The Unquiet heart

TWENTY ONE

I met Vic as arranged at nine o’clock the next morning. It was drizzling but warm. Before going inside I checked out the cafй as best I could through the steamed-up windows, and saw no one I didn’t want to meet. I entered and added my own cigarette smoke to the cosy fug. I took a seat with my back to the wall and easy access to the kitchen and the back exit, and waited. The radio warbled away in the background. Four other customers sipped at their coffees and pulled at their fags.

Vic arrived and shook off the rain from his mac. He looked a wee bit happier this morning.

“OK, the deal’s on,” he started.

“You mean we’re forgiven?” I asked.

He sat back and lit up. “Even the Pope wouldn’t forgive you for what you did to my car. But seems the Army’s prepared to draw a line under this. Toby wants you out of his hair ASAP.”

“And Eve?”

“Bit more awkward there. She might have to travel separately. Under guard. Our MPs will escort her back. She is a Nazi spy, you know. Not to mention knocking off a senior Russian administrator in Berlin.”

“She’s not a Nazi anything! She’s a Jew. She was forced into working for these bastards to keep her parents safe. Fat lot of good that did. And she was a double. She worked for MI5.”

“Quiet, man,” Vic hissed. “Keep it down. So – I might have got it a bit wrong.

Nobody tells me anything, you know. I’m only a bleedin’ corporal at the end of the day. I’m telling you what Toby told me.”

“Well, you can tell Toby to stuff his offer! I’m going back with Eve and without a bloody escort of Redcaps, or not at all. Maybe we’ll talk to the Americans, or find our own way home.”

“All right, all right. I get the picture. But I wouldn’t count the Yanks as pals, if I were you.”

“Oh, why not?”

“Let’s just say they’re as pissed off about the uproar as we are. You don’t understand how big this guy Mulder was… Danny? Are you listening?”

“Shut up.” I’d caught something on the radio. More details were coming over. A bomb. A big one. In Jerusalem.

“Thought you couldn’t speak the lingo, Danny?” Vic nodded at the radio where a newscaster was excitedly reporting the event in German. “Danny? Where the fuck are you going?”

I was already out of my seat and heading for the door. “I’ll be in touch, Vic.”

I shouted.

It was tipping down. The rain drummed across the pavements and settled the dust on the bomb sites. The streets were filthy rivers. I splashed my way through and arrived at the building, panting and soaked to the skin. The door to the flat was open. Eve was sitting in the gloom listening to the BBC’s half-hourly newsflashes. Her face was strained and she’d been crying. She looked up at me and away.

“Was this the story, Eve? Was this what Gideon meant?”

She didn’t reply. She just looked at me like I was on the other side of the river Hades. The living side.

“Eve! Answer me! Are we in even more shit?”

Slowly she focused on my face. Her voice was light, mocking. “We? You and me? I think not. This isn’t your fight. Whereas – we – me and the other Shylocks, are in trouble again.”

By coincidence, the announcer was tolling the news. “Jerusalem is in shock – scenes of devastation – massive bomb attack – the King David Hotel has partly collapsed – dead and missing now over fifty and expected to rise – among the dead are many British, Arab and Jewish workers – no warning…”

“No warning?!” I asked.

She snapped at me. “Of course there was a warning! That was the plan. We wanted them out of there and then the bomb was to go off. It was to show them what we could do. The French embassy got their warning. They listened. No one got hurt.”

“Are you saying the British were warned but didn’t buy it? They ignored it? Is that what you’re saying?!”

“Stop shouting! I don’t know!”

At least she was engaged. Her face was blotched with anger. There was a growing pool of water round my feet. I went to dry myself, and came back wearing a towel. I sat at the table and drew on a fag. We were well into my last pack. Eve was standing looking out the rain-streaked window. The radio was off. She turned to me.

“Danny, it wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Assuming it did.” She nodded at the radio.

“So now you think the BBC is lying?”

“I’m a reporter. Everybody lies. Even your saintly BBC.”

“Why that hotel?”

“It’s the headquarters of the British Protectorate. It was to send a message.

Irgun wanted to let them know they weren’t impregnable. That it would cost them.”

“Seems it has.”

“We didn’t want them killed! There was a warning!”

I raised my hands in acquiescence. “How can you check?”

She took a deep breath. “There is a man with a transmitter. American sector. Out in Grunewald.”

I turned on an electric fire and hung my shirt and trousers in front of it over the back of a chair. We waited an hour till the rain cleared. My clothes were still steaming when I put them on. I looked like I’d just climbed out of a washing machine and hadn’t got as far as the mangle, far less the iron. We stepped into the street. Water lay in huge pools unable to clear from the blocked drains. Vapour swirled across the concrete and rose from the ruins like smoke as the sun poured down. The air smelled like a jungle, wet and fњtid, mixed with the pervasive stench of drains and soaked plaster.

We kept to the back alleys as best we could, heading west. We didn’t speak much.

What was there to say? We eased into the crowd on the Potsdammer Strasse and picked up a crowded bus heading south. If you squinted, it could be Oxford Street: people walking and shopping and chatting in the sun. But the occasional gap or gutted shell jarred. We trundled down Rhein Strasse and into Berliner Strasse. After twenty minutes the buildings began to thin out, and not just because of our bombing. We were coming into a residential area, the suburbs, with individual homes set back from the road among clumps of pine trees.

“This is where the rich live. Used to,” she corrected herself. The damage was less, but an occasional swathe of large houses and pines had been obliterated as though by a giant scythe. We got off the bus in what seemed to be a forest glade, and proceeded on foot down one of the pine-dark avenues. It was much cooler here. The trees were dripping and dank after the rain. The area should have felt luxurious, exclusive; individual villas set in a cool forest, their owners living some Aryan dream. Instead, the homes were crammed side by side in the shade of the heavy trees.

