The Colonel frowned, looking down at the floor, a sad expression.
Yes, he said softly. I can imagine.
Stern hit the Armenian in the chest and sent him flying, continued the Major. The owner was standing near them at that moment, behind the counter, and he saw the Armenian’s face when Stern hit him. The Armenian was astonished. Obviously he had no idea what was going on. At that point the owner went down, threw himself on the floor behind the counter. It was an instinctive reaction to Stern hitting the Armenian, a dive for cover. Not away from the grenade, which he didn’t recognize, but away from Stern. The roar went off and that’s all we have from the owner until the glass stopped showering down.
Mirror behind the counter?
Yes.
The Colonel found his pipe. He went over and sat down on the sofa, using his hands to move his false leg into a straight position.
Stern?
The grenade must have been coming directly at him. He had time to hit the Armenian and knock him clear, and that was that. Full in the chest probably. Nothing much left above the waist.
The Colonel struck a match. Ever been close to that? he asked. Had it happen right next to you?
No.
It’s the worst sound in the world. Does something to your brain. For an instant you’re no longer human. It’s another existence, primeval, black. You see something inside yourself. Go on.
There was the roar and the shattering glass and smoke and confusion, said the Major. When the owner showed his face, men were screaming and pushing out the door. Bits and pieces everywhere, and blood. The Armenian was still sprawled in the corner where Stern’s blow had sent him. Besides the two Arabs who were unconscious from opium on the far side, the Armenian was the only other man left in the room. He lay there on the floor in the smoke, staring up at the spot where he and Stern had been sitting. Slowly he got to his feet, dreamlike, and just stood there staring. The owner was dazed and he did the same thing, just stood there staring. But the owner was watching the Armenian.
Yes, said the Colonel, the fascination is incredibly intense. You don’t know whether you’re alive or dead and you’re not in your own body at all. In fact you have no body. It’s strange … a kind of sudden sense of pure consciousness. Your mind looks around and the first thing with any sign of life utterly captivates you. At that moment the merest flicker of an eye contains all the mystery of the universe. Go on.
The Armenian still didn’t move, he just stood there staring. After a bit the owner came to his senses and began screaming himself. People shouted and stuck their heads in, and there was nothing really after that until the policeman arrived.
What kind of man?
Average, unfortunately. The confusion and damage got to him but not much else, except for one curiosity. When he first came in, something about the Armenian struck him as peculiar. But only vaguely, he can’t recall it exactly. It happened when he first glanced around the place and he might have only imagined it, or it could have been a trick of peripheral vision. Anyway, it was a sensation of something unusual, in the sense of inappropriate or out of place. At least that’s my interpretation of it. The policeman isn’t able to describe it with any degree of accuracy, apparently it only flashed through his mind. But what it amounts to is, he had the sensation the Armenian was smiling. Staring and smiling. And that’s all we have on the incident itself.
The Colonel nodded.
But there’s one other very curious fact, added the Major. The owner says the Armenian came to the bar yesterday morning, very early. There was nobody else there and he’d just started his cleanup when all of a sudden the Armenian came rushing in with a wild man.
A what?
That’s how the owner describes him. A ghostlike figure in rags, an Arab, thin and small and caked with dust and dirt, hair matted and eyes bulging out of his head. According to the owner, he looked like a desert hermit who’d been off in a cave somewhere for years. He seemed deranged. He was clawing at the air and making strange sounds as if he couldn’t breathe. The Armenian came rushing in with this wild man and ordered coffee and the two of them collapsed in a corner. Then the wild man began to sob and a moment later they were rushing out again, the Armenian in the lead, the wild man running after him.
Nothing more specific on this other man?
The owner kept mentioning his eyes, frantic bulging eyes. Frightening, wild. He was convinced the man was insane. That was the only time the owner has ever seen this other man, and it was the only other time he has ever seen the Armenian.
And lastly there’s this, said the Major, placing a small length of worn curved metal in the Colonel’s hand. The bar owner found it on the floor after the policeman left. It was lying at the foot of the counter where Stern and the Armenian had been sitting. So far as I can see it’s exactly what it appears to be, an old Morse-code key. From the last century, probably.
The Colonel turned the small piece of worn metal between his fingers. The key was highly polished from innumerable handlings.
Stern used to carry that, murmured the Colonel. It was a kind of good-luck charm. He was never without it.
The Colonel frowned. He took a bottle of whiskey from a cupboard and poured into two glasses. The Major sipped his whiskey, waiting. The room was in the heart of the building and few sounds reached it. The Colonel worked on his pipe in silence. Finally he picked up the other glass.
Are you and Maud friendly these days?
Yes. Should I speak to her?
The Colonel shook his head.
No. You see, I think we’ve stumbled upon an operation that belongs to somebody else, and the reason we found out about it is because something went wrong in that bar. I’m sure the Armenian’s name was never supposed to turn up in a police report. No, certainly not. As for Maud, it’s not possible that she has anything to do with the operation, because if she did, I would have to have been told.
