‘How did I sound?’ said Charlie. She sat down. ‘I thought I was the best thing since Bernhardt.’
‘Better. In Marty’s view, the best thing since Moses came down the mountain. Maybe before he went up. If you wished, you could stop now with honour. They owe you enough. More than enough.’
They, she thought. Never we. ‘And in Joseph’s view?’
‘Those are big people, Charlie. Big little people from the centre. The real thing.’
‘Did I fool them?’
He came and sat beside her. To be near but not to touch.
‘Since you are still alive, we must assume that so far you fooled them,’ he said.
‘Let’s go,’ she said. A smart little tape-recorder lay ready on the table. Reaching past him, she switched it on. With no more preamble, they passed to the debriefing, like the old married couple they had become. For though Litvak’s audio van had listened to every word of last night’s conversation as it was transmitted by the cunningly adapted little radio in Charlie’s handbag, the pure gold of her own perceptions had still to be mined and sifted.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The swift young man who called at the Israeli Embassy in London wore a long leather coat and granny glasses, and said his name was Meadows. The car was a spotless green Rover with extra pace. Kurtz sat in the front in order to keep Meadows company. Litvak smouldered in the back. Kurtz’s manner was diffident and a little shabby, as became him in the presence of colonial superiors.
‘Just flown in, have we, sir?’ Meadows asked airily.
‘Yesterday as ever is,’ said Kurtz, who had been in London a week.
‘Pity you didn’t let us know, sir. The Commander could have smoothed things over for you at the airport.’
‘Oh now, we didn’t have that much to declare, Mr Meadows!’ Kurtz protested, and they both laughed because liaison was so good. From the back, Litvak laughed too, but without conviction.
They drove fast to Aylesbury, then fast through pretty lanes. They reached a sandstone gateway mastered by stone cockerels. A blue-and-red sign proclaimed ‘No. 3 TLSU’, a white boom blocked their path. Meadows left Kurtz and Litvak to themselves while he went into the gatehouse. Dark eyes surveyed them from its windows. No cars passed, no distant tractor chattered. There seemed little around that was alive.
‘Looks like a fine place,’ said Kurtz, in Hebrew, while they waited.
‘Beautiful,’ Litvak agreed for the microphone, if there was one. ‘Nice people, too.’
‘First rate,’ said Kurtz. ‘Top of the profession, no question.’
Meadows returned, the boom lifted, and for a surprisingly long time they wove through the uneasy parkland of paramilitary England. In place of sweetly grazing thoroughbreds, blue-uniformed sentries in Wellington boots. Low-backed brick buildings with no windows lay half buried in the earth. They passed an assault course and a private landing strip laid out with orange cones. Rope bridges were strung across a trout-stream.
‘A dream,’ said Kurtz politely. ‘Just beautiful, Mr Meadows. We should have all this at home, but how can we?’
‘Well, thanks,’ said Meadows.
The house had once been old but its façade was vandalised with ministerial paint of battleship blue, and the red flowers in the window-boxes were dressed strictly by the left. A second young man was waiting at the entrance and led them quickly up a glistening staircase of polished pine.
‘I’m Lawson,’ he explained breathlessly, as if they were already late; and rapped bravely with his knuckles on a double door. A voice inside barked, ‘Come!’
‘Mr Raphael, sir,’ Lawson announced. ‘From Jerusalem. Bit of bother with the traffic, I’m afraid, sir.’
For as long as it takes to be rude, Deputy Commander Picton stayed seated at his desk. He took up a pen and, with a frown, signed his name on a letter. He looked up, and fixed Kurtz with a yellow-eyed stare. Then he leaned his head right forward as though he were about to butt someone, and lifted himself slowly to his feet, all the way, until he was standing to attention.
‘And good day to you, Mr Raphael,’ he said. And he smiled sparsely, as if smiles were out of season.
He was big and Aryan, with waved fair hair parted like a razor slash. He was broad and thick-faced and violent, with pressed-together lips and a bully’s straight gaze. He had the senior policeman’s fastidious bad grammar and the borrowed good manners of a gentleman, and both were returnable without notice any time he damn well felt like it. He had a spotted handkerchief stuffed in his left sleeve and a tie with flat gold crowns to tell you he played his games in better company than you. He was a self-made counter-terrorist, ‘part soldier, part copper, part villain,’ as he liked to say, and he belonged to the fabled generation of his trade. He had hunted Communists in Malaya and Mau Mau in Kenya, Jews in Palestine, Arabs in Aden, and the Irish everywhere. He had blown people up with the Trucial Oman Scouts; in Cyprus he had missed Grivas by a whisker and when he was drunk he talked of it with regret – but let anybody dare to pity him! He had been second man in several places, first man rarely, for there were other shadows too.
