The Dark Side of Love (129 page)

BEIRUT, SEPTEMBER 1969

Sarkis and Georgina Shammas, man and wife, entered the lobby of the Hotel Paris in East Beirut. The man at the reception desk inspected them suspiciously.

“Do you have a double room for the night?” asked the husband.

“Yes, sir, and all rooms have a direct view of the sea. Fifty lira a day, breakfast included,” replied the receptionist automatically.

“
D'accord.
” Sarkis Shammas looked at his wife, and nodded.

“May I see your passports, please? You'll be aware that since the civil war in Jordan and the mass exodus of Palestinians we have to register our guests' passports. I know it's a nuisance, but …”

“Here you are,” replied the guest, putting two Syrian passports down on the counter. When the hotel clerk read the names he gave them a friendly smile. “Right, I won't be needing those any more,” he said, handing the documents back. “You're one of us. You know – well, I can speak frankly now. It's not just Palestinians, it's all kinds of Muslims coming here: hungry Pakistanis, Afghans, Indonesians, God knows who else. They marry some Lebanese Muslim woman or other, and that makes them Lebanese. Then they breed like rabbits, and we Christians, the real Lebanese, get the blame for it in our own
country. You're welcome here, sir, very welcome,” reiterated the man behind the desk in friendly tones. “My cousin lives in Bab Tuma. Do you know him? François Frangi, that's his name, are you acquainted with him?”

“No.” The stranger's voice sounded brittle and nipped all curiosity in the bud.

The hotel bellboy, a thin Sudanese in a bright red uniform, came hurrying up. The two cases were heavy, and he hauled them into the first-floor room groaning quietly. When he came back downstairs he was beaming all over his face.

“Real gentlefolks,” he said, lighting a cigarette.

“You mean more than a lira tip?” asked the clerk at reception. “Let me guess – two lira?”

The bellboy grinned. “More than that.”

So my nose didn't let me down, thought the receptionist. Prosperous Christians on honeymoon, most likely. No, he must correct that assessment,
very
prosperous Christians. They didn't even haggle. He would have let them have the room half-price in this slack season. And now they tipped the bellboy more than two lira. Only the super-rich Saudis handed out more.

“Three?”

“That's right,” replied the Sudanese, his eyebrows shooting up as he grinned with delight.

As soon as Georgina and Sarkis Shammas had closed the door of their room behind the bellboy, they fell on the big bed, almost fainting with desire.

They kissed, laughed, wept for joy, and undressed each other. The woman pressed close to the man and sucked his lower lip, while he caressed her and kissed her right leg, which she had flung over his shoulder.

And when he could delay his climax no longer, he told her he loved
her. The woman felt as if liquid fire were running through her veins. “I love you too, Farid,” she said.

When they had quenched their thirst for the first time, they lay side by side, and he licked her perspiring face.

“I find it so hard to call you Sarkis,” she said. “Why was it so easy for you to say Georgina to me? Have you ever had a relationship with a Georgina?” And she affectionately pulled his earlobe.

“No, nothing like that, but in the underground you get used to new names quickly.”

“Farid and Rana are right for a love story, but Sarkis and Georgina sound to me more like saints' names.
Kyrie eleison
.”

Farid laughed. “I'm afraid I couldn't pick and choose. As I understand it, the forger used the names of children who died in our own birth years. The only thing that mattered was for the passports to get us over the Syrian border safe and sound. I'm sure Mahdi was quick to pass my name on to all the border checkpoints. We fly at thirteen hours tomorrow. When we leave the hotel after breakfast I'll destroy the forged passports on the way to the airport, and then we'll be Rana and Farid again – for ever.”

“Are we really safe at last? And now can you tell me why we're flying to Germany and not France?”

“Yes, dear heart, we have two places to study at Heidelberg. I'll continue my researches into chemistry, and you can study philosophy if you want to. Claire's cousin got us accepted. He's a well-known Orientalist at the university. And no one will find us there. Mahdi and his secret service have known we were planning to go to France for some time. So I confirmed them in that belief, and even organized the flight. Claire gave me the money for an air ticket with Air France, and I let Mahdi know, through a good friend, when I'd be flying. The bastard will certainly have found out details from the airline, and if I know him he was at the airport in person to see me humiliated. The plane was due to take off just as we arrived in Beirut.”

“Are you sure?”

“That we've shaken him off? As good as certain. I'll get in touch with Claire from Germany once we have nothing more to fear, and then we'll find out all about it.”

“My compliments! What a good thing my lover knows his way about the underground,” said Rana, embracing him. He smelled particularly delicious today. Soon she fell asleep.

When she woke up it was already day outside. Light filtered through the slats of the shutters. Farid was breathing peacefully. He looked more handsome than ever in the dim light, and she tenderly nibbled his throat. He woke up and kissed her.

“Am I dreaming, or is it all true?” he asked, tickling her. Only when she laughed out loud and almost fell off the bed did he stop.

