Next time, the two Swiss returned without the guards but looking very grave indeed, and bringing with them Yanuka's diary as if, small though it might be, it somehow changed things completely. They also had with them his two spare passports, one French, one Cypriot, which had been found hidden under the floorboards in his flat, and the Cypriot passport on which he had been travelling at the time of his kidnapping.
Then they explained their problem. Laboriously. But with an ominous manner that was new to them--not threatening but warning. At the request of the Israelis, the West German authorities had made a search of his apartment in central Munich, they said. They had found this diary and these passports and a quantity of other clues to his movements over the last few months, which they were now determined to investigate "with full vigour." In their representations to the governor, the Swiss had insisted that such a proposal was neither legal nor necessary. Let the Red Cross place the documents before the prisoner, they suggested, and obtain his explanation for the entries. Let the Red Cross, in decency, invite him, rather than force him, as a first step, to prepare a statement--if the governor wished, a written one, in the prisoner's own hand--of his whereabouts during the last six months, with dates, places, whom he had met, where he had stayed, and on what papers he had travelled. If military honour dictated reticence, they said, then let the prisoner honestly indicate this at the appropriate points. Where it did not--well, at least it would buy time while their representations continued.
Here they ventured to offer Yanuka--or Salim as they now called him--some private advice of their own. Above all, be accurate, they implored him as they set up a folding table for him, gave him a blanket, and unchained his hands. Tell them nothing you wish to keep secret, but make absolutely certain that what you do tell them is the truth. Remember that we have our reputation to maintain. Think of those like yourself who may come after you. For their sakes, if not for ours, do your best. The way they said this suggested somehow that Yanuka was already halfway to martyrdom. Quite why seemed not to matter; the only truth he knew by then was the terror in his own soul.
It was thin, as they had always known it would be. And there was a moment, a rather long one, in which they feared they had lost him. It took the form of a straight, unclouded stare at each of them as Yanuka seemed to shake aside the curtains of delusion and look out clearly at his oppressors. But clarity had never been the basis of their relationship and it wasn't now. As Yanuka accepted the proffered pen, they read in his eyes the unmistakable supplication that they should continue to deceive him.
It was on the day following these dramas--around lunchtime in the normal scheme of things--that Kurtz arrived directly from Athens, in order to inspect Schwili's handiwork, and to give his own personal approval for the diary, passports, and receipts, with certain ingenious embellishments, to be put back where they legally belonged.
To Kurtz himself went also the task of going back to the beginning. But first, seated comfortably in the downstairs apartment, he called in everyone except the guards and let them brief him, in their own style and at their own pace, on the progress so far. Wearing white cotton gloves, and looking none the worse for his all-night interrogation of Charlie, he examined their exhibits, listened appreciatively to tape-recordings of crucial moments, and watched with admiration as Miss Bach's desk computer printed out one day after another of Yanuka's recent life in green type on its television screen: dates, flight numbers, arrival times, hotels. Then he watched again while the screen cleared and Miss Bach superimposed the fiction: "Writes Charlie from City Hotel,Zürich,letter posted on arrival de Gaulle Airport eighteen-twenty hours... meets Charlie Excelsior Hotel, Heathrow... phones Charlie from Munich railway station..." And with each insertion, the collateral: which receipts and diary entries referred to which encounter; where deliberate gaps and obscurities had been introduced, because in the reconstruction nothing should ever be too easy or too clear.
When Kurtz had done all this--it was by then evening--he took off the gloves, changed into plain Israeli Army uniform with a colonel's badges and a few grimy campaign ribbons above the left pocket, and generally reduced his external self until he was the epitome of any military remittance man turned prison officer. Then he went upstairs and tiptoed spryly to the observation window, where for some time he watched Yanuka very closely. Then he sent Oded and his companion downstairs with orders that he and Yanuka should be left with their privacy. Speaking Arabic in a grey, bureaucratic voice, Kurtz began asking Yanuka a few simple, dull questions, tiny things: where a certain fuse came from, or explosive, or a car; or the exact spot, say, where Yanuka and the girl had met up before she planted the Godesberg bomb. Kurtz's detailed knowledge, so casually displayed, was terrifying to Yanuka, whose reaction was to shout at him and order him to keep quiet for reasons of security. Kurtz was puzzled by this.
"But why should I keep quiet?" he protested, with the glazed stupidity which comes over people who have spent too long in prison, whether as guards or inmates. "If your great brother won't keep quiet, what secrets are there left for me to preserve?"
He asked this question not as a revelation at all, but as the logical outcome to a piece of common knowledge. While Yanuka was still staring wildly at him, Kurtz told him a few more things about himself that only his big brother could have known. There was nothing magical about this. After weeks of sifting through the boy's daily life, monitoring his phone calls and his correspondence--not to mention his dossier in Jerusalem from two years back--it was no wonder if Kurtz and his team were as familiar as Yanuka himself was with such minutiae as the safe addresses where his letters went to earth; the ingenious one-way system by which his orders were handed to him; and the point at which Yanuka, like themselves, was cut off from his own command structure. What distinguished Kurtz from his predecessors was the evident indifference with which he referred to these items, and his indifference also to Yanuka's reaction.
"Where is he?" Yanuka began screaming. "What have you done with him? My brother does not talk! He would never talk! How did you capture him?"
The deal was done in moments. Downstairs, as they crowded round the loudspeaker, a kind of awe settled over the whole room as they heard Kurtz, within three hours of his arrival, sweep away Yanuka's last defences. As governor, my job is limited to matters of administration, he explained. Your brother is in a hospital cell downstairs, he is a little tired; naturally one hopes he will live but it will be some months before he can walk. When you have answered the following questions, I shall sign an order permitting you to share his accommodation and nurse him to recovery. If you refuse, you stay where you are. Then, to avoid any mistaken notions of chicanery, Kurtz produced for Yanuka the Polaroid colour photograph they had rigged, showing the barely recognisable face of Yanuka's brother peering out of a bloodstained prison blanket as the two guards carried him away from his interrogation.