But she knew Stern had been killed, said the Major, and someone had to tell her. A Purple Seven alert comes directly to us. So we were the first to know of Stern’s death, and we’re still the only ones who do know. Unless, of course, you’ve already passed the information along.
I haven’t, said the Colonel. I will tonight. But as for us being the first to know of Stern’s death, that’s not quite true, is it?
The first to know inside, I meant. The Armenian knew, of course.
Yes, our Purple Seven knew. Our man with the Armenian name who’s conveniently in transit while dealing in Coptic artifacts. Our small shabby European who wears a secondhand suit and likes to have his morning coffee in a Cairo slum with some wild Arab hermit from the desert, and who has all the signs of being an experienced professional. He knew.
And told Maud?
That’s right, said the Colonel. But what I meant before is that she can’t have anything to do with the operation itself, as such. It’s obvious she must have a good deal to do with some of the people involved in it. From a personal point of view.
Wasn’t her connection with Stern known from the beginning?
Oh yes. Stern was the one who recommended her to us, and he was right on target as usual. She’s been a fine addition. But tell me, what do you know about Stern?
Only what comes through from the files, replied the Major. That he seemed to be able to find out almost anything.
Ever wonder why that was so?
Excellent contacts, I assume.
Yes, the best. The French and the Germans and the Italians, Turks and Greeks and Arabs and Jews—he had them all. And why was that, do you suppose?
Because he must have made it his business to have them, said the Major. Because that was what he did. His life.
Yes, what he did. But I’m beginning to wonder about that … what Stern really did. Stern gave information as well as took it, but the real reason people trusted him was because they always felt, deep down, that he was working just for them. In the end, just for them. We believed that, didn’t we?
; In answer, the Major frowned. In the short time he had worked for the Colonel, there had been some extremely sensitive operations set in motion almost entirely on the basis of information supplied by Stern. And there must have been many other such operations in the past, so he found it difficult to follow what the Colonel now seemed to be suggesting about Stern.
That’s not to say he wasn’t working for us, continued the Colonel. It’s just that ultimately …
The Colonel broke off, trying to order his thoughts. For some reason he had suddenly recalled an obscure incident from before the war, Stern’s escape from a Damascus prison in the summer of 1939. The episode had never made any sense to the Colonel, because Stern had been due for release from the prison within twenty-four hours.
Yet Stern had risked his life to escape. Why?
Later he had talked about it with Stern and Stern had turned the whole affair into a joke, moving around in his chair in his awkward way and belittling any courage it might have shown on his part, claiming simply that he had felt more useless than usual and had decided on a sudden whim to try to prove his superiority over his Syrian guards. Stern had even showed the Colonel the scars left by the thumbnail he had ripped away during the escape, clawing his way through some masonry, deep ugly scars slashing up the back of his thumb. The Colonel remembered how painful they had looked at the time, but Stern had dismissed them with a shrug.
It’s nothing, Stern had said, laughing. Really painful wounds never bother with the body, do they? They cut deeper and the scars they leave are elsewhere.
And then they had gone on to talk of other things. But now the incident in Damascus troubled the Colonel and he began hunting through Stern’s file. He seemed to recall that Stern had said he had gone to Haifa after the prison escape, and had hidden in Haifa until the war had broken out a few weeks later, turning everyone’s attention elsewhere.
The Colonel stopped at a page in the file. He had found the corroborating evidence taken from the reports of other contacts that Stern had been in Haifa in August 1939. But when the Colonel looked at the evidence now, he realized that all the scattered bits and pieces of information had been provided by contacts who were known or suspected Zionist activists, involved with illegal immigration into Palestine.
The Colonel turned more pages in the file. Stern’s unlikely adventure had also brought Poland to mind. Why the association? Simply because the German invasion of Poland had followed so soon after Stern’s escape?
No. There was a connection and he found it. A short paragraph from an informer’s report to the Turkish police in Istanbul. To the effect that the informer had seen Stern in Istanbul shortly after his escape from Damascus. That Stern had been carrying a forged Polish passport and had been frantically arranging a secret trip to Poland. To the Pyry forest near Warsaw, on a mysterious mission of great importance.
Or so the informer had speculated, offering a personal opinion without a trace of evidence to back up his claim.
Under normal circumstances the Colonel would have smiled at these cobwebs of conjecture. The Turkish police were wildly inaccurate about everything, and Istanbul was notorious for its legions of aspiring informers who would gladly claim anything in exchange for a minor official favor. And in this case not even the informer’s identity had been included in the report. Even the fact that the informer had subsequently been found dead floating in the Bosporus meant nothing, given the situation in Istanbul in that last summer before the war.
Pure invention from some desperate refugee. Ridiculous rumors whispered across a café table and set adrift in the clouded brain of a Turkish policeman lazily puffing hashish, dimly trying to focus his eyes on the crotch of a serving-boy across the way.
And yet?
The Colonel closed the file. He frowned.
