by Gavin Lyall
His mouth opened wide and he sat down backwards with a silent thud. The gun tumbled loose.
I’d fired – three times, was it? I counted the echoes in my head. They weren’t loud, in that noise. Three it had been. I walked around Janni, picked up the other gun, looked down at Jehangir.
Two had hit him. One high on his left arm, the other somewhere below his heart. His mouth said things I couldn’t hear.
Janni got painfully to his feet, hating me. I waved the guns and gestured him to get Jehangir. He hated me a moment longer, then hobbled over to help.
The pilot suddenly stepped down beside me and nearly got the two-gun treatment. His hands jerked high.
‘Get them on board!’ I shouted. ‘And get took off!’
The pilot stared at Jehangir, now on his feet but bent over clutching the bloody patch on his shirt. ‘But he may be dying!’
‘In his trade he’s always been dying. If he does, dump him in the sea. Dump the boxes anyway: Beirut’s getting a phone call.’
He went wide-eyed. ‘This could lose my licence.’
‘Don’t come that brother-birdman act with me! You knew what was happening.’
Janni had Jehangir in his arms, carrying him like a baby and still with breath enough to yell at the pilot. Who turned back tome: ‘He wants to get a doctor now.’
I shrugged. ‘Tell him his boss goes now or we all stick around for fifteen years minus good behaviour.’
He must have said something like that; they all got on board. I stuffed both pistols in my briefcase and walked away. I heard the second engine start behind me. By the time I reached the Queen Air, the Piper was moving.
Suddenly I didn’t feel like climbing the steps, so I sat on them and began to shiver. But not with regret. And it didn’t last.
Chapter 24
We got airborne just about on time, estimating Ben Gurion airport at four-ten, given a helping wind. Ken’s flight would land about half an hour ahead. I’d just reported joining Blue 17 at 9,000 as we reached the coast, set up the engines for cruise power and was fiddling with the mixture levers when Mitzi leaned tentatively in over my shoulder.
I waved her into the right-hand seat. ‘Just don’t hang your handbag on any knobs.’ She smiled, eased cautiously into the seat, and sat looking puzzled at the instrument panel.
‘How do you not get muddled with all the clocks like this?’
‘You don’t look at all of ’em all the time. Like a reference library. You don’t need to keep staring at your outside air temperature or fuel state; only when you want to know.’
The loudspeaker crackled: ‘Whiskey Zulu, change to Nicosia Control, 126.3.’
‘Whiskey Zulu, over to 126.3. Thank you.’ I changed both comm sets.
Mitzi asked: ‘What is that about?’
‘Just changing to a different controller. This one listens in case I report both wings have fallen off over the sea.’
‘Then can he do anything?’ She looked serious.
‘Sure: he lights as many candles as I’ve got passengers.’
She stared for a moment longer, then smiled.
I checked in with 126.3, then switched in the autopilot. Given luck, now I didn’t need to touch anything except the radio and navigation knobs until we reached Israel.
After a while, I asked: ‘Did you have much to do with your father’s work?’
‘Ah yes. I also have a degree in archaeology. Before I married I worked much with my father. And when my marriage ended, I was going back with him – but then he was put in prison.’
I made sympathetic clicking noises.
‘It was a very bad time, that year. It was so difficult for me to get money from my father, and there is no work for archaeologists who are not teachers. I washed floors, watching out with children, work like that. Then my father is out of prison and it is going to be all right and …’ she shook her head slowly.
‘His first time, was it? In prison?’ Tactful question.
‘Pardon?’ She frowned and blinked her sharp eyes.
‘Well … he did have a reputation for not always reporting his finds.’
‘Perhaps …’ She nodded reluctantly. ‘But who should own what is lost a thousand years and nobody knows it existed even? King Richard did not give in his will the sword to Israel. Israel was not clever enough to find it. My father was.’
‘He was good.’ Trying to make amends.
‘Oh yes. They do not let him dig if he is just a … a bulldozer. He was like Schliemann: he walked on a site and could say: “Here they put the wagons, that was the wine Keller, on the corner is the most profit-making shop in the town.” I think it is like a man who plans towns except backwards.’
