Items related to Moonlight Hotel: A Novel
David Richards is a mid-level diplomat assigned to the sleepy Middle Eastern kingdom of Kutar. Richards spends his days monitoring small development projects and his nights attending embassy cocktail parties and bedding various visiting American women and diplomats’ wives.
The time is the early 1980s, when the American Empire has begun to tentatively flex its muscles once again. Kutar is a diplomatic backwater, a former British colony, barely a blip on the State Department’s radar back in Washington. For centuries desultory tribal conflict has flared sporadically in the arid hills hundreds of miles from the coastal capital of Laradan, and as the book opens rumors of a new skirmish there reach the city’s inhabitants. As always, the residents of Laradan ignore the stories, but this time something is different: The Americans decide to do something about it.
As any casual student of geopolitics might guess, this is bad news for the people of Kutar. Urged on by a Kurtzian American military advisor named Colonel Munn, the little-used Kutaran army marches into the hills. In quick order they are decimated, and with stunning rapidity the heights above Laradan are occupied by a rebel force possessed of the government’s abandoned artillery. Soon the Americans, and all other foreigners, are ordered from the country and leave the people of Laradan to their fate.
For his own deeply personal reasons, David chooses to stay on in the besieged city, and moves into the Moonlight Hotel, a crumbling colonial dinosaur. There he is joined by an eclectic assortment of other foreigners, including a senior British diplomat, an acid-tongued Romanian countess, and Amira, an aristocratic young woman who previously spurned David’s romantic advances. Together, this small community tries to maneuver over the radically-changed landscape of the beleaguered city, while holding out hope that the outside world might yet come to its rescue. Then the shooting begins in earnest.
The time is the early 1980s, when the American Empire has begun to tentatively flex its muscles once again. Kutar is a diplomatic backwater, a former British colony, barely a blip on the State Department’s radar back in Washington. For centuries desultory tribal conflict has flared sporadically in the arid hills hundreds of miles from the coastal capital of Laradan, and as the book opens rumors of a new skirmish there reach the city’s inhabitants. As always, the residents of Laradan ignore the stories, but this time something is different: The Americans decide to do something about it.
As any casual student of geopolitics might guess, this is bad news for the people of Kutar. Urged on by a Kurtzian American military advisor named Colonel Munn, the little-used Kutaran army marches into the hills. In quick order they are decimated, and with stunning rapidity the heights above Laradan are occupied by a rebel force possessed of the government’s abandoned artillery. Soon the Americans, and all other foreigners, are ordered from the country and leave the people of Laradan to their fate.
For his own deeply personal reasons, David chooses to stay on in the besieged city, and moves into the Moonlight Hotel, a crumbling colonial dinosaur. There he is joined by an eclectic assortment of other foreigners, including a senior British diplomat, an acid-tongued Romanian countess, and Amira, an aristocratic young woman who previously spurned David’s romantic advances. Together, this small community tries to maneuver over the radically-changed landscape of the beleaguered city, while holding out hope that the outside world might yet come to its rescue. Then the shooting begins in earnest.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
scott anderson is a war correspondent and a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. His work has also appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Harper’s, Outside, and many other publications. Over the years he has written from Beirut, Northern Ireland, Chechnya, Israel, Sudan, Sarajevo, El Salvador, and a number of other war-torn areas. He is the author of the novel Triage and the nonfiction books The 4 O’Clock Murders, The Man Who Tried to Save the World, and, with his brother, Jon Lee Anderson, War Zones. Anderson lives in Upstate New York.
One
She was leaning on the balcony railing, staring into the night, and David saw how her bare arms shone white, like marble or bone, from the lights of the house. She turned to look at him over her shoulder, tossing her blond hair as she did so. She smiled.
"You must have the best view in Kutar," she said.
David set their drinks on the railing, leaned like her, gazed out at what she saw. "One of them, I guess," he said.
