Beirut Incident

Chapter 3

The flight to Beirut was uneventful. I spent the two hours trying to push thoughts of Betty Emers from my mind with attempts at mapping out a plan of action once I got to Lebanon.

In my business, of course, you can't really plan too far ahead. Nonetheless, a certain amount of direction is needed to get started. After that, it's more like Russian roulette.

The first thing I would need would be a new identity. Actually it shouldn't be too difficult. Charlie Harkins was in Beirut, or had been last time I had been there, and Charlie was a good, working penman, very good with passports, false bills of lading, that sort of thing.

And Charlie owed me a favor. I could have implicated him when I broke up that Palestinian bunch bent on overturning the Lebanese government, but I had deliberately omitted his name from the list I'd turned over to the authorities. He was small fry anyway, and I figured he might come in handy some day. Those type of people always do.

My second problem in Beirut was a bit more formidable. Somehow, I had to get myself into the Mafia pipeline.

The best way — I guessed the only way — would be to pose as an Italian. Well, between my naturally dark complexion and Charlie's penmanship, that could be arranged.

I fingered the metal tube of heroin alongside the two identical tubes containing expensive cigars. That heroin could be my entree into the charmed circle.

My thoughts drifted back to Betty Emers and the muscle in my thigh jumped. I fell asleep, dreaming.

Even at nine o'clock at night, Beirut Airport was hot and dry.

The Government Business overlay on my passport drew a few raised eyebrows from the Lebanese customs personnel, but it got me through the long lines of white-robed Arabs and business-suited Europeans. Within minutes I was outside the terminal building and trying to cram my legs into the back seat of a tiny Fiat taxicab.

"The St. Georges Hotel," I ordered, "and for Chrissake, take it easy." I had been in Beirut before. The stretch of precipitous road that snakes down from the airport to the city edges along plummeting cliffs is one of the more hair-raising routes devised by man. The cab driver turned in his seat and flashed me a grin. He was wearing an open-necked, bright yellow sport shirt, but on his head was a tarboosh, the conical red fez of Egypt.

"Yes, sir," he laughed. "Yes, sir. We fly low and slow!"

"Just slow," I grumbled.

"Yes, sir!" he repeated, chuckling.

We catapulted out of the airport at top speed, tires squealing, and made the turn onto the Beirut road on two wheels. I sighed, sat back on the seat and forced my shoulder muscles to relax. I closed my eyes and tried to think of something else. It had been that kind of a day.

Beirut is an ancient Phoenician city dating back before 1500 B.C. According to legend it was the spot on which St. George slew the dragon. Later, the city had been captured by the Crusaders under Baldwin, and still later by Ibrahim Pasha, but it had withstood the siege guns of Saladin and defied the British and French. Bouncing around in the back seat of the hurtling Fiat as we plummeted down the Beirut road, I wondered what it held for me.

The St. Georges Hotel rises tall and elegant on the palm-fringed shore of the Mediterranean, oblivious to the filth and incredible poverty of the Thieves' Quarter, only a few blocks away.

I requested a southwest corner room above the sixth floor, got it, and registered, surrendering my passport to the unctious room clerk as is demanded by law in Beirut. He assured me it would be returned within a few hours. What he meant was, within a few hours after Beirut Security had checked it out. But that didn't bother me; I wasn't an Israeli spy out to blow up a bunch of Arabs.

Actually, I was an American spy out to blow up a bunch of Americans.

Once I had unpacked and checked the view of the moonlit Mediterranean from my balcony, I called Charlie Harkins and told him what I wanted.

He was hesitant "Well, you know I'd like to help you, Nick." There was a high nervous whine to his voice. There always had been. Charlie was a nervous, whining man. He went on: "It's just that… well… I'm sort of out of that business now and…"

"Bull!"

"Well, yeah, I mean, no. I mean, well, you see…"

I didn't care what his problem was. I let the volume of my voice drop several decibels, "You owe me one, Charlie."

"Yeah, Nick, yeah." He paused. I could almost hear him looking nervously over his shoulder to see if anyone else were listening. "It's just that I'm supposed to be working exclusively for one outfit now and not for anyone else and…"

"Charlie!" I let my impatience and irritation show.

"Okay, Nick, okay. Just this one time, just for you. You know where I live?"

"Could I have called you up if I didn't know where you lived?"

"Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. How about eleven o'clock then…and bring a picture of yourself with you."

I nodded into the phone. "Eleven o'clock." Hanging up, I lay back in the luxury of the white-slipped giant bed. Only hours before I had been worming my way up that giant sand dune on a death hunt for Hamid Raschid and the Dutchman. I liked this kind of assignment better, even if there wasn't a Betty Emers around.