“Why are they all jammed together?”

“Cost of land. Everyone wanted to be here even if they had no elbow room. As long as the next elbow belonged to someone rich.”

“No wonder they liked Hitler’s plans for Lebensraum.”

Studded among the pines the villas were a jumble of styles. Tall rambling wood-clad chateaux next to cubist steel and glass. It was a mess. Many of the houses had boards over the windows and doors. Some had obviously been looted, their entrails hanging out of wrecked windows. We saw no one, though I fancy the odd curtain twitched.

We stopped outside a tall wooden house with a tiny front garden and wood fence.

It must have been a fine home in its heyday. Four storeys, wood-clad with big shutters and a wide porch. I imagined a rocking chair and a glass of beer on a summer evening. We pushed through the gate and walked up the path, and we’d barely begun to climb the steps to the porch when the door crashed open. A skinny, wild-eyed man came out. He wore glasses and a shirt buttoned up to the neck but no tie.

“Ava! Is it you? This is a black day. Who is this? Come in. Quick, now!” His quick-fire German hit us like bullets. He kept casting his eyes about, as if worried what the neighbours might think.

We walked into the hall and he slammed the door behind us. We stood in a slab of light from the glass panel above the door. The house smelled of cabbages and death.

“So, it’s true, Willi?” she asked.

“Who is this, Ava?” He pointed at me.

“A friend. A good friend. He saved us. Gideon and me. Though…”

“I know, I know. Gideon is dead.”

“Are you sure? He was hit. But he might have…”

Willi was shaking his head. “Ach, you mustn’t hope, Ava. They say he hit the Gate and ended up on the bonnet still shouting at them and firing at them. They shot him to pieces.” Her face melted. “It was quick.”

Willi suddenly slid past us like a ferret and headed up the stairs. “We have other things now. Come. Begin’s been waiting for you.”

We followed him up to the top floor and into a room where the ceiling angled down and the window was boarded up. There was a desk and two chairs. On the desk glowed a radio transmitter and receiver with headphones and a microphone. Willi made straight for it and began to tune it. He turned the volume up and the set hummed and warbled. At last there was a steady pitch.

“Come in, Menachem, come in. Menachem, this is Willi calling.” He spoke now in a heavily accented English.

There was a static burst, then, from the loudspeaker, a distant voice. “Willi, this is Menachem. Is she there?” The voice was strong, speaking in English with a guttural mid-European accent: Polish? Russian? “Hold on, Menachem.”

Willi handed over the headphones and seat to Eve. She hooked on the phones and picked up the mike with professional ease.

“Shalom, Menachem, it’s Ava. What happened? Is it true?”

“I made the calls myself. One to the British in the King David. One to the French embassy next door. And one to the press. The British had twenty-five minutes to clear the hotel. They did nothing.”

“Did the French listen?”

“They closed all their shutters.”

“I don’t understand. The British are not stupid.”

“ But they are arrogant. A British officer said we don’t take orders from Jews!

The whole corner of the hotel, above the kitchens, it’s gone. Those idiots!” His voice rose higher and higher with every utterance. Then he broke off.

“Any of our people?” she asked.

“No one in the squad was hurt. It went like clockwork. Such a waste…” He suddenly sounded bone weary.

“Listen, Menachem. We have to act. More than ever we need to get the truth out.

We must tell the world what happened.”

There was silence for a while except for the background hum down the line. “Ava, do you think there is anything we can say that will be believed? Already they are talking of a Jewish massacre. Already they are saying there will be vengeance.”

“It’s all the more important! We must get our story out, Menachem. Tell them we issued a warning.”

His angry voice dripped down the line. “Do you think it matters? So many dead.

Young girls, our own people in the kitchens… Is this the way we build our promised land? There has been so much blood. All we wanted was a scrap of desert. A place we could be safe.”

Eve’s jaw was clenched. She shook her head.

“Menachem, Menachem, we have to try. I’m going to contact our Reuters man. We’ll get the message out. I’ll contact the British press. They’ll listen to me. We have to try.” Her fists were clenched on the table.

“Try, my dear. Try. What is there to lose? Listen, are you safe? Can you get out of there?”

She turned and looked at me. “Don’t worry about me. Shalom, Menachem.”

“Shalom, Ava.”

Eve sat back and took her phones off. She wiped her face and turned to me.

“Willi, do we have a phone? Does it work?”

“Yes, yes. They repaired the lines last week. But I haven’t dared…”

“We must dare, now!” She turned to me. “I’m going to make some calls, Danny. Can you amuse yourself for an hour?”

Eve placed calls with the operator and after a long wait, wonder of wonders, got patched through to New York. She spoke to her man in Reuters, but he seemed to be having a convenient bout of amnesia. He denied all knowledge, denied he knew her, denied the truth as she saw it.

She turned to her radio transmitter. From the world’s radio stations it was clear that the real message wasn’t being picked up. The constant refrain was that the casualty number had risen to eighty and was expected to climb. There was widespread condemnation for this act of evil by these unspeakable terrorists. Eve scrubbed at her hair, her face getting pinker by the minute. At last she flung off her earphones and sat back. We shared our last cigarette.

“I’ve got to get back. I need to see Jim Hutcheson. He’ll listen to me. He’ll print the story.”

I didn’t say anything. Even if she could get through to Hutcheson he wouldn’t believe it. Wouldn’t want to.