Jules smiled. ‘Show me the Frenchman who doesn’t drink wine and you show me an imposter.’
‘But they’re not all French,’ Anderson remarked, ‘The trainee manager for instance, he’s a limey.’
‘I beg your pardon, m’sieur?’
‘Foster, he’s an Englishman.’
‘Then, of course, he drinks warm beer.’
‘He seems a pleasant enough guy. Any idea what he did before he came here?’
‘No, m’sieur. I think he is that breed of Englishman who doesn’t do very much until it is almost too late.’
They eyed each other across the bar. Then Anderson said: ‘This doesn’t fool you one little bit, does it, Jules?’ ‘M’sieur?’
‘All this small talk.’
Jules gestured eloquently with his hands.
‘I’ll be honest with you,’ Anderson said, ‘I need your help. Always consult the barman, one of life’s unwritten rules.’
‘And in your profession the chambermaid?’
‘Right,’ grinning. ‘I know all about you and I reckon I can trust you.’ He consulted a black notebook. ‘Born 1932, went to school at Saint Christophe en Brionnais in Burgundy. Good wine there, huh, Jules?’
‘And poultry and meat,’ Jules said.
‘And you’ve worked here for three years. Do you want to hear any more?’
Jules shook his head.
‘I want you to keep your ears open. More indiscretions are committed in bars than beds, contrary to popular opinion.’
‘And—’
‘You will be suitably rewarded. How does five hundred dollars grab you?’
‘With pleasure, m’sieur!’
‘Half now, half when the conference is over.’ Anderson slid 250 dollars across the bar and left.
Jules Fromont stared at the money for a moment. Shrugged and slipped it into the inside pocket of his blue jacket.
He was just finishing his mineral water when the guest who had ordered the Special came in. He was a Frenchman, and he worked for the security section of SDECE.
‘I was just mixing your drink, m’sieur,’ Jules said, reaching for the shaker.
The Frenchman sat on the stool vacated by Anderson and said: ‘This bar, it’s beautiful. I meant to remark upon it last night.’
‘From a café in the gardens of the Palais Royal,’ Jules said, giving the shaker a final dramatic flourish.
XIV
The muscular young man was still in hot pursuit of the girl in the swimming pool.
Lying in the black marble bath, Claire Jerome gazed at him – and thought of Pete Anello, now waiting for her in London while she tied up some business deals prior to the meeting at the Château Saint-Pierre.
Her thoughts warmed her with the sort of pleasure that she would not have thought possible a year ago. Since the night in the Bahamas, when they quarrelled about armaments – the night when the envelope containing his birth-date had been delivered (still a mystery)—their relationship had developed wonderfully. He didn’t intrude into her business life but he was nearly always around. He even wore suits without looking as though he wanted to tear them off.
There were, of course, still those shark-fins of danger just below the surface. Their age difference for one. But dieting, exercise and her mental approach to life kept her young. Not to mention Anello himself.
The far greater peril was Anello’s principles which, since the Bahamas, he had kept sublimated. What, she wondered stepping out of the bath, would he have made of the extraordinary deal that had been negotiated the previous day?
Claire Jerome had never been troubled by a conscience in her business dealings. She always invoked the arguments of arms manufacturers throughout the ages: weapons maintained a balance of power. And: ‘If I don’t provide them someone else will.’
‘If Britain had been adequately armed in 1939, World War II might never have happened,’ she was fond of pointing out.
Nor did she have misgivings about the business practices involved in her calling. The purchase of arms was usually controlled by a few influential people; for security reasons the deals were often secret; it was therefore inevitable that commissions, inducements—‘Bribes if you like’—had to be offered.
‘Why not? If we don’t oil a few palms, then the French, Swedes or British, not to mention the Russians, will walk right in there.’
And: ‘Right, I agree, I’m also out-bidding American firms. So, what’s so goddam wrong about that? Competition’s healthy. I provide employment for thousands of men and women. Do you want me to let them starve?’
She had been involved in many such arguments since the Lockheed and Northrop scandals in the mid-seventies and the subsequent revelations that, in five years, fifty of America’s largest corporations had paid out a hundred million dollars.
