Looking for Charley

By Randal Shirley

Russell Courtney is tasked with finding Charley, one of six young female English croupiers he had taken to war-torn Beirut to run a casino during a long pause in Lebanon's civil war. Before long factional fighting flared up again and, with the imminent prospect of an Israeli invasion, they returned to the UK - with the exception of Charley who chose to stay in Lebanon with her Palestinian boyfriend, Fayez.

Four years later her relationship with Fayez has soured and Charley makes plans to return home. When she doesn’t arrive Russell returns to Beirut to find her - but immediately hits a wall of silence and survives an attempt on his life by luck, not judgment.

From Lebanon Russell traces Charley to Africa where things start to get seriously bad and they are forced to turn to others for help. Charley has something that Hezbollah want - and Mossad want it too.

They are on the run. Nowhere is safe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Randal Shirley
• Release date: Apr 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301759545

Randal Shirley

The author lived and worked Beirut during the Lebanese civil war - as well as in most of the places and countries featured in Looking for Charley. He now lives a relatively quiet life by Rutland Water with his wife and two dogs. Looking for Charley is his first full length novel. Charley, the Rock and the Hard Place - a stand-alone sequel - is also available as an e-book.

Book preview

Looking for Charley

By Randal Shirley

Copyright 2013 Randal Shirley

Smashwords edition

All the characters in this book are entirely fictional

and any similarities or resemblances are purely coincidental

Chapter 1

Beirut, Spring 1986

The plane dropped out of the clear blue Mediterranean sky in the mid turn, barely skimming the roofs of the shacks which spread almost to the end of the runway. Settling almost immediately on the tarmac to reduce exposure to gunfire we taxied quickly towards the terminal buildings which, even at a distance, showed the years of sporadic shelling and frequent gunfire. Hardly a square foot of the facade was undamaged. Much of the glass was shattered or boarded over.

I followed a Lebanese couple carrying a sleeping child down the worn steps. The forty metres from the plane to the open doors of the terminal were lined with Lebanese Army soldiers holding assault rifles, alert and uneasy - a sight I had become familiar with in an earlier life in this godforsaken former paradise. Nobody trusted this fragile ceasefire to last any longer than any of the dozens that had gone before.

It was not until I reached the imagined safety of the airport buildings and queued with my papers that I had time to take in the scene around me. Walls that had once been merely pockmarked by bullets and shrapnel were now hopelessly beyond repair. Nobody bothered to replace glazing which might not last the day. The runways and paved areas were cracked and crazed. Hundreds of small craters, like the first splashes of rain on a virgin beach, defiled the once smooth apron. Weeds grew unchecked in every crack and cranny.

My apprehension turned to depression, my sense of purpose to despair.

Customs and Immigration dismissed me with a bored glance at my passport. Carrying only my flight-bag, I was through arrivals and into the foyer in moments, to be greeted by the sounds and smells of the Beirut I had never expected to see again. Like a reunion with a long lost lover from a relationship turned sour: remembering the good things, forgetting the bad - the generosity of memory.

A channel of steel crowd-barriers tapered to a narrow gap where a small throng waited for the first glimpse of friends or family among my fellow travellers. I picked my way through and made for the exit doors ahead where taxi drivers touted desperately for trade.

A dull thud - more a sensation than a sound - rattled the remaining glass in the building, bringing a moment’s silence to the excited babble.

This particular shell or bomb was someone else’s problem.

I looked up and there, towering a full head and shoulders above the taxi drivers with a huge toothy grin, stood my old friend François.

‘Bloody Englishman,’ he laughed. With my bag in one big bony hand and my shoulder in his other he steered me through the doors and out into the cool spring air of the Lebanon.

He still had the Honda Prelude I had sold him for a song when I had left in a hurry almost four years ago. It was probably the only car in the pick-up area not displaying some sort of memento of the years of conflict. Few of the taxis and other private cars were unmarked by bullet or blast.

‘Okay mon ami, where first? Chez moi.....or first for the beer?’

‘A beer and a chat ....but I’ve booked a room at the Commodore. I need to drop my stuff off first and clean up a bit’.

François stopped in his tracks. ‘You are staying at my place - not with those parasites!’

