The Little Drummer Girl

two

Almost eight weeks passed before the man whom Dr. Alexis knew as Schulmann returned to Germany. In that time the investigations and planning of the Jerusalem teams had taken such extraordinary leaps that those still labouring through the debris of Bad Godesberg would not have recognised the case. If it had been a mere matter of punishing culprits-if the Godesberg incident had been an isolated one instead of part of a concerted series- Schulmann would not have bothered to involve himself at all, for his aims were more ambitious than mere retribution, and were intimately related to his own professional survival. For months now, under his restless urging, his teams had been looking for what he called a window that was wide enough to slip someone through and so take the enemy from inside his house, rather than beat him down with tanks and artillery from the front, which was increasingly the inclination in Jerusalem. Thanks to Godesberg, they believed they had found one. Where the West Germans still floundered with vague leads, Schulmann's deskmen in Jerusalem were stealthily making connections as far apart as Ankara and East Berlin. Old hands began to speak of a mirror image: of a remaking of Europe in patterns familiar from the Middle East two years ago.

Schulmann came not to Bonn but to Munich, and not as Schulmann either, and neither Alexis nor his Silesian successor was aware of his arrival, which was what he intended. His name, if he had one, was Kurtz, though he used it so seldom he might have been forgiven if one day he forgot it altogether. Kurtz meaning short; Kurtz of the short cut, said some; his victims-Kurtz of the short fuse. Others made laborious comparisons with Joseph Conrad's hero. Whereas the bald truth was that the name was Moravian and was originally Kurz, till a British police officer of the Mandate, in his wisdom, had added a "t"-and Kurtz, in his, had kept it, a sharp little dagger jabbed into the bulk of his identity, and left there as some kind of goad.

He arrived in Munich from Tel Aviv by way of Istanbul, changing passports twice and planes three times. Before that he had been staying for a week in London, but in London particularly maintaining an extremely retiring role. Everywhere he went, he had been squaring things and checking out results, gathering help, persuading people, feeding them cover stories and half-truths, overriding the reluctant with his extraordinary restless energy and the sheer volume and reach of his advance planning, even when sometimes he repeated himself, or forgot a small instruction he had issued. We live for such a short time, he liked to tell you with a twinkle, and we are far too long dead. That was the nearest he ever came to an apology, and his personal solution was to relinquish sleep. In Jerusalem, they liked to say, Kurtz slept as fast as he laboured. Which was fast. Kurtz, they would explain to you, was the master of the aggressive European ploy. Kurtz cut the impossible path, Kurtz made the desert bloom. Kurtz wheeled and dealed and lied even in his prayers, but he forced more good luck than the Jews had had for two thousand years.

Not that they loved him to a man exactly; for that he was too paradoxical, too complicated, made up of too many souls and colours. In some respects, indeed, his relationship with his superiors-and in particular with Misha Gavron, his Chief-was more that of a gruffly tolerated outsider than of a trusted equal. He had no tenure, but mysteriously sought none. His power base was rickety and forever shifting, according to whom he had last offended in his quest for the expedient allegiance. He was not a sabra; he lacked the elitist background from the kibbutzim, the universities and the crack regiments that, to his dismay, increasingly supplied the narrowing aristocracy of his service. He was out of tune with their polygraphs, their computers and their ever-growing faith in American-style power-plays, applied psychology, and crisis management. He loved the diaspora and made it his speciality at a time when most Israelis were zealously and self-consciously refurbishing their identity as Orientals. Yet obstacles were what Kurtz thrived on and rejection was what had made him. He could fight, if need be, on every front at once, and what they would not give him freely one way he took by stealth another. For love of Israel. For peace. For moderation. And for his own cussed right to make his impact and survive.

At what stage in the chase he had hit upon his plan probably not even Kurtz himself could have said. Such plans began in him deep down, like a rebellious impulse waiting for a cause, then welled out of him almost before he was aware of them. Did he dream it up when the bomber's trademark was confirmed? Or while he was eating his pasta up there on the Caecilian Heights overlooking Godesberg, and began to recognise what a fine catch he could make out of Alexis? Before. Long before. It must be done, he had told anyone who would listen after a particularly menacing session of Gavron's steering committee, that spring. If we don't take the enemy from inside his own camp, those clowns in the Knesset and Defence will blow up the whole of civilisation in their hunt for him. Some of his researchers swore it went back even further in time, and that Gavron had suppressed a similar scheme twelve months ago. Never mind. The certainty is that operational preparations were well under way before the boy had been conclusively tracked down, even if Kurtz assiduously held back all intimation of them from the scathing glance of Misha Gavron, and fudged his records in order to deceive him. Gavron is Polish for rook. His craggy black looks and parched bellow could have belonged to no other creature.

Find the boy, Kurtz told his Jerusalem team, setting out on his murky travels. It's one boy and his shadow. Find the boy, the shadow will follow, no problem. Kurtz dinned it into them till they swore they hated him; he could apply pressure as fiercely as he withstood it. He phoned in from odd places at any hour of day or night just to keep his presence among them at all times. Have you found that boy yet? Why is that boy not run to earth? But still cloaking his questions in such a way that Gavron the Rook, even if he got wind of them, would not understand their meaning, for Kurtz was holding off his assault on Gavron till the last, most favourable moment. He cancelled leave, abolished the Sabbath, and used his own meagre money rather than pass his expenses prematurely through the official accounts. He hauled reservists from the comfort of their academic sinecures and ordered them back, unpaid, to their old desks in order to hurry up the search. Find the boy. The boy will show us the way. One day, from nowhere, he produced a codename for him: Yanuka, which is a friendly Aramaic word for kid-literally a half-grown suckling. "Get me Yanuka and I'll deliver those clowns with the whole apparatus on a plate."

But not a word to Gavron. Wait. Nothing to the Rook.

