But it was a girl, Alexis urgently objected in his mind; why does Schulmann say he suddenly, when we are supposed to be thinking of a pretty girl in a blue dress? Unaware apparently of how – for the moment, at least – he had upstaged the Silesian in the full flight of his performance, Schulmann transferred his attention to the homemade booby trap inside the lid, gently tugging at the stretch of wire that was stitched into the lining and joined to a dowel in the mouth of the clothespeg.
‘There is something interesting, Herr Schulmann?’ the Silesian enquired, with angelic self-restraint. ‘You have found a clue, perhaps? Tell us, please. We shall be interested.’
Schulmann pondered this generous offer.
‘Too little wire,’ he announced as he returned to the buffet table and hunted among its grisly exhibits. ‘Over here you have the remains of seventy-seven centimetres of wire.’ He was brandishing a charred skein. It was wound on itself like a woollen dummy, with a loop round its waist holding it together. ‘In your reconstruction, you have twenty-five centimetres maximum. Why are we missing half a metre of wire from your reconstruction?’
There was a moment’s puzzled silence before the Silesian gave a loud, indulgent laugh.
‘But, Herr Schulmann – this was spare wire,’ he explained, as if reasoning with a child. ‘For the circuitry. Just common wire. When the bomber had made the device, there was evidently wire over, so he – or she – they threw it into the suitcase. This is for tidiness, this is normal. It was spare wire,’ he repeated. ‘Übrig. Without technical significance. Sag ihm doch übrig.’
‘Left over,’ someone translated needlessly. ‘It has no meaning, Mr Schulmann. It is left over.’
The moment was past, the gap had sealed, and the next glimpse Alexis had of Schulmann, he was poised discreetly at the door, in the act of leaving, his broad head turned part way towards Alexis, his watch arm raised, but in the manner of somebody consulting his stomach rather than the time. Their eyes did not quite meet, yet Alexis knew for certain that Schulmann was waiting for him, willing him across the room and saying lunch. The Silesian was still droning on, the audience still standing aimlessly round him like a bunch of grounded airline passengers. Detaching himself from its fringe, Alexis tiptoed quickly after the departing Schulmann. In the corridor, Schulmann grasped his arm in a spontaneous gesture of affection. On the pavement – it was a lovely sunny day again – both men took off their jackets and Alexis afterwards remembered very well how Schulmann rolled his up like a desert pillow while Alexis hailed a taxi and gave the name of an Italian restaurant on a hilltop on the far side of Bad Godesberg. He had taken women there before, but never men, and Alexis, in all things the voluptuary, was always conscious of first times.
On the drive they barely spoke. Schulmann admired the view and beamed about with the serenity of one who has earned his Sabbath, though it was midweek. His plane, Alexis recalled, was scheduled to leave Cologne in early evening. Like a child being taken out from school, Alexis counted the hours this would leave them, assuming Schulmann had no other engagements, a ridiculous but wonderful assumption. At the restaurant, high up on the Cecilian Heights, the Italian padrone made a predictable fuss of Alexis, but it was Schulmann who quite rightly enchanted him. He called him ‘Herr Professor’ and insisted on preparing a big window table that could have seated six. Below them lay the old town, beyond it the winding Rhine with its brown hills and jagged castles. Alexis knew that scenery by heart, but today, through the eyes of his new friend Schulmann, he saw it for the first time. Alexis ordered two whiskies. Schulmann did not object.
Gazing appreciatively at the view while they waited for their drinks to arrive, Schulmann finally spoke: ‘Maybe if Wagner had left that fellow Siegfried in peace, we might have had a better world of it, after all,’ he said.
For a moment, Alexis could not understand what had happened. His day till then had been crowded; he had an empty stomach and a shaken mind. Schulmann was speaking German! In a thick, rusted Sudeten accent that grizzled like a disused engine. And speaking it, moreover, with a contrite grin that was both a confession and a drawing-together in conspiracy. Alexis let out a small laugh, Schulmann laughed too; the whisky came and they drank to each other, but with none of the heavy German ceremony of ‘look, sip, and look again,’ which Alexis always found too much, especially with Jews, who instinctively saw something menacing in German formality.
