Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine Presents Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense (44 page)

“No, it ain't!” she cried indignantly.

“He ain't a bird that just flies off,” Donald sputtered, feeling angry without knowing why. “He ain't in New Orleans, neither! He's dead, you hear me?” He leaped sideways off the porch and ran around the side of the house.

Twilight was deep before Sarah went looking for her cousin. The air was cooling quickly with the sunset these autumn days, and the purple colors of evening added to the child's sense of summer's end. She found the boy behind the house, sitting on the “step box” beside the rain barrel.

“Hey, Donald,” Sarah spoke gently into the shadows. “You wanna play checkers?” No answer came. “I got my checkers in the house. You wanna play?”

In that instant purple turned to black. It was that moment when day stops. If you see it happen, night seems very sudden.

“You mad at me?” she asked. But the boy was silent. “You're actin' mad, but if we play checkers or somethin' you'll cheer up.” Still no words came from the shadows by the rain barrel.

“Donald!” she snapped, finally in a huff. “You're about the sorriest thing I ever saw!”

“You're the sorriest thing in the whole world,” said the boy at last. “Sayin' dead men ain't dead, they're only fishin' in Lake Ponchetrain. That's purely stupid. ‘I'm at the funeral but I ain't sad,'” he mimicked her, “‘'cause Elmo ain't dead, he's in Paris, France.'” His voice was hard and angry. Sarah began to cry.

“You're so meanhearted,” she whimpered, “I don't want even to mess with you.”

“Aw, hush,” he said, softening. “I ain't mad at you. 'At threw me how you said Elmo ran off. I think I wisht he had run off. I think I wisht he'd run off more'n anythin'. You understand?”

“Well, how come you're so dang sure he didn't?” she sniffed.

“Okay, listen an' use your head …”

“Huh!” she pouted.

“What did Uncle Elmo take with him when he left?” he asked.

“A cane pole and a bag of cold biscuits,” she replied. It was common knowledge. Everybody knew that.

“If he was goin' off travelin', would he of took that?”

“No,” she nodded doubtfully. “I reckon he'd not of tooken off half cocked.”

“'Course not,” said Donald. “He always was careful what he took on a Sunday drive. If he had a pole an' a bite to eat, he was goin' to the river an' no place else. Right?”

“I guess so,” Sarah agreed sadly. “I just don't see how he could of got dead between here an' there, an' my daddy couldn't find him.”

“I cain't either,” he said through tight lips, “an' that's just what's botherin' me. Since our daddies are as good in the woods as Uncle Elmo, how come they cain't find their own brother on a gravel road? It don't make sense to me. Do you see what I'm drivin' at?”

“Not percisely, no,” she answered.

“Ain't you seen Momma cryin'?” he asked.

“Gosh, yes,” she said. “She's awful sad about Uncle Elmo. They was good friends, wasn't they?”

Donald was silent again. After a while Sarah knew he wasn't going to play checkers at all. She went into the house where all the adult funeral-goers were gathered over Miss Tatum Harris's lemon cakes. They were in a deep discussion of the quarter horse auction in Fayetteville.

He swears
that it's never his fault and may even believe that. Manganelle, with his autopsy-conducting gaze and face the color of rare steak, is my least likeable and most worrying friend. Ancient Norsemen would have shunned him as an ill-bringer. He's a lightning conductor for scandal and worse; lumbers through such storms without so much as a scorch mark, leaving charred victims in his path. This makes him uneasy though interesting company.

Eric Manganelle is a journalist, so he has been everywhere and seen everything. Par for the course, except that he probably
caused
most of everything as well.

We ran into each other at Palmcastle on England's soft and seemly south coast recently. Palmcastle is where mildly affluent, strongly elderly Britons wait for death. They crave dignity and are confident of their passing's arousing minimal fuss, because hardly anyone will be able to tell the difference. Even the waves break in an undertone there, and thunder neither rolls nor rumbles overhead. It clears its throat—diffidently at that.

Nothing ever happens at Palmcastle, that's what Palmcastle is for. When I laid this insight on Eric Manganelle, he sneered like a silent movie heavy, as if to say, “Much
you
know.” But what he did say over the first of many scotches, none going on his bill, was: “I'll tell you something funny about Beirut.”

“Nothing's funny about Beirut.” We'd spent too long there, starting with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and siege of Beirut, on through the PLO's departure and beyond.

“Shut up,” he remarked, “I'm telling this. The funny thing about Beirut, seeing that it was the capital of a country where anarchy had been the norm for a decade or so
before
our impulsive friends from Jerusalem kicked the front door down and started smashing the china, is that it was such a terribly safe place.”

He took my breath away. Finally I said feebly, “Sorry to bother you with the facts, but I was there, remember. Safe place? The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have been using Beirut for their stable, years on end.”

“Oh, that,” he grunted, dismissing air raids, sniping, shelling, rockets, and seventy different factions of the PLO alone. “Yes, there was fighting and so forth—”

“Ever the trained observer, Mangy. Nothing escapes your attention, born reporter.”

“But apart from that,” Manganelle persisted, “it
was
a very safe place. Think about it, if you're capable. S-a-f-e, providing you were a genuine civilian or a hack, a journo, with the right accreditation documents. Keep a civil tongue in your head, lie low when it got noisy, and none of the citizenry or warriors would look at you crosswise. This was before the hostage-taking lunacy, mark you. Can you deny it?”