In his beloved diaspora, if not in Jerusalem, his repertoire of supporters was unearthly. In London alone, he flitted, with barely a change in his smile, from venerable art dealers to would-be film magnates, from little East End landladies to garment merchants, questionable car dealers, grand City companies. He was also seen several times at the theatre, once out of town, but always to see the same show, and he took an Israeli diplomat with him who had cultural functions, although culture was not what they discussed. In Camden Town he ate twice in a humble transport restaurant run by a group of Goanese Indians; in Frognal, a couple of miles northwest, he inspected a secluded Victorian mansion called The Acre and pronounced it perfect for his needs. But only speculative, mind, he told his very obliging landlords; no deal unless our business brings us here. They accepted this condition. They accepted everything. They were proud to be called on, and serving Israel delighted their hearts, even if it meant moving to their house in Marlow for a few months. Did they not keep an apartment in Jerusalem, which they used for visiting friends and family every Passover after two weeks of sea and sunshine in Eilat? And were they not seriously considering living there for good-but not till their children were past military age and the rate of inflation had steadied? On the other hand, they might just stay in Hampstead. Or Marlow. Meanwhile they would send generously and do anything Kurtz asked of them, never expecting anything in return, and not breathing a word to anyone.

At embassies, consulates, and legations along the route, Kurtz kept abreast of feuds and developments at home, and of the progress of his people in other parts of the globe. On aeroplane journeys he revised his familiarity with radical revolutionary literature of all sorts; the emaciated sidekick, whose real name was Shimon Litvak, kept a selection of the stuff in his shabby briefcase and pressed it on him at inappropriate moments. At the hard end, he had Fanon, Guevara, and Marighella; at the soft, Debray, Sartre, and Marcuse; not to mention the gentler souls who wrote mainly of the cruelties of education in consumerist societies, the horrors of religion, and the fatal cramping of the spirit in capitalist childhood. Back in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, where similar debates are not unknown, Kurtz was at his quietest, talking to his case officers, circumventing rivals, and ploughing through exhaustive character profiles assembled from old files and now cautiously but meticulously updated and expanded. One day he heard of a house that was going begging in Disraeli Street, number 11, at a low rent, and for greater secrecy ordered everyone who was working on the case quietly to decamp there.

"I hear you are leaving us already," Misha Gavron remarked sceptically next day, when the two men met at some unrelated conference; for Gavron the Rook by now had wind of things, even if he did not know for certain their direction.

Still Kurtz would not be drawn. Not yet. He pleaded the autonomy of operational departments and pulled an iron grin.

Number 11 was a fine Arab-built villa, not large but cool, with a lemon tree in the front garden, and about two hundred cats, which the women officers overfed absurdly. So the place inevitably became known as the cathouse, and gave fresh cohesion to the team, ensuring, by the proximity of desk officers one to another, that no unfortunate gaps occurred between the specialised fields, and no leaks either. It also raised the status of the operation, which to Kurtz was crucial.

Next day came the blow he had been waiting for and was still powerless to prevent. It was dreadful but it served its purpose. A young Israeli poet on a visit to Leyden University, in Holland, where he was to receive an award, was blown to pieces over breakfast by a parcel bomb delivered to his hotel on the morning of his twenty-fifth birthday. Kurtz was at his desk when the news came, and he took it like an old prize-fighter riding out a punch: he flinched, his eyes closed for a second, but within hours he was standing in Gavron's room with a stack of files under his arm and two versions of his operational plan in his free hand, one for Gavron himself and the other, much vaguer, for Gavron's steering committee of nervous politicians and war-hungry generals.

What passed precisely between the two men could not at first be known, for neither Kurtz nor Gavron was of a confiding nature. But by next morning, Kurtz was out in the open, evidently with some kind of licence, mustering fresh troops. For this he used the zealous Litvak as his intermediary, a sabra, an apparatchik trained to his fingertips, and able to move among Gavron's highly motivated young, whom Kurtz secretly found stiff and embarrassing to handle. The baby of this hastily assembled family was Oded, a twenty-three-year-old from Litvak's own kibbutz and, like himself, a graduate of the prestigious Sayaret. The grandfather was a seventy-year-old Georgian named Bougaschwili, but "Schwili" for short. Schwili had a polished bald head and stooped shoulders and trousers cut for a clown-very low in the crotch and short in the leg. A black Homburg hat, worn indoors as much as out, topped the quaint confection. Schwili had begun life as a smuggler and confidence trickster, trades not uncommon in his home region, but in middle life he had turned his trade to forger of all kinds. His greatest feat had been performed in the Lubyanka, where he had faked documents for fellow inmates from back numbers of Pravda, repulping them to press his own paper. Released at last, he had applied the same genius to the world of fine art, both as a forger and as an expert under contract to distinguished galleries. Several times, he claimed, he had had the pleasure of authenticating his own fakes. Kurtz loved Schwili and, when he had a spare ten minutes, would march him off to an ice-cream parlour at the bottom of the hill and buy him a double caramel, Schwili's best flavour.

Kurtz also supplied Schwili with the two most unlikely helpers anyone could have imagined. The first-a Litvak discovery-was a graduate of London University named Leon, an Israeli who by no choice of his own had had an English childhood, for his father was a kibbutz macher who had been dispatched to Europe as the representative of a marketing cooperative: macher being the Yiddish word for a busybody or a fellow on the move. In London, Leon had developed a literary interest, edited a magazine, and published a completely unregarded novel. His obligatory three years in the Israeli Army left him miserable, and on release he went to earth in Tel Aviv, where he attached himself to one of the intellectual weeklies that come and go like pretty girls. By the time it collapsed, Leon was writing the whole thing single-handed. Yet somehow, among the peace-obsessed, claustrophobic young of Tel Aviv, he experienced the deep reawakening of his identity as a Jew and, with it, a burning urge to rid Israel of her enemies, past and future.

"From now on," Kurtz told him, "you write for me. A big readership you won't have. But appreciative-that they will be."

