Beehive Page 8

  When I was in college, I met with professors only when I needed a favor, and often as not one of the assistant coaches came with and actually did the asking for me. I never needed to plead to pass a course, but I always needed more time than I had to complete the work. I dreaded professors. I knew they knew I knew nothing.

  The professor stood and shook my hand. “A week in Beirut and he’ll be an expert too. You’ve undertaken a very difficult and dangerous job, Mr. Stutzer. I admire you.”

  Against the wall, the big man burrowed his fingernails into his scalp, as though our simple conversation meant something incomprehensibly horrible.

  “Call me Ron, Professor.”

  His face opened in pleasure. “And my name is Ahmad. I recommend the asparagus wrapped in sturgeon. I’ll eat the whole plate if you don’t fight me for it.”

  The plate was a foot and a half around and piled high. The whole crew couldn’t finish it. “Let’s just divide it up now and use them for poker chips.”

  The professor laughed, “You didn’t promise me a sense of humor, Mr. Jacobs. Come, Ron, sit down and let’s talk.”

  41.

  Before I could negotiate the chair next to Nusanti, the big man approached. “So you’re going into Lebanon.” His eyes were red, white and blue.

  I looked to Jacobs. “Ron, this is Bengal.” You could tell the name embarrassed Jacobs.

  “Bengal?”

  “Code name. He’s our guerrilla warfare expert. He’s getting off in Paris.”

  I shook Bengal’s hand and mine got lost in his. “You’re the one who will show me about the guns.”

  His big head rocked. Jacobs said, “Bengal knows everything about weapons. Not missiles, you know, just guns.”

  “And knives, string, staple guns, poison, slingshots, you name it.”

  “String?” He pinched his throat and gagged. “Ah,” I said, “string.”

  “I did eight years in Nam, three in Argentina, three in Honduras, two in Afghanistan and the last half a dozen chasing trouble around the world for these bozos.”

  “Never played football?”

  “Pansy game for college boys.” But he smiled, like he wanted to play, just never did. “You never made it pro, right? I work with some guys made it pro.”

  “Yeah, not big enough, not fast enough.”

  He glanced at Nusanti. “Too much college learning.”

  “Maybe, yeah.”

  “Well, you go back to class. When you get done I’ll tell you what you really need to know.”

  The professor told me all he knew about Lebanon, it seemed, about the people, the history, the land, the cities, the laws, the leaders, the pacts. We ate, we drank, I listened and worried: What will stop these people in quest of a peaceful home from gunning me down to get it?

  That’s what I asked Bengal after the professor gave up on me and went to bed.

  “Nothing. They might shoot you for nothing at all.”

  “So why was I asked to do this job?”

  “Because I won’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I set foot in that place I’m meat. I’m known and those guys have no honor. If I buy it in the course of duty, I can buy that, but just for stepping off a plane? Fuck no.”

  “So none of the professionals go?”

  “Oh, you can find some crazy freelancers to do anything, even go to Lebanon, but the fat man don’t want them working for him.”

  “Am I crazy to go?”

  He eyed me. “As I get the story, you’re in it for the fat man’s daughter. Even that ass isn’t worth Lebanon, so you must be in love with her. That’s proof to me you’re crazy. You want to learn something about guns?”

  The new metal of the weaponry, harder than the jet’s fuselage, reflected nothing, like my memory. I couldn’t compare any part of the past day and a half to anything that had gone before. ‘Before’ never happened. Everything was now. Bengal. The professor’s openness. Destination. The sturgeon. The plane. Everything my ears absorbed, my eyes lighted on, my mouth enclosed, I had never heard, seen, tasted before.

