Lovers and Liars Trilogy (28 page)

“Fine,” he said, and turned away.

“No, wait, Pascal,” she said quickly. “I was afraid to be alone, after this. I’d feel safer with you here—I can admit that….”

Pascal turned. He gave her a long, considering look. It was appraising, and without warmth.

“If you thought I’d leave you tonight,” he said finally in a quiet voice, “you can’t know me at all.”

P
ASCAL LAY IN THE
darkness, on the sofa. The street outside was silent. An hour passed, then another hour; he could not sleep.

His thoughts trudged on and on the same treadmill. He tried to force them back to work, to the Hawthorne story, but they refused to remain there. They returned to the past, to the present; they made him watch, with the sickening despair of sleeplessness, the mess he had made of his life.

At two he fell into a thin, jagged, and insubstantial sleep. He dreamed of his English lawyer, to whom he had spoken briefly that morning, and then of his French lawyer, who was dressed in the black gown he wore in court. Their identities converged, merged: Insubstantial black forces pursued him. They followed him to Lebanon, then to Africa; he saw a street he knew well in Maputo, Mozambique. All around him, people lay dead. Those still living reached out to him with thin hands from dark doorways.
Shoot me,
cried a shape from one of those doorways, but when Pascal raised his camera and focused, this man, too, fell dead. He walked along the street, bending over the bodies. The smell of blood was intense. He knelt beside a small child, wearing a familiar dress. She was lying facedown, but when he tried to turn her over, he saw the child was Marianne.

He woke sweating, sure he had shouted out. The apartment was silent. Napoleon lay curled next to his feet. Pascal knew these dreams, they were his old familiars; when he slept, he was always close to deaths. He knew there was no cure for them except activity. He knew that if he tried to sleep again, they would return. They were pitiless; they always came back.

He switched on the lamp, and waited. He watched the room, and reality, reassert. He loathed and feared this free-fall of the mind in sleep; the way in which the past could rewrite itself, change shape. Sometimes dreams made nightmares of past events, as they had done tonight. At other times—and this he also feared—they took the actual sadnesses and made them sweet.

They let him, sometimes, glimpse the might-have-beens. This Pascal hated most of all. At least, tonight, he had been spared that trickery. He rose, and began to pace the room. He made coffee, drank it, lit a cigarette. Work, sometimes, could divert him, and he tried that next. Quietly, fearing to disturb Gini, he played and then replayed McMullen’s tape. He considered the interview with McMullen’s sister. He read and reread the Hawthorne clippings. Opening the model agency directory Gini had showed him, he examined Lorna Munro’s face.

Finally, with the persistence of exhaustion, he returned to that slip of paper found in a picture frame on McMullen’s desk. He examined and reexamined the numbers and their pattern on the page. For a while he was sustained by a wild conviction that if he could just see them this way, turn them that way, he would decode their message, reveal their sense. An hour passed. A car swished by in the street. He tossed the paper aside and admitted the truth: He could discern no pattern in these numbers, and no pattern in this story. If there was a way through, it was in the interstices, some tiny pointer he had missed.

He returned to the sofa and lit another cigarette. He lay back, staring at the ceiling. He watched the smoke curl.

After a while, as he had half hoped, half feared, the details of the Hawthorne story began to slip away. Cross-fade: He watched his own past shadow his mind, focus, and take shape. A film twelve years old: There it was, frame by frame—a press bar in a five-star hotel, a box of a room by a harbor, a once-beautiful city. Lebanon, Beirut.

He was twenty-three years old, and this was his third Beirut trip. He had a growing reputation and very little money. Two writers he had worked with in the past were now dead, so he preferred to work alone. On the day he met Gini, he had been back in Beirut two months. Two months of mayhem, lit by the cries of the dying. Two months of constant unrelenting heat. Two months without alcohol or sex. When he was working, he never drank and he never slept with women. This code, this puritanism, was mocked by friends and enemies alike. It made him conspicuous, but he did not care. It was
his
code.