I buried a smile. I knew his feelings about the intrepid foreign war correspondents who filed their copy from the fax machine in the lobby of the Commodore Hotel as they passed between the bar and drunken stupors in their rooms. Hotel warriors.

‘François - listen. I’ve got to find Fayez and talk to him and I don’t want to get you involved any more than I have to. And anyway....’ I lit a fresh cigarette from the last one, ‘I might have to cross the Green Line’.

His rolled his eyes to heaven. ‘Bloody hell’s bells, Russell, things are now more easy. I can cross the Green Line anytime I want now - no problems!’

He slung my bag onto the back seat and contorted his tall gangly frame into the driving seat. Lebanese come in all shapes and sizes, but François was by far the tallest I had come across.

‘I know, my friend, but I can always fly out if things go bad - but you can’t. Besides, I need to be at the Commodore for the phones and telex’.

François rubbed his long stubbly jaw thoughtfully for a moment before nodding his reluctant approval. ‘Okay. Come, we go for some beers first. Then you can tell me about these things’.

The Honda shot forward and slotted into the kamikaze Beirut traffic like a racing car exiting the pits. Horns sounded behind us but François took no notice.

‘Did you have any luck with your contacts?’ I asked with a strained voice as I braced my feet where the pedals ought to be. The nose of the Honda was almost touching the car in front.

‘Not yet. Much of the phones are kaput. I’ll try again tomorrow. You did not give me much time’.

I changed the subject. ‘How’s business?’ François and his elder brother ran a small but select gentleman’s tailors in El Hamra.

‘Booming!’ he declared, laughing. ‘No seriously. There was a bombing. Much damage. Much of our stock was burned. We now are working from the home while the shop is being repaired.’

‘A car bomb?’

He shrugged. ‘A bomb. I don’t know what bomb. We arrived in the morning and the shop is smoking. Three - maybe four shops all broken and smoking and many cars smoking too. Yes, I think a car bomb. Who cares what bomb?’

I looked for familiar landmarks as we skirted the southern suburbs and entered the city, but many had simply disappeared and ugly new concrete buildings stood in their place. Others were just piles of dust and rubble. The casino I had once helped run was boarded up. Graffiti covered the steel shuttered entrance. The upper floors - apartments - listed like a drunk’s house of cards above where a supporting wall had been blown away. Fresh washing hung from balconies.

My favourite Italian restaurant was now a bombed-out lot that would have been empty but for a jumble of timber and makeshift dwellings festooned with washing lines and pirate power cables which had sprung up in its place.

Further along the road threadbare rugs hung from the balcony of my old apartment - once a smart affair. A wide-eyed child stared down from between rusted railings. Behind her, where the French windows used to be, the tattered remnants of my expensive Venetian blinds swung in the breeze. Below them a sign with the legend Perfect Apartments swung from one end over the lobby entrance.

Everywhere I looked was pitted and chipped by street fighting and shelling - old and new - years and bloody years of fighting.

We came to street crowded with market barrows selling everything from freshly squeezed orange juice to one-day-old chicks where the traffic was reduced to a crawl. I lowered my window and the smells and clamour of the street filled the car.

A woman in a full black burka came to the driver’s window, a child in tattered cloth clutched to her breast. Only her eyes were visible. She wailed in a language I didn’t recognise - Farsi or Kurdi maybe - clearly begging - her voice like damp chalk on a blackboard. François muttered something and hit the window button, but she continued mouthing at him and scratched at the glass with her free hand until the traffic moved on.

As we turned into L’Avenue de Paris the din and raw human and animal smells of the market faded behind us. A cold dust-laden wind gusted across the desolate seafront to our left and I wound up my window. We slowed as we approached a road block; Syrian army now. A tense youth, fresh from the farm wearing a uniform he hadn’t grown into yet, glowered down the barrel of a light machine gun, its tripod set on a wall of sandbags.

Another slightly older youth - eighteen at a guess - clicked his fingers and opened his hand palm-up, the international ‘your papers’. François passed his ID card and my passport which the lad flicked through without taking his eyes off me - the fair haired infidel. Fifty-fifty he couldn’t read Arabic, let alone English. He handed them back and waved us on with a jerk of the barrel of his M16 rifle.

Piles of rubbish festered on the promenade near where the British Embassy used to be. Clouds of flies tried to obscure the view. Nothing much had changed. I just wished I had seen Beirut in its heyday - before it all went wrong.