They were on the back balcony of the house. The land fell away abruptly at that point on the ridgeline, giving the illusion at night that one was perched on the edge of a steep cliff. The airport and northern suburbs were below them, and then the desert began, a great darkness broken only by an occasional vehicle coming over the national highway and a few bright lights in the far distance. During his first weeks in Kutar, David had thought those lights were of isolated homes, homes he could never make out during the day, until his telescope arrived and he discovered they were stars low on the horizon. He looked to her and told her this.
She was very pretty in a wholesome, middle-America kind of way: striking eyes somewhere between blue and gray, a pleasant mouth, the emerald-green sheath dress suited her pale skin. He had forgotten her name. Julia, possibly, or maybe Janine.
She took a perfunctory sip from her drink, glanced at her wristwatch. "I should probably get going. Corinne will get worried."
David knew this was the time for him to say something--really, most anything would do. Instead he looked back out at the desert.
An upland breeze brought sounds from the northern suburbs: car horns, the rhythmic clang of metal, the whine of a truck laboring over Gowarshad Pass. From somewhere down the ridge came the baying of a wolf. David had heard the coastal range was home to great packs of wolves--the small, tan-colored sort one found in this part of the world--but he had yet to see one personally.
It was her green dress that he had first noticed at the party; even now, in what passed for early autumn in Kutar, most foreigners wore shades of white on account of the heat. Corinne, the wife of the political attaché, had waved David over and introduced her cousin, just in from Chicago for a visit, with a sly expression. Janine? Perhaps it was Jennifer.
At the balcony, he pointed into the dark, off to the east. "The sun comes up right over there. At first the desert is pink, then orange. Then it turns to gold." He lowered his arm, turned to her. "You should stay and watch the sunrise."
He saw the way her hand tightened on the railing, she gave a nervous little laugh. "I don't know," she said. "What would Corinne think?"
David smiled, as much to himself as to her. Corinne knew exactly what to think. Corinne would be far more surprised if her cousin from Chicago actually made the journey back down the mountain tonight. He didn't say this, though.
"You can call her," he said, "tell her you want to see the sunrise."
She reached for her glass again, but stopped, her lips quivering in an uncertain way. He leaned in to kiss her lightly on the jaw.
"You should stay," he whispered.
He kissed her again, a bit lower this time, on her throat, and he felt her sharp intake of breath, her tensing. She smelled of gardenia and rose and something astringent, and she tilted her head back to make room for him.
By the bed, he watched her undress, felt a tug of something almost like sadness at the careful way she removed the green dress and draped it over a chairback.
Afterward, with her sleeping beside him, David gazed up at his bedroom ceiling and listened. There were the usual sounds of the night: the low thrum of the city, the odd creaks of the house; the wolf was quiet now. He felt her breath, hot and regular, on his neck.
He smiled in the dark, struck by the incongruous thought that her breaths on his throat were meant to serve a purpose, as if he were some inflatable object that needed air. With this thought, he considered kissing her--the top of her head was just an inch from his mouth, her hair brushed his lips--but he didn't want to wake her. Instead, after a time he moved out of her embrace, the warm breath on his throat was gone, because what had started out as a humorous image had become a bit unsettling, and he silently rose from the bed and went back outside. He looked to the east, as if for the first traces of dawn, even though he knew this was still a long way off.
The Monday morning staff meeting began at 10:30. David arrived a bit early, as was his habit, in order to claim a seat facing the windows and the embassy's inner courtyard. Though he couldn't see the courtyard garden from that vantage point--the conference room was on the third floor--some of the upper branches of the trees were visible, and he liked having them to gaze at when the meetings went long.
The others began filing in shortly after, singly or in pairs, and David said a few words of greeting to each. To his surprise, Bill Myerson sat directly across from him. David couldn't recall him ever sitting there before, and he wondered if it signified something. He nodded at Bill, then opened one of his file folders and pretended to scan its contents.