“Well, maybe …”

“No maybe about it. Remember how we'd blunder about at night, feeling no pain, wandering down the most appalling dark alleys and getting thoroughly lost? There was always a crone or a thug with an assault rifle and a checked tea towel on his head who'd pop up to show the way back to the Commodore. Dozens of us, bouncing about after dark, loaded with cash, expensive cameras, and tape recorders. Answer me this: did you ever get mugged? Did you ever hear of
anybody
getting mugged, rolled, having their pocket picked?”

“No,” I conceded, “now you mention it. They must have been too busy with their war to waste time on that kind of thing.”

“Just so. Israel was hammering the PLO, the Christians were hammering the Muslims and vice versa, and most of them had a bash at the Druse when otherwise unoccupied,” Manganelle recalled. “Yet foreign civilians could get away with things they'd never risk in London, New York, Paris. Indulge in conduct rightly regarded as hazardous in civilized cities, such as braving those aforementioned dark alleys, asking total strangers for directions—really reckless, provocative stuff of that persuasion.”

“I was there,” I repeated; “stop lecturing me.”

“Reminding, old boy, reminding. It was a few years ago, fine detail soon blurs into mush at your time of life.” Only Manganelle can drink on your tab without a word of thanks, let alone acknowledgment, before implying senility in his benefactor.

Driven to waspishness, I said, “Talking of getting old, when somebody keeps hanging on and on with the same remark, it's a sure sign he's over the hill.”

Either Manganelle had been hit by the hideous possibility of buying his liquor, or he was treating me to a look of hurt dignity. “I'm establishing the context, you blockhead. Setting the stage for the last untold drama of Beirut in '82, the strange affair of Lancelot Pasover.”

“Never heard of him,” I scoffed. “Fine old Middle Eastern name, though. Skipper of a trading dhow, was he?”

“That's the way, glory in your ignorance.” He snapped his fingers and grinned balefully. “Ah yes, you never met Pasover. You'd sneaked away to loll about in Cyprus when the going got tough, leaving stauncher colleagues to face shot and shell.”

I had sneaked away on a stretcher and been absent for all of two weeks, before returning with an ankle in plaster but raring to go, sort of. Perhaps I forgot to mention Eric Manganelle's compassion and his obsessive concern to show professional rivals' conduct in the best possible light.

Once we'd sorted that out, unprintable on my side, he complained, “D'you want to wrangle like a nasty little guttersnipe or hear about Pasover?”

“Is there a choice?”

Deliberately dense, Manganelle agreed, “It's a choice story, certainly, the … the …” My heart sank, for Manganelle adores excruciating puns. “The passing over of Lancelot Pasover,” he boomed, sizzling with satisfaction.

He wagged a fat finger, tip beveled flat from striking sundry million typewriter keys. “Pasover died in a far land, a foreign field, but he was a Palmcastle man born and bred. Which is why I'm here—in at the death, all over again.”

E
RIC
M
ANGANELLE
is a good reporter, but even a bad one would have done well in Beirut during the early years of the eighties. You couldn't very well miss the story, for instance.

There was too much story, if anything. Or rather, too many of them, all squeezed between the city's Green Line frontier, held by the Israeli army with its Lebanese Christian onlookers, and the sea a mile or so away, to which the PLO and Muslim militias of East Beirut had their backs.

It was an extraordinary time and matching place, not at all what outsiders could expect from words such as “siege.” Bombs fell, shells slammed home, Israeli missiles lanced in from their gunboats, making savage echoes chatter among the tower blocks. Assault rifles were fired in the air as a gesture of defiance or simply to clear traffic for an ambulance. Sometimes all these incidents took place within the same few minutes, which was hard on the nerves.

Yet between whiles, and occasionally
during
whiles, West Beirut's life went on, dinners were served, people strolled, business was done. And there were a lot of people: TV and print journalists and their entourages by the scores, volunteer doctors and nurses, United Nations officials, representatives of international charities, questing executives impatient for the shooting to stop so they could start dealing.

Some of them, Manganelle reasoned, had to be spooks—intelligence men under cover. His paper loves that sort of thing, so Manganelle set about locating an agent. He never did, not provably, but he did meet Lancelot Pasover.

Incredibly, considering that Lebanon had been a killing ground for so long, there remained a sizable expatriate community. This included French nationals who'd been around Beirut since its prewar days as a colony, Americans connected with the university, and Britons who taught English for a living, served in bars, or generally hung out.

Lancelot Pasover's reason for being there was so odd that Manganelle felt sure he must be a spook. Then he looked again, sighed, and scrapped the idea.

M
ANGANELLE NOTICED
Pasover in the lobby of the Commodore hotel one morning. Pasover caught his bloodshot eye and smiled goofily, a balding young fellow in sandals over tartan socks, baggy lightweight suit, and a hand-knitted tie, lopsided and full of dropped stitches.

“Hello,” Pasover beamed, “are you British by any chance, sir?” Which was such a bloody silly question, nearly an insult, that Manganelle harrumphed at him in fury.

But he was bored and at a loose end until Arafat's daily press briefing, so Manganelle bought Lancelot Pasover breakfast—putting it on the bill of an unwary new chum from the
Washington Post
, naturally.

“What am I doing here? Sometimes I ask myself that,” Pasover answered the obvious question.

“Never mind the epigrams,” Manganelle entreated sourly.

Young Pasover nodded, still smiling. He was too dim to have hurt feelings. “Well, sir, I'm just settling up Auntie's estate. Soon as that's done, and I'm confident of success within days, I shall be back to Palmcastle like an arrow. Anne's missing me dreadfully. Anne is my wife. You know how women are, they need a strong, protective male at hand.”