Bamboo and Blood

CHAPTER Four
“On your return, you will be hailed with a great ceremony at the airport. It will be thronged with press and cheering crowds, all to greet a man who had thought of abandoning the motherland but returned in its time of challenge and travail. Speakers will note that you are the grandson of a great hero; the blood lineage of the revolutionaries is always a good theme. There will be much waving of banners as you step from the aircraft stairs and plant your feet on the soil of your homeland. When they ask what made you return, you will say that Grandfather’s words echoed in your heart, that you saw him in front of you constantly, that you searched your conscience and finally realized you could not betray the people. You will weep at the mistake you almost made, weep at returning to the bosom of the country, the land where your parents shed their blood.”
My brother had left a message at my hotel for me to meet him again, this time in the park near the mission during the noontime break. As soon as I walked in through the gate and saw him sitting in the sun near the big pine tree, I knew I had made a mistake. Now that I heard what he had to say, I knew it was worse than a mistake.

“No. That I will not do.” I clenched my jaw so hard it hurt. “I will not play that sort of fool. I will not misuse Grandfather or our parents for such a ridiculous show. I will not betray them. You know I won’t do that. Why would you even suggest it? Are they so desperate at home to counter the defection in Beijing? Are they so rattled that they will grasp at anything, even this?”
My brother looked alien to me, and I thought I might despise him forever if I didn’t make one last effort. “Don’t you feel him near sometimes? I don’t mean like a ghost, but in your blood? When you see an old man on the street who looks a little like he did at the end, walks like he did, very proud and straight, don’t you think he is still around, a part of you?”
“Don’t be a fool.”
One more desperate attempt, one more and then I would quit. “Do you remember how Mother would sing at night, how her voice sounded in the darkness when she went down to the river to be alone? Can’t you hear it on the wind, still?”
“How could you remember anything like that? You were barely more than a baby. You’re romanticizing. There’s no time for sentimentality.”
“No, I remember. It is clear to me, her voice. I hear it sometimes.”
“Do you want to know what I hear? I hear grandfather telling us that they were dead, that we had no family left but him and that we had to leave in the morning because the battle was moving our way.”
“I remember her songs.”
“You don’t. You don’t remember a thing. You didn’t even cry when he told us. I don’t think you knew what was happening.”
“I remember Grandfather looking for someplace warm for us to sleep. I won’t let you use him. It’s betrayal.”
“Use him? He’s dead! We all have jobs to do, now and maybe after we die as well. Besides, he wasn’t perfect, you know. Or maybe you don’t.”
“Perfect? What would you know about perfection? That’s just like you, isn’t it? Tearing down whatever makes you look small by comparison. Have you ever said anything decent about him? Have you ever mentioned what he did? No, you pretend as if he didn’t sacrifice everything for us.”
“This isn’t about me. What I’m asking does no harm to the old man. Let him be useful again, really useful, not a musty symbol of a bygone era. For all you know, he might have approved. He approved of almost everything that you did, didn’t he?”
That was meant to get to me. It did. “Damn you.” I thought of stopping there, but then the words boiled over. When other people mentioned my grandfather, I could ignore them, or just walk away like I almost did in Pak’s office with Sohn. That was impossible with my brother. With him it was different, exactly because he planned every word he spoke. Every word, every thought was for him part of an unending war fought against his own existence. But he did not fight on the front lines. He was a sapper who studied the structure, planned where to place the charge, and exploded it to cause maximum destruction. He thought of me as a bridge that had to be brought down to prevent the past from pursuing him.
“We aren’t related anymore.” I had never once thought of saying that, but there was no going back once I heard the words spoken in my own voice. “We aren’t part of the same family. We don’t share the same blood. From now on, we are strangers.”