Perhaps he had made a serious mistake in accepting Stern’s explanation of what he had been doing in those last few days before the war began. Perhaps Stern had actually made a secret trip to Poland without telling anyone about it.
Why? wondered the Colonel. What did it mean and what had he been hiding? Why had he lied and taken such care to make sure his lie had been covered?
Stern had been unusually experienced and clever. He had been dedicated to a cause that was probably too idealistic ever to be realized, but the cause had still been straightforward and comprehensible, as splendid in its simplicity as Stern’s ideals had been.
Or rather, as they had appeared to be. For it was obvious now that someone else had stumbled upon Stern’s Polish adventure and had decided to look into it more deeply, and in so doing had caught a glimpse of something unexpected. A suggestion of some enigma, some profound truth, that must have subsequently been uncovered by the Armenian.
Who had then told Stern what he had discovered. Just before a hand grenade had come flying in through the door of a dingy Arab bar in a Cairo slum, and Stern had been killed saving the Armenian’s life.
Where were we? asked the Colonel, looking up.
I’m not sure, replied the Major. You were talking about the important work Stern did for us, and then you seemed to have some doubts about something.
Yes, well, it’s just that the situation isn’t as clear in my mind now as it was. Because that seems to be the very nature of this operation. Somewhere a doubt arose, as I see it, a doubt with very serious implications. So a man who knew Stern from somewhere, an outsider, was recruited to come in and find out what he could about Stern.
That would be our Purple Seven, said the Major.
Yes, the Armenian. A professional who might have been a friend of Stern’s once, or who might have worked with him at some point in the past. Possibly in Stern’s gunrunning activities, without knowing they were just a cover for his role in intelligence. Well the Armenian went about his business and my guess is he was successful. Either he discovered the truth about Stern or he came close enough for it not to make any difference.
The Colonel leaned back. There was admiration and even a touch of awe in his voice.
My God, you just can’t appreciate the enormity of that task without having known Stern. The layers to the man, the subtleties. He grew up in these parts and knew every language and dialect, every nuance, every corner and what lay around it. There was simply no competing with him out here. He could go anywhere and be anyone, and at one time or another he did seem to go everywhere and be just about everyone. As he wanted, as it served his purposes. Describe a tiny corner of the desert and he knew it. Mention a shop hidden away in a bazaar in any of ten dozen towns and he’d been there, knew the owner. An extraordinary experience, dealing with a man like Stern. And he was modest. You didn’t even begin to sense the depths to the man until he happened to mention some unexpected thing in an offhand way.
The Colonel grimaced. He reached down and moved his false leg.
Anyway, the Armenian must have done whatever he did and then gone to Stern with what he’d learned, which is strange in itself. You’d think he would have gone first to the people who’d hired him, but obviously he didn’t. Because if he had, those same people would now know that Stern is dead, and they don’t. Not yet, because I haven’t told them.
So the Armenian went directly to Stern, continued the Colonel, and that was the meeting in the Arab bar. The Armenian got in touch with Stern and set up a meeting, and then he sat down in that bar and told Stern what he’d discovered, and it was the full truth or close to it. Which was what caused Stern to begin smiling halfway through their conversation. Because at last, after all these years of subterfuge, someone had uncovered the truth about him.
Stern’s reaction to that would be to smile? asked the Major. Why not just the opposite?
I have no idea. It might have to do with who the Armenian is. The Armenian confronted Stern with the facts, in any case, and Stern’s reaction was to smile with relief. That was the expression you used.
Jameson used, corrected the Major.
Yes, Jameson, our alter ego in this case. So we have Ster
n smiling and the Armenian not liking it at all, and that’s when the conversation grew heated. The Armenian didn’t agree with what Stern was doing, couldn’t agree, and he argued about it. But Stern was confident. He was convinced of his rightness and he went on to justify himself. Your words again, or Jameson’s rather. And that was where matters stood when the grenade came sailing in the door and Stern saved the Armenian’s life.
The Colonel paused.
Important, that. I don’t know why, but it has to be. It was Stern’s last act and there’s a meaning to it. Something to do with the discovery the Armenian had made, or perhaps going further back, to the whole relationship between the two of them. Which was profound, I’d say. Something quite special to both of them.
You know, concluded the Colonel, the curious part in all this is that we seem to have some of the answers without knowing the questions. More whiskey for you?
The Major poured for them both. A clock ticked on the wall. When it appeared the Colonel had nothing more to say, the Major decided to ask his own questions.
Whose operation do you think it is? The Monastery’s?
Yes, no doubt. It’s much too deep and roundabout to be anyone else’s. And it’s bizarre and wildly improbable, not what anyone would expect. All the characteristics of a Monastery operation.
What about the Armenian?
I’ve been thinking about him but no one comes to mind. Frankly, I haven’t the least idea. Of course I know who originally used that Purple Seven identity, in fact I helped put it together for him. But that was three or four years ago, in Palestine in connection with the Arab revolt, and somehow it all seems irrelevant now.
Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 2) Page 50