Bride of a Bygone War (19 page)

Shortly before dawn on a summer day nearly two years earlier, a platoon of Bashir Gemayel’s Phalangist shock troops had crept through the early morning stillness to attack the summer retreat of rival militia chieftain Tony Franjiyé. Despite a desperate defense by Franjiyé’s bodyguards, he and his wife, his three-year-old daughter, their maid, chauffeur, and family dog were machine-gunned to death in the courtyard of the house while still in their bedclothes. When the shooting stopped, fourteen people lay dead.

“You did exactly the right thing, César. Don’t worry about not using the secret writing this time. Your papers will be safely concealed when I cross the Green Line. Just send me a signal when you’re back in town and have something new for me to pick up.”

“But of course,” César replied, proud for having transmitted his reporting so rapidly.

“Now go, before somebody comes in. I’ll leave in a few minutes.”

Prosser heard water rushing down the drainpipe and a moment later César’s stall door slammed shut. He considered opening the sheaf of onionskin papers to read while he waited, but thought better of the idea and resolved to wait calmly until he could be certain that César was clear of the lobby.

At last he pulled up his trousers and took a position before one of three gaudy clamshell-shaped washbasins, whose faucet handles were crafted of glazed ceramic to resemble starfish. He washed his hands, splashed some cool water on his face, and looked around. To his left, beyond the toilet stalls, was a second exit. He opened it just far enough to see that it led to a darkened restaurant with a raised platform at the opposite end where musicians played on nights when the restaurant featured belly dancers.

Prosser consulted his watch once more: nearly forty past one, time to leave if he was to beat the rush-hour traffic through the port crossing. He took a deep breath, pulled open the door to the lobby, and fixed his gaze upon the huddle of Pakistanis jabbering to one another on the blacktop just outside. He was already abreast of them when he heard a woman scream, and then another, from somewhere near the pool. A rifle shot, followed at once by a string of shots fired on full automatic, drew his attention to the parking lot.

A hand suddenly seized his elbow and spun him around. “No,
siidi
, go back inside! They shoot now! Bang! Bang! Bang!”

“What’s going on? Who is shooting?” he demanded upon recognizing the Pakistani who had offered to wash his Renault.

“Men with—”

At that moment the Pakistani’s eyes opened wide with horror and he dove for cover. Only then did Prosser realize that automatic rifle fire was converging rapidly on the Libramarine Club from three sides. He ducked back into the lobby, retraced his steps to the men’s toilet, and just as quickly dashed through the rear door into the darkened restaurant. Without waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, he scanned the unlit room for a hiding place. The tables and chairs offered no real shelter. He tried a door, but it was locked. He tried another, a storage closet.

Then his eyes stopped at the musicians’ platform and he thought of the crawl space between platform and floor. Dashing to the far side of the platform, he used his pocketknife to slit open the black vinyl that sealed off the crawl space then lay on his belly and backed into the darkness, feetfirst.

He had maneuvered himself nearly to the center of the platform when three or four simultaneous bursts of automatic rifle fire shattered the silence. The shots blew out the row of high windows along the rear wall, knocked over several chairs, and blasted chunks of plaster that fell like hail onto the bare tabletops. He heard the scuffle of a half dozen pairs of boots as a squad of gunmen gave the room a cursory search. His heart nearly stopped when one of the gunmen leaped onto the platform and fired a three-round burst into the floor less than two meters from his head. When he opened his eyes again, feeble rays of light penetrated through the splintered holes.

“
Yalla, shabab, avance! Emile, a la cuisine! Les autres, suives-moi a la piscine
!” a young voice shouted directly above him. Prosser’s first reaction was to wiggle his fingers and toes to verify that he had not been hit, and then to hold his hands over his ears in a vain attempt to stop them from ringing.

