New Jerusalem

by John Meaney

  Another was on hands and knees but moving, the one Pinchas had hit with the briefcase, but then he croaked, frog-like, as his limbs gave way. Pinchas took a high step forward, stamping down with a liquid crunch.

  Have you ever squashed a beetle with your heel?

  A minute later, Pinchas began to laugh. You could justify what he'd done to the fallen man – a trigger-finger's dying twitch could kill – but there was something cold and different about his laughter. Then he stopped, a sudden switching-off, and said: "Sorry."

  Farther along the dock, the Sabra's door opened and the driver got out. Pinchas turned away as I glimpsed reflected silver moonlight: twin tracks of tears were glinting on his cheeks. None of my business.

  "There was an empty van," said our driver, approaching, "parked around the other side of the warehouse. I didn't like the look of it."

  "Thanks. I'm glad you're—" I stopped, seeing a twitch from the guy I'd dropped. "He's alive."

  Two of them would never move again. The man that the Sabra had hit looked like a rag-doll ripped in half and used as a paintbrush: fresh black paint glistening in the night. But the other man, the one I had injured, was beginning to move. Pinchas picked up a gun.

  "For God's sake," I said.

  "He's a footsoldier." Pinchas took aim. "He won't know anything."

  "That doesn't—"

  There was a collapse, a rattling breath, and a final hiss like a slashed tyre. Death is a sound that you recognize the first time you hear it, and I wish it were less familiar.

  "There's nothing left to argue about," I said.

  "So I see." Pinchas lowered the gun. "I'm sorry."

  But the regret wasn't directed toward me. He was apologizing to a ghost, the one he needed to kill for, the memory he could soothe with blood, newly spilled. Because we all have ghosts, and anyone can recognize a kindred spirit, especially on a night like this.

  Happy Birthday to me.

  The driver was called Carl. While he used the Sabra's radio to request a cleaner's van, Pinchas got busy. Opening the car's boot, he drew out a startling piece of equipment: a Geiger counter. He switched it on, checked the dial, then crouched over the man he had killed, sweeping the sensor across the corpse, lingering over fingernails and hair.

  The speaker gave one tiny click; the needle scarcely flickered.

  "Shit," muttered Pinchas.

  He checked the other bodies, finding no radioactivity. Then he stowed the Geiger counter back in the Sabra. Meanwhile, Carl snapped a slender chain from a dead man's throat. From it hung a Swastika.

  "Surprise, huh?"

  Out on the water, the seaplane was moving toward us. Pinchas picked up his briefcase. As I watched, two vans pulled onto the dock.

  "That was quick," I told Carl.

  "We do our best."

  Berlin Central tends to treat Hamburg like a backwater. Maybe Carl was making a point.

  "And the plane?"

  Pinchas said: "That's for us."

  Five minutes later, Pinchas was puffing as he lowered himself over the edge of the dock. He was bulky, but I'd seen how fast he moved when it counted. I followed, dropping to a canvas-covered barge. We crossed to the bobbing Beechcraft, watched by the pilot.

  Briefcase in hand – whatever it contained, it wasn't share certificates – Pinchas clambered onto a duralumin float and hauled himself inside the plane. When I grabbed the metal strut it was freezing, an encouragement to get inside the cabin fast. The seat felt cold.

  A few minutes of manoeuvring followed, then we were accelerating along the waves. To either side, on the banks, streetlamps and apartment blocks streamed past. With luck the police launch had done its work, clearing a channel; we were going too fast to stop. Finally, the pilot hauled the joystick back into his stomach, the engine pitch shifted and we were up, the Old Town dropping away.

  "Let's chat over breakfast," Pinchas shouted above the noise. "Randolf's, eight a.m."

  A chat. Wonderful.

  Tiny white magnesium lights shone below, along the Elbe Strip. Border checkpoints. Soon New Jerusalem was behind us, and we were in foreign airspace, over Outer Germany, heading for the air corridor. We were over the Curtain, going into the East, where communist MIGs would hang back from shooting us down... unless someone had told them who was aboard.