The results of the scandals – and the size of America’s arms commitment to Iran – had been the Humphrey Bill of 1976-77, designed to control the outflow of arms.
Like other arms dealers, Claire Jerome negotiated the Bill smoothly. Congress could now halt sales of weapons worth more than 25 million dollars – except under extraordinary circumstances.
Extraordinary circumstances proliferated. And as the bill specified that nothing should ‘impair the U.S. competitive position in foreign arms sales’ business was much as usual.
Although one of the ‘extraordinary circumstances’ was abruptly terminated when the Shah of Iran was overthrown. Then the arms manufacturers had to find other outlets. Among them Saudi Arabia which, in 1976, had already bought 2 1/2 billion dollars worth of arms from the U.S.
Now, according to two men who visited Claire Jerome in her New York office on Madison Avenue, Arabs were hoping to buy wire-guided missiles and conventional weapons manufactured by Marks International.
There Claire’s conscience baulked.
She was Jewish and she had never sold arms to Arabs. Not even to Saudi Arabia, even though its attitude to Israel was less belligerent than its neighbours. Once the arms had been delivered, she argued, they could be handed over to Israel’s immediate enemies.
The two visitors were diplomats from the Israeli Embassy in Washington. One named Eyal was a first secretary in the Chancery division, the other named Bein was an assistant armed forces attaché.
Although Claire at first didn’t realise it, the two men were re-enacting a scene similar to that played nearly forty years ago when two American intelligence agents had visited her father, now a frail eighty-year-old.
Except that these two visitors had no desire to conduct their sort of business in her office: these days the only safe place to talk was the open-air.
Eyal was stocky and intense; Bein was taller with a face that looked as though it had been stamped indelibly by the sun over the Sinai desert.
‘Very well,’ she said when they told her they wanted to leave the office. ‘But where?’
‘Nowhere in particular,’ Eyal told her. ‘We’d just like to take a walk.’
With Claire in between the two men, they strolled in the spring sunshine down Park Avenue like tourists bewildered by the bustling lunch-time crowds.
Claire guessed that the two men represented Israeli intelligence, probably its third arm, Mossad, the external agency, more explicitly known as the Central Institute for Information and Espionage.
As they waited for the lights to change to WALK on one of the fifties, Bein said: ‘You have been a good friend to Israel, Mrs Jerome.’
‘Of course. Could it be any other way?’
Bein waited until they had crossed the street before he told her that she would soon be approached to see if she would be willing to supply arms to Arabs – the Saudis.
‘Whoever’s going to make the approach must be crazy,’ she snapped.
‘Not necessarily. Throughout history, arms dealers have sold their wares to friend and foe.’
‘This is different for God’s sake. I am Jewish.’
‘Someone will provide those ar
ms, Mrs Jerome,’ Eyal said.
‘But not me.’
Bein continued as though she hadn’t spoken. ‘The request will be for your new machine-guns that fire eight hundred .380 bullets in a minute, weigh only four pounds and have a revolutionary silencer. The perfect weapon for a terrorist.’
‘And your latest wire-guided missiles,’ Eyal added.
‘So? Why are you telling me all this? You surely don’t want me to supply them.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ Bein said softly, ‘we do.’
Claire Jerome stopped walking. ‘Is this some sort of a hoax?’ Passers-by glanced at them with mild interest; a row was always stimulating, especially when it involved a beautiful woman who looked as if she had walked out of the pages of Vogue.
Bein took her arm. ‘Let me explain,’ he said. ‘According to our information the man who will approach you is Mohamed Tilmissan.’
‘That bastard!’
Tilmissan was a Lebanese who, when the Arabs began to flex their muscles, had made a fortune negotiating deals with the West. With the millions he had made, he had become a multi-national salesman owning banks, real estate, hotels. For his personal convenience he had acquired a jet airliner, a yacht, homes in the business capitals of the world, and the companionship of the world’s reigning beauties.
