Litvak did not like to be so closely questioned. "So now they're in the car and on their way into town. To make love. To pull a job and hide the rest of the explosive. Who will ever know? Why should we explain so much?"
"So where is she at this moment?" Kurtz asked, gathering in the details while he continued to deliberate. "In reality?"
"In the van," said Litvak.
"And where's the van?"
"Beside the Mercedes. In the laybye. You give the word, we transfer her."
"And Yanuka?"
"Also in the van. Their last night together. We sedated both of them, just like we agreed."
Taking up his binoculars again, Kurtz held them halfway to his eyes, then returned them to the table. Then he put his hands together and frowned into them.
"Tell me a different method," he suggested, addressing himself by the pose of his head to Becker. "We fly her home, stick her in the Negev Desert, lock her up. Then what? What has become of her? they will ask. From the moment she disappears, they will think the worst. They will think she has defected. That Alexis has got her. That the Zionists have. In any case, that their operation is at risk. That is what they will say, no question: ‘Disband the team, send everybody home.' " He summarised: "They have to have the evidence that nobody has got her except God and Yanuka. They have to know she's as dead as Yanuka is. You disagree with me, Gadi? Or do I perceive from your expression that you know better?"
Kurtz merely waited, but Litvak's gaze, trained upon Becker, remained hostile and accusing. Perhaps he suspected him of innocence at a moment when he needed him to share the guilt.
"No," said Becker, after an age. But his face, as Kurtz had noticed, had the hardness of a willed allegiance.
Then suddenly Litvak was on him--so tense and jerky in his voice that his words were like a leap from where he sat. ‘No?" he repeated. "No what? No operation? What is no?"
‘No is: we have no alternative," Becker replied again, taking his time. "Spare the Dutch girl, they'll never accept Charlie. Alive, Miss Larsen is as dangerous as Yanuka. If we are going on, this is where we do it."
"If," Litvak echoed with contempt.
Kurtz restored order with another question.
"Does she have no useful names at all?" he asked Litvak, seeming to want the answer yes. "Nothing that we should maybe pursue with her? A reason to hold her back?"
Litvak pulled a high shrug. "She knows of a big north German called Edda. She only met, her once. Beyond Edda there's another girl, who's a voice from Paris on the telephone. Beyond the voice is Khalil, but Khalil doesn't hand out visiting cards. She's a half-wit," he repeated. "She drugs so hard you get stoned just standing over her."
"So she's a dead end," said Kurtz.
Litvak was already buttoning his dark raincoat. "A dead end is what she is," he agreed, with a mirthless grin. But he didn't move towards the door. He was still awaiting the specific order.
Kurtz had a last question. "How old is she?"
"Twenty-one next week. Is that a reason?"
Slowly, self-consciously, Kurtz too stood up, and faced Litvak formally across the cramped little room, with its carved, hunting-lodge furniture and wrought-iron fittings.
"Ask each kid individually, Shimon," he ordered. "Does he or she wish to stand down? No explanations needed, no mark against anyone's name who does. A free vote, right across the board."
"I asked them already," Litvak said.
"Ask them again." Kurtz raised his left wrist and looked at his watch. "One hour from now exactly, telephone me. Not earlier. Do nothing until you have spoken to me."
When the traffic is at its thinnest, Kurtz meant. When I have made my dispositions.
Litvak departed. Becker stayed.
Kurtz's first call was to his wife, Elli, and he reversed the charges because he was punctilious about expenses.
"Stay right where you are, please, Gadi," he said quietly as Becker rose to leave, for Kurtz prided himself on living a very open life. So for ten minutes Becker listened to such urgent trivia as how Elli was getting along with her Bible study group, or coping with her shopping problems while the car was off the road. He did not need to ask why Kurtz had chosen such a moment to discuss these matters. In his day, he had done the same thing exactly. Kurtz wanted to touch base before the killing. He wanted to hear Israel talking to him live.
"Elli's just fine," Kurtz assured Becker enthusiastically as he rang off. "She sends love, she says ‘Gadi hurry on back home.' She bumped into Frankie a couple of days back. Frankie was fine too. A little lonely for you, but fine."
Kurtz's second phone call was to Alexis and at first Becker might have supposed, if he hadn't known Kurtz better, that it was all part of the same affable round-up of good friends. Kurtz listened to his agent's family news; he asked about the coming baby--yes, mother and child in excellent health. But once these preliminaries were over, Kurtz braced himself and went straight and hard to the nub, for in his last few conversations with Alexis he had sensed a distinct easing in the Doctor's devotion.
"Paul, it appears that a certain accident we recently spoke of is about to occur at any moment and there is nothing you or I can do to prevent it, so get yourself a pen and paper," he announced jovially. Then, changing tone, he poured out his instructions in a brisk Germanic stream: "For the first twenty-four hours after you receive the official word, you will confine your enquiries to the student quarters of Frankfurt and Munich. You will let it be known that the principal suspects are a left-wing group of activists known to have connections with a cell in Paris. You have that?" He paused, allowing Alexis time to write things down.
"On day two, after midday, you present yourself at the Munich main post office and you collect a poste restante letter addressed to you in your own name," Kurtz continued when he had apparently obtained the required reassurance. "This will provide you with the identity of your first culprit, a Dutch girl, together with certain background data regarding her involvement in previous incidents."
Kurtz's orders now proceeded at dictation speed, and with great force: no searches to be made in Munich city centre until day fourteen; the results of all forensic tests to be sent to Alexis alone in the first instance, and not put into distribution until cleared by Kurtz; public comparison with other incidents made only with Kurtz's approval. Hearing his agent bridle, Kurtz held the receiver a distance from his ear so that Becker could hear it too. "But, Marty, listen--my friend--I must ask something, actually--
"Ask it."
"What are we looking at here? An accident is not a picnic, after all, Marty. We are a civilised democracy, you know what I mean?"
If Kurtz did, he refrained from saying so.
"Listen. I must demand something. Marty, I demand it, I insist on it. No damage, no loss of life. This is a condition. We are friends. You follow?"
Kurtz followed, as his terse answers testified. "Paul, there will surely be no damage to German property. A little bruising maybe. No damage."
"And life? For God's sake, Marty, we are not primitive here!" cried Alexis, with a resurgence of alarm.
A massive calm entered Kurtz's voice. "No innocent blood will be shed, Paul. You have my word. No German citizen will suffer so much as a scratch."
"I can rely on this?"
"You'll have to," said Kurtz, and rang off without leaving his number.
In normal circumstances, Kurtz would not have used the telephones so freely, but since Alexis now had the responsibility for the tapping of them, he felt entitled to take the risk.
Litvak rang ten minutes later. Go, said Kurtz; the green light; do it.
They waited, Kurtz at the window, Becker in his chair again, looking past him at the uneasy night sky. Grabbing the central catch, Kurtz unfastened it and shoved the two casements as wide as they would go, admitting the boom of the traffic from the autobahn.