  Moshe's missing.

  All right, but why had Pinchas scanned the dead men with a Geiger counter? Correction: dead Nazis. Remember the Swastika.

  And there was a second connection. Moshe had been working in Czechoslovakia – and was possibly still there, poor bastard, in a cold cell or beneath even colder soil. The Czechs are sitting on the largest uranium deposits in Europe, second only to Poland: all behind the Iron Curtain.

  Nazis and uranium.

  Nice combination.

  "You want to tell me what's going on, Pinchas?"

  "Tomorrow."

  Staring out at blackness, I saw in my mind's eye a mushroom cloud expanding in the heart of Berlin or London, perhaps L.A. or New York.

  "Oh, and..." – Pinchas raised his voice – "Happy Birthday, Wolf."

  Our plane banked to port and descended, accelerating as we entered the air corridor leading to Berlin. Farther and farther into the night and away from Fern, as if that made a difference.

  Was she already in bed, in Jean-Paul's bed, tonight?

  TWO:

  BERLIN, November 1962

  It was late when I reached the Branch 7-owned apartment on Spinoza Rachov. The high-ceilinged rooms were empty of occupants, and the end bedroom looked inviting. After hanging up my suit, I rolled into bed. In an instant, it seemed, pre-dawn was a brightening grey, calling me out to a cold yet wonderful world.

  I could have died last night.

  From the bathroom tap I drank some water – ordinary, yet amazing – and smiled at myself in the mirror. Someone has to.

  The linen closet contained garments in various sizes, including a freshly laundered tracksuit that fitted. The running shoes in my size were a little ripe, but at least the socks were new. Wearing them, I went outside into a wintry morning. Cold air pressed against my chest and thighs. Berlin's boulevards are strange and eerie in the hours before traffic.

  Fern's probably still in bed.

  Following a path alongside the flat, dark River Spree, I trudged past a rusted memorial: the site of a synagogue that had survived Kristalnacht but not the subsequent atrocities. The inscription was carved in Hebrew, German and English.

  Within ten minutes I was running through the snow-covered parkland of the Tiergarten (like the river, one of the few landmarks to retain its original name), then east along the empty boulevard, Gideon Rachov, that passes through the park to become Unter den Linden. My route stopped a hundred metres from the Brandenburg Gate: a baroque, majestic presence amid the waste of no man's land. It's grand and magnificent, a symbol of Teutonic empire gone by – and on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, several hundred metres into the East.

  The barrier which divides the city stretches to either side of the checkpoint. Call it kir or die Mauer; it's still The Wall. Two years after the Soviets slammed it into place one summer evening, the sight remains uncomfortable.

  But on this side stand tall aluminium masts, and the flags that always fly: the blue-on-white Star of David above New Jerusalem's capital city. A symbol of victory, or merely survival. Perhaps there's no difference.

  I turned and ran back into the chilly Tiergarten park. Snowy ground stretched to either side, with dark trees set well back. A mile distant, facing the Brandenburg Gate on the site of the ruined Grosse Stern, stood the angry black iron sculpture called Raging Wall, Moskowitz's most unsettling creation.

  But I turned off on a side path before reaching the sculpture, then headed into the trees, running harder as the cold began to bite.

  My roundabout route led, some twenty minutes later, to a small cobbled alley close to the apartment. I slowed down to marching pace, breathing deeply. Ahead, an angled li
ght illuminated a white sign. It read Willis Muskelzimmer – Willi's Muscle Room. A small arrow pointed down the steps that led to a basement.

  The gym's name was sardonic, like its owner. I went down into the familiar thick atmosphere of sweat and exertion. The only sounds were the clanking of weights and stentorian breathing. A bear-like bearded man – that was Willi – pressed a heavy bar above his head. When he lowered the bar to the floor, the movement revealed the number tattooed in blue above his thick wrist.

  "Hey," Willi called. "Wie geht's?"

  "Not bad," I said. "How about you?"