He saw himself as the leader of the Arab crusade founded on oil. He had helped them re-discover their pride: now he had to help them destroy the enemy. Israel.
‘Yes,’ Eyal said, ‘that bastard.’ His voice had taken on a new bitterness.
Bein, who was clearly the senior of the two, told Claire: ‘Tilmissan will approach you very soon. He will tell you that the arms are destined for Saudi Arabia—’
‘And I—’
‘Please let me finish, Mrs Jerome. We believe he will also suggest a way by which you can achieve this without invoking the fury of every decent-thinking Jew in the world. In short, the overt destination of the arms will be Pakistan.’ Eyal took over the story as they turned into Paley Park, the tiny oasis on 53rd, where cascading water muted the roar of traffic. ‘Mr Tilmissan,’ he said in his still-bitter voice, ‘is an enterprising man. As soon as the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, he saw the possibilities of its neighbour, Pakistan. In fact, Pakistan has become the Eldorado of arms dealers. As I’m sure you are aware ….’
‘I don’t understand,’ Claire said flatly, sensing Eyal’s hostility – the familiar attitude to Merchants of Death.
Bein said quietly: ‘Of course you don’t, Mrs Jerome.’ He was the soldier, Claire thought, with his harsh, dark features – ironically just like the history-book picture of a Bedouin – and yet officially he was the diplomat ‘Of course you don’t. No-one expects that you should.’
They stood for a moment absorbing the peace that splashing water conveys. A businessman carrying an umbrella in one hand and a dripping hamburger in the other sauntered past; a girl with fashion-model looks smiled at them. What a beautiful day, her smile said.
Bein said: ‘The point my colleague is trying to make is that Tilmissan now uses Pakistan for his own purposes. Of course he supplies a few arms to the Pakistanis, but basically there’s no call there for a middleman.’
‘I still don’t see—’
‘You will. So we now have a situation where, to save your face, arms intended for Saudi Arabia are apparently being dispatched to Pakistan. You understand that?’
‘Of course.’
‘How would you transport your merchandise to Pakistan, Mrs Jerome?’
Claire shrugged. ‘By sea. There are several possible routes ….’
‘Only one in this case,’ Bein told her. ‘Tilmissan will ask you to freight them across the States and ship them from the East Coast, across the Atlantic, through the Mediterranean and down the Suez Canal.’
‘Except,’ Eyal interrupted, ‘that they won’t get farther than Port Said. Tilmissan has a set-up there. They will be off-loaded and transferred to another ship.’
‘And shipped to Saudi Arabia?’
For a moment neither of them answered. When Bein spoke his voice was taut. ‘No, Mrs Jerome, to the Palestinians.’
As she began to protest he took her arm again and led her out of the park, back into the bustle of Madison Avenue.
‘You see,’ Bein said as they began to walk back in the direction of her office, ‘Mr Tilmissan is a very devious gentleman indeed.’
‘But no match for you two gentlemen. Can you please explain why I should sell arms to Pakistan which I believe are going to Saudi Arabia but are, in fact, going to the Palestinians?’
‘Yes, Mrs Jerome, I believe I can,’ Bein said. ‘Tilmissan will ship the arms from the East Coast – we’re not sure where yet – on his own boat. We,’ dropping any pretence that they were conventional diplomats, ‘have three men on board that ship. Your arms, Mrs Jerome, will be doctored en route to Port Said. So in a way you will be emulating your father. Years ago he undertook valuable work for the Allies in World War Two. I don’t know if you are aware of the details, but what he did was to manufacture sub-standard weapons for the Germans. What we are asking you to do is not so very different.’
‘The men on board the ship are weapons experts,’ Eyal said. ‘They also hold Lebanese passports. And they are aware of certain deficiencies in the first batch of machine-guns off your assembly lines which were written off.’
‘You’re nothing if not thorough,’ said Claire, who had exhausted her reserves of surprise.
Eyal said: ‘We have to be. We are a small nation.’
Bein said: ‘On board the ship, the process by which the faults in those first guns was corrected will be reversed. It is a fairly simple procedure, I believe.’