And once she’d said it, I could see the Professor as a medieval merchant prince – with the silk robe, the neat beard, the air of fastidious toughness. Fingering a bale of cloth here, sniffing a handful of spice there, clinking the gold coins in his satchel …
If the gold had been there. ‘Straight archaeology isn’t a sort of high-paid business, then?’
She flicked her hand sharply. ‘If you are writing the big picture books that nobody is reading, or making television programmes for people who sleep with open eyes – yes, there is money. But if you wish to do only the real work, to dig, you are only famous.’
‘Pure knowledge spreads pretty thin on bread.’
She thought this out. ‘Yes, that is right.’
One radio-compass needle was pointing firmly at what it thought was Tel Aviv’s beacon, but we were at too much of an angle to the coastline for me to trust it. I tried switching the VOR around to get a bearing on Ben Gurion airport itself, but we were too far and too low for a very-high-frequency gadget.
‘What is that?’ Mitzi leant across to look.
‘A mixed affair. Combined Visual Omni-Range and Instrument Landing System. Reads on to the same dial. The VOR navigates you – points at a radio station – then when you get there the ILS, both needles together, give you height and course
to fly so you come down a glide path on to the runway. Bad weather and night’
‘You can land without seeing?’
‘No, you’ve still got to see the runway at the last moment. But on ILS I’d bring an aeroplane like this down to 300 feet in cloud.’
‘And if then you could not see?’
‘Then I’d go away and land somewhere else.’
Time buzzed gently by, a calm sea crawled away below. I took out a pre-prepared pipe and added to the collection of matches on the floor.
Finally I said: ‘Your father can’t have found many million-dollar swords. I mean, when you’ve found one the pressure must ease up a bit.’
‘You must not say “million-dollar sword”,’ she said impatiently. ‘That is museum talk. Do you think my father first thought that when he saw it?’
No, I didn’t. Allowing for inflation in the last eighteen months, he probably said: There’s an $800,000 sword.’ But that was wrong, too – or incomplete. It must have meant something else as well – knowledge, truth, beauty – for him to be good at his job at all. Some well-engineered aircraft mean more than money to me. No sword’s intrinsically more beautiful than the original 049 Connie.
I nodded. ‘But what are you going to do when you’ve got it?’
‘I must sell. I would want to give it to a museum in Vienna in the memory of my father, but … I have to live also. But even in New York I can make sure my father’s finding of it is known.’
Professor-Doktor-convict Bruno Spohr’s last round-up? But I didn’t say that. Soon after, she went back to the main cabin.
My estimated time of arrival turned out just about right, and just before the coast I remembered to open the little quarter-light window at my side and shove out the two guns. Jehangir’s silenced job turned out to be an old Smith & Wesson ‘Victory’ .38, one of the few models actually made with a screw thread for a silencer. Probably quite a valuable antique in its own right by now.
At Ben Gurion International they parked us well out, away from the ranks of airliners, and told us to wait. After about ten minutes the customs gave the aircraft a quick frisk and we were clear to haul our baggage over five hundred yards to the terminal, watched by strolling guards in sloppy uniforms and an easy sureness about the way they held their sub-machine guns. You can’t mistake Israel for a country at peace, and I don’t think they shoot off their own feet much, either.
I did the paperwork for the aircraft and then went through the meat-grinder they call customs and immigration. Eleanor and Mitzi were waiting on the other side. They hadn’t had any trouble.
‘Just for interest,’ I said to Eleanor, ‘what profession do you have on your passport?’
‘You don’t say on an American passport, now.’
‘That could help.’ So then we got Mitzi into a sherut – a communal taxi that looks like an American hearse – for Jerusalem. It’s only thirty miles, though with Israeli driving it can seem both shorter and longer.
‘Give us a ring when you’ve got a hotel,’ I told her. ‘Remember we’re at the Avia. Ken’ll phone us later.’
