There were the other fronts to fight on too. To monitor Charlie's progress through enemy territory, he was obliged to go cap in hand to the department that specialised in the maintenance of grass-roots courier lines and listening posts along the north-east seaboard. Its director, a Sephardi from Aleppo, hated everyone but hated Kurtz particularly. A trail like that could take him anywhere! he objected. What about his own operations? As to providing field support for three of Litvak's watchers merely to give the girl a sense of hominess in her new surroundings, such feather-bedding was unknown to him, it could not be done. It cost Kurtz blood, and all sorts of underhand concessions, to obtain the scale of collaboration he required. From these and similar deals, Misha Gavron remained callously aloof, preferring to allow the market forces to find their natural solution. If Kurtz believed enough, he would get his way, he told his people secretly; a little curbing, added to a little of the whip, did such a man no harm, said Gavron.
Reluctant to leave Jerusalem even for a night while these intrigues continued, Kurtz consigned Litvak to the European shuttle as his emissary charged with strengthening and recasting the surveillance team, and to prepare by all possible means for what they all prayed would be the final phase. The carefree days of Munich, when a couple of boys on double shift could meet their needs, were over for good. To maintain a full-time watch on the heavenly trio of Mesterbein, Helga,and Rossino, whole platoons of fieldmen had to be levied--all German-speakers and many of them rusty from disuse. Litvak's suspicion of non-Israeli Jews only added to the headache, but he would not yield: they were too soft in action, he said; too divided in their loyalties. On Kurtz's orders, Litvak also flew to Frankfurt for a clandestine meeting with Alexis at the airport, partly in order to obtain his help in the surveillance operation, and partly--as Kurtz had it--"to test his spine, a notably uncertain article." In the event, the renewal of their acquaintance was a disaster, for the two men loathed each other on sight. Worse still, Litvak's opinion confirmed the earlier prediction of Gavron's psychiatrists: that Alexis should not be trusted with a used bus-ticket.
"The decision is taken," Alexis announced to Litvak, even before they had sat down, in a furious, half-whispered, half-coherent monologue that kept slipping into falsetto. "I never go back on a decision; it is known of me. I shall present myself to my Minister as soon as this meeting is over, and make a clean breast of everything. For a man of honour there is no alternative." Alexis, it quickly developed, had suffered not merely a change of heart but a full-blown political realignment.
"Nothing against Jews, naturally--as a German, one has one's conscience--but from recent experiences--a certain bomb incident--certain measures one has been forced-blackmailed--into undertaking--one begins also to see reasons why historically the Jews have attracted persecution. Forgive me."
Litvak, with his locked-in glower, forgave him nothing.
"Your friend Schulmann--an able man, impressive-persuasive also--your friend is without all moderation. He has performed unlicensed acts of violence on German soil; he is showing a degree of excess which has too long been attributed to us Germans."
Litvak had had enough. His expression white and sickly, he had turned his eyes away, perhaps to conceal their fire. "Why don't you call him up and tell him all that yourself?" he suggested. So Alexis did. From the airport telephone office, using the special number Kurtz had given him, while Litvak stood at his side, holding the spare earpiece to his head.
"Well now, you do that, Paul," Kurtz advised heartily when Alexis had finished. Then his voice changed: "And while you're talking to the Minister, Paul, just you make sure you tell him all about that Swiss bank account of yours as well. Because if you don't, I may be so impressed by your fine example of candour that I'll have to go down there and tell him about it myself."
After which Kurtz ordered his switchboard to receive no more calls from Alexis for the next forty-eight hours. But Kurtz bore no grudges. Not with agents. The cooling-off period over, he squeezed himself a free day and made his own pilgrimage to Frankfurt, where he found the good Doctor much recovered. The reference to the Swiss bank account, though Alexis ruefully called it "unsporting," had sobered him, but the factor most conducive to his recovery was the joyous sight of his own features in the middle pages of a mass-circulation German tabloid--resolute, dedicated, but always that underlying Alexis wit--which convinced him he was who they said he was. Kurtz left him with this happy fiction and, as a prize, brought back one tantalising clue for his overworked analysts that Alexis in his dudgeon had been holding back: the photocopy of a picture postcard addressed to Astrid Berger under one of her many other aliases.
Handwriting unfamiliar, postmark the seventh district of Paris. Intercepted by the German post office, on orders from Cologne.
The text, in English, ran: "Poor Uncle Frei will be operated next month as planned. But at least that is convenient because you can use V's house. See you there. Love K."
Three days later, the same dragnet pulled in a second in the same hand, sent to another of Berger's safe addresses, the postmark this time Stockholm. Alexis, fully collaborating once more, had it flown to Kurtz by special delivery. The text was brief: "Freiappendectomy room 251 at 1800 hours 24th." And the signature was "M," which told the analysts there was a missing communication in between; or such, at least, had been the pattern by which Michel had also from time to time received his orders. Postcard L, despite everyone's efforts, was never found. Instead, two of Litvak's girls picked up a letter posted by the quarry herself, in this case Berger, to none other than Anton Mesterbein in Geneva. The thing was finely done. Berger was visiting Hamburg at the time, staying with one of her many lovers in an upper-class commune in Blankenese. Following her into town one day, the girls saw her drop a letter surreptitiously into a postbox. The moment she had gone, they posted an envelope of their own, a big yellow one, franked and ready for just such a contingency, to lie on top of it. Then the prettier of the girls stood guard over the box. When the postman came to empty it, she pitched him such a story about love and anger, and made such explicit promises to him, that he stood by grinning sheepishly while she fished her letter out of the bunch before it ruined her life for ever. Except that it was not her letter but Astrid Berger's, nestling just beneath the big yellow envelope. Having steamed it open and photographed it, they got it back in the same box in time for the next collection.
The prize was an eight-page scrawl of gushing schoolgirl passion. She must have been high when she wrote it, but perhaps on nothing more than her own adrenaline. It was frank, it praised Mesterbein's sexual powers. It shot away on wild ideological detours arbitrarily linking El Salvador with the West German defence budget, and the elections in Spain with some recent scandal in South Africa. It raged about the Zionist bombings of Lebanon and spoke of the Israelis' "Final Solution" for the Palestinians. It delighted in life, but saw everything wrong everywhere; and on the clear assumption that Mesterbein's mail was being read by the authorities, it referred virtuously to the need to remain "within the legal borders at all times." But it had a postscript, one line, scribbled off like a parting conceit, heavily underscored, and backed with exclamation marks. A strutting, teasing pun, personal to both of them, yet, like other parting words, containing perhaps the purpose of the whole discourse up to this point. And it was in French. Attention! Onva épater les'Bourgeois!
The analysts froze at the sight of it. Why the capital "B"? Why the underlining? Was Helga 's education so poor that she applied her native German usage to French nouns? The idea was ridiculous. And why the apostrophe, so carefully added above and to the left of it? While the cryptologists and analysts sweated blood to break the code, while the computers shuddered and creaked and sobbed out impossible permutations, it was the uncomplicated Rachel, none other, with her English North Country directness, who sailed straight for the obvious conclusion. Rachel did crosswords in her spare time and dreamed of winning a free car. "Uncle Frei" was one half, she declared simply, and "Bourgeois" was the other. The "Freibourgeois" were the people of Freiburg, and they were to be shocked by an "operation" that would take place at six in the evening of the twenty-fourth. Room 251? "Well, we'd have to enquire, wouldn't we?" she told the bemused experts.
Yes, they agreed. We would.