Schwili's second helper after Leon was a Miss Bach, a quiet-mannered business lady from South Bend, Indiana. Impressed equally by her intelligence and her non- Jewish appearance, Kurtz had recruited Miss Bach, trained her in a variety of skills, and eventually dispatched her to Damascus as an instructor in computer programming. Thereafter, for several years, the sedate Miss Bach reported on the capacity and disposition of Syrian air radar systems. Recalled at last, Miss Bach had been talking wistfully of taking up the wagon-trail life of a West Bank settler when the new summons from Kurtz saved her from this discomfort.

Schwili, Leon, Miss Bach, therefore: Kurtz called the incongruous trio his Literacy Committee, and gave it special standing within his fast-expanding private army.

In Munich, his business was administrative, but he went about it with a hushed delicacy, contriving to force his driving nature into the most modest mould of all. No fewer than six members of his newly formed team had now been installed there, and theyoccupiedtwoquiteseparateestablishments,inquite different areas of town. The first team consisted of two outdoor men. They should have been a full five, but Misha Gavron was still determined to keep him on a short rein, so they were two. Collecting Kurtz not from the airport but from a glum cafe in Schwabing, and using a rickety builder's van to hide him in-the van also was an economy-they drove him to the Olympic! Village, to one of the dark underground car parks there, a favourite haunt for muggers and prostitutes of both sexes. The Village is not a village at all, of course, but a marooned and disintegrating citadel of grey concrete, more reminiscent of an Israeli settlement than anything that can be found in Bavaria. From one of its vast subterranean car parks, they ushered him up a filthy staircase smeared with multi-lingual graffiti, across small roof gardens to a duplex apartment, which they had taken part-furnished on a short let. Outdoors, they spoke English and called him "sir," but indoors, they addressed their chief as "Marty" and spoke respectfully to him in Hebrew.

The apartment was at the top of a corner building, and filled with odd bits of photographic lighting and portentous cameras on stands, as well as tape decks and projection screens. It boasted an open-tread teak staircase and a rustic minstrel gallery, which jangled when they trod on it too hard. From it led a spare bedroom four metres by three and a half, with a skylight let into the rake of the roof, which as they carefully explained to him they had covered first with blanket, then hard-board, then several inches of kapok wadding held in place with diamonds of black tape. Walls, floor, and ceiling were similarly padded, and the result resembled a mix between a modern priesthole and a madman's cell. The door to it they had reinforced with painted steel sheeting, and had built into it a small area of armoured glass at head height, several thicknesses, over which they had hung a cardboard notice saying "dark room keep out" and underneath, "Dunkelkammer kein Eintritt!" Kurtz made one of them enter this little room, close the door, and yell as loud as he could yell. Hearing only a hoarse, scratching sound, he gave his approval.

The rest of the apartment was airy but, like the Olympic Village, awfully down-at-heel. Northward the windows gave a grimy view of the road to Dachau, where a great many Jews had died in the concentration camp, and the irony escaped none of those present; the more particularly since the Bavarian police, with stultifying insensitivity, had housed its flying squad in the former barracks there. Nearer at hand, they could point out to Kurtz the very spot where, in more recent history, Palestinian commandos had burst into the living quarters of the Israeli athletes, killing some immediately, and taking the rest to the military airport, where they killed them too. Right next door to their own apartment, they told Kurtz, was a student commune; underneath them was for the moment nobody, because the last tenant had killed herself. Having stomped all around the place alone, and considered the entrances and escape routes, Kurtz decided he must rent the lower flat also, and the same day telephoned a certain lawyer in Nuremberg instructing him to handle the contract. The kids themselves had developed a floppy, ineffectual look, and one-the young Oded-had grown a beard. Their passports revealed them to be Argentinians, professional photographers, of what sort no one knew or cared. Sometimes, they told Kurtz, to give their household an air of naturalness and irregularity, they announced to their neighbours that they would be holding a late party, of which the only evidence was loud music till all hours and empty bottles in the dustbins. But in reality they had admitted nobody to the apartment, except the courier from the other team: no guests, no visitors of any kind. As to women, forget it. They had put women right out of their minds till they got back to Jerusalem.

When they had reported all this and more to Kurtz, and discussed such office matters as extra transport and operational expenses, and whether it might not be a good plan to set iron rings into the padded walls of the darkroom-Kurtz was in favour of the idea-they took him, at his own request, for a walk and what he called some nice fresh air. They wandered through the rich student slums, lingered over a pottery school, a carpentry school, and what was proudly offered as the first swimming-school in the world to have been built for very small babies, and they read the daubed anarchist slogans on the painted cottage doors. Till inevitably, by gravitation, they found themselves standing before the same ill-fated house where, almost ten years ago, the attack on the Israeli boys had shocked the world. A stone tablet, engraved in Hebrew and in German, commemorated the eleven dead. Eleven, or eleven thousand, their feeling of shared outrage was the same.

"So remember that," Kurtz ordered needlessly as they returned to the van.

From the Village, they brought Kurtz to the middle of the town where he deliberately lost himself for a while, walking wherever his fancy took him, till the kids, who were watching his back, gave him the signal that it was safe to go on to his next rendezvous. The contrast between the last place and the new one could not have been greater. Kurtz's destination was the top floor of a high-gabled gingerbread house right at the heart of fashionable Munich. The street was narrow, cobbled, and expensive. It boasted a Swiss restaurant and an exclusive couturier who seemed to sell nothing, yet prosper. Kurtz climbed to the flat by way of a dark stairway and the door opened to him as he reached the top step, because they had been watching him come down the street on their little closed-circuit television screen. He walked in without a word. These men were older than the two who had received him first, fathers more than sons. They had the pallor of long-termers, and a resigned way of moving, particularly when they trod round each other in their stockinged feet. For these were professional static watchers-even in Jerusalem, a secret society to themselves. Lace curtains hung across the window; it was dusk in the street and dusk in the flat also, and the whole place was pervaded with an air of sad neglect. An array of electronic and optical devices was crowded among the fake Biedermeier furniture, including indoor aerials of varying designs. But in the failing light their spectral shapes only added to the mood of bereavement.

