words, both hands raised. He clearly felt he hadn't earned the title.
'I'm a great admirer,' he said to Bill. 'And when Mr. Everson suggested you might join us at the press conference I was surprised and deeply pleased. Knowing of course how you shun public appearances.'
He was clean-shaven, a tall man in his mid-forties, hair gone sparse at the front of his head. He had moist eyes and appeared sad and slightly hulking in a drab gray suit and a plastic watch he might have borrowed from a child.
'What's your connection?' Bill said.
'With Beirut? Let's say I sympathize with their aims if not their methods. This unit that took the poet is one element in a movement. Barely a movement actually. It's just an underground current at this stage, an assertion that not every weapon in Lebanon has to be marked Muslim, Christian or Zionist.'
'Let's use first names,' Charlie said.
Coffee came. Bill felt a stinging pinpoint heat, a shaped pain in his left hand, bright and slivered.
Charlie said, 'Who wants to stop this meeting from taking place?'
'Maybe the war in the streets is simply spreading. I don't know. Maybe there's an organization that objects in principle to the release of any hostage, even a hostage they themselves are not holding. Certainly they understand that this man's release depends completely on the coverage. His freedom is tied to the public announcement of his freedom. You can't have the first without the second. This is one of many things Beirut has learned from the West. Beirut is tragic but still breathing. London is the true rubble. I've studied here and taught here and every time I return I see the damage more clearly.'
Charlie said, 'What do we have to do in your estimation to conduct this meeting safely?'
'It may not be possible here. The police will advise you to cancel. The next time I don't think there will be a phone call. I'll tell you what I think there will be.' And he leaned over the table. 'A very large explosion in a crowded room.'
Bill picked a fragment of glass out of his hand. The others watched. He understood why the pain felt familiar. It was a summer wound, a play wound, one of the burns and knee-scrapes and splinters of half a century ago, one of the bee stings, the daily bloody cuts. You slid into a base and got a raspberry. You had a fight and got a shiner.
He said, 'We have an innocent man locked in a cellar.'
'Of course he's innocent. That's why they took him. It's such a simple idea. Terrorize the innocent. The more heartless they are, the better we see their rage. And isn't it the novelist, Bill, above all people, above all writers, who understands this rage, who knows in his soul what the terrorist thinks and feels? Through history it's the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark. Where are your sympathies? With the colonial police, the occupier, the rich landlord, the corrupt government, the militaristic state? Or with the terrorist? And I don't abjure that word even if it has a hundred meanings. It's the only honest word to use.'
Bill's napkin was bunched on the table in front of him. The two men watched him place the glass fragment in a furrow in the cloth. It glinted like sand, the pebbly greenish swamp sand that belongs to childhood, to the bruises and welts, the fingers nicked by foul tips. He felt very tired. He listened to Charlie talk with the other man. He felt the deadweight of travel, the apathy and vagueness of being in a place that didn't matter to him, being invisible to himself, sleeping in a room he wouldn't recognize if he had a picture of it in front of him.
George was saying, 'The first incident was unimportant because it was only a series of phone calls. The second incident was unimportant because nobody was killed. For you and Bill, pure trauma. Otherwise strictly routine. A few years ago a neo-Nazi group in Germany devised the slogan 'The worse the better.' This is also the slogan of Western media. You are nonpersons for the moment, victims without an audience. Get killed and maybe they will notice you.'
In the morning Bill had breakfast in a pub near his hotel. He found he was able to order a pint of ale with his ham and eggs even though it was just past seven because night workers from the meat market were on their meal shift now. Extremely progressive licensing policy. White-coated doctors from Saint Bartholomew's sat at the next table. He looked at the cut on his hand. Seemed to be doing nicely but it's good to know the medics are near if you need advice or assistance. Old hospitals with saints' names are the ones you want to go to if you have cuts and abrasions. They haven't forgotten how to treat the classic Crusader wounds.
He took out a notepad and entered the breakfast bill and last night's taxi fare. The sound of the blast was still an echo in his skin.
Later in the day he met Charlie by prearrangement in front of the Chesterfield. They walked through Mayfair in a lazy dazzle of warm light. Charlie wore a blazer, gray flannels and bone-and-blue saddle oxfords.
'I talked to a Colonel Martinson or Martindale. Got it written down. One of those hard sharp technocrats whose religion is being smart. He knows all the phrases, he's got the jargon down pat. If you've got the language of being smart, you'll never catch a cold or get a parking ticket or die.'
'Was he in uniform?' Bill said.
'Too smart for that. He said there wouldn't be a news conference today. Not enough time to secure a site. He said our friend George is an interesting sort of academic. His name appears in an address book found in an apartment raided by police somewhere in France -a bomb factory. And he has been photographed in the company of known terrorist leaders.'
'Every killer has a spokesman.'
'You're almost as smart as the colonel. He talked about you in fact. He said you ought to get on a plane and go back home. He will make arrangements.'
'How does he know I'm here, or why I'm here, or who I am?'
'After the first series of threatening calls,' Charlie said.
'I thought I was the unannounced presence. But you told George I was here. And now this colonel with a brush mustache.'
'I had to report the names of all the people invited to the conference. Because of the phone calls. The police needed a list.
And I told George actually the day before because I thought it would help. Anything that helps.'
'Why does the colonel want me to go home?'
'He says he has information that you may be in danger. He hinted that you would be worth a great deal more to the group in Beirut than the hostage they're now holding. The feeling is he's too obscure.'
Bill laughed.
'The whole thing is so hard to believe I almost don't believe it.'
'But of course we do believe it. We have to. It doesn't break any laws of logic or nature. It's unbelievable only in the shallowest sense. Only shallow people insist on disbelief. You and I know better. We understand how reality is invented. A person sits in a room and thinks a thought and it bleeds out into the world. Every thought is permitted. And there's no longer a moral or spatial distinction between thinking and acting.'
'Poor bastard, you're beginning to sound like me.'
They walked in silence. Then Charlie said something about the loveliness of the day. They chose their topics carefully, showing a deft indirectness. They needed some space in which to let the subject cool.
Then Bill said, 'How do they plan to get me into a hostage situation?'
'Oh I don't know. Lure you eastward somehow. The colonel was vague here.'
'We don't blame him, do we?'
'Not a bit. He said the explosive was Semtex H. A controlled amount. They could have brought down the building if they'd wanted to.'
'The colonel must have enjoyed dropping that name.'
'The material comes from Czechoslovakia.'
'Did you know that?'
'No, I didn't.'
'See how stupid we are.'
'Where are you staying, Bill? We really have to know.'
'I'm sure the colonel knows. Just go ahead and arrange the conference. I came here to read some poems and that's what I'm going to do.'
'Nobody wants to be intimidated. But the fact is,' Charlie said.
'I'm going back to my hotel. I'll call you at noon tomorrow. Get a new location and let's do what we came here
