New Jerusalem

by John Meaney

  "What happened?" I asked her now.

  "He got free. He could have escaped, but he tried to get me out of here." There was pride and love and massive sorrow in her voice. "They killed him, Larry. Murdered him."

  From what Pinchas had said, Jürgen had been imprisoned on the floor below. He had turned a wire coathanger into a weapon, and used it to take out a guard's eye. Fighting his way through to this room, he'd reached his sister Hilde because he was that courageous, that resourceful. And he'd been working on the straps that bound her to the bed when armed reinforcements rushed in, took aim and pulled the triggers. Inside buildings, our forces use soft-nosed bullets, to prevent penetration of walls and accidentally killing passers-by when they miss the intended target... and it means that when they do hit what they're aiming for, the soft metal disintegrates on impact, ripping apart all soft, organic tissue surrounding it.

  No wonder Jürgen's head had sprayed apart.

  And no wonder Hilde Schenck was undergoing personality breakdown. Besides the commands embedded in her by Strang, here was psychic trauma enough to shatter anyone.

  ("She knows about the bomb," Pinchas had said, "if any of our prisoners do. We need to find out where the damned thing is.")

  "I'm English," I said. "Innocent. If they let me out of here, I could go to see Reinhard. Albrecht Reinhard."

  "Yes... He could... Get me out."

  "Where do I find him, Hilde? So I can help us?"

  That word – us – was horribly compelling, because of the mound...

  Can't see...

  ... that I wasn't aware of...

  Later, it will be all right.

  ... that I couldn't deal with yet.

  "Or the thing he's working on. Building something?"

  Larry Brown wasn't supposed to know about the bomb, but we were running out of time here. Hilde's bloodshot eyes were wide, flicking back and forth from side to side. She looked about to have a seizure.

  "Can't tell," she said, and moaned.

  "What is it?"

  "Just. Those... fucking Jews. You were the perfect sweet thing, the one perfect thing, and now they've got you too. Larry, oh my Larry."

  "Where's Albrecht, Hilde? Where's Reinhard?"

  But reality was wavering. Hilde was breaking apart and so was I because the mound beneath the bedsheet was not her knees drawn up. Not as I'd first thought, or wanted to think.

  That was not it at all.

  "Hilde, where's the bomb? Where are they...?"

  But I couldn't go on.

  Manny, you fucking bastard.

  Beneath the sheets—

  It was impossible.

  No.

  But Hilde said: "I don't want him born in this place."

  That was what broke the spell. Because Hilde was...

  NO.

  ... carrying my son.

  Please, no.

  Or daughter. It could be a daughter. She'd referred to him, but there was no way of telling before the birth. It was seven months since Hilde and I had, had—

  For God's sake, Hilde, you're pregnant!

  It made all the difference. It made everything...

  "Hilde."

  But something showed itself in my eyes. I don't know what, exactly. I'll never know what it was.

  "Larry. Not... you."

  "What do you mean?" But my response was too fast, betraying a sense of guilt.

  "You're working with the—No!"

  Oh, shit.

  If you've ever misplaced your house keys right under your nose, you'll know how to hallucinate something out of existence. When I'd been in the car with Dyenisovitch in Poland, I'd been effectively invisible, even though some part of his brain must have known I was there. The evidence of impending birth been hidden from my awareness by Manny's preparation; but that had fallen away.

  "Hilde, stop. You're going to be all right."

  But she was thrashing in the bed now, groaning and howling in a kind of grand mal seizure. With my hands cuffed behind me there was nothing I could do to help.

  "Relax, Hilde, my love. Just breathe, just—"

  "You're one of them!"

  The shock had slammed into her. Her eyes were wide, bloodshot spheres, unable to look at me without disbelief.

  "Larry, you're... No!"

  "Hilde."

  "The baby."

  "No, Hilde. The bastards captured me when I was looking for—"

  "It's got the blood. It's got Jew blood!"

  And then she howled.

  Her mind was lost.

