Bride of a Bygone War (27 page)

Their eyes met, then Muna looked away quickly, a faint flush visible on her cheeks. “Jean Malouf bought the agency from him. Jean is the fellow you liked so much—from Jezzine—the one who gave us the set of Jezzine knives with the carved handles at our wedding.”

“Oh, yes. I do remember Jean. So Jean is your boss now...” Lukash felt like the engineer of a train that has derailed inexplicably on a straight and clear stretch of track. Why was it so difficult to say what he had come to tell her?

She nodded. “Jean and I and Anaïs and the two account managers are the only ones left from before the Events.”

A gap of silence followed, and Lukash moved quickly to fill it. “You used to talk about working for your uncle’s ad agency in Cairo. Did you ever go there after the fighting started?”

“I might have, but when the Muslims set fire to Father’s warehouse, there was no longer any money. We had to sell everything to pay our suppliers for the inventory that we lost. The chalet at Farayya was sold first. Later my grandmother’s house in Beït Meri. Then when Mother was killed, I could no longer think of leaving Father alone.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, unable to think of anything else. “When did it happen?”

“She died two years ago this June,” Muna answered. Then, interrupting her own train of thought, she said, “Would you like some coffee? Tea?”

Lukash shifted his weight around to face her. “We have a great deal to talk about, Muna. I don’t even know where to begin.”

Now she sat facing him with her knees nearly touching his and gazed with longing into his eyes. He began to speak again, but she held two fingers to his lips. “There will be plenty of time for talking. Let it wait.”

She ran her fingertips across his lips, over his temples and bearded cheeks, and then through his uncombed hair, where gray had lately begun to infiltrate. Then she let her hands slip level with his chest and pressed her palms softly against his pectoral muscles, and from there down his abdomen to the line where his shirt met his belt. She grasped the shirt with both hands and tugged sharply, pulling the shirttails out from his trousers while her lips sought the flesh of his belly. Lukash leaned back and let her climb astride him as she worked her way, button by button, up toward his throat.

“I said I forgot how it felt to touch you,” she whispered. “I was mistaken. I remember everything now.”

She pulled one sleeve free, then the other, and tossed his shirt to the floor. Lukash felt his hardness grow and could not wait any longer. He reached under her dress and jersey and pulled them over her head.

“Do you remember this?” she demanded.

He unhooked her brassiere and took a nipple in his mouth, then he ran his tongue in concentric circles around its edges until it was erect and did the same for the other breast. She stiffened for a moment and then grabbed his face with both hands, pushing him gently onto his back.

“Slowly now. It has been so long,” she said.

* * *

A cloud blocked the sun, and Lukash suddenly felt a chill on his naked body. He glanced at Muna lying beside him with her head on his chest and wondered whether they had lain there for an hour or only for a few minutes. He had scheduled a meeting with Elie at eleven to make a final inspection of the electronic equipment they would be taking into the mountains. He felt a twinge of guilt when he thought about Elie’s feelings toward Muna and then a superstitious unease: would his face somehow betray what he and Muna had done?

Suddenly it occurred to him that his BMW was still parked across the street almost directly in front of the block of flats. He reached for the scattered clothes on the floor in the hope of finding his watch. He found his shirt, a shoe, panties, a leather belt, but no watch. Then he remembered that his watch was in his trouser pocket, and that the trousers were somewhere beneath them. He took Muna’s hand from his chest, laid it softly beside her, and slowly slid out from under her. The trousers were beneath Muna’s leg and impossible to pull free without waking her.

A quick survey of the room showed no sign of a clock, so he set off toward the bedrooms in search of one. The first bedroom off the central corridor was clearly Muna’s. Lukash recalled seeing the same 1930s art deco travel posters of Switzerland at her grandmother’s house in Beït Meri. He approached her bedside table and began to look for an alarm clock among the thicket of framed photographs. There was a color photo of César and Muna, another of Muna and her mother, and a large black-and-white photo of Muna with her aunt Claudette and uncle Victor at the Sea Castle in Sidon.

Then a small color photo of a child caught his eye. The little girl could not have been more than a year old, but the shape of her face and the intense curiosity of her brown eyes bore an odd resemblance to his own. He scanned the other photos on the table quickly and turned to leave, but then another cluster of photos atop Muna’s chest of drawers caught his eye. As he approached, he could see that all of the photos showed the same little girl, either as an infant or as a toddler. The largest of the photos was in a clear plastic frame and showed a two-year-old with loose ringlets of mahogany hair clinging tightly to her forehead. The resemblance to his own baby pictures was unmistakable.

