Triple

by Ken Follett

  The first person Dickstein saw boarding the ship was an official from the shipping company. He had to give the pilots their pourboire and secure from the captain a crew list for the harbor police.

  The second person aboard was Josef Cohen. He was here for the sake of customer relations: he would give the captain a bottle of whiskey and sit down for a drink with him and the shipping company official. He also had a wad of tickets for free entry and one drink at the best nightclub in town, which he would give to the captain for the officers. And he would discover the name of the ship's engineer. Dickstein had suggested he do this by asking to see the crew list, then counting out one ticket for each officer on the list.

  Whatever way he had decided to do it, he had been successful: as he left the ship and crossed the quay to return to his office he passed Dickstein and muttered, "The engineer's name is Sarne," without breaking stride.

  It was not until afternoon that the crane went into action and the dockers began loading the drums into the three holds of the Coparelli. The drums had to be moved one at a time, and inside the ship each drum had to be secured with wedges of wood. As expected, the loading was not completed that day.

  In the evening Dickstein went to the best nightclub in town. Sitting at the bar, close to the telephone, was a quite astonishing woman of about thirty, with black hair and a long, aristocratic face possessed of a faintly haughty expression. She wore an elegant black dress which made the most of her sensational legs and her high, round breasts. Dickstein gave her an almost imperceptible nod but did not speak to her.

  He sat in a corner, nursing a glass of beer, hoping the sailors would come. Surely they would. Did sailors ever refuse a free drink?

  Yes.

  The club began to fill up. The woman in the black dress was propositioned a couple of times but refused both men, thereby establishing that she was not a hooker. At nine o'clock Dickstein went out to the lobby and phoned Cohen. By previous arrangement, Cohen had called the captain of the Coparelli on a pretext. He now told Dickstein what he had discovered: that all but two of the officers were using their free tickets. The exceptions were the captain himself, who was busy with paperwork, and the radio operator--a new man they had taken on in Cardiff after Lars broke his leg--who had a head cold.

  Dickstein then dialed the number of the club he was in. He asked to speak to Mr. Sarne, who, he understood, would be found in the bar. While he waited he could hear a barman calling out Sarne's name: it came to him two ways, one directly from the bar, the other through several miles of telephone cable. Eventually he heard, over the phone, a voice say, "Yes? Hello? This is Sarne. Is anybody there? Hello?"

  Dickstein hung up and walked quickly back into the bar. He looked over to where the bar phone was. The woman in the black dress was speaking to a tall, suntanned blond man in his thirties whom Dickstein had seen on the quay earlier that day. So this was Sarne.

  The woman smiled at Sarne. It was a nice smile, a smile to make any man look twice: it was warm and red-lipped, showing even, white teeth, and it was accompanied by a certain languid half-closing of the eyes, which was very sexy and looked not at all as though it had been rehearsed a thousand times in front of a mirror.

  Dickstein watched, spellbound. He had very little idea how this sort of thing worked, how men picked up women and women picked up men, and he understood even less how a woman could pick up a man while letting the man believe he was doing the picking up.

  Sarne had his own charm, it seemed. He gave her his smile, a grin with something wickedly boyish in it that made him look ten years younger. He said something to her, and she smiled again. He hesitated, like a man who wants to talk some more but cannot think of anything to say; then, to Dickstein's horror, he turned away to go.

  The woman was equal to this: Dickstein need not have worried. She touched the sleeve of Sarne's blazer, and he turned back to her. A cigarette had suddenly appeared in her hand. Sarne slapped his pockets for matches. Apparently he did not smoke. Dickstein groaned inwardly. The woman took a lighter from the evening bag on the bar in front of her and handed it to him. He lit her cigarette.

  Dickstein could not go away, or watch from a distance; he would have a nervous breakdown. He had to listen. He pushed his way through the bar and stood behind Sarne, who was facing the woman. Dickstein ordered another beer.

  The woman's voice was warm and inviting, Dickstein knew already, but now she was really using it. Some women had bedroom eyes, she had a bedroom voice.

