"Commander, our reading of that meeting suggests to us that it was a somewhat exploratory exercise. Left to itself, we fear that the meeting is unlikely to bear further fruit."
"How the hell do you know that!" Picton's voice filled with a marvelling wrath. "/'// tell you how you know. You had your ear pressed up to the bloody keyhole! What do you think I am, Mr. Raphael? Some kind of jungle nignog? That girl belongs to you, Mr. Raphael, I know she does! I know you Izzies, I know that poison dwarf Misha, and I'm beginning to know you!" His voice had risen alarmingly. Striding out ahead of Kurtz, he waited until he had brought it under control. Then waited again till Kurtz fell in beside him. "I have a very nice scenario in my mind at this moment, Mr. Raphael, and I'd like to share it with you. May I do that?"
"It will be a privilege, Commander," said Kurtz pleasantly.
"Thank you. The trick is normally done with dead meat. You find a nice corpse, you dress him up and leave him somewhere where the enemy will stumble on him. ‘Hullo,' says the enemy, ‘what's this? A dead body carrying a briefcase? Let's look inside.' They look, and they find a little message. ‘Hullo,' they say, ‘he must have been a courier! Let's read the message and fall into the trap.' So they do. And we all get medals. ‘Disinformation,' we used to call it, designed to misguide the enemy's eye, and very nice too." Picton's sarcasm was as awesome as his wrath. "But that's too simple for you and Misha. Being a bunch of over-educated fanatics, you've gone one further. ‘No dead meat for us,oh no! We'll use live meat. Arab meat. Dutch meat.' So you did. And you blew it up in a nice Mercedes motorcar. Theirs. What I don't know, of course--and I never will, because you and Misha will deny the whole thing on your deathbeds, won't you?--is where you've planted that disinformation. But planted it you have, and now they've bitten. Or they'd never have brought her those nice flowers, would they?"
Ruefully shaking his head in admiration of Picton's amusing fantasy, Kurtz started to move away from him, but Picton with a policeman's unerring touch lightly held him where he was.
"You tell this to Master bloody Gavron. If I'm right and you lot have recruited one of our nationals without our consent, I'll personally come over to his nasty little country and take his balls off. Got it?" But suddenly, as if against his wish, Picton's face relaxed into an almost tender smile of recollection. "What was it the old devil used to say?" he asked. "Tigers, was it?You'd know."
Kurtz said it too. Often. Grinning his pirate's grin, he said it now. "You want to catch the lion, first you tether the goat."
The moment of adversarial kinship past, Picton's features once more set to stone. "And at the formal level, Mr., Raphael, compliments of my Chief, your service has got itself a deal," he snapped. Swinging on his heel, he marched briskly back towards the house, leaving Kurtz and Mrs. O'Flaherty to plod after him. "And tell him this too," Picton added, pointing his stick at Kurtz in a final assertion of his colonial authority. "He will please to stop using our bloody passports. If other people can manage without them, so can the Rook, damn him."
For the return journey to London, Kurtz sat Litvak in the front seat of the car to teach him English manners. Meadows, who had grown a voice, wanted to discuss the problem of the West Bank: how could one solve the thing, actually, sir, while giving the Arabs a fair deal, of course, do you think? Cutting himself off from the? futile conversation, Kurtz abandoned himself to memories he had held at bay till now.
There is a working gallows in Jerusalem where nobody is hanged any more. Kurtz knew it well: close to the old Russian compound, on the left-hand side as you drive down a half-made road and stop before a pair of aged gates that lead to what was once Jerusalem's central prison. The signs say"to the museum" but also"hall of heroism" and there is a rather cracked old man who loiters outside and bows you in, sweeping his shallow black hat in the dust. The entrance fee is fifteen shekels but rising. It is where the British hanged the Jews during the Mandate time, from a noose with a leather lining to it. Only a handful, actually, and they hanged Arabs galore; but this was where they hanged two of Kurtz's friends, in the years when he was in the Haganah with Misha Gavron. Kurtz might well have joined them. They had imprisoned him twice and interrogated him four times, and the occasional troubles he had with his teeth were still ascribed by his dentist to the beatings he had received at the hand of an amiable young field security officer, now dead, whose manner, though not his looks, reminded him a little of Picton's.
But a nice man, that Picton, all the same, thought Kurtz, with an inward smile, as he contemplated yet another successful step along the road. A little rough maybe; a little heavy with the mouth and hand; and sad about his taste for alcohol--a waste as always. But in the end as fair as most men. A fine practitioner too. A fine mind inside the violence. Misha Gavron always said he'd learned a lot from him.
nineteen
It was back to London and the waiting. For two wet autumn weeks, ever since Helga had broken the terrible news to her, the Charlie of her imagination had entered a morbid, vengeful hell, and burned in it alone. I am in shock; I am an obsessive, solitary mourner without a friend to turn to. I am a soldier robbed of my general, a revolutionary cut off from the revolution. Even Cathy had deserted her. "From now on, you manage without a nanny," Joseph told her, with a drawn smile. "We cannot have you going into phone boxes any more." Their meetings during this period were sparse and businesslike, usually elaborately planned car pickups. Sometimes he took her to out-of-the-way restaurants on the edge of London; once to Burnham Beeches for a walk; once to the zoo in Regent's Park. But wherever they were, he talked to her about her state of mind and briefed her constantly for various contingencies, without ever quite describing what they were.
What will they do next? she asked.
They are checking. They are observing you; thinking about you.
Sometimes she alarmed herself with unscripted outbreaks of hostility towards him, but, like a good doctor, he hastened to assure her that the symptoms were normal to her condition. "I am the archetypal enemy, good heavens! I killed Michel and if I had half a chance I would kill you. You should regard me with the most serious misgivings, why not?"
Thanks for the absolution, she thought in secret wonder at the seemingly endless facets of their shared schizophrenia: to understand is to forgive.
Until the day came when he announced they must temporarily abandon meetings of any kind, unless an extreme emergency occurred. He seemed to know something was about to happen, but refused to tell her what it was for fear she might respond out of character. Or not respond at all. He would be close, he said, reminding her of his promise in the Athens house: close--but not present--from day to day. And having thus, perhaps deliberately, stretched her sense of insecurity almost to breaking point, he sent her back again to the life of isolation that he had invented for her; but this time with her lover's death as its theme.