She was away in a cloud of hot rubber, and we found an ordinary cab for ourselves.
The Avia is just around the airport perimeter, in flat dull country that’s fine for building an airfield, but not historic or pretty enough to suit tourists. So the hard core of its clientele are airline crews and occasional batches of stranded passengers, which makes it a good place for getting a drink at breakfast or breakfast at teatime.
By six o’clock I’d showered, hung up my two damp shirts to finish dripping, got back into a dirty one and was sitting down behind a Maccabee beer in the first-floor dining-room. Eleanor wandered in soon after,
‘No bar?’ she asked.
‘No, but you can drink what you like here. Airline influence, I suppose.’ Despite my personal example, aircrews aren’t big boozers.
She ordered a gin and tonic. ‘So now we wait?’
‘I have to, but you can go down to Tel Aviv for dinner. It’s only ten miles.’
‘I’ll see.’ She’d changed into a bright red trouser suit with a ruffled white blouse and a gold whatsit on a chain around her neck. Since she’d sat down there’d been some high-intensity radiation coming off a TWA crew that was breakfasting on turkey sandwiches at the next table, but she let it bounce off.
Her gin arrived, and she said ‘cheers’ because I was British and drank. ‘I thought you said Ken had been deported.’
‘Yes, but they changed their minds.’ Would she ask why the change? Would I tell her my guess – a trap?
She didn’t ask that. ‘What was he … charged with?’
‘Espionage.’
‘What? And he only got two years?’
‘Three with one off for good behaviour. But they call everything espionage over here. We were in the usual business: a load of small arms for Jordan only we landed in Israel instead.’
‘That’s a habit you can’t afford often,’ she said dryly. ‘Wait – you said we?’
‘Uh-huh. We were coming out of the Lebanon into Syria, in thick weather. There’s a couple of bloody great mountain ranges around there, Mount Hermon and all, and your safety height’s about 11,000 feet. So we lost an engine in between them, and we were overloaded so she wouldn’t hold more than six thousand feet on one fan. Couldn’t go back, couldn’t go on – not unless we could see – so the only place to go was south. And that’s the Jordan valley. You know it goes on down and becomes the Red Sea and then the Kenya Rift Valley?’
‘But you didn’t reach Kenya,’ she said gently.
‘We nearly made Jordan. But when we came out of cloud over Galilee we found we’d got a fighter escort. Ken put her down on a road just south of the lake.’
‘And you got away?’
‘Israel’s got a lot of frontier to guard, and they guard it against an army – not just one man.’
So then the TWA crew decided it was takeoff time, but not so urgent they couldn’t get a closer look at Eleanor on the way. The captain, a solid man with cropped grey hair, nodded at me and said pleasantly: ‘Haven’t met here before, have we? You fly?’
He was looking at my shirt, which had the little pen-holders stitched to the outside of the breast pocket.
I nodded back. ‘Business and charter.’
‘Ah.’ His Dow-Jones rating of me slumped several points. ‘You do a nice line in stewardesses.’
Eleanor gave him a quick flashgun smile. ‘No, I’m his employer.’
The captain sighed. ‘And we get Howard Hughes. Come on, boys; it may be the wrong business, but it’s the only one we know.’
Eleanor watched them to the door, sipping her drink thoughtfully. ‘But Ken got caught?’
‘Somebody had to stay and argue, or they’d just have confiscated the whole aeroplane right off. And somebody has to be on the outside paying for defence lawyers. He came close to an acquittal.’
She looked at me curiously. ‘How did you decide who stayed? Spin a coin or compare stiff upper lips?’
‘No. It was his turn.’
‘It was …? You mean you’ve been in jail, too?’
‘Nearly three years, in Persia. Same sort of reason. It goes with the job.’
Then the waiter called: ‘Mees Travis, telephone for Mees Travis.’
She went to take it. I called for another round, then started scraping out a pipe. I’d just got it packed and lit when she came back. ‘Mitzi: she’s booked in at a place called the Holy Land, West Jerusalem.’
