cortile of the Umayyad Mosque where there is, they say, one of the severed heads of John the Baptist, and above all eat, eat, drink, and get bored watching the fine winter sleet fall on the city of sadness and dust, of course the French embassy was a forbidden zone for me, that’s too bad, I would have liked to see the beautiful Arabic house where Faysal settled in 1918, Faysal the sharif of Mecca whom Lawrence of Arabia had made King of the Arabs, before the French and General Gouraud threw him out of his new capital and the British recovered him to place him on the throne in Iraq by giving a Hashemite legitimacy to that country newly founded by the joining of three Ottoman provinces that had no intention of cohabiting peacefully within a puppet state, even to please Churchill or Gertrude Bell the archeologist spy, in that Near- or Middle-East that the French and English had shamelessly divided among themselves in 1916, what could be left of Faysal in the residence of the powerful French ambassador to Syria, the first velvet armchair in which the Bedouin king had sat, maybe, the tired springs of the bed where he had slept, did his ghost come to disturb the sleep of a charming ambassadress, causing dreams of horses galloping through the scorching desert, nightmares of thirst, or erotic dreams of frenzied Arabic nights — nights in Damascus or Aleppo were not very conducive to lust or Capuan luxury, the very prudish Syrian dictatorship preferred a martial austerity, Aphrodite passed only rarely through the mountains of Mount Lebanon, on the shores of the almost dry Barada River there were a few cabarets where drunken Saudis showered banknotes on fat, wrinkled belly-dancers with acid music accompaniment, a very ugly gentleman armed with a red plastic bucket collected the carpet of notes while these ladies continued shaking their breasts into the mustaches of emirs who immediately ordered another bottle of Johnny Walker to make their hard-on go away, in Aleppo in a side-street between two spare-parts stores there was a similar kind of establishment but full of Ukrainian and Bulgarian women in swimsuits who raised their legs French-Cancan-style for a few beer-drinking soldiers with mustaches, after each number they’d go sit on the clients’ laps, I remember one of them had lived in Skopje and spoke a passable Serbian, she said she’d visit me in my hotel room in exchange for the modest sum of 200 dollars, at that rate the Syrians must not have screwed much, she told me that she had arrived in Aleppo in reply to a job offer for dancers, she loved to dance, she said to herself that dancing in a Syrian troupe would be a beginning I didn’t know if I should believe her or not, and also the salary was good, it wasn’t prostitution, she said, it was dancing, she seemed as if she were trying to convince herself, she was just on twenty, a smiling face she was blonde as wheat, they were all blonde as wheat, she got back on stage for the next number, she looked at me as she jigged up and down, the five girls took sensual poses to “My Way,” they mimed kisses with depressed little pouts I left to go back to my hotel and to the solitude of my room very happy not to need to succumb to the charms of the swimsuit-wearing dancers, I remember the next day I had a “meeting” with a man about whom I knew nothing on a café terrace facing the incredible Citadel of Aleppo, I was supposed to sit on a terrace with a red sweater and a wool scarf placed on the back of the chair opposite me — sometimes reality becomes a spy movie from the 1960s, probably this honorable correspondent had read too many Cold War spy novels, in the Zone things were very different, still I was a little worried, I didn’t much want two Syrian secret service agents to sit down at my table and say “so, red sweater and wool scarf, eh?” and kick me out of Syria after giving me a beating, or worse, the most likely thing would be for them to keep me in secret somewhere while they waited to exchange me for someone or something, and even if there is in fact a share of risk in my business it always seems very remote, in the Agency I never carried a weapon or anything of that sort (I did have a little 7.65 Zastava at my place but that was an unusable war souvenir) but that morning when I went to the meeting at the Citadel I wasn’t entirely at ease, because it was Syria, because Syria is the country of informers, because in Syria there aren’t many tourists and it’s not as easy to melt into the crowd as in Cairo or Tunis, I walked through the endless Aleppo souk on foot, I bought three knickknacks for Stéphanie the brunette (to hell with secret trips), some bay-leaf soap, a silk scarf, and a little copper hookah probably impossible to smoke but at least I looked like a perfect tourist when I emerged from the covered market onto the Citadel square, I settled onto a café terrace, I asked for coffee, coffee, café, please, I placed my scarf on the chair in front of me, and I waited as I contemplated the glacis of the impregnable fortress, a masterpiece of Arabic military architecture said the Lonely Planet open on the table to give me the look of a solitary adventurer, I had finished my coffee when a man about sixty, quite tall, with white hair, came up to me and asked if I spoke French, I replied yes, of course, and he said in French