Levin’s search forces him to take up the path such men tread. Luckily, he shares their appreciation for the finer things in life. After loup de mer with the family friend in Paris (“this place has the best fish in town,” the friend says), Levin makes off to the Kempinski hotel in Istanbul (a “gorgeous, former Ottoman imperial palace on the Bosporus”). Here he is greeted by a waiter who brings honey (“straight off the honeycomb”) and dates to a table overlooking the strait. His dining companion, an intelligence operative in the employ of the emir of Qatar, makes some inquiries and arranges for Levin to meet with a powerful Lebanese sheikh (code name: “the Sheikh”) in Beirut. In Beirut there is tea, another round of elaborate Middle Eastern hospitality and deep indifference to the lost man. Over many pages, the Sheikh philosophizes in his grand but vapid way. Exhausted, Levin jets off to Amman. And so on.
In this book, now and then, certain phrases require careful parsing. On the opening page, Levin promises a “search for a missing person in Syria.” But do these words mean that the search must take place in Syria? They do not. In this case, the closest the searcher comes to Syria is the Four Seasons in Amman.
I like bargains as much as the next person. I am keen to understand more about the dark powers in Syria. And I’m willing to believe that, from the vantage of the Four Seasons in Amman, the war in Syria could seem a game presided over by profiteers, in which everyone is on drugs and whose leaders only feign belief in God and might even dress in a diamond-studded T-shirt, as the villain in this book, a Syrian dope trafficker, does.
I suspect that if Levin had conducted at least some of his search inside Syria, reality sooner or later would have forced him to toss his game theory away. A day or so inside the country would have shown him that, there, God remains alive and well. If he had stayed a bit longer, he would have seen that on neither side of the war do the combatants require drugs or, for that matter, money in order to kill one another. Under such conditions, a search for a missing person would have tried his nerves even more than the pashas in Beirut and Amman did, but had it yielded a book, it probably would not feel, as this one does, like a novel dashed off at the hotel bar between business meetings.