  There were two other men training. We exchanged brief nods as I carried a pair of thirty-kilo dumbbells to a rough wooden bench, then sat down with the 'bells on my thighs.

  "Warum nicht das Langhantel?" called Willi in his gruff Bavarian accent. Why not the long handle?

  "I like to keep the workout short."

  "Ha."

  Barbells and dumbbells are 'long handles' and 'short handles' respectively. It was an argument we'd had before. Willi grinned, then went behind the small desk, towelling off his face. I lay back, brought the dumbbells to my chest, and pushed, feeling the blood begin to gather in my muscles.

  This was a place of hard work and little conversation, sometimes a strained curse or a loud fart that normally went unremarked. As I hoisted and pushed, there was no need to look in Willi's direction to know what pictures were pinned on the wall behind him: photographs of American muscle-men – the massive Bill Pearl in his golden posing trunks; the young Dave Draper, fresh-faced. Icons to young men who want to grow strong.

  But lower down on the wall, where you have to lean over to see, stretches a row of photographs from Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen that show how close to stick-like skeletons it's possible for human bodies to be pared down to and yet – sometimes, by the grace of the God I don't believe in – survive.

  Randolfs was a corner eatery with immaculate black-and-white tiling on the floor, and small round tables that someone had polished until they glowed.

  "Shalom." Randolf greeted me as if I came here every day. "You're going well?"

  "Always."

  I ordered eggs, plus coffee which I drank while watching a brightly dressed couple outside as they failed to flag down a taxi. Probably Americans – tourists, not immigrants: not making aliyah – and the husband had waved instead of pointing at the ground. Finally a passing driver understood and braked to a halt.

  After they'd disappeared, I turned to today's newspaper. The front page news covered the proposed hike in income tax, comments made by some French politicians about the forthcoming government reshuffle in Paris, and a small paragraph about Basque separatists. Inside was an editorial diatribe, reflecting the usual EEC unhappiness about pouring funds into Outer Germany, and moaning about the dispirited lack of German rebuilding, so different from the way Japan has bounced back.

  But then, the Japanese don't have millions of their former victims living in an enclave – two enclaves, to be more precise – inside their borders. Imagine if their former oppressed Chinese subjects had been granted fifteen percent of the former Imperial Nippon's land? What kind of economic revival would Japan be enjoying if that were the case?

  Then there are the Hasidim who think the Germans haven't suffered enough; but that's another story.

  Finishing my eggs, I read an interview with a Jewish Palestinian novelist whose marriage into a Muslim family formed the background for his latest book. The piece was interesting and lighthearted. Algeria might be a nightmare for the French, but at least Palestine shows that a country can be both religious and peaceful, with several faiths integrated internally and at peace with their neighbours. Not many Jews remain, of course, and those that do speak a very Arabic form of Hebrew, so different from our Yiddish-peppered language here.

  I was two-thirds of the way through the newspaper when Pinchas came in, said hello to Randolf, and ordered the usual, whatever that was. He came over to join me. The place was deserted and Randolf was one of ours, so we were free to speak.

  "I don't suppose," murmured Pinchas, sitting down, "you've visited Moshe Boaz at home?"

  "No. I went a year without seeing him at all. You know what our place is like." You can make close friends with someone in dangerous circumstances, then never see them again. "I spent more time with him in Britain" – with the SAS – "than I ever did here."

  Pinchas nodded. "Did Moshe talk about his wife at all?"

  Shit.

  "I didn't know he was married." And, since this was obviously official: "There was a barmaid in Hereford at the Bunch Of Grapes. That's a pub. I think the girl's name was Lorraine. They looked good together."

  "I'll need to know the details later."

  "All right. Why—?"

  I broke off. Randolf brought a plate of bread rolls and cold cuts for Pinchas. Our food is more Russian – Ashkenazi – than the Palestine Jewish diet. There was time to think trivia, waiting for Randolf to retreat behind his counter.

  Finally I said: "Spell it out, Pinchas, why don't you?"

