Shake Off

by Mischa Hiller

  “Bring it up here, you can write it up here.”

  She was silent, and I could hear people talking in the background at her end. I thought she was talking to someone else again but then I could hear her breathing. I watched the roller-skating kids move off the road to let a dirty red Golf go past. A dirty red Golf with the same number plate as the one I’d seen from Helen’s window in Tufnell Park. It was driving away from me up the road towards the house, it had passed the phone box without my noticing it. Helen was talking.

  “But I’m going to my mother’s place on Monday. Do you still want to come, by the way?” Of course, her mother’s place in Scotland, remote and by the sea.

  “Yes, I do. Definitely, more than ever.”

  “Have you started drinking, Michel?”

  “Helen, listen to me. Can we go today? I’ll meet you down there, just tell me we can go today.” I knew I was sounding desperate.

  “You’re beginning to scare me a little, Michel.” From her tone I could tell I was losing her.

  She had to know the truth. She deserved to know it—some of it, anyway.

  “I’m in trouble, Helen, and I can’t go back to my room.” She went quiet again and someone laughed in the background. I wondered if it was Professor Zorba. She muttered something about not being unpacked or packed and something about her mother still being in Scotland. I watched the Golf slow down and go around a corner beyond the house. Another car, a Renault 4, interrupted the roller skaters and did a three-point turn. It parked facing away from the house towards me and no one got out of the car. It was too far away for me to see who was in it. I turned my back on it, glad that I’d brought my bag of money and documents out with me.

  “Helen?”

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “Will you help me?”

  She sighed. “We would go from Euston. Can you come back today?”

  “Yes, I can be there this afternoon.”

  “OK, ring me when you’re in London. I’ll get the train times and pick up my bag from the house.” I was concerned about her picking her bag up from the house but didn’t want to worry her unnecessarily; anyway, if they’d moved up to Cambridge, then maybe, just maybe, they’d given up on Tufnell Park. In my heart of operational hearts I knew that they would still have someone there, even if it was just one person. I’d have to worry about that, and how they’d tracked me to Cambridge, later. Helen gave me a more direct number to call her on and we agreed a time after which I could ring.

  “Helen.”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t tell anyone where you’re going, OK?” Again the breathing and the other voices in the background.

  “You have a lot of bloody explaining to do when we meet.” She hung up.

  “Je t’aime,” I said, to the dial tone.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have sent the postcard, although how they could have pinpointed the house from a Cambridge postmark was beyond me and my training. Besides, they couldn’t have got up to Cambridge so quickly. I also assumed that Helen’s departmental phone must be clean; there was no way, given that I seemed to have tracked her down to a common room or somewhere, that they could have the whole switchboard covered. They could have bugged the phone box I was in, but they’d have had to have known I was here in the first place. I thought about dismantling the receiver but was conscious of the Renault behind me; I’d been in the phone box long enough. I dialed the speaking clock. At the sound of the tone it was 12:16. I dug around in the bag for the baseball cap I’d stolen from the house in Tufnell Park, pulled the peak down hard and walked away.

  I stopped at several points to see if anyone was following, going through a couple of parks and catching a bus into town. I walked to the station using backstreets, praying the station wasn’t being watched, although one reason I’d chosen Cambridge was the ease with which it could be watched. On a fast train to King’s Cross I gave things more thought. Perhaps it was Rachel, perhaps she had found my behavior odd and reported me to someone. But then she’d been there every night for three days and they’d had plenty of opportunity to act. Act how, to do what, to get the envelope? Rachel had ignored many opportunities to take it. It was only as we were pulling into King’s Cross that it came to me. I had neglected an essential fact, and I hung my head in shame: I was not the only one who knew of the house in Cambridge; I had given Abu Leila the address the morning he was killed, written it down on a piece of paper for him which he’d put in his wallet—the wallet that I’d left in his pocket when I’d abandoned him on the Ku’Damm pavement. I cursed myself again for not clearing his pockets. No doubt then that German, and perhaps British, intelligence knew of the house, which could explain how the competition knew about it too.

  At King’s Cross I went down into the underground station and found a pay phone that was on its own. This time I got straight through to Helen, who answered on the second ring.

  “Where have you been? There’s a train in forty-five minutes.” She sounded breathless. I told her I would meet her on the train.

  “Why not at the station?”

  “On the train,” I said. “Don’t hang around for me, just buy yourself a ticket and get on the train.” I hung up as she started to argue.

  I took the underground to Warren Street, then doubled back to Euston, where I came up the escalators and went immediately to the ticket office. It was fifteen minutes since I’d hung up on Helen. I stood in one queue then moved to another, just to throw anyone who might have jumped in behind me to try and overhear my transaction. I bought two first-class, one-way tickets to Glasgow, paying in cash. I left the ticket office and found a good vantage point—wedged between a pillar and a flower stall—from which to observe the doors through which I knew Helen would enter the station. From here I could see anyone who might have followed her from Tufnell Park.

  The train was due to leave in thirty minutes.

