Numbered Account Page 26

  Ortiga spots the boats one half mile out. A shout goes up from the exhausted men.

  Johnny Burke looks to Nick. “Semper fi,” he says weakly.

  Nick squeezes the Kentuckian’s hand. “You’re home, kid. Be on board in no time.”

  Ortiga orders “A” squad to form up. The men must remain inside the line of vegetation until the boats are on the sand. As they move out, a hailstorm of fire erupts from a grove of bent palms to their left. More shots come from a stand of rubber trees behind them. The marines are caught in a classic enfilade, effectively cut off from the beach.

  Nick yells for his men to dig in. “This is the last dance! Fire at will!”

  Eight marines loose the fury of their weapons at the hidden enemy. The air is afire with exploding shells. Ortiga launches a grenade from the snout of his rifle. Nick empties a clip into the grove and advances toward the beach. He can hear the scream of his enemy above the shooting. He rejoices in the tumult.

  The first landing craft is on the beach. “A” squad sprints toward it, free hands clamping helmets to their heads. Nick and Ortiga provide covering fire. The first landing craft is away, the motor opened to full throttle, white wake trailing.

  A second craft slides onto the sand. Nick pulls Burke onto his shoulders for the final dash to the beach. Emerging from the underbrush, he stumbles in the sand. Ortiga motions for him to hurry, putting the M-16 to his shoulder and spraying the jungle with disciplined bursts of fire. Nick grunts as he pushes his boots into the fine white sand. He sees the craft, waves to the skipper. He is there. And then he is sailing through the air, a hot wind lashing at his back. He has been swallowed by a mighty roar, enveloped in a blast furnace of fire and grit. Air is sucked from his lungs. Time stops.

  Nick’s face is buried in the sand. Ortiga is lifting his shoulder. “You kicking, sir?”

  “Where’s Burke?” Nick yells. “Where’s Burke?”

  “Ain’t nothing left of him,” Ortiga screams. “We gotta get to the boat, Lieutenant. Now!”

  Nick looks to his right. Burke’s torso sprawls in a patch of sand black with blood. His legs and arms are missing, cropped off neatly at the trunk. His back is pocked with chunks of shrapnel, flesh sizzling with molten lead. The smell makes Nick vomit. He tells himself to hustle to the boat, to get off his butt and motor to the landing craft, but his legs refuse to obey his commands. There is something wrong with him. He looks at his right knee. Oh God, he thinks. I’ve been hit. The fabric of his uniform is torn in a hundred places, the flesh ripped into too many jagged strands and burned black as coal. Blood, this time his own, jets in a small but determined geyser. A band of moist cartilage glimmers in the afternoon sun. Nick grabs the Kentuckian’s rifle and rams the barrel into the sand, an impromptu crutch. He stands and sees only white, and then a fuzzy curtain of gray. An internal shrieking more deafening than any noise he has ever heard fills his ears. Ortiga’s arm is around him. Together they stagger the last paces to the landing craft. The craft’s skipper drags the black stump that is Burke’s body to the rubber dinghy.

  They are away.

  The shooting has stopped.

  The pain begins a hundred yards to sea.

  Lying in the prow of the craft, Nick dodges unconsciousness for the long ride to theGuam. Every wave crested means a spasm of agony, every swell, a rip current of nausea. His right knee is torn apart. His lower leg shattered. A shard of ivory bone pushes through the flesh as if anxious to test the warm afternoon air. Nick does not moan. For a few minutes the pain clears his mind. It allows the implications of the day’s events to take form.

  The assassination of Enrile. The murder of his wife and daughter. The failure of theGuam to respond to Nick’s emergency calls. All were planned. All were preordained.

  Nick envisions Keely hidden inside the radio room for eighteen hours; he hears Keely relaying news of Enrile’s arrival, promising that the insurgent would be alone; he imagines Keely turning off the radio, refusing to respond to the rescue call of nine marines, one gravely wounded. Why? Nick screams. Why?

  Rocking in the prow of the bucking craft, he vows to find the answers. He promises to make responsible those who have sanctioned the murder of Enrile and the betrayal that took the life of Johnny Burke.