He was silent, but not with shock or hurt or even with contemplation. I knew what he was doing; he was searching even then for a way to destroy me. There was only one thing left to say, and I might as well say it. “We are nothing to each other,” I said. “You and me, we have nothing in common, and we never did. Do you understand? Can I make it any clearer to you? We are not brothers. We are complete strangers who owe each other nothing. We will not meet. We will not talk. We will not acknowledge each other’s existence. As far as I am concerned, you died and I did not mourn.” He was looking out at the lake, pretending not to hear. I stopped for a moment to consider, but the words were already there, honed and dipped in poison that must have been fermenting for centuries. “Let me tell you this, if I ever find that you haven’t died, if you ever work your way into my sights, if I am ever, for any reason, told to hunt down a man and kill him and it turns out to be you, I will pull the trigger. You hear me? I will pull the trigger.”

That caught his attention. “No doubt you will, little brother.” He got to his feet. “The only question is whether you’ll live long enough to see that day.”
2
I watched him walk down the hill, past the stand of oaks and the line of maples all the way out of the park. I willed myself to be calm, but I had no will left, not for that. I made it a point to draw few lines in my life. Drawing them rarely made sense. People who drew lines became trapped on the wrong side. Things changed, reality shifted, shapes became shadows and shadows faded into night. You can’t see your principles in the dark. But where I did draw a line, I had no intention of erasing it.
At my grandfather’s funeral, a day of bright sunshine, people I had never met before bowed their heads and murmured as they passed by that I should be true to his name. On the day he died, the radio called him the Beating Heart of the Revolution, and all at once, when I heard that, I knew what he had been trying to tell me for all the years I had been in his house. I never saw him bend.
When we were young, not long after the war, my brother came home a few times a year. Whenever he did, my grandfather would become silent. It was a great honor, my brother would say. He was attending the revolutionary school for the children of heroes killed in the war. The students were all orphans, but they had not lost their family, he told us. The fatherland was our family, the party was our future, the Great Leader was the center of our hope. No one could rest on what he had done in the past; it was to the future we owed our lives. To me, it was stirring stuff. My grandfather sat with his hands on his knees and was silent.
Once, after my brother had returned to school, the old man went out to his workroom and didn’t come back, even though night had fallen. I found him sitting by the light of a single candle, holding a beautiful piece of wood he had been working on for weeks. As I stepped inside the room, he broke the wood across his knee. “Which piece should we burn first?” he asked me. I had no idea what to reply.
After my brother had disappeared outside the wall that surrounded the park, I set off for the lake. I walked, not noticing where I was or what I saw. I must have gone across one of the bridges, because the next thing I knew, I was all the way around on the western side of the lake, sitting on a bench that shared a patch of grass with a small linden tree. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a man jogging down the path. Barely a meter away, he stopped to tie his shoe. I knew what was going to happen next. He sat down beside me. “Nice day,” he said. “You jog? Good way to get exercise and see the sights.”
These people had no shame. I started to get up.
“Whoa, I didn’t mean any offense,” he said. “Just trying to make conversation. You look a little lonely, sitting here.”
I sat back down. “Let’s save ourselves a lot of time. I’ll give you my answer first. No. I’ll throw in an extra one for emphasis. No. And I have plenty in reserve. I brought a suitcase full of them and put several in my pocket this morning. No. Now, go ahead and ask your question.”
“What question? I told you, I was jogging. I’m here on a vacation.”
“Good for you. Myself, I’m here to dedicate a memorial to the Heroes of the Revolution.”
“Funny man. Look, you may not know it, but there are a lot of people about to crawl up your ass. Here’s my phone number.” He put a piece of paper on the bench next to me. “If you get nervous or decide you want a change of scenery, just call and ask for Mr. Walbenhurst.”
“Some name. I don’t think I can remember it. Is it real?”
“Everything is real, Inspector. And everything is possible.” He leaned over and checked his laces again. “Well, write if you get work,” he smiled. “That’s what my mama used to tell me.”
The woman sitting three benches away waited until he jogged past before she stood up. Nothing left to chance, I said to myself. Which is why nothing was possible.
3
The talks were on and then off and then on again for the next week. Their side read talking points, we read ours, then we all stood up and stretched. Then we sat down again to read the same talking points, and to hear theirs all over again. Finally, on a rainy afternoon, the opportunity arose to pass the message that Sohn had given me. The man I had selected as the target walked up to me.