I looked at my watch. Ten-thirty. Time to see Charlie. I rolled off the bed, made an instant decision that the lightweight tan suit I was wearing would do for the likes of Charlie Harkins, and was on my way. Once I finished with Charlie, I thought I might stop by the Black Cat Café or the Illustrious Arab. It had been a long time since I had had a taste of Beirut nightlife. But today had been a very long day. I hunched my shoulders forward, stretching the muscles. I just might go right to bed instead.

Charlie lived on Almendares Street, about six blocks from the hotel and just on the eastern edge of the Thieves Quarter. Number 173. I climbed three flights of the filthy, dimly lit staircase. It was dank, in the airless heat, with the stench of urine and rotting garbage.

At each landing, four once-green doors opened off a short hallway opposite a sagging wooden railing that jutted precariously over the stairwell. From behind the closed doors came muted shrieks, shouts, gales of laughter, furious obscenities in a dozen languages, blaring radios. On the second floor, a great crash splintered a faceless door just as I was passing by and four inches of axe blade protruded through the wooden paneling. Inside, a woman screamed, long and warbling, like an alley cat on the prowl.

I took the next flight of steps without pausing. I was in one of the biggest red-light districts in the world. Behind similar faceless doors in a thousand faceless tenements in the garbage-strewn streets of the Quarter, thousands upon thousands of whores vied with each other for the monetary rewards of satisfying the sexual needs of the dregs of humanity who had washed into the teeming slums of Beirut.

Beirut is at once the gem of the Mediterranean and the cesspool of the Mideast. Ahead of me a door flew open and a greasy fat man staggered out. He was stark naked except for a ludicrous tarboosh sitting tightly on his head. His face was twisted into an agony-ecstasy grimace, his eyes glazed with either pain or pleasure, I couldn't tell which. Behind him came a lithe jet-black girl, dressed only in hip-high leather boots, her heavy-lipped countenance a phlegmatic mask as she stalked relentlessly after the fat Arab. Twice she flicked her wrist and twice a three-lashed whip, tiny, dainty and excruciating, slicked out and around the Arab's larded thighs. A gasp of pain escaped him and six tiny rivulets of blood etched his shaking flesh.

The Arab staggered past me, oblivious to anything but his own torturous joy. The girl stalked behind him, poker-faced. She couldn't have been over 15 years old.

I told my stomach to forget it and went up the last flight of stairs. Here a single doorway blocked the staircase. I pushed the buzzer. Charlie Harkins had occupied the entire third floor for as long as I had known him. In the few seconds before he answered, a picture of the sprawling squalor of his loft-like apartment flashed through my mind: His brightly-lit bench, with its cameras, brushes, pens, and engraving equipment were always there like an island of calm among the dirty socks and underwear, some of which, I remembered, looked as if they had been used to wipe clean the exquisitely tooled little platen press in the corner.

This time, it took me a moment to recognize the little man who opened the door. Charlie had changed. Gone were the sunken cheeks, the three-day stubble of gray beard he had always seemed to maintain. Even the dead, hopeless look in his eyes was gone. Charlie Harkins now looked bright, wary perhaps, but no longer as terrified of life as he had been over the years I had known him.

He wore a lightweight plaid sports jacket, neatly pressed grey flannel trousers and brightly shined black shoes. This was not the Charlie Harkins I had known. I was impressed.

He ushered me in with a tentative handshake. At least that hadn't changed.

The apartment had, however. What had been a littered mess was now neat and clean. A fresh green rug covered the old scarred floorboards and the walls were painted a neat off-white. Inexpensive but obviously new furniture was placed strategically to break up the barnlike lines of the big room… a coffee table, several chairs, two couches, a long, low, rectangular platform bed in one corner.

What had once served haphazardly as Charlie's work corner was now partitioned off with louvered panels and, from the evidence escaping through the openings of the partitions, vividly lit.

I raised my eyebrows, looking around. "Looks like you've been doing pretty well, Charlie."

He smiled nervously. "Well… uh… business has been pretty good, Nick." His eyes brightened. "I've got a new assistant now and things have really been going all right…" His voice trailed off.

I grinned at him. "It would take more than a new assistant to do this to you, Charlie." I waved my hand at the new decor. "Off hand, I'd say that for once in your life you've found something steady."

He ducked his head. "Well…"

It wasn't common to find a forger with a steady business. That sort of work tends to go in sudden spurts and long stoppages. What it probably meant was that Charlie had somehow gotten into the counterfeit game. Personally, I didn't care what he was doing as long as I got what I came for.

He must have been reading my mind. "Uh… I'm not so sure I can do this, Nick."

