by John Meaney
I spread my hands, palms up. "You were expecting maybe something different?"
"Go on, Wolf. Get out of here."
But outside in the corridor, my half-smile faded. Perhaps the world had changed – on that scorching day two decades earlier, in the emptiness of New Mexico beneath a clear sapphire sky, when Oppenheimer's team of genius physicists exploded the first bomb and, like the Greeks' Prometheus, brought white-hot fire to the world. Atomic fire. The power of the sun, and you could see how some people could imagine it cleansing as it burned, because the sun means life and that's a more captivating image than ashes and charcoal: a ruined, contaminated land.
Isn't it always about the land?
Some people say that calling our country Neu Jerusalem is blasphemy. It is no better than if we'd named it Ezreth Yisrael, or simply Israel. The Torah declares there should be no Jewish state before the Messiah comes.
But the Sanatorium, in its bleak situation on a ridgetop amid widespread grounds, ringed by dark forest, recasts the question in a surreal aspect. For they say at least one of the patients, a katsa whose mind broke before he escaped from a cell in Moscow's Lubyanka, believes he is the Messiah. That's the rumour. I pushed the memory aside as I stopped the Sussita at the main gate, winding down the window. In the big guard box, a square-faced man in uniform slid his window open.
"Your name, please?"
"Wolf, David." I held up my pass. "I'm on the list."
"Just a moment." The guard ran a blunt finger down a clipboard. "Thank you, sir."
There was a click, and the iron gates unlocked. Another guard came from behind the booth and swung one gate open. I slipped the car into gear and moved forward slowly, careful not to spray gravel. Then I rolled up the driveway, and parked in front of the Sanatorium's 18th century façade. Would Moshe be wrapped in a strait-jacket? Tethered in restraints?
I sat in the car, afraid to find out.
Come on. Do it.
The engine shuddered when I switched the ignition off.
Moshe's room turned out to be small and pleasant, with cream walls, grey-blue carpet rather than lino, and a small television with a twisted V-shaped antenna, the kind that people call rabbit ears. There was a wooden chair and Moshe was sitting on it, reading Dostoevsky, that cheerful bastard. Behind him the window was set high up, showing the sky. If you squinted you might pretend there were no bars.
"Hey, Moshe. What's the haps?"
Moshe's mouth moved slightly: precursor to a smile. We had known a CIA case officer who opened every conversation that way.
"You look wrecked," I added, "in case you wondered."
"Right." Moshe's eyes looked dull and yellowish. "You ever heard of twilight sleep?"
"No. What's that?"
"Thorazine and dopamine, I think. An injection. I'm... getting it later. Supposed to heal me up..."
"Well, good."
"...now the mindbenders have finished with me."
Oh, shit.
"I'm sorry."
"Have you ever talked to them, Wolf?"
"No."
"You're lucky. I..." Then Moshe had nothing to say. He lowered his head to stare at the book, seeing nothing.
It was awful, seeing him like this. But I needed information.
"What the bloody hell happened, Moshe? What was it?"
"There was a girl."
I closed my eyes. Opened them.
"What's her name?"
"Rachel. I've always liked the name."
Moshe liked anyone in a tight-fitting skirt, if she laughed a lot and looked bouncy. But who am I to judge him?
"This was in Prague?"
"Near enough." Moshe blinked: moist, like a frog. "It was a reprocessing plant in Přībram, and she was an engineer. Told me once that it was better than in the West: she could be a useful citizen. Not tied to the kitchen sink."
This Rachel was not like Shana, then. Not like Moshe's wife.
"Sounds nice," I said.
Except that in personality she probably was similar: I'd stake a bet on it.
"Yes... Who sent you, Wolf? Was it Schröder?"
"I came to see how you were."
"Listen, I didn't blot my copy-book, as you English guys say." Moshe rendered a boarding-school accent, a patrician drawl.
My normal reaction would have been to tell him to piss off. I'm half-English and grew up in the place. Nobody ever made me speak that posh, though the schoolmasters tried.
"You carried out the mission objective," I said.
"That's right. That's what I did."
