She fixed him, then decided. “So, Mr. Lizard, now that you’re all soft with wine, another question?” Eleanor stopped, gathered herself, then said quietly: “You’ve lost someone close, haven’t you?”
Misha stared at her then nodded, blindsided for once. “How did you know?” he asked, his voice hoarse.
“Your eyes, Misha. There. Your shoulders sometimes too—like a child who’s been bullied. Poor you.”
“Poor Neimanns, poor you, poor everybody,” Misha replied.
Eleanor cupped his face in her hands and gently, with far more tenderness than even she thought she had in her, kissed him.
Misha woke first. Eleanor slept on, tucked beneath their coats. Her carnality had quite bowled him over. He’d had an inspiration in return, the moment his eyes opened.
Far from certain what he’d find, Misha dressed quickly and set off down the half-mile-long riverside pathway through the linden and birch to the boathouse. The river was to his left, the sun filtering down through the overhanging branches, islets of white on the dark-shadowed pathway. He heard laughter and the familiar squeak-groan of dry oarlocks; he looked upriver. A couple, Russian by the sound of them, rowed across. The woman was taking a photograph of the man as he rowed. The man shipped his oars and gestured for the camera. Laughing, the woman flirted with the lens as they drifted downstream. Misha, curious, watched them as he walked, then glanced at the Red Army jeep parked amongst the trees on the far side.
He reached the end of the path and the boathouse itself. It was a miracle the structure still stood. He shouldered the clapboard wall: it creaked and gave slightly at his touch. He could just wriggle in, chest to the wall. He arched his back to spring wreckage away, edging his way crabwise between the wall and the heaped pile of splintered wood that remained of the roof and its beams.
A few yards along and he was face to face with it, the beautiful cameo frame of ivory. Pristine save for a hairline crack in the plate glass over the photograph was the image of the rowers at the Krumme Lanke pergola, hoop skirts and all.
The screws defeated him until he remembered the change in his pocket. An English ha’penny coin helped him prize loose his treasure; he placed it lovingly in his jacket. He wormed his way onto the skeleton of the indoor dock, out of breath, covered in dust, and streaked with sweat. Here he could stand and inspect the old racecourse; he looked upstream and saw the rowboat near the riverbank, bobbing empty on its line. He worked his way back onto dry land and headed back toward Eleanor.
Far enough from the boathouse to feel utterly exposed, Misha felt rather than heard the footfalls behind him, just for a heartbeat, the sound of boot on soft earth, then nothing. He held his breath and listened again, every mutter of the shadowy woods in his ears. The Russian woman stepped out from behind a tree squarely into the middle of the path, not five yards from him, and raised a Tokarev semiautomatic pistol in a smoothly practiced arc.
A thump of adrenaline dropped him instantly into a crouch and Misha felt the sizzle of the first round as it screamed through the airspace his face had occupied a moment before.
Then he heard the crack of the handgun, and the pathway through the trees and the wooded rise behind it became a kind of sticky haze of light and dark. Moving too slow, too slow, he dived into the bramble, uphill, driving off his stronger foot, landing facedown in the soft, dry soil.
Of course: two of them … and then something whined past his shoulder and a cascade of branch and leaf fragments rained over him. The bang-crack of the rifle never registered: Misha was on his belly, wriggling into a quintet of birch saplings in the hillside swale above the river path. A low run of evergreens, head-high, stretched ahead of him in the gloom, and he moved very slowly toward them. Once there, he took stock for a few quick breaths.
Shiloah had taught him about being the hunted: circle, buy time, stay low, and never stop moving. They would try to drive him uphill, where the cover broke, to silhouette him against the light at the top of the ridge.
Misha decided. He left the cover of the evergreens, cutting uphill, following the shade lines, as hard and as fast as he could, then dived across a small clearing, colliding in the forest gloom with a slender tree, ricocheting off that and running again, broken-field, like a rugger player, uphill in a semicircle, jinking and stutter-stepping, anything to prevent a clear shot.
Then he turned, diving, rolling, somersaulting back downhill, not caring how much noise he made, tearing down through a gap in the underbrush. He hit the flat ground where the forest met the path, sprang to his feet, and began to run, keeping to the shadows, not fearing the woman now, only the rifleman, whose weapon could find his back at a distance.