Ambassador Draper strode in precisely on time and made for his chair at the head of the table. Flipping to a blank page in his notebook, he took a silver pen from his shirt pocket, looked along the table with a knowing smile.
"Well," he said, "I just read over the NSA's situation report." He paused for effect. "No mention of us again."
There were polite chuckles at the ambassador's favorite--and at this point, somewhat tired--opening joke. Every Sunday, the National Security Agency cabled a classified report to all overseas missions listing any potential crises--military unrest, labor strikes, the failing health of a head of state--that might be cause for concern somewhere in the world that week. Over the course of a year, a particularly troubled country might garner dozens of such citations, but this was not the case with Kutar; before his own posting there, David had checked the NSA index and discovered the kingdom hadn't even been mentioned in nearly a decade.
"So let's do it," John Draper said, and turned to the man on his immediate right, the agricultural, commercial, and economic attaché, Lee Warren.
Because the American mission to Kutar was so small--nine officials, a support staff of some two dozen, the eight Marine Guards--all the traditional diplomatic portfolios were handled by a mere four attaches. This rarely caused problems. In Lee Warren's case, for example, Kutar had virtually no external commerce to speak of, its role in the global economy was largely theoretical, and for the attaches the consolidation held the benefit of making them eligible for a wider range of postings in the future.
As usual, Lee spoke for only a few minutes, and then it was the turn of Cheryl Thompson, the consular officer. Cheryl reported that her office had received 112 new visa applications during the previous week, but had processed 163--9 approvals, 154 rejections--as it tried to pare down the backlog. This brought an approving nod from the ambassador.
"Excellent," he said. "At this rate, we should be pretty well caught up by Christmas."
"I should think so," Cheryl replied.
It was, in fact, Kutar's very insignificance that had made Ambassador Draper's arrival six months earlier a bit puzzling. Not yet forty-five, his rise through the Foreign Service up to that point had been steady and swift, so there was considerable debate among the American legation as to why he had ended up there. Some speculated he was being groomed for a more sensitive post in the region, and thus "paying his dues," but at least as many suspected he had made an enemy of someone important at State and was suffering retribution. For his part, John Draper never let on that he was anything but thrilled to be in Kutar--which, of course, was itself the sign of a good diplomat.
In any event, David had taken a quick liking to Draper, as had most of the staff. Handsome, with the lanky frame of a former athlete, the ambassador exuded an energy and optimism that was refreshing. With his attractive wife, Susan, and their three polite children, the Drapers seemed the very essence of a diplomatic family--charming, earnest, easy with all kinds of people--the sort that could be relied upon to cast the United States in a positive light abroad. And even if the vigor he brought to the post seemed a tad excessive--the previous ambassador had found once-a-month staff meetings more than sufficient--David saw its benefit as a guard against the torpor of the place.
"And the king thinks he'll get everyone on board with it?" John Draper was following up on some issue raised by Harold Derwinski, the political attaché, the details of which David had missed.
"I'd say it's still in the talking phase," Harold replied. "There's liable to be some grumbling from the traditionalists, but it's got a lot of support with the technocrats."
"Good," the ambassador said, "let's keep on top of that."
As the meeting wore on, David looked to the tree branches beyond Bill Myerson's head. What passed for winter in Kutar--a misting rain, an ocean-borne wind--wouldn't start for at least another three months, and until then even the slenderest of limbs would barely move in the still air of the enclosed garden; the little leaves would wear their brown coats of dust. Beyond the tree branches and the embassy roof, he saw the top of the coastal ridge and the uppermost reaches of the poorer hillside neighborhoods of Laradan, cascades of white houses that from this distance looked rather like mottled snow. He knew he couldn't see his ...
She was leaning on the balcony railing, staring into the night, and David saw how her bare arms shone white, like marble or bone, from the lights of the house. She turned to look at him over her shoulder, tossing her blond hair as she did so. She smiled.
"You must have the best view in Kutar," she said.
