Kurtz seemed pleased rather than the reverse: "Commander, this reflects no inefficiency on the part of your fine records department. Until a matter of days ago, I would say, Mr. Mesterbein has also been regarded by Jerusalem as innocuous. The same goes for his accomplices."
"Including Blondie?" Captain Malcolm asked, harking back to Mesterbein's lady companion.
But Kurtz only smiled, and tugged a little at his spectacles as a way of calling the attention of his audience to the next photograph. It was one of many that the Munich surveillance team had taken from across the street, and it showed Yanuka by night about to enter the street door to his own apartment. It was fuzzed, as infra-red pictures on slow speed tend to be, but it showed him clearly enough for identification purposes. He was in the company of a tall blonde woman in quarter profile. She was standing back while he put a house key into the front door, and she was the same woman who had already caught Captain Malcolm's fancy from the earlier photograph.
"Where are we now?" said Picton. "Not Paris any more. Buildings are wrong."
"Munich," said Kurtz, and gave the address.
"And the when!" Picton demanded, so brusquely that one might have imagined he had momentarily mistaken Kurtz for one of his own staff.
But Kurtz again chose to mishear the question. "The name of the lady is Astrid Berger,"he said, and once again Picton's yellowed gaze settled on him with an air of informed suspicion.
Deprived for too long of major speeches, meanwhile, the Welsh policeman had chosen to read Miss Berger's particulars aloud from the dossier: "'Berger, Astrid, alias Edda alias Helga '--alias you name it... ‘born Bremen ‘54, daughter of a wealthy shipping owner.' You do move in fine circles, I will say, Mr. Raphael. ‘Educated universities of Bremen and Frankfurt, graduated politics and philosophy 1978. Sometime contributor West German radical and satirical journals, last known address 1979, Paris, frequent visitor Middle East--‘"
Picton cut him short. "Another bloody intellectual. Get her, Malcolm."
As Malcolm again slipped from the room, Kurtz deftly took back the initiative.
"If you will kindly compare the dates there a little, Commander, you will find that Miss Berger's most recent visit to Beirut occurred in April this year, thus coinciding with Mr. Mesterbein's own tour. She was also in Istanbul during Mr. Mesterbein's stopover there. They flew different flights but stayed in the same hotel. Yes, Mike. Please."
Litvak's offering was a couple of photocopied hotel registration forms for Mr. Anton Mesterbein and Miss Astrid Berger,dated April i8th. Beside them, much reduced by reproduction, was a receipted bill, paid by Mesterbein. The hotel was the Hilton, Istanbul. While Picton and the Chief Inspector studied them, the door once more opened and closed.
"NRA on Astrid Berger too, sir. Can you believe it?" said Malcolm, with the most forlorn of smiles.
"Is that Nothing Recorded Against, please?" Kurtz enquired swiftly.
Taking up his silver propelling pencil with the tips of both hands, Picton revolved it before his dyspeptic gaze.
"It is," he said thoughtfully. "It is. Go to the top of the class, Mr. Raphael."
Kurtz's third photograph--or, as Litvak later irreverently called it, his third card in the trick--had been so beautifully forged that even the best guess of Tel Aviv's aerial reconnaissance experts had failed to pick it out from the bunch that they had been invited to inspect. It showed Charlie and Becker approaching the Mercedes in the forecourt of the Delphi hotel on the morning of their departure. Becker was carrying Charlie's shoulder bag and his own black grip. Charlie was in her Greek finery and carrying her guitar. Becker was wearing the red blazer, silk shirt, and Gucci shoes. He had his gloved hand stretched towards the driving door of the Mercedes. He was also wearing Michel's head.
"Commander, this picture was taken by a lucky chance just two weeks before the bomb incident outside Munich, in which, as you rightly say, a certain pair of terrorists had the misfortune to destroy themselves with their own explosives. The red-headed girl in the foreground is a British subject. Her escort addressed her as ‘Joan.' She called him in return ‘Michel,' which was not, however, the name on his passport."
The change in atmosphere was like a sudden drop in temperature. The Chief Inspector smirked at Malcolm, Malcolm seemed to smile in return; but then Malcolm's smile, it was becoming slowly clear, had little to do with what commonly passes for humour. But it was Picton's massive immobility that held the centre stage--his refusal, as it seemed, to take his information from anywhere but the photograph before him. For Kurtz, by his reference to a British subject, had ventured as if unawares upon Picton's holy territory, and men did that at their peril.
"A lucky chance,"Picton echoed through tight lips while he went on staring at the photograph. "A good friend who just happened to have his camera ready, I suppose--that sort of lucky bloody chance."
Kurtz grinned shyly but said nothing.
"Banged off a couple of frames--sent ‘em to Jerusalem on the off-chance. Terrorist he happened to spot on holiday--thought he'd be helpful."
Kurtz's grin broadened; and to his surprise, he saw Picton grinning in return, if not very nicely.
"Yes, well, I think I do remember friends like that. You people have friends everywhere, now I come to think of it. High places, low places, rich places--" For an unfortunate moment, it appeared that certain old frustrations of Picton's days in Palestine had unexpectedly revived themselves and were threatening to spill out of him in a gush of temper. But he contained himself. He tamed his features, he brought his voice down. He relaxed his smile until it could have passed for friendly. But Kurtz's smile was an all-weather thing, and Litvak's face was so twisted by his hand that for all anybody knew he could as well have been laughing his head off or nursing a raging toothache.
Clearing his throat, the grey Chief Inspector, with Welsh bonhomie, ventured another timely intervention. "Well now, even given she was English, sir, which seems to me on the face of it something of a hypothetical long shot, there's still no law, is there, not in this country, against sleeping with Palestinians? We can't mount a nationwide hunt for a lady, just on account of that My goodness, if we--"
"He's got more," said Picton, returning his gaze to Kurtz."Much more."
But his tone went further. They always do have, he was saying.
His courteous good humour undimmed, Kurtz invited his audience to study the Mercedes to the right of the photograph. Forgive him for not knowing too much about cars, but his people assured him this was a saloon model, wine red, with the radio aerial forward on the offside wing, two wing mirrors, central locking, and seat belts in the front only. In all of these details, and many others not visible, he said, the Mercedes in the picture corresponded to the Mercedes that had been accidentally blown up outside Munich, and of which most of the front had miraculously survived.
Malcolm had a sudden solution. "But surely, sir--all this about her being English--isn't she the Dutch girl? Red hair, blonde hair--that doesn't mean a thing. English in this case just means their common language."
"Quiet," Picton ordered, and lit himself a cigarette without offering them to anyone. "Let him go on," he said. And drank in a huge amount of smoke without expelling it.