‘Misha Gavron in good shape?’ he enquired, selecting a button on his telephone and pushing it so hard it might never come up again.
‘Commander, Misha is just fine!’ said Kurtz enthusiastically, and started to ask after Picton’s superior in return, but Picton was not interested in what Kurtz might have to say, least of all about his Chief.
A highly polished silver cigarette box lay prominently on his desk with the signatures of brother officers engraved on the lid. Picton opened it and held it out, if only for Kurtz to admire its shine. Kurtz said he did not smoke. Picton returned the box to its correct position, an exhibit disposed of. There was a knock at the door and two men were admitted, one grey, one tweed. The grey was a forty-year-old Welsh bantamweight with claw marks on the lower jaw. Picton described him as ‘my Chief Inspector’.
‘Never ever been to Jerusalem, I’m afraid, sir,’ the Chief Inspector announced, rising on his toes and pulling down the skirts of his jacket at the same time, as if he were trying to stretch himself an inch or two. ‘The wife’s all for spending Christmas in Bethlehem, but Cardiff was always good enough for me, oh yes!’
The tweeded one was Captain Malcolm, who possessed the class that Picton sometimes longed for and always hated. Malcolm had a soft-toned courtesy that was its own aggression.
‘Honour, sir, actually,’ he confided to Kurtz very sincerely, and gave his hand before Kurtz needed it.
But when Litvak’s turn came, Captain Malcolm appeared not quite to grasp his name: ‘Say again, old boy?’ he said.
‘Levene,’ Litvak repeated, not quite so softly. ‘I have the good fortune to work with Mr Raphael here.’
A long table was laid for a conference. There were no pictures – no framed photograph of a wife, not even of the Queen in Kodachrome. The sash windows gave on to an empty yard. The one surprise was the lingering smell of warm oil, as if a submarine had just passed by.
‘Well, why don’t you simply shoot straight off then, Mr’ – the pause was really much too long – ‘Raphael, isn’t it?’ said Picton.
The phrase at least had a curious aptness. As Kurtz unlocked his briefcase and started handing round the dossiers, the room was shaken by the long thud of an explosive charge detonated in controlled circumstances.
‘I knew a Raphael once,’ said Picton as he lifted the top cover of his dossier and peered inside, like a first peek at a menu. ‘We made him mayor for a while. Young chap. Forget the town. Wasn’t you, was it?’
With a sad smile, Kurtz regretted that he was not that lucky person.
‘No relation? Raphael – like the painter chap?’ Picton turned a couple of pages. ‘Still, you never know, do you?’
The forbearance in Kurtz was unearthly. Not even Litvak, who had seen him through a hundred different shades of his identity, could have predicted such a saintly muzzling of his demons. His roistering
energy had disappeared entirely, to be replaced by the servile smile of the underdog. Even his voice, at least to start with, had a diffident, apologetic ring.
‘“Mesterbine,”’ the Chief Inspector read out. ‘Is that the way we pronounce it?’
Captain Malcolm, anxious to show his languages, intercepted the question. ‘“Mesterbine” it is, Jack.’
‘Personal particulars in the left pocket, gentlemen,’ Kurtz said indulgently, and paused to let them plunder their dossiers for a little longer. ‘Commander, we have to have your formal undertaking regarding use and distribution.’
Picton slowly lifted his fair head. ‘In writing?’ he asked.
Kurtz gave a deprecating grin. ‘A British officer’s word will surely be enough for Misha Gavron,’ he said, still waiting.
‘Agreed then,’ said Picton, with an unmistakable flush of anger; and Kurtz passed quickly to the less contentious person of Anton Mesterbein.
‘The father a conservative Swiss gentleman with a nice villa on the lakeside, Commander, no known interests beyond making money. The mother a free-thinking lady of the radical left, spends half the year in Paris, keeps a salon there, very popular among the Arab community –’
‘Ring a bell, Malcolm?’ Picton interrupted.
‘A faint tinkle, sir.’
