There was a long silence. Gini was not sure, even then, if she had made the right approach. Outright appeals, antagonism, sympathy—nothing she said seemed to reach this girl. She was still looking at Gini with a mutinous hostility, as if Gini were irrevocably on the other side of some impassable wall between the young and the adult.

Gini could sense the impasse. Feeling suddenly tired and dispirited, she signaled to the waiter to bring more coffee. There was an irony here, beneath the surface of this difficult conversation. Gini wondered if Fricke would believe her if she tried to explain how close she herself felt to Anneke, to Mina. She thought of herself, a few weeks short of her sixteenth birthday, cutting school, taking a plane to Beirut to join her father, the last futile attempt she had made to make her father notice her, take some interest in her life.

“I want to be a journalist too, Daddy,” she had said. “I thought—if I came here. Watched you. I could learn. And I wanted to see you, of course.”

He hadn’t even replied. He’d just sat there in his hotel room, sipping his bourbon. When she mentioned journalism, there was an immediate flicker of derision in his eyes; he laughed suddenly—a snort of laughter. Gini had never forgiven that.

Her father had been her god: since she scarcely knew him, rarely saw him, it had been easy to imagine him as such. In Beirut, day by day, watching him sit sweating in the bar of the Hotel Ledoyen, doing next to no work, rehearsing his endless anecdotes about Vietnam, his Pulitzer, to a crowd of sycophants, she had discovered how misplaced her idolatry had been. She turned back to Fricke, to her cold, hostile stare. The girl was already on her third cigarette.

“I can understand some of this, Fricke,” she began. “I can remember how it feels to be your age, Anneke’s age. I can remember—oh, the confusion, the pain, the clash of loyalties. I can remember all that.”

“Oh, yeah?” The girl gave a small smile. Her certainty that Gini could not, that the experiences of her sister and herself were unique, unprecedented, infuriated Gini. Then she remembered: that blind teenage arrogance, that conviction that no one, ever, could have experienced emotions so complex and intense, she too had felt that.

She gave another sigh and looked away. She thought of the day on which she had first met Pascal, of his introduction in the Ledoyen bar, of her father continuing to hold court, her own embarrassment—it was midmorning, and her father was at the three-bourbon stage already, the anecdotes getting too protracted, too boastful—and then her gradual realization that this tall, silent young Frenchman, standing on the edge of a group of men twenty strong, was watching her father in silence, with an expression of undisguised contempt.

He had left the bar shortly afterward; she had followed him, furious, intent on challenging him. The challenge had escalated into confrontation, almost a fight. The conflict in Beirut was still localized then. Pascal Lamartine had caught hold of her arm and dragged her out into the white heat of the street.