Before another burst could be squeezed off, the squad leader jumped from the platform and followed the shooters out the same way they had come. Meanwhile, the background of rapid gunfire continued, punctuated by the muffled explosions that Prosser assumed were grenades being tossed into rooms and stairwells to stun their occupants before finishing them off with gunfire. Shrieks of terror and cries of pain carried through the open windows and blended into a hellish wail. Outside the rear wall of the dining room, a long howl ended with a sickening thud as someone jumped or was hurled from an upper-story window. The chaos dragged on for minute after minute while Prosser cowered motionless under the bandstand.

At last the gunfire receded toward the south, spilled over into the parking lot, and then was mixed with the muffled roar of truck engines. Moments later, silence descended upon the place, but the calm lasted no longer than a few seconds before moans and murmured sobs rose from the pool deck and the open-air restaurant. A klaxon horn blared somewhere far off and grew nearer.

At last Prosser crawled slowly toward the open end of the bandstand and peered out. The tabletops and floors were littered with plaster dust, broken glass, and brass shell casings. He stepped softly toward the lobby door, wincing at the loud crunching sounds made by his feet as they crushed lumps of plaster and shards of glass. He prayed silently that no Phalangist still lurked in the shadows.

Prosser stopped just behind the frame of the door to the lobby and looked out. The body of an elderly Lebanese in what only minutes earlier had been an immaculate white terry robe lay dead at the foot of the registration desk, with three gaping exit wounds in back and a broad swath of crimson covering his left side from the waist to shoulder. Prosser had never seen a fresh corpse up close before, and certainly not one that had met a violent end. He had expected to have more of a visceral sensation, but it was as if some sensory overload switch had already been tripped, leaving only numbness. His nerves were refusing to respond to something as inconsequential to his own survival as another person’s mortal remains.

He glanced around the corner into the bar and saw the heap of broken glass—all that remained of the shelved whiskey and apéritif bottles that had been arranged in such careful rows—and then he stepped back into the lobby. He peered behind the registration desk. Two more lifeless figures were piled in the corner, their backs facing him, with skulls so horribly smashed by rifle bullets that he felt compelled to turn away. His eyes fell on a five- or six-meter-long smear of still-moist blood that led to a turbaned corpse sprawled at the edge of the semicircular driveway. Prosser saw the mangled shoulder and the shattered thigh first and pressed two fingers against the young Pakistani’s neck to check for a pulse. He held his breath and waited five seconds, then a few more, before giving up and moving on.

He turned back toward the swim club’s iron gate. The massive double doors had been forced half open. As he approached, the first thing he noticed was the color of the water in the pool, a dull, murky shade of pink that gathered and dispersed in swirling clouds. Only when he stepped to the edge did he realize that he was losing control. He felt his gorge rise, and his breakfast spilled out onto the deck in a gut-wrenching fit of vomiting.

Yet he could not stop himself from looking again, for just beneath the surface of the pool, poised in a sort of jellyfish float, lay the facedown corpse of a tanned and athletic young woman in a lime-green string bikini, with delicate wisps of crimson still playing about the entry wounds in her lower back. As he stared at the drifting corpse, he caught sight of the hairy back and shoulders of a thickset figure in red bathing trunks—César Khalifé’s luncheon companion. Barely an arm’s length beyond that corpse, a barrel-chested body stretched its arms across the surface of the water, its gray ringlet-covered head bobbing and rolling like an apple on a loose tether of purplish muscle and sinew that was all that remained of a neck. He did not need to see the face to know it was César.

A wave of horror, panic, and revulsion passed over Prosser, threatening to sweep all rational thought from his mind. He quickly looked away from the two dead men and then just as quickly forced himself to look again. Surrounding César on all sides, and distributed randomly around the pool, lay some twenty or more other corpses, all suspended at various depths, their movement propelled with infinite slowness by minute underwater currents. Many wore bathing costumes; a few were fully clothed. Men outnumbered women; youth predominated over the aged, including at least a half dozen children. Many of them, he thought, were doubtless unrepentant Chamounists who had resisted the will of the Lebanese Christian community and rejected the infallible leadership of the Phalange Party. But to punish them like this…

* * *

Prosser remained at the Libramarine Club for a half hour or more to help find and tend to the survivors of the massacre while waiting for ambulances to arrive. In any event, he dared not leave the club so close on the heels of the departing gunmen, and with César dead there was no longer an agent’s secrecy to protect. Within a few minutes after the gunmen’s departure, a crescendo of sirens and klaxon horns rose in the distance.

