Dear God, I just don't. Right away the answer came to him: all that counts is wrath.

  Love doesn't matter? he asked.

  No, came the answer, it surely doesn't. Drink no more.

  But what would that change? What else do you have?

  He took a leak and flushed the loo, the red and yellow liquid sucking down. Every drop of the Thames goes through nine people, says the National Rivers Association, between the Cotswolds and the Channel. Drinking piss, we are, cradle to grave.

  Clasping the empty glass to his chest he wandered back down the corridor with the blue-red Persian runner that Bev had paid good money for, to the head of the stairs. At forty-two he shouldn't be afraid of tripping down the stairs. Trick is to have each foot well posed. Like each question posed but never answered. Dear God, if I could only understand.

  THE DOOR SWUNG open, damp urine odor rushing out, no light. Broken glass underfoot, tinkle of a bottle cap. Smell of corpses beneath the rubble.

  It was a long low cellar with a gaping window at the back. Footsteps clattered into the alley behind her; Rosa ducked into the cellar, shut the door. The men dashed past, three or four, frightened, gasping. One tripped on debris and fell with a crash of metal then ran onward, wailing.

  Streets away a Kalashnikov barked; death seeking someone. A whoosh and wham of shells against the next hill. A scream – no a ricochet; anguished metal hunting a home in flesh.

  More men ran into the alley, panting, halted, clink of steel on steel. A crackle of Hebrew on the radio. “Damn you,” she said, pressed herself back into the corner of the cellar, beside the window, reached under her raincoat into the sack round her waist and took out a grenade.

  A rocket swooshed over. The ground shivered, a roar split the night. Chunks of wall and ceiling pattered down, one punching her shoulder.

  Bullets whacked and crashed into the alley, an M16, uphill. Galils chattered back, someone called out, Israeli. Again the Galils roared, the noise deafening through the street door. A man was moaning, as if he'd had the wind knocked out of him. Another whispered, Israeli, then harsher, louder. Ahead, the Galil spat more bullets down the alley. She bent over her sack of grenades, trying to cover them, fearing the noise would explode them.

  Sounds of choking, ripping cloth, someone speaking fast in Hebrew about a medic in five minutes and a recoilless rifle; she couldn't understand.

  A spent round pinged down into the street. Stab of light under the door, fifty-caliber bullets hammering off distant walls.

  The Israelis broke the door and dragged the wounded man into the cellar. They shut the door and snapped on a flashlight. One tall and broad-chested, on the floor, gut shot. Another trying to compress the wound while a third held the light, tearing open a medical kit.

  Her heart was beating so hard she couldn't hear what they said. Steps thumped across the ruined floor overhead – more Israelis taking up positions. No. The Israelis in the cellar were silent, holding their guns, listening. The wounded man's legs began to quiver and another put a hand over his mouth, shut off the flashlight.

  She took a deep, silent breath. Two grenades clicked together in her sack; she held her breath; the Israelis didn’t hear.

  A shell came down sighing and smacked into the next street, the earth shook, staggered, a building began to fall. In the roar Rosa crawled quickly through the window, over a tile roof that had fallen in one tilting piece, then down the next alley, listening, moving ten feet and listening again. A Mirage came in low and dropped napalm, the sky bright as a hearth, wind roaring through the streets toward the seething flames, the screams, the wail of metal, stone and flesh bending, breaking, melting. So this is Hell, she thought, running up the narrow street under the boiling red clouds, her sack of grenades clasped tight to her belly.

  3

  NEILL WOKE WITH HIS STOMACH AFIRE. There was a distant, nearing rumble. A 747, the first United from New York. In that plane the passengers would be waking, stretching, gathering their things after a night over the Atlantic. Not the same as the first time he had crossed fourth class in the SS Statendam, a kid of seventeen deserting Cleveland for the London School of Economics and a world of excitement and anticipation.

  The plane passed over rattling the glass. What if he'd stayed in the States – how could it have been worse than this? What would he have become, an editor on some local paper, chasing down dog-bite stories, living in some split-level suburban slum? He'd have never gone to Beirut, Czechoslovakia, all those other places, have never met Bev.

  He got up and closed the window. “I was going somewhere with Jonathan Tremaine,” Beverly mumbled. “In his Austin Healey. The wind was blowing our hair.”

  “Good old Jonathan.” Neill got back into bed, wondering if in the dream she'd slept with him. A 707, a charter maybe, crisped over, closer to the Thames, landing lights blinking as it crossed the window.

  Without Bev he wouldn't have had the kids. He thought of them sleeping in their rooms above the ceiling. If he never came back would they miss him? They'd grow up fine without him. Or is even a lousy father better than none? Edgar already had too much of the world on his broad young shoulders. And the boys like sharks round Katerina – a fatherless girl is always easier to screw. Even if they don't think so they need you. More than you give.

  But you always feel like this before you go. A total coward, always have been. Admit it. You may be a world-jaded journalist but you've hated or feared or been bored by nearly every moment of it.

  And aren't kids better with a father who does what he wants, instead of one who's always afraid? He noted the triumphant smile of peace on Beverly's sleeping face. Would that I
could. He raised his knees but the knot in his stomach wouldn't go away. Beverly a believer in twenty-year cycles. Ready to slip from him to the next. He sat up, feet cold on the carpet, rubbing his stubble. Can I shower without waking her?

  A SHELL SCREAMED over like a siren, Syrian from the hills, aimed here, coming down louder, louder, shaking the night, shuddering the earth, shrapnel shrieking through the streets.

  Beneath her raincoat Rosa cradled the sack of grenades closer. “You're crazy,” the Christian guard said.

  He had a scar down one cheek, under the stubble. It cut into his lip and in the early morning light made him seem petulant. She adjusted her weight. “He's still in there, my father. Rue Lebbos –”

  “We've cornered some Shiites there. You can't go in.”

  “He's blind. I have to get him out.”

  He tipped up her chin with his rifle, watching her eyes. “There is no more Rue Lebbos.”

  “He's in a cellar.”

  “They've all caved in. There's no one there any more, sister.” He glanced at the round belly beneath her raincoat. “Bring us new life. Forget the old.”

  He seemed kind, despite his scar, maybe not one of the Christians that murdered the two thousand Palestinian women and children and old people here in Shatila last year. She pushed round him, over the broken concrete. “You'd treat your father so?”

  He pointed the rifle at her belly, nudged the muzzle up to her face, tapped the trigger as he swung the muzzle up and the bullets spattered over her head off the wall and up into the sky. Chunks of clay fell down on her head and shoulders. “It's for your child, sister, that I didn't shoot you. Perhaps I still will.”

  “Shoot me, then.” She turned and walked between the broken houses, tensed for the bullets to bore like rods of fire through her belly, spine, and brain, the grenades blowing up and spreading her in tiny chunks of flesh and bone.

  A shell roared down and slapped the next street, shrapnel singing off the buildings. She ducked, straightened slowly, walking still, cradling her belly of grenades beneath the raincoat, the rush of her breath and hustling footsteps and the clicking of the grenades loud in her ears.