John Le Carre - The Little Drummer Girl

Foreword Many Palestinians and Israelis gave me their help and time in the writing of this book. Among the Israelis, I may mention especially my good friends Yuval Elizur of Ma’ariv and his wife, Judy, who read the manuscript, left me with my own judgements, however mistaken, and headed me off from several grave solecisms that I prefer to forget. Other Israelis-in particular, certain past and serving officers of the intelligence fraternity-also deserve my sincere thanks for their advice and cooperation. They too asked for no assurances and scrupulously left me with my independence. I think with special gratitude of General Shlomo Gazit, formerly chief of military intelligence, and now president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, who will always personify for me the enlightened Israeli soldier and scholar of his generation. But there are others whom I may not name. I must also express my gratitude to Mayor Teddy Kollek of Jerusalem for his making everything possible in impossible circumstances, and to Abu Said Abu Rish, doyen of Beirut journalists, for the generosity of his counsel, although he knew nothing of my intentions. Of the Palestinians, some are dead, others are taken prisoner, the rest presumably are for the most part homeless or dispersed. The fighting boys who looked bomb-weary but indomitable refugees of the camps at Rashidiyeh and Nabatiyeh: from what I hear, their fate is little different from that of their reconstructed counterparts in this story. My host in Sidon, the Palestinian military commander Salah Ta’amari, deserves a book to himself, and I hope that one day he will write it. For the present, let this book record his courage, and my thanks to him and his assistants for having shown me the Palestinian heart. Lt.Col. John Gaff,G.M.,acquainted me with the banal horrors of home made Jeremy Cornwallis of Alan Day Ltd., Finchley, cast a professional eye over my red Mercedes car. John le Carr�July 1982 part one the preparation one It was the Bad Godesberg incident that gave the proof, though the German Page 1

authorities had no earthly means of knowing this. Before Bad Godesberg, there had been quality of the bomb, turned the suspicion into certainty. Sooner or later, they say in the trade, a man will sign his name. The vexation lies in the waiting. It exploded much later than intended, probably a good twelve hours later, at twenty-six minutes past eight on Monday morning. Several defunct wristwatches, the property of victims, confirmed the time. As with its predecessors over the last few months, there had been no warning. But then none had been intended. The D�orf car-bombing of a visiting Israeli arms-procurement official had been preceded by no congress in Antwerp, which blew up the honorary secretary and burnt her assistant to death. Neither had the dustbin bomb outside an Israeli bank in Z�which maimed two passers-by. Only the Stockholm bomb had a warning, and that turned out to be a completely different group, not part of the series at all. At twenty-five minutes past eight, the Drosselstrasse in Bad Godesberg had been just another leafy diplomatic backwater, about as far from the political turmoils of Bonn as you could reasonably get while staying within fifteen minutes drive of them. It was a new street but mature, with lush, secretive gardens, and maids’ quarters over the garages, and Gothic security grilles over the bottle-glass windows. The Rhineland diplomatic community, grows almost as fast as the Germans build their roads, and slightly faster than they make their maps. Thus the fronts of some of the houses were already half obscured by dense plantations of conifers, which, if they ever grow to proper size, will presumably one day plunge the whole area into a Grimm’s fairy-tale blackout. These trees turned out to be remarkably effective against blast and, within days of the explosion, one local garden centre had made them a speciality. Several of the houses wear a patently nationalistic look. The Norwegian Ambassador’s residence, for example, just around the corner from the Drosselstrasse,is an austere, red bricked farmhouse lifted straight from the stockbroker hinterlands of Oslo. The Egyptian consulate, up the other end, has the forlorn air of an Alexandrian villa fallen on hard times. Mournful Arab music issues from it, and its windows are permanently shuttered against the skirmishing North African heat. The season was mid-May and the day had started glorious, with blossom and new leaves rocking together in the light breeze. The magnolia trees were just finished and their sad white petals, mostly shed, afterwards became a feature of the d�is. With so much greenery, the bustle of the commuter traffic from the trunk road barely penetrated. The most audible sound until the explosion was the clamour of birds, including several plump doves that had taken a liking to the Australian Military Attache’s mauve wistaria, his pride. A kilometre southward, unseen Rhine barges provided a throbbing, stately hum, but the residents grow deaf to it unless it stops. In short, it was a morning to assure you that whatever calamities you might be reading about in West Germany’s earnest, rather panicky newspapers-depression, inflation, insolvency, unemployment, all the usual and apparently incurable ailments of a massively prosperous capitalist economy-Bad Godesberg was a settled, decent place to be alive in, and Bonn was not half so bad as it is painted. Depending on nationality and rank, some husbands had already left for work, but diplomats are nothing if not clich�of their kind. A melancholy Scandinavian Counsellor, for example, was still in bed, suffering from a hangover brought on by marital stress. A South American charg�clad in a hairnet and Chinese silk dressing-gown, the Page 2

prize of a tour in Peking, was leaning out of the window giving shopping instructions to his Filipino chauffeur. The Italian Counsellor was shaving but naked. He liked to shave after his bath but before his daily exercises. His wife, fully clothed, was already downstairs remonstrating with an unrepentant daughter for returning home late the night before, a dialogue they enjoyed most mornings of the week. An envoy from the Ivory Coast was speaking on the international telephone, advising his masters of his latest efforts to wring development aid out of an increasingly reluctant German exchequer. When the line went dead, they thought he had hung up on them, and sent him an acid telegram enquiring whether he wished to resign. The Israeli Labour Attach�ad left more than an hour ago. He was not at ease in Bonn and as best he could he liked to work Jerusalem hours. So it went, with a lot of rather cheap ethnic jokes finding a basis in reality and death. Somewhere in every bomb explosion there is a miracle, and in this case it was supplied by the American School bus, which had just come and gone again with most of the community’s younger children who congregated every school-day in the turning-circle not fifty metres from the epicentre. By a mercy none of the children had forgotten his homework, none had overslept or shown resistance to education on this Monday morning, so the bus got away on time. The rear windows shattered, the driver went side-winding into the verge, a French girl lost an eye, but essentially the children escaped scot-free, which was afterwards held to be a deliverance. For that also is a feature of such explosions, or at least of their immediate aftermath: a communal, wild urge to celebrate the living, rather than to waste time mourning the dead. The real grief in such cases comes later when the shock wears off, usually after several hours, though occasionally less. The actual noise of the bomb was not a thing people remembered, not if they were close. Across the river in K�swinter,they heard a whole foreign war and drifted around shaken and half deaf, grinning at each other like accomplices in survival. Those accursed diplomats, they told each other, what could you expect? Pack the lot of them off to Berlin where they can spend our taxes in peace! But those at hand heard at first nothing whatever. All they could speak of, if they could speak at all, was the road tipping, or a chimney-stack silently lifting off the roof across the way, or the gale ripping through their houses, how it stretched their skin, thumped them, knocked them down, blew the flowers out of the vases and the vases against the wall. They remembered the tinkling of falling glass all right, and the timid brushing noise of the young foliage hitting the road. And the mewing of people too frightened to scream. So that clearly they were not so much unaware of noise as blasted out of their natural senses. There were also several references by witnesses to the din of the French Counsellor’s kitchen radio howling out a recipe for the day. One wife, believing herself to be rational, wanted to know from the police whether it was possible that the blast had turned up the radio’s volume. In an explosion, the officers replied gently as they led her away in a blanket, anything was possible, but in this case the explanation was different. With all the glass blown out of the French Counsellor’s windows, and with no one inside in a condition to turn the radio off, there was nothing to stop it from talking straight into the street. But she didn’t really understand. The press was soon there, of course, straining at the cordons, and the first enthusiastic reports killed eight and wounded thirty and laid the blame on a dotty German right-wing organisation calledNibelungen5, which consisted of two mentally retarded boys and one mad old man, who could not have blown up a balloon. By midday the press had been forced to scale their bag down to five dead, one of them Israeli, four critically injured, and twelve others in hospital for this and that, and they were talking of the Italian Red Page 3