But how could it be? Muna had been fitted with a diaphragm long before their honeymoon and, as far as he knew, she had never missed a period.

He looked at the photo again and then carried it back to compare it with the one in the silver frame. It was the same child. He turned the plastic frame over and looked for a date stamp on the reverse side. “Studio Manoukian/5–17–77” was printed along the bottom edge.

He heard the soft padding of feet behind him and looked over his shoulder. Muna was standing in the doorway.

“From the day I brought her home, everyone said she favored you. See the eyes and the shape of the chin?”

Lukash put the photo back on the table and turned around slowly to face Muna. “I had no idea...” His voice sounded foreign to him, as if it had been recorded and were being played back at a much slower speed.

“You have seen all that I have of her. One morning two years ago, while I was at work, my mother took her shopping. They were at a bakery not far from here when a car bomb exploded in the street outside. My mother and Marie-Claire and three others were killed.”

“Dear God,” Lukash whispered.

“I do not remember much else that happened at that time. They would not show us the bodies at first, so it was difficult for us to believe there had not been some mistake. Finally, Elie arranged through a colleague of his to take my father and a cousin of mine who is a physician to the place where the Civil Defense Office kept the bodies until their investigation was complete.

“The first thing I remember after that was the mass for the victims at the Eglise Mar Maroun. I was in such shock that I found it hard to believe my mother and daughter were gone. At some moments I blamed myself, and at others I felt a terrible rage against the Syrians and Palestinians and the Muslims in West Beirut who would not let us Christians live in peace. I remember hearing the priest speaking time after time about how God’s vengeance would fall upon those who had sent the shells and rockets from West Beirut, and I looked across the aisle.

“Sitting in the row behind us was a group of five or six Phalangists whom I had known as boys in school. Among them was Elie’s friend Fadi, the one who had arranged for my father and cousin to identify my mother’s and Marie-Claire’s remains. I turned around for some reason, and I could see written on their faces their intention to take God’s work of vengeance upon themselves. Somehow I knew that the next day or the day after or perhaps the following week, some mother like me or some husband like my own father would take their places in a mosque in Bab Idriss or Zarif or Moussaitbé to mourn those killed in revenge by the Phalange. I felt a heaviness in my heart and a tightening in my throat, and I felt I would suffocate if I did not leave that very instant.

“As soon as I pushed open the heavy wooden door of the church and breathed the fresh night air, I felt in my soul that if I ever allowed myself to desire revenge for what happened to my child and my mother, I would be no different from those who murdered Marie-Claire—in fact, from that time forward I would share responsibility for her death. I remembered that Jesus taught forgiveness, but it seemed that our Maronite Church had allowed itself to be persuaded by the politicians that forgiveness no longer applied between Christians and Muslims. So I vowed to forgive those who killed Marie-Claire and to beg God’s mercy for them.

“Almost at once my mind cleared, and I was able to accept what had happened. I went home and slept until the evening of the following day. When I awoke, I felt as if I had climbed the last in a series of mountain ranges and, for the first time, could view the valley on the other side. Only then did I realize that I still had not yet forgiven you for leaving me.

“Until that day, I had never doubted that you were alive. Somehow I imagined that you had struck your head or contracted some disease that made you forget me and our life together. I was certain that you had never intended to leave me as you did. But as much as I tried to imagine what had happened to you and where you had gone, I could not do it. But then after the mass at Mar Maroun, I was free from worrying about what had happened the day you went to the airport—all that mattered to me afterward was that you should return.

“And now that you are here, what has happened before no longer matters to me. What is important is only that you are here. I do not expect you to stay forever, William—only long enough so that I can remember your face if I should ever lose you again.”

“Muna, I don’t know what to...”

She held up an outstretched palm. “Don’t speak. Just hold me.”

Chapter 16

Conrad Prosser reached over his shoulder and pulled a can of diet cola from the nylon ring of a six-pack sitting atop a stack of eight or nine cases in the corner of the communications center. The station chief, having recovered from a peptic ulcer on his previous tour of duty, had sworn off coffee and now kept a sixty-day supply of caffeinated soft drinks on hand at all times in case the commissary ran out. Although U.S.-made diet cola was available in supermarkets throughout Beirut, the local price was nearly double the price charged by the heavily subsidized military commissary system.

