Beehive Read online

  The fathers and grandfathers looked up from their backgammon games amazed, stunned. A shout started somewhere in the square, and then laughter. An old man nearby, beard white and scraggled, smiled up at me from his low stool. His tunic was a dirty grey and his one front tooth horse-yellow and turned sideways. He kept his hand close to his chest, but still he pointed to the next alley over off the square. I winked at him. He nodded, smiled again, and folded his hand away like a precious, oft-read letter.

  I ran, now, flat out, but no one followed me. Out into the square just enough to reach the next alley. Who knows what damage I did on the way, tables upended, premature heart attacks? The men in the café I skirted watched me only briefly. They kept their eyes pinned behind me. They saw I had no gun. Could they be sure my pursuers had none? But no pursuers arrived, and no gunfire, and no catastrophe except a slight disturbance in a long Saturday afternoon. I must have disappointed them.

  The next alley was long and nearly straight. It chasmed like a canal for forty yards off the square. The buildings crammed side-by-side shops, but they were all closed, doors blocked tight. There were no locks, anywhere, and very few young men. All at the mosque? All dead? All working for Avai, guarding Elizabeth?

  I choked. My God, what have I done? I’m deep in the hive of my enemy, lost, unguided. I am even wary, I realize, of my goal, my Elizabeth. Will she recognize me? Will she come with me, leave the safety of capture for the risk of escape? The buildings in rows around me grew tall and narrow, three storeys and just five yards of the alley between them.

  Ahead, the alley breaks slightly to the right and then goes straight as far as I can see. At the break there’s a walk to the left. As I near the walk’s corner, I see them, I hear them. The swarms, the competing, buzzing, stinging swarms.

  70.

  The walkway is dim, even in bright sun, but I see the place right away. The second house in on the right, two storeys high, no guard out front. No problem knowing why, either. I hear the frantic shouts in the upstairs window. The bees are rampaging in a brown cloud in and out the upper windows. The first wave has found their queen, surrounded by bees from other hives and swinging startled humans. Just sit still Elizabeth! Just sit! There’s panic in that room upstairs. The guard from the door must have run up to settle it and fell into the panic himself. One hundred thousand bees! More! Panic, of course!

  Another brown cloud appears over the roof of the house across the street and tears in the open windows. The shouts get higher, the panic more pronounced. Someone’s head appears at the window, shouting. His arms flail; he has no gun.

  Two teenagers, one dragging his gun by his strap, explode in a tumble from the door and tear off past me, right beside me, a knife blade away, but fear has replaced their sight. Both brown faces are blotched with welts, and a few dozen more bees are in pursuit. One bee takes a moment to sting me. I could have crushed her, as I watched her land on my hand, prevented the sting, but the smell of her blood would arouse her hive-mates. I accept the venom; the pain is nothing compared to the burn of a bullet.

  I hug the right hand wall and move quickly along. I’m hunting the ball-carrier, it feels like. The field’s gotten smaller, but the search is just the same. I freeze outside the doorway. Inside I hear a scream and a leap. One’s coming downstairs. I tense, hunker down. Deep breath. Tighten! Tighten! Spring!

  I laid my right shoulder into his kidney. I felt the air going out of him, like a blow-up soldier. Fast as a cat, I lifted myself off of him. He was maybe eighteen, same kid who’d flailed at the window, no gun. He didn’t breathe the moment I looked at him, but that was only the wind I’d taken out of him.

  I clambered up the stairs, saying nothing. I wanted to shout for Elizabeth, hear her voice, embrace. But I had no idea how many people remained to guard her, how many guns. The bees fluttered thicker than autumn leaves. I held my breath and squinted my eyes against them. I needed to move slowly or be stung entirely.

  In the first room a man balled up on the floor screamed. His gun rocked on the floor behind him, but he had his face to the wall and his hands shielding his head. He kept kicking, like a mad dog set on him instead of a thousand bees. Three hundred stings will kill a man and I thought that one might die. He thought nothing of me, didn’t seem to know I was there.