‘Long way out. I suppose things are getting jammed up, there, with Passover and Easter coming on.’
She sipped her new drink. ‘How did you get set up as gunrunners?’
‘Please not that filthy phrase. We weren’t illegal. Well – we were sort of arms-running for the RAF in Transport Command and 38 Group, so we learned something, and then when we came out it was the only cargo on offer for small outfits, so we sort of specialised.’
‘But not illegally.’
‘Straight government-to-government deals; compared to that, the illegal stuff’s peanuts. Britain sold £400 million in arms abroad last year, France did better and God knows what America did. A lot of that’s fighters and ships and tanks, but a lot’s small stuff: rifles, ammunition, radar bits. High value and always in a rush: perfect air freight. But the big airlines won’t touch it: not respectable. So …’
‘And if you didn’t, somebody else would.’
I lit my pipe again. ‘Actually, I believe in the right of small countries to bear arms.’
She was puzzled. ‘Who said “small countries”?’
‘I see: you think America should scrap its armed services, too. Or did you just mean small countries that have to buy its arms abroad? Like Jordan. Like Israel.’
After a while, she heaved a sigh, and I mean heaved: a nice bra-busting movement. ‘I guess that’s so. And it’s all legal?’
‘That rather depends on which side of the ol’ river Jordan you land.’
‘I never knew being a merchant of death was so tricky.’
So then it was my turn to take a phone call, down in the lobby.
‘It’s your loving Uncle Moishe,’ said Ken’s voice. So we were going to try and play it in code. ‘How d’you like our beautiful country? Have any problems on the journey?’
‘Our old friend from the race-course turned up again.’
‘Did he? Was he being impetuous?’
‘Yes, but I got even more so.’
‘Fine …’ he couldn’t expect any more detail, not on the phone. ‘Have you heard from your second cousin yet?’
‘Who? Oh, yes. At the Holy Land, West Jerusalem. Any contact yet?’
‘Yes, but only India Foxtrot.’ I suppose ‘Instrument Flight’ meant not visual contact: he’d only rung Gadulla. ‘Looks hopeful. And something else: I checked with shipping offices in Haifa. Old three-stripes was booked on a tourist boat that got in today.
No show, of course.’
‘No sign of the gent from … from the Establishment?’
‘No, but he wouldn’t book on the same boat, just pretend he had, maybe.’
‘He’ll be on his way. Watch your back, uncle.’
‘And yours, nephew. Love to cousin Ellie. Shalom.’
When I got back to the table, Eleanor was glooming at the menu.
I said: ‘Ken, all right. Some progress. D’you want to eat here or go in to Dizengoff?’
‘Where?’
‘Tel Aviv’s Broadway or Boul’ Mich’. Or something.’
She put the menu down with a slap. ‘So why not live a little?’
Chapter 25
We ate at a small restaurant just up from Dizengoff Circle. Sunday isn’t as lively as Saturday, with the Sabbath just out, but the gentle night air had brought enough of a crowd to give it a bit of a swing.
I made coffee-drinking gestures at the waiter. The food hadn’t been anything to write home about, not unless your mother knew those sort of words already, but the Israelis take coffee seriously.
Eleanor said: ‘You and Ken – you’ve been together a long time, now?’
‘Twenty years or something. We don’t actually give each other flowers on the anniversary of that first day I nearly landed up his chuff on the West Mailing runway.’
‘You’re going to go on?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Then I stopped to think why ‘of course’. ‘I suppose … you’ve got a man you can work with, you trust, he’s good at his job, you can talk to him but you don’t have to … most of life is seven to four against, as somebody said, so why change?’
‘But don’t you like Ken?’
‘Of course I like the crummy bastard.’
She looked at me carefully. ‘Men.’ Then: ‘And neither of you ever got married?’
‘I did once. Nearly.’
‘What happened?’
‘Three years in a Persian nick.’
‘Oh. And she didn’t wait?’
‘I felt bad for a time, but … I’d never promised to give up merchanting death. I suppose a woman wants a man home more than once every three years.’