I gave him a friendly smile and sat down on one of the double-ended sofas that sat at right angles with its twin, making a false corner in the middle of the living room. "Sure you can, Charlie," I said easily.

Taking Wilhelmina out of her holster, I waved it carelessly in the air. "If you don't, I'll kill you." I wouldn't have of course. I don't go around killing people for something like that, particularly little people like Charlie Harkins. But then, Charlie didn't know that. All he knew was that I could kill people on occasion. The thought apparently occurred to him.

He thrust out a pleading palm. "Okay, Nick, okay. It's just that I'm not… well, anyway…"

"Okay." I reholstered Wilhelmina and leaned forward, my elbows on my knees. "I need a whole new identity, Charlie."

He nodded.

"When I leave here tonight, I'm going to be Nick Cartano, originally from Palermo, more recently from the French Foreign Legion. Leave me about a year or so between the Foreign Legion and now. I can fake that." The fewer actual facts people had to check back on, the better off I would be.

Harkins frowned and pulled at his chin. "That means a passport, discharge papers… what else?"

I ticked them off on my fingers. "I'll need personal letters from my family in Palermo, from a girl in Syracuse, a girl from St. Lo. I want a driver's permit from St. Lo, clothes from France, an old suitcase, and an old wallet."

Charlie looked distressed. "Gee, Nick, I can get that stuff all right, I guess, but it will take some time. I'm not supposed to being doing anything for anybody else now and I'll have to go slow and… uh…"

Again, I got the impression that Charlie was working steadily for someone else. But at the moment, I couldn't have cared less.

"I want it tonight, Charlie," I said.

He sighed in exasperation, started to say something, then thought the better of it and pursed his lips, thinking. "I can do the passport and the discharge papers, all right," he finally said. "There's enough demand for those that I've got forms on hand, but…"

"Get them," I interrupted.

He looked at me dismally for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders in resignation. "I'll try."

Some people just won't do anything unless you lean on them. I leaned on Charlie and about midnight that night I walked out of that plastic elegance into the fetid streets of the Quarter as Nick Cartano. A phone call to our embassy would take care of my old passport and the few belongings I had left in the Hotel St. Georges. From now until I finished this job, I was Nick Cartano, a footloose Sicilian with a cloudy past.

I whistled a light Italian tune as I went down the street.

I moved into the Hotel Roma and waited. If there was a stream of Sicilians pouring through Beirut on their way to America, they would be coming through the Roma. The Roma in Beirut is an irresistible attraction for Italians, as if the front desk were decorated with cloves of garlic. Actually, the way it smells, it could be.

For all my planning, however, I met Louie Lazaro by pure chance the very next day.

It was one of those flatly hot days you find so often along the coast of Lebanon. The scorching blast of the desert is there, sand dry and fiercely hot, but the cool blue of the Mediterranean lessens the impact.

On the sidewalk in front of me, hawk-visaged Bedouins, their black abayas trimmed with gold brocade, shouldered their way past sleek Levantine businessmen; flagrantly mustached merchants bustled by, talking excitedly in French; here and there appeared tarbooshes, their wearers sometimes in severely cut Western suits, sometimes in galibeahs, the ever present nightgown-like robe. On the curb, a legless beggar wallowed in the street's accumulated filth, wailing, "Bahksheesh, bahksheesh," at each passer-by, his palms upturned in supplication and his rheumy eyes beseeching. In the street, a veiled old haridan perched high on a mangy camel that plodded along disconsolately, oblivious to the taxis dodging wildly through the narrow street, raucous horns honking in dissonance.

Across the street, two American girls were taking pictures of a Negebian family group as it paraded slowly down the street, the women balancing huge earthen jars on their heads, both men and women in the soft oranges and blues these gentle people so often affect in their robes and turbans. In the distance, where Almendares Street curves southward toward the St. Georges, the magnificent white sand beach was dotted with sunbathers. Like swirling ants on the blue glass sea, I could see two water skiers trailing their toy-like boats on invisible threads.

It happened suddenly: A taxi whipping blindly around the comer, the driver fighting the wheel as he swerved into the middle of the street to avoid the camel and then see-sawing back to miss an oncoming car. Tires screeching, the cab hurtled out of control in a careening side skid toward the beggar groveling on the curb.

Instinctively I moved, darting toward him in a headlong dive, half-shoving, half-throwing the Arab out of the path of the taxi and tumbling after him into the gutter as the cab smashed across the sidewalk and slammed against the stucco wall of the abutting building in a shrieking agony of rending metal.