“Nice tie,” he said. “Where did you get it?”
“My tie?” It wasn’t what I had considered as the opening for slipping in the assassin’s blade.
“You seem to have a good collection. That one looks Italian.” He pointed to his own tie. “Mine are shabby by comparison, I’m afraid. I used to have one I bought in the Paris airport, but I can’t find it anymore. Does that happen to you? Ties disappearing. I have the same problem with socks.”
What problem? Were socks a problem? Were we exporting socks to rogue states?
“It looks like we’re going to be here for another week or so. Why don’t we all get together on the weekend, maybe go for a drive in the mountains? We could get a small bus. Let me know.” He smiled. “Nice talking to you.”
4
The idea of meeting the daughter of a Turk who worked for Israeli intelligence was not mine. I resisted up to a point, but I do not believe in taking hopeless stands. Dilara wanted to do it; she insinuated herself against me in ways that rapidly made my opposition untenable. I’d been to her father’s café almost every day, and every time she served me tea and little sweets and long ravishing looks that made my heart pound on my rib cage with a fierce insistence. Thursday afternoon, during the lunch break at the talks, I hurried over to the café. Her father was away. She came outside and walked with me to my hotel.
“I’m not going up to your room,” she said. “If my father caught me in your room, he’d slice you to ribbons. He doesn’t trust you.”
“Me? What have I done to deserve such suspicion?”
“Nothing. You’re Korean, that’s all, and he has bad memories of your country. You remind him of the war. He’s been very strange since you showed up.”

“The war was a long time ago.”
“My father says time is merde.” She smiled faintly. “Whatever that means. I try not to listen to everything he says. He doesn’t like me speaking to men, by the way.”
“What if I just nod my head?”
“Be serious. You aren’t going to be here forever.”
Such a pretty girl, such an ominous line of thought. It was unnerving. “I suppose not,” I said.
“What I mean is, you won’t be in Geneva forever. People show up and then fly away. It happens all the time. We need to take advantage of the time we have.”
I thought so, too, though the image of my body cut to ribbons was something of a brake.
“Let’s meet tonight at the Crazy Swan. It’s a club. My father won’t know anything about it. He doesn’t even know where it is. The music is loud and the dance floor is so packed, you can barely move. Some people dance naked once in a while. It will be fun.”
It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. Still, I made sure to smile.
“What? Don’t you want to be with me? My father’s away until tomorrow afternoon. That means tonight is free. Carpe diem, Inspector, don’t you think?”
I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know how to dance. “Yes,” I said, “it will be fun.”
I barely got back to the meeting room on time. The other side invited us to dinner that night. The idea of sitting and discussing where socks go instead of writhing with young bodies—some of them not wearing socks, if Dilara was to be trusted—did not appeal to me. Fortunately, fate stepped in. During a break, the delegation leader took me aside. “You slipped,” he said. “You spoke English to one of them. They think they can sink their teeth into you. It probably isn’t a good idea for you to be at the dinner tonight. What do you think?”
What did I think? He wanted to know what I thought? I thought the image of them as wolves pulling me down and gnawing on my throat was overdrawn. “I really think I should go to the dinner. It’s important that I be there. In fact, it’s critical that I be there. But if you advise against it, I have to consider that seriously.” I paused long enough for serious consideration. “Please pass my regrets, won’t you?”
That night, when I reached the club, there was a line at the door. “Good evening, monsieur,” the doorman said. “Do you have a ticket?” He asked in French, and when I didn’t respond, he repeated the question in English.
“Ticket? I’m meeting someone here.” Dilara hadn’t mentioned anything about a ticket. “Maybe she’s inside. I’ll just go in and look.”
“No, pal, I don’t think so.” Given how big his hands were, they were surprisingly gentle on my neck. “We’ll just wait over here, and maybe your friend will come out looking for you, eh?”