  Sarne was saying, "This kind of thing is always happening to me."

  "The phone call?" the woman said.

  Sarne nodded. "Woman trouble. I hate women. All my life, women have caused me pain and suffering. I wish I were a homosexual."

  Dickstein was astonished. What was he saying? Did he mean it? Was he trying to give her the brush-off?

  She said, "Why don't you become one?"

  "I don't fancy men."

  "Be a monk."

  "Well, you see, I have this other problem, this insatiable sexual appetite. I have to get laid, all the time, often several times a night. It's a great problem to me. Would you like a fresh drink?"

  Ah. It was a line of chat. How did he think it up? Dickstein supposed that sailors did this sort of thing all the time, they had it down to a fine art.

  It went on that way. Dickstein had to admire the way the woman led Sarne by the nose while letting him think he was making the running. She told him she was stopping over in Antwerp just for the night, and let him know she had a room in a good hotel. Before long he said they should have champagne, but the champagne sold in the club was very poor stuff, not like they might be able to get somewhere else; at a hotel, say; her hotel, for example.

  They left when the floor show started. Dickstein was pleased: so far, so good. He watched a line of girls kicking their legs for ten minutes, then he went out.

  He took a cab to the hotel and went up to the room. He stood close to the communicating door which led through to the next room. He heard the woman giggle and Sarne say something in a low voice.

  Dickstein sat on the bed and checked the cylinder of gas. He turned the tap on and off quickly, and got a sharp whiff of sweetness from the face mask. It had no effect on him. He wondered how much you had to breathe before it worked. He had not had time to try out the stuff properly.

  The noises from the next room became louder, and Dickstein began to feel embarrassed. He wondered how conscientious Sarne was. Would he want to go back to his ship as soon as he had finished with the woman? That would be awkward. It would mean a fight in the hotel corridor--unprofessional, risky.

  Dickstein waited--tense, embarrassed, anxious. The woman was good at her trade. She knew Dickstein wanted Sarne to sleep afterward, and she was trying to tire him. It seemed to take forever.

  It was past two A.M. when she knocked on the communicating door. The code was three slow knocks to say he was asleep, six fast knocks to say he was leaving.

  She knocked three times, slowly.

  Dickstein opened the door. Carrying the gas cylinder in one hand and the face mask in the other, he walked softly into the next room.

  Sarne lay flat on his back, naked, his blond hair mussed, his mouth wide open, his eyes closed. His body looked fit and strong. Dickstein went close and listened to his breathing. He breathed in, then all the way out--then, just as he began to inhale again, Dickstein turned on the tap and clapped the mask over the sleeping man's nose and mouth.

  Sarne's eyes opened wide. Dickstein held the mask on more firmly. Half a breath: incomprehension in Sarne's eyes. The breath turned into a gasp, and Sarne moved his head, failed to weaken Dickstein's grip, and began to thrash about. Dickstein leaned on the sailor's chest with an elbow, thinking: For God's sake, this is too slow!

  Sarne breathed out. The confusion in his eyes had turned to fear and panic. He gasped again, about to increase his struggles. Dickstein thought of calling the woman to help hold him down. But the second inhalation defeat
ed its purpose; the struggles were perceptibly weaker; the eyelids fluttered and closed; and by the time he exhaled the second breath, he was asleep.

  It had taken about three seconds. Dickstein relaxed. Sarne would probably never remember it. He gave him a little more of the gas to make sure, then he stood up.

  He looked at the woman. She was wearing shoes, stockings, and garters; nothing else. She looked ravishing. She caught his gaze, and opened her arms, offering herself: at your service, sir. Dickstein shook his head with a regretful smile that was only partly disingenuous.

  He sat in the chair beside the bed and watched her dress: skimpy panties, soft brassiere, jewelry, dress, coat, bag. She came to him, and he gave her eight thousand Dutch guilders. She kissed his cheek, then she kissed the banknotes. She went out without speaking.

  Dickstein went to the window. A few minutes later he saw the headlights of her sports car as it went past the front of the hotel, heading back to Amsterdam.

