But Kurtz replied only with a long and speculative silence, during which he seemed to be testing Alexis with his eyes and thoughts. Then he made that gesture which Alexis so admired, of pushing back his sleeve and raising his wrist to contemplate his watch. And it reminded Alexis yet again that while his own time was ebbing wearily away before his eyes, for Kurtz there was never enough of it.
"Cologne will be very grateful to you, you may be sure," Alexis pressed. "My excellent successor--you remember him, Marty?--he will score an immense personal triumph. With the assistance of the media, he will become the most brilliant and popular policeman in West Germany. Quite rightly, yes? And all thanks to you."
Kurtz's broad smile conceded that this was so. He took a tiny sip of his whisky, and wiped his lips with an old khaki handkerchief. Then he put his chin into the cup of his hand and sighed, implying that he hadn't really meant to say this, but since Alexis had brought it up, he would.
"Well now, Jerusalem gave quite a lot of thought to this question, Paul," he confessed, "and we're not quite as sure as you seem to be that your successor is the type of gentleman whose progress in life we are over-enthusiastic to advance." So what could one do about that? his frown seemed to ask. "It occurred to us, however, that there was an alternative available to us, and maybe we should explore that a little with you and test your response to it. Maybe, we said to ourselves, there are ways in which the good Dr. Alexis could pass our information to Cologne on our behalf? Privately. Unofficially yet officially, if you take my meaning. On a basis of his own personal enterprise and wise stewardship. This is a question we have been putting to ourselves. Maybe we could go to Paul, and we could say to him: ‘Paul, you are a friend of Israel. Take this. Use it. Profit from it. Have it as our gift and keep us out of it.' Why always promote a wrong man in these cases? we asked ourselves. Why not the right one, for once? Why not deal with friends, which is our principle? Advance them? Reward them for their loyalty to us?"
Alexis affected not to understand. He had gone rather red, and there was a slightly hysterical note to his denials. "But, Marty, listen to me, I have no sources! I am not operational, I am a bureaucrat! Shall I pick up the telephone--‘Cologne, here is Alexis, I advise you, go immediately to Haus Sommer,arrest the Achmann daughter, pull in all her friends for questioning'? Am I a conjurer--an alchemist--that I make such wonderful pieces of information out of stones? What are they thinking about in Jerusalem--that a coordinator is suddenly a magic man?" His self-ridicule became cumbersome, and increasingly unreal. "Shall I demand the arrest of all bearded motorcyclists who are possibly Italian? They will laugh at me!"
He had dried up, so Kurtz helped him out, which was what Alexis wanted, for he was in the mood of a child who is criticising authority only in order to be reassured of its embrace.
"Nobody is looking for arrests, Paul. Not yet. Not on our side of the house. Nobody is looking for anything overt at all, least of all in Jerusalem."
"Then what are you looking for?" Alexis demanded, with sudden snappishness.
"Justice," said Kurtz kindly. But his straight, unflinching smile was transmitting another kind of message. "Justice, a little patience, a little nerve, a lot of creativity, a lot of inventiveness from whoever plays our game for us. Let me ask you something, Paul." His big head drew suddenly much closer. His powerful hand settled on the Doctor's forearm. "Suppose, now. Suppose a very anonymous and exceptionally secret informant--I see a high Arab here, Paul, an Arab of the moderate centre, who likes Germany, admires her, and possesses information regarding certain terror operations which he disapproves of--suppose such a man had seen the great Alexis on television a while back. Suppose, for instance, that he was sitting in his hotel room one night in Bonn, say--Düsseldorf,wherever he was sitting--and he happened to turn the switch of his television set for a distraction, and there was the fine Dr. Alexis, a lawyer, a policeman, sure; but a man of humour also, flexible, pragmatic, a humanist to his fingertips--in short, a lot of man--yes?"
"Suppose," Alexis said, half deafened in his mind by the volume of Kurtz's words.
"And this Arab, Paul, he was moved to approach you," Kurtz resumed. "Would speak to no one else. Trusted you on impulse, declined to have dealings with any other German representative. Bypassed the ministries, the police, the intelligence people. Looked you up in the telephone directory, say--called you at your home. Or at your office. How you like--the story's yours. And met you here in this hotel. Tonight. And drank a couple of whiskies with you. Let you pay. And over those whiskies he presented you with certain facts. The great Alexis--no one else will do for him. Do you see a line of advantage here, for a man unjustly deprived of the proper flowering of his career?"
Reliving this scene later, a thing that Alexis did repeatedly in the light of many conflicting moods of amazement, pride, and total, anarchic horror, he came to regard the speech that followed as Kurtz's oblique justification in advance for what he had in mind.
"Terror people get better and better these days," he complained gloomily. " ‘Put in an agent,Schulmann,' Misha Gavron shrieks at me from halfway inside his desk. ‘Sure, General,' I tell him. ‘I'll find you an agent. I'll train him, help him trail his coat, gain attention in the right places, feed him to the opposition. I'll do whatever you ask. And you know the first thing they'll do?' I say to him. ‘They'll invite him to authenticate himself. To go shoot a bank guard or an American soldier. Or bomb a restaurant. Or deliver a nice suitcase to someone. Blow him up. Is that what you want? Is that what you are inviting me to do, General--put in an agent, then sit back and watch him kill our people for the enemy?' " Once again, he cast Alexis the unhappy smile of someone who was also at the mercy of unreasonable superiors. "Terrorist organisations don't carry passengers, Paul. I told Misha this. They don't have secretaries, typists, coding clerks, or any of the people who would normally make natural agents without being in the front line. They require a special kind of penetration. ‘You want to crack the terror target these days,' I told him, ‘you practically have to build yourself your own terrorist first.' Does he listen to me?"
Alexis could no longer withhold his fascination. He leaned right forward, his eyes bright with the dangerous glamour of his question. "And have you done that, Marty?" he whispered. "Here in Germany!"
Kurtz, as so often, did not answer directly, and his Slav eyes seemed already to look beyond Alexis to the next goal along his devious and lonely road.
"Suppose I were to report an accident to you, Paul," he suggested, in the tone of one selecting a remote option from the many that had presented themselves to his resourceful mind. "One that was going to happen, say, in around four days' time."