Kurtz embraced each man gravely.Then, over crackers, cheese, and tea, the eldest of the men, whose name was Lenny, gave Kurtz the full tour of Yanuka's life-style, quite disregarding the fact that for weeks now Kurtz had been sharing every small sensation as it arose: Yanuka's phone calls in and out, his latest visitors, his latest girls. Lenny was big-hearted and kind, but a little shy of people he was not observing. He had wide ears and an ugly, over-featured face, and perhaps that was why he kept it from the hard gaze of the world. He wore a big grey knitted waistcoat like chain mail. In other circumstances Kurtz could tire of detail very quickly, but he respected Lenny and paid the closest attention to everything he said, nodding, congratulating, making all the right expressions for him.

"He's a normal young man, this Yanuka," Lenny pleaded earnestly. "Tradesmen admire him. Friends admire him. That's a likeable, popular person, Marty. Studies, likes to enjoy himself, talks a lot, he's a serious fellow with healthy appetites." Catching Kurtz's eye, he became a little foolish: "Now and then it's hard to believe in this other side to him, Marty, trust me."

Kurtz assured Lenny that he fully understood. He was still doing this when a light came on in the mansard window of the flat directly across the street. The rectangular yellow glow, with nothing else lit near it, had the look of a lover's signal. Without a word, one of Lenny's men tiptoed swiftly to a pair of binoculars anchored to a stand, while another squatted to a radio receiver and clutched a headphone to his ear.

"Want to take a look, Marty?" Lenny suggested hopefully. "I can see by Joshua's smile there that he has a very nice perception of Yanuka tonight. Wait too long, he'll draw the curtain on us. What do you see, Joshua? Is Yanuka all dolled up for going out tonight? Who does he speak to on the telephone? A girl for certain."

Gently pushing Joshua aside, Kurtz ducked his big head to the binoculars. And he remained a long time that way, hunched like an old seadog in a storm, hardly seeming to breathe, while he studied Yanuka, the half-grown suckling.

"See his books there in the background?" Lenny asked. "That boy reads like my father."

"You have a fine boy there," Kurtz agreed finally, with his iron-hard smile, as he slowly straightened himself. "A good-looking kid, no question." Picking his grey raincoat from the chair, he selected a sleeve and pulled it tenderly over his arm. "Just be sure you don't marry him to your daughter." Lenny looked even more foolish than before, but Kurtz was quick to console him: "We should be thankful to you, Lenny. And so we are, no question." And as an afterthought: "Keep taking photographs of him, all angles. Don't be shy, Lenny. Film is not so expensive."

Having shaken hands with each man in turn, Kurtz added an old blue beret to his costume and, thus shielded against the bustle of the rush hour, strode vigorously into the street.

It was raining by the time they picked Kurtz up in the van again, and as the three of them drove from one glum spot to another, killing time before Kurtz's plane, the weather seemed to affect all three of them with its sombre mood. Oded was doing the driving, and his bearded young face, by the passing lights, revealed a sullen anger.

"What's he got now?" Kurtz asked, though he must have known the answer.

"His latest is a rich man's BMW," Oded replied. "Power steering, fuel injection, five thousand kilometres on the clock. Cars are his weakness."

"Cars, women, the soft life," the second boy put in from the back. "So what are his strengths, I wonder?"

"Hired again?" Kurtz asked of Oded once more.

"Hired."

"Stay close to that car," Kurtz advised them both. "The moment he hands back his car to the rental company and doesn't take another one, that's the moment we have to know about immediately." They had heard this till they were deaf from it. They had heard it before they ever left Jerusalem. Kurtz repeated it none the less: "Most important is when Yanuka turns his car in."

Suddenly Oded had had enough. Perhaps he was by youth and temperament more prone to stress than his selectors had appreciated. Perhaps, as such a young fellow, he should not have been given a job that needed so much waiting. Pulling up the van at the kerbside, he yanked on the handbrake so hard he all but wrenched it from its socket.

"Why do we let him go through with this?" he demanded. "Why play games with him? What if goes back home and doesn't come out again? Then what?"

"Then we lose him."

"So let's kill him now! Tonight. You give me the order, it's done!"

Kurtz let him rave on.

"We've got the apartment opposite, haven't we? Put a rocket across the road. We've done it before. An RPG-y-Arab kills Arab with a Russian rocket-why not?"

Kurtz still said nothing. Oded might have been storming at a sphinx.

"So why not?" Oded repeated, very loud indeed.

Kurtz did not spare him, but neither did he lose his patience: "Because he doesn't lead anywhere, Oded, that's why. You never heard what Misha Gavron himself used to say perhaps? A phrase I personally still like to echo? That if you want to catch a lion, you first must tether the goat? Whose crazy fighting talk have you been listening to? I ask myself. Are you seriously informing me you want to hit Yanuka, when for ten dollars more you can have the best operator they produced for years?"

"He did Bad Godesberg! He did Vienna, maybe Leyden too! Jews are dying, Marty! Doesn't Jerusalem care about that these days? How many do we let die while we play our games?"

Carefully taking hold of the collar of Oded's wind jacket with his big hands, Kurtz shook him twice, and the second time he did this, Oded's head banged painfully against the window. But Kurtz did not apologise and Oded did not complain.

"They, Oded. Not he: they," said Kurtz, this time with menace. "They did Bad Godesberg. They did Leyden. And it's them we intend to take out; not six innocent German householders and one silly little boy."

"It's okay," said Oded blushing. "Leave me alone."

"It is not okay, Oded. Yanuka has friends, Oded. Relatives. People we have not yet been introduced to. You want to run this operation for me?"

"I said-it's okay."

Kurtz released him, Oded started up the engine again. Kurtz suggested they continue their interesting tour of Yanuka's lifestyle. So they bumped down a cobbled street where his favourite nightclub was, the shop where he bought his shirts and ties, the place where he had his hair cut, and the left-wing bookshops where he liked to browse and buy. And all the while Kurtz, in the best of spirits, beamed and nodded at everything he saw as if he were watching an old movie he couldn't get enough of-until, in a square not far from the city air terminal, they prepared to part. Standing on the pavement, Kurtz clapped Oded on the shoulder with unabashed affection, then ran his hand through his hair.