David set their drinks on the railing, leaned like her, gazed out at what she saw. "One of them, I guess," he said.
They were on the back balcony of the house. The land fell away abruptly at that point on the ridgeline, giving the illusion at night that one was perched on the edge of a steep cliff. The airport and northern suburbs were below them, and then the desert began, a great darkness broken only by an occasional vehicle coming over the national highway and a few bright lights in the far distance. During his first weeks in Kutar, David had thought those lights were of isolated homes, homes he could never make out during the day, until his telescope arrived and he discovered they were stars low on the horizon. He looked to her and told her this.
She was very pretty in a wholesome, middle-America kind of way: striking eyes somewhere between blue and gray, a pleasant mouth, the emerald-green sheath dress suited her pale skin. He had forgotten her name. Julia, possibly, or maybe Janine.
She took a perfunctory sip from her drink, glanced at her wristwatch. "I should probably get going. Corinne will get worried."
David knew this was the time for him to say something--really, most anything would do. Instead he looked back out at the desert.
An upland breeze brought sounds from the northern suburbs: car horns, the rhythmic clang of metal, the whine of a truck laboring over Gowarshad Pass. From somewhere down the ridge came the baying of a wolf. David had heard the coastal range was home to great packs of wolves--the small, tan-colored sort one found in this part of the world--but he had yet to see one personally.
It was her green dress that he had first noticed at the party; even now, in what passed for early autumn in Kutar, most foreigners wore shades of white on account of the heat. Corinne, the wife of the political attaché, had waved David over and introduced her cousin, just in from Chicago for a visit, with a sly expression. Janine? Perhaps it was Jennifer.
At the balcony, he pointed into the dark, off to the east. "The sun comes up right over there. At first the desert is pink, then orange. Then it turns to gold." He lowered his arm, turned to her. "You should stay and watch the sunrise."
He saw the way her hand tightened on the railing, she gave a nervous little laugh. "I don't know," she said. "What would Corinne think?"
David smiled, as much to himself as to her. Corinne knew exactly what to think. Corinne would be far more surprised if her cousin from Chicago actually made the journey back down the mountain tonight. He didn't say this, though.
"You can call her," he said, "tell her you want to see the sunrise."
She reached for her glass again, but stopped, her lips quivering in an uncertain way. He leaned in to kiss her lightly on the jaw.
"You should stay," he whispered.
He kissed her again, a bit lower this time, on her throat, and he felt her sharp intake of breath, her tensing. She smelled of gardenia and rose and something astringent, and she tilted her head back to make room for him.
By the bed, he watched her undress, felt a tug of something almost like sadness at the careful way she removed the green dress and draped it over a chairback.
Afterward, with her sleeping beside him, David gazed up at his bedroom ceiling and listened. There were the usual sounds of the night: the low thrum of the city, the odd creaks of the house; the wolf was quiet now. He felt her breath, hot and regular, on his neck.
He smiled in the dark, struck by the incongruous thought that her breaths on his throat were meant to serve a purpose, as if he were some inflatable object that needed air. With this thought, he considered kissing her--the top of her head was just an inch from his mouth, her hair brushed his lips--but he didn't want to wake her. Instead, after a time he moved out of her embrace, the warm breath on his throat was gone, because what had started out as a humorous image had become a bit unsettling, and he silently rose from the bed and went back outside. He looked to the east, as if for the first traces of dawn, even though he knew this was still a long way off.
The Monday morning staff meeting began at 10:30. David arrived a bit early, as was his habit, in order to claim a seat facing the windows and the embassy's inner courtyard. Though he couldn't see the courtyard garden from that vantage point--the conference room was on the third floor--some of the upper branches of the trees were visible, and he liked having them to gaze at when the meetings went long.
The others began filing in shortly after, singly or in pairs, and David said a few words of greeting to each. To his surprise, Bill Myerson sat directly across from him. David couldn't recall him ever sitting there before, and he wondered if it signified something. He nodded at Bill, then opened one of his file folders and pretended to scan its contents.