Then he heard, very clearly, off the water, a voice, Russian, hoarse, a man’s voice. Forget the river, he calculated, and glanced around.
A great linden, one of a row that guarded the waterfront, loomed on the uphill side of the path. He tore off his shoes and socks, tied the laces with fumbling fingers, and tossed them around his neck. Half shinnying, half clawing, he began to climb, climbing for his life, straddling the massive tree trunk, muscles shaking and trembling and gasping as he hauled himself into the heart of the canopy.
He clung to the linden fifteen yards above the forest floor, completely hidden now, his body closer to that tree than any woman had ever held him, his breath roaring out of him in rib-bending gouts of air. The sweat poured off him, down his face, onto his eyelids and lips, and down the wet hair on the back of his neck, like a racehorse in full lather.
He willed his heart to slow. His breathing followed. He listened, wedging himself deep into the cleft of the linden, his back curved concave, his shoes in his lap. He could feel the bark shards burning in the soles of his feet.
Through the leaves, he glimpsed the two Russians in their rowboat. The man rowed quickly, either furious or fearful, Misha couldn’t tell; the woman held the gunwales rigidly, as if she might fly away.
He leant back into the cover of the leaves and settled in to wait for whatever might happen next.
A dog’s barking echoed through the forest, waking Misha. He sat up, too fast, and cracked his head against the trunk. Shifting, he felt something slip and looked down: his shoes hit the forest floor with a thud. The barking moved closer and he heard shouting, dulled by the leaves, indistinct.
Then the dog was below, circling his shoes, raising a terrible racket.
A skinny MP stepped forward and looked skyward, his M1 carbine angled at Misha’s chest. “Hey, Jake,” he yelled. “I got him. Hände hoch, buddy.”
“I’m with the War Office,” Misha protested.
“I know. You gonna come down, Mr. Resnikoff? You got a lotta people worried about you.”
Back in the American zone, Misha spent the rest of the afternoon in a military-police station. He repeated, “Gunshots? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” some twenty times before the MPs released him with a stern lecture. He walked back to his office at the edge of the British zone, the top floor of what had been a brewery. This was home these days, desk, chair, Sixth Army cot and filing cabinet and telephone. He lifted the phone: dead again.
He’d missed a meeting that afternoon with the French about currency policy; Schorr had left him a querulous note. At least his pay was waiting for him. A courier arrived with a package from Eleanor’s State Department office across town, with his papers and a brief note from her, wondering where he was and telling him she’d been called away on urgent business. She gave a military-exchange telephone number and an address and that was all. He was seeing ghosts in the hallway by then, so he locked himself in the washroom, washed and shaved, gently pried several splinters from his feet, and then put the second of his two shirts on.
He picked most of the dust and debris off his jacket and headed out, armed with a bundle of Reichsmarks and five fresh five-pound notes; in today’s Berlin that much might buy him a new suit on the street. An obliging Canadian NCO driving a Bren carrier took him to the Burgerbraukel
ler, but there were no burghers left in this cellar, only Allied officers and German touts, with a sprinkling of working girls.
Halfway through his chicken stew, Misha heard a familiar voice. Standing at the foot of the cellar stairs was Kronthal, with a short fellow with a massive nose and a fleshy mouth surmounted by a thick mustache—Italian at some point, but a fellow American to judge from his hat and coat. They argued with the maître d’, a lost cause: there were no tables. Misha paid and made his way up the crowded stairs, spotting Kronthal and his short companion heading down the street toward the remains of a big department store whose basement, Misha heard tell, held several “clubs.” Little more than gimcrack tables and a piano and watered-down drinks, the clubs were a vital part of Berlin commerce, crossroads for every trader and pimp in town.
He followed them, not knowing quite what to expect but gauging that tailing Kronthal might yield something. The department store sign read ÖTCHNER, the initial H long gone. Kronthal and his companion continued past the main entrance into an alley marked off with red warning ribbon, which the gas men strung around town like Christmas garland. Misha counted to ten, then followed.