I awoke - sour-mouthed, dry eyed and with a sore head - to an insistent knocking on the door. I unlocked it and decrepit old man shuffled across the room with the breakfast I had ordered in the evening: thick Turkish coffee, croissants, orange juice and a bowl of Kellogg’s cornflakes. He had forgotten the milk but I didn’t care; I wasn’t hungry. The phone rang painfully loudly on the bedside table as he left. I stubbed my toe and dropped it as I lunged forward to silence it.

‘François,’ said François.

‘I’ll call you back.’

‘Call me what you wish. I am downstairs at the lobby’.

‘Blimey, mate. I feel like death warmed up.’

‘You are getting soft, my friend. We only had a few little drinks. We must meet by the coffee bar now. Ten minutes - okay?’

‘No François. I really don’t feel too good. Seriously.’

‘Russell. You know what time it is? Nine hours. You asked me to help.... okay? I have someone who tells me he has news of Fayez. Twenty minutes, okay? We have a busy day and I have business things also to do.’

‘Alright.’ I groaned and put a tentative finger to my temple and sure enough I could feel the vein there throbbing. My ears were still popping from yesterday’s rapid descent, so I did an exaggerated yawn in an attempt to clear them. My jaw cracked like a gunshot.

‘Okay mate. I’m sorry. Order me a coffee with a double brandy in it and I’ll be down as quick as I can.’

François cackled and hung up. I swallowed some aspirin and paracetamol and yawned - carefully in case the top of my head fell off.

The Commodore was never a splendid hotel - even in its pre-war days - but it was the only hotel in Beirut still with reliable communications with the outside world. There was too much glass for comfort in a war zone but at least the air-conditioning sometimes worked. As such it was where the world’s news correspondents, film crews, writers and spies, arms and drug dealers met with their contacts or informers. From a bar to one side of the foyer looking out over a blue tiled swimming pool used mostly by drunken guests in the wee small hours, one could watch in comfort as the seedier side of Middle Eastern life slithered past.

Weapons from Eastern Europe, hashish from the Bekaa, processed heroin from Turkey, Iraq and Afghanistan and raw cocaine pasta from South America - for any of these in large quantities you needed go no further than the Commodore in the early eighties. Not that any of these commodities actually passed through the hotel’s armoured glass doors; it was a place of negotiation.

The place had changed little since I had last seen it except it was even scruffier and there were signs of hasty repairs to ceilings and walls.

To one side of the lobby, to the right of the lifts and telex machines, was a lounge with a huge TV screen and comfortable chairs. On the other side - beyond the bar and across a carpeted reception area where men in suits or long white dishdasha talked or paced arm in arm clicking their worry-beads - was the entrance to the high walled patio garden and pool area.

It was here, at a white plastic table beside the pool, I sat facing François and a short, obese, toad-like Lebanese gentleman as we waited for the waiter to finish arranging bowls of pistachios, peanuts, cashews and wafer-thin biscuits, small cups of strong thick black coffee - and my large brandy. I felt mildly embarrassed about the brandy so early in the day, but I was in dire need of the hair of the dog....and anyway this was Beirut where anything goes.

François tilted his head towards the man beside him who had the cold, clammy sheen that fat people acquire in a hot climate. Sweat ran from his greasy forehead down his heavily creased jowls to his many chins and the grubby collar of his white shirt. The expensive looking but crumpled cream suit had dark crescents under both arms. The creases around his piggy eyes were lined with white fat spots. He reeked of cheap aftershave.

‘Ali - my friend here - has some information he is thinking is of much value to you, Russell.’ He raised his eyebrows as he said ‘friend’.

‘Go on. I’m listening’ I yawned. Although he had yet to utter a word I had taken an instant dislike to Ali. He made my flesh crawl. I downed the brandy in a gulp and had to fight the impulse to heave.

‘Ali does not speak the English he says, but maybe he can understand a little so be taking care what you say to me,’ he winked. ‘Am I to translate or do we go forward in your bad French, which Ali does speak?’

I shook my head. My rusty French was terrible, my Arabic even worse now. ‘Carry on professor. So what does our distinguished friend have to tell me?’

There followed an exchange in rapid excited Arabic embellished with the usual gesticulations. I caught a few words ‘Fayez’ and ‘dollars’.

