Having shaken hands with each man in turn, Kurtz added an old blue beret to his costume and, thus shielded against the bustle of the rush hour, strode vigorously into the street.
It was raining by the time they picked Kurtz up in the van again, and as the three of them drove from one glum spot to another, killing time before Kurtz’s plane, the weather seemed to affect all three of them with its sombre mood. Oded was doing the driving, and his bearded young face, by the passing lights, revealed a sullen anger.
‘What’s he got now?’ Kurtz asked, though he must have known the answer.
‘His latest is a rich man’s BMW,’ Oded replied. ‘Power steering, fuel injection, five thousand kilometres on the clock. Cars are his weakness.’
‘Cars, women, the soft life,’ the second boy put in from the back. ‘So what are his strengths, I wonder?’
‘Hired again?’ Kurtz asked of Oded once more.
‘Hired.’
‘Stay close to that car,’ Kurtz advised them both. ‘The moment he hands back his car to the rental company and doesn’t take another one, that’s the moment we have to know about immediately.’ They had heard this till they were deaf from it. They had heard it before they ever left Jerusalem. Kurtz repeated it none the less: ‘Most important is when Yanuka turns his car in.’
Suddenly Oded had had enough. Perhaps he was by youth and temperament more prone to stress than his selectors had appreciated. Perhaps, as such a young fellow, he should not have been given a job that needed so much waiting. Pulling up the van at the kerbside, he yanked on the handbrake so hard he all but wrenched it from its socket.
‘Why do we let him go through with this?’ he demanded. ‘Why play games with him? What if he goes back home and doesn’t come out again? Then what?’
‘Then we lose him.’
‘So let’s kill him now! Tonight. You give me the order, it’s done!’
Kurtz let him rave on.
‘We’ve got the apartment opposite, haven’t we? Put a rocket across the road. We’ve done it before. An RPG-7 – Arab kills Arab with a Russian rocket – why not?’
Kurtz still said nothing. Oded might have been storming at a sphinx.
‘So why not?’ Oded repeated, very loud indeed.
Kurtz did not spare him, but neither did he lose his patience: ‘Because he doesn’t lead anywhere, Oded, that’s why. You never heard what Misha Gavron himself used to say perhaps? A phrase I personally still like to echo? That if you want to catch a lion, you first must tether the goat? Whose crazy fighting talk have you been listening to? I ask myself. Are you seriously informing me you want to hit Yanuka, when for ten dollars more you can have the best operator they produced for years?’
‘He did Bad Godesberg! He did Vienna, maybe Leyden too! Jews are dying, Marty! Doesn’t Jerusalem care about that these days? How many do we let die while we play our games?’
Carefully taking hold of the collar of Oded’s windjacket with his big hands, Kurtz shook him twice, and the second time he did this, Oded’s head banged painfully against the window. But Kurtz did not apologise and Oded did not complain.
‘They, Oded. Not he: they,’ said Kurtz, this time with menace. ‘They did Bad Godesberg. They did Leyden. And it’s them we intend to take out; not six innocent German householders and one silly little boy.’
‘It’s okay,’ said Oded, blushing. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘It is not okay, Oded. Yanuka has friends, Oded. Relatives. People we have not yet been introduced to. You want to run this operation for me?’
‘I said – it’s okay.’
Kurtz released him, Oded started up the engine again. Kurtz suggested they continue their interesting tour of Yanuka’s life-style. So they bumped down a cobbled street where his favourite nightclub was, the shop where he bought his shirts and ties, the place where he had his hair cut, and the left-wing bookshops where he liked to browse and buy. And all the while Kurtz, in the best of spirits, beamed and nodded at everything he saw as if he were watching an old movie he couldn’t get enough of – until, in a square not far from the city air terminal, they prepared to part. Standing on the pavement, Kurtz clapped Oded on the shoulder with unabashed affection, then ran his hand through his hair.
‘Listen, both of you, don’t pull so hard at the bridle. Buy yourselves a nice meal somewhere, charge it to me personally, okay?’
His tone was that of a commander moved to love before the battle. Which, for as long as Misha Gavron permitted it, was what he was.