  In the next room there was a bed, a table, a chair. The small square room was in the middle of the house, dark, no windows. It smelled of old food and sweat, shit and piss, like an old school gym they use as a cafeteria at lunchtime. On the bed a lump under an old thin blanket quivered. I kept feeling the little pricks of stings, one, another, another, very slow. I was fine, if I could get Elizabeth now and go.

  “Elizabeth!” I whispered. The lump rolled. I hissed again, “Elizabeth!”

  She sat up. I never thought I would say it, but she looked horrible, like a pale brown mouse terrified into fatalism. Her green eyes looked old, like oak leaves just after they drop. I would have opened my mouth to shout, but the bees would have taken it for a new hive and buzzed right in.

  But she doesn’t know. She shouts, “Ron!” a hoarse, hoary croak, like she hadn’t spoken for a week and wasn’t sure she had the strength now. Then her finger goes into her mouth to pull out the invader. She shudders. She was a sorry mass of terror, a fluttering child having nightmares about the familiar.

  In an instant, I gather her up in the blanket she used to protect herself from the bees. There were probably dozens wrapped up with her. She was light, tense, squirming. I carried her through the room with the dying man, whose protests had shrunk to moans and half-hearted kicks.

  At the top of the stairs I set her down. “How many guards?” I hissed. She didn’t hear me, she didn’t see me. I shook her, I might have slapped her, I can’t remember. “How many guards!?”

  “Four.”

  Then we got them all, I thought. Three out the front, one communing with the bees. “Can you handle the stairs?” She nods. I start down ahead of her, skipping almost, but keeping slow and steady. At the door, the bees begin to dissipate, fighting each other, saving their queens.

  The light outside makes me squint. I look back at Elizabeth. The light blinds her.

  I step out into the alley.

  One of the two who ran blindly by me, the one who held onto his gun, now holds his gun on me, barrel to my chest.

  I grab the muzzle with my right hand, push it up.

  He pulls his trigger.

  Elizabeth screams. My index finger burns as I tear the gun from his hands. I whirl, lash the butt of the weapon into the side of his head.

  First I feel the crush of bone up the muzzle.

  Then I feel the burn.

  I drop the gun and it lands on top of him. He was in almost the exact position I had left the other one before I’d gone up, but that first one was gone now, burrowed into some hole somewhere, moaning, and the second one wasn’t going anywhere. Blood came from his ear and nose. His eyes didn’t close, but they didn’t look anywhere either.

  I grabbed Elizabeth by the wrist and ran off to the right, away from that little square, away from where the guards had gone. The walk ended at another long straight alley, wider that the other one, also walled with closed shops. Overhead, I saw a trail of bees, the young ones, the slow fliers. Dead ahead I saw the beige open dirt of the main street, of escape. I dragged Elizabeth through the alleys, back to Amir’s cab.

  71.

  Elizabeth was huddled and shrunken. She kept herself swaddled in her blanket, though the heat of Dahya roasted us. I led her like a dog, barking out “This way!” and “Hurry!” as though that was all she could understand — and it might have been. I felt certain we would run into Avai and his men at each corner that cut into our alley. I knew they would think nothing of gunning us to the pavement. The one gun already fired must have alarmed the prayer-peaceful neighbors. Could pursuers be far behind?

  We lurch
ed against the bees. We headed where they came from. At least they knew where they were going. If you mix together different species of bees in the same hive, they’ll accommodate each other, but they’ll never learn to speak the same language, they’ll always misunderstand the other’s gestures. Like the cities people build: I understand DC, but I’m lost even in familiar parts of Beirut.

  The bees took us where they’d come from. I followed them backward. Only after we lurched out into the main street did I realize they weren’t coming from the cab, but from the truck, fifty yards from Amir to the checkpoint and then another hundred beyond.

