"You have made a practical objection. ‘We cannot dine together because there is no restaurant.' You might as well say you cannot sleep together because you have no bed. Michel senses this. He brushes your hesitations aside. He knows a place, he has made arrangements. So. We can eat. Why not?"
Swinging off the road, he had brought the car to a halt in the gravel laybye in front of the taverna. Dazed by his wilful leap from past fiction to present time, perversely elated by his harassment of her, and relieved that, after all, Michel had not let her go, Charlie remained in her seat. So did Joseph. She turned to him and her eyes made out, by the coloured fairy lights outside, the direction of his own. He was gazing at her hands, still linked on her lap, the right hand uppermost. His face, as far as she could read it by the fairy lights, was rigid and expressionless. Reaching out, he clasped her right wrist with a swift, surgical confidence and, lifting it, revealed the wrist below, and round it the gold bracelet, twinkling in the dark.
"Well, well, I must congratulate you," he remarked impassively. "You English girls don't waste much time!"
Angrily she snatched back her hand. "What's the matter?" she snapped. "Jealous, are we?"
But she could not hurt him. He had the face that did not mark. Who are you? she wondered hopelessly as she followed him in. Him? Or you? Or nobody?
nine
Yet, much as Charlie might have supposed the contrary, she was not the only centre of Joseph's universe that night; not of Kurtz's; and certainly not of Michel's.
Well before Charlie and her putative lover had said a last goodbye to the Athens villa--while they still, in the fiction, lay in each other's arms, sleeping off their frenzy--Kurtz and Litvak were chastely seated in different rows of a Lufthansa plane bound for Munich, and travelling under the protection of different countries: for Kurtz, France, and for Litvak, Canada. On landing, Kurtz repaired immediately to the Olympic Village, where the so-called Argentinian photographers eagerly awaited him, and Litvak to the Hotel Bayerischer Hof,where he was greeted by a munitions expert known to him only as Jacob, a sighing, other-worldish fellow in a stained suède jacket, who carried with him a wad of large-scale maps in a pop-down plastic folder. Posing as a surveyor, Jacob had spent the last three days taking laborious measurements along the Munich-to-Salzburg autobahn. His brief was to calculate the likely effect, in a variety of weathers and traffic conditions, of a very big explosive charge detonated at the roadside in the early hours of a weekday morning. Over several pots of excellent coffee in the lounge, the two men discussed Jacob's tentative suggestions, then, in a hired car, slowly toured the entire hundred-and-forty-kilometre stretch together, annoying the faster traffic and stopping at almost every point where they were allowed, and some where they were not.
From Salzburg, Litvak continued alone to Vienna, where a new team of outriders was awaiting him with fresh transport and fresh faces. Litvak briefed them in a soundproofed conference room at the Israeli Embassy and, having attended to other small matters there, including reading the latest bulletins from Munich, led them southward in a ragged trippers' convoy to the area of the Yugoslav border, where with the frankness of summer sightseers they made a reconnaissance of urban car parks, railway stations, and picturesque market squares, before distributing themselves over several humble pensions in the region of Villach. His net thus spread, he hurried back to Munich in order to contemplate the crucial preparation of the bait.
The interrogation of Yanuka was entering its fourth day when Kurtz arrived to take up the reins, and had proceeded till then with unnerving smoothness.
"You have six days with him maximum," Kurtz had warned his two interrogators in Jerusalem. "After six days your errors will be permanent, and so will his."
It was a job after Kurtz's heart. If he could have been in three places at once rather than merely two, he would have kept it to himself, but he couldn't, so he chose as his proxies these two heavy-bodied specialists in the soft approach, famous for their muted histrionic talents and a joint air of lugubrious good nature. They were not related, nor, so far as anybody knew, were they lovers, but they had worked in unison for so long that their befriending features gave a sense of duplication, and when Kurtz first summoned them to the house in Disraeli Street, their four hands rested on the table-edge like the paws of two big dogs. At first he had treated them harshly, because he envied them, and was of a mood to regard delegation as defeat. He had given them only an inkling of the operation, then ordered them to study Yanuka's file and not report to him again until they knew it inside out. When they had returned too quickly for his liking, he had grilled them like an interrogator himself, snapping questions at them about Yanuka's childhood, his lifestyle, behaviour patterns, anything to ruffle them. They were word perfect. So grudgingly he had called in his Literacy Committee, consisting of Miss Bach, the writer Leon, and old Schwili, who in the intervening weeks had pooled their eccentricities and turned themselves into a neatly interlocking team. Kurtz's briefing on that occasion was a classic of the art of unclarity.
"Miss Bach here has the supervision, holds all the strings," he had begun, by way of introducing the new boys. After thirty-five years of it, his Hebrew was still famously awful. "Miss Bach monitors the raw material as it comes down to her. She makes up the bulletins for transmission to the field. She supplies Leon here with his guidelines. She checks out his compositions, makes sure they fit the overall game-plan for the correspondence," If the interrogators had known a little before, they knew less now. But they had kept their mouths shut. "Once Miss Bach has approved a composition, she calls a conference with Leon here and Mr. Schwili jointly." It had been a hundred years since anyone had called Schwili "Mister." "At this conference are agreed the stationery, are agreed the inks, pens, the emotional and physical condition of the writer inside the terms of the fiction. Is he or she high or low? Is he or she angry? With each projected item, the team considers the entire fiction in all its aspects." Gradually, despite their new chiefs determination to imply his information rather than impart it, the interrogators had begun to discern the outlines of the plan they were now part of. "Maybe Miss Bach will also have on record an original sample of handwriting--letter, postcard, diary--that can serve as a model. Maybe she won't." Kurtz's right forearm had batted either possibility across the desk at them. "When all these procedures have been observed, and only then, Mr. Schwili forges. Beautifully. Mr. Schwili is not merely a forger, he is an artist," he had warned--and they had better remember it. "His work complete, Mr. Schwili hands it straight back to Miss Bach. For further checking, for fingerprinting, for docketing, for storage. Questions?"
Smiling their meek smile, the interrogators had assured him they had none.