  "Boaz made it back to Central when his mission was over. While Ops kept him waiting for debrief, he slipped out – somehow – and went to ground. Since then there's been no contact. No sign of him."

  "You've got to be kidding."

  Somebody would be for the high jump. Moshe might be brilliant at slipping through security nets, but come on. You did not let a returned katsa, a field agent, leave Berlin Central without a session in the Grinder, the debriefing suite.

  Because you never know. You have no idea what might have happened to them on the other side. Haven't you heard of agents being turned? Perhaps you've heard the process is like seduction, and it can be. But sometimes it's like being raped, and the shame is enough to bring on suicide, and the people in Ops are supposed to bloody well know that.

  There was another thing. Pinchas must have known last night that I'd reckon Moshe was dead, but he'd let me go on thinking it until this moment. Bastard.

  "Where had he been, Pinchas? Was it Czechoslovakia?"

  "How did you know?"

  "When I bumped into Moshe two months back, it was in the language lab. He was practising his Czech. It wasn't a difficult guess."

  "Balls. We need to redesign the lab. Individual rooms."

  "It's enough like a prison already."

  But he had a point.

  I finished eating before Pinchas. Outside, three dark-skinned street sweepers in municipal orange garb were cleaning the gutters. Moroccan Jews, at a guess. Was this the kind of future the poor bastards had envisaged leaving their homeland? Or had they expected pale-skinned Jews to treat them as equals?

  Pinchas put down his fork.

  "It was a delicate penetration," he said. "Moshe's team were infiltrating a neo-Nazi cell with suspected links to Black Path." A shadow passed across his face and was gone. "The cell was operating in Czechoslovakia. The State Police and military were everywhere."

  "You think the opposition caught Moshe? And turned him?"

  Moshe and I underwent interrogation simulation, in Britain and here in New Jerusalem; but practice is never the real thing. Anyone can be broken, if not turned.

  "Not in the timeframe. Tell me... What's your assessment of his loyalty?" Pinchas's tone tightened. "Would he have an ingrained sense of duty?"

  "I wouldn't figure him for a traitor."

  No one had figured George Blake for a KGB operative either, but he had penetrated to the heart of Britain's SIS before a change of leadership prompted a witch hunt. The news had rattled Mossad, our sister organization. There were rumours that a kidon, an assassination specialist, would be sent to infiltrate Wormwood Scrubs, the prison where Blake was held, to make sure that he would spill no embarrassing secrets. The operation had been cancelled – so the whispers went – only because Blake's Moscow masters knew everything already.

  And in Branch 7 we have kidon specialists of our own (sooner them than me). Until this morning I wou
ld have ranked Moshe Boaz as one of the finest.

  "How long has he been gone?"

  "Since Tuesday last week."

  "Nine days?"

  Pinchas said: "I suggest you start by having a word with Mrs Boaz – first name, Shana – then we'll talk about the investigation at Central, and work out the rest." He reached inside his jacket, and pulled out a slip of paper bearing an address.

  "Investigation."

  "Yes. I understand you're not a witchfinder, Wolf, but I want someone with... sensitivity... to handle this."

  "I'll take that as a compliment. I guess."

  Even concerned about Moshe, I might have refused. But there was the Geiger counter that Pinchas had used without comment, and the dead men who had tried to kill us. Something was going on, and if there was going to be a mission, I wanted to be part of it.

  And I did want to know about Moshe.

  I took a dark-blue saloon, a Sabra Sussita, from the Berlin Central car pool. The drive was a long one, not because of the distance but the need to check for surveillance. It provided time to think, or maybe just avoid the coming task, wondering if Moshe really had been turned.

  Finally, I pulled into a quiet street, parked in front of a row of bleak shops, and shut off the engine. A clean phone booth stood on the corner. The Boaz's house was past the next side-street, on the right.

  It's quiet here.

  All the front gardens were small but neat. It was a good place to come back to after life on the edge. Or had the peaceful interludes palled for Moshe? Had risk-taking become so attractive that he abandoned loyalty for a greater thrill – playing both sides in the shadow game? Or was it for the money?