  Thirty-Nine

  From my hiding position I could see Helen approaching the entrance to the station through the large glass doors. There she was, in jeans and white T-shirt, Indian shawl around her shoulders, long legs, hair loosely tied, her runaway father’s wristwatch glinting in the sun. I had never before felt so happy to see someone. She was striding with purpose, a large kit bag slung over one shoulder. I pulled my cap down and waited for her to come through the doors, then saw, some twenty meters behind her, Professor Zorba. There he was, slicked-back hair, crumpled linen suit, bulging midriff, a newspaper in one hand. He was obviously following her; dodging behind pillars and stopping and starting like a bad parody of a private detective. The sight of him made my jaw tighten and my vision blur in anger.

  Helen pushed through the doors, heading for the ticket office, passing just five meters away from me but so focused that she would not have seen me had I waved. It took all my willpower to avoid rushing out and hugging her. I concentrated on Zorba, who was approaching the doors. As he neared them I took off my jacket and swung my bag over my shoulder. I made sure that Helen was facing the counter, then ran forward and pushed the big glass door open hard as he approached it. It caught him full on the chest with the big metal door handle. The wind left him like a deflating set of bagpipes and he dropped to the pavement.

  “Oh my God. I’m sorry. Are you OK?” I said, quickly bending down and applying a thumb to his windpipe, my hand covered by my jacket, the Stasi Beeskow training at last paying off. Unable to take in a badly needed breath, he started to panic and I let go for a second. “I think he’s OK,” I said to a concerned bystander. “He just needs to catch his breath.” Most people were too busy catching trains to stop. Besides, once they saw someone else looking after a fallen stranger, it absolved them of the need to do anything themselves.

  I checked on Helen: she was at the counter. I pulled Zorba to his feet and half-dragged, half-pushed him over to a wall out of her view, where I held him up and reapplied pressure to his neck.

  “I want you to listen to me, malaka,” I said into his hairy ear.
“I want you to leave Helen alone. It’s finished between you and her. Go back to your wife.” I released the pressure and he took a deep breath, coughing and spluttering. “If I see you near her again I’ll fuck you upside down, do you understand me?” I said. He nodded, clutching at his neck, his eyes welling up. He was pathetic, and part of me wanted him dead. I hated him. Hated that he had lain on top of Helen, maybe even used the scarves on her as I had. I would easily have killed him if I thought I could get away with it. As a matter of fact, I could have got away with it, even with all these people walking past, so that wasn’t what stopped me.

  I let go of him and he slumped halfway down the wall. I had to go, the train left in ten minutes. I couldn’t see the ticket office from where I was; hopefully Helen had already boarded the train. I started to leave when Zorba grabbed my sleeve and looked up at me. He rasped words out from his damaged throat.

  “I hope she leaves you,” he said, with a little smile. He put his hand to his throat. “It will be more painful than this.”

  He was tougher than I thought, I give him that. I left him bent over with his hands on his knees, dry-retching onto his suede shoes.

  With Zorba indisposed, I went into the main hall and looked for the Glasgow platform: number five. I stood with my back to the entrance to platform four, checking my watch against the station clock. Five minutes. I scanned the main hall, no longer caring whether I was being obvious or not; by now they would know that I was carrying out overt counter-​surveillance. Try as I might, I could spot no one suspicious, although it wasn’t an ideal place to spot them, and my dealings with Zorba may have caused them to pull back. It wouldn’t do any harm for them to think I’d lost the plot. I moved to another platform entrance and did it again, then wandered onto platform three and watched people board a train. I checked the platform clock: three minutes. I went back into the main hall and walked slowly back towards platform five, stopping, looking up at the board and putting my bag down as if I had all the time in the world. I watched platform five through the entrance, looking for the guard to see what he was doing. A teenager with a rucksack ran onto the platform and got onto the train. No one else was embarking, and the guard put a whistle to his lips in readiness, looking at his watch, moving next to the barrier so he could close it before he blew his whistle. I bent on one knee and retied an already tied shoelace. While still on my knee I grabbed my bag handle, then stood up and walked briskly to the platform, all in one movement. The guard was starting to close the barrier as I went through. I made the first door of the train just as he blew the second of two long whistles. I got on and slammed the door shut, which coincided with the train jerking to life. My hands were shaking. I pulled down the door window and looked back at the departing barrier as the train started to pull out; I was definitely the last one on.

  As the train ran out of platform, I saw two people standing behind the barrier. They looked very small at this distance and could have been absolutely anyone. If it was them, I didn’t care. They hadn’t tied me to Helen, that was the important thing.

  Forty

  I didn’t know where to start with Helen: with the fact that I knew Zorba had been with her in Turkey, or the fact that I had just assaulted him, or the fact that I was an undercover PLO agent whose handler had been shot in the back of the head by persons unknown and was being followed by other persons unknown, possibly Israeli agents, who wanted an envelope that was sticking into my ribs? I wasn’t even sure where Helen stood on the Palestine issue; many people were ambivalent about the whole thing, believing at best that it was a two-sided problem with both sides equally to blame. At worst, they thought the Palestinians were terrorists who had no claim to anything, and that villages like Mama’s never existed to start with. Should I tell her that I had nobody to report to and nowhere to go? Or should I start from the beginning, with my upbringing, the camp, that I was not who I told her I was? Could I even begin to tell her about that terrible day?