"Listen, both of you, don't pull so hard at the bridle. Buy yourselves a nice meal somewhere, charge it to me personally, okay?"

His tone was that of a commander moved to love before the battle. Which, for as long as Misha Gavron permitted it, was what he was.

The night flight from Munich to Berlin, for the few who use it, is one of the last great nostalgic journeys to be made in Europe. The Orient Express, the Golden Arrow, and the Train Bleu may be dead, dying, or artificially revived, but for those who have their memories, sixty minutes of night-flying through the East German corridor in a rattly Pan American plane three-quarters empty is like the safari of an old habitue indulging his addiction. Lufthansa is forbidden to fly the route. It belongs only to the victors, to the occupiers of the former German capital; to the historians and island-seekers; and to one war-scarred elderly American impregnated with the docile quiet of a professional, who makes the journey almost daily, knows his favourite seat and the first name of the air hostess, which he pronounces in the frightful German of the Occupation. For two pins, you think, he will slip her a packet of Lucky Strikes and make an assignation with her behind the commissary. The fuselage grunts and lifts, the lights falter, you cannot believe the plane has no propellers. You look into the unlit enemy landscape-to bomb, to jump?-you think your memories and confuse your wars: down there, at least, in some uneasy sense, the world is as it was.

Kurtz was no exception.

He sat at his window, he gazed past his own reflection at the night; he became, as always when he made this journey, a spectator looking upon his own life. Somewhere in that blackness was the railway line which had brought the goods train on its slow journey from the East; somewhere the very siding where it had parked for five nights and six days in dead of winter to make way for the military transports that mattered so much more, while Kurtz and his mother, and the hundred and eighteen other Jews who were crammed into their truck, ate the snow and froze, most of them to death. "The next camp will be better," his mother kept assuring him, to keep his spirits up. Somewhere in that blackness his mother had later filed passively to her death; somewhere in its fields the Sudeten boy who was himself had starved and stolen and killed, waiting without illusion for another hostile world to find him. He saw the Allied reception camp, the unfamiliar uniforms, the children's faces as old and hollow as his own. A new coat, new boots and new barbed wire-and a new escape, this time from his rescuers. He saw himself in the fields again, slipping southward from farm to village for weeks on end as the escape line handed him on, until gradually the nights grew warm and smelled of flowers, and he heard for the first time in his life the rustle of palm trees in a sea wind. "Listen to us, you frozen little boy," they whispered to him, "that's how we sound in Israel. That's how blue the sea is, just like here." He saw the rotting steamer slumped beside the jetty, the biggest and noblest boat he had set eyes on, so black with Jewish heads that when he boarded it, he stole a stocking cap and wore it till they had cleared harbour. But they needed him, fair hair or none at all. On the deck in small groups, the leaders were giving lessons in how to shoot with stolen Lee-Enfield rifles. Haifa was still two days away, and Kurtz's war had just begun.

The plane was circling to land. He felt it bank, and watched as it crossed the Wall. He had only hand luggage, but security was tight on account of the terrorists, so formalities took quite a time.

*

Shimon Litvak was waiting in the car park in an inferior Ford. He had flown from Holland after two days spent looking at the mess in Leyden. Like Kurtz, he did not feel he had a right to sleep.

"The book bomb was delivered by a girl," he said as soon as Kurtz had clambered in. "Shapely brunette. Jeans. The hotel porter assumed she was from the university, convinced himself she arrived and left by bicycle. Speculative, but I believe him partly. Somebody else again says she was brought to the hotel on a motorbike. A party ribbon round the parcel and 'Happy birthday, Mordecai' on the label. A plan, a transport, a bomb, and a girl, what's new?"

"Explosive?"

"Russian plastic, shreds of wrapping, nothing traceable."

"Any trademark?"

"One neat twist of surplus red circuit wire, made into a dummy."

Kurtz glanced at him sharply.

"No surplus wire," Litvak confessed. "Carbonised fragments, yes. But no identifiable wire."

"No clothespeg either?" said Kurtz.

"This time he preferred a mousetrap. A sweet little kitchen mousetrap." He started the engine.

"He used mousetraps too," said Kurtz.

"He used mousetraps, clothespegs, old Bedouin blankets, untraceable explosives, cheap one-handed watches, and cheap girls. And he's the absolute lousiest bombmaker bar none, even for an Arab," said Litvak, who hated inefficiency almost as much as he hated the enemy who was guilty of it. "How long did he give you?"

Kurtz affected not to understand. "Give me? Who gave me?"

"What's your licence? A month? Two months? What's the deal?"

But Kurtz was not always inclined to precision in his replies. "The deal is that a lot of people in Jerusalem would prefer to charge the windmills of Lebanon rather than fight the enemy with their heads."

"Can the Rook hold them off? Can you?"

Kurtz lapsed into an unaccustomed quiet from which Litvak was disinclined to rouse him. In the middle of West Berlin there is no darkness, at the edges no light. They were heading for the light.

"You paid Gadi a big compliment," Litvak observed suddenly, with a sideways look at his master. "Coming to his town like this. A journey from you to him is like a homage."

"It's not his town," said Kurtz equably. "He borrowed it. He has a grant, a trade to learn, a second life to make. That is the only reason Gadi is in Berlin."

"And he can bear to live in such a trash heap? Even for a new career? After Jerusalem, he can come here!"

Kurtz did not answer the question directly, nor did Litvak expect him to. "Gadi has made his contribution, Shimon. No man made a better, according to his ability. He fought hard in hard places, most of them behind the lines. Why should he not remake himself? He is entitled to his peace."

But Litvak was not trained to abandon his battles inconclusively. "So why disturb it? Why resurrect what is finished with? If he is making a new beginning, so leave him to make it."

"Because he is the middle ground, Shimon." Litvak turned swiftly to him for enlightenment, but Kurtz's face was in shadow. "Because he has the reluctance that can make the bridge. Because he ponders."

They passed the memorial church and proceeded between the icy fires of the Kurfurstendamm, then returned to the menacing stillness of the city's dark outlands.