For a moment, the world of Almendares Street was stunned into a wax museum tableau. Then a woman wailed, a long drawn-out moan that released her fear and seemed to echo the relief in the crowded street. I lay motionless for a moment, mentally counting my arms and legs. They all seemed to be there, though my forehead felt as if it had taken quite a thumping.

I got up slowly, testing all my working parts. No bones seemed to be broken, no joints sprained, so I moved over to peer through the front door window of the cab, jammed grotesquely against the unyielding stucco.

A multi-lingual babel swelled behind me as I ripped open the door and, as gently as I could, pulled the driver from behind the wheel. Miraculously, he seemed unscathed, only stunned. There was an ashen cast to his olive face as he leaned unsteadily against the wall, a tassled tarboosh improbably cocked over one eye, staring incomprehensively at the wreck of his livelihood.

Satisfied that he was in no immediate distress. T turned my attention to the beggar who lay writhing on his back in the gutter, too much in pain to help himself or, perhaps, too weak. God knows, he was as thin as any starving man I have ever seen. There was quite a lot of blood on his face, most of it from a deep gash high on his cheekbone, and he was moaning piteously. When he saw me leaning over him, however, he half-raised himself on one elbow and thrust out his other hand.

"Bahksheesh, sadiki," he sobbed. "Bahksheesh! Bahksheesh!"

I turned away, revolted. In New Delhi and Bombay I have seen the living heaps of bones and bloated bellies that lie in the streets awaiting death by starvation, but even they have more human dignity than the beggars of Beirut.

I started to move away, but a hand on my arm detained me. It belonged to a short, pudgy little man with a cherubic face and eyes as black as his hair. He wore a black silk suit, a white shirt and white tie, incongruous in the heat of Beirut.

"Momento," he said excitedly, his head bobbing up and down as if to lend emphasis. "Momento, per favore."

Then he switched from Italian to French. "Vous vous êtes fait du mal?" His accent was atrocious.

"Je me suis blessé les genous, je crois," I answered, flexing my knees carefully. I rubbed my head. "Et quelque chose bien solide m'a cogné la tête. Mais ce n'est pas grave."

He nodded, frowning but grinning at the same time. I guessed that his comprehension wasn't much better than his accent. He still had one hand on my arm. "Speak English?" he asked hopefully.

I nodded, amused.

"Great! Great!" He fairly bubbled with enthusiasm. "I just wanted to say that was the bravest thing I've ever seen. Fantastic! You moved so fast, so quick!" He was quite carried away by the whole thing.

I laughed. "Just reflex action, I guess." And it had been, of course.

"No!" he exclaimed. "It was courage. I mean, that was real guts, man!" He pulled an expensive cigarette case from his inside coat pocket, flipped it open and proferred it to me.

I took a cigarette, and bent to take a light from his eager fingers. I didn't quite know what he was after, but he was amusing.

"Those were the greatest reflexes I've ever seen." His eyes shone with excitement. "Are you a fighter or something? Or an acrobat? A pilot?"

I had to laugh. "No, I…" Let's see. What the hell was I? Right now, I was Nick Cartano, formerly of Palermo, more recently of the Foreign Legion, currently… currently available.

"No, I'm none of those things," I said I pushed through the throng that had gathered around the wrecked cab and the stunned driver and strode down the sidewalk. The little man scurried to keep pace.

In mid-stride, he stuck out his hand. "I'm Louie Lazaro," he said. "What's your name?"

I shook his hand unenthusiastically, still walking. "Nick Cartano. How do you do."

"Cartano? Hey, man, are you Italian, too?"

I shook my head. "Siciliano."

"Hey, great! I'm Sicilian, too. Or… I mean, my parents were from Sicily. I'm really American."

That hadn't been too hard to figure out. Then a thought struck me and I suddenly became more amiable. It was true that not every American of Sicilian background in Beirut would have a connection with the Mafia pipeline I was looking for, but it was equally true that almost any Sicilian in Beirut could possibly aim me in the right direction, either inadvertently — or intentionally. One Sicilian, it was reasonable to assume, could lead to another.

"No kidding!" I replied with my best look-at-me-I'm-a-delightful-guy smile. "I lived there a long time myself. New Orleans. Prescott, Arizona. Los Angeles. All over."

"Great! Great!"

This guy couldn't be for real.

"Jeez!" he said. "Two Sicilian-Americans in Beirut and we meet right in the middle of the street. It's a small goddamned world, you know?"

I nodded, grinning. "It sure is." I spotted the Mediterranean, the tiny little café on the corner of Almendares and Fuad, and gestured toward the beaded doorway. "What do you say we split a bottle of wine together?"

"Great!" he exclaimed. "In fact, I'll buy."

"Okay, man, you're on," I replied with make-believe enthusiasm.