Brigades, for which, once more, there was not a shred of proof. Next day they did another turnabout and gave the credit to Black September. The day after that, credit for the outrage was claimed by a group calling itself the Palestine Agony, which laid convincing claim to the previous explosions also. But Palestine Agony stuck, even if it was less of a name for the perpetrators than an explanation for their action. And as such it worked, for it was duly taken up as a headline for many ponderous leading articles. Of the non-Jews who died, one was the Italians’ Sicilian cook, another their Filipino chauffeur. Of the four injured, one was the wife of the Israeli Labour Attach�n whose house the bomb had exploded. She lost a leg. The dead Israeli was their small son Gabriel. But the intended victim, it was afterwards widely concluded, was neither of these people, but rather an uncle of the Labour Attache’s injured wife who was here on a visit from Tel Aviv: a Talmudic scholar who was mildly celebrated for his hawkish opinions regarding the rights of Palestinians on the West Bank. In a word, he believed they should have none, and said so loud and often, in stark defiance of the opinions of his niece the Labour Attache’s wife, who was of Israel’s liberated left, and whose kibbutz upbringing had not prepared her for the rigorous luxury of diplomatic life. If Gabriel had been on the school bus, he would have been safe, but Gabriel was on that day, as on many others, unwell. He was a troubled, hyperactive child who till now had been regarded as a discordant element in the street, particularly during the siesta period. But, like his mother, he was gifted musically. Now, with perfect naturalness, no one in the street could remember a child they had loved more. A right-wing German tabloid, brimming with pro-Jewish sentiment, dubbed him “the Angel Gabriel”-a title that, unknown to its editors, did service in both religions-and for a full week ran invented stories of his saintliness. The quality papers echoed the sentiment. Christianity, one star commentator declared-quoting without attribution from Disraeli-was completed Judaism concerned Germans felt much better for knowing this. Thousands of marks, unsolicited, were sent in by readers and had to be disposed of somehow. There was talk of a Gabriel memorial, but very little talk of the other dead. In accordance with Jewish tradition, sick to travel, stayed in Bonn until her husband could accompany her, and they could sit shiva together in Jerusalem. By early afternoon of the day of the explosion, a six-man team of Israeli experts had flown in from Tel Aviv. On the German side, the controversial Dr. Alexis, of the Ministry of the Interior, was imprecisely charged with the investigation, and made the airport pilgrimage to meet them. Alexis was a clever, foxy creature who had suffered all his life from being ten centimetres shorter than most of his fellow men. As a compensation for this handicap, perhaps, he was also headstrong: in both his private and official lives, controversy attached to him easily. He was partly lawyer, partly security officer, partly power-player, as the Germans breed them these days, with salty liberal convictions not always welcome to the Coalition, and an unfortunate weakness for airing them on television. His father, it was vaguely understood, had been some kind of resister against the Hitler thing, and the mantle, in these altered times, fitted the erratic son uncomfortably. Certainly there were those in Bonn’s glass palaces who found him twenty years his junior, had done little to improve their view of him. If it had been anybody else arriving, Alexis would not have bothered with the airport at all-there was to be no press coverage of the event-but relations between Israel and the Federal Republic were going through a trough, so he bowed to Ministry pressure Page 4

and went. Against his wishes, they saddled him at the last minute with a slow-mannered Silesian policeman from Hamburg, a proclaimed conservative and tortoise, who had made a name for himself in the field of “student control” in the seventies and was accounted a great expert on troublemakers and their bombs. The other excuse was that he went down well with Israelis, though Alexis, like everyone else, knew he was there primarily as a counterweight to himself. More important, perhaps, in the fraught climate of the day, both Alexis and the Silesian were unbelastet,meaning that neither was old enough to bear the remotest responsibility for what Germans sadly refer to as their unconquered past. Whatever was being done to Jews today, Alexis and his unwished-for Silesian colleague press, with guidance from Alexis, made a point of all this. Only one editorial suggested that as long as the Israelis persisted in their indiscriminate bombing of Palestinian camps and villages-killing not one child but dozens at a time-they must reckon on this type of barbaric reprisal. A white-hot, if slightly muddled, retort from the Israeli Embassy’s Press Officer was run hastily the next day. Since 1961, he wrote, the State of Israel had been under constant attack from Arab terrorism. The Israelis would not kill a single Palestinian anywhere if only they could be left in peace. Gabriel had died for one reason only: because he was a Jew. The Germans might possibly remember that Gabriel was not alone in this. If they had forgotten the Holocaust, perhaps they recalled the Munich Olympics of ten years ago? The editor closed the correspondence and took a day off. The anonymous Air Force plane from Tel Aviv landed on the far side of the airfield, clearance formalities were waived, and collaboration began at once, a night-and-day affair. Alexis was under pressing orders to deny the Israelis nothing, but such orders were superfluous: he was philosemitisch and known for it. He had made his obligatory “liaison” visit to Tel Aviv and been photographed with bowed head at the Holocaust Museum. As to the ponderous Silesian-well, as he did not tire of reminding everyone who would listen to him, they were all looking for the same enemy, weren’t they? The Reds, clearly. By the fourth day, though the results of many enquiries were still outstanding, the joint working party had put together a convincing preliminary picture of what had happened. In the first place, it was common ground that no special security watch had been kept on the target house, nor by the terms of the agreement between the Embassy and the Bonn security authorities was any provided for. The Israeli Ambassador’s residence, three streets away, was protected round the clock. A green police caravan too young to be troubled by the historical ironies of their presence dutifully patrolled the gardens with submachine guns. The Ambassador also rated a bullet-proof car and an escort of police outriders. He was an ambassador, after all, as well as a Jew, and here in house came under the general protection of the mobile diplomatic patrol, and all that could be said was that as an Israeli house it was certainly a subject of particular vigilance, as the police logs showed. As a further precaution, the addresses of Israeli staff were not printed in official diplomatic lists for fear of encouraging the impulsive gesture at a time when Israel was being a little hard to take. Politically. At just after eight o’clock that Monday morning, the Labour Attach�nlocked his garage and, as usual, inspected the hubcaps of his car, as well as the underparts of Page 5

