He ducked his head. "Well…"
It wasn't common to find a forger with a steady business. That sort of work tends to go in sudden spurts and long stoppages. What it probably meant was that Charlie had somehow gotten into the counterfeit game. Personally, I didn't care what he was doing as long as I got what I came for.
He must have been reading my mind. "Uh… I'm not so sure I can do this, Nick."
I gave him a friendly smile and sat down on one of the double-ended sofas that sat at right angles with its twin, making a false corner in the middle of the living room. "Sure you can, Charlie," I said easily.
Taking Wilhelmina out of her holster, I waved it carelessly in the air. "If you don't, I'll kill you." I wouldn't have of course. I don't go around killing people for something like that, particularly little people like Charlie Harkins. But then, Charlie didn't know that. All he knew was that I could kill people on occasion. The thought apparently occurred to him.
He thrust out a pleading palm. "Okay, Nick, okay. It's just that I'm not… well, anyway…"
"Okay." I reholstered Wilhelmina and leaned forward, my elbows on my knees. "I need a whole new identity, Charlie."
He nodded.
"When I leave here tonight, I'm going to be Nick Cartano, originally from Palermo, more recently from the French Foreign Legion. Leave me about a year or so between the Foreign Legion and now. I can fake that." The fewer actual facts people had to check back on, the better off I would be.
Harkins frowned and pulled at his chin. "That means a passport, discharge papers… what else?"
I ticked them off on my fingers. "I'll need personal letters from my family in Palermo, from a girl in Syracuse, a girl from St. Lo. I want a driver's permit from St. Lo, clothes from France, an old suitcase, and an old wallet."
Charlie looked distressed. "Gee, Nick, I can get that stuff all right, I guess, but it will take some time. I'm not supposed to being doing anything for anybody else now and I'll have to go slow and… uh…"
Again, I got the impression that Charlie was working steadily for someone else. But at the moment, I couldn't have cared less.
"I want it tonight, Charlie," I said.
He sighed in exasperation, started to say something, then thought the better of it and pursed his lips, thinking. "I can do the passport and the discharge papers, all right," he finally said. "There's enough demand for those that I've got forms on hand, but…"
"Get them," I interrupted.
He looked at me dismally for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders in resignation. "I'll try."
Some people just won't do anything unless you lean on them. I leaned on Charlie and about midnight that night I walked out of that plastic elegance into the fetid streets of the Quarter as Nick Cartano. A phone call to our embassy would take care of my old passport and the few belongings I had left in the Hotel St. Georges. From now until I finished this job, I was Nick Cartano, a footloose Sicilian with a cloudy past.
I whistled a light Italian tune as I went down the street.
I moved into the Hotel Roma and waited. If there was a stream of Sicilians pouring through Beirut on their way to America, they would be coming through the Roma. The Roma in Beirut is an irresistible attraction for Italians, as if the front desk were decorated with cloves of garlic. Actually, the way it smells, it could be.
For all my planning, however, I met Louie Lazaro by pure chance the very next day.
It was one of those flatly hot days you find so often along the coast of Lebanon. The scorching blast of the desert is there, sand dry and fiercely hot, but the cool blue of the Mediterranean lessens the impact.
On the sidewalk in front of me, hawk-visaged Bedouins, their black abayas trimmed with gold brocade, shouldered their way past sleek Levantine businessmen; flagrantly mustached merchants bustled by, talking excitedly in French; here and there appeared tarbooshes, their wearers sometimes in severely cut Western suits, sometimes in galibeahs, the ever present nightgown-like robe. On the curb, a legless beggar wallowed in the street's accumulated filth, wailing, "Bahksheesh, bahksheesh," at each passer-by, his palms upturned in supplication and his rheumy eyes beseeching. In the street, a veiled old haridan perched high on a mangy camel that plodded along disconsolately, oblivious to the taxis dodging wildly through the narrow street, raucous horns honking in dissonance.
Across the street, two American girls were taking pictures of a Negebian family group as it paraded slowly down the street, the women balancing huge earthen jars on their heads, both men and women in the soft oranges and blues these gentle people so often affect in their robes and turbans. In the distance, where Almendares Street curves southward toward the St. Georges, the magnificent white sand beach was dotted with sunbathers. Like swirling ants on the blue glass sea, I could see two water skiers trailing their toy-like boats on invisible threads.
It happened suddenly: A taxi whipping blindly around the comer, the driver fighting the wheel as he swerved into the middle of the street to avoid the camel and then see-sawing back to miss an oncoming car. Tires screeching, the cab hurtled out of control in a careening side skid toward the beggar groveling on the curb.
Instinctively I moved, darting toward him in a headlong dive, half-shoving, half-throwing the Arab out of the path of the taxi and tumbling after him into the gutter as the cab smashed across the sidewalk and slammed against the stucco wall of the abutting building in a shrieking agony of rending metal.
For a moment, the world of Almendares Street was stunned into a wax museum tableau. Then a woman wailed, a long drawn-out moan that released her fear and seemed to echo the relief in the crowded street. I lay motionless for a moment, mentally counting my arms and legs. They all seemed to be there, though my forehead felt as if it had taken quite a thumping.
I got up slowly, testing all my working parts. No bones seemed to be broken, no joints sprained, so I moved over to peer through the front door window of the cab, jammed grotesquely against the unyielding stucco.
A multi-lingual babel swelled behind me as I ripped open the door and, as gently as I could, pulled the driver from behind the wheel. Miraculously, he seemed unscathed, only stunned. There was an ashen cast to his olive face as he leaned unsteadily against the wall, a tassled tarboosh improbably cocked over one eye, staring incomprehensively at the wreck of his livelihood.
Satisfied that he was in no immediate distress. T turned my attention to the beggar who lay writhing on his back in the gutter, too much in pain to help himself or, perhaps, too weak. God knows, he was as thin as any starving man I have ever seen. There was quite a lot of blood on his face, most of it from a deep gash high on his cheekbone, and he was moaning piteously. When he saw me leaning over him, however, he half-raised himself on one elbow and thrust out his other hand.
"Bahksheesh, sadiki," he sobbed. "Bahksheesh! Bahksheesh!"
I turned away, revolted. In New Delhi and Bombay I have seen the living heaps of bones and bloated bellies that lie in the streets awaiting death by starvation, but even they have more human dignity than the beggars of Beirut.
I started to move away, but a hand on my arm detained me. It belonged to a short, pudgy little man with a cherubic face and eyes as black as his hair. He wore a black silk suit, a white shirt and white tie, incongruous in the heat of Beirut.
"Momento," he said excitedly, his head bobbing up and down as if to lend emphasis. "Momento, per favore."
Then he switched from Italian to French. "Vous vous êtes fait du mal?" His accent was atrocious.