There was something odd about his face and it took a moment for me to realize: tears were tracking down Moshe's cheeks. He seemed unaware of it. (And remember Pinchas on the dock, laughing and then crying after he had killed. Perhaps we're all insane. And what kind of woman, for that matter, could do Fern's work?)
Concentrate.
Moshe had cried before. In Hereford, the SAS had taken their infiltration training seriously, down to handling guard dogs on the prowl. They had deployed real dogs, taken away our guns and left the knives, and sent us inside the wire. Moshe wept that night in barracks, when only I was there to see it. (I like dogs, and had managed not to kill the one that came at me.)
That was also the night he said, in complete seriousness, that Nazis still existed (and were growing stronger) only because we survived (and were thriving). That wherever we went, we were destined to create our own nemesis. It was a dark facet of the grinning daredevil Moshe that was normally hidden.
Now he looked like a man who would never smile again.
"Rachel's mother was Jewish." He appeared to be telling his story to the floor. "But no one cared, because some anonymous admin clerk removed her origin from the official file."
"That's good."
Moshe looked up.
"The opposition false-flagged Rachel. Set her up for recruitment and did it beautifully. She was altering plant records, slipping out uranium, and she thought she was doing it for Mossad. For New Jerusalem."
Was doing it. Past tense.
"What was your mission, Moshe? No one's briefed me."
"Huh... Watching a Nazi scientist called Weber, known as Müller to his current friends. Worked on Hitler's A-bomb programme in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. That was after studying the effect of shrapnel dispersion on living bodies, in Auschwitz."
"Is that why they sent you?"
Because Moshe was a kidon and his specialty was death, and those who escaped Nürnberg were his favourite prey.
"The watch-team bugged Weber's hotel room. He was with a cell led by someone called Banacek, and they were using a small truck to drive to the plant at night. Rachel would come out with her vacuum flask of tea, except that inside..."
"A pellet of uranium, right." I softened my voice. "What happened, Moshe?"
Here was a connection to radioactive materials and A-bomb construction, but none of it explained Moshe's condition.
"I rigged a bang under the chassis," he said. "TNT/Cyclonite mix with a lead azide primary. Radio detonation."
Only the facts. My facial skin felt tight. He had set a bomb in place. But what else?
"It turned out she was in the van, is that it?"
Moshe said nothing.
"Was Rachel in the van?"
Five more seconds silence, then: "Would you go now, Wolf? I mean piss off."
I walked down a staircase of ancient blackened wood. It was smoothed to a polish that matched the dark-green linoleum and the institutional green walls. Glass-paned doors led out to gravel.
The empty Sussita awaited me but I ignored it, walking past with my footsteps crunching. The countryside air was cold, filled with vapours of the forest beyond the dark meadow. The scent tumbled me backwards through the years.
The school grounds, beyond the cricket pavilion. A day that was nominally spring but felt as chill as winter. Or perhaps that was only the way I reconstructed things later. For sure, it began with my watching the deer, a m
other and two fawns, beyond the school boundary. This was a time of rationing, three years into the war, and what happened next should have come as no surprise. But at age thirteen, the cruelties I knew involved fellow pupils or the whimsical absolutism of school discipline, nothing more.
The fawn's head exploded in a gout of dark blood and it dropped as the mother and sibling bolted into the Kent shrubland. The school caretaker, Jim Fellowes, cracked open his shotgun and removed the spent shell.
"Hey, look. It's Puppy, blubbing."
Three fourth-formers were approaching. (My mother would have called them tenth graders.) The ones I least wanted to bump into. "It's the wind. Got dirt in—"
"Dirt in your eye, you weaselly little kike?" Hanley, hands in the pockets of his flannels, spoke with a drawl. "You're quite the sniveller, aren't you?"
Beside him, the larger Hanratty scowled. Given a chance to direct attention away from his own non-English blood, he would take it. He looked at the third boy, Lewis, who was hard-faced and thin with bone-coloured skin.
Lewis said: "Does the Jew-boy need something to cry about?"
I could only shook my head, not knowing what to say.
"Go on Hanners." Lewis turned to Hanratty. "You take first blood."
