And everyone knew his sympathies were with the progressive policies of the Baath, the party of social reform and nationalism. His friends suspected he might take a more public role when enough time had passed for him to feel firmly established. He might not, but that was the usual way with businessmen who owed their success to hard work and caution.
Although he had little time to enjoy it, Halim was obviously very fond of the house he had found for himself. It was one of those old Damascus villas he had always admired, with rustling palm trees and an overgrown garden tucked away between newer buildings, a relic from a more leisurely era. The house itself wasn't so large and much of it was given over to wholly useless verandahs with broad stone steps to nowhere, which must have once commanded a view. The villa had been on the outskirts of Damascus when it was built and now it was well within the city, but the grounds and the trees and walls still gave the house a great sense of privacy. Halim could walk to his office and did so every day, strolling briskly along tree-lined streets and greeting dozens of people on the different routes he followed to vary his walks. Because Damascus was growing so rapidly, squalor stood next to luxury and Halim passed through many kinds of neighborhoods.
Ziad wasn't surprised at the sort of house his friend had chosen. Since their days on the hotel balcony he had expected Halim would eventually live in one of these crumbling old villas, hidden away behind high walls and crowded in among ancient fruit trees. Ziad knew his friend would take no notice of the primitive electrical wiring and water pipes which ran along the walls inside the rooms. Naturally it was the tangled garden that would enchant Halim, with its disused fountains and broken, discolored statues. The statues were half as old as Damascus itself, relics of the Greek and Roman and Byzantine periods, worn both white and black by two millennia of rain and sun. How many gardens have they stood in? mused Halim. How many eras have they calmly watched come and go?
Of course, tradition, Ziad said, laughing. It takes a man from the wide open spaces of the New World to appreciate such a romantic ruin of a house. What does it matter that it has leaky roofs and bad plumbing and huge drafty rooms which are impossible to heat in the winter? The garden alone justifies all. Here Aristotle can contemplate the bust of Homer and marvel at the poet's blind stone eyes and wonder whither time marches . . . yes?
There was another government coup. Tanks rumbled through downtown Damascus and this time the Baath seized power outright. The more outrageous land speculators were arrested, allowing this sure means of instant wealth to slip into other hands, perhaps those closer to the new educated classes and the army. The general who had been the Syrian military attaché in Buenos Aires became the new president. Halim sent flowers to his former shesh-besh partner, congratulating him, and became a guest at presidential receptions.
Ziad was able to find a job for himself in the ministry of information, the most substantial position he had ever held.
Halim began entertaining in his home and Ziad turned up with his new friends, mostly Baath army officers.
Ziad also brought along women to these evenings. With the ways of regular journalism now behind him and no longer a source of income, with his success now dependent upon army officers, he had come up with a new service for those in power — pandering. Always pathetically unsuccessful himself with women, he now found he could enjoy their company on the strength of the important men he would introduce them to. Slightly hysterical and already a little drunk, he appeared at Halim's door early in the evening with a woman on each arm, and rushed off to try to gather up a few more who might or might not be waiting for him. Then he gulped Scotch and spent the rest of the evening flitting around Halim's living room, refilling glasses and telling raucous anecdotes.
Halim himself acted as a quiet host at these gatherings, in keeping with his more reserved manner. While Ziad chattered noisily from group to group, Halim was apt to be in conversation with someone off to the side.
Most of the women brought along by Ziad were secretaries from government ministries, but occasionally he captured a more glamorous prize. One evening he turned up with a popular singer, a vivacious and ambitious young woman. Halim introduced her to a colonel and took the two of them for a stroll in his garden, applying all his charm to making the encounter a success. For the colonel, who was the new commander of the paratroop brigade on the Golan Heights, that evening in the shadows of Halim's garden was the beginning of a passionate love affair with the singer, and he always felt warmly toward Halim for bringing her into his life.
There were also other kinds of friendships for Halim. The austere minister of information, educated in Paris and the leading intellectual of the Baathist regime, was a man of a different sort. Halim met him through Ziad but thereafter they got together without Ziad, the better to discuss Latin American politics and pursue the minister's scheme, first suggested by Halim, of securing financial support for the Baath from the Syrian community in Buenos Aires. Halim wrote letters to Argentina and collected some funds for the minister. But as the minister said, the amount of money wasn't as important as the principle of Syrians overseas taking part in the rejuvenation of their ancient homeland.
***
Halim was busy, always busy. The machinery company in which he was a partner had been given a contract to improve the ventilation systems of bunkers on the Golan Heights, which accommodated armored vehicles as well as artillery and tank crews, a whole complicated series of connecting underground fortresses. Each bunker was different and presented a slightly different set of ventilation problems. Halim worked on the diagrams with his master machinists, making modifications and finding practical solutions.
For his central office Halim still used the suite of rooms he had acquired originally in the large building off Martyrs' Square, the building with the hotel on the top floor. Now he had to find space in the suite to work on these ventilation schemes. The only free area was the seating arrangement at the end of his own room, where a company director normally sat with his guests over coffee. Halim moved the overstuffed chairs to his manager's office and put in draftsman's tables and lighting fixtures and banks of deep flat cupboards with dozens of drawers to hold the blueprints and diagrams. When his partner came by and found Halim and the master machinists pouring over their papers, he joked that Halim's room looked more like a crowded architect's den than a successful businessman's office.
It was crowded and there were papers everywhere, but nothing was done by chance in the Runner's life. The entrance to Halim's offices lay at the end of one of the two corridors that ran the length of the building on each floor. The elevators opened between the first and the second corridors. In the second corridor was the room with toilets and sinks for the smaller offices on the floor which were without toilets of their own. The entrance to Halim's offices was in the first corridor, but his rooms extended to the blank wall of the second corridor.
And the far end of his own room, now crowded with draftsman's cupboards and tables, backed exactly against the wall where the toilet stalls were.
In redesigning the room the Runner had done some special work of his own. If he set the screws in the back of one of his cupboards in a certain way, a man in the second corridor could enter the toilets and lock himself in the last stall, unfasten a panel in the back wall and another panel in Halim's wall, and reach through into Halim's cupboard — to remove the cardboard cylinder that had been placed there for him. The panel in the toilet stall could conceivably have been opened by chance, but if that happened it would have revealed nothing. The next panel through Halim's wall, giving access to Halim's cupboard, couldn't be discerned. Nor could that second panel be opened accidentally, since only a correct combination of screw turns on Halim's side allowed it to open.