When he knocked at the door, she opened it to him.
She wore the loose dress of an Arab woman.
He saw the soft whiteness of the skin on her throat.
He saw the curved fullness of her breasts and of her hips.
He saw the hands that reached for his face in welcome.
She was Margarethe Anneliese Schultz.
At Wiesbaden in the Federal Republic of Germany, in the computerised records section of the Bundesamt fur Verfassungsschutz, the printout directly relating to her history, biography and activities would, on a continuous roll of paper, stretch to 235 inches. That part of the Federal Internal Security Office devoted in its work to the destruction of urban guerrilla movements inside the state was indeed familiar with Margarethe Anneliese Schultz.
She was now 33 years of age. She had been born the only daughter of a pastor serving a small community a few kilometres to the north of Munich. As an only daughter she had been a spoilt and privileged child.
Early in her life she had learned the art of winning her way either by tantrums or by sweet smiles. Within the budget of her parents' household her every whim had been granted.
Excellent grades in her final school examinations led to her admission as a student of social sciences to the Free University of West Berlin. Her father had a married cousin living in the city. Her father had believed that it would be a good thing for the young girl to continue her education away from home, while at the same time remaining under the eye of the family. It had been the summer of 1974 when Margarethe Anneliese Schultz had left home with her two suitcases to take a train to Frankfurt, and another train to West Berlin.
That late summer the Federal Republic recovered from the excesses brought on by victory in the World Cup soccer tournament, and awaited the death of a judge shot dead at his front door, and the death of Holger Meins from self-inflicted starvation, and the sentencing of Ulrike Meinhof.
From the day they waved their goodbye, as the long distance express train pulled away from the platform at Munich's Hauptbahnhof, Doktor and Frau Schultz had not set eyes on their beloved daughter. One letter only had been received by them, written a week after her arrival in West Berlin. Margarethe Anneliese Schultz had within a month of her arrival in West Berlin dropped out of her course, dropped into underground cover. She had been recruited into a cell of a Red Army faction that sought to revive the drive of armed insur-rection on behalf of an oppressed proletariat as first initiated by Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader and Jan-Carl Raspe and Gudrun Ensslin and Holger Meins.
In a world of heady excitement she became a part of the small core of revolutionaries living in sympathisers' apartments, stretching her legs to the newest young man who carried a Firebird 9 mm Parabellum pistol, eating in restaurants on the proceeds of bank robberies, moving in stolen BMWs and Mercedes saloons.
Her parents had reported her missing to the Munich city police.
Eight months after she had left them, men of the
"P0P0", the political police, had called on the pastor. had interviewed him in the living room of his home, and after 35 minutes had left him in prayer on his knees and with the comfort of his wife.
The pastor's daughter was a bank robber. The pastor's sweet child had driven the getaway car from a robbery in which a policeman had been fatally shot.
The pastor's angel was on the list of those hunted by the political police, the criminal police and the security police.
Her induction had been through a working circle, photography. It had been her initial role to photograph targets for assassination, targets for bombing. Her hand was steady. Her photographs were crystal sharp in focus. The years passed. The Red Army faction slaughtered the high and the mighty of the state. The capitalist exploiters were cut down. Chief Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback, executed. Chief Executive of the Dresdner Bank Jurgen Ponto, executed. Military attache to the FRG embassy in Stockholm, Baron von Mirbach, executed. President of the Federation of Industries Hanns-Martin Schleyer, executed. The government stood firm. The killings did not win the freedom of the founding fathers and mothers of the movement. There was a week when despair became a plague. A Lufthansa holiday jet hijacked to Mogadishu in the African state of Somalia was retaken by the intervention of the Grenzschutz Gruppe Neun. The principal imprisoned activists hanged or shot themselves in their cells. The movement sagged under the failure of action and the loss of the star participants. Margarethe Anneliese Schultz, her face on the wanted posters, her name on the charge sheet of a Federal court, her future likely to be 20 years behind bars, drove into Switzerland, took a train to Italy, bought an airline ticket to Damascus.
She threw off the cause of the bovine proletariat of her homeland, she embraced the cause of the Palestinian people. She was careful with her favours, she dispensed them only where they could be of advantage to her.
She had sought out a protector, a man of such influence that she would not be repatriated to the maximum security women's prisons of West Germany.
He was a repulsive bastard, the major in Syrian Air Force Intelligence, but he had influence. She warmed his bed. She worked hard to please him. In obedience to the wishes of Major Said Hazan, she had, many months before, given herself to a young Palestinian fighter of the Popular Front.
The pendant hung at her neck.
The pendant was a sapphire held by a fastening crescent of diamonds.
The pendant hung at her neck from a gold chain of close, fine links.
He heard the words. The drooled words slipping from the rebuilt mouth of Major Said Hazan… "in the presence of the orphans of the Palestine revolution you pledged your loyalty to the struggle"… He heard the words that had been used to taunt him.
The chain that supported the pendant lay on the smooth skin of her throat.
She was kissing his mouth, and the lobes of his ears.
She told him of her love. The flatness of her stomach undulated against his groin. The warmth of her breasts drifted through the cotton of his shirt.
Abu Hamid, standing just inside the room, leaning hack against the closed door, hearing the muffled i aucous sounds of the souq, knew that he would kill the girl he had loved.
He was calm. He felt no fear. It was not as it had been when the woman who was a spy for the Israelis had gazed back in contempt into his face. It was as it had been when he had gone to seek out the man who had stolen his transistor radio. It was as it had been when he had eased himself up from the bench outside the Oreanda Hotel, when he had walked, filtering between the traffic, towards the hotel steps. As it had been when he had raised the assault rifle to confront the old man and the young woman pushing through the glass swing doors.
Major Said Hazan had played with him as a child.
The toy that had won him had been the breasts and the cleft of Margarethe Schultz. He held her in his arms.
He smelled the cleanness of her hair and the dry pleasure of her body.
"I love you, brave boy."
"As you love him?" Abu Hamid murmured from the pit of his throat.
"I love you for your courage, brave boy."
She arched her head upwards, she stretched to kiss his forehead. Her neck was pulled taut. The pendant seemed to him to dance on her skin, and the candlelight caught the kingfisher brilliance of the sapphire and flashed upon the wealth of the diamonds.
"As you love him?"
He held the back of her head in his left hand, the fingers tight into the looseness of her hair. He held the back of her neck in his right hand, the fingers twined into the slender strength of the chain.