Behind me and beyond the school bounds, Jim Fellowes was bent over the dead fawn, unaware or uncaring of what was about to happen to me. I might have cried out for help, but that was when a fist or a shoe exploded in my stomach – impossible to say which – and I was on my side curled up as Lewis spat on my face. Some of it got into my mouth, warm and slimy. I rolled onto my front, frantically wiping my tongue with the back of my hand, tasting sour grass. Then pain speared my ribs with a crunch, as the world flared orange.
"Get his—"
"Christ, no. Here's Donaldson."
Their shoes moved back among the grass blades. Then a strong hand took hold of my shoulder and hauled me to my feet. The world swung back into place. My rescuer was Donaldson: tall and lean, the head boy.
Hanley was swallowing hard while Lewis looked away. Hanratty was too surprised to do anything save stand with his mouth open. Donaldson was academically gifted and the school's premier boxer, but there was more. In precisely two months he would be leaving school to fly Spitfires like my father. Everyone was in awe.
"Come with me, Wolf. Straighten yourself up." Donaldson looked at the fourth-years and said: "You three piss off. We'll have words later."
Despite my pain, I gaped at Donaldson's raw language. Then I was struggling to breathe as he helped me walk across the playing fields, toward the side entrance that led almost directly to the Headmaster's office.
"Where are we going?" One of my buttons was off, lost in the grass.
"Never mind that." Donaldson's tone dropped into awkward gentleness. "The Head won't care how you look."
Perhaps that was when I realized the news, although it would be another fifteen minutes before the Headmaster, Dr Grayston-Smith, unfolded the telegram and settled his reading glasses on his nose before changing my world in one clean stroke, shearing away the first half of my life from the second.
"Listen, afterwards..." Donaldson paused. "Meet me in my room, and I'll take you down the gym. I've an old pair of gloves that'll fit you."
"Gloves?"
"Boxing-gloves. Big brown things, Wolf. So you don't hurt your— Never mind."
I stopped at the edge of the playing-field, swallowing as hard as Hanratty had earlier. "You have to fight back, Wolf."
Lowering my head, I muttered: "There were three of them."
"Everyone makes tough choices, Wolf. Your father—" But Donaldson shook his head. "Sometimes running away is worse than being beaten. That kind of pain" – he pointed at my burst lip – "heals up."
Later I would wonder about the choices available to my father in those final minutes, to fight on or bale out as his fuel-tank emptied. The images would be mixed up with the smell of sweat and leather gloves, the joy and fear of learning to fight, of learning how to move and strike, to keep going regardless of what they do to you.
I stopped at the edge of the parkland, sucked in a deep cold breath, returning to the moment. Trust your unconscious, always. Turning back toward the Sanatorium, I hoped I was wrong this time, but it seemed unlikely.
Moshe's head jerked up as they let me into his room once more. He blinked three times. The book was still on his lap, unopened.
"Fuck," he said.
"Oh, my friend... Tell me about Rachel."
Moshe shook his head.
"Then I'll tell you." I lowered my tone. "She got into the van, didn't she? The van that you'd rigged."
With high explosives. TNT/Cyclonite mix with a lead azide primary, he had said before. Now he swallowed.
"She... I thought they were going to meet her afterwards, after she left the plant. Not on the way there. I never..."
The part-way confession had set up a trembling in Moshe's body. The book slipped from his grasp and slid from his lap. It landed with a light thud. Crime and bloody Punishment. Tough choices in the midst of pain.
"You had the opposition in your line of sight, didn't you? And you saw her face. Rachel's face."
He'd told me it was a radio trigger. That meant he would have waited in concealment, in the back of a truck or beneath a blanket in an overlooking room, with binoculars or sniper-scope and his finger on the button, ready to detonate.
"You knew, but you pressed the trigger anyway."
We'd talked about achieving the mission objective, and he had achieved it: that was the problem. Because the mission objective meant obliterating the woman he had loved – loved briefly and shallowly, or deeply, life-changing, a woman he might have left his pregnant wife for. Who could tell? He certainly never could. From now on all he had were the images in his mind, playing through infinite iterations.
Moshe, you poor bastard.
He began to slip from the chair.
