Legends

With the presence of the Syrian army, the warring factions that had slaughtered each other in the streets of Beirut since the mid 1970s had more or less gone to ground; Muslim and Christian emissaries were rumored to be meeting at Taif, in Saudi Arabia, to formalize the cease-fire accord but armed militias still patrolled the city, which sprawled like a mutilated virago at the edge of the Mediterranean, its shell-ridden buildings mute testimony to the brutal fifteen-year civil war. As the sun dipped into the sea and darkness enveloped Beirut, the whetted crack of distant gunfire reverberated through the city; Abdullah, visibly edgy, muttered something about old scores being settled before the formal cease-fire came into effect. Careful not to stray from the Muslim-controlled areas of Beirut, he guided the driver to the port area and deposited Dante on a corner opposite the burnt-out shell of a neighborhood mosque. A narrow street angled off down-hill toward the docks. “We will wait for you here,” Abdullah told Dante. “Please to be returned by the hour of ten so we can be returned to the camp by the midnight.”

On the narrow street, broken neon lights sizzled over a handful of bars that catered to the seamen from the ships docked at the quays or tied to giant buoys in the harbor. Waving cheerfully at his keepers, Dante skipped down the sidewalk and, ducking to get under a broken neon tube dangling from its electric cord, shouldered past the thick rug that served as a door into the first bar, set up in a mercantile building that had been gutted by a direct hit from a mortar. The charred rafters that held up the jury-rigged sloping roof had been whitewashed, but they still stank from the fire. Dante found a place at the makeshift bar between two Turkish sailors holding each other up and a Portuguese purser wearing a rumpled blue uniform.

“So now, what will your pleasure be?” the barman called, a distinct Irish lilt to his gruff voice.

Dante punched a hole in the cigarette smoke that obscured his view and spoke through it. “Beer and lots of it,” he called back, “the warmer the better.”

The bartender, a thick man with a shock of tousled rusty hair spilling over his eyes and a priest’s white shirt buttoned up to his neck, plucked a large bottle of Bulgarian beer from a carton at his feet. He flicked off the metal cap with a church key, stopped the throat of the bottle with the ball of his thumb and shook the beer to put some life into it, then set it on the counter in front of Dante. “And will your lordship be wanting a mug to drink from?” he inquired with a laugh.

“Do you charge for it?” Dante asked.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, why would we want to do that? You’re paying such an outrageous price for the goddamned beer, we supply the mug at no extra cost to yourself.” He slid a freshly washed mug down the bar to Dante. “Now what ship did you say you were off?”

“I didn’t say,” Dante shot back. “It’s the H.M.S. Pinafore.”

The smile froze on the bartender’s face. “H.M.S. Pinafore, did you say?”

Dante filled the mug, swiped away the foam with the back of a forefinger and, tilting back his head, drank off the beer in a long gulping swallow. “Ah, that surely transforms the way a man sees the world,” he announced, starting to fill the mug again. “H.M.S. Pinafore. That’s what I said.”

Accepting this with a brisk nod, the bartender made his way to the far end of the bar and, blocking one ear with the tip of a finger, spoke into a telephone. Dante was halfway through his second bottle of Bulgarian beer when the woman appeared at the top of the broken wooden steps that led to what was left of the offices on the upper floor of the mercantile building. A sailor buttoning his fly trailed behind her. The woman, wisps of long dark hair falling across a face disfigured by smallpox scars, was wearing a tight skirt slit high on one thigh and a gauzy blouse through which her breasts were as visible as they would be if she’d been caught walking naked through a morning haze. All conversation ceased as she came across the room, her high heels drumming on the wooden floorboards. She stopped to take her bearings, spotted Dante and installed herself at the bar next to him.

“Will you buy me a whiskey?” she demanded in a throaty murmur.

“I’d be a horse’s ass not to,” Dante replied cheerfully, and he held up a finger to get the bartender’s eye and pointed to the woman. “Whiskey for my future friend.”

“Chivas Regal,” the woman instructed the bartender. “A double.”