Beehive Read online

“The people in the hill call him the Mule, you know. He’s stubborn, but you don’t want to be behind him when he kicks.”

  “He told me the tape was a fake, nothing. Just a piece of badly made American pornography.”

  “Pornography? Oh yes, Hezbollah doesn’t approve.”

  “So I gathered.”

  Brian studied his tea leaves a second, and then looked me in the eye. “Do you believe the Colonel?”

  My laugh came out rounder this time. “No Should I?” He shrugged and sat back, face turned to the sun, eyes closed. A bee scouted his forehead and then turned away. “Do you have bees, Brian?”

  “What?”

  “Bees. Do you keep bees?”

  “The family has a few hundred hives, yes. Frankly, they frighten me. Are you an apiarist?”

  “On a small scale, a couple dozen hives maybe. Not a commercial operation.” The bee which rejected Brian’s forehead discovered the honeypot on the table. “That one just found a gold mine.”

  “Probably wondering where he is; that could well be from his hive. Time was we exported honey. Not nearly as profitable as other things now.”

  I watched the bee fill herself up and fly off contentedly. You can almost see the smile a bee has when she’s full of honey. A half an hour and a horde other hive-mates would be back to suck up their own dram of the stuff. “You don’t believe Harbison either.”

  He shrugged again. “Not for me to say, really.”

  “But?”

  “But no, I don’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Think about it. Arabs love American pornography, unless they are born-again Muslims, in which case they loathe it just as passionately. If your Avai is not Hezbollah, he wouldn’t give up his pornography when he could easily find some other tape or give you nothing at all. If he is Hezbollah . . . — Did he say the tape contained anything when he gave it to you?”

  “That it would tell me what to do next.”

  “Did you tell Harbison that?”

  “Sure.”

  “And he said?”

  “He said, ‘Just their way of telling you to fuck yourself’ Possible, isn’t it?”

  “No. ‘Fuck’ doesn’t translate that way. In Arabic, it’s always transitive, never reflexive. Fucking is always something you do to something else, for your pleasure.”

  “So, if Avai is Hezbollah?”

  “Then he at least knows where your friend is, or knows who knows. Then you are either someone he can keep bilking or a real trader. If he just wants to bilk you, he doesn’t hurt you. My guess is he has her and wants to deal. I lay you five to one Harbison is lying.”

  “So what should I do?”

  “What does Harbison want you to do?”

  “Go home.”

  “So you stay. Go to Dahya during the daytime. Let yourself be seen. If they didn’t kill you last night they won’t kill you now.”

  “You told me yesterday they wouldn’t kill me last night.”

  “Well, did they? Did they even try?”

  57.

  After a long afternoon hospital trip with surprisingly little bad news, I went back to my prison-home for an exhausted twelve-hour sleep. I had two dreams I remember, both with bees. Not that strange for me really; bees often fly around my dreams. Sometimes the people in my dreams have wings, bee-wings, not angel-wings. With the shutters closed, my room became dark and close as a hive. I half dreamed and half remembered a hive Jim and I had up until two seasons back, before I met Elizabeth. We called it LP, because the bees were so temperamental they used to have thirty-three-and-a-third revolutions a minute, worse even than Langley. If the queen slackened her laying, they would raise another. If the new queen came back from her nuptial flight with only a half-full sac of semen, they struck her down and began grooming another princess. They had no mercy for majesty, like most bees, no reverence for royalty.

  Once, they killed a new queen right after she had killed all other possible successors. A hive without a queen falls to shameful, sad practices. One of the workers will inevitably take to laying eggs, but because she can’t fertilize them, the eggs all grow up into drones. That’s the great irony in bee biology: fathers have no fathers. All the eggs laid by a bee without sperm will grow into drones. So, in no time at all, LP looked like a hunting cottage, all fat boys scarfing up the honey and leaving droppings everywhere. Moths moved in, birds picked off the unmotivated bees who still went out to the fields, resigned. The beautiful excitement of LP crashed into a foul and smelly mess, because the hive killed their queen in a fit of fear or pique or addiction to drama.