The night flight from Munich to Berlin, for the few who use it, is one of the last great nostalgic journeys to be made in Europe. The Orient Express, the Golden Arrow, and the Train Bleu may be dead, dying, or artificially revived, but for those who have their memories, sixty minutes of night-flying through the East German corridor in a rattly Pan American plane three-quarters empty is like the safari of an old habitué indulging his addiction. Lufthansa is forbidden to fly the route. It belongs only to the victors, to the occupiers of the former German capital; to the historians and island-seekers; and to one war-scarred elderly American impregnated with the docile quiet of a professional, who makes the journey almost daily, knows his favourite seat and the first name of the air hostess, which he pronounces in the frightful German of the Occupation. For two pins, you think, he will slip her a packet of Lucky Strikes and make an assignation with her behind the commissary. The fuselage grunts and lifts, the lights falter, you cannot believe the plane has no propellers. You look into the unlit enemy landscape – to bomb, to jump? – you think your memories and confuse your wars: down there, at least, in some uneasy sense, the world is as it was.
Kurtz was no exception.
He sat at his window, he gazed past his own reflection at the night; he became, as always when he made this journey, a spectator looking in upon his own life. Somewhere in that blackness was the railway line which had brought the goods train on its slow journey from the East; somewhere the very siding where it had parked for five nights and six days in dead of winter to make way for the military transports that mattered so much more, while Kurtz and his mother, and the hundred and eighteen other Jews who were crammed into their truck, ate the snow and froze, most of them to death. ‘The next camp will be better,’ his mother kept assuring him, to keep his spirits up. Somewhere in that blackness his mother had later filed passively to her death; somewhere in its fields the Sudeten boy who was himself had starved and stolen and killed, waiting without illusion for another hostile world to find him. He saw the Allied reception camp, the unfamiliar uniforms, the children’s faces as old and hollow as his own. A new coat, new boots, and new barbed wire – and a new escape, this time from his rescuers. He saw himself in the fields again, slipping southward from farm to village for weeks on end as the escape line handed him on, until gradually the nights grew warm and smelt of flowers, and he heard for the first time in his life the rustle of palm trees in a sea wind. ‘Listen to us, you frozen little boy,’ they whispered to him, ‘that’s how we sound in Israel. That’s how blue the sea is, just like here.’ He saw the rotting steamer slumped beside the jetty, the biggest and noblest boat he had set eyes on, so black with Jewish heads that when he boarded it, he stole a stocking cap and wore it till they had cleared harbour. But they needed him, fair hair or none at all. On the deck in small groups, the leaders were giving lessons in how to shoot with stolen Lee-Enfield rifles. Haifa was still two days away, and Kurtz’s war had just begun.
The plane was circling to land. He felt it bank, and watched as it crossed the Wall. He had only hand luggage, but security was tight on account of the terrorists, so formalities took quite a time.
Shimon Litvak was waiting in the car park in an inferior Ford. He had flown from Holland after two days spent looking at the mess in Leyden. Like Kurtz, he did not feel he had a right to sleep.
‘The book bomb was delivered by a girl,’ he said as soon as Kurtz had clambered in. ‘Shapely brunette. Jeans. The hotel porter assumed she was fr
om the university, convinced himself she arrived and left by bicycle. Speculative, but I believe him partly. Somebody else again says she was brought to the hotel on a motorbike. A party ribbon round the parcel and “Happy birthday, Mordecai” on the label. A plan, a transport, a bomb, and a girl, what’s new?’
‘Explosive?’
‘Russian plastic, shreds of wrapping, nothing traceable.’
‘Any trademark?’
‘One neat twist of surplus red circuit wire, made into a dummy.’
Kurtz glanced at him sharply.
‘No surplus wire,’ Litvak confessed. ‘Carbonised fragments, yes. But no identifiable wire.’
‘No clothespeg either?’ said Kurtz.
‘This time he preferred a mousetrap. A sweet little kitchen mousetrap.’ He started the engine.
‘He used mousetraps too,’ said Kurtz.