  By the time the guards came inside and held me upright, gently removing my handcuffs, Hilde was catatonic. She lay still, staring at the ceiling with round unfocussed eyes, not responding to anything I or anyone else said.

  I could only stare at the convex mound of her belly.

  My son?

  Or perhaps a daughter was living in there. A child, two months short of being born.

  The guards helped me limp out of the cell – I'd wrenched my knee as well as my shoulder – and escorted me back to the makeshift briefing room, where Pinchas and Manny waited.

  My child.

  Hilde was having my child.

  "Sit down," said Manny.

  "My God. Did you know—?"

  "I'm sorry," said Pinchas. "Wolf, I'm so very sorry."

  Then Manny began to speak in long, calming, elliptical sentences that made little syntactical sense, allowing him to lull the logical mind while talking to my subconscious. I felt myself relax, accepting the disaster that had occurred. Eventually, I rose back up to ordinary awareness, as Manny counted backwards from ten.

  "Zero, and you're awake."

  My eyes snapped open. What I saw was Pinchas, sitting behind Manny, his face pale and worried-looking.

  "I'm sorry, Wolf."

  His wife and child had died in a Black Path bombing.

  "Me, too. But not for anything you did."

  Seducing Hilde Schenck had not seemed right at the time, but I'd gone ahead and done it. So whose fault was it, when the consequences were appalling?

  "All right," said Pinchas. "Thank you for that. But what should we—?"

  At that moment, someone hammered on the iron door to the room, and rushed in without waiting for an answer.

  "Sir—" The man stopped, his breathing fast and heavy. He looked from Manny to Pinchas to me. "The prisoner. She..."

  He swallowed.

  "What is it?" I was on my feet.

  "She had a weapon. Another coat-hanger. The first escaped prisoner, her brother, must have slipped it to her before we... stopped him."

  Before they blew off Jürgen's head, in front of his pregnant sister.

  "How many hurt?" Pinchas was also standing. "Has she got out of the building?"

  "No, I..."

  The man swallowed again, blinking.

  My God, he's crying.

  "She used it on herself." His voice came out in a whisper. "The coat-hanger, stabbing over and over, up inside her, right up, I mean her, her..."

  He could no longer speak.

  THIRTY-TWO:

  BRECON BEACONS, November 1963

  I had to go somewhere to grieve – Schröder ordered me to do so – and this Welsh wilderness was the most natural place. Rain swept like tears across heathland and mountain, where in past times I had pushed through marathon training exercises with the Regiment, exercises that forced me beyond all previous limits. In retrospect, those days held a kind of innocence.

  Hilde. Oh God, Hilde.

  Sometimes, in my mind, her face blurred into Fern's. Other times, everything was a swirl of black and red, a kaleidoscopic rage, unfocused.

  To Hilde, I was the ultimate betrayal.

  We could have worked something out.

  In the mornings, I trekked across cold wilderness. Sometimes it seemed I pushed onward for the sake of life; other days, I might have been looking for the end. One slip, and I would be lying broken across the bottom of a ravine. There could be no
assistance. No one knew I was here. During one trek, I passed through a deserted Welsh village. I entered a cold telephone booth, and got as far as picking up the handset, asking the international operator to dial Washington for me, and reciting Fern's number.

  Then I hung up, and walked into the countryside without looking back.

  On the ninth night, when the moon was up, I glimpsed black shadows slipping across the landscape. I wondered if Brummie Greenmore remained in the SAS, and whether he still trained men to move like ghosts. At dawn, I returned to my tiny rented cottage, set a fire going in the grate, and watched crackling orange flames until I drifted into sleep.

  It was my thirty-fourth birthday.

  I read a thin book by Korzybski entitled The Manhood of Humanity that argued for the place of rational thinking in everyday affairs. It had been written in the 1920s in the aftermath of the Great War, as people termed that catastrophe, not realizing that its horrifying sequel was already in gestation.

  My son. Daughter.