Prosser pulled off the ring top and tossed it back into the half-filled cardboard flat. Three stacks of classified cables lay in front of him. The first consisted of outgoing messages from Beirut Station since close of business on the previous day. The second was incoming top-secret signals intelligence material, mostly summaries prepared at Headquarters, but also a few raw intercepts obtained locally against the Syrians and the PLO. The third stack contained incoming messages from Headquarters and other CIA field stations, sorted in order of precedence, from “Immediate” through “Priority” and “Routine” to “Telepouch.”

Prosser scanned the headlines of the signals intelligence materials rapidly and rearranged the stack to appear as if it had been untouched. Like a head of household rising late on a Sunday morning to find that someone had dared to tamper with the newspaper before it reached him, Ed Pirelli always insisted on having the first look at the morning cable traffic. Next Prosser checked the stack of outgoing messages to confirm that the cables he had drafted the day before had been released. They had—without revision, as far as he could tell. And finally he leafed through the stack of incoming cables.

The first two incoming cables were circulars directed to all Agency stations worldwide, one asking for any information that might affect the security of the president on his visit to the Far East the following week, and the other calling attention to recent Soviet setbacks in the Afghan war and the improved outlook for recruiting new spies as the morale of Soviet officials posted abroad deteriorated. Then, hidden between the stapled pages of the third message, he found a single sheet, barely a half page in length, which began “EYES ONLY COS.” It had obviously been overlooked by the communicator, who would normally place every “Eyes Only” message in a sealed envelope. Prosser stood up to take the cable back to the communications center but could not resist the temptation to read it first:

EYES ONLY COS

FROM: CHIEF/NE DIVISION

SUBJECT:SIDNEY R. JUNGHANS

REFS: A. AMMAN 45503

B. BEIRUT 68175

C. DIRECTOR 127841

1. HAVING RECEIVED NO EXPLANATION FROM JUNGHANS CONCERNING HIS RELATIONS WITH IRISH NATIONAL WHO IS SUBJECT REF A, WE FIND REF B SUFFICIENTLY DISTURBING TO JUSTIFY JUNGHANS IMMEDIATE TRAVEL TO HEADQUARTERS CITY TO EXPLAIN POSSIBLE VIOLATION OF AGENCY REGULATIONS RE MARRIAGE TO FOREIGN NATIONAL.

2. OUR FILES INDICATE YOU WERE SUPERVISOR TO JUNGHANS DURING HIS PREVIOUS BEIRUT ASSIGNMENT. DID HE REPORT CONTACTS WITH LEBANESE NATIONAL WHO IS SUBJECT REFS B AND C TO YOU OR TO ANY OTHER STATION OFFICER AT ANY TIME? PLEASE EXPLAIN FULLY.

3. LIKEWISE, HAS JUNGHANS DISCUSSED RECENT WHEREABOUTS OF SAID IRISH NATIONAL WITH YOU OR ANY OTHER STATION OFFICER? RELIABLE INFORMATION INDICATES THAT SAID IRISH NATIONAL RECENTLY DEPARTED AMMAN FOR BEIRUT IN PURSUIT OF JUNGHANS. PLEASE PROVIDE FULLEST DETAILS ASAP.

4. AS YOU MAY RECALL, JUNGHANS WAS SELECTED FOR CURRENT SENSITIVE ASSIGNMENT ON BASIS OF HIS PAST DISCRETION AND GOOD JUDGMENT NOT LESS THAN HIS TRACK RECORD AS RECRUITER. REFS INDICATE SUCH BASIS FOR HIS SELECTION MAY HAVE BEEN IN ERROR. AS DECISION MUST BE TAKEN SOONEST RE POSSIBLE NEED FOR REPLACEMENT, PLEASE ARRANGE FOR JUNGHANS TDY RETURN TO HEADQUARTERS CITY ASAP. DUE TO SCHEDULED CHIEF/NE TRAVEL IN COMING DAYS, MUST REPEAT MUST ARRANGE JUNGHANS ARRIVAL IN HEADQUARTERS CITY IN TIME FOR CONFERENCES TO BEGIN NEXT MONDAY. IN DIRECTING JUNGHANS TO REPORT TO HEADQUARTERS FOR CONSULTATIONS, YOU MAY DISCUSS WITH HIM IRISH NATIONAL WHO IS SUBJECT REF A BUT DO NOT REPEAT DO NOT DISCUSS WITH HIM LEBANESE NATIONAL WHO IS SUBJECT REFS B AND C.