Bride of a Bygone War (12 page)

“The usual selection, Major?” the maître d’hôtel inquired.

“Yes, unless my friend has any favorite dishes he would like me to add.” The major looked expectantly at Lukash.

“Actually, I’d love to have some of your—”

“
Assafeer
?” the headwaiter asked with a knowing smile. “And perhaps a dish of
kebdé nayyé
?”

Lukash stared at the headwaiter in blank astonishment. Few foreigners relished suspending grilled baby sparrows in the air by their spindly legs and eating the entire bird in one mouthful, bones and all. And fewer had developed a taste for purplish chunks of raw liver served on a bed of leaf lettuce. Yet somehow the waiter had divined that these were two of the
mezzé
items that Lukash savored most.

The headwaiter returned Lukash’s stare and chuckled. “You once ordered
mezzé
at my restaurant in the Place Riad Solh. The young lady beside you insisted that you try our
assafeer,
and you ordered a second platter after finishing the entire first platter by yourself. The
kebdé nayyé
disappeared quickly as well. I thought you might enjoy tasting how we prepare them at La Chasse.”

“By God, I do remember,” Lukash muttered softly. “But it’s been five years. And it was the only time I ever ate there. How could you possibly recall—?”

“Boulos remembers every customer he has ever served over the last thirty years,” Major Elie interrupted. “Am I not right, Boulos? You remembered what my father ordered when he brought my mother to your restaurant for the first time, before I was even born. Have you ever forgotten a face?”

An inscrutable smile passed across the fat man’s face, as if he were weighing his words with a very specific purpose in mind. “I have forgotten many. But some are easier to remember than others. Foreigners, for example. And beautiful women.”

Major Elie shook his head and gave a good-natured laugh. “If Boulos wished to become a blackmailer, he would be the richest man in Beirut. In the evenings he works at the most expensive restaurant in Achrafiyé.”

“But as you see, gentlemen, I am only a waiter. Which proves, I think, that your secrets are safe with me.” With that, Boulos left the two younger men and rushed to greet an elderly couple who examined the menu posted at the restaurant’s door.

“So back to the Syrians,” Elie said as soon as the headwaiter was out of earshot. “You asked about proof. I can show you signed confessions if you like. The stories are remarkably similar. Syrian military intelligence has taken over nearly all responsibility for car bombings in Christian territory. The bombs themselves are fabricated in and around Shtaura, in the Bekaa Valley, for the most part. Being an American, you may not approve of the methods we use in extracting the confessions, but once you read them, you will recognize that it would have been impossible for such details to have been fabricated merely to satisfy the interrogator.”

“What kind of methods are we talking about, Elie? Beatings? Electrodes? Isolation?”

Major Elie poured Lukash’s beer carefully down the side of the fluted pilsner glass and then poured another for himself. “You will not report this to your State Department, of course...”

“I won’t say a word of it to anyone unless you want me to.”

The major popped an almond into his mouth and cracked it between his teeth before speaking. “You should understand that we have three categories of hostile interrogation. In the first category belong the well-known methods that you and the Soviets and the British use—or at least those that you admit you use.” Elie smiled and took another almond. “Deprivation of sleep, deprivation of the senses, manipulation of temperature, manipulation of diet, and the various psychological techniques. Such methods are generally effective, though not quite as effective as you and the Soviets would have us believe.
 

“For those who resist Category One interrogation, or with whom time is of the essence, we use a second category of interrogation that includes certain types of beating that leave no permanent mark. Category Two interrogations are also effective with most subjects, although usually not with those who have successfully resisted a week or more of Category One treatment.

“Finally, in extreme cases, where speed is of critical importance and the information required is simple and easily verified or, in other cases, where the subject will be executed regardless of the outcome, we sometimes resort to Category Three. This includes physical methods that entail a substantial risk of permanent bodily injury or death. As you might expect, when a subject has been assigned to this level of interrogation, there is no question of his future release. Most Category Three subjects are already under a death sentence when interrogation begins and are executed shortly after it is completed, although some are kept alive for longer periods if they may be of use in the future.”

Major Elie leaned back in his chair and peered through the window as a procession of fashionably dressed women moved from boutique to boutique across the square, some with neatly scrubbed children in tow.
 

Lukash wondered what the major was thinking. Was he reassuring himself that torture, while repugnant, was necessary to defend the Christian Lebanese community? Was he also weighing whether a society that relied upon torture for its self-defense was worth defending? Five years ago Lukash would have known where to stand on these questions. Today he was no longer quite so sure.

“You are not shocked,” the Phalangist observed, a wry smile returning to his lips.

“We just finished a war in Southeast Asia, Elie. I wasn’t there, but some of my friends tell me that intelligence work is different in wartime. When the war is a civil war, I suppose it’s even worse. America hasn’t had one of those in a hundred years.”

“You fought in Vietnam?”

“No,” Lukash replied, almost apologetically. “I was prepared for it, but I was a lucky winner in the first draft lottery. The Viet Cong would have had to take the beaches at Malibu before the army called me up. It seems odd to me now, but even after I drew a winning number, I tried once to sign up for Army Officer Candidate School. That was 1970, and by then all the reserve and OCS programs were fully subscribed. Every able-bodied man with a college degree was trying to become an officer to avoid the draft.”

“I sense that perhaps you regret not having fought in the war.”

“I ought to have sense enough not to,” Lukash responded agreeably, “but, in a way, the Vietnam War was the defining event for my generation. And I wasn’t a part of it—I wasn’t even part of the movement to stop the war. Looking back, I think that my sitting out the war may have had something to do with my going into intelligence. I was unbelievably naïve; I had no idea what intelligence work was about. But I had this feeling deep in my gut that someday we’d be at war with the Russians, and that, no matter what, I was not going to miss out on the Big One. Well, maybe we’ll fight them someday and maybe we won’t. Either way, that’s how I became a spy, and now I’m in for the duration, whatever that is.”