Jen? emerged from the club. “What are you doing here?” He looked over his shoulder into the noise and the lights beyond the door. “You’re not here with Dilara, I hope. Ahmet will cut you to ribbons if he finds out. That isn’t a bread knife he carries around. It’s his Turkish army knife, the one he carried in the war. The last boyfriend she had was Lebanese. He disappeared.”
The doorman chimed in. “He said he was waiting for a friend. Are you his friend, boss?”
Jen? shook his head. “He’s not waiting for anyone. He’s leaving. If he shows up again, Rudi, kick his tush down the street.” Rudi nodded and stepped back inside the door.
“You give the orders around here?” I rubbed my neck where Rudi had given me a final squeeze. “You act like you own the place.”
“I do. That’s why Ahmet lets his sweet flower of a daughter keep coming here. We keep an eye on her.”
“He knows she comes here?” Dilara had been very definite that it was a secret she kept from her father.
“Ahmet knows everything his daughter does, everyone she sees, everyone who thinks lascivious thoughts when they watch her walk away.”
“I was only going to dance with her.” I suppressed any thoughts Ahmet might pick up on the airwaves.
“What would you know about nightclub dancing, Inspector?”
“How hard can it be?”

“Forget about her. She’ll only get you in trouble. Besides, the music in there is so loud, it could make your knees ache. Come on, we’ll go get a drink someplace quiet, where we can actually hold a conversation. We need to talk.”
A car pulled around the corner. The driver climbed out, and Jen? slid in behind the wheel. “Hop in, Inspector, we may have to put on a little speed to lose M. Beret’s hordes.” Before I had closed the door, the car jumped ahead. “Put on the seat belt, I don’t want to get cited for ignoring safety regulations.” We were already going 60 kph in a narrow street that seemed to be taking us rapidly out of the city. Jen? still hadn’t turned on the headlamps. “Hang on for a few more minutes.” He looked quickly in the rearview mirror and laughed. “Damn, they’re good.” The road curved sharply and the car accelerated. I thought for a moment we had left the ground. “Relax, Inspector. Enjoy the side.” Jen? took both hands off the steering wheel. “You see? The road is straight from here for the next five kilometers, and M. Beret’s friends are stuck behind a garbage truck. I’m taking you to a nice place near Chamonix. You have your papers, I hope.”
“No.”
“Well, that’s a problem. But we’ll deal with it.”
5
There were no other cars in the parking lot, and the inn was completely dark. Jen? pulled around back under a covered shed. “Nice and cozy,” he said. “They’ll figure out which road we took, but it will take them a while to find us.” We walked to the back door. “I hope you like lamb, Inspector, because that’s what they serve here. Lamb this and lamb that. It’s a specialty of the house.” Jen? opened the door with a key, waited for me to step inside, then locked the dead bolt. “The stairs to the basement are off the hall,” he said. “Careful not to trip. I’ll be down in a second.”
Ahmet was waiting for me in the hall. It was hard to see much in the dark, but it didn’t look like he was smiling. “Downstairs,” was all he said, and so I went, my head suddenly full of images of ribbons. It seemed like a lot of trouble to go to over an unsuccessful effort to dance with his daughter, but you never know with some people. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I turned to Ahmet to ask where I should go next.
6
When I regained consciousness, I was sitting in a dimly lit room, at the head of a large table. The other people were eating. “Forgive us, Inspector, but if lamb gets cold, it loses its flavor,” said the man nearest me after taking a sip of wine. “We decided not to wait. Ahmet has been keeping yours warm.”
“Actually, I’m not hungry.” I had drooled on the tablecloth and had a slight headache.
“Have a bite, Inspector. Don’t worry, we won’t start dessert until you’ve caught up. Perhaps you’d better clean your palate first. Try some wine.” He didn’t offer to pour for me.
“Is this some sort of joke? You take me here”—I looked around for Jen?, but he was nowhere to be seen—“and then you knock me out. When I finally come to, you pretend I’m a welcome dinner guest.” I put the napkin to my lip, which had stopped bleeding but still hurt. Pain annoys me, especially my own. “Someone has a lot of explaining to do. I don’t even know who you are.”