  Images of birth and death flitted through my daydreams. But in the evening, as dusk was falling, I put on my running shoes and ran for three quarters of an hour, along a narrow track that ran parallel with a ridge-line, above a narrow valley where a silver stream of mountain water flowed. The next day, I ran six slow miles.

  It was a beginning.

  Every fourth day, I went down to the nearest village to buy fruit and other supplies. On my seventeenth day of isolation, recovered enough to run for over three hours on end – something I wouldn't try to do more than once a week – I entered the little whitewashed house that served as shop and post office. Folded copies of yesterday's newspaper were stacked for disposal, and my gaze fell on the visible lower half of the front page: ten a.m. local time yesterday, that President Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. Governor John Connally was also hit and today remains seriously wounded. Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson has assumed—

  The world seemed to tilt. Had everything gone crazy while I was hidden away, licking my psychological wounds?

  —who shot the killer, now named as Lee Harvey Oswald, resident of—

  In June I had applauded the man with tears in my eyes, thinking that individual human beings really could make a difference in the path of history, that JFK and Einstein would bring about something good in the world. Now JFK lay dead, like my unborn child, the baby who would have—

  Stop.

  Baby who'd have grown up to be—

  No.

  Giving the child just the right kind of upbringing, I could have turned around Hilde's hate and—

  Just bloody stop it.

  A voice called from above the shop. Ivor Hughes, the owner, was coming downstairs. I blew out a breath and went out into the fresh air, and stared up at the mountains.

  I'm sorry.

  And I was sorry, because if I'd been paying more bloody attention, President Kennedy would still be alive. Ignatieff had given us the damned dossiers but not the whereabouts of the GRU-trained killers. He'd fed us Crossman, and also Banacek, after the event: the assassin wiped out by Moshe's bomb in Czechoslovakia. But the others... No. No help there.

  In this trade, you don't get neat answers, and I didn't suppose I would ever learn Ignatieff's exact intentions. He himself would be acting on hints and whispers, glimpses through smoke and shadows, unable to know any kind of final truth.

  Whether he'd known where they were located or not, he'd given me the names of two American-born assassins, not just Crossman but also Oswald, L.H.. That was part of the information I'd held back from Blackstone... just as the CIA had refused to hand Appleton over to us, when they took him into custody in New York.

  Damn. Oh, damn.

  There was no truly logical sequence in the events that preceded and followed the killing of Archduke Ferdinand, but in hindsight it always seemed to be the defining moment that brought about World War I, and perhaps the second war also. Was today another such day, prelude to another disastrous European war, whose momentum would look obvious to future generations? Would they wonder why we did so little to prevent it happening?

  I walked out to the grassy mountain slope, sat on a flat, triangular shard of rock, and stared into space. Despite all the techniques that Manny had taught us, and all the insights we had gained, we had learned nothing of the bomb's location, or what Black Path were really up to, although I remembered Zeev and myself going to see that woman, Lotti Handel, Moskowitz's agent...

  Where did that come from?

  This was a time for breathing, for relaxing the muscle groups one at a time, starting with the eyes, allowing myself to sink deeper and deeper into trance. As if Manny were here in person, part of me talked the rest of me through the process, because we can all talk to ourselves, and some of us are trained in leading others into altered states...

  Lotti Handel. Moskowitz's agent.

  (My eyes were closed, the rock was hard beneath my buttocks and hamstrings, the air was moving against my face. But I was months and a thousand miles away.)

  In the car, before we went in to see her, Zeev had discovered my feelings toward Fern, feelings I'd kept away from everyone's view, even in a place like Branch 7 where we all get Manny's training...

  Relax. Allow it.

  ... and still Zeeva had seen through me, because I'd mentioned Fern's name once too often, focusing on a detail that was inconsistent with the public image of myself. It's the little detail, the mention of something that doesn't belong, that provides the key to everything, like the snag that unravels a whole sweater.

  Why had the image of Lotti Handel had popped into my mind?

  And that's all right. Drifting is fine, as things drift in and out of our awareness, sometimes hazy, indistinct, at other times...