It was 1982, July 1982, and one morning a friend took him to the Palm Bar at the Hotel Ledoyen. The great Sam Hunter would be there, this friend said, and if Pascal minded his manners just for once, the friend—who had known Hunter in Vietnam—would insure Pascal was introduced. Pascal shrugged and agreed. He stood on the edge of the group, ordered a mineral water, and watched Hunter perform. A thick-set, aggressive American with a Harvard Yard accent. He was wearing Brooks Brothers clothes, smoking heavily, drinking bourbon on the rocks. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. Pascal watched Hunter contemptuously. He loathed the man on sight.

Eventually, the introduction was made. Hunter was gracious but dismissive. “Sure, sure,” he said. “I’ve seen your pictures. Who hasn’t? Amazing stuff. But you want to watch it—that adrenaline sickness. One of these days you’ll get too close. You’ll get yourself shot.”

That was it. Hunter’s attention span for others was short. He snapped his gaze away; the cronies joked and the sycophants prompted; Sam Hunter held court. This great Pulitzer Prize winner, Pascal thought, had gone soft. Men who had made their reputations, he implied, were not like ordinary mortals. There was always time for yet another bourbon on the rocks. If anything of any significance happened, one of his stringers, one of his street-boy network, would get in touch. Meantime, Lebanon was a small affair, a historical footnote. Sooner or later the fighting would peter out. He’d filed a couple of reports, sure, but he was planning on leaving. Hunter had covered bigger wars than this one; he could coast

Over in the corner, ignored, silent, the only female in a group of twenty men was a girl—Hunter’s daughter, someone negligently said. She was a daughter, Pascal noted, that Hunter did not bother to introduce.

Pascal edged past the man from UPI; he avoided two sweating Reuters men, a reporter from the Sydney
Morning Herald,
an Englishman from
The Times.
He positioned himself between his friend from
Le Monde
and a gloomy Russian who spoke poor English, the representative from TASS. He took a closer look at the girl, and his French friend, following his gaze, gave a wink. There was more to this kid than met the eye, he said. Hadn’t Pascal heard the story? Where the hell had he been this last week? Everyone else in the bar had. She’d been at some fancy English boarding school, this friend said. One day, she’d just cut hockey or lacrosse or whatever damn game it was girls played at schools like that. She walked out and turned up at six in the morning, unannounced, in Beirut.

Hunter had been regaling all and sundry with this story for the past few days: How he’d been roused by the hotel manager, how he’d come downstairs with a massive hangover to find this kid in the lobby, clutching her suitcase. Hunter, apparently, hadn’t recognized her at first. He hadn’t laid eyes on her in three years—the girl lived in England with his ex-wife—and in those three years the kid had grown up, filled out. …Here, Pascal’s friend winked.

When he realized it was his only child, Hunter had not been pleased. He’d been all for putting the girl on the next plane back. She had dissuaded him, stood her ground—and Hunter changed his mind. He was like that. Her presence had amused him for a couple of days; he’d treated her like a lucky charm, a mascot. But now he was finding the girl’s constant presence an irritant: The amusement was rapidly wearing off.

It was an interesting story, Pascal thought. Not too many teenage girls would fly out to Beirut in the middle of the night, get themselves from the airport through the city, through this dangerous city, and arrive in a strange hotel at dawn. His friend moved away to the bar, and Pascal turned back to study the girl again.

She was sitting to one side of her father in silence; since Pascal’s arrival, she had not spoken once. She was tall, slender, and boyishly dressed; Pascal put her age at seventeen, eighteen perhaps. She sat quietly, with an unconscious grace; her skin was tanned, and her somewhat untidy hair was sun-bleached. She wore it caught back carelessly at the nape of her neck; she was wearing khaki shorts, and an ordinary white T-shirt. On her feet was a pair of battered tennis shoes. From time to time she would shift in her seat, glance toward the windows, glance back at her father, stretch. It seemed to Pascal that she longed to be outside, away from this crowded, smoky room. Glancing toward the windows, her face became wistful; she crossed then uncrossed her long legs. She appeared not to notice that when she did so, she riveted the gaze of every man in the place.

Pascal moved a fraction closer, so he had a better view of her face. She had fine eyes, widely spaced. It was, he decided, a not-unattractive face, but it wore an obstinate expression, as if there were elements in this room she disliked, but she was determined to ignore them for her father’s sake. Whenever she looked at Hunter, it was with a painful devotion. As Pascal watched, her father launched himself on yet another long, wandering anecdote. The girl seemed embarrassed. She colored, then stared at her feet.

