David Dean - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005

The following year I learned that for myself, during five weeks in West Beirut, covering the Israeli army’s siege and its sequel, Chairman Arafat and Co. turfed out. Interesting times, as the Chinese put it. I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds — and how splendid it was to get out of there.

Don’t quote me, but I’m a fair feature writer and a poor reporter. Survival depends on sticking with better ones, which is how Digger Purnell and I became joined at the hip. It used to be a rite of passage for many Oz hacks to spend awhile on a British paper and I’d eased his way through mine, until Digger sprinkled vodka into the managing editor’s wastebasket and set it alight, “to liven up the stuffy bugger.” That was too rich for our blood and he was off on his travels once more.

Digger settled in Beirut before the civil war began; he spoke fluent bad Arabic and any local he didn’t know, he knew of. A sound man, the hooligan.

We were having dinner at the Commodore one night — out there in the cement garden with its emptied, dangerously deep, slipper-shaped swimming pool and the parrot doing perfect imitations of incoming artillery rounds — and maybe an empty chair sparked an association of ideas. “Did you see much of Robbo Ratcliffe when he was here?”

“Not as much as some saw.” Digger’s a professional Australian and they can be wearing. Digger in cryptic, I-know-and-you-do-not mode is even worse, so I didn’t bite.

“Doesn’t matter, I just wondered what the heck he was doing here.”

“He was shagging somebody’s wife,” Digger informed me matter-of-factly. He said that the husband was an executive of a company I have no intention of naming, to protect the adulterous. “Yeah, Robbo followed her wherever her old man was posted, like a little doggie. When they were here, before things got really bad, she’d sneak over to Cyprus for fun ’n games. The Mister was sweet provided they didn’t carry on under his nose.

“But madam found better fish to fry and stopped going to Cyprus. So Robbo upped sticks and based himself here, bloody fool. Somebody, uh, found that unacceptable.”

“You mean...?”

“Put it this way: He got blown away by a man in military fatigues and a barracks cap. PLO or local militia, moonlighting. The job cost twenty pounds sterling, I know that for a fact.” (Later, gingerly, I tried the concept on a PLO officer for credibility, and his verdict was, “Twenty? Some of my men would do it for a pack of cigarettes. Or a kind word.”)

That night, uncertain whether Digger Purnell was making it up as he went along, to impress me with insider stuff, I objected, “You said the husband didn’t mind.”

“Typical dim pom, never listens! Chilly Willy wasn’t around anymore, was he. He’d been posted home-side, she stuck around for a while. It was her new fancy man, scared Robbo might get her back.” Digger cackled and cocked an eye over the candle in its red glass globe. “I wouldn’t have minded a punt at her myself, she was tasty, but I dropped that idea after what happened. Fine chance, anyway — after Robbo got himself scragged she shot straight home to hubby. So the guy who paid the piper invested twenty quid for nothing. Serve him right. Your round, Charlie.”

That was a weird siege: West Beirut was cordoned off and under sporadic attack from land, sea, and air (gunboats with missiles), yet there were quiet spells and it was a relatively large area. One needed wheels, meaning a taxi.

Sharif was my driver. He’d owned a restaurant and a decent house by what had been the St. George’s Hotel, and some rental property, and now he had his car. Like many of them, not your standard cabbie. I don’t know how he discovered that I’d known Robin Ratcliffe — nothing stayed private around the Commodore, the waiters listened out and everybody was somebody’s kinsman, a cousin or thereabouts.

One morning we were rolling along Hamra, the main shopping street, when Sharif observed, “Mr. Robin was a nice man. A happy man.” Here he sighed heavily, obviously thinking that he had been the same, longer ago than he cared to remember. “He lived in one of my apartments, the Is-ra-aelis got it last month, it was the last of them. I had many flats.”

I made a neutral sound. Terrible thing to say, but true: He was lucky compared to some. Still had his skin — and the Mercedes. Sharif pulled over. “I saw it happen. Over there. No, here on my side.” His tone was casual, much as you’d use when indicating a minor landmark to a tourist.

“I was in Hamra constantly when I had businesses, that is how I saw it happen, there where I point. It was a restaurant,” he added helpfully. We were looking at a hole in the frontages where the remains of an industrial-size freezer and a catering range showed through heaped rubble and charcoal beams bulldozed towards the back.

A sole surviving chair, the aluminium, stackable kind, leaned drunkenly out of the gap and a stray mongrel was lifting a leg against it.

There’d been a canopy, and the chairs stood at tables in its shade, with little bay trees in tubs to divide them from passersby. Sharif saw his tenant Robin Ratcliffe pause outside the restaurant. A man in olive-drab had been some distance behind. Once he was closer, he drew his pistol and shot Robin through the head, hardly breaking stride to do so.

The gunman kept walking. Everybody in the vicinity sat tight until he went down an alley, although he had holstered the weapon while his target was hitting the ground. The incident was not uncommon in civil-war Beirut and a certain etiquette had emerged.

I knew the alleged motive for the killing and I expect Sharif did, too, but we dropped the subject by tacit agreement. However, he took to pausing outside the ex-restaurant if we weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere and Digger was not in the car.

It got on my nerves but I kept quiet in case Sharif put a higher value on life than I’d assumed, and it was his way of signalling regret. Towards the end, when the PLO was on its way out and American and French and Italian troops — feathered headgear when they landed, very dashing — held the ring, Sharif pulled over and this time he mentioned something else.

“It was strange,” he said meditatively. “I wanted to speak to Mr. Robin, that was why I was watching. I meant to offer a long lease at a good rate, he was a tenant I wanted to keep.

“A delivery was finishing, and soon there would be space to park, but I didn’t want to get blocked in. If Mr. Robin looked round, I could call him over, talk of the lease. He was staring at the window of the restaurant.

“There was nothing to see, the blinds were... the strips were joined, it was just a shut blind, the place was closed. But he was looking, looking.” Sharif made that catlike hiss some Lebanese emit to signal incomprehension laced with impatience. “What else could make him stare — empty tables, empty chairs?

“He could not have seen the soldier coming, he was looking the wrong way. But he did see, though his back was turned, he shouted, ‘No, no!’ and covered his eyes just as the soldier shot him. Strange...”

And we rolled on, with me speechless and... preoccupied, you might say.

No, I do not believe that the Seated Woman escaped from the canvas and crossed the world to ambush Robin Ratcliffe in Beirut. He didn’t see her where his reflection belonged in that restaurant window, or find her in one of those metal chairs, invisible to anyone but him.

It’s insulting to even suggest that I might consider the notion. I am a twenty-first century adult, after all.

Admittedly Sharif had no reason to lie to me. I am confident that he didn’t, for that matter. Nonsense is talked about death meaning less in the Middle East — the stereotype is hard to sustain if you attend funerals there. But death is taken differently, maybe because there is so much of it.