After several minutes of this François took a sip of coffee while Ali mopped his wet neck with a paper napkin, leaving scraps of tissue stuck to his stubble.

‘Ali knows where Fayez is. He hears you need to seek him badly. He says he can make a meeting with him. For this meeting he asks only one thousand dollars - American dollars,’ François eyes rolled. ‘He is crazy of course’. We both laughed heartily at Ali’s great joke. Even Ali was laughing.

‘Tell him one hundred - after I have seen Fayez.’

‘Last best price - he says - eight hundred dollars. He has too many expenses....you understand?’ my friend replied after several more minutes of hand-wringing and whining by Ali.

I was getting impatient and the brandy was not helping my hangover one bit. Information is currency in Beirut, but I couldn’t understand why this man thought that meeting Fayez was so valuable to me. I was sure to find him on my own in time - Beirut is not such a big city and everybody knows somebody who knows somebody. I made to rise. Ali began to talk rapidly - panicking as he saw his meal ticket about to leave. François raised a hand to stop me.

‘He says Fayez is in big trouble. More of this he does not know or will not say. Also he is somewhere - somewhere outside Beirut - where Ali cannot go...... I understand this; there are places I cannot wisely go. You understand how it is in the villages with - how do we say - vendettas?’

I nodded. I knew only too well the bad-blood nearly a decade of civil war and later factional fighting had left behind, village against village, family against family - even within families.

I finally and reluctantly agreed on a figure of two hundred dollars. A friend of Ali’s would meet us at a certain bar and we were to follow this friend to a rendezvous with Fayez somewhere in the Chouf Mountains. I was to pay the money upfront.

‘Why should I trust him, François? That’s a lot of money.’

‘He says he trusts you - therefore you can trust to him - like brothers.’

Lebanese logic. He didn’t trust me enough not to ask for the cash in advance, but I held my tongue - maybe he knew there was a good chance I wouldn’t be coming back from the proposed rendezvous to pay him.

‘Do you trust him?’ I asked as I counted out the cash on the table. Ali’s hand swept over it and it was gone.

‘No. But it is not my money.’

We arranged to meet this friend in a bar we all knew in Al Hamra in the heart of what was left of the city’s once chic shopping centre. Ali made to kiss me on both cheeks but I managed to escape with just a damp handshake.

I was not looking forward to seeing how much of that part of town had changed. What I had seen on the journey from the airport was seriously depressing. The miles of squalid shacks were nothing new but I was not prepared for the damage to the old buildings of the souks. Worst of all was the air of despair and hopelessness which had not been so tangible before. The hectic market of Raouche, a shanty town of canvas and corrugated iron, perched on the cliff’s edge, was still a thriving area......and yet it had somehow darkened. The pastiche of brightly coloured western and Arabic dress on sale had largely been replaced by the sombre tones of fundamentalism.

Ten years of street fighting, haphazard bombing and - more recently Israeli shelling - had robbed the buildings of any sharp lines.

Sun-bleached graffiti covered walls and closed shutters. François translated as we drove by. Mostly it was anti-American or anti-Israeli ranting.

FREEDOM LIES - ISLAM DIES - TRUTH SUCKS! adorned one long wall in English despite crude attempts to scrub it out.

HAND IN HAND WITH ALLAH WALKS THE MARTYR smeared in blood red Arabic on the twisted rusting remains of an ambulance perched crazily between stalls with its front axle hanging over the forty foot drop to the sea below.

I had wanted to walk to the rendezvous but François wouldn’t let me and had arranged for Roger - an old friend of his family who I knew from before - to pick me up from the Commodore. Roger was ex-Légion étrangère and a handy man to have watching your back.

‘Things are more changed than you think, Russell,’ Roger said, ‘See what happens to foreigners these days? You want to be another ‘missing in Beirut’ person for the BBC? Before it was being English that was keeping you safe from the troubles. Now it is the fact of you being English that will get you killed or kidnapped. You are more in danger now than last time, and you do not have the protection of George Hassieni now.’ George had been my boss and a man of influence and respect.

Roger drove the Lebanese way; alternately accelerating and braking sharply while turning to talk to me with one hand draped nonchalantly out of the window and the other constantly jabbing the horn for no apparent reason, occasionally snatching the wheel to avoid a tardy pedestrian or to squeeze through a mirror-scraping gap in the traffic.

