Boutros Tannous

Boutros Tannous is 44 and for eighteen years has served behind the hotel bar. Born in Zahlé, the son of a winegrower, he came to the capital at 18 to work as a kitchen helper. Kind and talkative, he calls every customer habibihabibi Arabic term of endearment meaning "my dear"; also used as a friendly form of address., knows each correspondent's taste in drinks and swears he keeps nothing of what he hears, though he hears everything.

He lives with his wife and two children in Achrafieh, in a stone house with a terrace of clotheslines and jasmine, where he keeps canaries in a wooden aviary. On Sundays he has lunch with the family, plays the oud badly and tells stories that change every week. He waits tables at the correspondents' dinners on the side and says the hotel pays the bill, but it's the tips that pay for the children's school.

He is short and strong, with a broad, dark-skinned face, a neatly trimmed black mustache and wavy black hair slicked with brilliantine. He wears a white barman's jacket with gold buttons, a black bow tie, a dish towel over his shoulder and a silver ring on his little finger. He moves quickly between tables, always with the tray balanced on his fingertips, and speaks low, close to the ear, like someone passing a secret he doesn't yet have.

About the bar, his account is that of a man who sees everything: he has seen every correspondent in the world arrive, he says, and the messages stay with him, here behind the bar. About Crispin, he has a phrase of admiration: gin at eleven, gin at lunch, gin until closing, and he has never seen Mr. Ledyard lose the thread of a conversation. With the city seething with correspondents, diplomats and the curious, nobody can say for certain where each person was on any given night.

Boutros knows the barman who serves the correspondents is always the last to be heard and the first to be cited. When the detective says he is the Russians' carrier pigeon, the kindness gives way to indignation, and he recalls that he pours drinks for Russians, Englishmen and Americans alike. It could be the offense of a man who lives on discretion. It could be someone who uses laughter to escape a more direct question. The detective will have to decide which.