  He sat down to wait, again. After a while he began to feel sleepy. He went into the next room and ordered coffee from room service.

  In the morning Cohen phoned to say the first officer of the Coparelli was searching the bars, brothels and flophouses of Antwerp for his engineer.

  At twelve-thirty Cohen phoned again. The captain had called him to say that all the cargo was now loaded and he was without an engineer officer. Cohen had said, "Captain, it's your lucky day."

  At two-thirty Cohen called to say he had seen Dieter Koch aboard the Coparelli with his kitbag over his shoulder.

  Dickstein gave Sarne a little more gas each time he showed signs of waking. He administered the last dose at six A.M. the following day, then he paid the bill for the two rooms and left.

  When Sarne finally woke up he found that the woman he had slept with had gone without saying goodbye. He also found he was massively, ravenously hungry.

  During the course of the morning he discovered that he had been asleep not for one night, as he had imagined, but for two nights and the day in between.

  He had an insistent feeling in the back of his mind that there was something remarkable he had forgotten, but he never found out what had happened to him during that lost twenty-four hours.

  Meanwhile, on Sunday, November 17, 1968, the Coparelli had sailed.

  Chapter Fourteen

  What Suza should have done was phone any Israeli embassy and given them a message for Nat Dickstein.

  This thought occurred to her an hour after she had told her father that she would help Hassan. She was packing a case at the time, and she immediately picked up the phone in her bedroom to call Inquiries for the number. But her father came in and asked her whom she was calling. She said the airport, and he said he would take care of that.

  Thereafter she constantly looked for an opportunity to make a clandestine call, but there was none. Hassan was with her every minute. They drove to the airport, caught the plane, changed at Kennedy for a flight to Buffalo, and went straight to Cortone's house.

  During the journey she came to loathe Yasif Hassan. He made endless vague boasts about his work for the Fedayeen; he smiled oilily and put his hand on her knee; he hinted that he and Eila had been more than friends, and that he would like to be more than friends with Suza. She told him that Palestine would not be free until its women were free; and that Arab men had to learn the difference between being manly and being porcine. That shut him up.

  They had some trouble discovering Cortone's address--Suza half hoped they would fail--but in the end they found a taxi driver who knew the house. Suza was dropped off; Hassan would wait for her half a mile down the road.

  The house was large, surrounded by a high wall, with guards at the gate. Suza said she wanted to see Cortone, that she was a friend of Nat Dickstein.

  She had given a lot of thought to what she should say to Cortone: should she tell him all or only part of the truth? Suppose he knew, or could find out, where Dickstein was: why should he tell her? She would say Dickstein was in danger, she had to find him and warn him. What reason did Cortone have to believe her? She would charm him--she knew how to do that with men his age--but he would still be suspicious.

  She wanted to explain to Cortone the complete picture: that she was looking for Nat to warn him, but she was also being used by his enemies to lead them to him, that Hassan was half a mile down the road in a taxi waiting for her. But then he would certainly never tell her anything.

  She found it very difficult to think clearly about all this. There were so many deceits and double deceits involved. And she wanted so badly to see Nathaniel's face and speak to him herself.

  She still had not decided what to say when the guard opened the gate for her, then led her up the gravel drive to the house. It was a beautiful place, but rather overripe, as if a decorator had furnished it lavishly then the owners had added a lot of expensive junk of their own choosing. There seemed to be a lot of servants. One of them led Suza upstairs, telling her that Mr. Cortone was having late breakfast in his bedroom.

  When she walked in Cortone was sitting at a small table, digging into eggs over and homefries. He was a fat man, completely bald. Suza had no memory of him from the time he had visited Oxford, but he must have looked very different then.

  He glanced at her, then stood upright with a look of terror on his face and shouted: "You should be old!" and then his breakfast went down the wrong way and he began to cough and sputter.

  The servant grabbed Suza from behind, pinning her arms in a painful grip; then let her go and went to pound Cortone on the back. "What did you do?" he yelled at her. "What did you do, for Christ's sake?"

