Raymond Khoury - The Sanctuary

“One moment, please.” Evelyn’s heart contracted as the phone operator checked her records. “I’m sorry,” the operator came back, somewhat inappropriately chirpy. “I don’t show anyone here by that name.”

Evelyn shrank back in her chair. “Are you sure? I mean, could you check again, please?”

The operator asked Evelyn to confirm the surname’s spelling, ran it again, and came up with nothing. Evelyn heaved a doleful sigh. The operator must have caught it, as she then added, “If you like, I can check our personnel records and get back to you. Perhaps your friend left some forwarding details.”

Evelyn gave her her name and her Beirut cell-phone number, thanked her, and hung up. She hadn’t really expected to reach him there, it had been far too long for that, but the bubble of excitement still left her feeling tense and restless.

She checked her watch. It was almost seven. She frowned. She’d agreed to meet Mia for a drink at her hotel. The timing couldn’t have been worse. She thought of calling her and canceling it, but she couldn’t bear the thought of sitting alone for two more hours, captive to the memories rattling around in the attic of her mind, waiting to go out on a rendezvous that she was dreading more by the minute.

She decided a drink with her daughter, surrounded by good music and some distracting faces, might help nurse her through the wait. She just had some ducking and avoiding to do, on a particularly troublesome subject. At least until she understood what was going on.

She closed the file and laid it down on her desk, stuffed the Polaroids and her cell phone into her handbag, and headed for the hotel across the street from her apartment.

The telex machines were history. The middling Chinese restaurant was gone, replaced by a gleaming new Benihana. The circular and eponymous News Bar was also long gone — supplanted by the equally imaginatively named Lounge, complete with dark Wengé paneling, piped Café del Mar compilations, and passion-fruit mojitos — as was Coco, its resident parrot, who, with his eerily faultless imitation of an incoming artillery shell, sent many an uninitiated visitor scurrying for cover.

The hotel’s fifteen minutes of fame stretched out over most of the 1980s, when it was the favorite haunt of “the pack” in Beirut. Dan Rather, Peter Jennings — they’d all stayed here. At a time when rival militias had turned West Beirut into the modern era’s standard-bearer of urban chaos, before the honor was usurped by Mogadishu and then Baghdad, the Commodore was a sanctuary of filet mignon, electricity, working telex machines, and a bar that never ran dry, thanks to a dauntless hotel manager and some hefty protection payments. Truth be told, the manager probably did his job too well: Most of the reporters who were in town to cover the fighting rarely ventured away from the cushy safety of the hotel, filing their eyewitness reports from the front desk rather than the front line.

Those days were, mercifully, long gone — for the most part, anyway. And the face-lift that had brought the city back to life didn’t pass by the hotel, now known as the Meridien Commodore. Despite the fancy makeover, it was still the hangout of choice for the visiting news media, even sans Coco. The pack was loyal, a loyalty that was much in evidence since the sudden eruption of the brief but brutal war that had hogged the headlines around the globe all summer. The Commodore was back to its former glory, fueled by alcohol, adrenaline, and the best broadband connection in town, again displaying that intangible knack of making its guests feel as if they were part of an extended Sicilian family — which was comforting to Mia Bishop, given that her experience in war zones was nonexistent.

Not that it was something she was particularly keen to redress.

She hadn’t exactly chosen genetics as a ticket to adventure.

“I know it’s probably none of my business, but… are you sure you’re okay?”

After chatting with Evelyn about how her own work was progressing, and trading anecdotes and observations about the myriad aftereffects of the war that would color their lives for the foreseeable future, Mia finally popped the question. It had been gnawing at her from the moment they’d sat down, and although she felt uncomfortable asking, she felt even less comfortable not offering her mom an opening if she needed one.

Evelyn shifted slightly at the question, adjusting her position on the deep sofa, then took a lingering sip from her wineglass. “I’m fine,” she confirmed with what seemed like a forced half-smile, before her eyes wandered and lost themselves in the soothing glow of the wine. “It’s nothing.”

“You sure?”

Evelyn hesitated. “It’s just…I saw someone today. Someone I hadn’t seen for a long time. Fifteen years, maybe more.”

Mia flashed her a loaded smile. “I see.”

Evelyn caught her drift. “It’s nothing like that, believe me,” she protested. “It’s just a local fixer who helped out on our digs. In Iraq. Pre-Saddam. I was down south with Ramez — you met him, didn’t you?”

Mia nodded. “I think so. Last week, in your office? Small guy, right?”

He was the only colleague of Evelyn’s that she’d met. She’d only been in Beirut for three weeks, flying in on one of the first planes to land at the airport since it had reopened after its runways were blitzed by Israeli warplanes in the opening day of the war.

Her introduction to the bizarro world of postwar Beirut had been pretty swift: The massive Airbus had lurched to an abrupt stop seconds after touching down, then veered off the tarmac sharply, revealing a bulldozer and a cement truck that were nonchalantly repairing a huge bomb crater in the middle of the runway. Mia could still picture the workers’ casual wave to her and the rest of the shaken passengers on board.

Beirut was open for business, craters in the runway or not. And she could finally get going on the big Phoenician project she’d been gearing up for all year, albeit a few months later than scheduled.

She’d been approached while working with a small team of geneticists in Boston who had undertaken the prodigious task of tracing the spread of mankind across the globe. That project, which involved collecting and analyzing DNA samples taken from thousands of men living in isolated tribes on all of the continents, had confirmed with breathtaking finality that we were all descended from one small tribe of hunter-gatherers who lived in Africa around sixty thousand years ago, a discovery that didn’t go down too well in more “sensitive” circles. Mia had joined the team just after getting her postgraduate degree, which was shortly before their central findings were announced; since then, the work had been somewhat anticlimactic and repetitive, consisting mostly of collecting more and more samples to beef up the overall picture. She’d thought about moving on to other cutting-edge areas of research, but the most interesting work in genetics was being hampered by the presidential aversion to stem cell research. So she stayed put — until the offer popped up.

The man who’d made the approach was a representative of the Hariri Foundation, a charity with seriously deep pockets set up by the billionaire former prime minister of Lebanon, before his assassination in 2005. The proposal the charity’s rep put forward was vague, but compelling: Simply put, he wanted her to help them figure out who the Phoenicians were.

Which kind of threw her.

Surprisingly, and despite that they were mentioned in many ancient texts written by those they interacted with, little was known about the Phoenicians firsthand. For a people who were credited with inventing the world’s first alphabet and whose role as “cultural middlemen” sparked the revival in Greece that led to the birth of Western civilization, they didn’t leave much behind. None of their writings or literature had survived, and everything known about them had been pieced together from third-party reports. Even their name was attributed to them by others, in the case the ancient Greeks, who called them the Phoinikes , the red people, after the luxurious reddish purple cloth they made using a highly prized dye they extracted from the glands of mollusks. There were no Phoenician libraries, no troves of knowledge, no papyrus scrolls squirreled away in alabaster jars. Nothing from two thousand years of enigmatic history that came to a brutal end when their city-states eventually fell to a series of invaders culminating with the Romans, who, in 146 BC, burned Carthage to the ground, spread salt over its ruins, forbade resettlement in the city for twenty-five years, and obliterated the last major center of Phoenician culture. It was as if any trace of them had been wiped off the face of the earth.