At that, the five people around the table put down their silverware. Ahmet appeared and cleared the plates, including mine.
The man nearest me sighed. “You wouldn’t care for a brandy, would you?” I shook my head, which I instantly regretted. “No,” he said, “I didn’t suppose you would. Well, to business.”
Just then there was a lot of ringing of bells from upstairs. Ahmet moved quickly to close what appeared to be a heavy wooden door—oak, probably, but I didn’t think they would be happy if I went over to check. No one spoke. It occurred to me to shout to whoever was upstairs that I needed help, but on second thought it seemed hopeless, and not a sure thing that I would be any better off in all the commotion that would result. After the bells stopped, we all remained quiet for another five minutes or so. The man next to me got up and had a low conversation with Ahmet, who opened the heavy door and disappeared.
“You probably are wondering what is going on, Inspector.” A man at the far end folded his napkin in a triangle and set it on the table. “You don’t recognize us?”
“Should I?”
“We were on an airplane together.”
I looked at each of them carefully. “You must have been in first class.”
“A few of us were, actually. We are from Mossad. Does that worry you?
“Of course not. My job description calls for me to have regular meetings with Mossad. Every Thursday night over lamb. We take turns getting knocked out.”
“It was not exactly according to the script—that was Ahmet’s doing. He thinks you are making eyes at his daughter. You’re not, of course. She’s much too young.”
“Much.”
The man with the triangle napkin rearranged it into a rabbit with floppy ears. “We understand that you came to Geneva on Mr. Sohn’s orders. We have been trying to contact him, without success, I might add. Out of desperation, we decided to invite you to dinner.”
Two lights went on in my head. I almost thought I was seeing double. “Dilara was part of the invitation. Sort of like bait?”
“She helped.”
“There was never any idea of dancing with me at the disco.”
“Never.”
“Then why was Ahmet so upset?”
“Ahmet deals with possibilities. He likes to forestall things, especially when it comes to his virgin daughter. We don’t approve of everything he does in that regard; we also don’t control him.”
“Getting back to Sohn.” I looked at my wineglass, which was still empty. No one moved to fill it, and I was in no mood to pour for myself. This was the second light that had clicked on. They knew Sohn. That meant Sohn probably knew them, though these things are not always so symmetrical. But if he did know them, it meant the reason he picked me to come out here was welded to my bad luck in having to play host for Jen?. Unless, of course, it wasn’t just bad luck. Maybe Sohn had engineered my playing host. The idea had crossed my mind before, but I had dropped it as far-fetched. I should trust my instincts, the ones that didn’t touch on Turkish virgins.
“Getting back to Sohn,” said the man to my right. “We have been discussing a few ideas with him over the past many months, as you no doubt know.” No, I did not no doubt know. I had only entertained a bad premonition that Sohn had been working with the Israelis. Knowing and entertaining were not the same thing. “It turns out, much as he kept telling us, we do have some common ground, though as he constantly warned us, that is not a perception universally shared in your leadership.”
“Or in ours,” one of the other men muttered and left the table. The others did not watch him go.
The napkin man moved his chair closer to the table. “That’s good, now we are only five—an excellent number for a conversation. Six is too many, don’t you think?”
Ahmet walked in with a bowl of fruit and put it on the table.
“Please, Inspector, eat, have a piece of fruit.” The man with the napkin took a banana and began to peel it. Ahmet found a chair next to the fireplace and sat down. His radars were turning. I tried not to think about Dilara.
“Here’s what I know,” I said. “First, I have a diplomatic passport; second, and in contradiction to point one, I am being held against my will in a basement somewhere in France by people who have no authority to do so.”
“No, Inspector, we’re not in France at all. We’re in Italy. We were in France, but your M. Beret seems to know a lot of people in the French service. He doesn’t like the Italians, however, and they don’t like him. While you were resting we all drove here. Excuse my interruption—do you have a third point?”