El Hamra, which had once been graced by beautifully dressed women and smartly dressed men, was now peopled mostly by youths in combat fatigues and women of undeterminable age in dark robes and the ubiquitous burkas or yashmaks. There were still a few women in stylish western clothing but no bare arms or legs and not a hint of cleavage in sight. There were no longer fancy high heels in the windows, or bikinis or revealing tops. In fact there wasn’t much in the windows at all.

The magic that had once been Beirut had taken a sinister turn.

Roger parked his 15 year old Trans-Am and we walked into the air-conditioned chill of Jimmy’s Place, a bar - loosely style on an American diner - that had been popular with flight crews on stopovers in better times. There were no flight crews here now. Were it not for the handful of foreign journalists at the Commodore I could easily have believed I was the only Westerner in Beirut.

‘The way things are, Russell, there won’t be any places like this left open soon. The Mullahs want them shut down. There have been fires and threats of violence to club and bar owners,’ muttered Roger. Both he and François, like many educated Lebanese, had a distinct accent they had acquired at the American University of Beirut.

It was a quarter to four. The barman gestured at an empty table set in an alcove with a long window overlooking the street. Potted palms and plants framed the scene. There were a few business types in western cut suits, seated in twos and threes around low coffee tables nearer the bar. One group smoked a water-pipe serviced by a young boy in white dishdasha and sandals. Nobody spared us more than a glance. We ordered beers and talked about what each of us had been doing in the years since we had last met.

I asked about various friends we had in common. Some had been shot by snipers or shredded by shellfire. Some had died fighting. Some had fled abroad. A handful had simply disappeared. Few of the ones I knew well remained and most of those had taken refuge within their own tribal or family enclaves. One - a beautiful young Maronite girl who had been dating Roger in the days before I had left had been killed by a ‘missing bullet’ through her bathroom window as she took a shower.

Not my idea of a missing bullet.

It would take more than promises and concrete to rebuild the Lebanon.

After a while the conversation lapsed into reflection. We took long drinks from our glasses in silence. Roger coughed to break the spell.

‘Russell. You have not explained why you have come back to find Fayez. Why?’

François signalled the waiter for more beers.

I knew the same question had been on François’ mind while we had sat drinking in the hotel bar the previous evening, but he hadn’t asked. Neither of them liked Fayez for any other reason than that he came from a different side of Lebanese life in terms of class and caste. He was a Lebanese-born Palestinian Muslim from the refugee camps in the south. Many ethnic Lebanese blamed much of their countries woes on the Palestinian influx which had tipped the scales of the Christian - Muslim balance of political power in the ‘70s and led inexorably to civil war. Even though his family had worked hard and prospered in the Lebanon and his father had built up a successful ceramics business in the mountains near Zahle and made sure his children - the boys especially - received a first class education, Fayez would always be a second-class citizen in the eyes of the ethnic Lebanese. Roger and François, although no better educated and of a comparable middle-class background, were from Christian Maronite families and no amount of argument would ever persuade them that the Fayezes of this world would ever be considered equal: they might do business with them but they would not allow a sister to marry one.

I glanced at my watch. Four fifteen. Ali and co were late. I looked over my friend’s shoulder as we waited for fresh beers.

‘I don’t believe it....look at that!’

A pot-bellied policeman in motorcycle gear was writing a parking ticket for a car parked half on the pavement outside the bar. All the cars down the street behind him had tickets tucked under their wipers, including Roger’s Trans-am.

François turned to look and nearly choked on a mouthful of beer, ‘He must justify his salary of course!’

We laughed while the cop folded another ticket that would never be paid and slipped it under the wiper of the next car in line. Thumbing over a fresh sheet on his pad of tickets and licking the tip of his pen he walked with a swaggering, purposeful stride toward the next car in line - an ancient Datsun - parked right outside the window at which we sat. He made his way along the car to the passenger door, stooping to look inside, cupping a hand to shade his eyes.

‘I wish I had my camera. All this fighting and all these problems and here is some dickhead of a cop writing fucking parking tickets. No one would believe me back home,’ I chuckled, still watching the incongruous scene.

Suddenly the policeman straightened, turning with a speed that belied his ponderous size, half-running, half-diving away from the car.