  Bees, when left to their own, will never build supers and frames and so on. A swarm hunts for a cool, dark protected alcove — the hollow of a tree, a miniature cave — when they move away from home. But when a beekeeper sets up a hive, the bees don’t die from the strangeness of it all. They take the preformed frames as a blessed convenience and build from them. They guard the narrow entrance to the hive just as they would a propolis-enshrouded opening in the wild. When midnight came, thirty thousand feet above the ocean, I accepted Jacobs’ offer of the master bedroom, where my bags had been neatly opened and my toiletries carefully laid out. I hardly had time to notice the perfection of the bed’s cotton-and-linen sheets before a common sleep pushed all sense of strangeness aside.

  42.

  My long sleep must have pushed the strangeness not only aside, but into a pile, because when I stepped off the airplane I stepped right into it. Maybe back in the wild west, or today in some neighborhoods in American cities, people appreciate the authority of a gun, but I doubt observing other people wielding Saturday Night Specials has the same impact as a machine gun being used as a direction marker by a fifteen-year-old boy. Everywhere you look around the airport in Beirut, young boys in torn uniforms wave weapons around like sticks. If they want people to exit through a door instead of through the rubble, they point the little doughnut end of the barrel at you and they whisk it off towards the path they want you to take.

  When a policemen comes into the convenience store while I’m there, looking for a cup of coffee and something sweet, I look at his face, his badge and his gun. My eyes linger on the gun a long time. Even tucked snugly into that thick leather holster, the polish of the metal speaks a kind of reverence for the power it has. We shine silver and gold, because they are powerful, but we don’t polish raw steel except when we make it into a weapon.

  American policemen are fit youngsters or experienced pot-bellies. Their faces communicate their authority. The badge and the gun only back it up. But the children of Lebanon have no authority except their guns. They’re slight, dull boys, thrilled by the powerful impression the dark hole at the end of their weapons will make on a stranger. They toss the guns around, they rest their chins on the barrels, they scratch themselves with the sights. With their weapons, they are casual gods, guarding a country which announces at its border that nothing is safe and authority rests only on a trigger.

  I had the chance to study the boys because the Lebanese did not want the plane bearing Americans on the ground for long. We unloaded my bags and several crates of goods for the American Embassy and tucked them against what had been a wall. A boy-god sat on a high stone nearby, kicking his authority like a pendulum between his legs.

  “I don’t know what’s keeping them,” Jacobs said to me. “The Embassy people like to be prompt.”

  The professor sweated uncomfortably and tried to hide in the small available shade. Very nearly two days had passed on the calendar, but a quarter of that was time-zone shift. Early evening blistered off the tarmac. “I’ll go inside and call,” Nusanti volunteered. “I want a quick look around anyway.”

  The boy with the gun kept staring at us. “This place gives me the creeps,” Jacobs muttered. His nighttime cliché, muttered in bright light, gave me the same feeling. He said, “You never know when something might blow.”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “Me? No. I don’t like going places where you have to worry about your cab driver’s connections.”

  An older soldier, in a better uniform and with his automatic handgun still in his cloth-and-metal holster, beleaguered the young guard until he got off the wall and stood more militarily. When the older one came over to us, I saw he was hardly twenty. I couldn’t tell what the insignias he wore meant, but he had a lot of them. He spoke to
us in clipped Arabic, or that’s what I guessed it was.

  “We don’t speak your language.” Jacobs tried gesturing what he said.

  The adolescent major puffed once at us and then screamed, “Basbot! Basbot!”

  “Passport?” I asked Jacobs.

  “I guess.”

  I turned to open my small overnight case. Before I could bring my hand to the zipper I heard a thin metallic click. I looked back. The soldier had a very square gun in his very square hand. I pulled my hands back from the bag like it was made of acid. “My passport is in there.” I pointed with one finger, my hands still withdrawn.

  “Basbot!” he screamed again.

  This time I moved slowly, like a dance of unpacking. My papers sat right on top, but it still felt like ten minutes getting them out. I never had a passport before I met Elizabeth. She wanted to take a vacation to Jamaica, so I went and got one. We never got to go, because something came up with her work. Now her work put it to use.

  I handed over my virgin passport into which Jacobs had stapled a document saying I was attached to the US mission and had diplomatic immunity. I had no idea what good that would do me.