  We burst onto the open dirt road like thieves, out into the bright and unprotected sunlight halfway between the cab and the guns. The guards were occupied with the bees who were after the queen in the cage I gave them. Of the four there before, only two remained. Their faces, rubbled with bees stings, seemed from my distance to hover on the edge between wonder and terror. They squinted at us through the cloud of bees.

  But they didn’t see us blunder into the street, not the guards anyway; I couldn’t say about anyone else on the street. The twenty-five yards between us and cab looked like forever. Amir, leaning his head into the engine hood, looked under his left arm and saw me and my shrouded ghost approaching. He almost called out, but stopped himself. He scattered the few remaining children with a threat, but one kid slammed shut my open door when he left.

  I knew, watching the door swing shut, that the click it would make would sound to the checkpoint like the cocking of a gun.

  I began to run again, dragging Elizabeth, a rough sack, as devoid of will as the blanket she hid under.

  Amir knew too what the slammed door would do. He slammed shut the hood and whipped himself into the driver side. “No!” I shouted “No!” I didn’t know what he was doing — escaping without me? whizzing the ten yards to get us? The movement would confirm what the door-slam made the checkpoint suspect.

  But there was no room for observation down by the checkpoint. The remaining guards were too stunned by the bees to add up the scene fast. Amir’s tires spit dirt stopping beside us. I hurled open the back seat and shoved Elizabeth in. “Down on the floor!” I jumped in after her and tried to look composed, sitting like just another fare in any cab’s back seat. But there were no other cabs in Dahya, and there was no price on the meter for dangerous escapes. “Drive slowly, Amir. Drive like we’re just going home.”

  Amir tried, I’m sure he did, but with his head turned back to look and one hand under his hat feeling for his gun’s trigger, the car jerked ahead. My door slammed shut again with our forward thrust. I looked back and saw Avai’s guard pursuing now, at last and too late. They saw they couldn’t catch us on foot and opened fire from behind.

  I dropped like a pail of water all over Elizabeth; the bullets would get me, not her. Amir slunk down in the seat and gunned the engine. “Those machine guns, they shoot a lot but not well.”

  The checkpoint! I knew it was coming, but I couldn’t see when. I tried to figure our speed, the distance, anything! We’ll get there NOW! NOW!! NOW!!! At that third NOW we must have, because the inside of the cab exploded simultaneously with a shower of glass and deafening crack. Having been so close to a gun-muzzle, I knew Amir had blasted someone through the windshield. Then the cab hit some high gear and we disappeared from Dahya, its piety, its shouts and its gunshots.

  72.

  “I killed one of them, I know it!” Amir gloated. “At the checkpoint! And they scoffed at my gun!”

  I pulled myself up to the seat. The burn in my hands jangled me. I flopped back into the seat exhaustedly, my arms vibrating like chimes. The entire left side of the windshield had flown everywhere with the bullet’s impact, and the right side hung veined and limp as a fresh road-kill.

  I tried to help Elizabeth to the seat, but she wouldn’t budge on her own, and my arms had no strength. I had helped her all I could.

  I held up my hands to inspect the burns I felt across my palms. The burns were there, but the tip of my index finger wasn’t. I gasped for breath; I think that’s the only thing that kept Abdul’s coffee and specialty down.

  I couldn’t keep my mind from reviving the experience. Hand on the muzzle, the shot, the burn in my finger — that was it, I must have held the tip of my finger over the black hole! Then wrenching the gun free and swinging it like a bat through the ball of that man-boy’s head and then the burn on my hands, and the god on the ground, the crush of his skull now burned into my hands with the hit. A home run, we’re on our home run now.

  I ripped the cuff off my shirt and wrapped it around what was left of my finger. I said, “What about the other checkpoints?”

  “What?”

  I realized I had hardly hoarsed out a word. “The other checkpoints.”

  “Do not worry about the other checkpoints. We had no trouble coming down. You really got her, you really did!”