the chassis, with the aid of a mirror fixed to a broom handle issued to him for the purpose. His wife’s uncle, who was riding with him, confirmed this. The Labour Attach�ooked under the driving seat before he turned on the ignition. Since the bombing had started, these precautions had become mandatory to all foreign-based Israeli personnel. He knew, as they all knew, that it takes about forty seconds to pack an ordinary commercial hubcap with explosive and less time than that to stick a limpet bomb under the petrol tank. He knew, as they all knew-he had had it dinned into him ever since his belated recruitment to diplomacy-that a lot of people would like to blow him up. He read the newspapers and telegrams. Satisfied that the car was clean, he said goodbye to his wife and son and drove to work. In the second place, the family’s au pair girl, a Swede of impeccable record named Elke,had the day before begun a week’s holiday in the Westerwald with her equally impeccable German boyfriend, Wolf, who was on leave from the Bundeswehr. Wolf had fetched Elke on Sunday afternoon in his open Volkswagen car, and anybody passing the house or keeping watch could have seen her emerge from the front door dressed in her going-away clothes, kiss little Gabriel goodbye, and set off with cheerful waves to the Labour Attach�ho remained on the doorstep to see her leave, while his wife, an impassioned grower of green vegetables, continued her work in the rear garden. Elke had been with them for a year or more, and, in the words of the Labour Attach�he was a well-loved member of the household. These two factors-the absence of the well-loved au pair and the absence of a police check-made the attack possible. What made it succeed was the fatal good nature of the Labour Attach�imself. At six o’clock on the same Sunday evening-two hours after Elke’s departure therefore-while the Labour Attach�as wrestling at religious conversation with his house guest and his wife was wistfully tilling German soil, the front doorbell rang. One ring. As always, the Labour Attach�ooked through the peep-hole before opening. As always, he armed himself with his service revolver while he peeped, through in theory the local restrictions forbade him any firearm. But all he saw in the fisheye lens was a blonde girl of around twenty-one or two, rather frail and affecting, standing on the doorstep beside a scuffed grey suitcase with Scandinavian Airline Systems labels tied to the handle. A taxi-or was it a private saloon car?—waited in the street behind her, and he could hear its engine running. Definitely. He even thought he heard the tick of a faulty magneto as well, but that was later, when he was clutching at straws. She was a really nice girl as he described her, ethereal and sporty both at once, with summer freckles-Sommersprossen-round her nose. Instead of the usual drab uniform of jeans and blouse, she wore a demure blue dress buttoned to the throat and a silk headscarf, white or cream, which set off her gold hair and-as he readily confessed at the first heart-rending interview-flattered his simple taste for respectability. Replacing his service revolver in the top drawer of the hall chest, therefore, he unchained the door to her and beamed because she was charming, and because he himself was shy and over-large. All this, still, at the first interview. The Talmudic uncle saw nothing and heard nothing. As a witness, he was useless. From the moment he was left alone, with the door closed on him, he seems to have immersed himself in a commentary on the Mishna, in accordance with the general injunction upon him never to waste his time. number of accents on him, but the northern seaboard was as near as they could get. She enquired first whether Elke was at home, calling her not Elke but “Ucki”, a pet name used by close friends only. The Labour Attach�xplained that she had departed on holiday two Page 6

hours ago: what a shame, but could he help? The girl expressed mild disappointment and said she would drop by another time. She had just arrived from Sweden, she said, and had promised Elke’s mother she would deliver this suitcase containing some clothes and gramophone records. The gramophone records were a particularly neat touch, since Elke was mad about pop. The Labour Attach�y this time had insisted she step into the house and had even, in his innocence, picked up the suitcase for her and carried it across the threshold, a thing for which all his life he would never forgive himself. Yes, he had of course read the many exhortations about never accepting parcels delivered by Katrin, from her home town in Sweden, who had received the suitcase from her mother that very day! It was slightly heavier than he had expected, but he put this down to the gramophone records. When he remarked to her solicitously that it must have used up all her luggage allowance, Katrin explained that Elke’s mother had driven her to Stockholm Airport in order to pay the overweight. The suitcase was of the hard-walled type, he noticed, and felt tightly packed as well as heavy. No-no movement as he lifted it, he was sure. A brown label, a fragment, survived. He offered the girl a coffee but she declined, saying that she must not keep her driver waiting. Not taxi. Driver. The point was laboured to death by the investigating team. He asked her what she was doing in Germany and she replied that she hoped to enroll as a theological student at Bonn University. He hunted excitedly for a telephone pad, then for a pencil, and invited her to leave her name and address, but she gave them back to him, saying with a smile, “Just tell her ‘Katrin’ and she’ll know.” She was staying at a Lutheran hostel for girls, she explained, but only while she looked for rooms. (Such a hostel exists in Bonn, another nice touch of accuracy.) She would come by again when Elke was back from holiday, she said. Maybe they could spend her birthday together. She hoped so. She really did. The Labour Attach�uggested they might make a party for Elke and her friends-maybe a cheese fondue, which he could prepare by himself. For my wife-as he afterwards explained with pathetic repetition-is a kibbutznik, sir, and has no patience with fine cooking. About here, from the direction of the street, the car or taxi started hooting. Pitch around middle C, several light short blasts, about three. They shook hands, and she gave him the key. Here the Labour Attach�oticed for the first time that the girl was wearing white cotton gloves, but she was that kind of girl and it was a sticky day for carrying a heavy suitcase. No handwriting on the pad, therefore, and no fingerprints on the pad or the suitcase either. Or on the key. The entire exchange had taken, the poor man later estimated, five minutes. Not more, because of the driver. The Labour Attach�atched her down the path-a nice style of walking, sexy but not deliberately provocative. He closed and chained the door conscientiously, then took the suitcase to Elke’s room, which was on the ground floor, and laid it on the foot of her bed, thinking loyally that by leaving it flat he was being kinder on the clothes and records. He put the key on top of it. From the garden, where she was implacably breaking hard ground with a hoe, his wife had heard nothing, and when she came indoors to rejoin the two men, her husband forgot to tell her. Here a small and very human revision intruded. Forgot?the Israeli team asked him incredulously. How do you forget a whole passage of domestic bother about Elke’s friend from Sweden? The suitcase lying on the bed? The Labour Attach�roke down again as he admitted it. No, he had not forgotten exactly. Then what? they asked. Page 7