  Even the major used his gun as a pointer, running it like a finger along the information in my passport. He didn’t even unfold the diplomatic papers. He tapped my name twice and then prodded the crates with the toes of his boot. Boots! I thought, feeling my own feet burn through the soles of my loafers. I jumped when he barked at me and bumped against Jacobs. I felt him trembling through his cruisewear. The major barked again. Jacobs said, “I think he wants to search them.”

  “They’re not supposed to, right? That’s a diplomatic packet.”

  The man started kicking the crates. I understood the boots.

  Just then the professor came out. He said something to the soldier in Arabic. The major whirled around to face the professor and, after a flash shock at this American face, the two began howling and gesturing at once. In a minute it was over. The major hurled down my passport and walked away, stopping by the young boy with the gun to send him over to us, and the professor explained what happened. “People use American and diplomatic IDs to plant bombs or transport weapons, he says, though I don’t believe him. He knows Noah and I are leaving you behind; his real job here was to get us on the plane and out of here. Beirut is a small town, when it comes to Westerners. He said, ‘This is no city for an American fool. He could die here.’”

  The young boy came up close to the professor and said something sweet and high.

  “Time to go,” Ahmad told Jacobs.

  “I’m Jewish,” Jacobs told me, clasping me around the shoulder. “They don’t like Jews here. Good luck.”

  “Good luck,” the professor echoed. “Call if you need anything. The sergeant was right: this is a dangerous place.”

  Ahmad and Noah started to the plane. “Professor!” I called out. The boy blocked my way with the barrel of his gun. I could have removed his head with one arm, if it hadn’t been for the gun. Fortunately Ahmad heard me.

  “Yes?”

  “Where’s my driver?”

  “Oh, yes! A little delay at a checkpoint. They’ll be here very soon. And Ron?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “From now on keep your papers in your front pocket. Out of sight, but no place you could hide a weapon.”

  I picked up my passport and sat down, chasing my stares from the young god’s gun to the departing plane. When Elizabeth’s father’s jet taxied away, I felt certain that time had stopped, that nothing came next. If, in some distant millennia, an interstellar traveller happened on earth they would find me just as I sat, surrounded by my crates and luggage, guarded by a child, and unspeakably alone.

  43.

  But a heartbeat after I lost sight of the jet, I heard my name. It came from a small muscular woman in a straight black skirt and a colorless blouse. Her eyes had an odd cast to them, as though they had been brown but lost interest and faded to beige. She had heat-brittle hair, burnished skin and a human smile, a relief from the boy-gods. I swear she was pound-for-pound as strong as me, though when I stood I dwarfed her. She put up a hand. “Andrea Kowalski. I’m military, but we don’t wear uniforms here. Too dangerous. This all?”

  “Just the two crates and my bags.”

  “The van’s coming through the west checkpoint. Sorry it took so long getting down here, but no one in Beirut believes a van is just a van. It’s a tank, or a carrier, or a bomb. Panel vans make good car-bombs; the shrapnel really flies. Do you have any idea where you are?”

  “Outside of Lebanon, you mean?”

  “I mean in Lebanon.” She pointed past the guard and his gun toward the airstrip. “That’s west; the Mediterranean is just beyond there. West Beirut is Muslim, East is Christian. You better have a good sense of direction or a good compass if you plan to stay here long.”

  “Not more than a week, if I can help it.”

  “They all say that. Here’s the van.”

  Oddly, the boy with the gun helped Andrea, me and the driver Mahmet load up. We sat three across in the front and were waved through the gate off the field. After a couple of turns we mounted a wide and almost abandoned avenue clustered with low flat concrete and stucco homes. Every hundred yards or so, what had been a larger building glowered in a heap. Pretty little houses and big heaps gave way to a belt of rubble for almost a mile along the road. The avenue narrowed to a rock-strewn road, and we entered the checkpoint. Three gun barrels came in the windows as we stopped, and the faces behind them looked like they belonged to my airport guard’s younger brothers.