‘Young Anton, the son, is a lawyer of substance,’ Kurtz continued. ‘Studied political science in Paris, philosophy in Berlin. Attended Berkeley for a year, law and politics. Rome a semester, four years in Zürich, graduated magna cum laude.’
‘An intellectual,’ said Picton. He might as well have said ‘leper’.
Kurtz acknowledged the description. ‘Politically, we would say that Mr Mesterbein leans the mother’s way – financially, he favours the father.’
Picton let out the huge laugh of a humourless man. Kurtz paused long enough to share the joke with him.
‘The photograph before you was taken in Paris, but Mr Mesterbein’s legal practice is in Geneva, effectively a downtown law shop for radical students, Third Worlders, and guestworkers. A variety of progressive organisations short of money are also clients.’ He turned a page, inviting his audience to keep pace with him. He was wearing heavy spectacles on the tip of his nose and they gave him the mousiness of a bank clerk.
‘Got him, Jack?’ Picton asked of the Chief Inspector.
‘Not a tremor, sir.’
‘Who’s the blonde lady drinking with him, sir?’ asked Captain Malcolm.
But Kurtz had his own march route and, for all his docile manners, Malcolm was not going to deflect him.
‘Last November,’ Kurtz continued, ‘Mr Mesterbein attended a conference of so-called Lawyers for Justice in East Berlin, at which the Palestine delegation got a somewhat over-lengthy hearing. However, that may be a partial view,’ he added, with meek joviality, but no one laughed. ‘In April, responding to an invitation extended to him on that occasion, Mr Mesterbein made his first recorded visit to Beirut. Paid his respects to a couple of the more militant rejectionist organisations there.’
‘Touting for business, was he?’ Picton enquired.
As Picton said this, he clenched his right fist and punched the air. Having thus freed his hand, he scribbled something on the pad before him. Then he tore off the sheet and passed it to the suave Malcolm, who, with a smile to everybody, quietly left the room.
‘Returning from that same visit to Beirut,’ Kurtz continued, ‘Mr Mesterbein stopped over in Istanbul, in which city he held dialogues with certain underground Turkish activists committed, among other goals, to the elimination of Zionism.’
‘Ambitious chaps, then,’ said Picton.
And this time, because it was Picton’s joke, everybody laughed loudly, except for Litvak.
With surprising speed, Malcolm had returned from his errand. ‘Not a lot of joy, I’m afraid,’ he murmured silkily and, having passed the slip of paper back to Picton, smiled at Litvak and resumed his seat. But Litvak seemed to have gone to sleep. He had rested his chin in his long hands and tipped his head forward over his unopened dossier. His expression, thanks to his hands, was not defined.
‘Told the Swiss any of this, have you?’ Picton enquired, tossing Malcolm’s bit of paper aside.
‘Commander, we have not yet informed the Swiss,’ Kurtz confessed, in a tone that suggested that this raised a problem.
‘I thought you chaps were pretty close to the Swiss,’ Picton objected.
‘We surely are close to the Swiss. However, Mr Mesterbein has a number of clients who are wholly or partly domiciled in the Federal Republic of Germany, a fact which places us in a fairly embarrassing position.’
‘Don’t follow you,’ said Picton stubbornly. ‘Thought you and the Huns had kissed and made up long ago.’
Kurtz’s smile might have been starched into his skin, but his answer was a model of bland evasion. ‘Commander, that is so, but nevertheless Jerusalem still feels – given the sensitivity of our sources and the complexity of German political sympathy at this present time – that we cannot advise our Swiss friends without also advising their German counterparts. To do so would be to impose an unfair burden of silence upon the Swiss in their dealings with Wiesbaden.’
Picton had a good way with silence himself. In its day, his liverish stare of disbelief had done wonders with men of lesser breed who were worrying about what might happen to them next.
‘I suppose you heard they put that twerp Alexis back in the hot seat, did you?’ Picton asked, out of the blue. Something about Kurtz was beginning to hold him: a recognition, if not of the person, then of the species.
Kurtz had heard the news, naturally, he said. But it did not appear to have affected him, for he moved firmly to the next exhibit.
‘Hang on,’ said Picton quietly. He was staring into his dossier, exhibit 2. ‘I know that beauty. He’s the genius who scored an own goal on the Munich autobahn a month back. Took his piece of Dutch crumpet with him too, didn’t he?’