‘They tell me you are getting a new job soon, down in Wiesbaden,’ Schulmann remarked, still in German, when these mating ceremonies were behind them. ‘Some desk job. Bigger but smaller, I hear. They say you are too much man for the people here. Now that I have seen you, and seen the people – well, I am not surprised.’
Alexis tried not to be surprised either. Of the details of a new appointment nothing had been said – only that one would be forthcoming. Even his replacement by the Silesian was still meant to be a secret; Alexis had not had time to breathe a word of it to anyone, not even his young girlfriend, with whom he conducted rather meaningless phone calls several times a day.
‘That’s the way it goes, huh?’ Schulmann remarked philosophically, speaking as much to the river as to Alexis. ‘In Jerusalem, believe me, a man’s life is equally precarious. Upstream, downstream. That’s the way it goes.’ He seemed a little disappointed, all the same. ‘I hear she’s a nice lady too,’ he added, once again crashing in upon his companion’s thoughts. ‘Attractive, bright, loyal. Maybe she’s too much woman for them.’
Resisting the temptation to turn the occasion into a seminar upon the problems of his own life, Alexis directed the conversation towards this morning’s conference, but Schulmann answered vaguely, remarking only that technicians never solved anything, and that bombs bored him. He had asked for pasta and ate it the prisoner’s way, using his spoon and fork automatically, not bothering to look down. Alexis, afraid to interrupt his flow, kept as quiet as he knew how.
First, with an older man’s ease of narrative, Schulmann embarked upon a mildly worded lament about Israel’s so-called allies in the anti-terror business: ‘Back in January, when we were running a quite different investigation, we called on our Italian friends,’ he declared, in a voice of homey reminiscence. ‘Showed them some nice proofs, gave them some good addresses. Next thing we knew, they had arrested a few Italians, while the people that Jerusalem were after sat safe back home in Libya looking bronzed and rested, waiting for their next assignment. That was not what we had intended.’ A mouthful of pasta. A dusting of the lips with the napkin. Food is fuel for him, thought Alexis; he eats so that he can fight. ‘In March, when another matter came up, it was the same story exactly, but that time we were dealing with Paris. Certain Frenchmen were arrested but nobody else. Certain officials got some nice applause too, and, thanks to us, promotion. But the Arabs –’ he made a large, indulgent shrug. ‘Expedient it may be. Sound oil policy, sound economics, sound everything. Justice it isn’t. And justice is what we like.’ His smile broadened, in direct contrast to the scale of the joke. ‘So I would say that we have learned to be selective. Better tell too little than too much, we have decided. Somebody is nicely disposed towards us, has an impressive record – a fine father in his background, like yours – with him we will do business. Guardedly. Informally. Between friends. If he can use our information constructively for himself, advance himself in his profession a little – all the better that our friends should obtain influence in their professions. But we want our half of the deal. We expect people to deliver. Of our friends we expect this particularly.’
It was the nearest Schulmann ever came, that day or later, to stating the terms of his proposition. As to Alexis, he did not state anything at all. He let his silence declare his sympathy. And Schulmann, who understood so much about him, seemed to understand this too, for he resumed their conversation as if the bargain had been struck and they were squarely in business together.
‘A few years ago now, a bunch of Palestinians raised a certain amount of hell in my country,’ he b
egan reminiscently. ‘Normally these people are low grade. Peasant kids trying to be heroes. They sneak over the border, lie up in a village, get rid of their bombs, run for safety. If we don’t catch them first time out, we catch them the second, if there is one. The men I am speaking of were different. They were led. They knew how to move. How to stay clear of the informants, cover their tracks, make their own arrangements, write their own orders. First time in, they hit a supermarket in Beit She’an. The second time a school, then some settlements, then another shop, till it became monotonous. Then they started ambushing our soldiers hitchhiking home on leave. A lot of angry mothers, newspapers. Everyone saying, “Get these men.” We listened for them, put the word out everywhere we knew. We discovered they used caves in the Jordan Valley. Lay up. Lived off the land. Still we couldn’t find them. Their propaganda people called them the heroes of Commando Eight, but we knew Commando Eight inside out and Commando Eight could not have lit a match without us hearing of it comfortably ahead of time. Brothers, the word said. A family enterprise. One informant counted three, another four. But brothers for certain and operating out of Jordan, which we knew already.