  Mahmet explained who we were and what we carried. I pulled my passport from my pocket too slowly for the elder boy at my window. His gun barrel came in right under my nose. I smelled dust and oil and powder. That gun had been fired, I would bet. He pulled the barrel back and pointed it at my face. I froze, a little metal zero aimed at my forehead.

  “Pizpo! Pizpo!” the younger soldier said to me. I whipped it out and fumbled it over to the window. The elder turned his back on the van to look at the pages, but he kept one hand on his gun and the barrel in my face. The guard on the other side had already finished with Andrea and Mahmet. Mahmet raced the engine and untensed the clutch a hair. The van lurched forward an inch. My passport came flying back through the window, and we raced off into the afternoon heat.

  “The Amal,” Andrea explained. “Most of them can’t read. They treat every passport like ‘Dick and Jane.’ Better keep it out; we got a few more checkpoints before we get home.”

  The American Embassy put me up in a small house in the compound, but just for the first night, Andrea explained. “We’ll review your options tomorrow and find a hotel for you.”

  “There are hotels here?”

  “They aren’t all gone yet. None good, but they all have bars, unless Hezbollah closes one down for the night.”

  A deep rumble bounced around us, like the crash of a distant tidal wave. “What was that?”

  “Car bomb, likely, but that must have been three, four miles away. Nothing to worry about. Wash, relax, sleep. I’ll be back to fetch you in the morning.”

  44.

  I had no idea what time it was when Andrea knocked on my door. My sleep had been either good or bad, I couldn’t tell which. I might have dreamed the explosions and rumbles, in which case I slept horribly; or I might have woken briefly out of a coddling slumber when I heard them.

  “Terrorists sleep late,” Andrea said when I opened the door, “because they’re up all night. You can tell the good people by the hours they keep, so wake up.”

  “Do I have to be alert to qualify for good?”

  “Just awake. Got a meeting at six-thirty. Hustle a little.”

  “What time is it now?”

  “Six thirty-five.”

  Andrea walked me down the compound paths. Th
e buildings seemed to have grown out of the very dirt. Everywhere I looked I saw red-eyed soldiers wearing baggy fatigues. Even Andrea was in a bit of a uniform; the rare attentive soldier saluted her. The guarded compound seemed very small in the early light. The occasional tree, struggling up from the pale, clay dirt, made it feel smaller still. If all the buildings got shelled to oblivion, they’d still have to annex some territory beyond the walls to set up a football field.

  The largest of the buildings skulked against the ground in the shadow of a wall. The sign by the door said ‘Headquarters,’ but they couldn’t have tried to make the place less imposing.

  Not so inside. The place sparkled. Every door bore a label. “I’ll be in there when you get done,” Andrea told me, pointing to the room marked ‘Communications.’ Three doors down across the hall we entered a room marked ‘Commander.’ “Lieutenant Colonel Harbison, Ron Stutzer. Ron, the chief.”

  I shook hands with a rail-thin man in his mid-forties. His eyes glinted as though freshly oiled. His hair had been reddish-blond in his youth and now fell lank and pale. He had no eyebrows to speak of.

  “That will be all, Captain.”

  Andrea saluted. “Look for me later,” she whispered, slipping out.

  The chief eyed me silently and then walked behind his desk to his chair. The desk buried him in a corner, clear, I realized, of the only window in the room. Out the window, a yard beyond the screen, I saw remnants of hay stuck in the mortar of the surrounding wall. Tall grass grew between the window and the wall. I stood until the chief indicated a chair.

  No sooner did I settle down than he stood up. His voice flowed smooth but strident, like an evangelist. “The United States government has recommended American citizens leave Lebanon. The State Department discourages travel here. I know how you came, but I can’t say I endorse your presence here. We will help any American citizen interested in leaving Lebanon, but you have no interest in leaving. We will not help you.”