‘He used mousetraps, clothespegs, old Bedouin blankets, untraceable explosives, cheap one-handed watches, and cheap girls. And he’s the absolute lousiest bombmaker bar none, even for an Arab,’ said Litvak, who hated inefficiency almost as much as he hated the enemy who was guilty of it. ‘How long did he give you?’
Kurtz affected not to understand. ‘Give me? Who gave me?’
‘What’s your licence? A month? Two months? What’s the deal?’
But Kurtz was not always inclined to precision in his replies. ‘The deal is that a lot of people in Jerusalem would prefer to charge the windmills of Lebanon than fight the enemy with their heads.’
‘Can the Rook hold them off? Can you?’
Kurtz lapsed into an unaccustomed quiet from which Litvak was disinclined to rouse him. In the middle of West Berlin there is no darkness, at the edges no light. They were heading for the light.
‘You paid Gadi a big compliment,’ Litvak observed suddenly, with a sideways look at his master. ‘Coming to his town like this. A journey from you to him is like a homage.’
‘It’s not his town,’ said Kurtz equably. ‘He borrowed it. He has a grant, a trade to learn, a second life to make. That is the only reason Gadi is in Berlin.’
‘And he can bear to live in such a trash heap? Even for a new career? After Jerusalem, he can come here?’
Kurtz did not answer the question directly, nor did Litvak expect him to. ‘Gadi has made his contribution, Shimon. No man made a better, according to his ability. He fought hard in hard places, most of them behind the lines. Why should he not remake himself? He is entitled to his peace.’
But Litvak was not trained to abandon his battles inconclusively. ‘So why disturb it? Why resurrect what is finished with? If he is making a new beginning, so leave him to make it.’
‘Because he is the middle ground, Shimon.’ Litvak turned swiftly to him for enlightenment, but Kurtz’s face was in shadow. ‘Because he has the reluctance that can make the bridge. Because he ponders.’
They passed the memorial church and proceeded between the icy fires of the Kurfürstendamm, then returned to the menacing stillness of the city’s dark outlands.
‘So what name is he using these days?’ Kurtz enquired, with an indulgent smile to his voice. ‘Tell me how he calls himself.’
‘Becker,’ said Litvak tersely.
Kurtz expressed jovial disappointment. ‘Becker? What the hell name is that? Gadi Becker – and him a sabra?’
‘It’s the German version of the Hebrew version of the German version of his name,’ Litvak replied, without humour. ‘At the request of his employers, he’s reverted. He’s not an Israeli any more, he’s a Jew.’
Kurtz kept his smile flying: ‘Does he have any ladies with him, Shimon? What’s with women for him these days?’
‘A night here, a night there. Nothing he could call his own.’
Kurtz settled more comfortably in his seat. ‘So maybe an involvement is what he needs. Then afterwards he goes back to his nice wife, Frankie, in Jerusalem, whom, in my judgment, he had no business relinquishing in the first place.’
Entering a squalid side street, they pulled up before a clumsy three-storey apartment house of dappled stone. A pilastered doorway had somehow survived the war. To one side of it, at street level, a neon-lit textiles shop displayed a lacklustre range of women’s dresses. A sign above it said ‘WHOLESALE ONLY.’
‘Press the upper bell,’ Litvak advised. ‘Two rings, a pause, a third ring, he will come. They gave him a room above the business.’ Kurtz clambered out. ‘Good luck, okay? Really good luck.’
Litvak watched Kurtz storm across the street. He watched him thrusting along the pavement at his rolling pace, too fast, then halt too hastily at the shabby doorway. He saw his thick arm lift to the bell and the door open a moment afterwards, as if someone had been waiting just behind it, and he supposed someone had. He saw Kurtz square his feet and lower his shoulders to embrace a slimmer man; he saw the arms of his host fold round him in a brisk, soldierly greeting. The door closed, Kurtz was inside.
Driving slowly back through the city, Litvak glowered at everything he saw on his way, externalising his jealousy: Berlin as a place of hatred for him, an inherited enemy for all time; Berlin where terror had its spawning ground, then and now. His destination was a cheap pension where no one seemed to sleep, himself included. By five to seven, he was back in the side street where he had left Kurtz. He pressed the bell, waited, and heard slow footsteps, one pair. The door opened and Kurtz stepped gratefully into the morning air, then stretched himself. He was unshaven and had removed his tie.