Pascal’s friend, returning, and seeing he was still watching her, grinned. Pathetic, wasn’t it, how the girl worshipped that old windbag, her father? A little firebrand, too. She’d told Hunter, apparently in no uncertain terms, that nothing would make her go back to England. She intended to stay here and learn. Pascal’s friend made a face. Lowering his voice, half laughing, he said,
“Pauvre petite fille. Elle veut être journaliste.”

Pascal lost interest. The girl’s ambitions were nothing to him. If she wanted to be a journalist, fine; it made a change from model, or actress, or movie star. He felt a sudden angry impatience; he was wasting time in this place.

He finished his drink, put down his glass, and left the bar. In the lobby of the hotel he paused, looking out into the white midday heat. From the distance, somewhere in the direction of West Beirut, came the chatter of machine-gun fire, then the muffled roar of an explosion. Another car bomb.

The girl was at his elbow: Hunter’s daughter was at his elbow. He had not realized this until, half turning, about to leave, he found himself confronting accusing eyes, a pale, fierce face.

“I saw you watching my father,” she said; no preliminaries. “I know what you thought. You arrogant French bastard. How dare you look at him like that?”

In those days Pascal’s temperament was volatile. He could lose his temper very rapidly; he lost it then, at once.

He looked at this stupid teenage girl, straight off the plane, a girl straight from some stupid boarding school, a girl whose father he’d disliked on sight.

“You want to know why?” he answered her in English. “Fine. I’ll show you. Come with me.”

She hadn’t expected this reaction, no doubt. It took her by surprise, so when he gripped her arm and pulled her out of the hotel, she did not struggle or protest

Pascal let go of her almost at once. He slung his camera bag over his shoulder and strode off up the street. The girl followed him. He increased his pace. He already regretted this action, and would have shaken her off if he could, but the girl wasn’t having that. She broke into a run, she was out of breath in the heat, but she kept pace.

Her tenacity angered him, as did his own foolishness. Even then, when the conflict was still localized, the streets of Beirut were not the place for teenage American girls. He stopped; he said: “Go back. Forget what I said. This isn’t safe.”

“The hell with that.” She glared at him. “Do what you said you’d do. You’re not getting rid of me. I’m not going back.”

Pascal was tired. He had spent weeks under stress, with little sleep. Confronted with this fierce female obstinacy, his temper snapped again.

“Okay. Have it your way.” He turned. “Take a look at your father’s unimportant little war. You won’t find it in a hotel bar any more than he will. It’s just down this street.”

He turned into the side street, and she followed him. As they rounded the corner, the dust was beginning to settle. The remnants of a car were skewed across the street Huge chunks of masonry lay across their path; half a house tilted crazily against the skyline; there was a pile of rubble twenty feet high from which protruded a child’s feet.

A water main had burst: Water gushed and pumped across the street. People were gathering: Pascal scarcely heard the screams and wails, he had learned to block them out.

Pascal had his cameras out. He worked with two—color film in the Leica, the Olympus for monochrome. He had his eye to the viewfinder, on the attitudes of grief. Behind him, dimly, he was aware that the girl was still in the same place. Lowering his camera, glancing back, he saw her face register horror in slow motion. In slow motion she covered her ears, then her eyes, then her mouth.

There was a childsize plastic sandal on the ground in front of her. It was red, cheap, thonged—almost all the Arab children wore them. She bent and picked it up. Some men pushed past her. A woman dressed in black sank to her knees by the rubble and raised her hands to the sky. The space became confused: People ran, pushed, shoved, began to claw at the debris. Pascal could see the girl, then he could not see the girl. Masonry dust billowed. Pascal turned, became frantic, appalled by what he had done.

He ran in this direction, then that. People pressed. He found her, finally, where the lamentation was loudest, where they were lifting what remained of a man onto a sheet of tin roofing, an improvised stretcher. She was helping them to lift the body, and getting in the way. A woman screamed at her in Arabic, then spat. The girl stepped back, her face rigid. She had blood on her hands, blood on her face.