At midnight I was pacing up and down, still in my jacket—I could feel the bulk of the envelope rescued from Abu Leila sticking into my ribs. What to do with it? Who to give it to? I paced up and down some more, until I turned the light out and went into the hall. I listened at Helen’s door, although I knew she wasn’t there. I went down to the garden and fetched the lock-picking set from the abandoned cooker.
Her curtains were open and the light from the street lamps filled her room with the same unpleasant yellow as mine. I kept the lights off and lay on her bed and smelled her pillow; it was the herbal smell of her shampoo. I breathed in and I breathed out. Sometimes I could hear a car or a bus on the high street. I heard a car door close, but gently, as if they didn’t want to wake anyone up. Considerate, I thought. I was beginning to relax in Helen’s room. Did Abu Leila have a family that needed to be notified? What had happened to his body, was it already being cut up in an autopsy? What was it he was going to tell me about my future? To my surprise I started to cry. I buried my face in Helen’s pillow to muffle the noise. I cried like I was fifteen and had lost my family all over again. After a couple of minutes I stopped and sat up—I wasn’t crying for Abu Leila, I was crying for myself. It was loathsome self-pity.
I wiped my eyes. Something bothered me about the sounds I’d heard outside. I wondered why, following the closure of a car door, a car engine hadn’t started; nor had I heard it drive up and park beforehand. I heard a creaking on the stairs. A soft step, the groan of a floorboard, then silence. It couldn’t be Zorba. I took soft steps of my own to Helen’s door and I heard the slip of metal on metal, a slow keying of a lock, or maybe the racking of pins, not on Helen’s lock but on mine next door. Then I heard my door click open and probably two people go in, judging by the time it took for the door to close behind them. My heart sounded, and I crept back to the bed and listened at the wall.
They were quiet, professional; they didn’t speak or make much noise. Maybe a squeak of a drawer, a pressing of bed springs, nothing that you would hear if you hadn’t got your ear pressed against the wall. They spent fifteen minutes searching for something in there, then the noises stopped and I heard them leave, gently closing the door behind them. I went back to Helen’s door, terrified that they would try to come into her room. I desperately looked for a bolt, but none had been fitted: stupid, stupid Helen. What about all the stuff under the bath, what if they searched the bathroom? But then I heard that creak on the stairs again and the front door clicking shut. I hadn’t heard them come in but they had probably wedged it open, and besides, I had been blubbing like a baby. At the window I saw two men dressed in dark clothes walk down the road. They stopped by a car with a silhouette in the driver’s seat, and one of them opened the door. The courtesy light didn’t come on as the door opened, because people on a nighttime stake-out always disable it. The other man walked on and he was betrayed by the slope of his shoulders as he went. I watched him until he disappeared around the corner. It was the pale-faced man I had last seen outside Foyles.
Thirty-Four
The car was still there half an hour later. A dirty Golf, although I couldn’t discern the color under the yellow street light. I could make out the number plate; if they believed they hadn’t been seen they would still use it. It scared me, knowing that they had come into my room when they thought I’d be in it. They must have followed me here, since I’d stupidly done no proper countersurveillance from King’s Cross and nobody knew where I lived—not even Abu Leila, and SOAS had only a PO box in their records. They’d entered my room when they thought I was asleep, no doubt detecting which room I was in when I’d put the light on without closing the curtains. I was a victim of my own ineptitude. They must have thought I’d disappeared and perhaps were hoping I’d return. This meant that they might know about the back entrance, since my friend who had gone around the corner would have found the path running down behind the gardens by now. No doubt he was watching where it came onto the street, with someone at the other end. I took them to be the competition: Mossad agents wanting the envelope. I desperately wanted to get out.
It was starting to get light when I went into the bathroom. I didn’t go into my room, assuming they had placed something in it that would tell them if I did: either a microphone or a motion detector, something connected to the door, maybe. I unscrewed the panel on the side of the bath. I emptied the zip-lock case onto the floor, taking an inventory: the Le Monde article, one Greek passport, my Lebanese passport and £3,500. My Swiss passport and the fat envelope were still in my jacket. My first priority would be to go and empty my safety deposit box.
