LITMIR.BIZ

      Up in Hamra, but that far east already was impossible, surely?—so close, maybe farther, with the echoes it was too hard for him to tell—he could hear the automatic gunfire thickening, clotting, periods without pause..... .. .. .. . . . ...... ... ...............

      Tout Beirut may have been calling, but not him with only two U.S. dollars’ credit on his cell phone and only a few thousand utterly deflated Lebanese pounds in his pocket. The newly restored Downtown was empty. There were only the Lebanese Army APCs and soldiers reinforced at all the spokes of the wheel of new streets and unfinished alleys leading to the pristine Place d’Etoile and the Serail, the wheel’s diameter a ring of rolled-out razor wire.

      He slowed to a walk and greeted the first soldier he saw.

      “What’s up? It’s Hezbollah? Amal?” Leon said as he came near.

      The soldier stared at his face for a little too long. Then he shrugged amiably, hitched his M16 and boredly made two fists, sparring with one another.

      Leon nodded as if a little skeptical or just cool, and walked past him. The U.S.-made Vietnam-era APC was mounted with a massive but ancient Russian antiaircraft gun and parked sideways forming a gate in the middle of the street’s razor wire barrier. The three soldiers sitting around the big weapon looked down on him silently.

      The empty boulevard ahead gently dipped and rose. The concrete barriers were pitted and paint streaked with old fights and accidents. They had been moved from the sidewalks to the parking bays, narrowing the road to a single lane. There was the fundamental-sounding clump of an RPG, which told him that what was happening had spread, and was in more than one neighborhood, stretching west-east but back in the city. The further he got from the sea the closer the sounds became. At the Place des Martyrs, the Green Line of wasteland-crumbled concrete began, the blocks of dead yellow grass littered with rubble and trash up to the car parks. The Green Line known thus not for any UN ruling, but for the quiet explosion of growth in the streets in the war. A hundred meters wide and nine kilometers long dividing the promontory between east and west, sniper deadly no man’s land: a silent forest forming around the skeletal buildings. Under Hariri the remains—the old theaters, the machine gun nests, the tunnels and shops and blood-soaked stone and canvas—were bulldozed into the sea at the terminus of the Green Line to form the foundation of the new marina-corniche. No man’s land reclaimed now lying doubly deserted in the aftermath of Hariri’s death, and diffidently guarded by Leon’s friends, with their law degrees, their marketing diplomas.

      The gunfire shifted emphasis and pitch. Either the open areas were amplifying the sounds or the fighting was genuinely closer. It was less cracking than popping now, and there were no cars anywhere. No movement and little light, and above him the low poison-green clouds came in softly in strips like ragged sand dunes in a desertified sky over the wasteland to Mount Lebanon.

      Leon felt a sick sort of relief approaching the Christian East and rue George Haddad; its unacknowledged and unspoken border, still in conflict de facto if not de jure. The Kuwaitis’ apartment complex that his father guarded six nights a week looked emptily back over the Green Line toward the block comprising the Roman ruins, the Hariri mosque, the Orthodox cathedral, the Maronite cathedral, and the Virgin megastore. Hariri’s monument to Lebanese solidarity past and present and future, now utterly empty. The sensitive Kuwaitis had all left Lebanon a day ago when Aoun declared the general strike. Everyone knew it was trouble. As Leon cut across, down to his left at the intersection of Haddad and Avenue Charles Helou, there were more figures than usual outside the headquarters of the Christian Maronite Phalange party, a large tan building archer-windowed like a citadel, beflagged with the Phalange cedar, presiding over the port. Leon could see thickset Phalangist men on the rooftops watching for developments, watching him cross the square and the Green Line too.

      At the intersection by the Phalange HQ was a Lebanese Army APC with, pointedly, no AA gun. There was a jeep beside it and twenty men at least watching the Phalangists back—in the dim and the scattered streetlights it was hard to tell, but they were probably police not army. As if the army would or could, without falling apart, stop the Phalange or the Lebanese Forces anyway, if they came out in anger. In the old days the officers were all Christians trained at Saint-Cyr and the military écoles of France; the soldiers were Sunni, Shi’a, Druze. When fighting goes sectarian, uniforms come off and soldiers go home to their tribes. Everyone knows it’s this way and it works. Farther up George Haddad was another APC and jeep, glowing orange-green under the streetlights like pollution or strange sweets, by the Paul Café on the rue Gouraud corner.

      As he got closer he walked slower. He held his empty hands out from his sides so they would know he was unarmed. He could see the silhouette of Abu Keiko under the trees with a fat sergeant and some soldiers, laughing. Behind his father in the light sat one single plastic chair. Beside it was a paper bag

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