"You're very kind."
"And you are going to Lebanon tomorrow, so you need to sleep." She sat on the bed. She wore a deep cut green blouse, and a full skirt.
He thought her laughter was an effort. He thought she had sad eyes, and there were care lines on the edge of her mouth. He took the mug from her, held it in both hands, sipped at the thick stirred cocoa. He had not had cocoa since before he went to boarding school, since his mother used to make it for him on cold winter evenings when he was a small boy.
Holt tried to smile. "It's supposed to be a secret, me going into Lebanon tomorrow."
"My husband was in Lebanon. He went with the first push, and then he went back again in the last year of our occupation. After the first time he was a changed man. He was very bitter when he came home to me. Before he went he used to play the saxophone in a small jazz band where we lived. He never played after he came back. He was an architect, my husband. There were many casualties in his unit, tanks. I used to wonder what an architect, a saxophone player, was doing driving a tank in Lebanon. My husband said that when the IDF first went into Lebanon they were welcomed by the Shi'a people, the people in the villages threw perfumed rice at the tanks, by the time they left that first time they were hated by the same Shi'as. The mines were in the roads, the snipers were in the trees. He was called up again for Lebanon in '85, just before the retreat started. The leaders, the generals, of course they didn't call it a retreat, they called it a redeployment. He used to write to me. The letters were pitiful. He used to say he would never go back again, that he would go to prison rather than serve another tour in Lebanon. He used to say that the basic rule of survival was to assume the worst, at every moment, to shoot first. Lebanon bru-talised him. A week before he was due to come out, from the second tour, he wrote to me. He wrote that they had painted on their tank the words, 'When I die I will go to Heaven, I have already been through Hell.'
He was killed the day after. He was shot by a village boy near Joub Jannine. They knew it was a village boy because they caught him in their follow up search, he was 13 years old. He was 13 years old and through hate he shot my saxophone player, my husband. That is Lebanon, Holt."
"I am sorry."
"It is the way of life for us. We are Jews, we are condemned to a permanent perdition of warfare."
"I'm sorry, but my viewpoint is from a long way away. I'm not trying to be an impertinent outsider, but I think you've brought much of it on yourselves. Again, I'm sorry, but that's what I feel."
"When you go into Lebanon you will be part of us.
There is no escape from that."
"You know my quarrel, why I go?"
"I've been told. Your leaders, your generals, want a man killed. They need you for assistance at the execution."
"The man killed the girl I loved," Holt said. He raised the cocoa mug to his mouth. The cocoa spilled from his lips, dribbled down onto his new found tan from the beach at Tel Aviv.
"Do you go into Lebanon for the girl that you loved, or for your leaders and your generals?"
Holt shook his head. He said softly, "I don't know."
"Better you go for your girl."
"Did he love you, your husband, when he died?"
"He wrote in his letters that he loved me."
"My girl, she snapped at me, the last words that she spoke. We were quarrelling… Can you see what that means? The last time we spoke, the last memory I have of her, is of argument. That's a hell of a weight to carry."
"Close your eyes, Holt."
His back was against the pillow that was propped up against the wall. His eyes closed. He felt her movement on the bed. He felt the softness of her lips on his cheek.
He felt the moisture of her lips on his mouth. He felt the gentleness of her fingers on the bones of his shoulder.
"My husband, Holt, my saxophone player, he used to write to me from Lebanon that the feel of my mouth and my hands and my body was the only sanity that he knew."
With the palms of his hands he reached to the smooth angles where her cheeks came down to her throat. He kissed her, as if with desperation.
"Remember only her love, Holt. Make her love your talisman."
The memories were a rip tide. Walking with Jane in the sunshine of spring on the moorland hills. Sitting with Jane in the darkness of a London cinema. Lying with Jane in the wet warmth of her bed.
His eyes were tight shut. He moved aside in the bed.
He heard her peeling away her blouse, pushing off her shoes, dropping down her skirt. He felt the lovely comfort of her against his body.
He cried out, "It doesn't help her, cannot help her, killing him."
"Until he is dead you have no rest. Her memory will only be torment. Love me, Holt, love me as you would have loved her. Love me so that you can better remember her when you are in Lebanon."
When he woke, she was gone.
As if she had never been there. As if he had dreamed of Jane.
12
His eyes ached, his forehead hurt.
Crane had the maps in front of him, and the aerial photographs. An Intelligence officer took Crane through the photographs.
It was the close work that pained him, caused him to blink, but this close work was inescapable, critical. The pilotless drone had flown the previous day. The Delilah drone had flown from inside Israel, and taken a route north from Metulla and over Marjayoun in the security zone. The drone had clipped the edge of the NORBAT sector and flown on at a height of 15,000 feet towards Yohmor. By the time that it cleared Lake Qaraaoun at the southern end of the Beqa'a valley, the camera set in the belly of the Delilah was picturing the ground beneath. The drone's flight path had taken it along the western side of the valley, over small villages, over goat herds and the boys who minded them, over women hoeing the weeds out of the stony fields in preparation for the planting of corn crops, over the steep sloping tiled roofs of Shi'a villages, over Syrian army positions, over the main road running north east from Khirbet Qanafar to Qabb Elias, over the small vineyards from which would come in the autumn the delectable bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir, over the Syrian headquarters garrison at Chtaura across the Beirut to Damascus road, and then east, and then south along the Bar Elias to Ghazze road. And, of course, Delilah, a speck in a clear midday sky, had passed over a tented camp that was surrounded by a fence of coiled barbed wire and a bulldozed ditch. The drone had been seen by many people. It had been seen by the boys with the goats, and by the farming women, and by the men sitting outside their village coffee houses, and by bored Syrian soldiers, and by Abu Hamid as he lectured his class in the workings of the DShKM heavy anti-aircraft machine gun, and by Fawzi as he negotiated a transaction with a headman, and by a merchant who drove an old Mercedes car. Seen by many people, but unremarkable to all of them. The drone flew twice a week, it was accepted.
The photographs had been taken especially for the benefit of Sergeant Crane.
He studied each one with the help of a stereoscope.
It was the stereoscope that killed his eyes, brought the throb to the deep recess where his retina was diseased.
Had to use the stereoscope, because that was the instrument that threw the flat vision of the photographs into a three dimensional reality.
Crane spoke only rarely to the youngster. He thought of him as the "youngster". He believed that he was not a nursemaid, and his experience of handling novice troops had taught him that to talk too frequently was to confuse. He expected that Holt should listen, and above all that he should watch. Noah Crane did little by chance. He demanded that Holt should concentrate, watch everything, react on it, remember it.
Most times his conversation was with the Intelligence officer. He trusted the man. The planning of the route required trust, and the man had served him well. Most recently this gawky, spider-like Intelligence officer had carried out the detail of the planning for the sniping of a Hezbollah unit commander. His care had earned the trust of Noah Crane. They talked in the Hebrew tongue.