I left the house through the back door and went through the garden to the gate at the end. I listened for a bit, then opened it slowly. I heard nothing, so I went into the alley. I could have gone either way and come out on one of the roads leading from mine to Fortress Road, but I had to assume that both would be covered. I would go straight through instead. I climbed the fence opposite and walked up the tended garden to the back of the house. The lights were off, which hopefully meant they were still asleep. If I’d wished for a side alley that led to Fortress Road I was disappointed—all the houses on the road were terraced; I would have to go through the house. I still had my set of picks on me after using them on Helen’s door. I got through the back door and closed it quietly behind me. It was nearly half past five, and some people get up that early. I was in the kitchen—a family room with an enormous refrigerator covered with children’s drawings and magnetic letters. It was very quiet, until the refrigerator came to life with a shudder and started grumbling. I moved slowly into the hall, thankful for the wall-to-wall carpet, and studied the front door: bolted from the inside. The front door they bolt, but not the more vulnerable back one. The staircase was opposite the front door, and I looked up it to see darkness at the top.
Two bolts were on the door, top and bottom, and I pulled the top one slowly through its eye, pressing the door to reduce the friction and noise. I had it undone when a noise made me jump.
“Who are you?” A small child, a girl, sat halfway up the stairs, a blanket in her hands. She wasn’t upset or frightened, more curious than anything. She held the blanket up to her cheek and rubbed it between her fingers.
“I’m nobody. I’m just leaving,” I said softly, and put my finger to my lips, giving her a smile. I undid the bottom bolt more quickly than the top, then opened the door. Coats were on pegs by the door, and I chose a raincoat, along with a cap; any disguise at this stage would be useful. I waved at the girl and stepped onto the street, closing the door gently behind me.
I crossed the empty road and turned right, walking towards Kentish Town—I figured they would have someone outside Tufnell Park since it was the nearest station. I pulled the cap over my eyes as I passed the junction to the street with the alley on it. If they had anyone waiting for me, that was one of the places they would be. Within ten minutes I was on the platform at Kentish Town, and within fifteen I was on the first train heading into central London.
I was hit by a memory of Abu Leila. We were in West Berlin, at a small restaurant that did a Moroccan lamb and date tagine he was fond of. Abu Leila had just told me that I belonged to a big family. At first I thought he was talking about my dead family, which, relatively speaking, wasn’t that big.
“We are a family of uprooted gypsies, outsiders wherever we go. And although we wander alone, this inability to fit in, to be accepted, is what binds us together.” He was drinking from a liter-sized stein of beer and there was a glisten in his eyes—it wasn’t often I saw him drink. “We are roaming warriors, Michel, lost in a world that cares only about its immediate needs.” He had gone on in this vein for a few minutes, then he’d said something that distracted me from my food. “One day you may find yourself looking for these fellow travelers, but they will not be where you think they are. Sometimes when travelers congregate in a place they call home and settle down they lose their identity, they become something different,
something soulless.”
“What do you mean?” I’d asked. Was he talking about Palestinians in general, or people like him and me, invisible even to those Palestinians openly engaged in the struggle for a homeland?
“I’m talking about a soulmate, my son. A soulmate could be an unlikely person that you may not at first recognize as a soulmate. A true soulmate may not be of your world.”
He’d lost me, he seemed to be talking about more than one thing, and I didn’t press it; a liter of beer does not sit well with a burdened man, and Abu Leila had never been a drinker. A smoker, yes, but not one to wallow in alcohol-induced self-pity. That was the first time it had occurred to me that he might actually be a lonely man. Now he was dead.
