"Hired."
"Stay close to that car," Kurtz advised them both. "The moment he hands back his car to the rental company and doesn't take another one, that's the moment we have to know about immediately." They had heard this till they were deaf from it. They had heard it before they ever left Jerusalem. Kurtz repeated it none the less: "Most important is when Yanuka turns his car in."
Suddenly Oded had had enough. Perhaps he was by youth and temperament more prone to stress than his selectors had appreciated. Perhaps, as such a young fellow, he should not have been given a job that needed so much waiting. Pulling up the van at the kerbside, he yanked on the handbrake so hard he all but wrenched it from its socket.
"Why do we let him go through with this?" he demanded. "Why play games with him? What if goes back home and doesn't come out again? Then what?"
"Then we lose him."
"So let's kill him now! Tonight. You give me the order, it's done!"
Kurtz let him rave on.
"We've got the apartment opposite, haven't we? Put a rocket across the road. We've done it before. An RPG-y--Arab kills Arab with a Russian rocket--why not?"
Kurtz still said nothing. Oded might have been storming at a sphinx.
"So why not?" Oded repeated, very loud indeed.
Kurtz did not spare him, but neither did he lose his patience: "Because he doesn't lead anywhere, Oded, that's why. You never heard what Misha Gavron himself used to say perhaps? A phrase I personally still like to echo? That if you want to catch a lion, you first must tether the goat? Whose crazy fighting talk have you been listening to? I ask myself. Are you seriously informing me you want to hit Yanuka, when for ten dollars more you can have the best operator they produced for years?"
"He did Bad Godesberg! He did Vienna, maybe Leyden too! Jews are dying, Marty! Doesn't Jerusalem care about that these days? How many do we let die while we play our games?"
Carefully taking hold of the collar of Oded's wind jacket with his big hands, Kurtz shook him twice, and the second time he did this, Oded's head banged painfully against the window. But Kurtz did not apologise and Oded did not complain.
"They,Oded. Not he: they," said Kurtz, this time with menace."They did Bad Godesberg. They did Leyden. And it's them we intend to take out; not six innocent German householders and one silly little boy."
"It's okay," said Oded blushing. "Leave me alone."
"It is not okay, Oded. Yanuka has friends, Oded. Relatives. People we have not yet been introduced to. You want to run this operation for me?"
"I said--it's okay."
Kurtz released him, Oded started up the engine again. Kurtz suggested they continue their interesting tour of Yanuka's lifestyle. So they bumped down a cobbled street where his favourite nightclub was, the shop where he bought his shirts and ties, the place where he had his hair cut, and the left-wing bookshops where he liked to browse and buy. And all the while Kurtz, in the best of spirits, beamed and nodded at everything he saw as if he were watching an old movie he couldn't get enough of--until, in a square not far from the city air terminal, they prepared to part. Standing on the pavement, Kurtz clapped Oded on the shoulder with unabashed affection, then ran his hand through his hair.
"Listen, both of you, don't pull so hard at the bridle. Buy yourselves a nice meal somewhere, charge it to me personally, okay?"
His tone was that of a commander moved to love before the battle. Which, for as long as Misha Gavron permitted it, was what he was.
The night flight from Munich to Berlin, for the few who use it, is one of the last great nostalgic journeys to be made in Europe. The Orient Express, the Golden Arrow, and the Train Bleu may be dead, dying, or artificially revived, but for those who have their memories, sixty minutes of night-flying through the East German corridor in a rattly Pan American plane three-quarters empty is like the safari of an old habitué indulging his addiction. Lufthansa is forbidden to fly the route. It belongs only to the victors, to the occupiers of the former German capital; to the historians and island-seekers; and to one war-scarred elderly American impregnated with the docile quiet of a professional, who makes the journey almost daily, knows his favourite seat and the first name of the air hostess, which he pronounces in the frightful German of the Occupation. For two pins, you think, he will slip her a packet of Lucky Strikes and make an assignation with her behind the commissary. The fuselage grunts and lifts, the lights falter, you cannot believe the plane has no propellers. You look into the unlit enemy landscape--to bomb, to jump?--you think your memories and confuse your wars: down there, at least, in some uneasy sense, the world is as it was.
Kurtz was no exception.
He sat at his window, he gazed past his own reflection at the night; he became, as always when he made this journey, a spectator looking upon his own life. Somewhere in that blackness was the railway line which had brought the goods train on its slow journey from the East; somewhere the very siding where it had parked for five nights and six days in dead of winter to make way for the military transports that mattered so much more, while Kurtz and his mother, and the hundred and eighteen other Jews who were crammed into their truck, ate the snow and froze, most of them to death. "The next camp will be better," his mother kept assuring him, to keep his spirits up. Somewhere in that blackness his mother had later filed passively to her death; somewhere in its fields the Sudeten boy who was himself had starved and stolen and killed, waiting without illusion for another hostile world to find him. He saw the Allied reception camp, the unfamiliar uniforms, the children's faces as old and hollow as his own. A new coat, new boots and new barbed wire--and a new escape, this time from his rescuers. He saw himself in the fields again, slipping southward from farm to village for weeks on end as the escape line handed him on, until gradually the nights grew warm and smelled of flowers, and he heard for the first time in his life the rustle of palm trees in a sea wind. "Listen to us, you frozen little boy," they whispered to him, "that's how we sound in Israel. That's how blue the sea is, just like here." He saw the rotting steamer slumped beside the jetty, the biggest and noblest boat he had set eyes on, so black with Jewish heads that when he boarded it, he stole a stocking cap and wore it till they had cleared harbour. But they needed him, fair hair or none at all. On the deck in small groups, the leaders were giving lessons in how to shoot with stolen Lee-Enfield rifles. Haifa was still two days away, and Kurtz's war had just begun.
The plane was circling to land. He felt it bank, and watched as it crossed the Wall. He had only hand luggage, but security was tight on account of the terrorists, so formalities took quite a time.
Shimon Litvak was waiting in the car park in an inferior Ford. He had flown from Holland after two days spent looking at the mess in Leyden. Like Kurtz, he did not feel he had a right to sleep.
"The book bomb was delivered by a girl," he said as soon as Kurtz had clambered in. "Shapely brunette. Jeans. The hotel porter assumed she was from the university, convinced himself she arrived and left by bicycle. Speculative, but I believe him partly. Somebody else again says she was brought to the hotel on a motorbike. A party ribbon round the parcel and ‘Happy birthday, Mordecai' on the label. A plan, a transport, a bomb, and a girl, what's new?"
"Explosive?"
"Russian plastic, shreds of wrapping, nothing traceable."
"Any trademark?"
"One neat twist of surplus red circuit wire, made into a dummy."
Kurtz glanced at him sharply.
"No surplus wire," Litvak confessed. "Carbonised fragments, yes. But no identifiable wire."
"No clothespeg either?" said Kurtz.
"This time he preferred a mousetrap. A sweet little kitchen mousetrap." He started the engine.