It had been raining all morning. If the consultant had kept running, heading for the cafe’s door, he would have had either to sidestep or collide with the man. He slowed in the middle of the street and found himself anchored there. A delivery van hooted at him. The man had no umbrella, no raincoat. Water glistened on his short hair and the shoulders of his jacket. The shirt under the jacket had no collar and was buttoned at the throat, and the cheeks were swarthy. He thought the man was from the east, perhaps Baluchistan province. The trousers were baggy at the knees and the shoes dulled by wet.
The man had the appearance of a guest-worker in the northern German city. He could have been a bus driver, a plumber, a construction-site worker, or a book-keeping clerk in a warehouse – and would have been a ranking intelligence officer, working under diplomatic cover. He was rooted in the road, and a car swerved past to his left. A trio of students on bicycles trilled bells at him. The man had dressed, the consultant realised, to emphasise the old world of an orphan in Tehran, and of a student who had prospered because the state had paid his way.
There was a smile from the man, as if they were old friends. He came across the street with his arms outstretched. He ducked under the canopy of the consultant’s umbrella and kissed Soheil on both cheeks – not Steffen. There was a whiff of a spicy sauce on the man’s breath and a hint of nicotine. He would have been an official of Vezarat-e Ettela’at va Amniat-e Keshvar, and any official of VEVAK was to be feared. He had not told Lili of the call, and through that morning he had thought only twice of the contact.
He blurted, ‘I’ve just come out for a sandwich. I have little time, and-’
‘I have driven from Berlin and you have – distinguished Soheil – as much time as I need you to have. So, do we stand here and cause an accident or go somewhere? Your office? Can’t someone go out and fetch coffee for you, juice for me, some food? Will you entertain me in the rain or in the dry?’
Would he take an Iranian intelligence officer into his sanctum? Hang up a wet jacket beside a radiator? Introduce him? My friend here is from the Ministry of Intelligence and State Security in Tehran. Everybody knows – don’t they? – that I’m not really German, that I’m Iranian by birth. My education was subsidised by the Ministry of Health in Iran, and now the debt has been called in. They want a favour from me. Please, make him feel at home and bring him juice and a sandwich – salad with fish would be best – and see if his shoes need yesterday’s newspaper in the toecaps. He took the man’s elbow and led him towards the cafe.
There was a table by the window, and three chairs. They took two and the official kicked away the third so they had the table to themselves. From the wet on the man’s face, hair and jacket, the consultant thought he had waited for him for at least a half-hour, and knew he would have stayed there all day if necessary. No appointment had been made, but that screwed the pressure tighter.
He brought the tray with coffee and juice, a sausage baguette for himself and another with salad and fish. The man was reaching into his pocket and a cigarette packet emerged. The consultant – Soheil or Steffen – hissed that smoking was forbidden on all the university sites.
The man smiled. ‘We can bring the patient at any time now.’
He was known for his cool head, and was said to be as sure as any in the big Hamburg hospital if he was faced with potential catastrophe in theatre. He stammered that he had not yet had the chance to check the availability of facilities. The stammer became meandering waffle: he did not know what was required, would not know until he saw the patient, had read the case history and examined the scans. The man let him finish. He might have fought, called a bluff, but he didn’t dare.
What he did dare was to ask, ‘My patient, who is he?’
The smile was laughter. ‘Who? We have not yet decided on a name for them.’
The man took the consultant’s hand. As a surgeon he was reputed to be slick and fast, which kept anaesthetic times to a minimum and lessened the dangers of internal bleeding. Now the pressure on his fingers showed him how vulnerable his talent was.
‘I will see the patient.’
‘I didn’t doubt it.’
‘And I will look into the availability of theatre and scan equipment. I know we are heavily booked, but I will look into it.’
‘You will do what is necessary.’
His hand was freed. He was given a card. The man’s baguette was finished, his own not started. The juice glass was empty, and his coffee cooling. They could come with a hammer, force his hand onto a table, or one of the low walls around the canals of Lubeck, and break every bone. They could destroy him. The man stood up. The printed card had a first name only on it, with the address and numbers of the embassy in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin. The man put euros on the table, as if it would sully him to accept the consultant’s hospitality, and slipped out through the door into the rain.
Back in his small clinic, the consultant checked the availability of scanners in Lubeck and the theatre in Hamburg. Then a patient was shown in. He forced a smile. His daughter had a toy marionette: he understood the way it danced to its handler’s tune. If they had not yet determined the identity of the patient it was a security matter, sensitive… He thought his life teetered as a chasm yawned.
It had been a day like many others. He had finished the debrief – had enjoyed the session with the psychologist – and had been shown a file that told him little. Then he had walked out of the building into the winter sunshine of the Mediterranean, pleasant and clean, and had gone to eat on his own.
Gabbi did not have a living soul in whom to confide. Had he been dependent on company – his wife’s, the regulars in a bar, even others making up the numbers on the team – it would have been noted and the information tapped into his file. Any form of dependency, alcohol, bought sex or company, would have been noted and he would have been sliding fast out of the unit’s building, down the steps, across the car park, past the sentries and into the street. It would have ended.
It would end one day. It was not a pensionable activity. Long before old age caught up with him, he would be gone from the unit. There was no ‘former employees association’, no reunions on the eve of public holidays, no gossip opportunities with veteran campaigners. It would end when exhaustion dulled his effectiveness, and the psychologist would call it ‘burn-out’. He would be gone, and might get a job in a bank, or sell property, or just waste his days on the beach. His work for the state of Israel would be complete, and his pension earned.
He had sat on a bench and watched the sea, had had a book open on his knee but had watched the sails beyond the surf, the fitness joggers and dog walkers, the young soldiers who had their rifles hitched across their backs. He knew the case histories of the great failures of the unit’s work – he knew more about the failures than the successes. He could talk through, if he had to, the minute by minute intricacies of Lillehammer in Norway: wrong man shot dead, the team captured by local police – catastrophic. Could relate the disaster of the botched poisoning of Khaled Mashal in Amman: a toxic substance, lethal, squirted into the ear, but the unit’s people being held in police cells and their government having to deliver the antidote that would save the bastard’s life – humiliating. A wry smile, because the killing of the state’s enemies could be complex. But he did not make judgements, and the file he had been shown would carry the same importance as that of the man, buried the previous day in Beirut, who had stood outside a Maltese hotel. It was always best when he stood in front, blocked the path, looked into the face.
He headed for home and would reach it only a few minutes before she was due back. It was a day like many. The shadows fell, the sun dipped on a far horizon, and he would wait, as he did so often, for his pager to bleep or his phone to ring.