It was more-it seemed-that he had decided-in his lonely, inward way-that, well, that social matters had really ceased to interest his wife at all, sir. All she wanted was to return to her kibbutz and relate freely to people without this diplomatic persiflage. Put another way-well, the girl was so pretty, sir-well, perhaps he would be wiser to keep her to himself. As to the suitcase-well, my wife never goes into Elke’s room, you see-went, I mean-Elke looks after her room herself. And the Talmudic scholar, your wife’s uncle? The Labour Attach�ad told him nothing either. Confirmed by both parties. They wrote it down without comment:Keep her to himself. Here, like a mystery train that abruptly vanishes from the track, the passage of events stopped. The girl Elke,with Wolf gallantly in support, was whisked back to Bonn and knew no Katrin. Investigations into Elke’s social life were launched, but they would take time. Her mother had sent no suitcase, nor would she have dreamed of doing so-she disapproved of her daughter’s low taste in music, she told the Swedish police, and would not think to encourage it. Wolf returned disconsolately to his unit, and was subjected to wearying but directionless questioning by military security. No driver came forward, whether of a taxi or a private car, though he was paged all over Germany by police and press, and offered,in absentia, great sums of money for his story. No suitable traveller from Sweden or anywhere else could be traced through the passenger lists, computers, and memory-storage systems at any German airport, let alone Cologne. The photographs of known and unknown female terrorists, including the entire register of “half-illegals,” rang no bells with the Labour Attach�hough he was demented with grief and would have helped anybody to do anything, if only in order to feel useful himself. He could not remember what shoes the girl had on, or whether she wore lipstick, or scent, or mascara, or whether her hair had looked bleached or could have been a wig. How should he, he implied-he who was by training an economist and in all other respects a shambling, connubial, warm-hearted fellow whose only real interest outside Israel and his family was Brahms-how should he know about women’s hair dye? Yes, he remembered, she had good legs and a very white neck. Long sleeves, yes, or he would have noticed her arms. Yes, a petticoat or something, or he would have seen the shape of her body back-lit by the outdoor sunlight. A bra?—maybe not, she had a small bosom and could have got away without one. Live models were dressed up for him. He must have looked at a hundred different blue dresses sent in from warehouses up and down Germany, but he could not remember for the life of him whether the dress had collar The more they asked him the more he forgot. The usual chance witnesses confirmed parts of his story but added nothing of substance. The police patrols had missed the incident completely, and probably the planting of the bomb was timed that way. The suitcase could have been one of twenty brands. The car or taxi was an Opel or it was a was from Siegburg. Yes, a taxi sign on the roof. No, it was a sunshine roof, and someone had heard music issuing, what programme was not established. Yes, a radio aerial. No, none. The driver was male Caucasian but could be a Turk. The Turks had done it. He was clean-shaven, had a moustache, was dark-haired. No, blond. Slight build, could be a woman in disguise. Somebody was sure there had been a small chimney-sweep dangling in the back window. Or it could have been a sticker. Yes, a sticker. Somebody said the Page 8

driver wore an anorak. Or it could have been a pullover. At this point of stalemate, the Israeli team seemed to go into a kind of collective their Embassy, where they appeared to be receiving new instructions. The days passed and Alexis decided they were waiting for something. Marking time but excited somehow. Urgent but becalmed, the way Alexis himself felt far too often. He had an uncommonly good eye for seeing such things far ahead of his colleagues. When it came to empathising with Jews, he believed that he lived in a kind of vacuum of excellence. On the third day, a broad-faced older man calling himself Schulmann joined their team, accompanied by a very thin sidekick half his age. Alexis likened them to a Jewish Caesar and his Cassius. The arrival of Schulmann and his assistant provided the good Alexis with some rare relief from the controlled fury of his own investigation, and from the tiresomeness of being dogged everywhere by the Silesian policeman, whose manner was beginning to resemble more that of a successor than an assistant. The first thing he observed about Schulmann was that he immediately raised the temperature of the Israeli team. Till Schulmann came, the six men had had an air of incompleteness about them. They had been polite, they had drunk no alcohol, they had patiently spread their nets and preserved among themselves the dark-eyed Oriental cohesion of a fighting unit. Their self-control was discomfiting to those who did not share it, and when, over a quick lunch in the canteen, the ponderous Silesian chose to make jokes about kosher food and patronise them about the beauties of their homeland, allowing himself in passing a grossly insulting reference to the quality of Israeli wine, they received his homage with a courtesy that Alexis knew cost them blood. Even when he went on to discuss the revival of the Jewish Kulturin Germany, and the smart way in which the new Jews had cornered the Frankfurt and Berlin property markets, they still held their tongues, though the financial antics of shtetl Jews who had not answered the call to Israel secretly disgusted them quite as much as the ham-handedness of their hosts. Then, suddenly, with Schulmann’s arrival, everything became clear in a different way. He was the leader they had been waiting for:Schulmann from Jerusalem, his arrival announced a few hours in advance by a puzzled phone call from Headquarters in Cologne. “They’re sending an extra specialist, he’ll make his own way to you.” “Specialist in what?” Alexis had demanded, who made a very un-German point of loathing people with qualifications. Not given. But suddenly there he was-not a specialist, to Alexis’ eye, but a broad-headed, bustling veteran of every battle since Thermopylae, age between forty and ninety, squat and Slav and strong, and far more European than Hebrew, with a barrel your archetypal Dostoevsky student: starved, and in conflict with demons. When Schulmann smiled, the wrinkles that flew into his face had been made by centuries of water flowing down the same rock paths, and his eyes clamped narrow like a Chinaman’s. Then, long after him, his sidekick smiled, echoing some twisted inner meaning. When Schulmann greeted you, his whole right arm swung in on you in a crablike punch fast enough to wind you if you didn’t block it. But the sidekick kept his arms at his sides as if he didn’t trust them out alone. When Schulmann talked, he fired off conflicting ideas like a spread of bullets, then waited to see which ones went home and which came back at him. The sidekick’s voice followed like a stretcher-party, softly collecting up the dead. Page 9

