Show and Tell

Ever since the bombing of Tehran in February, Ahmed had begun to notice more Americans hanging around the Beirut waterfront café where he’d worked as a waiter for the last thirty years. There’d always been Americans here, he thought to himself, at least since his earliest memories as a young teenager during the Six Day War when the Israeli Defense Forces took out Jordan, Syria, and Egypt’s air defenses in less time than he could collect two paychecks at Ali Baba’s. Now, at the age of fifty-three, Ahmed, who had seen three generations of professors, tourists, students, spooks and businessmen—the latter two distinguishable only by the volume of their arrogance—had grown accustomed to serving these masters of the universe, as they liked to view themselves, but his instincts told him to keep an eye out for characters obviously up to no good.

--from Deja Vu http://skookumgeoduck.blogspot.com/2005/05/deja-vu.html
part of the collection titled Meitheal available at http://www.lulu.com/content/137429