  It took me a whole day to clean the hive out and another to prepare it for a new community of bees. Even after we moved it off into an orchard alone, the hive has never been able to maintain a population of more than 30,000. The winter before last nearly killed it off completely. They limp along, forlornly, perhaps finding signs everywhere of the great battles that had been fought there, and this gruesome history overwhelms hope of any future accomplishment.

  The second was dream pure and simple, not mixed up with memory. I was in a room or a hive flooded with bees. I might not have been in a room, but only in a winter ball. When the weather turns cold, bees gather into a ball and hang on tight to the bee beside them with the little hooks they all have on their feet. By squeezing together they raise the temperature at the middle, where they keep the queen. Always the ones at the middle push their way to the outside to eat and relieve themselves, and the ones on the outside push their way in for the warmth.

  I was in the pulsing mass, not a victim, not a queen, just one of the bees in the heating ball, hanging onto the hooks of one neighbor and then another on my trip to the outside.

  At the surface there were people flying in bee dances. Bees have a remarkable system of communication. They fly around the hive in circles when food is very near, as though they are saying, “Just go and look for it! You can’t help but find it!” If the food’s farther than a hundred yards away at most, they fly in figure eights. The line between the two circles of the eights shows the direction of the food. The speed with which they do these eights tells you how far. The swagger they show in the dance tells you how good the food there is.

  Hooked onto the outside of the ball, dozens of bee-people hurl wild stories at me, masses of indecipherable information. People I know — Bienenkorb, Bea, my father, Jim, Andrea — and people I don’t all fly patterns. I shout at them, “What do you know?!?” But they just fly and fly and buzz louder.

  I peel off the bee-ball and walk away, out toward the light. When I look back, the ball looks just like a brain, floating in the dark.

  The light of morning surprised me. I hobbled up and called Amir.

  58.

  The international calling center loomed like an armory, but had been mercifully untouched in the war. It seems even people in the passion of war prefer to destroy their past rather than jeopardize their future.

  “This is Ron Stutzer in Beirut. I’d like to speak with Noah Jacobs.”

  A moment later he came on.

  “Ron! Do you want us to come get you?”

  “No, no. I’m just reporting in.”

  Even across the scratchy lines I heard a change of tone.

  “Everything is all right, then?”

  “More or less. Nothing out of control yet.”

  “Good, good. Have you found Betsy? I talk to her father every day and he wants to know.”

  “I’m on her trail.”

  “Will you need more money? The man is willing to go one mill for release, but that will leave you short for expenses.”

  “I might. I’ll know better soon.” I’m used to cradling the phone on my left ear. In the midst of overwhelming strangeness, the little discomfort nagged. My left ear throbbed. “Tell him that everything seems to be going well.”

 
; “You’re not in any danger, are you Ron? There’s no point in losing two trying to save one.”

  “They seem more concerned with killing each other than killing me.”

  His voice hitched. “That’s something to be thankful for. We can be there in an hour, if you need us. You sure you’re all right?”

  I wanted to ask, Have you heard I’m not? but I didn’t want the answer. Better to know that I just couldn’t know. I said, “I’m in my element. I never felt so much at home in my life.”

  The plastic mouthpiece smelled like old coffee and the wooden booth like ammonia. My jaw hurt more from this bout of lying than from the longer conversation in the morning with Brian. Of course, I denied myself pain pills; I wanted to be alert this afternoon.

  “Still a sense of humor,” Jacobs echoed. “We got you down for a week from now.”

  “You might want to be ready sooner. Is the professor there?”

  “Nusanti? No, we sent him back home. Classes or something. Got a question for him?”

  “Nothing I can put into words.”

  A pause grew into a hollow, and he filled it. “Only an hour away, Ron. Remember.”