accented English. Just Schulmann. No first name, no rank, no academic title, no branch or occupation, and the student didn’t have a name at all-or not for Germans, anyway. A people’s the same day-the sidekick saw to it. Soon, from behind its closed door, Schulmann’s incessant voice had the tone of an out-of-town attorney, probing and evaluating their work till now. You didn’t have to be a Hebrew scholar to hear the why’s and how’s and when’s and why-not’s. An improviser,thought Alexis: a born urban guerrilla himself. When he was silent, Alexis heard that too, and wondered what the devil he was reading suddenly that was interesting enough to stop his mouth from working. Or were they praying?—did they do that? Unless it was the sidekick’s turn to speak, of course, in which case Alexis would not have heard even a whisper, for the boy’s voice in German company had as little volume as his body. But more than anything else, it was Schulmann’s driven urgency that Alexis felt most strongly. He was a kind of human ultimatum, passing on to his team the pressures that were upon himself, imposing a scarcely bearable desperation on their labours. We can win, but we can also lose, he was saying, in the Doctor’s lively imagination. And we have been too late for too long. Schulmann was their impresario, their manager, their general-all that-but he was himself a much-commanded man. So at least Alexis read him, and he was not always so wrong. He saw it in the hard and questioning way Schulmann’s men looked to him, not for the detail of their work but for its progress-does it help?—is it a step along the road? He saw it in Schulmann’s habitual gesture of cramming back the sleeve of his jacket by grasping his thick left forearm, then twisting his wrist around as if it were someone else’s, until the dial of his old steel watch returned his stare. So Schulmann has a deadline too, thought Alexis: there is a time bomb ticking under him The interplay between the two men fascinated Alexis-a welcome distraction for him in his stress. When Schulmann took a walk around the Drosselstrasse and stood in the precarious ruins of the bombed house, throwing out his arm, expostulating, examining his watch, acting as outraged as if the place had been his own, the sidekick hovered in his shadow like his conscience, with his skeletal hands battened resolutely at his hips, while he seemed to restrain his master with the whispered earnestness of his beliefs. When Schulmann called in the Labour Attach�or one last private word, and the dialogue between them, half heard through the adjoining wall, rose to a scream, then fell to the low murmur of the confessional, it was the sidekick who led the broken man from the room and personally returned him to his Embassy’s care, thus confirming a theory that Alexis had hugged to himself from the start but had been ordered by Cologne on no account to pursue. Everything pointed to it. The zealous, introverted wife dreaming only of her reception of the girl Katrin,practically appointing himself her proxy brother in Elke’s never do so. To Alexis, who had been in similar situations in his day, and was in one now-guilt-torn nerves exposed to every tiny sexual breeze-the signs were written all over the file, and secretly it gratified him that Schulmann had read them too. But if Cologne was adamant on the point, Bonn was nearly hysterical. The Labour Attach�as a public hero: a bereaved father, the husband of a fearfully maimed woman. He was the victim of Page 10

definition as respectable as any Jew yet invented. Who were the Germans, of all people, they begged him to consider, that they should expose such a man as an adulterer? The same night, the distraught Labour Attach�ollowed his child to Israel, and the television news bulletins led nationwide with a shot of his burly back lumbering up the gangway, and the ever-present Alexis, hat in hand, watching him go with stony respect. Some of Schulmann’s activities did not reach the ears of Alexis till after the Israeli team had flown home. He discovered, for instance, almost by accident but not quite, that Schulmann and his sidekick had together sought out the girl Elke independently of the German investigators and had persuaded her, at dead of night, to postpone her departure for Sweden so that the three of them could enjoy an entirely voluntary and well-paid private talk together. They spent another afternoon interviewing her in a hotel bedroom and, in complete contrast to the economy of their social efforts in other fields, blithely rode with her in the taxi to the airport. All this-so Alexis guessed-with the aim of finding out who her real friends were, and where she went to play when her boyfriend was safely restored to the military. And where she bought the marijuana and amphetamines that they had found in the wreck of her room. Or, more likely, who had given them to her, and in whose arms she liked to lie and talk about herself and her employers when she was really turned on and relaxed. Alexis deduced this partly because by now his own people had brought him their confidential report on Elke,and the questions he ascribed to Schulmann were the same ones he would have liked to ask of her himself, if Bonn had not been putting the muzzle on him and screaming “hands off.” No dirt, they kept on saying. Let the grass grow over it first. And Alexis, who was by now fighting for his survival, took the hint and shut up, because with every day that passed the Silesian’s stock was rising to the detriment of his own. All the same, he would have laid good money on the kind of answers that Schulmann in his frantic and remorseless urgency might have coaxed from her between glances at that old sundial of a watch of his-the pen-portrait of the virile Arab student or junior attach�rom the outer diplomatic fringes, for instance-or was he Cuban?—with money to burn and the right little packets of stuff, and an unexpected willingness to listen. Much later, when it was too late to matter, Alexis also learned-by way of the Swedish security service, who had also formed an interest in Elke’s love life-that Schulmann and his sidekick had actually produced, in the small hours while others slept, a collection of photographs of likely candidates. And that from them she had picked one out, an alleged Cypriot whom she had known only by his first name, Marius, which he required her to pronounce in the French manner. And that she had signed a loose statement for them to that effect-“Yes, this is the Marius I slept with”-which, as they gave her to understand, they needed for Jerusalem. Why did they? Alexis wondered. To buy off Schulmann’s deadline somehow? As surety, to whip up credit back at base? Alexis understood these things. And the more he thought about them, the greater became his sense of affinity with Schulmann,of comradely understanding. You and I are one, he kept hearing himself thinking. We struggle, we feel, we see. Alexis perceived all this profoundly, with great self-conviction. The obligatory closing conference took place in the lecture hall, with the ponderous Silesian presiding over three hundred chairs, mostly empty, but among them the two groups, German and Israeli, clustered like nuptial families either side of the church aisle. The Germans were fleshed out with officials from the Ministry of the Interior Page 11

