“Why?” said Solange. She had put down the lobster and was patting her mouth with her napkin.
“Because I thought to myself: This is what the Arabs want from us. From the West, I mean. They want to have sex with us. That’s why they are so eager for the modern world. Smoking our Marlboros and drinking our whisky. Because they think they’ll have more sex that way.”
“They are right,” said Solange. “They probably will.”
“Yes. But what happens when Arab culture becomes modern enough that the women have more sex, too? Or at least begin to think about it. I’m not sure that Arab men will be able to handle that part of modern life very well, because they’re so afraid of women to begin with. What will happen then?”
“They will go the other way,” said Solange.
“What do you mean?”
“Back into the dark ages,” said Madame Jezzine. “The Arabs will embrace just enough of the modern world to become terrified by it, and then they’ll run the other way.”
Jane finished the last bites of her sole. The busboy arrived from nowhere and cleared away the dishes. Solange offered Jane a cigarette. She took it and inhaled deeply and pleasurably.
“Tell me about your husband,” said Solange.
“Oh my goodness,” said Jane. “What can I tell you? It will sound so sentimental. He is a good man. A strong man. He loves his work. He adores the Middle East, but he also loves his family.”
What am I saying? thought Jane. Am I going too far?
“And do you think,” asked Madame Jezzine delicately, “that your husband has ever had an affair?”
Jane put her hand to her forehead. She had said too much. She had drunk too much wine. She had allowed the conversation to stray into the forbidden zone.
“No,” said Jane brightly, raising her head and smiling. “I don’t think that he ever has.”
“Lucky girl,” said Solange Jezzine. “Lucky girl.”
Jane excused herself and went to the bathroom. She tidied herself up, applied new lipstick, brushed her hair, and returned to the table. When she got back, Solange had gone. Jane peered down the room and saw that she was seated in one of the other booths, talking to a handsome Frenchman. Though the Frenchman was seated across from a younger blonde, he had his arm around Madame Jezzine.
Solange returned in a few minutes. They talked some more, about less exotic topics, and eventually drank their coffee and paid the bill. Solange insisted that they should meet again in several weeks.
“Next time,” she said, “I want to hear more about your husband. He is the only attractive man in Beirut.”
Jane felt flattered at this praise of her husband and nodded politely. Later that day, she wondered if there was anything in Madame Jezzine’s manner that should cause concern. Anything that she should mention to her husband. No, she concluded. She is simply a charming, gossipy Lebanese woman who is mad for sex.
27
Beirut; April 1971
As the Deuxieme Bureau crumbled, the CIA station tried to pick up useful pieces of the debris. There were so many angry and frustrated officers that the hardest problem for Hoffman and his colleagues was deciding which of them was worth trying to recruit.
Hoffman ignored most of them. He had a rule about buying members of another intelligence service: Don’t recruit the ten people in the field who are gathering information. Recruit the one man at the top who runs the network. With the surge of walk-ins, Hoffman added another rule: No more Lebanese agents at all, unless they had vital information or access to it.
For Rogers, the top priority was getting access to the Christian militias. He focused his attention on a bright young army officer named Samir Fares. Though only in his mid-thirties, Fares had gained a reputation as one of the Deuxieme Bureau’s ablest intelligence officers. He had the look of an intellectuaclass="underline" balding, smoking a pipe rather than the ubiquitous Lebanese cigarettes. But he was a tough operator. His current assignment, Rogers had learned, was to recruit agents from among the militias and secret political organizations of Christian East Beirut.
Rogers decided to set up a meeting with Fares. He asked Elias Arslani, a retired history professor who had been Fares’s mentor at AUB, to arrange a meeting at his country home in the mountains near Jezzine, in southern Lebanon. Dr. Arslani was the sort of person the American Embassy called on to make discreet introductions: a distinguished academic, a pillar of the Greek Orthodox community, a man who believed in the establishment of a modern and liberal Arab world. He was not an agent, not even an “asset.” He was simply and forthrightly a friend of the United States.
Rogers drove south on a spring day, navigating the hairpin turns that looped up and down the steep hills like thin strands of yarn, till he reached the village of Watani and the professor’s large, red-roofed villa. The professor, known to the villagers as “Sheik Elias,” greeted Rogers at the door. He was a gaunt, erect old man, dressed in the uniform of a Levantine gentleman: a crisp white shirt, a well-tailored gray suit, and a red fez. Standing next to him was Samir Fares, dressed in a baggy seersucker suit and looking more than a little uncomfortable.
Dr. Arslani apologized to his guests for making them travel to the mountains. He rarely went to Beirut anymore, he said. He found it too depressing. His goal as a professor had been to help train a modern civil service in Lebanon, the old man explained. But when he went to Beirut now and saw what had become of the Lebanese bureaucracy, he felt that his life’s work had been a failure.
“They are pickpockets,” Dr. Arslani said scornfully.
In his lapel, the old man still wore the fading emblem of the Order of Lebanon, awarded years earlier for his services to the republic. Looking at him, Rogers felt he was seeing a remnant of a vanishing era. Dr. Arslani excused himself after a few minutes and left Rogers and Fares alone to talk.
The conversation began awkwardly, since neither man wanted to admit, at this early stage of their discussion, what they had come so far to talk about.
“How is the new regime treating you?” asked Rogers.
“Well enough,” said the Lebanese Army officer. “They pay my salary.”
“Is it much different from the old?”
“We do the same things,” said Fares. “But we have stopped believing in them.”
“Why?”
“Because our job has become absurd,” said Fares. “We are charged with protecting the security of a state whose citizens no longer trust the state to do anything. So we are protecting something that is, in reality, nothing.”
“Why is this country unravelling?” asked Rogers, posing the question as much to himself as to the other man.
“Ask Dr. Arslani,” answered the young Lebanese. “He’s the professor.”
“You were his student,” continued Rogers patiently. “What do you think he would say?”
“He gave me a book once, years ago,” answered Fares. “It was a history of the Weimar Republic in Germany. It tried to explain how democracy collapsed in Germany. Inflation, demoralization, the growth of extremism. It was a story of how a country lost its center and collapsed from within. When Dr. Arslani gave me that book fifteen years ago, I wondered why. What could this possibly have to do with Lebanon? Now I’m beginning to understand.”
“What should a sensible German have done?” asked Rogers.
“If he had known what was coming?”
“Yes.”
Fares smiled thinly, almost grimly. He could see where Rogers was leading.
“He would have worked to strengthen the political institutions of his country,” said Fares.
“And if that was hopeless?” pressed Rogers.
“He would have left.”
“Where, do you suppose?”
Fares laughed.
“To America,” he said.
“Yes,” said Rogers. “I agree. That is what a sensible German would have done.”
Rogers decided then that he liked the young Lebanese and, what was considerably more, that he trusted him. The two men talked for another hour, still in vague and general terms, before emerging from the closed drawing room and joining Dr. Arslani for a pleasant lunch on a terrace overlooking the mountains and the sea far beyond.