It wasn’t until halfway through their grilled soles at their corner table at Le Poulbot, that their talk turned to business. Elleck swirled his glass of ’71 Montrachet around in his hand, took a large sip, put a forkful of sole in his mouth, took another large sip, and allowed the king of white burgundies and the prince of fish to mingle together in the company of a motley assortment of enzymes in the dank and stagnant void between his fat and greasy cheeks. After a while, he swallowed.
‘How did — er — everything work out?’ asked Ephraim.
Elleck looked nervously around, and then leaned forward: ‘Issy, you did wonderful. Wonderful.’ He shook his head. ‘The timing — the timing was so good.’ He lifted his glass up to him. ‘You’re a good boy, Issy, one hell of a good boy.’
Ephraim grinned. ‘And you’re a terrible rogue, Monty. It doesn’t matter which hole in the ground you are in, you’ll always end up on top of the pile, won’t you?’
‘With a little help from my friends.’ He grinned back. ‘Did you do what I said, Issy? Did you make plenty?’
Ephraim shook his head. ‘You know I’m not interested in that. I advised the go-ahead for Osirak because you needed a favour, and because of what you promised my country if we were successful. I did not do it to make money for myself, and I wouldn’t want any of it. My country needs money badly, my people around the world need money, money for their struggle. How much money are we going to make from the raid on Osirak?’
‘Who else knows about it?’
‘Who else? Do you think I am crazy? If the Knesset found out my true reasons, that I advised my country to bomb Iraq’s nuclear power station not because there was a danger that they were using it to manufacture plutonium for nuclear bombs, but so that our act of aggression would for a few hours send a nervous twitch around the money markets of the world, banging up the price of gold, so that you could make a killing, and bail your company out of the financial crisis you told me you had coming; if the Knesset found that out, what the hell do you think they would say? Eh? You think I’m going to go around shouting my mouth off about it? No way, Monty. I did what I did for two reasons: Firstly, when you and I were down that hole, right in those first days we were there, we made a pact; you remember? We said that if we ever got out, and survived, if either of us, at any time, ever, during the rest of our lives, was in trouble, needed help, the other would go to the ends of the earth to help him. Well, Monty, I’ve just done that now, and I tell you, Monty, the strain is killing me.’
Elleck nodded slowly. ‘I’m sure.’
‘And the second reason,’ continued Ephraim, ‘is the ten per cent you said you would pay to whichever Jewish groups in the world I told you. Well — I have that list here.’ Ephraim pulled an envelope from his pocket, and passed it across the table.
Elleck stared him in the face. ‘There’s a problem, Issy. Everything went according to plan, except for two things I had not worked out properly. Firstly, as I did not want to let anyone in on what was happening, I had to buy the gold myself. I think I must be getting rusty up in my big office — it’s a long time since I have done any dealing myself. I had forgotten how difficult it can be to buy large amounts of gold quickly without attracting a great deal of attention. So I did not buy nearly as much as I had hoped. Secondly, the world is getting used to short, sharp acts of aggression. I thought gold would have jumped fifty, possibly even seventy-five — possibly more still — maybe up to $100 an ounce...’ He shook his head, finished the last mouthful of sole and took another large sip of wine. ‘But it didn’t. It only went twenty-four. If I had managed to buy all the gold I wanted — which I could have done if you had held off another month, like I had asked you — I would have been okay, even on a $24 rise.’
‘But—’ Ephraim cut in, ‘you told me how wonderful the timing was, how perfectly it all went.’
‘What was wonderful was the timing of the information — the way you got the information through to me. Because of what you told me, I knew exactly when to sell. I was also able to advise my clients, and that has made them very happy. But in terms of my firm making money, Issy, we just didn’t make enough.’
‘But you must have made some?’
‘Sure we have bailed ourselves out of a lot of problems — but I still have a long way to go.’
‘So how much are you going to be able to give to the names on that list?’ Ephraim was starting to sound uneasy.
Elleck stared at him for a long time, then stared down at the ground. He spoke quietly: ‘Issy,’ he said, ‘you know me: If I possibly could, you know that I would, but...’
The head of the Mossad was in a fury when he arrived back at the Intercontinental Hotel. He had declined Elleck’s invitation to dinner and by doing so had terminated, as far as he was concerned, the oldest and deepest friendship he would ever know in his lifetime.
He was more than a little startled when the reception clerk handed him, along with his room key, a package from the pigeon hole above it. No name was on the fat buff envelope, about ten inches long and eight across, just the room number. His mind raced for a moment; no one knew he was staying here, not even Elleck. He never stayed in the same hotel for more than one night, and he used different hotels each time he came to London.
‘You sure this is for me?’ he asked.
‘It was delivered about half an hour ago, sir.’
‘By whom?’
‘Motorcycle messenger. Don’t ask me which firm — there’s hundreds of them.’
Ephraim nodded, took the envelope and walked to the cashier’s desk. ‘Please make my bill up, I have a change of schedule and I’m leaving right away.’ He sent a bell-hop up for his bag. As he would not now be having dinner with Elleck, there was no reason for him to stay in London anyway. He wanted to have a brief meeting with his chief of UK operatives and then, he decided, he would fly on to Paris this evening, instead of in the morning as he had originally planned.
The envelope worried him greatly. Maybe, he thought, it was for a previous occupant of the room, but he wouldn’t have put a large bet on it. It worried him because he did not know what it contained, and it worried him because someone had been able to discover his whereabouts. He climbed into a taxi, sat down, and began to examine the envelope carefully.
After some minutes he decided, with not a great deal of confidence, that the contents of the envelope were not of a nature that would liberally scatter him and the taxi around the two hundred yards or so of Knightsbridge that surrounded them, and carefully slit it open with the top of his pen. It contained an RCA videocassette. A label was stuck to it, which read: ‘MEET ME AT THE MORGUE — starring I. Ephraim.’
He looked at the label, at first in disbelief, then with a grin on his face and then in terror, and he began to shake uncontrollably. There was a note also stuck to the cassette, which he tore off and opened. The note said: ‘You are to be in the bar of L’Hermitage Hotel in La Baule, Brittany, at midday, Saturday. You are to come alone. If anyone accompanies you, or follows you, or if you do not turn up, then one of these will be delivered to every press agency in the world at nine o’clock on Monday morning.’
The note was typed, by an electric typewriter with a plastic ribbon. The paper was a sheet of thin white A4 that could have been bought in any stationery shop in the world. Ephraim studied everything for some clue. There was none. His shaking got worse, and he felt his head become unbearably hot. He jerked the side window down, stuck his head out of the moving taxi, and was violently sick.