the Embassy with them, but several of their team, including Schulmann’s emaciated sidekick, had already left for Tel Aviv. Or so it was said by his comrades. The rest assembled at eleven in the morning, to be greeted with a buffet table covered with a white cloth on which the tell-tale fragments from the explosion were set out like archaeological finds at the end of a long dig, each with its own little museum label in electric type. On a pegboard wall beside it they could examine the usual horror pictures-in colour, for extra realism. At the door, a pretty girl, smiling too nicely, handed out memorial folders in plastic covers containing background data. If she had handed out candy or ice-cream, Alexis would not have been surprised. The German contingent chattered and craned their necks at everything, including the Israelis, who for their part preserved the mortal stillness of men for whom every wasted minute was a martyrdom. Only Alexis-he was assured of it-perceived and shared their secret agony, whatever its source. We Germans are simply too much, he decided. We are the living end. He had expected, until an hour before, to be holding the floor himself. He had anticipated-even privately prepared-one terse flash of his lapidary style, one brisk English “Thank you, gentlemen” and out. It was not to be. The barons had reached their decisions and they coffee. So he made a show of lounging ostentatiously at the back with his arms folded, affecting a careless interest while he fumed and empathised with the Jews. When everyone but Alexis was sitting, the Silesian made his entry, using that special pelvic walk which in Alexis’ experience overcame a certain type of German whenever he took the rostrum. After him trod a scared young man in a white coat, laden with a duplicate of the now celebrated scuffed grey suitcase complete with its Scandinavian Airline Systems labels, which he put on the dais as if it were an oblation. Searching for his hero Schulmann,Alexis found him alone in an aisle seat, well to the back. He had put away his jacket and necktie and wore a pair of comfortable slacks, which, because of his generous waistline, ended a little short of his unfashionable shoes. His steel watch winked on his look of someone about to leave on holiday. Hang on and I’ll come with you, Alexis thought wistfully, recalling his painful session with the barons. The Silesian spoke English “out of regard for our Israeli friends.” But also, Alexis suspected, out of regard for those of his supporters who had come to observe their champion’s performance. The Silesian had attended the obligatory counter-subversion course in Washington, and spoke therefore the butchered English of an astronaut. By way of introduction, the Silesian told them that the outrage was the work of “radical left elements,” and when he threw in a reference to the “Socialist overindulgence of modern youth,” there was some supportive shuffling of approval in the parliamentary chairs. Our dear F�himself would have put it no better, Alexis thought, but remained outwardly nonchalant. The blast, for architectural reasons, had tended upward, said the Silesian, addressing himself to a diagram that his assistant unfurled behind him, and had sheared the central structure clean out of the house, taking the top floor and hence the child’s bedroom with it. In short, it was a big bang, thought Alexis savagely, so why not say so and shut up? But the Silesian was not given to shutting up. The best estimates put the charge at five kilograms. The mother had survived because she was in the kitchen. The kitchen was an Anbau. This sudden, unexpected use of a German word induced-in the German speakers, at least-a peculiar embarrassment. “Was ist Anbau?”the Silesian muttered grumpily at his assistant, making everyone sit up and hunt for a translation. Page 12

“Annexe,” Alexis called in reply before the rest, and won restrained laughter from the knowing, and less restrained irritation from the Silesian supporters’ club. “Annexe,” the Silesian repeated in his best English and, ignoring the unwelcome source, slogged blindly on. In my next life I shall be a Jew or a Spaniard or an Eskimo or just a fully committed anarchist like everybody else, Alexis decided. But a German I shall never be-you do it once as a penance and that’s it. Only a German can make an inaugural lecture out of a dead Jewish child. The Silesian was talking about the suitcase. Cheap and nasty, of a type favoured by such unpersons as guest workers and Turks. And Socialists, he might have added. Those interested could read about it in their folders or study the surviving fragments of its steel frame on the buffet table. Or they could decide, as Alexis had decided long ago, that both bomb and suitcase were a blind alley. But they could not escape listening to the Silesian, because it was the Silesian’s day and this speech was his victory-roll over the deposed libertarian enemy, Alexis. From the suitcase itself, he passed to its contents. The device was wedged in place with two sorts of wadding, gentlemen, he said. Wadding type no.1was old newspaper, shown by tests to have come from the Bonn editions of the Springer press over the last six months-and very suitable too, thought Alexis. Type 2 was a sliced-up army-surplus blanket similar to the one now demonstrated by my colleague Mr. somebody from the state analytical laboratories. While the scared assistant held up a large grey blanket for their inspection, the Silesian proudly reeled off his other brilliant clues. Alexis listened wearily to the familiar recitation: the crimped end of a detonator… minuscule particles of undetonated explosive, confirmed as standard Russian plastic, known to the Americans asC4 and to the British as PE and to the Israelis as whatever it was known as… the winder of an inexpensive wristwatch… the charred but still identifiable-spring of a domestic clothespeg. In a word, thought Alexis, a classic set-up, straight out of bomb school. No compromising materials, no touches of vanity, no frills, beyond a kiddy-kit booby trap built into the inside angle of the lid. Except that with the stuff the kids were getting together these days, thought Alexis, a set-up like this one made you quite nostalgic for the good old-fashioned terrorists of the seventies. The Silesian seemed to think so too, but he was making a dreadful joke about it: “We are calling this the bikini bomb!” he boomed proudly. “The minimum! No extras!” “And no arrests!” Alexis called out recklessly, and was rewarded with an admiring and strangely knowing smile from Schulmann. Brusquely bypassing his assistant, the Silesian now reached an arm into the suitcase and with a flourish extracted from it a piece of softwood on which the mock-up had been assembled, a thing like a toy racing-car circuit of thin, coated wire, ending in ten sticks of greyish plastic. As the uninitiated crowded round to take a closer look, Alexis was surprised to see Schulmann,hands in pockets, leave his place and amble over to join them. But why? Alexis asked of him mentally, his gaze fixed shamelessly upon him. Why so leisurely suddenly, when yesterday you had hardly the time to look at your battered watch? Abandoning his efforts at indifference, Alexis slipped quickly to his side. This is the way you make a bomb, the Silesian was suggesting, if you are cast in the conventional mould and want to blow up Jews. You buy a cheap watch like this one-don’t steal it, buy it at a big store at their peak shopping time and buy a couple of things either side of it to confuse the assistant’s memory. Remove the hour hand. Drill a hole in the glass, put a drawing-pin in the hole, solder your electric circuit to the head of the drawing-pin with heavy glue. Now the battery. Now set the hand as close to the Page 13