  In a peculiar way this farce helped calm her a little. She could not be terrified of a man who had been so terrified of her. She rode the wave of confidence, sat down at his table and poured herself coffee. When Cortone stopped coughing she said, "She was my mother."

  "My God," Cortone said. He gave a last cough, then waved the servant away and sat down again. "You're so like her, hell, you scared me half to death." He screwed up his eyes, remembering. "Would you have been about four or five years old, back in, um, 1947?"

  "That's right."

  "Hell, I remember you, you had a ribbon in your hair. And now you and Nat are an item."

  She said, "So he has been here." Her heart leaped with joy.

  "Maybe," Cortone said. His friendliness vanished. She realized he would not be easy to manipulate.

  She said, "I want to know where he is."

  "And I want to know who sent you here."

  "Nobody sent me." Suza collected her thoughts, struggling to hide her tension. "I guessed he might have come to you for help with this . . . project he's working on. The thing is, the Arabs know about it, and they'll kill him, and I have to warn him . . . Please, if you know where he is, please help me."

  She was suddenly close to tears, but Cortone was unmoved. "Helping you is easy," he said. "Trusting you is the hard part." He unwrapped a cigar and lit it, taking his time. Suza watched in an agony of impatience. He looked away from her and spoke almost to himself. "You know, there was a time when I'd just see something I wanted and I'd grab it. It's not so simple anymore. Now I've got all these complications. I got to make choices, and none of them are what I really want. I don't know whether it's the way things are now or if it's me."

  He turned again and faced her. "I owe Dickstein my life. Now I have a chance to save his, if you're telling the truth. This is a debt of honor. I have to pay it myself, in person. So what do I do?" He paused.

  Suza held her breath.

  "Dickstein is in a wreck of a house somewhere on the Mediterranean. It's a ruin, hasn't been lived in for years, so there's no phone there. I could send a message, but I couldn't be sure it would get there, and like I said, I have to do this myself, in person."

  He drew on the cigar. "I could tell you where to go look for him, but you just might pass the information on to the wrong people. I won't take that risk."

  "What,
then?" Suza said in a high-pitched voice. "We have to help him!"

  "I know that," Cortone said imperturbably. "So I'm going there myself."

  "Oh!" Suza was taken by surprise: it was a possibility she had never considered.

  "And what about you?" he went on. "I'm not going to tell you where I'm headed, but you could still have people follow me. I need to keep you real close from now on. Let's face it, you could be playing it both ways. So I'm taking you with me."

  She stared at him. Tension drained out of her in a flood, she slumped in her chair. "Oh, thank you," she said. Then, at last, she cried.

  They flew first class. Cortone always did. After the meal Suza left him to go to the toilet. She looked through the curtain into economy, hoping against hope, but she was disappointed: there was Hassan's wary brown face staring at her over the rows of headrests.

  She looked into the galley and spoke to the chief steward in a confiding voice. She had a problem, she said. She needed to contact her boyfriend but she couldn't get away from her Italian father, who wanted her to wear iron knickers until she was twenty-one. Would he phone the Israeli consulate in Rome and leave a message for a Nathaniel Dickstein? Just say, Hassan has told me everything, and he and I are coming to you. She gave him money for the phone call, far too much, it was a way of tipping him. He wrote the message down and promised.

  She went back to Cortone. Bad news, she said. One of the Arabs was back there in economy. He must be following us.

  Cortone cursed, then told her never mind, the man would just have to be taken care of later.

  Suza thought: Oh, God, what have I done?

  From the big house on the clifftop Dickstein went down a long zigzag flight of steps cut into the rock to the beach. He splashed through the shallows to a waiting motorboat, jumped in and nodded to the man at the wheel.

  The engine roared and the boat surged through the waves out to sea. The sun had just set. In the last faint light the clouds were massing above, obscuring the stars as soon as they appeared. Dickstein was deep in thought, racking his brains for things he had not done, precautions he might yet take, loopholes he still had time to close. He went over his plan again and again in his mind, like a man who has learned by heart an important speech he must make but still wishes it were better.