“What about Jen??” There was apparently a great deal of lamb going around this corner of Europe, French lamb, Italian lamb.
“He’s probably sitting with M. Beret at this moment. They have a lot to talk about. As do we, Inspector. We have a message for you to give to Mr. Sohn. It is an important message, and we had quite a discussion among ourselves as to whether we could trust you with it. In the end, there wasn’t much choice. Someone suggested that we pass it to your brother, but we have reason to believe that he and Sohn don’t get along.” A broad smile.
“And?” No question about it, they had good sources.
“And so you got the lamb dinner.”
“I’m not authorized to pass messages to Sohn from you, and having disappeared for I don’t know how long, I doubt if anyone in my mission will listen to anything I have to say once I get back. In fact, they probably already think I’ve defected.” I stopped to give a short laugh, but it came out more like a bark. I should have gone to dinner with the wolves.
“Amazing, you sound just like Sohn, Inspector,” said the man with the napkin. By now he had fashioned it into a hand puppet, though I didn’t recognize the shape. “It’s a dog,” he said when he saw my questioning look, “though it appears to have lost a leg. You’ve never seen a three-legged dog? They seem to adapt rather well, though they can be painful to watch.” I glanced around the table, but none of the others gave anything away.
“Adaptation has never been my best quality,” I said. “If you want me to pass a message to Sohn, you’d damn well better have a convincing explanation for why I disappeared.” I didn’t need authorization to carry a message to Sohn. They knew that perfectly well.
“So, you agree to pass the message?”
“I imagine that is the only way I’ll get out of here.”
“Goodness, no, Inspector. We’re not going to carry you away wrapped in a rug.” The man to my left snorted.
“Let’s get on with it.” A short, bald man walked in and sat down. The others nodded at him. “I ask only that you listen closely, Inspector.” He turned his full attention to me. “When I’m finished, if you have any questions about what I have said, you should ask them then. Understood?”
It wasn’t an order or a threat, nothing peremptory about it. He seemed like a man under a lot of pressure and in need of a good night’s sleep. “I’m listening,” I said.

“Good. Sohn must have told you we have been meeting with him, or with people attached to him, for quite a while. We’ve been dancing around each other, but there isn’t time to dance anymore.” I put aside the mental picture of Sohn’s little ears dancing in the desert at dusk. “Let me be blunt. We don’t want our neighbors buying missiles from you.” I assumed he didn’t mean me personally. “You, of course, don’t care what the buyers do with the missiles, as long as you are paid. You need the money from those sales, and if the sales stop, Sohn has made it very clear to us, you must have something to fill the vacuum. It’s not a difficult equation to solve. We do our part, you do yours.” He poured me a glass of wine, and then one for himself. “There is a little complication, however—the negotiations you are currently holding in Geneva.” He took an orange from the fruit bowl, examined it closely, then put it back. “A decent orange cannot be such a difficult thing to find in this country,” he said to the others in English. “Or am I wrong?” Nobody said a word.
“So far,” I said when it seemed that if I didn’t break the silence, we would be sitting all night contemplating fruit, “I haven’t heard a message.”
“That’s because I’m not quite there, Inspector.” The bald man rummaged through the bowl and emerged with a plum. He polished it. He held it up to the light. “Do you like plums, Inspector? Do you know what happens to a plum when it is dried? It becomes a prune. Same thing happens with countries. When they dry up, they are only good for shit.”
Ahmet smiled absently into the fireplace. The others watched me with interest. I may have flushed, but I was determined not to let him win the point. “Maybe that sort of thing works with Arabs,” I said evenly, “or with what’s left of the Ottoman Empire. Don’t try it with me.” Ahmet’s smile dimmed slightly, but I could tell it didn’t break his concentration on which of my body parts to add to next week’s lamb sausage.
The bald man bit into the plum. He said something to the others in a language that came from the back of his throat, and they nodded. “Very well, Inspector. We get down to business.” The plum had dripped onto his chin. He ignored it. “The talks you are holding. I’ll be blunt. They are a problem for us if they make progress.”

