He left the small modern apartment beside the old U-boat pens at St Nazaire harbour, walked over to his green Alfasud, climbed in and started the engine. He rammed the gear lever into first, and accelerated fiercely away; almost immediately, he felt a sharp stabbing pain in the base of his head.
‘Tournez à droite,’ said the man with the Walther automatic, in the back seat.
Menton arrived two hours late for his meeting with the Viscomte. He didn’t mention anything about the interlude with the man with the Walther. He was too scared.
At 3.15 that Tuesday morning, the green phone on General Isser Ephraim’s desk buzzed sharply. Ephraim picked up the receiver. It was Chaim Weisz, head of French operations for the Mossad. Ephraim took the piece of chewing gum from his mouth and placed it in the ashtray.
‘This man,’ said Weisz, ‘Jean-Luc Menton. We have some information.’
Baenhaker was feeling horny. It was a feeling that had persisted continually for about a week, and almost everything he did to turn his mind away from sex invariably brought him straight back to the subject. He read the newspapers and found himself turning with avid attention to any article that hinted of rape or divorce. He tried three novels in succession, to discover limbs and organs entwined, after only a few pages, in each one. He tried the television, the radio, and then he would give up for a while and would luxuriate in ogling the nurses in the ward.
He was slightly ashamed with himself that during the course of the week his standards of who he did and did not fancy among the nurses had lowered considerably. Last Friday, he had decided that there were only two he fancied, and that the rest were extremely unattractive. By Saturday, four of them he decided were passable and by Sunday, six. It was now Tuesday morning, and he decided that even one of the elderly cleaning women didn’t look too bad.
He tried to figure out exactly for how long it was that he had been in here: he knew it was about three weeks, but he wanted to be more precise. The day of the accident was still a blank. He could remember only having gone to stay with a male friend at Bristol university that weekend, and playing chess much of the time; it was a game of chess that had caused him not to leave on the Sunday and stay over until the Monday; but he could not remember actually leaving.
Something, however, nagged him. He was deeply upset still over Amanda and somehow, he was sure in his mind, there was some connection between her and his accident. He tried to go back in his mind to that Monday, but there was nothing there.
‘Good morning Mr Baenhaker.’
Thoughts of Amanda’s body came vividly back to him: her streaked hair cascading like a fringed curtain across her nipples as she sat on top of him in the bed.
‘Good morning Mr Baenhaker.’
Her long slim legs and thighs, with the blaze of gold between them.
‘Just going to take a quick look and see how we’re getting on.’
The sheet and blankets were whipped back, and Baenhaker came out of his day dream to discover the surgeon, and attendant Nurse McDonald, staring down at him with faintly bemused expressions as he lay in the bed, hand firmly clenched around his poker-hard organ which protruded from the fly of his pyjama bottoms.
It was some time on Friday that Baenhaker had decided that Nurse McDonald was extremely pretty. Between then and today, he had put in a considerable amount of effort at drawing her attention and chatting her up. By the time she had gone off duty the previous night, Baenhaker was certain that he had someone who would succumb to his charms, if not in some dark corner of the hospital, then at least in the comfort of his Earls Court flat after his release. But the expression on her face as she stood now above him dispelled all of that with the tartness of a lavatory air-freshener spray. The expression on her face told him she thought he was a nasty little pervert.
The surgeon examined the stitches, then nodded. Nurse McDonald pulled back the sheet and blanket with as much grace as if she were putting the lid on a dustbin full of empty sardine cans.
‘Healing very nicely,’ said the surgeon. ‘Should have you out of here within a few days now.’ The pair of them turned to walk off, then the surgeon stopped, and leaned over to Baenhaker and whispered confidentially into his ear: ‘Don’t do that sort of thing in here old chap — it embarrasses everyone. If you have to, go and do it in the lavatory.’ Then he strode off in Nurse McDonald’s wake.
Baenhaker’s face took several minutes to lose its bright red flush. He sat and glared around the ward, and then began to scrape his teeth with the nail of his little finger. An elderly orderly marched into the ward and came up to his bed. ‘Mr Baenhaker?’
He nodded.
‘There’s a telephone call for you outside — you can take it in Sister’s office.’
‘Thank you.’ Baenhaker followed him out through the ward to the small cubicle with a chair and a telephone from which Sister conducted her empire. He shut the door, and picked up the receiver. ‘Hallo?’
The crackling and faint sound of heavy breathing told him it was an overseas call. ‘Danny?’ It was the voice of General Ephraim.
Baenhaker was feeling very fed up with his chief since Ephraim’s visit, and in light of his present mood, he had no difficulty in adopting a sullen voice: ‘Yes.’
‘How are you?’
‘All right.’
‘I’ve spoken to the senior registrar of your hospital. He thinks you’re pretty well okay now.’
‘What the fuck does he know?’
‘He’s had the reports from the surgeon. I have some urgent business for you: I want you to discharge yourself, and report to the office at nine o’clock tomorrow.’
‘I don’t know if they’ll let me.’
‘In British hospitals you can discharge yourself.’
‘What about my injuries?’
‘I’ve told you — they’re better.’
‘How the fuck do you know? You’re two thousand miles away.’
‘I’ll talk to you at nine.’ The line went dead. The head of the Mossad had rung off.
Baenhaker put the receiver back down; as he walked back to his ward, his leg twinged like crazy right down along the scar line, and his chest still hurt like hell every time he breathed deeply. He was angry, very angry, but he knew that it didn’t matter how angry he got, nor how fed up he got: he could get as angry, or fed up, or anything else that he liked. The only one thing he could not do was disobey the General’s instructions.
The taxi dropped him outside the crumbling Earls Court terraced building, where he lived, shortly after 2.00. It was drizzling hard, and he pushed his way out of it through the door and into the dark corridor with its smell of musty carpets and curry. He had no idea who in the building ate curry, but from the smell that pervaded it all the days of the year, either someone was running a clandestine take-away, or else they were addicted to the stuff.
An appalling stench hit him halfway down the corridor of the top floor, the fourth, which grew stronger with every step he took nearer his own flat. He put the key in and opened the door — it was the stench of rotting meat. He went to the kitchen and pulled open the fridge door; he gagged, and nearly threw up. The fridge had packed up, and the four steaks and two pints of milk were hopping about inside it.
Baenhaker had been at a party the previous winter, and there was a woman there who claimed she had psychic powers. He had let her read his palm. She’d predicted a lot of bad news for the future; so depressed had she been by what she had seen in his hand, that she had burst into tears. That hadn’t made Baenhaker feel too terrific either. When, on the New Year’s Eve, he had tripped over and smashed his bedroom mirror, he had begun to feel that, possibly, the mad woman had been right; things didn’t look too good.