Part 15 (1/2)
”They wanted to mike me - Ziog was miked, 1409 was clean. No good to them, so they moved me up. They thought I was an Arab spy!”
”Why would they think that?”
”Because of my father. He was a Lawrence man. They knew that. They'd decided. That's what they do. Photograph your room.”
I scarcely remember the rest of lunch. I don't remember what we ate or what else we drank or anything at all. I have a recollection of Giles extolling Mabel at great length as the perfect Service wife, but perhaps that was my conscience. All I really remember is the two of us side by side in Giles's room back at Head Office, and Personnel standing in front of Giles's steel cupboard with the door removed, and the thirty-two missing files crammed higgledy-piggledy into the shelves - all the files Giles hadn't been able to cope with while he was having what Smiley called his ”Force Twelve nervous breakdown” in place.
And the reason for it, as I learned later? Giles too had found his Monica. What had unhinged him, ostensibly, was his pa.s.sion for a twenty-year-old girl in his village. His love for her, his guilt and despair had dictated that he could no longer function. He had continued going through the day's motions - naturally, he was a soldier - but his mind wouldn't play any more. It had acquired its own preoccupations, even if he wouldn't own to them.
What else had unhinged him, I leave that to you, and to our in-house shrinks who seem to be daily gaining ground. Something to do, perhaps, with the gap between our dreams and our realities. Something to do with the gap between what Giles longed for when he was young, and what he'd got now that he was nearly old. And the hard truth was, Giles had frightened me. I felt he had gone ahead of me down the road I myself was treading. I felt it as I drove to the airport; I felt it on the plane while I thought about my mother. And downed several in-flight whiskies in order not to feel it more.
I was still feeling it as I set out my own meagre wardrobe in Room 607 at the Commodore Hotel, Beirut, and the telephone began ringing a few inches from my head. As I picked up the receiver, I had a wayward fancy I was going to hear Ahmed at the front desk telling me I had been allocated a new room on floor twenty-one. I was wrong. Surreal episode number two had just announced itself.
Shooting had started, semi-automatic on the move. Most likely a bunch of kids in a j.a.panese pickup hosing down the neighbourhood with AK 47s. It was one of those seasons in Beirut when you could set your watch by the first excitements of the evening. But I had never minded too much about the shooting. Shooting has a logic, if a haphazard one. It's directed at you, or away from you. My personal phobia was car bombs-never knowing, as you hurried along a pavement or dawdled in the sweating, crawling traffic, whether a parked car was going to take out the entire block with one huge heave, and leave you in such tiny shreds that there was nothing worth a body bag, let alone a burial. The thing you noticed about car bombs - I mean afterwards - was shoes. People blown clean out of them, but the shoes intact. So that even after the bits of body had been picked out and taken away, there was still the odd pair or two of wearable shoes among the broken gla.s.s and smashed false teeth and shreds of someone's suit. A little machine-gun fire, like now, or the odd hand-held rocket, didn't trouble me as much as it did some people.
I lifted the receiver and when I heard a woman's voice I quickened, not only because of my domestic ambiguities but because my errand was to trace a German woman - the same Britta who had been taking lessons in terror in the Shuf Mountains.
But it was not Britta. It was not Monica and not Mabel. The voice was middle-American and scared. And I was Peter, remember-Peter Carter, from a great British newspaper, even if its local correspondent had never heard of me. I was reminding myself of this as I listened to her.
”Peter, for Christ's sake, I need to be with you,” she said in a single rush of breath. ”Peter, where the f.u.c.k have you been?”
A rattle of heavy machine-gun fire broke out, to be promptly silenced by the smack of a rocket-propelled grenade. The voice on the phone resumed in greater agitation.
”Jesus, Peter, why don't you call me? Okay, I said some s.h.i.+tty things. I spoiled your copy. I'm sorry. I mean, Jesus, what are we? Children? You know how I hate this stuff.”
A frenzy of rifle fire. Sometimes the kids just shot into the sky for effect.
Her voice rose steeply. ”Talk to me, Peter! Tell me something funny, will you, please? Something funny must be happening somewhere in the world! Peter, will you please answer me? You're not dead are you? You're not lying on the floor with your head blown off? Just nod for no. I don't want to die alone, Peter. I'm sociable. I love sociably, I die sociably. Peter, answer me. Please.”
”What room are you calling?”
I said. Dead silence. The really dead silence that gathers between bursts of gunfire. ”Who is this?” she demanded. ”This is Peter, but I don't think I'm your Peter. What room are you calling?”
”This room.”
”What number?”
”Room 607.”
”I'm afraid he must have checked out. I arrived in Beirut this afternoon. This is the room they gave me.”
A grenade exploded, answered by another. Out in the street, perhaps three blocks away, somebody screamed seriously. The scream ended.
”Is he dead?” she whispered. I didn't answer. ”Could have been a woman,” she said. ”Could have been,” I agreed. ”Who are you? You British?”
”Yes.”
Peter is too, I thought, without knowing why. ”What do you do?”
”For a living?”
”Just talk to me. Keep talking.”
”I'm a journalist,” I said. ”Like Peter?”
”I don't know what kind of journalist he is.”
”He's tough. The danger school. Are you tough?”
”Some things scare me, some don't.”
”Mice?”
”Mice scare me stiff.”
”Are you good?”
”As good as the news, I suppose. I don't write much any more. I'm editorial these days.”
”Married?”
”Are you?”
”Yes.”
”To Peter?”
”No, not Peter.”
”How long have you known him?”
”My husband?”
”No. Peter,” I said. I did not ask myself why I was more interested in her adultery than her marriage.
”You don't time things like that out here,” she said. ”A year, a couple of years-you don't talk that way. Not in Beirut. You're married too, aren't you? You didn't want to tell me till I told you first.”
”Yes, I am.”
”So tell me about her.”
”My wife?”
”Sure. Do you love her? Is she tall? Great skin? Very British, stiff upper lip?”
I told her some harmless things about Mabel and invented some others, hating myself.
”I mean, who on earth can believe in s.e.x after fifteen years of the same person?”
she said.