“It's a strange thing, but I long for you even though you're here sleeping with me,” he whispered, bending over her.

“You're beside me, but not at this precise moment sleeping
with
me,” she said mischievously. Burning with desire, she sat astride his thighs and pressed him gently down on the bed. Then she made ardent love to him, and thought of their first meeting at the Sabunis' house. It was his first touch that had gone to her heart. Here in this comfortable bed, Rana felt it again. Every touch of his hands set off electric currents under her skin. She felt it tickling so that she was always on the point of laughter.

Outside, the gulls swooped and cried, and a fire flared up in her, streaming through her veins. Farid trembled, and held her close.

Rana slid off the bed, slipped her shirt on and went to the window. The clock on the tower of a nearby church struck ten. Rana flung the double window open and saw the wind crinkling the surface of the sea. The waves foamed on the stones of the breakwater. A young mother and her son were feeding the gulls with stale bread, and the birds were screaming as they fought for it. When the two sides of the window struck the wall, two pigeons flew up in alarm.

A passenger plane was cutting through the sky at a great height, leaving a white trail behind it. It looked like the first line of chalk that Rana used to draw on the asphalt as a child to mark out the spaces of her favourite hopscotch game, “Heaven and Hell”.

She closed her eyes and breathed in the fresh breeze caressing her face. Then, at the top of her voice, she cried out, “Yes!”

Farid, still lying in bed exhausted with his eyes closed, and enjoying the pleasure of drowsing briefly off, woke with a start. Rana
turned and looked at him. He gazed back at her, surprised.

How was he to know that her “Yes!” was an answer to the question he had asked her nine and a half years before?

DAMASCUS, MEDITERRANEAN COAST, SPRING – AUTUMN 1970

Colonel Badran was a passionate movie buff, and loved thrillers. He had written three screenplays himself, but they were now gathering dust in a drawer. Today he was wearing civilian clothes and sunglasses as he walked beside the widow Said, following her murdered husband's coffin and filming the whole occasion with his new Super-Eight camera.

When the little party of mourners left the widow Said's apartment later, the colonel stayed on. He confided to her that her husband's ambition had led him to join a conspiracy. Several high-ranking officers, he said, had been planning a coup, and they had promised Mahdi the job of Interior Minister. At first her husband had gone along with them, but then he had scruples, and tried to back out.

The widow couldn't help giggling. “Scruples!” she said, spluttering with laughter. “Mahdi and scruples? You must be joking!” The colonel hesitated, but when the widow fell backward on the couch because she was laughing so hard, it was too much for him. He sat down beside her and laid a hand on the knee she had bared. It was as soft as if she had no bones. She didn't flinch away. He pressed harder, and the widow lay still, closed her eyes, and opened her legs.

Badran caressed her tenderly and carefully, and was surprised to find what sexy lingerie she was wearing under her mourning. She was willing and ardent. Badran enjoyed their love-play on the couch, and when the widow was almost beside herself in her longing for the release of orgasm, he carried her into the bedroom, where he laid her carefully on the bed and made passionate love to her. When they had finished, the widow felt happy for the first time in what seemed an eternity.

Badran lay in her arms, laughing and shaking his head.

“What is it?”

“I don't even know your first name, madame, and I've already slept with you!”

She smiled. “I'm Balkis, and I don't want to be called anything else.” And then she told him how cold Mahdi Said had been. “Just the opposite of you, brutal with his hands, but he was useless further down.”

Their relationship didn't remain a secret for long, and soon there was an ugly rumour going around that Mahdi had to die because the colonel was having an affair with his wife, and the two of them had strangled him for fear of scandal.

Commissioner Barudi didn't believe that Badran had anything to do with the murder. The man had too many mistresses in Damascus for that. Barudi had tracked down four of them.

For a long time he thought it possible that there was a political motive for Mahdi's death, but the evidence of the fingerprints failed to reinforce his suspicion. Paper is one of the few materials from which fingerprints do not disappear. So he had prints lifted from the note found with the murdered major, and in secret he also obtained the prints of the condemned officers from the army files. None of them resembled those on the scrap of wrapping paper at all.

Was Badran covering up for something? And if so, why?

After a few days the widow could be disregarded as a source of
information, because she was the colonel's lover. Commissioner Barudi put all his information into a folder and carefully kept it with him.

Old Adjutant Mansur, who shared the room with him, noticed that the commissioner had a secret, but he was unable to find out what it was. Since the “Mahdi” case, the young first lieutenant was no longer as hard-working as before. He arrived late for work, and often didn't seem to have his mind on it.

“You wait, you peasant fool, Mansur will get the better of you yet,” whispered the adjutant, with a smile playing around his mouth.

In summer Barudi launched out on a new line of research. He decided to discover where the paper found in the murdered man's pocket came from. The answer was easy. Five souvenir shops in the Christian quarter used the pale grey paper in question, another ten used a yellowish wrapping paper. He wrote down the names of the owners and their staff, but this track led nowhere.