"So what name is he using these days?" Kurtz enquired, with an indulgent smile to his voice. "Tell me how he calls himself."

"Becker," said Litvak tersely.

Kurtz expressed jovial disappointment. "Becker? What the hell name is that? Gadi Becker-and him a sabra?"

"It's the German version of the Hebrew version of the German version of his name," Litvak replied, without humour. "At the request of his employers, he's reverted. He's not an Israeli any more, he's a Jew."

Kurtz kept his smile flying. "Does he have any ladies with him, Shimon? What's with women for him these days?"

"A night here, a night there. Nothing he could call his own."

Kurtz settled more comfortably in his seat. "So maybe an involvement is what he needs. Then afterwards he goes back to his nice wife, Frankie, in Jerusalem, whom, in my judgment, he had no business relinquishing in the first place."

Entering a squalid side street, they pulled up before a clumsy three-storey apartment house of dappled stone. A pilastered doorway had somehow survived the war. To one side of it, at street level, a neon-lit textiles shop displayed a lacklustre range of women's dresses. A sign above it said "wholesale only."

"Press the upper bell," Litvak advised. "Two rings, a pause, a third ring, he will come. They gave him a room above the business." Kurtz clambered out. "Good luck, okay? Really good luck."

Litvak watched Kurtz storm across the street. He watched him thrusting along the pavement at his rolling pace, too fast, then halt too hastily at the shabby doorway. He saw his thick arm lift to the bell and the door open a moment afterwards, as if someone had been waiting just behind it, and he supposed someone had. He saw Kurtz square his feet and lower his shoulders to embrace a slimmer man; he saw the arms of his host fold round him in a brisk, soldierly greeting. The door closed, Kurtz was inside.

Driving slowly back through the city, Litvak glowered at everything he saw on his way, externalising his jealousy: Berlin as a place of hatred for him, an inherited enemy for all time; Berlin where terror had its spawning ground, then and now. His destination was a cheap pension where no one seemed to sleep, himself included. By five to seven, he was back in the side street where he had left Kurtz. He pressed the bell, waited, and heard slow footsteps, one pair. The door opened and Kurtz stepped gratefully into the morning air, then stretched himself. He was unshaven and had removed his tie.

"Well?" Litvak asked, as soon as they were inside the car.

"Well what?"

"What did he say? Will he do it, or does he want to stay peacefully in Berlin and learn to make dresses for a bunch of Polish campniks?"

Kurtz seemed genuinely surprised. He was in the midst of that gesture which had so fascinated Alexis, the one that brought his old wristwatch into his line of sight, while he shoved back his left sleeve with his hand. But, hearing Litvak's question, he abandoned it. "Do it? He's an Israeli officer, Shimon." Then he smiled so warmly that Litvak, taken by surprise, smiled in return. "First, I admit, Gadi said he would prefer to continue to study his new trade in its many aspects. So we talked about that fine mission he made across Suez in '63. Then he said the plan wouldn't work, so we discussed in detail the inconveniences of living under cover in Tripoli and maintaining a network of extremely mercenary Libyan agents there-a thing Gadi did for three years, I seem to remember. Then he said, 'Get a younger man,' which nobody ever meant seriously, and we recalled his many night raids into Jordan and the limitations of military action against guerrilla targets, a point on which I had his full agreement. After that, we discussed the strategy. What else?"

"And the similarity? Is enough? His height, his face?"

"The similarity is enough," Kurtz replied as his features hardened into their old lines. "We work on it, it's enough. Now leave him alone, Shimon, or you'll make me love him too much."

Then he put aside his gravity and broke out laughing until tears of relief and tiredness were running down his cheeks. Litvak laughed also and, with laughter, felt his envy disappear. These sudden, rather crazy weather changes were deep in Litvak's nature, where many irreconcilable factors played their part. His name meant originally "Jew from Lithuania" and was once derogatory. How did he see himself? One day as a twenty-four-year-old kibbutz orphan without a known relation alive, another as the adopted child of an American Orthodox foundation and the Israeli special forces. On another again, as God's devoted policeman, cleaning the world up.

He played the piano wonderfully.

Of the kidnapping, little need be said. With an experienced team, such things happen fast and almost ritualistically these days, or not at all. Only the potential scale of the catch gave it its nervy quality. There was no messy shooting or unpleasantness, just a straight appropriation of one wine-red Mercedes car and its occupant, the driver, some thirty kilometres on the Greek side of the Turkish-Greek border. Litvak commanded the field team and, as always in the field, he was excellent.

Kurtz, back in London again to solve a sudden crisis that had blown up in Schwili's Literacy Committee, sat out the critical hours beside a telephone in the Israeli Embassy. The two Munich boys, having duly reported the return of the hire car with no substitute in sight, followed Yanuka to the airport and, sure enough, the next anyone heard of him was three days later in Beirut, when an audio crew operating from a cellar in the Palestinian quarter picked up his cheerful voice saying hullo to his sister Fatmeh, who worked at one of the revolutionary offices. He was in town for a couple of weeks to visit friends, he said; did she have an evening free? He sounded really happy, they reported: headlong, excited, passionate. Fatmeh, however, was cool. Either her approval of him was lukewarm, they said, or she knew her phone was tapped. Maybe both. In either case, brother and sister failed to meet.

He was picked up again when he arrived by air in Istanbul, where he checked into the Hilton on a Cypriot diplomatic passport and for two days gave himself to the religious and secular pleasures of the town. The followers described him as taking one last good draught of Islam before returning to the Christian commons of Europe. He visited the Mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent, where he was seen to pray no less than three times, and afterwards to have his Gucci shoes polished once, on the grassy promenade that runs beside the South Wall. Also he drank several glasses of tea there with two quiet men who were photographed but never afterwards identified: a false scent, as it turned out, and not the contact they were waiting for. And he drew quite extraordinary amusement from the sight of some old men with an air-rifle who were gathered at the kerbside taking turns shooting feathered darts into a target drawn on a cardboard box. He wanted to join in, but they wouldn't let him.