  All this churned in my head as I tracked Helen down on the train. The tickets were all allocated to specific seats, and she was wedged in the window seat by an overweight middle-aged man who had no doubt thanked the gods when he’d discovered who he was seated next to. She was staring out of the window, trying to avoid physical contact with the man, who overflowed from his seat. He was intent on verbal intercourse with her and I interrupted him in mid-sentence.

  “Let her out, will you, she’s with me.” He looked up at me in annoyance. Helen’s face broke into a relieved smile. Stupidly, the man started to protest, as if there was something to argue about. I cut him off. “I’m not in the mood, believe me I’m not—I’ve had a difficult day, so just get out of your seat so she can get past.” I pulled Helen’s bag down from the overhead luggage rack.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, when she had squeezed past the man.

  “Somewhere more comfortable.”

  Something had changed between us. We did not embrace or kiss. I still had Rachel on my skin and Zorba in my mind. She was full of questions and no doubt Zorba was still fresh on her skin. We collapsed into our first-class seats, Helen at the window. A steward took our orders for tea, coffee and sandwiches. We had a couple of seats on their own so we had the illusion of solitude, although there were people in the seats in front of us so real conversation was going to be difficult. I needed to know where we stood, so I kicked off in a low voice.

  “Did you tell anyone you were going to Scotland?” I asked.

  “No. But it was really no secret that I was going next week,” she said.

  “Does anyone know where it is?”

  “Most people know where Scotland is, Michel.” She wasn’t going to make this easy, and I couldn’t blame her.

  “I mean your mother’s place, does anyone know where it is?”

  “Apart from my mother? No.”

  I took a deep breath through my nostrils and exhaled through my mouth. “What about your tutor?”

  “Niki? I think he knows where it is, I’ve spoken about it, obviously. But no, he’s never been there, which I think is what you’re really asking.” Did that mean I was the first to be asked there? If I could believe her, of course; after Turkey, who knew what was true. “By the way, shouldn’t I be the one asking questions?” she asked. She was right, but I didn’t know where to start. I pointed to the seats in front and put a finger to my ear to indicate that we could be overheard.

  “Have you got a pen and paper?” I asked. I had to get her bag down to retrieve a notepad, and then the coffee and food arrived. When we were settled back in our seats I told her to write her questions down. We didn’t touch the sandwiches except to determine that they were limp. She looked out of the window and so did I, switching between the view (a blur that was the outskirts of London) and her left ear, which had the small mole that I had taken for a piercing when I had first invited her into my room. She tapped the pen on the pad as she thought—I was thinking that I’d have to get rid of it afterwards; the idea of anything being written down made me break out in a sweat.

  She wrote slowly on the pad and showed it to me: “What’s going on?” it said, in elegant handwriting.

  “You need to be more specific,” I said.

  She pulled a face and thought, then wrote again. “Who trashed your room?”

  I took the pen and pad and wrote, “Israeli agents—Mossad, I think.”

  “Really?” she said out loud, with a mix of incredulity and worry.

  “I think so. I can’t be sure. I’d have to speak to them to find out, but I’m not that keen.”

  She didn’t smile.

  “But what were they doing in your room?”

  I hesitated, but decided it had to be done, and it was easier done writing it down than saying it. “Because I work for the PLO and have something they want.”

  She frowned and took the pen. “But you told me you were Lebanese???” The question marks were super-sized.

  I took the pen. I was drenched in sweat and i
t wasn’t the heat.

  “No, I’m Palestinian, but I was born in Lebanon.” Then I wrote, “This is very difficult for me.”

  “It’s no fucking picnic for me,” she said loudly.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, keeping my voice low.

  She took the pen and wrote quickly, tossing the pad into my lap. I picked it up. The elegant script had turned into a scrawl.

  “FUCK YOU. Arsehole,” it read. She turned to the window. We watched the outside go by for a while. It was as if the train was standing still and the whole world was hurtling past us. I started to feel dizzy with it and had to actively correct the illusion. She picked up the pad and wrote for a while. When she was done, she passed it to me without looking at me. I took it and read: “You tricked me into getting on the train. You knew that if we’d had this conversation beforehand I’d be on this train alone. You lied to me, and have lied to me all along.” I shook my head but she snatched the pad back and wrote, “By the way, are you a terrorist?”

  “No, I’m not,” I said. I wrote on the pad quickly, trying to match the speed I wanted to speak it, “I am not a terrorist. I had to lie to you—it was the only way if I was to carry on being with you, WHICH I WANT TO DO. I didn’t lie about anything that matters, like how I feel. This is the truth. It’s all that matters now, the rest of it we can sort out.”

  She took the pad and read it. I watched her but gained no clues as to her reaction. She reached out for the pen and I placed it in her hand. She wrote, more slowly this time, tilting the pad so I could see it.

  “How do I know that you’re not just using me because you’re in trouble?” I read. She looked at me, moving her face up close to mine with the question formed in her eyes.

  “You don’t,” I said. “But I’m not.”

  Forty-One