  # # #

  At first, Nick did not hear the light knock on his door. His eyes were open, staring at the papers on his desk, but he saw only blurred images of his past. When the knock came a second time, this time louder and more insistent, he blinked and told the visitor to come in. He looked up to see the door to his office already open, and the blond head of Sylvia Schon peering anxiously round the corner.

  “Are you okay? I’ve been knocking for ten seconds.”

  Nick rose to greet her. “I’m fine. Just have a lot on my mind. You can imagine. Come on in.” He wanted to tell her it was nice to see her and that she looked great—but he was afraid of appearing overly friendly. He didn’t know what to make of her phone call yesterday morning. First she’d acted like she hated his guts, her voice barren. Then she’d called back to apologize, sounding sincere. Before she cut him off, that was.

  Sylvia closed the door behind her and leaned against it. She was carrying a faded yellow file under her arm. “I wanted to say I’m sorry about the way I acted yesterday morning. I know I sounded crazy. It’s hard for me to say this, but frankly, I’m a little jealous. I don’t think you know what you’ve got here.”

  Nick swung an arm around the windowless office. It measured eight feet by ten feet. Bookshelves covered two walls and a credenza the third. “What, this?”

  “You know what I mean. The Fourth Floor. Working with the Chairman.”

  He knew exactly what she meant. “I guess I’m pretty lucky, but right now we’re so busy I haven’t had time to congratulate myself.”

  “Consider this a present to celebrate your promotion.” She took the yellow folder from under her arm and tossed it playfully on his desk.

  “What is it? Don’t tell me. A questionnaire to be filled out in triplicate asking how I like my furniture?”

  She smiled impishly. “Not exactly.”

  “A listing of every school I attended, days absent, and what I did for every summer vacation.”

  She laughed. “Now you’re getting closer. Take a look.”

  Nick picked up the file and turned it sideways to read its title.United Swiss Bank, Los Angeles Office. Monthly Activity Reports 1975. “I should never have asked you to get these for me. I wasn’t thinking of your position here at the bank at all. It was unfair and rude. I don’t want you to put yourself in a bad spot for me.”

  “Why not? I told you I owed you a favor and besides I want to.”

  “Why?” he asked, a little louder than intended. He was afraid one day she’d help him and the next turn him in.

  “It was me who was being selfish the other day, not you. Sometimes, I can’t help it. I’ve worked so hard to get here that even the smallest bump frightens me.” She raised her head and addressed him in a forthright tone. “Frankly, I’m embarrassed about my behavior and that’s why I hadn’t called you back. I thought about what you asked me and I decided that a son has every right to know as much as he possibly can about his father.”

  Nick appraised this providential turn of fortune. “Should I be suspicious?”

  “Should I?”She took a step closer and laid a hand on his arm. “Just promise me one thing: that soon you’ll tell me what this is all about.”

  Nick laid the dossier on his desk. “All right. I promise. How about tonight?”

  Sylvia looked taken aback. “Tonight?” She bit her lip and stared directly at him. “Tonight would be wonderful. My place at seven-thirty? You remember where it is, don’t you?”

  “Deal.”

  A minute after she had gone, Nick stared at the place where she had stood as if her presence had been an illusion. On the desk lay a faded yellow folder with a neatly typed title, and next to it, a bin number and a coded refere
nce.

  All neat.

  All proper.

  And for the next twenty-four hours, all his.

  CHAPTER

  30

  At the same time that Nick received the files from Sylvia, in a warmer location some three thousand miles to the east, Ali Mevlevi inched his Bentley along the rue Clemenceau, happy to be within shouting distance of the Hotel St. Georges, where he had been due for lunch fifteen minutes earlier. Ahead, the white porte cochere of the hotel beckoned as an oasis from the noxious exhaust that fleeced the center of town at midday. Beirut had grown so civilized as to boast a noontimebouchon equal to her more fashionable sisters of Paris and Milan.

  Mevlevi tapped his foot furiously on the automobile’s floorboard, exhorting the vehicles in front of him to progress another fifty feet so that he could offer his car to the hotel valet. Rothstein would hate him for being late. The proprietor of Little Maxim’s was famed for his slavish devotion to habits long ago adopted. Mevlevi had practically begged to join him for his weekly lunch at the St. Georges. The memory of his pleading brought a sour taste to his mouth.