I caught him before he could hit the floor; then I yelled for help. Within seconds, two big men were inside the room, taking Moshe's weight from me and swinging him on to the bed. A third man stepped inside, preparing a syringe.
Shit. Oh, shit.
They pressed the needle in.
FOUR:
BERLIN, November 1962
This time Pinchas was with Schröder in the office. Blinds were pulled down over the windows, and a large shiny laminated map was fastened to the wall. The cartographer had rendered New Jerusalem in garish pink. A mapmaker with a sense of irony. The Elbe Strip started at the top left corner of the former Germany, angling diagonally down with a bulge to the South, enclosing Hanover; also pink was NJ-Berlin, the little island we were in now, surrounded by a sea of Soviet purple.
I hated geography in school.
Most of the West was coloured spinach-green: the Federal Republic of Outer Germany. We occupy fifteen percent of the pre-war (and pre-Anschluss) German territory. Some people think it should be more. They're the ones who are never satisfied. It's an eye for an eye, and that's where you're supposed to stop.
Six million pairs of eyes.
There were no mission markers on the map, and in any case this was Schröder's office, not a briefing room. I felt my expression tighten as I sat down. There was a near-subliminal hint of beeswax polish on the air, a scent that kept trying to fling my memory back into the Sanatorium, to the room where they had Moshe, now sedated in chemical coma.
"You're looking a little strained," said Pinchas.
"Yeah? What makes you an expert on how I feel?"
"All right." Schröder leaned forward on his desk, upper arms bulging inside his shirt sleeves. "Take it easy, Wolf."
"I'm just back from seeing Moshe Boaz, you know that. For God's sake, Schröder. Do you have any idea what they're doing to him?"
"Not in clinical detail."
"You know what condition his wife is in." I turned to Pinchas. "There's a kid on the way who's going to need a father."
"That'
s right," Pinchas said. "We're bearing it in mind."
"What does that mean?"
"We know" – Pinchas adjusted his suit and crossed his legs – "that Boaz achieved the mission objective. We're aware of that."
"That was quick," I said. Call it a point in his favour. He'd already listened to the surveillance tapes from the Sanatorium, for he was quoting my own words back at me. "So are you overseeing the witchfinders?"
"I'm interested in what they find." It was an oblique answer.
"Moshe didn't give us away in Hamburg. That was something else. Maybe the local opposition just spotted the seaplane and wondered what it was doing."
My argument sounded feeble, but the real point was that they knew the background and I didn't. Wherever the leak had come from, they'd have a better idea of its likely source.
"All right." Schröder rose from behind his desk. He never could sit still. "Come back in two hours, Wolf. We'll talk again, all three of us."
"So is this a mission? And what about the missing Czech uranium? Who's got it?"
Something shifted deep inside Pinchas's eyes, like a hunting octopus on the ocean floor.
"Why don't you come back later," said Schröder. "Go down to the language lab or something."
Did that mean they were waiting for more information before they could set up a mission? Or were they trying to find the right person for the job?
"If there's an operation, then I want it."
Neo-Nazis stealing uranium from behind the Iron Curtain? If ever there was a setup we had to shut down, this was it.
"No shit," muttered Pinchas.
"OK." I got up. "The language lab. Any hints as to what I should work on?"
Schröder looked at Pinchas, then at me.
"You might want to brush up your Polish."
When I was at that damned school, this was what you needed to learn a foreign tongue: a dusty old text stained with the years; a scruffy, worn exercise book; and a scratchy fountain pen . Add one crusty grey-haired schoolmaster with chalk-powder on his black gown; then flavour with an absolute certainty that a bamboo cane whipped across your palm hurts like bloody hell.
I entered the language lab, scanning the booths, the padded earphones with chin mikes. At study, we must look like pilots readying for take-off. The desks have clean, pale-grey Formica tops (not ancient wood engraved with schoolboy hieroglyphs) that lift to reveal tape recorders. In my hand, retrieved from the anteroom, I carried a tape-reel marked P1 from shelf DW017, suitable for my first-level knowledge of Polski: enough to buy a train ticket or a cup of coffee, but under prolonged interrogation my accent will show or my syntax will slip, and the punishment will be more severe than detention or a thousand lines.