Neglecting his mantle of assumed humility for a moment, Kurtz stepped in fast. ‘Commander, that is so, and it is our information that both the vehicle and the explosives in that unfortunate accident were supplied by Mr Mesterbein’s contacts in Istanbul and ferried northward through Yugoslavia into Austria.’
Picking up the scrap of paper that Malcolm had restored to him, Picton began moving it back and forth in front of him as if he were short-sighted, which he was not. ‘I am advised that our magic box downstairs contains not a single Mesterbein,’ he announced with feigned carelessness. ‘Not whitelisted, not black-listed, not bugger all.’
Kurtz seemed pleased rather than the reverse: ‘Commander, this reflects no inefficiency on the part of your fine records department. Until a matter of days ago, I would say, Mr Mesterbein has also been regarded by Jerusalem as innocuous. The same goes for his accomplices.’
‘Including Blondie?’ Captain Malcolm asked, harking back to Mesterbein’s lady companion.
But Kurtz only smiled, and tugged a little at his spectacles as a way of calling the attention of his audience to the next photograph. It was one of many that the Munich surveillance team had taken from across the street, and it showed Yanuka by night about to enter the street door to his own apartment. It was fuzzed, as infra-red pictures on slow speed tend to be, but it showed him clearly enough for identification purposes. He was in the company of a tall blonde woman in quarter profile. She was standing back while he put a house key into the front door, and she was the same woman who had already caught Captain Malcolm’s fancy from the earlier photograph.
‘Where are we now?’ said Picton. ‘Not Paris any more. Buildings are wrong.’
‘Munich,’ said Kurtz, and gave the address.
‘And the when?’ Picton demanded, so brusquely that one might have imagined he had momentarily mistaken Kurtz for one of his own staff.
But Kurtz again chose to mishear the question. ‘The name of the lady is Astrid Berger,’ he said, and once again Picton’s ye
llowed gaze settled on him with an air of informed suspicion.
Deprived for too long of major speeches, meanwhile, the Welsh policeman had chosen to read Miss Berger’s particulars aloud from the dossier: ‘“Berger, Astrid, alias Edda alias Helga” – alias you name it . . . “born Bremen ’54, daughter of a wealthy shipping owner.” You do move in fine circles, I will say, Mr Raphael. “Educated universities of Bremen and Frankfurt, graduated politics and philosophy 1978. Sometime contributor West German radical and satirical journals, last known address 1979, Paris, frequent visitor Middle East –”’
Picton cut him short. ‘Another bloody intellectual. Get her, Malcolm.’
As Malcolm again slipped from the room, Kurtz deftly took back the initiative.
‘If you will kindly compare the dates there a little, Commander, you will find that Miss Berger’s most recent visit to Beirut occurred in April this year, thus coinciding with Mr Mesterbein’s own tour. She was also in Istanbul during Mr Mesterbein’s stopover there. They flew different flights but stayed in the same hotel. Yes, Mike. Please.’
Litvak’s offering was a couple of photocopied hotel registration forms for Mr Anton Mesterbein and Miss Astrid Berger, dated April 18th. Beside them, much reduced by reproduction, was a receipted bill, paid by Mesterbein. The hotel was the Hilton, Istanbul. While Picton and the Chief Inspector studied them, the door once more opened and closed.
‘NRA on Astrid Berger too, sir. Can you believe it?’ said Malcolm, with the most forlorn of smiles.
‘Is that Nothing Recorded Against, please?’ Kurtz enquired swiftly.
Taking up his silver propelling pencil with the tips of both hands, Picton revolved it before his dyspeptic gaze.
‘It is,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘It is. Go to the top of the class, Mr Raphael.’
Kurtz’s third photograph – or, as Litvak later irreverently called it, his third card in the trick – had been so beautifully forged that even the best guess of Tel Aviv’s aerial reconnaissance experts had failed to pick it out from the bunch that they had been invited to inspect. It showed Charlie and Becker approaching the Mercedes in the forecourt of the Delphi hotel on the morning of their departure. Becker was carrying Charlie’s shoulder bag and his own black grip. Charlie was in her Greek finery and carrying her guitar. Becker was wearing the red blazer, silk shirt, and Gucci shoes. He had his gloved hand stretched towards the driving door of the Mercedes. He was also wearing Michel’s head.
The Little Drummer Girl Page 40