Prosser described for the first Public Security Forces officer to arrive on the scene what he had seen and heard, then exercised his privilege as an accredited diplomat in the Lebanese Republic to leave the Libramarine compound and to make any further statement at the American embassy. The officer, who as a representative of the rump central government of the Lebanese Republic was doubtless accustomed to cleaning up the bloody messes left by the country’s unregulated militias, reluctantly accepted the American’s business card and let him drive away.

* * *

Some forty minutes later Prosser unlocked the deadbolt on César Khalifé’s apartment door and entered, carrying a thick, brown Samsonite briefcase. He shut the door behind him and listened. There was no sound other than that of an air conditioner droning in the dining room, and the place generally looked as if it had not been disturbed since César had left that morning for the Libramarine Club.

Prosser walked softly along the carpeted hallway to its end and turned left into César’s windowless study. He switched on the overhead lamp and scanned, one by one, the titles of the books on the uppermost shelf above César’s desk. Near the middle of the shelf he found a dog-eared copy of Camille Chamoun’s
Crise au Liban
and took it down to examine it. Inside the front cover he found three blank sheets of white paper, each marred by countless tracings of handwriting, like a sheet of carbon paper that has been used to copy dozens of handwritten letters. The sheets were, in fact, a particular form of carbon paper, impregnated with specialized chemicals of the kind used to prepare the invisible writing of spies. Prosser took the sheets, folded them twice, and slipped them under the waistband of his underpants.

He crossed the hall to César’s bedroom and surveyed its contents: an elaborately carved wardrobe, an overstuffed velvet settee, a matching pair of straight-backed rosewood chairs, a teak writing desk, a lacquered nightstand, and a black leatherette hassock resting on tiny plastic casters. César had been correct: the hassock was clearly out of place among the other furniture. Prosser wasted no time in dragging it out into the middle of the floor, flipping it onto its back, and unscrewing the four fasteners that held the hassock’s Masonite bottom in place.

He pulled the Masonite out, twisted a pair of metal fasteners, and lifted out a false bottom to reveal a cavity that held a textbook-size digitally tuned radio, an ultralight headset, a flexible whip antenna, a spare set of batteries, and a tiny code book smaller than a deck of playing cards. Prosser removed each item in turn from its padded niche and arranged them in his Samsonite briefcase so that there was just enough room for the briefcase to latch shut. Then he reassembled the hassock concealment device and replaced it between the chair and the nightstand.

Having no further materials to recover, Prosser had started back down the corridor toward the door when he heard the deadbolt tumblers turn and the door open. The clatter of a woman’s heels on the parquet floor gave away Muna’s presence. Prosser remained where he stood and waited for the door to slam shut and the bolt to click into place. The click of her heels became louder.

Prosser stood motionless, briefcase in hand.

The clatter of heels began again and suddenly stopped. Muna gasped, letting the oversize leather art portfolio slip out from under her left arm as she raised both hands to cover her mouth.

“Excuse me, Muna,” Prosser said evenly. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. Your father had given me a key, in case...” A view of César’s lifeless corpse flashed before his eyes and he caught himself in mid-sentence as the aftershock of the massacre gripped him. He swallowed hard and resumed what he had planned to say. “…In case anything happened to him and I had to remove some special materials of ours from his study.”

“Do you mean to say that my father....”

“I came directly from the Libramarine Club. Your father and I met there before.”
 

Muna’s face turned a chalky white and she seemed ready to crumble at the knees.