In the gardens of Sultan Ahmed Square he sat on a bench among the orange and mauve flower beds, gazing benignly at the surrounding domes and minarets that made the perimeter, and also at the clusters of giggling American tourists, particularly a group of teenage girls in shorts. But something held him back from approaching them, which would have been his normal practice-to chat and laugh his way among them until they accepted him. He bought slides and postcards from the child hawkers without caring about their outrageous prices; he wandered round the Saint Sophia, contemplating with equal pleasure the glories of Justinian's Byzantium and of the Ottoman conquest; and he was heard to let out a cry of frank amazement at the sight of columns dragged all the way from Baalbek in the country he had so recently relinquished.

But his most devout concentration was reserved for the mosaic of Augustine and Constantine presenting their church and city to the Virgin Mary, for that was where he made his clandestine connection: with a tall, unhurried man in a windjacket who at once became his guide. Until then Yanuka had resolutely refused such offers, but something this man now said to him-added no doubt to the place and time of his approach-persuaded him immediately. Side by side, they made a second, cursory tour of the interior, dutifully admired the early unsupported dome, then drove together along the Bosphorus in an old American Plymouth, till they came to a car park close to the Ankara highway. The Plymouth drove off; Yanuka was once more alone in the world-but this time as owner of a fine red Mercedes car, which he calmly took back to the Hilton and registered with the concierge as his own.

Yanuka did not go out on the town that night-not even to watch the belly dancers who had so enchanted him the night before-and the next sighting of him was very early the following day as he set off westward on the dead straight road that leads over the plains towards Edirne and Ipsala. At first the day was misty and cool and the horizons close. He stopped in a small town for coffee, and photographed a stork nesting on the dome of a mosque. He climbed a mound and relieved himself, watching the sea. The day grew hotter, the dull hills turned red and yellow, the sea ran between them to his left. On such a road, the followers had no choice but to ride him astride, as it is called, with one car far out ahead, and another far behind, hoping to God he would not plunge into some unmarked side turning, which he was quite capable of. But the deserted nature of the place gave them no option, for the only signs of life for miles at a time were tented gypsies and young shepherds and an occasional surly man in black whose life seemed taken up with studying the phenomenon of motion. Reaching Ipsala, he fooled everybody by preferring the right fork into town instead of continuing to the border. Was he going to hand over the car? God forbid! Then what the hell did he want in a stinking little Turkish border town?

The answer was God. In an undistinguished mosque in the main square, at the very edge of Christendom, Yanuka once more commended himself to Allah, which, as Litvak said grimly afterwards, was wise of him. Emerging, he was bitten by a small brown dog, which escaped before he could retaliate. That too was seen to be an omen.

Finally, to everyone's relief, he returned to the main road. The frontier crossing there is a hostile little place. Turk and Greek do not meet easily. The area is mined indiscriminately on both sides; terrorists and contrebandiers of all kinds have their illegal routes and purposes; shootings are common and seldom spoken of; the Bulgarian border runs just a few miles north. A sign on the Turkish side says "have a good trip" in English, but there is no kind word for departing Greeks. First come the Turkish insignia, mounted on a military board, next a bridge over slack green water, next a nervous little queue for the Turkish emigration formalities, which Yanuka tried to bypass on the strength of his diplomatic passport; and indeed succeeded, thus hastening his own destruction. Next, sandwiched between the Turkish police station and the Greek sentries, comes a no-man's-land of twenty yards or so, where Yanuka brought himself a bottle of duty-free vodka and ate an ice-cream in the cafe, watched by a dreamy-looking, long-haired lad called Reuven, who had been eating buns there for the last three hours. The final Turkish flourish is a great bronze bust of Ataturk, the visionary and decadent, glowering into the hostile Greek plains. As soon as Yanuka had passed this, Reuven hopped onto his motorcycle and transmitted a five-dot signal to Litvak, who was waiting thirty kilometres inside the Greek border-but outside the military area-at a point where traffic had to slow to a walking pace because of construction work. He then hurried to join the fun.

They used a girl, which was common sense considering Yanuka's proven appetites, and they gave her a guitar, which was a nice touch because these days a guitar legitimises a girl even if she can't play it. A guitar is the uniform of a certain soulful peaceability, as their recent observations in another quarter had reminded them. They havered about whether to use a blonde girl or a brunette, knowing his preference for blondes, but aware also that he was always ready to make an exception. In the end they came down in favour of the dark girl, on the grounds that she had the better backside and the saucier walk, and they posted her where the road works ended. The road works were a godsend. They believed that. Some of them even believed that God-the Jewish one-rather than Kurtz or Litvak, was master-minding their entire luck.

First there was tarmac; then without warning there were the coarse blue chippings the size of golf balls but a lot more jagged. Then came the wooden ramp with yellow scarecrow lights blip-ping along it, speed limit ten kilometres and only a madman would have done more. Then came the girl on the other side of the ramp, plodding along the pedestrian walkway. Keep moving just as you are, they said: don't tart around, but trail your left thumb. Their only real worry was that because the girl was so pretty she might hole up with the wrong man before Yanuka appeared to claim her. A particularly helpful feature of the spot was the way the sparse traffic was separated by a temporary divide. There was about a fifty-yard wasteland between the eastbound and westbound lanes, with builders' huts and tractors and every kind of junk spread over it. They could have hidden a whole regiment in there without a soul being the wiser. Not that they were a regiment. The team was seven strong, including Shimon Litvak and the decoy girl. Gavron the Rook would not allow a penny more. The other five were lightly dressed kids in summer rig and track-shoes, the sort who can stand about all day staring at their fingernails with no one ever asking why they don't speak. Then flash into action like pike, before returning to their lethargic contemplations.

