"I want to talk about your book," Charlie said.

"It's not done yet. When it's done."

"You don't have to talk about it. I'll talk about it. And when it's done, we can both talk about it."

"We were nearly killed a little while ago. Let's talk about that."

"I know how to publish your work. Nobody in this business knows you better than I do. I know what you need."

"What's that?"

"You need a major house that also has a memory. That's why they hired me. They want to take a closer look at tradition. I represent something to those people. I represent books. I want to establish a solid responsible thoughtful list and give it the launching power of our mass-market capabilities. We have enormous resources. If you spend years writing a book, don't you want to see it fly?"

"How's your sex life, Charlie?"

"I can get this book out there in numbers that will astound."

"Got a girlfriend?"

"I had some prostate trouble. They had to reroute my semen."

"Where did they send it?"

"I don't know. But it doesn't come out the usual place."

"You still perform the act."

"Enthusiastically."

"But you don't ejaculate."

"Nothing comes out."

"And you don't know what happens to it."

"I didn't ask them what happens to it. It goes back inside. That's as much as I want to know."

"It's a beautiful story, Charlie. Not a word too long."

They looked at dessert menus.

"When will the book be done?"

"I'm fixing the punctuation."

"Punctuation's interesting. I make it a point to observe how a writer uses commas."

"And you figure two days tops and we're out of here," Bill said.

"This is what we're hoping. We're hoping it doesn't continue. The bomb was the culmination. They made their point even if we don't know exactly what it is."

"I may need to buy a shirt."

"Buy a shirt. And let me check you in here. Under the circumstances I think we ought to be able to find each other as expeditiously as possible."

"I'll think about it over coffee."

"We use acid-free paper," Charlie said.

"I'd just as soon have my books rot when I do. Why should they outlive me? They're the reason I'm dying before my time."

The man stood by the table waiting for them to finish the exchange. Bill looked off into space and waited for Charlie to realize the man was standing there. The table was large enough to accommodate another person and Charlie handled introductions while the waiter brought a chair. The man was George Haddad and when Charlie called him a spokesman for the group in Beirut the man made a gesture of self-deprecation, leaning away from the words, both hands raised. He clearly felt he hadn't earned the title.

"I'm a great admirer," he said to Bill. "And when Mr. Everson suggested you might join us at the press conference I was surprised and deeply pleased. Knowing of course how you shun public appearances."

He was clean-shaven, a tall man in his mid-forties, hair gone sparse at the front of his head. He had moist eyes and appeared sad and slightly hulking in a drab gray suit and a plastic watch he might have borrowed from a child.

"What's your connection?" Bill said.

"With Beirut? Let's say I sympathize with their aims if not their methods. This unit that took the poet is one element in a movement. Barely a movement actually. It's just an underground current at this stage, an assertion that not every weapon in Lebanon has to be marked Muslim, Christian or Zionist."

"Let's use first names," Charlie said.

Coffee came. Bill felt a stinging pinpoint heat, a shaped pain in his left hand, bright and slivered.

Charlie said, "Who wants to stop this meeting from taking place?"

"Maybe the war in the streets is simply spreading. I don't know. Maybe there's an organization that objects in principle to the release of any hostage, even a hostage they themselves are not holding. Certainly they understand that this man's release depends completely on the coverage. His freedom is tied to the public announcement of his freedom. You can't have the first without the second. This is one of many things Beirut has learned from the West. Beirut is tragic but still breathing. London is the true rubble. I've studied here and taught here and every time I return I see the damage more clearly."

Charlie said, "What do we have to do in your estimation to conduct this meeting safely?"

"It may not be possible here. The police will advise you to cancel. The next time I don't think there will be a phone call. I'll tell you what I think there will be." And he leaned over the table. "A very large explosion in a crowded room."

Bill picked a fragment of glass out of his hand. The others watched. He understood why the pain felt familiar. It was a summer wound, a play wound, one of the burns and knee-scrapes and splinters of half a century ago, one of the bee stings, the daily bloody cuts. You slid into a base and got a raspberry. You had a fight and got a shiner.

He said, "We have an innocent man locked in a cellar."

"Of course he's innocent. That's why they took him. It's such a simple idea. Terrorize the innocent. The more heartless they are, the better we see their rage. And isn't it the novelist, Bill, above all people, above all writers, who understands this rage, who knows in his soul what the terrorist thinks and feels? Through history it's the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark. Where are your sympathies? With the colonial police, the occupier, the rich landlord, the corrupt government, the militaristic state? Or with the terrorist? And I don't abjure that word even if it has a hundred meanings. It's the only honest word to use."

Bill's napkin was bunched on the table in front of him. The two men watched him place the glass fragment in a furrow in the cloth. It glinted like sand, the pebbly greenish swamp sand that belongs to childhood, to the bruises and welts, the fingers nicked by foul tips. He felt very tired. He listened to Charlie talk with the other man. He felt the deadweight of travel, the apathy and vagueness of being in a place that didn't matter to him, being invisible to himself, sleeping in a room he wouldn't recognize if he had a picture of it in front of him.

George was saying, "The first incident was unimportant because it was only a series of phone calls. The second incident was unimportant because nobody was killed. For you and Bill, pure trauma. Otherwise strictly routine. A few years ago a neo-Nazi group in Germany devised the slogan 'The worse the better.' This is also the slogan of Western media. You are nonpersons for the moment, victims without an audience. Get killed and maybe they will notice you."

In the morning Bill had breakfast in a pub near his hotel. He found he was able to order a pint of ale with his ham and eggs even though it was just past seven because night workers from the meat market were on their meal shift now. Extremely progressive licensing policy. White-coated doctors from Saint Bartholomew's sat at the next table. He looked at the cut on his hand. Seemed to be doing nicely but it's good to know the medics are near if you need advice or assistance. Old hospitals with saints' names are the ones you want to go to if you have cuts and abrasions. They haven't forgotten how to treat the classic Crusader wounds.

He took out a notepad and entered the breakfast bill and last night's taxi fare. The sound of the blast was still an echo in his skin.

Later in the day he met Charlie by prearrangement in front of the Chesterfield. They walked through Mayfair in a lazy dazzle of warm light. Charlie wore a blazer, gray flannels and bone-and-blue saddle oxfords.

"I talked to a Colonel Martinson or Martindale. Got it written down. One of those hard sharp technocrats whose religion is being smart. He knows all the phrases, he's got the jargon down pat. If you've got the language of being smart, you'll never catch a cold or get a parking ticket or die."