There are moments when time slows right down – like in the movies.

Roger launched himself into a slow and graceful dive along the length of the narrow table - arms outstretched - from his seat placed sideways to François and mine. An orange glow began to emanate from the inside the Datsun and grew to an intense searing blue-white light. The doors and roof burst open. Myriad tiny crystals of safety glass cascaded in every direction like uncut diamonds in the afternoon sun. The window, a huge sheet of plate glass, started to flex inwards like a giant soap bubble gently blown between cupped hands. It quivered, turned white and then retreated for what was probably just a microsecond before exploding into the bar in a hundred thousand murderous shards. At the same instant Roger’s left arm crashed into my right shoulder and his left arm collected François and in a slow-motion rugby tackle we were both swept sideways and onto the floor. Tables, chairs and barstools, light fittings, ceiling tiles, glass, plaster, beer mats and God knows what else settled around us as we lay in a timeless and soundless vacuum.

I don’t think I lost consciousness but a few seconds seem to be missing when I look back. François was propped in a half-sitting position with his elbows behind him and his legs spread out in front, his thinning black hair thrown forward and hanging over his eyes. With a bemused half smile he mouthed something at me and twisted to look at his old friend.

My ears had gone - I couldn’t hear anything above a piercing white noise.

Roger was face down beside me on the floor and I tried to lift him but he was limp and had the heaviness of death. I managed to roll him on his side. The right side of his face was bloody and countless bloody slivers of glass glistened on his scalp and cheek. His right ear looked chewed and was hanging on by a strip of flesh and gristle. But he was breathing - albeit thinly. I rolled him on his side and loosened his collar.

Then - François told me later - what was left of the ceiling fell on me.

‘How is Roger?’ I asked François as he helped me from the couch in the emergency room of the American University Hospital and guided me into the corridor. I was stiff, dizzy and very sore. My head throbbed. My ears hurt. My face felt badly sunburned, but looked normal in my reflection in the glass doors - apart from a half dozen neat little translucent butterfly plasters. ‘He’s okay, but they want to keep him in here for a few days for tests. His ear was nearly off. Don’t worry, he has good doctors.’

François had avoided most of the flying glass. Apart from a few cuts and bruises from where he had hit the floor, he was more or less untouched.

‘What about a beer then, Russell? You are not looking so good.’

‘Sod you and your choice of bars, Frankie baby. Let’s go to the hotel.’ François giggled. I have never met anyone with such an infectious laugh. We giggled and hobbled our way to the Honda which he had collected while the doctors were putting me back together. Everything sounded strange, as if through a closed door, but my hearing was slowly getting back to normal except for the treble notes. I suspected I would never make First Violin.

‘Roger does not find it so funny. He has many particles of glass in his fat derrière.’ François remarked dryly.

‘Stop it François. No jokes. I think I have cracked a rib. What about the other customers?"

‘Everyone there was a little cut and so forth, but not so serious I think. But Roger was the worst - what do you say - casualty? Did you see how fast he can move?’

I nodded thoughtfully. ‘He saved us, mate. I was looking at the bomb when it went off. He must have guessed what that cop had seen. Another split second and.....’

François reversed out of the parking space and we shot down the ramp into the Beirut traffic. ‘Not a very good bomb, I think, luckily,’ he observed.

I had a death grip on the door handle; I’d had enough excitement for one day.

‘What’s a good bomb?’ I asked. Something like a missing bullet, I supposed.

We had a couple of stiff drinks back at the bar in the Commodore, but I was tired and although I didn’t seem to be suffering from shock as such, I did feel on edge and not a just little fragile. Mild concussion maybe, or perhaps the result of more alcohol on top of painkillers on top of the alcohol of earlier in the afternoon. François obviously wanted to know what was going on and why I was here, but now wasn’t the time. I just needed sleep.

My friend saw me to my room, arranged to collect me the next morning and wished me good night. He went to leave but stopped in the doorway and turned to face me, stroking his moustache downwards at the side of his mouth.

‘Take good care, my friend. I think they will try again.’ He smiled sadly.

‘What are you talking about? Try what? Who?’

‘To kill you, perhaps. I do not know who - but I suspect it is involving your friend Fayez.’

He turned again and walked to the lift.