The Italian fellow led Kronthal to a boarded-over storefront and then stopped, bending to knock on an iron service door set in the pavement—three hard double raps. The door opened and Kronthal and his friend descended. A Berliner, an old man pushing a wheelbarrow full of women’s shoes, walked past and caught Misha staring at the closed door.
“It’s for the pansies,” the old man said, shrugging. “Transvestite club.”
Remembering a story Shiloah told him about a stakeout of his own, Misha waited for a few minutes for a kid of perhaps twelve or thirteen, carrying a sack of kindling, to cross the street. Misha hailed him, offered him five marks, and sent him into the club. He then waited in the shadows of a bombed-out butcher shop, its tile floor covered in fine dust an inch thick, its ceiling a jumble of broken wood and hanging cable. Somewhere water dripped.
The iron door slammed open and eight or nine men hurriedly followed the boy out of the club, including Kronthal and his companion. “Funny, that,” Misha said to himself. “Just announce ‘military police’ in a crowded club and up they come.” The kid accepted tips from the fleeing men as they fanned out.
Misha followed Kronthal and his companion for another ten minutes, until they entered an office building, just off one of the canals, from which an American flag hung limply in the spring air. He hired a car and paid the driver five marks to wait while he watched the building entrance. Another car pulled up, a big official American Dodge, quite new, and a familiar figure emerged and walked up the stairs.
It was Renni Schippers, looking spruce in a new suit, every inch the successful banker Misha remembered from his Haifa days. And, sure as night follows day, some minutes later down the stairs came Schippers, with Kronthal and his odd colleague, ready for an evening out.
So, Misha calculated, we have an OSS spy, an American fixer, and a suspect Dutch banker out for a companionable evening in Berlin. He tapped the driver on the shoulder and gestured after the departing Dodge.
By eight-thirty that night he’d followed the three to the best rooftop restaurant in Berlin. Misha waited below, chewing on a hard roll and a length of real Italian salami he’d bought at the all-night bakery on the corner. At half past ten, well after curfew, the three emerged and boarded the big Dodge. Misha dropped a postcard in a postbox, addressed to Schorr at the office, explaining tersely what he’d found.
After dropping off Kronthal and his odd friend at their hotel, Schippers went straight to the rail station and bought a first-class ticket for Amsterdam.
Every nerve told Misha to follow.
Armed with his War Office pass and military passport, Misha bought a second-class sleeping-car berth, to keep his distance. That night, just past four and just before the Berlin–Amsterdam express reached the Dutch frontier, Misha used the passport and another five-pound note to bribe the sleeping-car conductor for his passkey.
After five minutes with a penlight and the sleeping Schippers’s papers, Misha knew enough: there was a New York end to Schippers’s banking work for Thyssen in Berlin—and Schippers himself was the courier.
A carefully worded postcard to Shiloah’s mail drop in Marseille did the rest.
ACT SIX
Cunning men’s cloaks sometimes fall
Sicilian proverb
XLIX
TEL AVIV
JUNE 1946
Reuven Shiloah and Jewish Agency chairman David Ben-Gurion sat in the wily old leader’s garden, in a shell of intimacy in the darkest shade, on identical simple wooden chairs. The sun shone paper white in the sky, coming up on noon. As he spoke, Shiloah’s gap-toothed smile appeared in his round, flat, almost Asiatic face as often as his harsh frown. The pair of them watched a field mouse pick its way along the line of feed Ben-Gurion had spread on a sunburnt path between the trees.
“Yes, there is now a United Nations. And yes, the British mandate in Palestine will die on paper there. No matter. We will still have to fight. And always we must act as if we have no friends,” Reuven warned. “Because we don’t.”
Ben-Gurion glanced at the mouse nipping at the seeds he’d cast. He listened, rare for him, his street fighter’s face turned to Shiloah. His friend Reuven, his sense of anticipation as feline as his watchful eyes, was a legend for the way he could almost touch the future with his hooded thinking. That ability, above all others, was why Ben-Gurion admired the keeper of Zionism’s secrets. “You are suggesting, then …” Ben-Gurion offered.
“I am suggesting nothing. Yet.”
Ben-Gurion said nothing in reply.
