At six in the evening, though she would have preferred to keep driving all night, she saw the painted sign that nobody had told her to watch out for, and she said, "Oh well,that looks a nice place, I'll try it." Just like that. She said it aloud, bright as brass, probably to her bloody mother. She drove a mile into the hills and there it was, exactly as he-who-did-not-exist had described it, a hotel built inside a ruin, with a pool and miniature golf course. And as she entered the foyer, whom should she walk straight into but her old pals Dimitri and Rose, whom she'd met on Mykonos. Gosh, look, darling, it's Charlie,what a coincidence, why don't we all have dinner together? They ate a barbecue by the pool and swam, and when the pool shut and Charlie couldn't sleep they played Scrabble with her in the bedroom, like warders on the eve of her execution. She dozed for a few hours, but at six in the morning she was back on the road, and by mid-afternoon she had hit the queue for the Austrian border, at which point her appearance suddenly became desperately important to her.
She was wearing a sleeveless blouse from Michel's trousseau; she had brushed out her hair and looked great in each of her three mirrors. Most cars were being waved straight through, but she wasn't counting on that, not again. The rest were showing papers and a few were being fished out for a thorough search. She wondered whether it was random, or whether they had advance warning, or whether they went by certain illegible indications. Two men in uniform were coming slowly down the line, pausing at each car window. One wore green, the other blue, and the blue one had bent his peaked cap to make himself look like an air ace. They glanced at her, then walked slowly round the car. She heard-one of them kick her rear tyre and she had a good mind to yell "Ouch, that hurt," but restrained herself because Joseph, whom she dared not think of, had said, don't go to them, keep your distance, decide what you think is necessary and halve it. The man in green asked her something in German and she said "Sorry?" in English. She was holding up her British passport to him, profession actress. He took it, compared her with her photograph, handed it to his colleague. They were good-looking boys; she hadn't realised they were so young. Blond, full of sap, straight-eyed, with the permanent tan of mountaineers. It's prime quality, she wanted to tell them, in a dreadful lurch towards self-extinction: I'm Charlie, weigh me.
Their four eyes stayed on her while they asked their questions--your turn, my turn. No, she said--well, just a hundred Greek cigarettes and a bottle of ouzo. No, she said, no gifts, honest. She looked away from them, resisting the temptation to flirt. Well, a piece of junk for her mother, but no value. Say, ten dollars. Copybook stuff: give them something to think about. They opened her door and asked to see the bottle of ouzo, but she had a shrewd suspicion that, having had a good look down the front of her blouse, they were keen to see her legs and match everything up. The ouzo was in a basket on the floor beside her. Leaning across the passenger seat, she drew it out and as she did so her skirt opened, which was ninety per cent accidental but for a moment her left thigh was exposed all the way north to the hip. She lifted the bottle to show it to them and in the same moment felt something damp and cold strike her bare flesh. Jesus, they've stabbed me! She let out an exclamation, clapped her hand over the spot, and was astonished to see, printed on her thigh, an inky blue entry stamp recording her arrival in the Republic of Austria. She was so angry she nearly flew at them; she was so grateful she nearly burst into uncontrollable laughter. Without Joseph's words of caution to stop her, she would have embraced them both then and there for their incredible, lovable, innocent generosity. She was through, she was bloody marvellous. She looked in the mirror and saw the darlings shyly waving goodbye to her for about thirty-five minutes on end, oblivious to all other comers.
She had never loved authority so well.
The long watch of Shimon Litvak began in early morning, eight hours before Charlie had been reported safely across the border, and two nights and one day since Joseph, acting on behalf of Michel, had sent the duplicated telegrams to the lawyer in Geneva, for onward transmission to his client. It was now mid-afternoon and Litvak had changed the guard three times, but nobody was bored, nobody was less than very vigilant; his problem was not to keep the team alert but to persuade them to rest properly in their off-hours.
From his commanding position at the window of the bridal suite of an old hotel, Litvak looked down upon a pretty Corinthian market square of which the main features were a couple of traditional inns with outdoor tables, a small car park, and an agreeably antique railway station with an onion dome on the stationmaster's office. The inn nearer to him was called the Black Swan, and boasted an accordion player, a pale, introspective boy who played too well for his comfort and glowered when cars went by, which was quite often. The second inn was called the Carpenter's Arms, and possessed a fine golden sign made up of hand tools. The Carpenter's had class: white tablecloths and trout, which you could choose from an outside tank. There were few pedestrians at this time of day; a heavy, dusty heat cast a pleasant somnolence over the scene. Outside the Swan, two girls drank tea and giggled over a letter they were jointly writing, and their job was to keep a list of vehicle numbers of whoever entered or left the square. Outside the Carpenter's Arms, an earnest young priest sipped wine and read his breviary, and in southern Austria nobody asks a priest to go away. The priest's real name was Udi, short for Ehud, the left-handed killer of the King of Moab. Like his namesake, he was armed to the teeth and left-handed and he was there in case there was fighting to be done. He was backed by a middle-aged English couple seated in the car park in their Rover, to all the world sleeping off the effects of a good luncheon. All the same, they had firearms wedged between their feet and a variety of other hardware within handy reach. Their radio was tuned to the communications van parked two hundred metres up the road towards Salzburg.
Litvak had, in all, nine men and four girls. He could have done with sixteen but he was not complaining. He liked a good stake-out, and the tension always filled him with a sense of well-being. This is what I was born for, he thought: in the run-up to action he thought it always. He was becalmed, his body and his intellect were in a deep sleep, his crew was lying on the deck daydreaming about boyfriends, girlfriends, summer rambles in the Galilee. Yet the lightest whisper of a breeze and every one of them would be at his post before the sails had caught the first strain of it.
Litvak muttered a routine checkword over his headset and had one in reply. They were speaking German in order to attract less attention. Their cover was now a radio-taxi firm in Graz, now a helicopter rescue service based on Innsbruck. They changed wavebands frequently, and used a variety of confusing call signs.