And England? they enquired innocently.
Oh, England was the worst of all! he replied decisively. England was decadent, bankrupt, and directionless; England was the agent of American imperialism; England was everything bad, and her greatest crime was to have given his country to the Zionists. He wandered away into yet another diatribe against Israel, and they let him. They did not wish at this early stage to kindle the least suspicion in him that his travels in England were of special interest. They asked him instead about his childhood--his parents, his home in Palestine--and it was observed with silent satisfaction that he never once mentioned his elder brother; that even now, big brother was written out of Yanuka's life entirely. With so much going for them, they noted, Yanuka would still talk only of matters he considered harmless to his cause.
They listened with unflinching sympathy to his stories of Zionist atrocities, and to his reminiscences about his days as goalkeeper with his camp's victorious football team in Sidon. "Tell us about your best match," they urged. "Tell us about your best save ever. Tell us about that cup you won, and who was there when the great Abu Ammar himself pressed it into your hand!" Haltingly, shyly, Yanuka obliged them. Downstairs the tape-recorders turned and Miss Bach entered one nugget after another into her machine, only pausing to pass interim bulletins to Samuel the pianist for dispatch to Jerusalem, and to his counterpart, David, in Athens. Leon meanwhile was in his private heaven. Eyes half closed, he was immersing himself in Yanuka's idiosyncratic spoken English: in his impulsive, rushing style of delivery; his spurts of literary flourish; his cadence and vocabulary; his unheralded changes of theme, which occurred practically in mid-sentence. Across the passage from him, Schwili penned and muttered to himself and chortled. But sometimes, Leon noticed, he broke off and lapsed into despair. A few seconds later, Leon would see him padding softly round his room, pacing out its dimensions with an old prisoner's empathy for the luckless boy above.
To talk about the diary, they had a different bluff, and a far more hazardous one. They put it off until the third real day, by which time they had picked him as clean as they knew how by the simple conversational methods. Even then, they insisted on Kurtz's say-so before they went ahead, so nervous were they of breaking the eggshell of Yanuka's trust in them at a point where they had no time left to resort to other methods. The watchers had found it on the day after Yanuka's kidnapping. They had marched into his flat, three of them, wearing canary overalls with badges describing them as members of a commercial cleaning firm. A house key and an almost genuine letter of instruction from Yanuka's landlord gave them all the authority they needed. From their canary van they fetched vacuum cleaners, mops, and a stepladder. Then they closed the door and drew the curtains and for eight full hours went through that flat like locusts, till there seemed to be nothing left they had not probed, photographed, and put back in its rightful place before laying dust over it from a puffer. And among their finds, wedged behind a bookcase in a spot handy for the telephone, was this brown leather-clad pocket diary, a handout from Middle East Airlines that Yanuka must somehow have come by. They knew he kept one; they had missed it among his effects when they grabbed him. Now, to their joy, they had found it. Some entries were in Arabic, some in French, some in English. Some were indecipherable in any language, others in a none too private word-code. Mostly, the jottings related to forward appointments, but a few had been added retrospectively: "Met J, phoned P." In addition to the diary, they discovered another prize they had been looking out for: a plump manilla envelope containing a wad of receipts, kept against the day when Yanuka got round to making up his operational accounts. On instruction, the team purloined that also.
But how to interpret the crucial entries in the diary? How to decipher them without Yanuka's help?
How therefore to obtain Yanuka's help?
They considered an increase in his drug intake, but decided against it. They feared he might unhinge completely. To resort to violence was to throw all their hard-earned goodwill out of the window. Besides, as professionals they genuinely deplored the very thought. They preferred to build on what they had already established--on fear, on dependence, and on the imminence of the fearful Israeli interrogation still to come. So first they brought him an urgent letter from Fatmeh, one of Leon's briefest and best. "I have heard that the hour is very near. I beg you, I pray you, to have courage." They switched on the lights for him to read it, switched them off again, and stayed away longer than was customary. In the pitch darkness, they played muffled screams to him, the clanging of distant cell doors, and the sounds of a slumped body being dragged in chains along a stone corridor. Then they played the funeral bagpipes of a Palestinian military band and perhaps he thought he was dead. Certainly he lay still enough. They sent him the guards, who stripped him, chained his hands behind his back, and put irons on his ankles. And left him again. As if for ever. They heard him whispering "oh no," on and on.
They dressed Samuel the pianist in a white tunic and gave him a stethoscope, and had him listen, without interest, to Yanuka's heart rate. All in the dark still, but perhaps the white coat was just visible to him as it flitted round his body. Again they left him. By the infra-red light they watched him sweating and shuddering, and at one point he appeared to contemplate killing himself by butting his head against the wall, which in his chained state was about the only uninhibited movement he could make. But the wall was deep in kapok, and if he had beaten himself against it all year, he would have had no satisfaction from it. They played more screams to him, then made an absolute silence. They fired one pistol shot in the darkness. It was so sudden and clear that he bucked at the sound of it. Then he began howling, but quietly, as if he couldn't get the volume to rise.
That was when they decided to move.
First the guards walked into his cell, purposefully, and lifted him to his feet, one arm each. They had dressed themselves very lightly, like people prepared for strenuous activity. By the time they had dragged his shaking body as far as the cell door, Yanuka's two Swiss saviours appeared and blocked their way, their kindly faces the very picture of concern and outrage. Then a long-delayed, passionate argument broke out between the guards and the Swiss. It was waged in Hebrew and therefore only partly comprehensible to Yanuka, but it had the ring of a last appeal. Yanuka's interrogation had still to be approved by the governor, said the two Swiss: Regulation 6, para 9 of the Convention laid down emphatically that no intensive duress could be applied without the authority of the governor and the presence of a doctor. But the guards could not give a fig for the Convention, and said so. They had had the Convention till it was coming out of their noses, they said, indicating where their noses were. There was nearly a scuffle. Only Swiss forbearance prevented it. It was agreed instead that they would all four go to the governor now for an immediate ruling. So they stormed off together, leaving Yanuka in the dark yet again, and quite soon he was seen to hunch up to the wall and pray, though he could have had no earthly idea, by then, where the East was.