‘We put a team together, went after them – people we call the Sayaret, small teams, hard-hitting men. The Palestinian commander was a loner, we heard, and very disinclined to give his trust to anybody outside his family. Sensibly paranoid about Arab treachery. We never found him. His two brothers were not so nimble. One had a soft spot for a little girl in Amman. He walked into some machine-gun fire leaving her house one morning. The second made the mistake of calling up a friend in Sidon, inviting himself for a weekend. The Air Force blew his car to pieces as he drove down the coast road.’
Alexis could not suppress a smile of excitement. ‘Not enough wire,’ he murmured, but Schulmann chose not to hear him.
‘By then we knew who they were – West Bankers from a grape-growing village near Hebron, fled after the war of ’67. There was a fourth brother, but he was too young to fight, even by Palestinian standards. There were two sisters, but one of them had died in certain reprisal bombings we had to carry out south of the Litani River. That didn’t leave much of an army. All the same, we kept looking for our man. We expected him to collect reinforcements, come back at us. He didn’t. He ceased trading. Six months passed. A year. We said, “Forget him. Most likely his own people have killed him, which is normal.” We heard the Syrians had given him a rough time, so maybe he’d died. A few months back, we picked up a rumour he’d come to Europe. Here. Put himself a team together, several of them ladies, mostly German, young.’ He took another mouthful, chewed, and swallowed thoughtfully. ‘He was running them at arm’s length,’ he went on when he was ready. ‘Playing the Arab Mephisto to a bunch of impressionable kids,’ he said.
At first, in the long silence that followed, Alexis could not make Schulmann out. The sun, high above the brown hills, shone directly into the window. In the resulting brilliance it was hard for Alexis to read his expression. Alexis moved his head and took another look at him. Why this sudden milky clouding of the dark eyes? he wondered. And was it really the sunlight that had bleached Schulmann’s skin of colour, leaving it cracked and sickly like something dead? Then, in a day filled with bright and sometimes painful perceptions, Alexis recognised the passion which till then had remained hidden from him: here in the restaurant; down there in the sleepy spa town with its sprawling ministerial cantonments. As some men may be seen to be in love, so Schulmann was possessed by a deep and awesome hatred.
Schulmann left that evening. The remnants of his team hung on for two more days. A farewell celebration, with which the Silesian was determined to mark the excellent relations traditionally existing between the two services – an evening get-together, with white beer and sausages – was quietly sabotaged by Alexis, who pointed out that since the Bonn Government had chosen that very day to drop heavy hints about a possible forthcoming arms deal with the Saudis, it was unlikely their guests would be in festive mood. It was perhaps his last effective act in office. A month later, as Schulmann had foretold, he was shunted off to Wiesbaden. A back-room job, theoretically a promotion, but one that gave less rein to his capricious individuality. An unkind newspaper, once counted among the good Doctor’s supporters, sourly recorded that Bonn’s loss would be the television viewer’s gain. His one consolation indeed, at a time when so many of his German friends were hastily giving up their claims on him, was the warm little handwritten note of good wishes, postmark Jerusalem, that greeted him on his first day at his new desk. Signed ‘As ever, Schulmann,’ it wished him luck and looked forward to their next meeting, whether private or official. A wry postscript hinted that Schulmann too was not having the easiest of times. ‘Unless I deliver soon, I have an uncomfortable feeling I shall be joining you,’ it said. With a smile, Alexis tossed the card into a drawer where anyone could read it, and no doubt would. He knew exactly what Schulmann was doing and admired him for it: he was laying the innocent basis for their future relationship. A couple of weeks later, again, when Dr Alexis and his youthful lady went through an anticlimactic wedding ceremony, it was Schulmann’s roses, of all the gifts, that gave him the greatest joy and the greatest amusement. And I didn’t even tell him I was getting married!
Those roses were like the promise of a new love-affair, just as he was needing one.