I stayed on the Northern Line until Stockwell, and went back north again on the Victoria Line to Green Park, then southbound on the Piccadilly Line to Knightsbridge, where I got off. The people on the trains had started out as black and Asian, people on their way back from night shifts or doing early cleaning shifts. They slumped in their seats and slept, and had I not been on full alert I would have joined them. The numbers and ethnic mix increased at each change until, by the time I emerged above ground opposite Harrods, it was rush hour and the train was full.
Although employees were entering Harrods, it wasn’t yet open to customers, so I sat in a small café on a side street. It was full of breakfasting taxi drivers and the smell reminded me that I hadn’t eaten anything except a pretzel since yesterday morning. I ordered a bacon sandwich and a mug of tea. I needed to let someone know about Abu Leila. People must be wondering what had happened to him. Arrangements would need to be made, networks dismantled, the envelope given to someone. The only thing I could think to do was to contact the PLO in London and let them have the envelope. Since it was somewhere I avoided, I didn’t know who to speak to, but I knew there would be a security officer, someone who would know what to do, who to tell.
What I also hoped, as I drained my tea, was that the same person would tell me who I should now report to, what I should do next, and how best I could use my experience and training for the good of the cause. There was the small matter of making contact. Phoning them was out of the question, and besides, I didn’t have a name. Somehow I would need to get a letter to them.
I looked around at the breakfasting taxi drivers.
Thirty-Five
Standing in the drinks section of the food hall at Harrods I checked my watch. It was two minutes to twelve and the place was busy with tourists. I carried a Harrods carrier bag full of passports, a large amount of money in various currencies, forged documents, packs of codeine and the file of papers and reports on the massacre—the whole contents of my safety deposit box. The well-worn envelope sat in my inside jacket pocket, digging into my armpit every time I moved.
I had chosen a young taxi driver sitting on his own to deliver the note to the PLO mission, offering him £100 and strict instructions to hand-deliver it to someone inside. He’d jumped at the chance. The mission was a short taxi ride from Harrods—I knew where it was after using it for trade-craft practice when I’d first arrived in London, spotting the surveillance who were watching the place. I hoped the note had been passed to whoever was responsible for security. All I’d written was, “I worked for Abu Leila and was with him when he was martyred in Berlin. I have his personal effects. I will be in Harrods drinks department at 12 p.m. You will know me by what I carry.” It was the first time I’d written in Arabic since leaving Lebanon.
I was having second thoughts. I clutched the plastic bag and the carton of Turkish cigarettes I’d just bought, wondering whether I should leave—but where would I go? I was tired, too tired to think straight. Would anyone come? Perhaps they thought it some hoax or trap; they might even have called MI5, who would take their concerns seriously after Berlin. Hopefully though, I’d given them little time to organize anything. I stared at a bottle of Johnny Walker. I heard Arabic at my ear.
“The cigarettes are a nice touch, Michel.” I hadn’t put my name in the note. I turned to see a thin balding man with a kindly face and the wary eyes of someone trained to notice things. He had a twenty-four-hour growth of stubble except for where there was a small white scar on his chin. Exactly as Ramzi had described him: the taxi driver who had taken them back to the bridge from Ramallah. He gave nothing away in his expression, but experience was furrowed in his face. Not just age, but things seen and done. “It is Michel, no?”
I nodded, checking the busy store behind him.
“I’m Khalil. Don’t worry, I’m here alone, for sure. Like you, I know how to be careful. You have something for me, something of Abu Leila’s?”
“I didn’t know where else to go,” I said. “I wanted to report what happened—I felt it to be my duty.”
The man who called himself Khalil took some cigarettes from his raincoat, remembered where he was and put them back again. He was studying me for something. His eyes flicked to the Harrods bag. I grasped it with both hands. This was not how I had imagined things would go. Why wasn’t he asking me the details of what had happened in Berlin?
“I would like to talk about our mutual friend, I most certainly would, but not here. Let’s go somewhere more private, where we can sit down.” The last thing I wanted was to go somewhere private. Who was this man anyway?
“He knew the Old Man,” I said, my voice cracking.
