Sargon

Degaul (Degaul! Whose son is, perhaps inevitably, named Charles. He takes his father's first name as his second, in the Lebanese tradition) drives us away from Zouk and down and up and around to an oddly serene sun-bathed warehouse in a tree-ringed yard somewhere in Beyrouth. A sombre giant, Degaul, whose jowls, heavy-lidded grey eyes and graphite curls put one in mind of a whisky-swilling cinematic hero of the underworld rather than patient photocopier-cum-chauffeur confined to the spiritless corridors of LDL. His roars and gestures at incompetent drivers are the stuff of ancient battle cries, filling the car to bursting, suddenly turning it into a fragile toy that ill-contains his size and wrath. He never complains, but has a distant stoicism that makes you wonder what he wished for, once. I cannot ask, and he cannot tell, until one of us learns more than a few words in the other's language.

Slumped stickily on plastic seats, then, we wait as long past the appointed time as it takes for our company's version of wasta* to materialise, heralded by an overgrown boy child's fanfare of motorbike vroom vroom vroom. And then into the barely-office, metal desks and concrete walls and old men sleeping around piles of out-of-date interior decoration magazines, stalks a veritable vision, with all the self-importance of one entering Saatchi in New York.

There is no one word to sum up Sargon, unless it be a choice expletive. What would his namesake, the legendary Mesopotamian king who founded the now-lost kingdom of Akkad, make of him? The Beyrouth 2009 version, though tall and broad, has all the regal grace and poise of a coat hangar bent and crammed into an empty wineskin. His edges – collars, cuffs, belt, keyring, wallet – are gilded with the metal of his true passion, Harley Davidson. “Better than sex,” he informs me. “My girlfriends complain that I prefer riding Harleys to making love to them.” Yet his clothes are ugly and awkward over his incipient paunch, his shoes the plastic lace-ups of a nerdy child who still buys the same Clark's versions in adulthood that his mother did for his schooling, his conversation eye-wateringly dull. The whole is crowned with sepia Ray-Bans and tragicomically unsubtle hair plugs in a thick straight line across his forehead, combed back in a plastic, stalely-perfumed, mincing insult to James Dean. His age is hard to determine, but must be in the region of fifty. I once saw him without his tinted aviators and wearing endearingly grandfatherish spectacles. His pale eyes seemed suddenly vulnerable, until he opened his mouth.

He is, by his own account, highly educated, indispensably well-connected, a hard-bodied Lebanese style icon and irresistible to women. I was unwise enough to allow him to fool me into a day out in his company – he promised me “the ride of a lifetime” on the back of one of his bikes to the famous Cedars with the Lebanese Harley Davidson chapter. I was prepared to overlook his over-familiar touches of arm or leg to emphasise a point for this promise. After postponing for a week, he turned up in a car (admittedly, a burgundy '77 Mercedes) and drove me to a mountainside restaurant where he solemnly informed me that Oscar Wilde was, he thought, a homosexual. He then preceded to sing “Love me Tender” in an uncertain baritone while I concentrated furiously on my glass of arak. A short ride in Beyrouth on the back of his Harley was not enough to convince me to try this again, particularly as he made me wear his leather jacket and pose for photos by the bike while he muttered “Oh my god, beautiful”.

So, this is the guardian of my passport and future acquisition of appropriate visas. Excruciating days are spent in the grey green yellow corridors of various state buildings, as uniformed army members with cushy desk jobs lounge around and Sargon struts and preens. His much-vaunted connections have failed to get previous editors work permits within the twelve months of their contracts. Hezbollah is blamed, idiots at the ministry, anything but this man at whom officials laugh and who will never reveal the secret workings of his plans to the hapless Brit whose passport he is conjuring with. LDL wishes to send me to Damascus today – on Thursday we made the journey to Sargon's lair and I took some grim enjoyment in watching him fail to swing an exit visa for me via the back door. The trip has been planned for weeks, and Sargon is supposed to descend in a cloud of Harley glory at 12 with my stamped passport, for departure at 2.

I have not cancelled my alternative plans.

* Roughly, “who you know”. Wasta smooth transactions of all kinds through their power and connections, from traffic fines to visas to conscript placements to political offices. This is how it has always been done, and explains a lot about the Arab conception of rules and regulations – they are for those who are not important enough to be able to avoid them. It seems apt that LDL's principal channel of such power is through such a man as Sargon; awkward, incompetent, delusions of grandeur.