The major tilted his head back and gave a hard laugh. “Your life and mine are like two caravans passing in the desert going opposite directions. I entered manhood in the militia and gave it up to become a spy. I know very little of your army or your war, but I could not have endured our own war for a single day longer than I did. When Colonel Faris offered me a commission in the Intelligence Department, it was like being pulled out from a pit of wild beasts.”

“Did you see much action during the war?”

“More than some, less than others. I was a lieutenant in an Ahrar militia unit raised from Antélias and Jall ed Dib. We fought in Aïn el Rummaneh, the Burj, and the hotel district, and later laid siege to the Palestinians at the Tel al Zaatar refugee camp. Seventeen months of combat. I joined the Intelligence Department in August, just after the camp fell. By then I was more than sick of combat.”

“Were you with the men who entered Tel al Zaatar?” Lukash asked, unable to suppress a morbid curiosity about the notorious siege and massacre.

The major scowled momentarily and then let out a deep breath. “My platoon was at the forward edge of the assault. Even from a distance, the camp was an appalling sight. After nearly two months of steady bombardment, hardly a wall remained that did not show gaping holes from shellfire. The streets were filled with Palestinian dead; afterward we counted more than twelve hundred corpses. The enemy’s leaders had proclaimed throughout the siege that their fighters would resist to the last man and that this would be the Maronites’ Stalingrad. Every Palestinian inside was armed—even the grandmothers and small children.

“In the first minutes of the assault, we saw a white flag wave from behind an earthen berm and ordered their fighters to come out without their weapons. Four white-bearded old men appeared over the top, hands on their heads. But as soon as they came within thirty meters of our line, a machine gun raked us from the right flank and one of the four old men lobbed a grenade at us. After that we saw only two other white flags. We paid no attention to them.

“The international press claimed that what we did was a massacre—that we lined up our prisoners against the earthworks and shot them, and that we charged around the camp knocking down doors, bayoneting infants and pregnant women, and mutilating corpses. Well, we did knock down doors and we did use our bayonets. But I saw no prisoners lined up against walls, and the only corpses of children I saw had weapons in their hands. The fault lies with the Palestinian leaders for not surrendering when they had the opportunity. We would have given the old women and small children safe passage if they had been willing to take it.”

“And the other prisoners?”

“I imagine we would have offered some in trade for our own men captured in earlier fighting. As for the rest, I do not know. For some, interrogation, no doubt.”

“Category Three?”

“I was not involved in such matters then.”

“And now?”

“Still not,” Elie replied, meeting Lukash’s eyes as he raised his glass to drink. “I prefer to let others deal with the prisoners. Men who specialize in such work. Not that I hold such work to be unimportant, Wali. Not at all. If someone did not carry it out, our organization would be placed at a serious disadvantage. Perhaps the very survival of the Christian Lebanese community would be put at risk. But, taking that into account, I prefer not to stain my hands with the blood of others any more than necessary. Let every man judge whether the ends justify the means in his own work. As to my own activities, I have convinced myself that they do not offend my own scruples or God’s laws. If another man can say the same of combat or interrogations, it is not for me to question his participation in them.”

“And do you employ many such specialists in your organization?” Lukash persisted.

“No more or less than necessary,” the major replied steadily. “In fact, you will be meeting some of them within the hour. For as soon as we have finished our lunch, we will make a delivery to a friend of mine who commands a sector of the front lines from his bunker downtown in the Burj. He, too, was at Tel al Zaatar.”

* * *

Major Elie parked his olive drab Range Rover at the stone curb before a two-story shell of a building whose ground floor now comprised a row of five blackened and rubble-filled merchant stalls. The roll-down steel door of each stall had been torn off its tracks and lay like a crumpled sheet of cardboard before its gaping entry. Lukash stepped out of the Range Rover and looked around while Elie reached behind his seat for a canvas rucksack before standing and slinging the sack over one shoulder.

Lukash tried to recall from distant memory the spot where they were now standing in the old commercial district. He remembered that these streets east of Martyrs’ Square had once teemed with merchants’ stalls, much like those in the Damascus souk or Cairo’s Khan al-Khalili, where one could find every conceivable type of goods, from auto parts to pungent spices to electrical equipment to children’s clothing, in a hotchpotch of totally unfettered commercial enterprise. Now thorny weeds grew waist-high in the cracks between the cobblestones, and the sidewalks were knee-deep in rubble that had been bulldozed to either side of the narrow lane to clear a passage down the center of the street.

One block away a massive concrete-and-sandbag shelter sprawled across the intersection of two weed-infested boulevards. A pair of helmeted heads peered out over shoulder-high sandbagged walls to watch with cold suspicion as Elie and Lukash inched forward along the wall on the eastern side of the street.
 

Thirty meters before reaching the barricade, the major held up a hand and halted opposite an alley no wider than his shoulders to speak in a voice barely loud enough for Lukash to hear. “At the end of the passage, we will turn right and enter a house. Follow close behind me and watch your step because it will be dark. First we will descend into a cellar. Then we will follow a tunnel to the observation post.”

Lukash did as he was told, following Major Elie down a short flight of concrete steps and then along a corridor reminiscent of an old mine shaft, with wooden crossbeams every two meters. At last they ascended another short flight of steps and Major Elie pounded his fist on a wooden trapdoor overhead. Lukash heard heavy footsteps approaching and suddenly the underground passage was bathed in bright sunlight.

“
Bonjour,
Elie,” a friendly voice spoke from the light. “Did you bring the radios?”