The time was by now mid-morning; the sun was high, the air dusty. The rest of the traffic consisted of grey lorries laden with some kind of lime or clay. The polished wine-red Mercedes-not new, but handsome enough-stood out in such company like a wedding car sandwiched between rubbish trucks. It hit the blue chip at thirty kilometres an hour, which was too fast, then braked as the rocks started popping against the underbody. It mounted the ramp at twenty, slowing to fifteen, then ten, and as it passed the girl everybody saw Yanuka's head turn to check whether the front of her was as good as the back. It was. He drove for another fifty yards till he reached the tarmac, and for a bad moment Litvak was convinced he would have to invoke the fallback plan, a more elaborate affair that involved a second team and a faked road accident a hundred kilometres on. But lust, or nature, or whatever it is that makes fools of us, had its way. Yanuka pulled up and lowered his electric window, poked out his handsome young head, and, full of life's fun, watched the girl walk luxuriously towards him through the sunlight. As she drew alongside, he enquired of her whether she intended to walk all the way to California. She replied, also in English, that she was heading "kind of vaguely" for Thessalonika-was he? According to the girl, he replied "As vaguely as you like," but no one else heard him and it was one of those things that are always disputed after an operation. Yanuka himself flatly denied that he had said anything at all, so perhaps the girl romanced a little in her triumph. Her eyes, her features altogether, were really most alluring, and her slow enticing motion claimed his complete attention. What more could a good Arab boy ask, after two weeks of austere political re-training in the southern hills of Lebanon, than this beguiling jeans-clad vision from the harem?

It must be added that Yanuka was slim and extremely dashing in appearance, with fine Semitic looks that matched her own, and that there was an infectious gaiety about him. Consequently a mutual scenting resulted, of the kind that can take place instantly between two physically attractive people, where they actually seem to share a mirror image of themselves making love. The girl set down her guitar and, true to orders, wriggled her way out of her rucksack and dumped it gratefully on the ground. The effect of this gesture of undressing, Litvak had argued, would be to force him to do one of two things: either to open the back door from inside, or else get out of the car and unlock the boot from outside. In either case he would lay himself open to attack. In some Mercedes models, of course, the boot lock can be operated from inside. Not in this one. Litvak knew that. Just as he knew for certain that the boot was locked; and that there was no point in offering him the girl on the Turkish side of the border because-however good his papers might be, and by Arab standards they were held to be quite good-Yanuka would not be stupid enough to compound the risk of a frontier crossing by taking aboard unattested lumber.

In the event, he selected the course they had all voted most desirable. Instead of simply reaching back an arm and unlocking one door manually, which he could have done, he chose, perhaps in order to impress, to operate the central locking device, thereby releasing not one but all four doors together. The girl opened the rear door nearest her and, remaining outside, shoved her rucksack and guitar onto the back seat. By the time she had closed the door again, and started on her languid journey towards the front, as if to sit beside him in the passenger seat, one man had a pistol to Yanuka's temple while Litvak himself, looking his most frail, was kneeling on the back seat holding Yanuka's head from behind in a most murderous and well-informed grip, while he administered the drug that, as he had been earnestly assured, was the best suited to Yanuka's medical record: there had been worry about his asthma in adolescence.

The thing that struck everyone afterwards was the soundlessness of the operation. Even while he waited for the drug to take its effect, Litvak distinctly heard the snap of a pair of sunglasses above the rumpus of the passing traffic, and for a dreadful moment feared it was Yanuka's neck, which would have ruined everything. At first they thought he had somehow contrived to forget or shed the false number plates and papers for his onward journey, till they found them to their pleasure neatly fitted into his smart black grip, under several handmade silk shirts and flashy ties, all of which they were obliged to appropriate for their own purposes, together with his fine gold watch by Cellini and his linked gold bracelet and the gold-plated charm that Yanuka liked to wear against his heart, believed to be a gift from his beloved sister Fatmeh. Another glory of the operation-not of anyone's devising but Yanuka's-was that the target car had heavily smoked windows to prevent the common people from seeing what goes on inside. This was the first of many instances of the way in which Yanuka became the fatal victim of his own plush lifestyle. To spirit the car west and then southward after this was no headache; they could probably have driven it quite normally without a soul noticing. But for safety's sake they had hired a lorry purportedly conveying bees to a new home. There is quite a trade in bees in that region, Litvak reasoned sensibly, and even the most inquisitive policeman thinks twice before intruding upon their privacy.

The only really unforeseen element was the dog-bite; what if the brute had rabies? Somewhere they bought some serum, and injected him just in case.

With Yanuka temporarily removed from society, the vital thing was to make sure nobody, in Beirut or anywhere else, noticed the gap. They knew already that he was of an independent and carefree nature. They knew he made a cult of doing the illogical thing, that he was celebrated for altering his plans from one second to the next, partly on a whim, and partly because he believed with reason that this was the best way to confuse his trail. They knew of his recently acquired passion for things Greek, and his proven habit of chasing off in search of antiquities while in transit. On his last run, he had gone as far south as Epidaurus without so much as a by-your-leave from anyone-a great arc, right off his route, for no known reason. These random practices had in the past rendered him extremely hard to catch. Used against him, as now, he was in Litvak's cool judgment unsavable, for his own side could keep no better check on him than his enemies. The team seized him and wafted him from view. The team waited. And in all the places where it was able to listen, not one alarm bell rang, there was not a whisper of unease. If Yanuka's masters had a vision of him at all, Shimon Litvak cautiously concluded, then it was of a young man in his prime of mind and body, gone off in search of life, and-who knows?-new soldiers for the cause.

So the fiction, as Kurtz and his team now called it, could begin. Whether it could also end-whether there was time, by Kurtz's old steel watch, for it to unfold as he determined-that was another matter altogether. The pressures upon Kurtz were of two kinds: the first, crudely enough, was to show progress or have Misha Gavron close his shop. The second was Gavron's threat that if no such progress was forthcoming, he would no longer be able to hold back the mounting outcry for a military solution. Kurtz dreaded this.

"You preach at me like the English!" Gavron the Rook squawked at him in his cracked voice, during one of their frequent arguments. "And look at their crimes!"

"So maybe we should bomb the English too," Kurtz suggested, with a furious smile.

But the subject of the English was by then not coincidental; for ironically it was to England that Kurtz was now looking for his salvation.