I stood there for a long time looking at the closed lift doors as his words sunk in.

‘François? What you said last night about someone wanting to kill me….were you serious?’

We were sitting at a table on the patio of a restaurant not far from the hospital where we had just left Roger propped up in bed, his head swathed in bandages, an air cushion under his glass- peppered butt and a drip of some sort in his arm - but in surprisingly good humour.

François took a long draught that emptied the tall frosted glass in front of him, condensation dripping down its side despite the coolness of the morning. Froth clung to his moustache. He gestured to the waiter for two more lagers.

‘I am being serious of course,’ he said, wiping his mouth with the back of a long bony hand, ‘and why not? We know something strange is happening and so forth - Ali being very nervous about making the meeting with Fayez for the first thing. We arrange to meet in a certain bar - no-one else knows this. Our contact does not appear but instead a bomb goes off which should have killed us all. If the bomb had been more bigger or more closer, or if Roger had not made like Batman....who knows? And now I look for Ali but he is disappeared and his family doesn’t know....or won’t say ....where he is. Do you think this is just - how do you say - coincidence maybe?’ He looked up at me, unsmiling now, and shook his head. ‘No, my friend, this is not a - how do you say - random car bomb? You were - err - set up - like in the movies? There was nothing else in the street to ask for an attack like this. The people who want to make bombs like this choose busy streets or markets where they can do much killing - not little quiet streets when it is siesta time - unless they have a target.’

‘But how could they have known we would be sitting by the window?’

François simply shrugged and lifted the fresh glass to his lips.

‘Maybe it was someone who was upset about getting a parking ticket?’ I suggested, not feeling as glib as I was trying to make out.

‘This is not for joking, Russell. We had luck. This bomb was not so good. Not big enough.’

He glanced over my shoulder and raised a bushy eyebrow. ‘Don’t look now, for instance, but there is a car in the street behind of you. The Mercedes. This driver is speaking with the receptionist in the hospital when we are leaving. He is following us for sure. By his dress I would say he is a Palestinian. The car is from the Bekaa I think - a Zahle sticker on the back window. This is most usual....not many Palestinians in Zahle. Fayez’s family is one of few living there - it’s a Catholic town, mostly Greek or Maronite Christian.’

Trying to look casual I leaned back in my chair and pretended to be taking in the surroundings. I could make out the shadowed silhouette in the fairly new looking grey Mercedes 200 parked in the shadow of an ancient olive tree which had somehow survived better than the buildings around it. Both car and tree looked strangely out of place. The gutted remains of the Holiday Inn and the Phoenicia Hotel rose in the background, fire-blackened windows devoid of glass; stark reminders of October ‘75 when the Christian Phalangists joined forces with Beshir Gemayal’s Kataeb against the Leftist Palestinians and Joumblat’s Druze fighters in The Battle for The Hotels and for downtown Beirut. Forty thousand dead, one hundred thousand wounded and five thousand terribly maimed in just the first eighteen months of civil war - civil only in as much as most of its victims were civilians. Innocents of each side falling under the sniper’s sights, indiscriminate shelling, house to house fighting on a scale never seen before - the heart ripped out of the commercial centre of the gateway to the Middle East and the intersection of two cultures in flames. The end of Lebanon as it was and never can be again.

As if its driver had sensed my interest the car pulled away from the curb and disappeared down one of the narrow deserted streets of the ruined souks, leaving the avenue empty apart from the enchanted tree.

‘Now you have made me really nervous. Let’s go.’

‘But I have not eaten yet, Russell!’ He was genuinely upset.

‘Come on mate. Let’s get out of here. I’ll buy you dinner in the mountains.’

‘Okay, my friend …but I think it is time for you to tell me what this is about and why it is you look for Fayez.’

‘I will, as soon as we get away from here. Anyway it’s not really Fayez I’m looking for…it’s Charley. I should have told you before, I know, but I didn’t want you doing anything foolish.’ We were standing and I was folding some Lebanese pounds and tucking them under an ashtray to save them from the breeze. I looked up. His dark eyes stared back below a darker frown and he was not smiling. A tic began at one corner of his mouth. He was not a happy man.

Chapter Two

Oh Lebanon! Oh land of beauty, land of mystery and dreams, what have you become? Oh that I had known you when the future lay at your feet, before