“I don’t think there’s much danger of that.”
“You may not think so. We do not think so. But things sometimes take an odd bounce in these talks. Do you play soccer?”
“Too much running around,” I said.
“Then you know what I mean. An odd bounce in a game that seems to be going nowhere, and suddenly someone makes a goal. If your talks should suddenly make a goal, that would be a problem.” He finally reached up and wiped away the drop of plum juice. “Like watching dirt on another man’s face.”
Sohn had sent me out to talk to the Americans in Geneva; instead I was somewhere in France—or Italy, if they were to be trusted—sharing a fruit bowl with Mossad. Sohn didn’t make mistakes. I was here because he wanted me to end up here. When he played soccer, I had a feeling, the ball only bounced where he wanted it to. “If the talks succeed,” I said, “it will stop our missile sales to your neighbors. I take it that isn’t what you really want, even though you say that it is.”
“To the contrary, it is very much what we want. And as you know, we are prepared to invest quite a bit in your country if we can be sure we are getting what we need. We want those missile transfers to stop, not slow down, not be rerouted. We want them to stop. But if the talks succeed, that will not happen. Why? Because you don’t trust the Americans, your side will probe for the seams in an agreement.”
Ahmet hissed through his false teeth.
“The deal will fall through sooner or later; and we will end up losing a lot of precious time on the problem. If the talks succeed, by which is commonly understood you sign something and drink a glass of champagne, we will be put on the sidelines and told not to interfere. Meanwhile, and this is our estimate, so please contradict me if you think we are wrong, your own situation will not improve. You will gain nothing from the negotiated deal, and the money you earn from sales elsewhere, even from your old customers, will become a pittance because no one will trust you anymore as a supplier. How can anyone sign a contract with someone who takes their money and then negotiates away the deal, tears it up for diplomatic gain? They barely trust you as it is. You see my point.” He didn’t wait for me to respond. “So it comes down to this: Would your side rather deal with someone who can deliver, or someone who can’t? That’s the choice. That’s the message that we want you to pass to Sohn.” He threw the plum pit into the fireplace and walked out of the room without saying good night.
7
“Don’t turn around, but that is probably one of your M. Beret’s boys who just swung in behind us.”
“Why do you keep calling him ‘my’ M. Beret? He isn’t mine. If anything he’s yours. You’re the one who dined with him last night. I didn’t even eat.” I could see headlights in the rearview mirror.
Jen? accelerated slightly and turned into the narrow street. “I’ll drop you just past that warehouse, up there, on the right. You’ll have to jump out while the car is moving. Are you trained for that?” It wasn’t a skill we used in Pyongyang, but that was no business of Mossad.
“See you around,” I said and reached for the door handle.
“You might want to release your seat belt first, Inspector.”
“European sequencing,” I said. Fortunately, we had slowed enough so that when I jumped out, I only stumbled against a lightpost and fell into a pile of boxes. Jen??s car disappeared; the one that had been following us squealed around the corner and roared past.
When I limped in the front door of my hotel, M. Beret was sitting with a book in his lap, dozing. He looked up when the door clicked shut.
“Ah, Inspector. Alarm bells have been ringing. Your mission is in an uproar wondering where you are. The talks were recessed and angry words have been exchanged. Your side says you have been kidnapped. Quite exciting. And you? Been skiing on the Italian side?”
“I don’t ski.”
“Then you must have bruised your shoulder jumping from a car. It takes practice.”
“How would you know if I bruised my shoulder?”
“You’re limping like a bird with a sprained wing.”
“I’m tired, if you don’t mind. I’d like to get some sleep. Will you do me a favor and tell my mission that I was knocked unconscious in a disco and nearly suffocated in the crush of young, sex-starved bodies, but that I’m alright now?”
“Of course, Inspector, that is probably as believable as anything.” He closed his book and watched me climb the stairs. “How was the lamb, by the way?”
“Good night, monsieur.”
I heard him move softly to the door.