‘Well?’ Litvak asked, as soon as they were inside the car.
‘Well what?’
‘What did he say? Will he do it, or does he want to stay peacefully in Berlin and learn to make dresses for a bunch of Polish campniks?’
Kurtz seemed genuinely surprised. He was in the midst of that gesture which had so fascinated Alexis, the one that brought his old wristwatch into his line of sight, while he shoved back his left sleeve with his hand. But, hearing Litvak’s question, he abandoned it. ‘Do it? He’s an Israeli officer, Shimon.’ Then he smiled so warmly that Litvak, taken by surprise, smiled in return. ‘First, I admit, Gadi said he would prefer to continue to study his new trade in its many aspects. So we talked about that fine mission he made across Suez in ’63. Then he said the plan wouldn’t work, so we discussed in detail the inconveniences of living under cover in Tripoli and maintaining a network of extremely mercenary Libyan agents there – a thing Gadi did for three years, I seem to remember. Then he said, “Get a younger man,” which nobody ever meant seriously, and we recalled his many night raids into Jordan and the limitations of military action against guerrilla targets, a point on which I had his full agreement. After that, we discussed the strategy. What else?’
‘And the similarity? Is enough? His height, his face?’
‘The similarity is enough,’ Kurtz replied as his features hardened into their old lines. ‘We work on it, it’s enough. Now leave him alone, Shimon, or you’ll make me love him too much.’
Then he put aside his gravity and broke out laughing until tears of relief and tiredness were running down his cheeks. Litvak laughed also and, with laughter, felt his envy disappear. These sudden, rather crazy weather changes were deep in Litvak’s nature, where many irreconcilable factors played their part. His name meant originally ‘Jew from Lithuania’ and was once derogatory. How did he see himself ? One day as a twenty-four-year-old kibbutz orphan without a known relation alive, another as the adopted child of an American Orthodox foundation and the Israeli special forces. On another again, as God’s devoted policeman, cleaning the world up.
He played the piano wonderfully.
Of the kidnapping, little need be said. With an experienced team, such things happen fast and almost ritualistically these days, or not at all. Only the potential scale of the catch gave it its nervy quality. There was no messy shooting or unpleasantness, just a straight appropriation of one wine-red Mercedes car and its occupant, the driver, some thirty kilometres on the Greek side
of the Turkish-Greek border. Litvak commanded the field team and, as always in the field, he was excellent. Kurtz, back in London again to solve a sudden crisis that had blown up in Schwili’s Literacy Committee, sat out the critical hours beside a telephone in the Israeli Embassy. The two Munich boys, having duly reported the return of the hire car with no substitute in sight, followed Yanuka to the airport and, sure enough, the next anyone heard of him was three days later in Beirut, when an audio crew operating from a cellar in the Palestinian quarter picked up his cheerful voice saying hullo to his sister Fatmeh, who worked at one of the revolutionary offices. He was in town for a couple of weeks to visit friends, he said; did she have an evening free? He sounded really happy, they reported: headlong, excited, passionate. Fatmeh, however, was cool. Either her approval of him was lukewarm, they said, or she knew her phone was tapped. Maybe both. In either case, brother and sister failed to meet.
He was picked up again when he arrived by air in Istanbul, where he checked into the Hilton on a Cypriot diplomatic passport and for two days gave himself to the religious and secular pleasures of the town. The followers described him as taking one last good draught of Islam before returning to the Christian commons of Europe. He visited the Mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent, where he was seen to pray no less than three times, and afterwards to have his Gucci shoes polished once, on the grassy promenade that runs beside the South Wall. Also he drank several glasses of tea there with two quiet men who were photographed but never afterwards identified: a false scent, as it turned out, and not the contact they were waiting for. And he drew quite extraordinary amusement from the sight of some old men with an air-rifle who were gathered at the kerbside taking turns shooting feathered darts into a target drawn on a cardboard box. He wanted to join in, but they wouldn’t let him.
The Little Drummer Girl Page 6