Becker seldom completed his telephone conversations with Kurtz as a rule, nor Kurtz with him. It was an odd thing between them that each vied to be the first to get out of the other's company. This time, however, Kurtz listened all the way to the end, and so did Becker. But as he put down the receiver, Becker caught sight of his attractive features in the mirror, and stared at them with sharp distaste. For a moment, they were like a wrecker's light to him, and he had a morbid and overwhelming wish to extinguish them for good:Who the hell are you?... What do you feel! He drew closer to the mirror. I feel as if I am looking at a dead friend, hoping he will come alive. I feel as if I am searching for my old hopes in someone else, without success. I feel that I am an actor, as you are, surrounding myself with versions of my identity because the original somehow went missing along the road. But in truth I feel nothing, because real feeling is subversive and contrary to military discipline. Therefore I do not feel, but I fight and therefore I exist.
In the town he walked impatiently, striding wide and looking hard ahead of him, as if walking bored him, and the distance, as ever, were too short. It was a town waiting for attack, and over twenty years or more he had known too many towns in that condition. The people had fled the streets, there was not a child to be heard. Knock down the houses. Shoot whatever moves. The parked charabancs and cars lay abandoned by their owners, and God alone knew when they would see them next. Occasionally, his quick glance slipped to an open doorway or the entrance to an unlit alley, but observation was habitual to him and his stride did not relent. Reaching a side street, he lifted his head to read the name but again swept past, before turning swiftly into a building site. A gaudy minibus was parked among tall stacks of bricks. The masts of a washing line drooped beside it, disguising thirty feet of thread aerial. Faint music issued from inside. The door opened, the barrel of a pistol pointed at his face like one eye scanning him, then vanished. A respectful voice said, "Shalom." He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. The music did not quite drown the unsteady chatter of the little teleprinter. David, the operator from the Athens house, was crouched over it; two of Litvak's boys kept him company. With no more than a nod, Becker sat down on the padded bench and began to read the fat bundle of tearsheets set aside for his arrival.
The boys eyed him respectfully. He felt them counting his medal ribbons in their hungry minds, and probably they knew his feats of heroism better than.he did himself.
"She's looking good, Gadi," said the bolder of the two.
Becker ignored him. Sometimes he sidelined a paragraph, sometimes he underlined a date. When he had finished, he handed the papers to the boys, and made them test him until he was satisfied that he knew his lines.
Outside the minibus again, he paused at the window despite himself and heard their cheerful voices discussing him.
"The Rook got him a whole directorship to himself, running some great new textile factory near Haifa," said the bold one.
"Great," said the other. "So let's retire and let Gavron make us millionaires."
eleven
For his forbidden but vital reunion with the good Dr. Alexis that same night, Kurtz had donned an attitude of collégial affinity between professionals, coloured by ancient friendship. They met, at Kurtz's suggestion, not in Wiesbaden but down the road in Frankfurt, where the crowds are thicker and more itinerant, at a large and dowdy conference hotel which was that week playing host to disciples of the soft-toy industry. Alexis had proposed his house, but Kurtz had declined with an innuendo Alexis was not slow to sense. It was ten at night when they met and most of the delegates were already out on the town in search of other varieties of soft toy. The bar was three-quarters empty and, to look at, they were just two more traders solving the world's problems over a bowl of plastic flowers. Which, in a manner of speaking, they were. Canned music played, but the barman was listening to a Bach recital on his transistor.
In the time since they had first met, the imp in Alexis seemed finally to have gone to sleep. The first faint shadows of failure lay on him like the advance notice of an illness, and his television smile had a new and unbecoming modesty. Kurtz, who was preparing himself for the kill, confirmed this gratefully at a glance--Alexis, less gratefully, each morning, when in the privacy of his bathroom he pushed back the skin around his eyes and briefly restored the last of his ebbing youthfulness. Kurtz brought greetings from Jerusalem and, as a token, a small bottle of clouded water certified by the label to have been taken from the true Jordan. He had heard that the new Mrs. Alexis was expecting a baby, and suggested the water might eventually come in handy. This gesture touched Alexis, and amused him somewhat more than the occasion of it.
"But you knew about it before I did," he protested when he had gazed at the bottle in polite marvel. "I haven't even told my office yet." Which was true: his silence had been a kind of last-ditch effort at preventing the conception.
"Tell them when it's over and apologise," Kurtz suggested, not without meaning. Quietly, as became people who make no ceremony, they drank to life, and to a better future for the Doctor's unborn child.
"They tell me you are a coordinator these days," said Kurtz, with a twinkle in his eye.
"To all coordinators," Alexis replied gravely, and once again each took a token sip. They agreed to call each other by their first names, but Kurtz nevertheless retained the formal style of Sie, rather than du. He did not want his ascendancy over Alexis undermined.
"May I ask what you coordinate, Paul?" asked Kurtz.
"Herr Schulmann,I must advise you that liaison with friendly services is no longer included among my official duties," Alexis intoned in deliberate parody of the Bonn syntax: and waited for Kurtz to press him further.
But instead Kurtz ventured a guess, which was not a guess at all. "A coordinator has administrative responsibility for such vital matters as transport, training, recruitment, and the financial accountability of operational sections. Also for the exchange of intelligence between federal and state agencies."
"You have left out official leave," Alexis objected, as much amused as he was horrified, once more, by the quality of Kurtz's information. "You want more leave, come to Wiesbaden, I give you some. We've got a very high-powered committee just for official leave."
Kurtz promised that he would do this--it really was high time he gave himself a break, he confessed. The hint of overwork reminded Alexis of his own days in the field, and he digressed in order to relate a case in which he had not slept--but literally, Marty, not even lain down--for three successive nights. Kurtz heard him out with respectful sympathy. Kurtz was an excellent listener, a breed Alexis met with all too rarely in Wiesbaden.
"You know something, Paul," Kurtz said when they had batted back and forth a while in this agreeable way. "I was a coordinator once myself. My supervisor decided I had been a naughty boy"--Kurtz pulled an accomplice's rueful grin--"so he made me a coordinator. I got so bored that after one month I wrote to General Gavron and I told him officially he was a bum. ‘General, this is official. Marty Schulmann says you are a bum.' He sent for me. You have met this Gavron? No? He's small and shrivelled with a big mop of black hair. No peace in him. No rest.'Schulmann,'he yells at me. ‘What the hell is this, one month and calling me a bum? How did you find out my dark secret?' A cracked voice, like someone dropped him when he was a kid. ‘General,' I say. ‘If you had one ounce of self-respect, you would reduce me to the ranks and throw me back into my old unit where I cannot insult you to your face.' You know what Misha did? He threw me out, then he promoted me. That's how I got my unit back."
This story was the more amusing since it reminded Alexis of his own vanished days as a well-publicised maverick among the stuffed shirts of the Bonn hierarchy. So that it was the most natural thing on earth that the conversation should pass to the matter of the Bad Godesberg outrage, which after all had been the occasion of their getting to know each other.
"I heard they're making a little progress at last," Kurtz remarked, "Tracing the girl back to Paris Orly, that's quite a breakthrough, even if they still don't know who she is."
Alexis was not a little irritated to hear this careless praise from the lips of someone he so admired and respected. "You call that a breakthrough? Yesterday I got their most up-to-date analysis. Some girl flies Orly-Cologne on the day of the bombing. They think. She's wearing jeans. They think. Headscarf, good figure, maybe she's a blonde, so what? The French can't even trace her embarkation. Or say they can't."