‘What about the missiles?’
Eyal said: ‘That, too, is comparatively simple.’ He smiled thinly. ‘The guns will blow up in the Palestinian’s faces. The missiles may well back-track on them as well.’
They stopped outside Claire’s offices in a modest high-rise near the IBM Exhibit Center. ‘I think,’ said Claire, ‘that we should walk a little more.’
‘As you please,’ Bein said. They crossed 57th. ‘You must have a lot of questions.’
‘An understatement.’ They threaded their way through a party of thick-bearded orthodox Jews sightseeing. Rubbing shoulders, in all probability, with fanatical Arabs. Pick a conflict and you could find its participants in Manhattan. ‘One question in particular comes to mind. Why me? Why did Tilmissan pick on a Jewish arms dealer?’
‘Because we paved the way,’ Bein told her. ‘He has been persuaded that you are cast in the mould of the great Sir Basil Zaharoff, who at the turn of the century was quite happy to sell arms to friend and foe. As you know, Mrs Jerome, unlike that other celebrated middleman, Adnan Khashoggi, Tilmissan is a militant.’
‘Now he can afford to be,’ Eyal said.
‘And it will give him great pleasure,’ Bein continued, ‘to believe that he has persuaded a Jew to help the Arabs fight the Jews.’
Claire glanced at her watch. ‘We’d better be getting back. I’ll make a list of the other questions. There will be plenty of them, believe me.’
‘One other matter,’ Bein said as they re-crossed 57th. ‘We would also like to buy some of your products. The Knesset has authorised the purchase of a considerable quantity of arms. In particular your new submachine-gun and wire-guided missiles.’ A trace of humour in his voice.
‘If I go along with your other plans?’
‘No strings attached, Mrs Jerome. But I would remind you that, if you collaborate with us, you will be a heroine of the Israeli people. But, I’m afraid, an unsung one. If it became known that you were selling arms to the Arabs then my guess is that one dark night your factories would join the satellites circling the earth.’
They stopped outside her offices, three lunch-hour strollers parting company.
Claire had already decided to collaborate with the two Israelis. One thing bothered her. ‘Tell me,’
she said, ‘will one consignment of flawed arms really make so much difference to the final outcome of the struggle?’
It was Eyal who answered her. ‘Oh yes, Mrs Jerome. You see the Arabs don’t forgive or forget. And they won’t forgive Mohamed Tilmissan for double-crossing them. You will be ridding Israel of a powerful enemy. You, Mrs Jerome, will be writing his death certificate.’
After she had bathed and dressed Claire called Anello in London to tell him that she was again going to see the President. No reply. No reason why there should be – it was mid-afternoon in England.
At 10 am she flew from La Guardia to Washington. At 2.15 she was in the Oval Office facing the President, successor to the big, even-tempered man she had met before.
He was smaller than she had imagined but, beneath the bright lights, radiating.
He looked physically fit but his features seemed to have been aged by awesome decision-making. The toothy smile, however, remained. He was dressed in a plain dark blue suit and a maroon tie.
An aide with pepper-and-salt hair and wary features, sat unobtrusively to one side.
The President smiled that smile and said: ‘I’m afraid I can only spare you a few minutes, Mrs Jerome. I have rather a lot on my plate ….’
Claire said: ‘I understand perfectly, Mr President.’
Which she did. She used up a day; this slenderly-built man consumed it. How, she wondered, could anyone have the stamina to cope with domestic matters dominated by the fuel crisis, the Confrontation over Afghanistan, the shift in relations with China, the hostages in Iran – and the campaign for Democratic nomination.
He gestured with one hand at the aide. A pre-arranged signal. The aide left the room, smiling faintly at Claire.
‘You are, I believe, attending a conference in a few days’ time ….’ the President said.
‘I’ve been invited to Bilderberg, yes.’
‘Did my predecessor consult you about this?’
‘He did.’
‘I thought as much. Well, Mrs Jerome, I have a request to make and I imagine it is very similar to his. Unfortunately, Mr Danby cannot be here today ….’
I, Said the Spy Page 21