  You did it for Lina, he reminded himself. To clear her name. To prove once and for all that she cannot be the spy cosseted in your nest.

  Mevlevi gave himself up to the unmoving traffic, relaxing momentarily. He thought of Lina. He remembered the first time he had seen her, and he smiled.

  # # #

  Little Maxim’s sat like a worn piece of clothing at the far end of Al Ma’aqba Street, two blocks from the waterfront. The place was done up like a seedy bordello on the Barbary Coast. Velvet couches and leather ottomans were spread throughout the room. In front of each grouping resteda glasstable, invariably soiled with the spit olive pits and spilledmezza of the party just departed. But if Max gave little attention to his furnishings, the same could not be said of his girls. Scattered about the room like loose diamonds on a mountain of coal were two dozen of the world’s most alluring women.

  That night, Mevlevi had wandered in around two, ragged from working his phones. He chose his usual table and had only just sat down when a slim Asian girl, lacquered pageboy and bursting lips, sauntered over and suggested she join him. He politely declined. As he declined a full-bottomed redhead from Tbilisi and a platinum man-eater from London whose oversize breasts were on display through a mesh blouse. He required not overwhelming beauty, not refined sexuality, but a carnal revelation: raw and primal. An atavistic reincarnation of primordial desire.

  It was a tall order, granted.

  But he had not been prepared for Lina.

  A thumping beat signaled the commencement of the evening’s entertainment. The music was near violent in its attack, and despite his normal distaste for American rock ’n’ roll, he found himself energized, anxious as to what the song might bring. When Lina walked onto the stage, muscles sinewy, black hair tumbling about her sculpted shoulders, he felt his heart fall into a chasm. She danced with the fury of a caged panther, and when the music demanded that she “walk this way,” her responding strut fired a bolt of hormonal lightning through his loins. Watching her remove the leather brassiere that supported her generous breasts, his mouth turned dry as the Gobi. She walked to the end of the runway and lifted her arms above her head, gathering her hair into her hands while swaying her sensuous hips to the music’s savage beat. She stared at him longer than appropriate, for even Max had his rules. Her eyes were black, but an untamed light shone within them. And when her gaze fell upon him, he felt as if she were staring into the core of his being. And that she desired him, as he desired her.

  A flurry of horns drew Mevlevi back to the present. He moved his car a few meters forward, then stopped. “Be damned,” he cursed at the stationary cluster of automobiles. He honked his horn twice and stepped out of his car. Leaving the motor running, he snaked through the traffic toward the hotel. A liveried attendant spotted him and ran down the easy slope onto the main avenue. Mevlevi shoved a hundred-dollar banknote into his hand and told him to keep the car near the entryway.

  Beirut. Improvisation in the face of adversity was one’s daily chore.

  # # #

  “Max, I thank you so much for letting me join you. And on such short notice. I should be honored.”

  A spry gray-haired man rose from his chair. He was extremely thin and extremely tan, and wore a silk shirt unbuttoned halfway to his navel. “You’re a charmer, Ali. Now I know I’m in big trouble. We have a saying, “When the lion smiles, even its cubs flee.’ Waiter, check!”

  Ali Mevlevi and Max Rothstein broke into a healthy laugh.

  “You are looking well, Maxie. It’s been a while since I saw you in daylight.”

  Rothstein dabbed at his eyes with a crisp white napkin. “All right for an old kvetch. You look worried. Do you want to get right into it?”

  Mevlevi forced a smile. Silently, he recited a homily from the Koran. “Verily, those who show patience will see the Kingdom of Allah.” Easier said than done. “I’ve come to eat with an old friend. Business can wait.”

  A captain arrived with menus bound in green leather.

  “Glasses,” ordered Rothstein, his voice raised. A bulky man at an adjacent table leaned over and handed his patron a pair of bifocals.

  “The usual?” asked Mevlevi, casually eyeing the muscle assembled at the next table.

  “You know me,” said Max, smiling. “I’m a man of habit.”