  I arced the receiver back to its hook and stayed in the booth a moment, staring at the phone. How many people listened to that conversation? How many thought they knew what it was about, or what it meant?

  59.

  “One trip to Dahya was not enough for you? You want to be shot again? You want me shot?”

  I had just stepped out of the bank, where I had arranged to withdraw $200,000 in cash. Naturally, they did not have the dollars on hand; they would get them packeted in the next day, however they do it in this sorry place. Downtown had a creepy, eerie smell that afternoon. Three car bombs had blown in succession, and an old building collapsed in the rumble. A fire started, and whatever had been inside the building left a yellow miasma as it smoldered into the midday siesta.

  “It’s better than staying here.”

  “OK, but what’s wrong with the hills? What’s wrong with the country club? We have to go to Dahya for you to enjoy yourself?”

  I handed him a bundle of the Grumbler’s hundreds. “A thousand. For last night and today.”

  He flopped them in his hand twice and then put them under his cap. “A thousand dollars makes it better. But don’t think it solves anything.”

  “Just drive, Amir. Back to the same gate. Find a café on a busy street.”

  “You want coffee? I know a good café on the corniche. We go to Dahya for coffee?”

  “Just drive.”

  I amazed myself with my complacency at the guns we faced at the checkpoints riding down there. But my own amazement just didn’t compare to the obvious shock and wonder on the faces of the Amal guards at the south Dahya checkpoint. They barked “Bezbat! Bezbat!” in the window before they took a look in the car. Three sets of eyes widened at once. I thought I recognized the face of one of Tuesday’s gunmen among the guards. They fell back from the car and argued among themselves for a breath of time — and then waved us through.

  “Why look at the passport of a ghost?” Amir said. “You will be dead soon enough. They can examine your passport all they want then.”

  “They’re going to Avai now. We don’t have a lot of time for surprise. Get us to the most central cafe in this part of Dahya.”

  “It’s Sheik Abdul’s, just off the square. But that’s where the Amal goes.”

  “How far?”

  “Fifty meters. A hundred.”

  “Then park it.”

  “Here? I want to keep my eye on it.”

  “I’ll buy you a new one if anyone touches it.”

  “I will drive it in heaven if they turn it into a bomb.”

  I couldn’t have asked for a better reaction when I stepped out of the car. A twelve-year-old kid squinted across the street at me and then looked behind him. In a flash, he disappeared in a filthy alley between buildings. A mullah scowled and made a point of looking away from where the boy had gone, though he hadn’t seen him.

  “What are we doing?” Amir whined.

  “We’re going for coffee,” I told him, “and we’re keeping our eyes open.”

  “My eyes will do you no good. I’m blind with fear.”

  In the square again I witnessed the dances. Most people could not grasp my presence. Their faces, their postures even, went blank. But some hopped on one foot, and others turned circles. Their eyes kept bouncing off where the first boy had run. Their faces became maps of fear, of panic, of alertness. No one threatened us, no one even gestured. My white bandage broadcast my status as alien, intruder, enemy, even more than my skin and dress. I stood tall as I could, my sleeves rolled up to show my thick white arms. I could gain nothing by hiding now. They were the ones hiding something, and they would tell me where it, she, was. Elizabeth.

  Sheik Abdul’s was the first doorway on the first alley to the right off the square. I called the angle the eyes shot to noon; with the big mosque in the square as the hub, Abdul’s was at about nine o’clock. Tables crowded the street, leaving just enough room for a man and mule to pass without feeling as though the animal had just stepped on your lunch. I grabbed a table up front. The other patrons watched us unabashedly. Two left, going each way up the alley, but most stayed and watched, talked among themselves and gestured. I saw three elbows jerk back, toward a little shy of noon.

  Not far off that main street, then.

  “We should go. They will not serve us here.”