CHAPTER TWO
Almost eight weeks passed before the man whom Dr Alexis knew as Schulmann returned to Germany. In that time the investigations and planning of the Jerusalem teams had taken such extraordinary leaps that those still labouring through the débris of Bad Godesberg would not have recognised the case. If it had been a mere matter of punishing culprits – if the Godesberg incident had been an isolated one instead of part of a concerted series – Schulmann would not have bothered to involve himself at all, for his aims were more ambitious than mere retribution, and were intimately related to his own professional survival. For months now, under his restless urging, his teams had been looking for what he called a window that was wide enough to slip someone through and so take the enemy from inside his house, rather than beat him down with tanks and artillery from the front, which was increasingly the inclination in Jerusalem. Thanks to Godesberg, they believed they had found one. Where the West Germans still floundered with vague leads, Schulmann’s deskmen in Jerusalem were stealthily making connections as far apart as Ankara and East Berlin. Old hands began to speak of a mirror image: of a remaking of Europe in patterns familiar from the Middle East two years ago.
Schulmann came not to Bonn but to Munich, and not as Schulmann either, and neither Alexis nor his Silesian successor was aware of his arrival, which was what he intended. His name, if he had one, was Kurtz, though he used it so seldom he might have been forgiven if one day he forgot it altogether. Kurtz meaning short; Kurtz of the short cut, said some; his victims – Kurtz of the short fuse. Others made laborious comparisons with Joseph Conrad’s hero. Whereas the bald truth was that the name was Moravian and was originally Kurz, till a British police officer of the Mandate, in his wisdom, had added a ‘t’ – and Kurtz, in his, had kept it, a sharp little dagger jabbed into the bulk of his identity, and left there as some kind of goad.
He arrived in Munich from Tel Aviv by way of Istanbul, changing passports twice and planes three times. Before that he had been staying for a week in London, but in London particularly maintaining an extremely retiring rôle. Everywhere he went, he had been squaring things and checking out results, gathering help, persuading people, feeding them cover stories and half-truths, overriding the reluctant with his extraordinary restless energy and the sheer volume and reach of his advance planning, even when sometimes he repeated himself, or forgot a small instruction he had issued. We live for such a short time, he liked to tell you with a twinkle, and we are far too long dead. That was the nearest he ever came to an apology, and his personal solution was to relinquish sleep. In Jerusalem, they liked to say, Kurtz slept as fast as he laboured. Which was
fast. Kurtz, they would explain to you, was the master of the aggressive European ploy. Kurtz cut the impossible path, Kurtz made the desert bloom. Kurtz wheeled and dealed and lied even in his prayers, but he forced more good luck than the Jews had had for two thousand years.
Not that they loved him to a man exactly; for that he was too paradoxical, too complicated, made up of too many souls and colours. In some respects, indeed, his relationship with his superiors – and in particular with Misha Gavron, his Chief – was more that of a gruffly tolerated outsider than of a trusted equal. He had no tenure, but mysteriously sought none. His power base was rickety and forever shifting, according to whom he had last offended in his quest for the expedient allegiance. He was not a sabra; he lacked the élitist background from the kibbutzim, the universities, and the crack regiments that, to his dismay, increasingly supplied the narrowing aristocracy of his service. He was out of tune with their polygraphs, their computers, and their ever-growing faith in American-style power-plays, applied psychology, and crisis management. He loved the diaspora and made it his speciality at a time when most Israelis were zealously and self-consciously refurbishing their identity as Orientals. Yet obstacles were what Kurtz thrived on and rejection was what had made him. He could fight, if need be, on every front at once, and what they would not give him freely one way he took by stealth another. For love of Israel. For peace. For moderation. And for his own cussed right to make his impact and survive.
At what stage in the chase he had hit upon his plan probably not even Kurtz himself could have said. Such plans began in him deep down, like a rebellious impulse waiting for a cause, then welled out of him almost before he was aware of them. Did he dream it up when the bomber’s trademark was confirmed? Or while he was eating his pasta up there on the Cecilian Heights overlooking Godesberg, and began to recognise what a fine catch he could make out of Alexis? Before. Long before. It must be done, he had told anyone who would listen after a particularly menacing session of Gavron’s steering committee, that spring. If we don’t take the enemy from inside his own camp, those clowns in the Knesset and Defence will blow up the whole of civilisation in their hunt for him. Some of his researchers swore it went back even further in time, and that Gavron had suppressed a similar scheme twelve months ago. Never mind. The certainty is that operational preparations were well under way before the boy had been conclusively tracked down, even if Kurtz assiduously held back all intimation of them from the scathing glance of Misha Gavron, and fudged his records in order to deceive him. Gavron is Polish for rook. His craggy black looks and parched bellow could have belonged to no other creature.