  The captain returned and took their orders. Mevlevi selected the Dover sole. Rothstein, a half-pound hamburger patty, well done, with a poached egg on top. He had been eating the same vile concoction for lunch and dinner for as long as Mevlevi had known him.

  Maxim Andre Rothstein. German in name, Lebanese by upbringing, the rogue was as slippery as a sturgeon on ice. He had ruled over a major part of the gambling and vice in Beirut for as long as Mevlevi could remember. Certainly since well before his own arrival in 1980. Even at the height of the civil war, Max had kept the doors to his club open. No soldier would risk the reprisal of his chieftains should any harm come to Max or his girls. To ensure that such affectionate feelings were long-lived, Max had sent out teams of croupiers to all factions, determined to bring craps, roulette, and baccarat to soldiers on both sides of the Green Line. And, of course, to extract his cut from every wager.

  In a time when nearly everyone in Beirut lost not only members of their family but a large part of their material wealth, Max Rothstein grew enormously wealthy. The presence of his well-attired bodyguards attested to the fact that the bastard had felt safer during the war than since its conclusion. And added to Ali Mevlevi’s growing insecurity at being alone and unprotected in the center of a city never more than a car bomb away from anarchy.

  The two men chatted amiably about the host of problems that still befell Lebanon. Neither offered firm opinions. Both knew it was best for businessmen to express their allegiance to whichever faction was in power. Yesterday, Gemayel. Today, Hariri. Tomorrow . . . who knew?

  A tray of desserts was brought to the table, and both men made their choices. Mevlevi took a chocolate eclair. Rothstein, the tapioca pudding.

  Mevlevi took a bite of his eclair and after confessing his delight, lowered his fork and asked Rothstein a question. “Cars or camels, Maxie?”

  “Run that by me one more time.”

  Mevlevi repeated his question. He thought it wise to refer to his problem in metaphorical terms for the time being. That way should Rothstein grow upset, he could extricate himself diplomatically.

  Rothstein looked to his table of bodyguards, then eyed the heavens and gave a whimsical shrug. “Cars,” he said. “I’ve never taken to animals. I don’t even have a dog.”

  Rothstein’s retinue laughed dutifully. Mevlevi joined in.

  “I have a small problem with my car,” he began. “Maybe you can help me.”

  Again the weary shrug. “I’m no mechanic, but go ahead. What are you driving?”

  “A beautiful machine. Dark body, clean, sexy lines
, and what an engine. I bought it about nine months ago.”

  Rothstein spread his hands and smiled sagaciously. “I know what model you’re talking about.”

  “Now let’s say, Maxie, that I bought this car new.”

  “Well, there’s new and then, there’s new. Sometimes new is new, and sometimes new is almost new, and sometimes new is—” Rothstein chuckled and threw up his hands, “well, sometimes new can be pretty old.”

  “So what if the car that I thought was new was in fact old? Let’s say a trade-in. Maybe something you were selling for a friend?”

  Concern blossomed on the wrinkled face. “Would I sell you, one of my oldest customers, a used car?”

  “Please, Maxie, it is no matter. That is not the issue today.”

  “You having troubles with this model? Send it back. If it’s the one I’m thinking of, I could find another buyer in an instant.”

  “I never send back what belongs to me. You know this, Maxie. My purchases are always final. What I no longer need, I discard.”

  Rothstein ladled a spoonful of tapioca pudding into his mouth. Half dribbled onto his bib, half from his chin. He paid the mishap little mind. “Then what is the problem? Is she losing a little horsepower?” He laughed for the benefit of his coterie, and his four thugs joined in.

  Mevlevi felt his patience slipping away. He tightened his grip on the hidden corner of tablecloth. “That is of no concern to you. Where did you find this car? The answer is worth more even than the car itself.”

  A thick envelope was passed across the table. In it was a stack of one hundred one-hundred-dollar bills. Rothstein inserted a thumb and eyed the bills.

  “Ali, I took this car in as a favor to an old friend. The friend told me the car needed a home. A place where she might get the attention she deserved. High-class, you get my drift. The car required a single owner. Definitely not a rental.”

  “A fine idea,” said Mevlevi. “But there are not many gentlemen, even among us, who can afford such a car.”

  “A few,” said Rothstein cagily.