  Something.

  Got it.

  My breathing began to quicken.

  Is it that simple?

  Faster and faster I breathed, as I counted backwards in my mind to zero, and burst into consciousness like a diver coming to the surface, gasping for life-giving air.

  "Was that all?" I asked the empty mountainslope. "Really? Was that it?"

  I made my way back down to the village, and the little shop kept by Ivor Hughes. When I went in, he was standing behind the counter.

  "How much would it be," I asked, "for the use of your phone?"

  "I don't know, boyo. Are you planning on calling Australia?"

  "No, friends travelling in Europe." I dug in my pocket, and pulled out several pound notes. "Good enough?"

  "That'll do." Ivor reached beneath the counter, found the phone, and placed it on top. He took the money. "Carry on."

  "Um... Does another ten bob buy me privacy?" I added a brown note to the cash.

  "No need for that." Ivor picked up all the money, including the ten shillings. "Back in a mo'."

  He disappeared into the back of the shop, while I asked for the international operator, and gave her the number that had popped into my brain.

  "Hello?" It was Lotti Handel's voice. "May I help you?"

  I introduced myself.

  "Yes, Inspector, I remember you. I'm afraid Peter's away again, although he was home for a few weeks."

  She meant Moskowitz. Another missed opportunity.

  "There was one thing," I said. "A little detail, which I'm curious about."

  "What was that?"

  "You mentioned a psychoanalyst."

  To two strangers, albeit police officers. That had been the little detail in the conversation, the one that was out of place. Neither Zeev nor I had picked up on it at the time. Not consciously.

  "That's... right, Inspector."

  "You said, he'd seen an analyst a long time ago, and then more recently, another man."

  "Yes."

  There was tension in Lotti Handel's voice now, confirming what I knew: this was something that caused her concern.

  "Have you met this man, Frau Handel?"

  "Yes, I have. He's a thin man, my age, with impecca
ble clothes..."

  Prompting for a description was going to be unnecessary.

  "...and a silver-grey van Dyke, if you know what I mean."

  "Like a goatee," I said. "Of course."

  "But I'm afraid I can't remember his name. And there was something about his eyes."

  "I'm sure there was," I said. "Yet it doesn't matter, because you've been enormously helpful."

  "I have?"

  "Yes. Please take care of yourself. Some of my colleagues will be around to see you soon, if that's all right."

  "Well... Yes. Of course. May I ask—?"

  "Many apologies, but I have another call. Until later, Frau Handel."

  "Goodbye, Inspector."

  I pressed the hook down with my right hand, still holding the handset with my left, then dialled the international operator once more. This time the number was even easier to remember.

  I got straight through to Schröder.

  "Yes?"

  "Moskowitz's sculpture is the bomb, after all."

  "What? Wolf?"

  "He started seeing a psychoanalyst some time back. Moskowitz did."

  "Um... Artists are obsessives, didn't you know?"

  I recalled Schröder's own hobby of glassblowing.

  "Right. The analyst in question was Strang. Black Path's counterpart to Manny Silverberg."

  "Oh, fuck."

  I'd never heard Schröder lose his cool so fast.

  "Reinhard's a showman, and they're making a switch, somewhere, at some point. They're going to blow the bomb in UN Plaza."

  "It doesn't make sense."

  I clenched the handset.

  "Not entirely, but here's something. After Kennedy's funeral, think about it... The unveiling ceremony, for the sculpture, It's going to have an even bigger number of more important delegates than originally planned. Half the foreign leaders over there for the burial will stay on for the unveiling. And it's a Jewish sculpture that's going to go up... I'm sure I'm right."

  The unveiling was part of the proposals for a World Harmony Day, which sounded like a beautiful idea if anyone could ever pull it off.

  "I'll ring you again," I said, "from Bradbury Lines."

  "Do it."

  The line buzzed.

  "Ivor?" I called.

  "No need to yell."

  He'd been just around the corner, listening in.