Kurtz was already laughing, though he was alone in his mirth: "Now, Charlie, I don't think that's quite fair to our friend Joseph here at all. This was a committee thing. We had a lot of heads at work here."
Kurtz had a final request: the envelopes that contain your letters, dear. He had them right here with him, look, they weren't franked or cancelled, and he hadn't yet put the letters inside for Michel to take them out again at the ceremonial opening. Would Charlie oblige? It was mainly for the fingerprints, he said; yours first, dear, afterwards the post office sorters', finally Michel's. But there was also the little point about it being her saliva on the flap and underneath the stamps; her blood group, lest anybody clever should ever think of checking, because don't ever forget they have some very clever people, as your fine, fine work has even last night confirmed to us.
She remembered the long fatherly hug from Kurtz, because at the time it seemed as inevitable and necessary as parenthood. Of her farewell from Joseph, however, her last of the series, she afterwards had no recollection at all--not the manner of it, not the place. The briefing, yes; the covert return to Salzburg, yes: an hour and a half in the back of Dimitri's clapped-out van, and no talking after lights out. And she remembered the landing in London, more alone than she had ever been in her life; and the smell of English sadness that had greeted her even on the runway, reminding her of what it was that had turned her towards radical solutions in the first place: the malign sloth of authority, the caged despair of the losers. There was a luggage handlers' go-slow and a rail-strike; the women's lavatory was like a taste of prison. She went through green and, as usual, the bored Customs officer stopped and questioned her. With the difference that this time she wondered whether he had a reason beyond wanting to chat her up.
Coming home is like going abroad, she thought as she joined the despondent queue for the bus. Let's blow the whole lot up and start again.
fifteen
The motor lodge was called Romanz and was set among pine trees on a rise beside the autobahn. It had been built twelve months ago for mediaevally minded lovers, with cement-stippled cloisters, plastic muskets, and tinted neon lighting, and Kurtz had the last chalet of the row, with a leaded jalousie window that looked over the westbound lane. It was two in the morning, an hour of day he was on cheerful terms with. He had showered and shaved, he had made himself coffee on the clever coffee machine and drunk Coca-Cola from the teak-lined refrigerator, and for the rest of the time he had done what he was doing now: he had sat in his shirt-sleeves at the little writing-table, with all the lights out and a pair of binoculars at his elbow, watching the headlamps as they switched through the tree trunks on their way to Munich. Traffic was light at that hour, on average five vehicles a minute; in the rain, they had a tendency to bunch.
It had been a long day and a long night, too, if you counted nights, but Kurtz believed that lassitude clouded the head. Five hours' sleep was enough for anyone, and for himself too much. It had been a long day all the same, not really starting until Charlie had left the city. There had been the Olympic Village apartments to clear, and Kurtz had supervised that operation personally, because he knew it gave the kids an extra edge when they were reminded of his determination to handle detail. There had been the letters to place in Yanuka's apartment, and Kurtz had seen to that as well. From the surveillance post across the street, he had been able to observe the watchers let themselves in, and he had remained there to flatter them on their return, and assure them that their long, heroic vigil would soon be rewarded.
"What's happening to him?" Lenny had asked querulously. "Marty, that boy has a future, now. Just you remember it."
Kurtz's reply had struck a Delphic note: "Lenny, that boy has a future, just not with us."
Shimon Litvak sat behind Kurtz on the edge of the double bed. He had taken off his dripping raincoat and dumped it on the floor at his feet. He looked cheated and angry. Becker sat apart from both of them on a dainty bedroom chair, with his own small ring of light around him, much as he had sat in the Athens house. The same aloneness, yet sharing the same close atmosphere of vigilance before the battle.
"The girl knows nothing," Litvak reported indignantly to Kurtz's still back. "She's a half-wit." His voice had risen slightly and had a quaver. "She's Dutch, her name is Larsen, she thinks Yanuka picked her up while she was squatting with a commune in Frankfurt, but she can't be sure because she's had so many men and she forgets. Yanuka took her on a few trips, taught her to shoot his gun all wrong, and lent her to big brother for his rest and recreation. That part she remembers. Even for Khalil's sex-life they used cut-outs, never the same place twice. She found that groovy. Between times she drove cars for them, placed a couple of bombs for them, stole a few passports for them. For friendly. Because she's an anarchist. Because she's a half-wit."
"A comfort girl," said Kurtz thoughtfully, speaking less to Litvak than to his own reflection in the window.
"She admits Godesberg, she half admits Zürich. If we had the time, she'd admit Zürich totally. Antwerp no."
"Leyden?" asked Kurtz. And now there was a knot in Kurtz's voice as well, so that from where Becker sat, it might have sounded as if the two men were suffering from the same minor throat affliction, a clenching of the cords.
"Leyden a solid no," Litvak replied. "No, no, no again. Then still no. She was on holiday with her parents at the time. On Sylt. Where's Sylt?"
"Off the coast of northern Germany," said Becker, but Litvak glared at him as if suspecting an insult.
"She's so damn slow," Litvak complained, talking to Kurtz once more. "She started talking around midday, but by mid-afternoon she was backing away from everything she'd said. ‘No, I never said that. You're lying!' We find the place on the tape, play it to her, still she says it's a forgery, and starts spitting at us. She's stubborn Dutch and she's nuts."
"I understand," said Kurtz.
But Litvak wanted more than understanding. "Hurt her, we raise her anger so she gets more stubborn. Stop hurting her, we give her the strength back, she gets even more stubborn, starts to call us names."
Kurtz turned half the distance, till, if he had been looking at anyone, he would have been looking straight at Becker.
"She bargains," Litvak continued, in the same note of strident complaint. "We're Jews so she bargains. ‘I tell you this much, you keep me alive. Yes? I tell you that much, you let me go. Yes?' " He swung suddenly on Becker. "So what's the hero's way?" he demanded. "I should enchant her maybe? Have her fall in love with me?"
Kurtz was looking at his watch and beyond it. "Whatever she knows, it's already history," he remarked. "Important is only what we do with her. And when." But he spoke as the man who must give the final.answer himself. "How does the fiction play, Gadi?" he asked of Becker.
"It fits," said Becker. He let them wait a moment. "Rossino had the use of her in Vienna for a couple of days, drove her south, delivered her to the car. All true. She drove the car to Munich, met Yanuka. Untrue, but they're the only two people who know it."
Litvak greedily took up the story: "They met in Ottobrunn. That's a village south-east of town. From there they went somewhere and made love. Who cares where? Not everything has to fit a reconstruction. Maybe in the car. She likes it all the time, she says so. But best she likes it with the fighters, as she calls them. Maybe they rented a room somewhere and the proprietor is too scared even to come forward. Gaps like that are normal. The opposition will expect them."
"And tonight?" said Kurtz, with a glance towards the window. "Now?"