City of martyrs
This was no country for anyone who wanted to imagine the future. DREADFUL PENNY, Ep. 11.
From Episode 10: Penny stows away on a cargo plane bound for Lebanon.
Fever. Burning up. Were these flames real or a hallucination? Faces danced beyond the fire: Viktor, observing her with the dead eyes of a shark. Fuad, compassionate smile melting into a sneer. The sister she hadn’t seen in ten years, bridal embroidery defiled with blood. Penny’s fingers cupped a man’s ears, and in the reflection of the mirror, his eyeball, dangling by an obscene cord of flesh, found her.
Infection. The word penetrated the smoke and heat like the bullet had pierced her skin. She was shaking but not from panic. From chills.
She was freezing.
They had crossed the desert, over blasted lands…of oil wells, arid riverbeds, bomb craters, chemical cities…or wrack, ruin and refugees. At the end they would have skimmed over snowcapped peaks before the land dropped precipitously into the green gorges of the Bekaa Valley and undulated down to the Mediterranean Sea, to Beirut. To home, if she survived long enough to reach it.
Some impulse, part training and part ineffable drive—the thing that made her heart beat—got Penny out of the plane when it landed. The snort of horses, the commands of their handlers. Stumbling into containers and boxes. Somewhere losing the Smith & Wesson, but the Beretta still tucked into her waist. She emerged with her arm on fire and her spine turning to ice, wearing a janitor’s ill-fitting trousers instead of the blue overalls.
Veronique Goetzle took her final bow at Lebanese immigration, doing her best to ignore her awful appearance and the way she must smell. She kept herself alert calculating the odds that the Emirati authorities had connected all of the dots. She had left them no shortage of clues, not to mention generous splatters of DNA samples.
No matter now. Struggling to simply remain standing and awake, she walked to the immigration desk and handed over the passport and an entry form. The officer gawked at her—filthy dungarees, unholy hair, sallow and drawn skin, black eyes glazed instead of bright, but the computer accepted her passport and, with a curt wave, he let her in.
So the United Arab Emirates had not put out an alert about Veronique. Eight hours after violence had overtaken the country’s landmark hotel and the escape vehicle clipped the world’s tallest skyscraper. Someone, maybe high up in the Dubai government, was opting for silence: don’t worry, oil barons and foreign dignitaries, there’s nothing here to concern you.
She knew how to keep herself out of the hands of the Emirati police. Viktor was another matter.
Penny crossed the arrivals hall, the dingy space mostly empty—it was only turning six a.m.—and headed for the exit.
Infection? If the bullet wound was exposed to sepsis, and her blood had carried it to any vital organ, she was a goner.
Taking a taxi was a risk. She could be easily tailed. And Beirut was an unstable place: a lone, weak woman could make for easy prey, particularly as she passed through the Palestinian and Shia slums. But Penny was too feeble to follow the usual drawn-out precautions. She considered directing the taxi driver to Fuad’s compound in the mountains. But her strength was leaking out of her in measurable quanta. She wasn’t ready to face the Chamouns.
“Shari Gemayzeh,” she told the driver. She gave him the street’s number before slumping against the window. She didn’t feel the engine start or the tires crunch against the pavement.
The taxi ambled through the maze of access roads before reaching Ouzai Highway, which made a straight line along the coast into the heart of the city. To her right reared Mount Lebanon, now a dark hulk beneath a brightening sky. City lights cascaded from the mountain’s sharp heights down to the edge of the sea. The Mediterranean was as wine-dark as Homer had advertized.
The sun scaled the mountain ridge and the heat and light brought her back to some kind of reality. The morning haze turned orange and she registered the piles of city clinging to the mountain’s skirts. Then they plunged into a tunnel and emerged into a third-world mess.
This land had once hosted orchards and farms. History’s dispossessed had long since turned the pastoral into slums: Palestinian refugees and Shia camps, prime recruiting grounds for Hezbollah. But this was Lebanon, a country of infinite factions. As they left the underpass behind, she passed banners and flags representing Amal and Hezbollah, rival Shia political groups, but also images of Bashar al-Assad, the dictator of war-torn Syria, as well as more obscure imams; anyone with a coterie of AK-47-armed zealots could make a claim to political relevance.
And everywhere loomed the images of martyrs, in posters and on banners, their names and images spread across bridges and overpasses, presiding over this city of ghouls. Men and boys killed by the Israelis, killed by the Sunni, killed by the Christians, killed while fighting across the border in Syria.
The mood changed once they emerged in West Beirut, the prosperous stronghold of the Sunni Arabs: tower blocks that could have been in Miami, the green hillocks of universities, official-looking buildings surrounded by soldiers.
They drove slowly through Lebanese Army checkpoints into the center of town, the old Green Zone that once divided Muslim from Christian. The old boundaries of the civil war had given way to a vista of cranes and construction equipment. This was Beirut as a phoenix, rising from the ashes with plenty of financing from the World Bank.
Penny spied groups of men in muddied clothes huddled beneath new overpasses, but these unfortunates weren’t Lebanese. They were Syrian refugees, a new phenomenon created by their own civil war.
The taxi reached a broad intersection of boulevards centered on a giant mosque; it, too, was new, built as a mausoleum for a recently murdered Christian president. But this somber landmark was at the heart of a young, rowdy Beirut. One road leading off the square into Eastern Beirut, the oldest and most established part of the city, was named for the French general who had once conquered this country. But everyone used the road’s Arabic name, Gemazyeh. Its narrow, byzantine path threaded a gamut of shabbily elegant buildings, a reminder of the old days when Beirut was called the Paris of the East. Its innards gasped with cafes, coffee shops, bars and nightclubs. From sundown its crumbling sidewalks were filled with fashionable people—Christian men in hip-hop garb, Muslim women in high heels and short skirts. The narrow streets would echo with the laughter of people desperate to bury the past and forget the present.
But this was no country for anyone who wanted to imagine the future. The future was a luxury no one had time to afford. Perhaps that’s why Penny had felt so at home in Beirut.
It was early morning now and the revelers had gone to sleep. Penny directed the taxi into a side lane and up an incline surrounded by houses and apartment buildings. She didn’t have Lebanese lira, only the money from Kasym Shokay’s stash. The driver happily pocketed her forty American dollars.
Penny did a full turn as the taxi meandered off. The neighborhood was quiet. A small parking lot filled the corner of the bent lane. Ali and his sons were always here, ready to park or fetch a resident’s car, spending the hot afternoons hosing the cars clean of the city’s dirt. There was no sign of a tail, but she had done such a poor job of covering her tracks that it would be easy for anyone now to keep an eye on her undetected.
The sky was blue and a gentle breeze rustled the great ficus trees that lined the alley, survivors of a bygone garden, harking from the days when the city’s best neighborhoods had been pleasantly spaced. Beirut had always been a magnet, however—for Arab playboys and European chancers, more recently for refugees, and the city groaned beneath the buildings and towers to house them all. Eastern Beirut still had room for some livable quarters, though. Squint and it could be a slice of bohemian Europe.
White-haired Ali said good morning, but his alarm was obvious. She knew she looked like a survivor in a slasher flick.
“Ali, no key,” she told him in her tourist Arabic. She had never found the time to nail the language. “Key?”
He blurted a stream of Arabic which she took to mean, What the blazes happened to you?
“I’m okay.”
He brought her the spare, politely ignoring her lie. Of all the deceptions in her world, this was the most benign. Penny knew, taking the key, that she was opening the door to lies she couldn’t fathom, including her own.