At the nadir of what he recognised as a nervous breakdown, Robin no longer needed to be asleep for the nightmare to grip. He could be on a Tube train or the treadmill in the gym and freeze, screaming inwardly while awaiting the worst. It was Simon Trimble’s bad luck that Robin was in the middle of one such session when Si nudged him...
Yes, I said, but we hadn’t finished with the original thing. What did he see when he was forced to confront the painting?
“Now I’ve got you at it — there was nothing to see, man. Paint on canvas.” Robin pulled a face. “But I didn’t have the guts to prove that,” he admitted.
He’d stood there, crouched and wincing, shaking, until to his horror his head started pulling round towards the far wall of the side room. “Think iron filings and magnet.”
What broke the spell was the sight of the edge of a now-familiar frame, right at the corner of his eye. “I’d made it all so real — the old crone was in charge, but I was so spit-scared of her that I wrenched away in a panic. It felt... physical, like the air was sticky, might as well have been Velcro, I swear I felt it catching and parting around me. But I was frantic, and suddenly I was falling over my own feet because it was easy to move again. I ran like hell, straight out of there.”
I had hand luggage — sensible foreign correspondents travel light, it saves vital time at the other end — and Robin’s cases were aboard a truck somewhere out in the airport triangle, so we parted a few minutes later. He gave me an address in Cyprus and said to look him up next time I passed through.
I was pleased that he’d come out of the tunnel, but human nature made one prefer the old Robin Ratcliffe, moodiness, neurotic delusions, and all. The spring-cleaned model looked ten years younger; obviously he was footloose and getting plenty of fulfilling, non-meaningless sex. Naturally I envied him like mad.
And little more than a year later he was dead.
Having sprained my ankle, I was copy tasting for the Foreign Desk while somebody was on holiday. The AP item was in the U.K.-side follow-ups basket before I did a mental double take and retrieved it. Two sentences with a Beirut dateline: Robin Ratcliffe, British businessman, killed by a gunman in the street. Ratcliffe had moved to Lebanon only three months ago, and he was believed to be a victim of mistaken identity.
British papers made a little more of it than that, though not much.
I was shocked, but once that passed, not unduly surprised. Lebanon had long been martyred by a political-religious civil war and the Palestine Liberation Army’s presence and influence weren’t helping. That made it a good place for a freelance reporter to operate and a bloody awful one for life expectancy.
The following year I learned that for myself, during five weeks in West Beirut, covering the Israeli army’s siege and its sequel, Chairman Arafat and Co. turfed out. Interesting times, as the Chinese put it. I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds — and how splendid it was to get out of there.
Don’t quote me, but I’m a fair feature writer and a poor reporter. Survival depends on sticking with better ones, which is how Digger Purnell and I became joined at the hip. It used to be a rite of passage for many Oz hacks to spend awhile on a British paper and I’d eased his way through mine, until Digger sprinkled vodka into the managing editor’s wastebasket and set it alight, “to liven up the stuffy bugger.” That was too rich for our blood and he was off on his travels once more.
Digger settled in Beirut before the civil war began; he spoke fluent bad Arabic and any local he didn’t know, he knew of. A sound man, the hooligan.
We were having dinner at the Commodore one night — out there in the cement garden with its emptied, dangerously deep, slipper-shaped swimming pool and the parrot doing perfect imitations of incoming artillery rounds — and maybe an empty chair sparked an association of ideas. “Did you see much of Robbo Ratcliffe when he was here?”
“Not as much as some saw.” Digger’s a professional Australian and they can be wearing. Digger in cryptic, I-know-and-you-do-not mode is even worse, so I didn’t bite.
“Doesn’t matter, I just wondered what the heck he was doing here.”
“He was shagging somebody’s wife,” Digger informed me matter-of-factly. He said that the husband was an executive of a company I have no intention of naming, to protect the adulterous. “Yeah, Robbo followed her wherever her old man was posted, like a little doggie. When they were here, before things got really bad, she’d sneak over to Cyprus for fun ’n games. The Mister was sweet provided they didn’t carry on under his nose.
“But madam found better fish to fry and stopped going to Cyprus. So Robbo upped sticks and based himself here, bloody fool. Somebody, uh, found that unacceptable.”
“You mean...?”
“Put it this way: He got blown away by a man in military fatigues and a barracks cap. PLO or local militia, moonlighting. The job cost twenty pounds sterling, I know that for a fact.” (Later, gingerly, I tried the concept on a PLO officer for credibility, and his verdict was, “Twenty? Some of my men would do it for a pack of cigarettes. Or a kind word.”)
That night, uncertain whether Digger Purnell was making it up as he went along, to impress me with insider stuff, I objected, “You said the husband didn’t mind.”
“Typical dim pom, never listens! Chilly Willy wasn’t around anymore, was he. He’d been posted home-side, she stuck around for a while. It was her new fancy man, scared Robbo might get her back.” Digger cackled and cocked an eye over the candle in its red glass globe. “I wouldn’t have minded a punt at her myself, she was tasty, but I dropped that idea after what happened. Fine chance, anyway — after Robbo got himself scragged she shot straight home to hubby. So the guy who paid the piper invested twenty quid for nothing. Serve him right. Your round, Charlie.”
That was a weird siege: West Beirut was cordoned off and under sporadic attack from land, sea, and air (gunboats with missiles), yet there were quiet spells and it was a relatively large area. One needed wheels, meaning a taxi.
Sharif was my driver. He’d owned a restaurant and a decent house by what had been the St. George’s Hotel, and some rental property, and now he had his car. Like many of them, not your standard cabbie. I don’t know how he discovered that I’d known Robin Ratcliffe — nothing stayed private around the Commodore, the waiters listened out and everybody was somebody’s kinsman, a cousin or thereabouts.
One morning we were rolling along Hamra, the main shopping street, when Sharif observed, “Mr. Robin was a nice man. A happy man.” Here he sighed heavily, obviously thinking that he had been the same, longer ago than he cared to remember. “He lived in one of my apartments, the Is-ra-aelis got it last month, it was the last of them. I had many flats.”
I made a neutral sound. Terrible thing to say, but true: He was lucky compared to some. Still had his skin — and the Mercedes. Sharif pulled over. “I saw it happen. Over there. No, here on my side.” His tone was casual, much as you’d use when indicating a minor landmark to a tourist.
“I was in Hamra constantly when I had businesses, that is how I saw it happen, there where I point. It was a restaurant,” he added helpfully. We were looking at a hole in the frontages where the remains of an industrial-size freezer and a catering range showed through heaped rubble and charcoal beams bulldozed towards the back.
A sole surviving chair, the aluminium, stackable kind, leaned drunkenly out of the gap and a stray mongrel was lifting a leg against it.
There’d been a canopy, and the chairs stood at tables in its shade, with little bay trees in tubs to divide them from passersby. Sharif saw his tenant Robin Ratcliffe pause outside the restaurant. A man in olive-drab had been some distance behind. Once he was closer, he drew his pistol and shot Robin through the head, hardly breaking stride to do so.