"Start at the end," Kurtz barked after them as they trooped out. "You can go back to the beginning later if there's time."
Other meetings had been taken up with the more tricky issue of how best to persuade Yanuka to fall in with their plans at such short notice. Once again, Misha Gavron's beloved psychologists were called in, peremptorily listened to, and shown the door. A lecture on hallucinatory and disintegrating drugs fared better, and there was a hasty hunt around for other interrogators who had used them with success. Thus to the long-term planning was added, as ever, an atmosphere of last-minute improvisation that Kurtz and all of them loved. Their orders agreed, Kurtz dispatched the interrogators to Munich ahead of time to set up their lighting and sound effects and rehearse the guards in their r?le. They arrived looking like a two-piece band, with heavy luggage clad in dimpled metal, and suits like Satchmo's. Schwili's committee followed a couple of days later and settled themselves discreetly into the lower apartment, giving themselves out as professional stamp dealers here for the big auction in the city. The neighbours found no fault with this story. Jews, they told each other, but who cares these days? Jews had been normalised long ago. And of course they would be dealers, what else did one expect? For company, apart from Miss Bach's portable memory-storage system, they had tape-recorders, earphones, crates of tinned food, and a thin boy called "Samuel the pianist" to man the little teleprinter that was linked to Kurtz's own command set. Samuel wore a very large Colt revolver in a special pocket of his quilted kapok waistcoat, and when he transmitted they heard it knocking against the desk, but he never took it off. He was of the same quiet cast as David of the Athens house; in manner, he could have been his twin.
The allocation of rooms was Miss Bach's responsibility. To Leon, on account of its quietness, she assigned the child's room. On its walls, dew-eyed deer peacefully cropped giant daisies. To Samuel went the kitchen with its natural access to the rear courtyard, where he rigged up his aerial and hung babies' socks from it. But when Schwili caught sight of the bedroom set aside for his own use--office and sleep space combined--he let out a spontaneous wail of woe.
"My light! Dear God, look at my light! A man could not forge a letter from his own grandmother in such a light!"
With Leon, full of nervous creativity, reeling before this unexpected storm, the practical Miss Bach spotted the problem immediately. Schwili needed more daylight for his work--but also, after his long incarceration, for his soul. In a trice she had phoned upstairs, the Argentinian boys appeared, furniture was whisked around like play blocks under her direction, and Schwili's desk was repositioned in the living-room window bay, with a view of green leaves and sky. Miss Bach herself tacked up an extra thickness of net curtain for his privacy and ordered Leon to make an extension for his posh Italian lamp. Then, on Miss Bach's nod, they quietly left him, though Leon watched him covertly from his door.
Seated before the dying evening sunlight, Schwili laid out his precious inks and pens and stationery, everything to its appointed place, as if tomorrow were his big exam. Then he took off his cuff-links and slowly rubbed his palms together to warm them, though it was warm enough even for an old prisoner. Then he removed his hat. Then he pulled at each finger one by one, loosening the joints with a salvo of little snapping noises. Then he settled to wait, as he had waited all his adult life.
The star they were all poised to receive flew into Munich punctually the same evening by way of Cyprus. No flashing cameras celebrated his arrival, for he was got up as a stretcher case attended by an orderly and a private doctor. The doctor was genuine, if his passport was not; as to Yanuka, he was a British businessman from Nicosia being rushed to Munich for heart surgery. A file of impressive medical papers bore this out, but the German airport authorities paid them not a glance. One uncomfortable sight of the patient's lifeless face told them all they needed to know. An ambulance rushed the party in the direction of the city hospital, but in a side street turned off and, as if the worst had happened, slipped into the covered courtyard of a friendly undertaker. At the Olympic Village, the two Argentinian photographers and their friends were seen to manhandle a wicker laundry basket marked"glass delicate" from their battered minibus to the service lift, and no doubt, said the neighbours, they were adding one more extravagance to their already inflated stock of equipment. There was amused speculation about whether the stamp dealers downstairs would complain about their tastes in music: Jews complained of everything. Upstairs, meanwhile, they unpacked their prize and, with the doctor's help, established that nothing was broken from the voyage. Minutes later, they had laid him carefully on the floor of the padded priesthole where he could be expected to come round in about half an hour, though it was always possible that the light-proof hood which they had tied over his head would retard the waking process. Soon after that, the doctor departed.
He was a conscientious man and, fearing for Yanuka's future, had sought assurances from Kurtz that he would not be asked to compromise his medical principles.
Sure enough, in less than forty minutes they saw Yanuka pull against his chains, first the wrists and then the knees, and then all four together, like a chrysalis trying to burst its skin, till presumably he realised that he was trussed face downward; for he paused, and seemed to take stock, then let out a tentative groan. After which, with no further warning, all hell broke loose as Yanuka gave vent to one anguished, sobbing roar after another, writhed, bucked, and generally threw himself about with a vigour that made them doubly grateful for his chains. Having observed this performance for a while, the interrogators withdrew and left the field to the guards until the storm raged itself out. Probably Yanuka's head had been crammed with hair-raising stories about the brutality of Israeli methods. Probably in his bewilderment he actually wanted them to live up to their reputation and make his terrors come true. But the guards declined to oblige him. Their orders were to play the sullen jailers, to keep their distance and inflict no injury, and they obeyed them to the letter, even if to do so cost them dear--Oded the baby, in particular. From the moment of Yanuka's ignominious arrival in the apartment, Oded's young eyes had darkened with hatred. Each day that passed, he looked more ill and grey, and by the sixth his shoulders had gone rigid, just from the tension of having Yanuka under their roof alive.
At last, Yanuka seemed to drop off to sleep again and the interrogators decided it was time to make a start, so they played sounds of morning traffic, switched on a lot of white light, and together brought him breakfast--though it was not yet midnight--loudly ordering the guards to unbind him and let him eat like a human being, not a dog. Then they themselves solicitously untied his hood, for they wanted his first knowledge of them to be their kind,un-Jewish faces gazing at him with fatherly concern.