  I looked down to the floor, holding the remains of my right index finger in my left hand. Yes. I got her. Amir was right. Amir skirted backroads and neighborhoods up into the Christian hills to avoid the Lebanese Armed Forces at the green-line. The checkpoints we hit gave no trouble: only two were manned, and Amir slowed down for them, but then he floored it before the casual gods could get their thunderbolts warmed up.

  “To the embassy?” Amir asked.

  “No,” I told him, “Brian’s. Take us to Mr. Bowman’s.”

  73.

  Elizabeth began coming around as we drove up the last hill to Brian’s house. He must have alerted Commander Faid’s men that we might be coming back with a prize, because they picked us up safely past the last checkpoint. I’d never had an armed escort before. I never felt worse in my life. But Elizabeth perking up warmed me, brought some feeling back. Given how I felt, this was like any answered prayer: better not asked for to begin with.

  “How are you doing?”

  Elizabeth settled herself on the seat next to me. “Better, I guess. A little.”

  Amir said, “Better than in the hands of those pirates! Much better!”

  “This is Amir, my driver.”

  “You’re hurt.” She noticed first my hand, then my ear. “What happened?”

  “He’s a hero, that’s what happened!”

  “I’ll tell you later,” I told her. “Now rest.” She did, against me.

  Brian met the car in front of the house, the first time I had ever seen him act like a regular person, coming out to greet company. But even that he couldn’t let pass without a dash of gallantry. He opened Elizabeth’s door with a flourish and helped her out. “Amir,” he said inspecting the windshield, “you seem to be having car trouble.”

  That’s when Elizabeth threw off the blanket and looked up at him. “Brian Bowman?” she asked.

  “Of course. I’ve called for a bath for you.” But Elizabeth was already around the car to me, as I negotiated between the pain in my hands and the door handle.

  “Do you know who he is? Do you know?”

  “Someone who helped you out. Does anything else matter?” She didn’t say any more, but tore away from me and went toward the door, into the waiting arms of Brian’s butler.

  “What was that about?”

  Brian shrugged. “Family business. You have to tell me all about your escape.”

  I examined Brian’s face. He had not one bee sting. “All went well from your end?”

  “Not a problem worth reporting. I had to dump the hives out of the truck when the sluggish ones wouldn’t come out. I rolled the windows closed before the launch so the cab would be clear. Hot, but clear. Hopped in the truck and took off. The checkpoint guards seemed preoccupied when I left.” I nodded. “I’ll have a bath drawn for you too, and some food. Which do you want first?”

  74.

  The stings and her bath made Elizabeth drugged and sleepy, so I helped put her to bed. �
�Not a good man,” she mumbled to me.

  “Who?”

  “Bowman. Family trades hashish everywhere. Them and the Gamayels, the Hamadis, they grow and sell. They run the Christian Phalange for profit. They’re bad people.”

  “You wouldn’t be free without him.”

  “Watch out.” Elizabeth curled deep into the bed. “He owns people. The General . . .”

  What about the General? She was slipping into dark sleep. “Elizabeth? What about the General?”

  “The Syrians. The Syrian Army has him east, in Beka’a.” She drifted off. “Not done yet. . . .” She was gone, unwakeable, captive again.

  I sat on the bed with her ten minutes, holding her hand gingerly with the uninjured tips of the fingers on my left hand. My right hand curled in my lap like a cold cat. Brian’s people had dressed the wound as best they could, and Brian himself had sent out a party from Faid’s contingent to rustle up my doctor. I had gulped two pain pills and two snifters of brandy. The world was becoming a narrower place, it seemed, and one thing remained to be done.

  “Where is Amir?” I asked Brian. He sat out on the terrace where we talked that first time I came to his house. I floated. My eyes held to their narrow focus.

  “Tending to his car. We have to decide how you want to handle this release. It will only be minutes before word gets to the embassy and Harbison and then to the press. We need a strategy.”

  “I need to find the General first,” I said. I got the whirlies as I walk back in the door, through the house and out front toward the car. I knew Brian had followed me, because I could hear a echo of his voice in thin protest.