  “You’re wrong. Look.” A bedraggled, bearded man and a husky clean-shaven one stared and gestured at me. The bearded one waved the back of his hand toward us, and then turned away from Abdul. It could only mean he’d been ordered to serve us.

  He came to our table, saying nothing, signifying nothing. “What now?” Amir asked.

  “Order for us. Can’t you see he’s waiting?” I bowed my head to Abdul, smiling. The pain in my neck brought a wince to my jaw, an echo of sympathetic pain.

  Amir ordered. “The specialty. Word on the street says it’s good, but I don’t know what it is.” People on the street pass news of pastry and hostages. No one ever keeps a secret. Nothing changes people like knowledge does. Confusion isn’t having two pieces of contradictory knowledge, it’s having them in the same place at the same time.

  The specialty was exquisite, a flourless almond cake flooded with honey. From the taste of the honey I would have said it came from Brian’s family apiaries, a poorer version of what he served me. It could be, too, that all honey tastes the same in this land, very sweet and curiously dry.

  We were on our second coffee when Avai came. He was surrounded by guards, who took up positions ten yards off in either direction. He looked more out of place in his native clothing than he did in western rags.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Avai.”

  “Mr. Stutzer.” He said nothing to Amir and acknowledged him only fractionally. “I hope that the warning shot did not make you stupid, Mr. Stutzer.”

  “Deaf, perhaps, but not stupid.”

  “Then I must compliment you of being brave.”

  “‘On being brave’.” He nodded acceptance of the correction. “I wanted to thank you in person for the tape.” I kept my hands on the table. One of Avai’s guards had a gun pointed at me, I felt certain.

  “You would have had that opportunity without coming in Dahya.” Abdul brought Avai a coffee and specialty; he did not need asking. “Would you like more coffee?” I nodded and he ordered for me. Amir did not exist to him.

  “I have not had the luxury of viewing the tape, Mr. Avai. I understand you have my friend.”

  “Do you also understand that we do not see the need to negotiate?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then before you make an offer which will embarrass both of us, I have the authority to open
a discussion with five million dollars.”

  My coffee came and I sipped it. The hot sweetness, the rush at the back of my head, brought a deep, soothing breath. I did not want to have to get used to this coffee, but I could, I could.

  “Does my willingness to work from that figure earn my friend some comfort?”

  “Your friend has received no harm. She is fed, she is warm.”

  “How about a gift.”

  “A gift? She has no use of perfumes and chocolates, Mr. Stutzer. We have no interest in any sort of tricks. A gift!”

  “It will comfort her. She can’t be an easy hostage. This might help.”

  “What gift do you have in mind?”

  “Bees, Mr. Avai.”

  “Honeybees?”

  “Just some queens and attendants. Small cages. No place to hide anything.”

  “Honeybees?”

  “A private pleasure for her.”

  “And in exchange for your friend’s comfort with these honeybees you will call your sources for more money. You see that we know what are your limits.”

  “I will call tomorrow morning, from the central telephone office. And the bees?”

  “Let us meet here in two days. Sabbath — a time of peace. If these honeybees are as you say to me, I will see that she gets them. Then we will talk other release.”

  “Thank you.”

  He bowed. “It is an honor to share a table with a brave man, Mr. Stutzer. My guard will see you and your driver to the checkpoint.”

  60.

  “Bees!” Amir cried, once we were well beyond the checkpoint. “I see you are a lunatic. Brave? Hah! Brave as a boil! A lunatic has more sense than to try to be this brave!”

  “Amir,” I asked, once we passed the next checkpoint, more boys regarding their weapons just as I now did, “do you know anything about bees?”

  “They make honey! They sting! What else is there to know?”

  “Nothing. Elizabeth likes them, that’s all.” I stared out the window at the ragged housing. Amir drove as though chased along the near-deserted street. It seemed to be closing in on six o’clock, the tail end of a long summer day. The pain I’d kept by me, to keep me alert, threatened now to overwhelm me. “It was the only thing I could think of.”