Ambassador Draper strode in precisely on time and made for his chair at the head of the table. Flipping to a blank page in his notebook, he took a silver pen from his shirt pocket, looked along the table with a knowing smile.
"Well," he said, "I just read over the NSA's situation report." He paused for effect. "No mention of us again."
There were polite chuckles at the ambassador's favorite--and at this point, somewhat tired--opening joke. Every Sunday, the National Security Agency cabled a classified report to all overseas missions listing any potential crises--military unrest, labor strikes, the failing health of a head of state--that might be cause for concern somewhere in the world that week. Over the course of a year, a particularly troubled country might garner dozens of such citations, but this was not the case with Kutar; before his own posting there, David had checked the NSA index and discovered the kingdom hadn't even been mentioned in nearly a decade.
"So let's do it," John Draper said, and turned to the man on his immediate right, the agricultural, commercial, and economic attaché, Lee Warren.
Because the American mission to Kutar was so small--nine officials, a support staff of some two dozen, the eight Marine Guards--all the traditional diplomatic portfolios were handled by a mere four attaches. This rarely caused problems. In Lee Warren's case, for example, Kutar had virtually no external commerce to speak of, its role in the global economy was largely theoretical, and for the attaches the consolidation held the benefit of making them eligible for a wider range of postings in the future.
As usual, Lee spoke for only a few minutes, and then it was the turn of Cheryl Thompson, the consular officer. Cheryl reported that her office had received 112 new visa applications during the previous week, but had processed 163--9 approvals, 154 rejections--as it tried to pare down the backlog. This brought an approving nod from the ambassador.
"Excellent," he said. "At this rate, we should be pretty well caught up by Christmas."
"I should think so," Cheryl replied.
It was, in fact, Kutar's very insignificance that had made Ambassador Draper's arrival six months earlier a bit puzzling. Not yet forty-five, his rise through the Foreign Service up to that point had been steady and swift, so there was considerable debate among the American legation as to why he had ended up there. Some speculated he was being groomed for a more sensitive post in the region, and thus "paying his dues," but at least as many suspected he had made an enemy of someone important at State and was suffering retribution. For his part, John Draper never let on that he was anything but thrilled to be in Kutar--which, of course, was itself the sign of a good diplomat.
In any event, David had taken a quick liking to Draper, as had most of the staff. Handsome, with the lanky frame of a former athlete, the ambassador exuded an energy and optimism that was refreshing. With his attractive wife, Susan, and their three polite children, the Drapers seemed the very essence of a diplomatic family--charming, earnest, easy with all kinds of people--the sort that could be relied upon to cast the United States in a positive light abroad. And even if the vigor he brought to the post seemed a tad excessive--the previous ambassador had found once-a-month staff meetings more than sufficient--David saw its benefit as a guard against the torpor of the place.
"And the king thinks he'll get everyone on board with it?" John Draper was following up on some issue raised by Harold Derwinski, the political attaché, the details of which David had missed.
"I'd say it's still in the talking phase," Harold replied. "There's liable to be some grumbling from the traditionalists, but it's got a lot of support with the technocrats."
"Good," the ambassador said, "let's keep on top of that."
As the meeting wore on, David looked to the tree branches beyond Bill Myerson's head. What passed for winter in Kutar--a misting rain, an ocean-borne wind--wouldn't start for at least another three months, and until then even the slenderest of limbs would barely move in the still air of the enclosed garden; the little leaves would wear their brown coats of dust. Beyond the tree branches and the embassy roof, he saw the top of the coastal ridge and the uppermost reaches of the poorer hillside neighborhoods of Laradan, cascades of white houses that from this distance looked rather like mottled snow. He knew he couldn't see his ...
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- PublisherDoubleday
- Publication date2006
- ISBN 10 0385515561
- ISBN 13 9780385515566
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages384
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