drawing-pin, or as far from it, as you wish. But allow, as a general rule, the shortest possible delay, in order that the bomb shall not be discovered and disarmed. Wind up the watch. Make sure the minute hand is still working. It is. Offer prayers to whoever you imagine made you, poke the detonator into the plastic. As the minute hand touches the shank of the pin, so the contact completes the electrical circuit and if the Lord is good, the bomb goes off. To demonstrate this marvel, the Silesian removed the disarmed detonator and the ten sticks of demonstration plastic explosive and replaced them with a small light-bulb suitable for a hand-torch. “Now I prove to you how the circuit works!” he shouted. Nobody doubted that it worked, most knew the thing by heart, but for a moment, all the same, it seemed to Alexis that the bystanders shared an involuntary shudder as the bulb cheerily winked its signal. Only Schulmann appeared immune. Perhaps he really has seen too much, thought Alexis, and the pity has finally died in him. For Schulmann was ignoring the bulb completely. He remained stooping over the mock-up, smiling broadly and contemplating it with the critical attention of a connoisseur. A parliamentarian, wishing to display his excellence, enquired why the bomb did not go off on time. “This bomb was fourteen hours in the house,” he objected, in silky English. “A minute hand turns for one hour at most. An hour hand for twelve. How do we account, please, for fourteen hours in a bomb that can only wait twelve maximum?” For every question, the Silesian had a lecture ready. He gave one now, while Schulmann,still with his indulgent smile, started to probe gently around the edges of the mock-up with his thick fingers, as if he had lost something in the wadding below. Possibly the watch had failed, said the Silesian. Possibly the car journey to the Drosselstrasse had upset the mechanism. Possibly the Labour Attach�in laying the suitcase on Elke’s bed, had jolted the circuit, said the Silesian. Possibly the watch, being cheap, had stopped and restarted. Possibly anything, thought Alexis, unable to contain his irritation. But Schulmann had a different suggestion, and a more ingenious one: “Or possibly this bomber did not scrape enough paint off the watch hand,” he said, in a kind of distracted aside as he turned his attention to the hinges of the facsimile suitcase. Hauling an old service penknife from his pocket, he selected from its attachments a plump spike and began probing behind the head of the hinge-pin, confirming to himself the ease with which it could be removed. “Your laboratory people, they scraped off all the paint. But maybe this bomber is not so scientific as your laboratory people,” he said as he snapped his knife shut with a loud clunk. “Not so able. Not so neat in his constructions.” he suddenly, when we are supposed to be thinking of a pretty girl in a blue dress? Unaware apparently of how-for the moment, at least-he had upstaged the Silesian in the full flight of his performance,Schulmann transferred his attention to the home-made booby trap inside the lid, gently tugging at the stretch of wire that was stitched into the lining and joined to a dowel in the mouth of the clothespeg. “There is something interesting,Herr Schulmann?”the Silesian enquired, with angelic self-restraint. “You have found a clue, perhaps? Tell us, please. We shall be interested.” Schulmann pondered this generous offer. “Too little wire,” he announced as he returned to the buffet table and hunted among its grisly exhibits. “Over here you have the remains of seventy-seven centimetres of wire.” He was brandishing a charred skein. It was wound on itself like a woollen dummy, with a loop round its waist holding it together. “In your reconstruction, you have Page 14

twenty-five centimetres maximum. Why are we missing half a metre of wire from your reconstruction?” There was a moment’s puzzled silence before the Silesian gave a loud, indulgent laugh. “But,Herr Schulmann-this was spare wire,” he explained, as if reasoning with a child. “For the circuitry. Just common wire. When the bomber had made the device, there was evidently wire over, so he-or she-they threw it into the suitcase. This is for tidiness, this is normal. It was spare wire,” he repeated.”�rig. Without technical significance. Sagihm doch �” “Left over,” someone translated needlessly. “It has no meaning, Mr. Schulmann. It is left over.” The moment was past, the gap had sealed, and the next glimpse Alexis had of Schulmann,he was poised discreetly at the door, in the act of leaving, his broad head turned part way towards Alexis, his watch arm raised, but in the manner of somebody consulting his stomach rather than the time. Their eyes did not quite meet, yet Alexis knew for certain that Schulmann was waiting for him, willing him across the room and saying lunch. The Silesian was still droning on, the audience still standing aimlessly round him like a bunch of grounded airline passengers. Detaching himself from its fringe, Alexis tiptoed quickly after the departing Schulmann. In the corridor,Schulmann grasped his arm in a spontaneous gesture of affection. On the pavement-it was a lovely sunny day again-both men took off their jackets and Alexis afterwards remembered very well how Schulmann rolled his up like a desert pillow while Alexis hailed a taxi and gave the name of an Italian restaurant on a hilltop on the far side of Bad Godesberg. He had taken women there before, but never men, and Alexis, in all things the voluptuary, was always conscious of first times. On the drive they barely spoke. Schulmann admired the view and beamed about with the serenity of one who has earned his Sabbath, though it was midweek. His plane, Alexis recalled, was scheduled to leave Cologne in early evening. Like a child being taken out from school, Alexis counted the hours this would leave them, assuming Schulmann had no other engagements, a ridiculous but wonderful assumption. At the restaurant, high up on the Caecilian Heights, the Italian padrone made a predictable fuss of Alexis, but it was Schulmann who quite rightly enchanted him. He called him”Herr Professor” and insisted on preparing a big window table that could have seated six. Below them lay the old town, beyond it the winding Rhine with its brown hills and jagged castles. Alexis knew that scenery by heart, but today, through the eyes of his new friend Schulmann,he saw it for the first time. Alexis ordered two whiskies. Schulmann did not object. Gazing appreciatively at the view while they waited for their drinks to arrive,Schulmann finally spoke: “Maybe if Wagner had left that fellow Siegfried in peace, we might have had a better world of it, after all,” he said. For a moment, Alexis could not understand what had happened. His day till speaking German! In a thick, rusted Sudeten accent that grizzled like a disused engine. And speaking it, moreover, with a contrite grin that was both a confession and a whisky came and they drank to each other, but with none of the heavy German ceremony of “look, sip and look again,” which Alexis always found too much, especially with Jews, who instinctively saw something menacing in German formality. “They tell me you are getting a new job soon, down in Wiesbaden,”Schulmann Page 15

