"The Minkels have changed their plans," she announced. "They are spending tonight in Tübingen, where they have friends in the faculty. They have four large suitcases, many small pieces, and a briefcase." With a fine instinct for effect, she took a damp cloth from Verona's handbasin and wiped the blackboard clean. "The briefcase is black, it has simple hinges. The location of the lecture is also changed. The police are not suspicious but they are nervous. They are taking what they call sensible precautions."
"What's with the bulls?" said Rossino. "The police wish to increase the guards, but Minkel is refusing this completely. He is a so-called man of principle. If he is to preach about law and justice, he insists that he cannot himself be seen surrounded by secret police. For Imogen, nothing is changed. Her orders are the same. It is her first action. She will be the complete star. No, Charlie?"
Suddenly they were all looking at her--Verona with a mindless fixity, Rossino with an appraising grin, and Helga with a frank straight stare to which self-doubt, as ever, was a stranger.
She lay flat, using her forearm as a pillow. Her bedroom was not a gallery in a church hall but a garret without light or curtains. Her bed was an old horsehair mattress and a yellowed blanket that smelt of camphor. Helga sat beside her, smoothing Charlie's dyed hair with her strong hand. Moonlight came through the high window; the snow made its own deep silence. Somebody should write a fairy story here. My lover should put on the electric fire and take me by its red glow. She was in a log cabin, safe from everything except tomorrow.
"What is the matter, Charlie? Open your eyes. Don't you like me any more?"
She opened her eyes and stared ahead of her, seeing and thinking nothing.
"Are you dreaming of your little Palestinian still? Are you worried what we do here? Do you want to give up and run away while you have time?"
"I'm tired."
"So why don't you come and sleep with us? We can have sex. Then we can sleep. Mario is an excellent lover."
Bending over her, Helga kissed her on the neck.
"You want Mario to come to you alone? You are shy? Even that I allow you." She kissed her again. But Charlie lay cold and rigid, her body like iron.
"Tomorrow night you will be more affectionate perhaps. With Khalil there can be no rejections. He is most fascinated to meet you already. He has asked for you personally. You know what he told a friend of ours once? ‘Without women I would lose my human warmth and fail as a soldier. To be a good soldier, it is essential to have humanity.' Now you may imagine what a great man he is. You loved Michel, therefore he will love you. There is no question. So."
Bestowing a last, lingering kiss on her, Helga left the room and Charlie lay on her back, wide-eyed, watching the half night slowly lighten in the window. She heard a woman's wail rising to a clenched, beseeching sob; then a man's urgent shout. Helga and Mario were advancing the revolution without her assistance.
Follow them wherever they lead you,Joseph had said. If they tell you to kill, then kill. It will be our responsibility, not yours.
Where will you be?
Close.
Close to the edge of the world.
In her handbag she had a Mickey Mouse hand-torch with a pinlight, the kind of thing she would have played with under the blankets at her boarding school. She took it out, together with Rachel's packet of Marlboros. There were three cigarettes left and she put them back loose. Carefully, as Joseph had taught her, she removed the wrapping paper, tore open the cardboard of the box, and spread it flat, the inside surface upward. Licking her finger, she began gently rubbing saliva onto the blank cardboard. The letters came up in brown, drawn fine as if with a mapping pen. She read the message, then poked the flattened packet through a crack in the floorboards until it dropped out of sight.
Courage. We're with you. The whole of the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin.
Their operations room in Freiburg city centre was a hastily rented ground-floor office in a busy main street, their cover the Walker & Frosch Investment Company, GmbH, one of dozens that Gavron's secretariat kept permanently registered. Their communications equipment had more or less the appearance of commercial software; in addition they had three ordinary telephones, courtesy of Alexis, and one of them, the least official, was the Doctor's own hot line to Kurtz. It was early morning after a busy night taken up first with the delicate business of tracking and housing Charlie; and afterwards with a tense argument about demarcation between Litvak and his West German counterpart, for Litvak was by now arguing with everyone. Kurtz and Alexis had kept aloof from such bickering between subordinates. The broad agreement held, and Kurtz had no interest yet in breaking it. Alexis and his men should have the credit; Litvak and his the satisfaction,
As to Gadi Becker, he was finally back at war. With the imminence of action, his manner had acquired a settled and determined swiftness. The introspections that had haunted him in Jerusalem had lifted; the gnawing idleness of waiting was past. While Kurtz dozed under an army blanket and Litvak, nervous and depleted, paced the office or spoke cryptically into one or another telephone, building himself into some kind of unclear temper, Becker stood sentry at the Venetian blinds of the wide window, gazing patiently upward into the snow clad hills across the olive Dreisam River. For Freiburg, like Salzburg, is a city ringed with heights, and every street seems to lead upward to its own Jerusalem.
"She's panicked," Litvak announced suddenly to Becker's back.
Puzzled, Becker turned and glanced at him.
"She's gone over to them," Litvak insisted. His voice had a throaty instability.
Becker returned to the window. "Part of her has gone over, part has stayed," he replied. "That is what we asked of her."
"She's gone over!" Litvak repeated, rising on the swell of his own provocation. "It's happened with agents before. It's happened now. I saw her at the airport, you didn't. She looks like a ghost, I tell you!"
"If she looks like a ghost, that's how she wants to look," said Becker, majestically unruffled. "She's an actress. She'll see it through, don't worry."
"So what's her motivation? She's not Jewish. She's not anything. She's theirs. Forget her!"
Hearing Kurtz stir beneath his blanket, Litvak lifted his voice higher to include him.
"If she's ours still, why did she give Rachel a blank cigarette packet at the airport, tell me that? Weeks on end among that rabble and she doesn't even write us a note when she comes out again? What kind of agent is that, who is so loyal to us?"
Becker seemed to be looking for his answer in the far mountains. "Maybe she has nothing to say," he said. "She's voting with her actions. Not her words."
From the shallows of his sparse camp bed, Kurtz offered drowsy consolation. "Germany makes you jumpy, Shimon. Ease off. What does it matter who she belongs to, so long as she keeps showing us the way?"
But the effect of Kurtz's words was the opposite of their
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intention. In his self-tormenting mood, Litvak sensed an unfair alliance against him, and it made him wilder still.
"And if she breaks down, confesses? If she tells them the whole story, Mykonos till here? Does she still show us the way?"
He seemed set upon collision; nothing else would satisfy him.
Lifting himself on one elbow, Kurtz took a harsher tone. "So what do we do, Shimon? Give us the team solution. Suppose she has gone over. Suppose she has blown the entire operation from breakfast to dinner. You want me to call Misha Gavron, say we're finished?"
Becker had not abandoned the window, but he had turned himself round once more and was watching Litvak thoughtfully down the room. Staring from one to the other of them, Litvak flung out his arms, a very wild gesture to make before two such static men.
"He's somewhere out there!" Litvak cried. "In a hotel. An apartment. In a doss house. He must be. Seal off the town. Roads, the railway. Buses. Have Alexis put a cordon round. Search every house till we find him!"
Kurtz tried a little kindly humour: "Shimon, Freiburg is not the West Bank."
But Becker, interested at last, seemed anxious to pursue the argument. "And when we have found him?" he said, as if he hadn't quite got his mind around Litvak's plan. "What do we do then, Shimon?"