Shiloah examined the old stone wall surrounding the garden, seeing something only he could see. “I propose that we exploit a paradox: that America is so very puritanical because it is so very corrupt.” He laid his hands flat on the table. “That is our weapon when the time comes for the vote at the United Nations. And all the more powerful a weapon because no one expects such a thing from us.”
“And just how expensive is our weapon?” Ben-Gurion asked.
That was a yes; Shiloah knew. “We have people who know quite a lot about the connections we need to exploit the swing votes for partition. Make no mistake, David, we are talking out-and-out blackmail here: one chance. We need to have our facts straight and we need to time this very carefully. I need,” he said, finally taking on Ben-Gurion’s blunt question, “time for some experts to examine the problem, Sol Lifton for one.”
Ben-Gurion nodded.
“Money is secondary for now,” Shiloah said. “I need to take one or two banking people off our operations in Europe … after that, not much, some travel. Not much.”
Ben-Gurion stood and stretched his tree-trunk legs: he and Shiloah had been sitting for almost half an hour. “What are our chances at the UN, Reuven?”
“If we hold the right feet in that fire, we may get the votes for partition. It’s a very short list of feet,” he said, allowing himself a smile. “But that is good—”
“Because we have no time.”
“Very, very little time,” Shiloah corrected. “We can work something. Have Kollek and Shertok at the meeting, if you can. And young Elam, our specialist at such things.”
“Kollek, yes, Shertok, no: he’s in London next week to meet with Weizmann. And of course Elam.” Ben-Gurion thrust his hands in his pockets. “You have a week to produce. Make the most of it. We live in a diminishing present.”
Shiloah stood.
“One last thing, Reuven,” Ben Gurion warned. “You cannot have a single American Jew caught committing espionage for us. Not one. Not ever. That will be the end of us: we will never raise another dollar in America if such a thing were to happen.”
Shiloah nodded and excused himself. As he left, Ben-Gurion sat in the shade, a blunt block of a man in a white shirt, his hands on his knees, the posture of a tough old farmer, alone with his thoughts.
A day later, five sat around a small table: Shiloah, Teddy Kollek, Lifton—the thin, taciturn fellow from the Institute’s banking section—and his assistant, a sharp-faced woman in khaki battle dress named Suri Handtmann. The fifth, Ben-Gurion, held a typed list Shiloah had passed him while they shared tea before the others arrived. He slid the list into the middle of the tabletop and looked at the faces around him. His glance was brutally frank. He spun the paper with his thick thumb, his forefinger the axis.
“We haven’t enough,” he said. “According to Reuven’s best estimate we’re at least fifteen yes votes short.”
“Delay until spring,” the easy, handsome Kollek offered. “Keep the partition vote off the order paper. Delay, delay, delay. The closer the vote to the day the British leave, the better for us. We’ll be that much better prepared to fight.”
No one said anything. “Sol Lifton here,” Shiloah said into the silence, “is our banking expert with the Institute in London. He has identified one or two openings we might explore. Sol?”
Lifton endured his high, thin voice and lank, dusty hair equably; he seemed all dry bone held together by nut-brown skin. He licked his lips and began to speak as if it pained him to form the words.
In August, Lifton and Handtmann had had a long meeting in London with a Jewish U.S. Army investigator attached to an Anglo-American anti-money-laundering team. Little did the investigator know that an occasional there as an observer, to whom he had taken a shine, happened to be a Miss Polner, one of Lifton’s contract players, a sweet thing with curly hair and big eyes, occupation Palestinian university student at the Imperial College.
“This American was not particularly handsome, even for a financial investigator,” Lifton continued, “about whose physical beauty I am myself no advertisement.” They all laughed, needing the relief. “I suggested she take her glasses off, for operational reasons.” No one expected that maneuver from the shy Lifton. “She knows men,” he continued, “an asset in this case. Human nature took its course. I don’t believe Miss Polner ever put her glasses back on until the American was on the plane back to Switzerland. I have,” he added, “a rather lengthy report from her about his activities for the American Treasury Department’s investigation called Safehaven.” He passed out copies of a seven-page typescript as Elam arrived, a slim, hard-eyed young man.
The Witness Tree Page 38