remarked, still in German, when these mating ceremonies were behind them. “Some desk job. Bigger but smaller, I hear. They say you are too much man for the people here. Now that I have seen you, and seen the people-well, I am not surprised.” Alexis tried not to be surprised either. Of the details of a new appointment nothing had been said-only that one would be forthcoming. Even his replacement by the anyone, not even his young girlfriend, with whom he conducted rather meaningless phone calls several times a day. “That’s the way it goes, huh?”Schulmann remarked philosophically, speaking as much to the river as to Alexis. “In Jerusalem, believe me, a man’s life is equally precarious. Upstream, downstream. That’s the way it goes.” He seemed a little disappointed, all the same. “I hear she’s a nice lady too,” he added, once again crashing in upon his companion’s thoughts. “Attractive, bright, loyal. Maybe she’s too much woman for them.” Resisting the temptation to turn the occasion into a seminar upon the problems of his own life, Alexis directed the conversation towards this morning’s conference, but Schulmann answered vaguely, remarking only that technicians never solved anything, and that bombs bored him. He had asked for pasta and ate it the prisoner’s way, using his spoon and fork automatically, not bothering to look down. Alexis, afraid to interrupt his flow, kept as quiet as he knew how. First, with an older man’s ease of narrative,Schulmann embarked upon a mildly worded lament about Israel’s so-called allies in the anti-terror business: “Back in January, when we were running a quite different investigation, we called on our Italian friends,” he declared, in a voice of homey reminiscence. “Showed them some nice proofs, gave them some good addresses. Next thing we knew, they had arrested a few Italians, while the people that Jerusalem were after sat safe back home in Libya looking bronzed and rested, waiting for their next assignment. That was not what we had intended.” A mouthful of pasta. A dusting of the lips with the another matter came up, it was the same story exactly, but that time we were dealing with Paris. Certain Frenchmen were arrested but nobody else. Certain officials got some nice applause too, and, thanks to us, promotion. But the Arabs”-he made a large, indulgent shrug. “Expedient it may be. Sound oil policy, sound economics, sound everything. Justice it isn’t. And justice is what we like.” His smile broadened, in direct contrast to the scale of the joke. “So I would say that we have learned to be selective. Better tell too little than too much, we have decided. Somebody is nicely disposed towards us, has an impressive record-a fine father in his background, like yours-with him we will do business. Guardedly. Informally. Between friends. If he can use our information constructively for himself, advance himself in his profession a little-all the-better that our friends should obtain influence in their professions. But we want our half of the deal. We expect people to deliver. Of our friends we expect this particularly.” It was the nearest Schulmann ever came, that day or later, to stating the terms of his proposition. As to Alexis, he did not state anything at all. He let his silence declare his sympathy. And Schulmann,who understood so much about him, seemed to understand this too, for he resumed their conversation as if the bargain had been struck and they were squarely in business together. “A few years ago now, a bunch of Palestinians raised a certain amount of hell in my country,” he began reminiscently. “Normally these people are low grade. Peasant kids trying to be heroes. They sneak over the border, lie up in a village, get rid of their Page 16

bombs, run for safety. If we don’t catch them first time out, we catch them the second, if there is one. The men I am speaking of were different. They were led. They knew how to move. How to stay clear of the informants, cover their tracks, make their own arrangements, write their own orders. First time in, they hit a supermarket in Beit She’an. The second time a school, then some settlements, then another shop, till it became monotonous. Then they started ambushing our soldiers hitch-hiking home on leave. A lot of angry mothers, newspapers. Everyone saying, ‘Get these men.’ We listened for them, put the word out everywhere we knew. We discovered they used caves in the Jordan Valley. Lay up. Lived off the land. Still we couldn’t find them. Their propaganda people called them the heroes of Commando Eight, but we knew Commando Eight inside out and Commando Eight could not have lit a match without us hearing of it comfortably ahead of time. Brothers, the word said. A family enterprise. One informant counted three, another four. But brothers for certain and operating out of Jordan, which we knew already. “We put a team together, went after them-people we call the Sayaret, small teams, hard-hitting men. The Palestinian commander was a loner, we heard, and very disinclined to give his trust to anybody outside his family. Sensibly paranoid about Arab treachery. We never found him. His two brothers were not so nimble. One had a soft spot for a little girl in Amman. He walked into some machine-gun fire leaving her house one morning. The second made the mistake of calling up a friend in Sidon, inviting himself for a weekend. The Air Force blew his car to pieces as he drove down the coast road.” Alexis could not suppress a smile of excitement. “Not enough wire,” he murmured, but Schulmann chose not to hear him. “By then we knew who they were-West Bankers from a grape-growing village near Hebron, fled after the war of ‘67. There was a fourth brother, but he was too young to fight, even by Palestinian standards. There were two sisters, but one of them had died in certain reprisal bombings we had to carry out south of the Litani River. That didn’t leave much of an army. All the same, we kept looking for our man. We expected him to collect reinforcements, come back at us. He didn’t. He ceased trading. Six months passed. A year. We said, ‘Forget him. Most likely his own people have killed him, which is normal.’ We heard the Syrians had given him a rough time, so maybe he’d died. A few months back, we picked up a rumour he’d come to Europe. Here. Put himself a team together, several of them ladies, mostly German, young.” He took another mouthful, chewed and swallowed thoughtfully. “He was running them at arm’s length,” he went on when he was ready. “Playing the Arab Mephistopheles to a bunch of impressionable kids,” he said. At first, in the long silence that followed, Alexis could not make Schulmann out. The sun, high above the brown hills, shone directly into the window. In the resulting brilliance it was hard for Alexis to read his expression. Alexis moved his head and took another look at him. Why this sudden milky clouding of the dark eyes? he wondered. And was it really the sunlight that had bleached Schulmann’s skin of colour, leaving it cracked and sickly like something dead? Then, in a day filled with bright and sometimes painful perceptions, Alexis recognised the passion which till then had remained hidden from him: cantonments. As some men may be seen to be in love, so Schulmann was possessed by a deep and awesome hatred. Schulmann left that evening. The remnants of his team hung on for two more days. A farewell celebration, with which the Silesian was determined to mark the excellent relations traditionally existing between the two services-an evening get-together, with white beer and sausages-was quietly sabotaged by Alexis, who pointed out that since the Bonn Government had chosen that very day to drop heavy hints about a possible Page 17

forthcoming arms deal with the Saudis, it was unlikely their guests would be in festive mood. It was perhaps his last effective act in office. A month later, as Schulmann had foretold, he was shunted off to Wiesbaden. A back-room job, theoretically a promotion, but one that gave less rein to his capricious individuality. An unkind newspaper, once counted among the good Doctor’s supporters, sourly recorded that Bonn’s loss would be the television viewer’s gain. His one consolation indeed, at a time when so many of his German friends were hastily giving up their claims on him, was the warm little handwritten note of good wishes, postmark Jerusalem, that greeted him on his first day at his new desk. Signed “As ever,Schulmann,”it wished him luck and looked forward to their next meeting, whether private or official. A wry postscript hinted that Schulmann too was not having the easiest of times. “Unless I deliver soon, I have an uncomfortable feeling I shall be joining you,” it said. With a smile, Alexis tossed the card into a drawer where anyone could read it, and no doubt would. He knew exactly what Schulmann was doing and admired him for it: he was laying the innocent basis for their future relationship. A couple of weeks later, again, when Dr. Alexis and his youthful lady went through an anticlimactic wedding ceremony, it was Schulmann’s roses, of all the gifts, that gave him the greatest joy and the greatest amusement. And I didn’t even tell him I was getting married! Those roses were like the promise of a new love affair, just as he was needing one. 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 d�is 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 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 r� Everywhere he went, he had been squaring things and checking out results, gathering help, persuading people, Page 18

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. 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 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 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 Page 19

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 Victorian mansion called The Acre and pronounced it perfect for his needs. But only 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 the stuff in his shabby briefcase and pressed it on him at inappropriate moments. At the 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 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. Page 20

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