Khalil smiled sadly. “Believe me, Michel, when I tell you that he was no friend of the Old Man.”
I didn’t understand.
“This was a mistake,” I said, but didn’t move. If only he’d say to me, “We’ll look after you, everything will be all right,” I’d go with him. But he simply stood there scrutinizing me. I could now see the potential violence in him; I’d seen a friendly face because I needed to.
“What do you have in the bag?” he asked.
“My life,” I said. “But I’ve brought it to the wrong place.”
“Do you have the envelope?”
“How—”
“It’s best for you if you give me the envelope, for sure. Have you opened it?”
I shook my head and started to walk past him.
“You are in danger if you keep it…”
A threat or a warning? I couldn’t tell. “I don’t have it with me,” I said, sticking the Turkish cigarettes in his hand. He started to say something but I continued into the air-conditioned cool of the main food hall, then through the exit onto a bright and hot Brompton Road.
I stood on the pavement outside like an idiot, disturbing the flow of shoppers. I couldn’t decide what to do next. Decide isn’t the right word: to decide means having options to choose from, and I didn’t have options, except to go either left or right.
Standing outside the meeting place was stupid. This Khalil would have brought someone with him, despite what he said. I had to move. With some effort I started to walk, and gradually, with every step, it got easier. I couldn’t say whether I went right or left, but it didn’t matter. I felt nauseous—Abu Leila “was no friend of the Old Man”—what did that mean? The man who called out, the man on the motorbike, he’d called out in Arabic—what did that mean? Khalil was the driver who’d insisted Ramzi take the envelope across. But he was no driver. My eyes were stinging as I walked and walked and those eels were in my head again, slipping around in the murk as I trod the pavement. And that big fucker was there, pushing itself forward and cannibalizing the others until I could no longer hold it back with practicalities, because I had run out of practicalities.
Things calmed down when I had done walking. I was back in Foyles, because for some reason I felt safe in a bookshop. I didn’t know what the people on my tail wanted from me, beyond the envelope, but they wouldn’t try anything in public, unless it was killing, in which case nowhere was safe, although the street would be their favored place to allow an easy getaway, like in Berlin. In all my training I’d never heard of anyone who had been assassinated in a bookshop: hotel rooms
, the street, at home, all likely venues, but never a bookshop. In the toilets I locked myself in a cubicle. I sat on the toilet and took out the battered envelope. Perhaps this was the time to open it. Abu Leila was dead, it wouldn’t matter if I opened it. But something was holding me back, something I couldn’t put my finger on, something beyond my duty as a foot soldier not to interfere in what didn’t concern me. But then I didn’t even know whose foot soldier I was anymore. Someone entered the toilets so I quickly put the envelope away and left.
I remembered that I did have somewhere to go, of course, temporarily anyway. I had the house in Cambridge, the house that Abu Leila wanted for the Palestinian contingent of his rival talks. I hadn’t told anyone about the house. I could get the key off Rachel, the letting agent. The truth was that Rachel was the only civilian I could turn to, since Helen would be on her way to Turkey by now. I had her business card in my wallet still, with her home number written on the back. I also had money, plenty of money, and it would help me get about and remain undetected until I sorted myself out.
A bookshop also happens to be a good place to check for surveillance, and by now I was no longer bothering to hide the fact that I was running, which gave me more options. I doubted whether the people in London were the same as the people in West Berlin, but they were just doubts, based on a shouted word and what Khalil had said. The Israelis had recruited Arabs before, without them even knowing they were working for Mossad. Dissembling, Abu Leila had called it. But then Abu Leila was “no friend of the Old Man,” and he had been organizing rival talks. Those eels were swimming in my head again. I spent a couple of hours in Foyles, browsing everything from poetry to military history, but I couldn’t see my pale, slopey-shouldered friend, nor was the Golf visible when I cut through the backstreets to King’s Cross Station, stopping only to buy some clothes and an overnight case to put the Harrods bag in.
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