As after the previous war, the Russians rearmed the Syrians with improved weaponry and the Americans rearmed the Israelis accordingly. In matters of electronic guidance for shells and missiles and bombs, and counterelectronic systems to overrule them, nothing could compare to tests under actual battlefield conditions.
More then ever Beirut flourished as the Middle Eastern entrepôt for pleasure and money and arms and drugs, the convenient meeting place for everyone with something or someone to buy or to rent or to sell. The oil embargoes had arrived with the October war and oil became the great black weapon of the world as the price shot up. The industrial nations of Europe scrambled to strike covert deals with the sheiks of the desert.
Enormous sums were to be made by entrepreneurs at every level. Western banks and corporations came to Beirut to help the oil princes dispose of their stupendous new wealth. And everyone in Beirut had to be serviced: the bankers and sheiks and corporations, the myriad business representatives from every country with oil or in need of oil, the arms dealers and smugglers, the drug merchants from Africa and the West, the intelligence agencies from all the countries of the Middle East, the intelligence agencies from the major countries of Eastern and Western Europe, and the biggest players of all with their spy satellites roaming the heavens — the KGB and the CIA.
Plots and schemes and trade. This for that in Beirut, with a cut for the smiling industrious people who provided the sun and the waterskiing, the seaside hotels and the dark back alleys, the appropriate setting for any transaction.
Trade in every guise had been the vocation of the Lebanese coast since the time of the Phoenicians, five thousand years ago. The temples of true believers had always been elsewhere, beside the Nile and the Tigris and the Euphrates and in Jerusalem and Damascus.
***
It was almost a surprise for Halim to realize how great a distance the Runner had traveled in the last years. A pattern had settled over his business enterprises and he no longer had to concern himself much about them, now that he wasn't trying to start up in new fields. The same earnest manager still ran his office in the building that had the Hotel Brittany on the top floor. The man had been with him more than a decade and they were old friends. Halim seldom had to interfere with his decisions.
In addition to his export-import business, Halim was generally involved in two or three partnerships which turned some profit. He wasn't wealthy but he was successful for a Syrian. He gave part of his income to charity as would any worthy Moslem in his position. The Runner's back-up team was Tajar's expense, but the Runner himself cost the Mossad nothing. In any case the back-up team was smaller than it had been before the Six-Day War, when the Runner was concentrating on tactical intelligence and moving a great deal of material, quickly. The cupboard-toilet dead drop was almost never used anymore.
Halim still rose early and walked to work for the exercise, taking different routes to vary the scenery. By now he knew hundreds of people along the way, familiar faces from over the years who greeted him and passed along the neighborhood news, sold him his cigarettes and newspaper, inveigled him to pause for a Turkish coffee. When he entered the lobby of his office building, the Tatar horseman on guard there solemnly raised his antique Mauser rifle with the red tassel at its end, in the morning ritual of salute. Halim conferred with his manager and dropped in on his bookkeepers, always a pleasantly nostalgic pastime for the boy hidden away in him who had once done bookkeeping.
At least once a week he rode the creaky cage-lift up to the top floor to have coffee in the hotel lounge and visit with his old friends who still worked there. He went out and walked to appointments in downtown Damascus, then met a business acquaintance for lunch near Martyrs' Square or by the river. He took a taxi home after lunch and observed the siesta hours, unplugging his phone and resting or reading until late afternoon, when he was known to be at home to visitors. He carried the phone out to the gathering of chairs beneath his fig tree, and there people came and went.
Halim welcomed them all, his Syrian friends, his Palestinian friends. He listened and advised and helped when he could. His friends knew where to find him and came around the house through the garden, after first calling and setting a time. Halim boiled Turkish coffee for every guest and later set up a table with drinks beneath the fig tree. It was a comfortable setting, relaxed and private. Occasionally he went on to dinner with some of his visitors but returned home early to read and listen to music. Several times a week he met one of his women friends for dinner at a restaurant beside the Barada, but even then he was home early the next morning to change clothes and walk to the office. It was a single man's regular life of work and routine, friends and commonplace pleasures.
Life was also a nexus in the usual Arab fashion. His office manager was a cousin of the machinery company owner who had been his first business partner in Damascus, the man he had met over dinner in the Hotel Brittany. The owner had now retired from his company and been replaced by his son, whom Halim served as a senior business adviser. Halim had been given a place of honor in the son's wedding and was an unofficial uncle to his firstborn, a boy. Halim had also helped his manager by guaranteeing a loan for a new apartment.
Halim's cleaning woman, who arrived in the morning and worked until he returned home in the early afternoon, was a poor relation of the manager's wife from a village in the north. And so it went, with obligation and loyalty tightly connected in the usual manner of a traditional society.
The pain Yossi used to feel over Assaf was hardly there anymore. Very slowly the torment had dimmed, the anguish receded. Halim still experienced it sometimes when he was alone in the garden, not in the house.
But even then the feeling was remote, a memory rather than a physical sensation that suddenly gripped his chest and threatened to strangle his heart, as it once had done. Only the sadness afterward was the same, the immense longing he was left with when the spasm passed, an emptiness for what was gone.
As if in compensation for his loss, a small compensation but nonetheless real, he had come to love his old house again. Here he had suffered and survived his terrible anguish and now it was truly his home, his place in the world. He loved its crumbling grandeur and tangled gardens, its noble old-fashioned rooms with their great window-doors opening onto the verandahs. He felt safe and comfortable sitting beside the fire on rainy winter nights, listening to music, and never tired of wandering along the verandahs on warm evenings and gazing up at the stars. Israel seemed very far away to him now and more than ever a dream, an imagined place. It was over there, like Ziad's dream of Europe and Paris: a distant place and beautiful, a rare and certain treasure to be loved, to be cherished, pure as only an abstraction can be.
But there was never anything abstract about Tajar in his thoughts. Tajar was also far away but Tajar was his dearest friend and more, his father and brother and keeper, the conscience of his finer self. He felt so close to Tajar that he often spoke of him in conversations with friends in Damascus, under the pretext of recalling the widower-cousin in Argentina who had given him his start in life. Naturally, this was most true with Ziad. It was curious but in some ways Ziad was more familiar with Tajar — under a different name, in a different time and place — than he was with almost anyone else in the world, save for Halim himself.
Halim had always hoped Anna would remarry, and his memories of her had an idyllic charm to them. The memories dwelled on the intensity of their lives at the little settlement in the Negev that was soon to fall. . . .