He heard them come through the door, and then there was a crash of bed springs.
‘Alex! Let me get my shoes off.’
‘Keep them on!’
‘Well, at least let me get my jacket off — ow — now I’m stuck — oooh, your hands are cold — ooh Alex — oh — oh — oh that’s good.’
Baenhaker listened in silence, quaking with a strange mixture of fear and fury. There was a creaking sound; it got louder and louder. With a panic, he realized it was the cupboard door swinging open. He put out a hand and slowly pulled it to. There was a loud ‘clunk’ as its magnet locking mechanism connected.
He began to feel baking hot in the cupboard; he was sitting uncomfortably on some very hard shoes, and was surrounded by suits and ties which draped themselves around his head. The bed began to creak consistently, faster and faster, and Amanda began to groan and shout. So many emotions rushed through Baenhaker that he was paralysed. For a moment he wanted to burst out of the cupboard, grab Rocq in one hand and Amanda in the other, and smash their skulls together. For another moment, he wanted to curl up in the cupboard, and just give up and die. He just hoped that after they finished what they were doing, neither of them was going to feel much like hanging any clothes up.
An hour passed; for the last quarter of it, there had been silence in the bedroom. Amanda’s voice broke the silence: ‘Do you really have to go to Switzerland tomorrow?’
‘I don’t want to Amanda, but I have to.’
‘It’s going to be such a gorgeous weekend — it’ll be rotten without you.’
‘It’s not going to be much fun for me — the last thing I want to do is spend half my weekend in an aeroplane.’
‘It’s only an hour’s flight.’
‘By the time I get to the airport, hang around — then Verbier is an hour and a half from the airport. And there’s fuck all to do in Verbier this time of year — I’m not exactly into mountain hiking.’
‘You say it’s business — why can’t you go during the week?’
‘I would, normally — but we have a panic on at the moment, and I cannot afford to be away from the office for even a few hours. Look — I tell you what — I’m catching the first flight out in the morning — it leaves nine o’clock. I’ll be in Geneva at 10.15 — with luck I’ll be in Verbier lunch time, sign everything I have to sign — and I may be able to make a late afternoon flight back here — be back in time to go out for dinner? How does that sound?’
‘Okay,’ she said dubiously. ‘That sounds fine — in theory.’
They talked for another hour, then made love again for another hour. Baenhaker continued to crouch in his stifling cupboard, half his body seized with cramp, the other half raging silently.
Finally, at a quarter to three, Baenhaker had heard no sound from either Amanda or Rocq for what he guessed had been an hour. He pushed the wardrobe door open gently. There was a report like a starting pistol as the metal catch on the inside of the door separated from the magnet, and Baenhaker froze. He listened carefully for several minutes, but there was no sound.
He climbed out of the cupboard, debated whether to risk trying to place the bug in the telephone, decided better of it, and quietly let himself out.
26
After General Ephraim had spoken to Baenhaker on the Friday evening, he had stood up and paced around his office without stopping, for half an hour; then he sat down, opened a drawer in his desk, and pulled out a computerized chess set. He played against the machine, set to its toughest level, and beat it in seven minutes; then he snapped off the switch and put the machine back in the drawer. He wished the current real-life game, in which he was an unwilling player, was as simple to win.
This week he had to send 100 Israeli sailors into Umm Al Amnah, quietly, without publicity. They were to be smuggled in, in a container in a cargo plane. It just didn’t make sense. Why sailors? Soldiers he could understand, that would be easy — a coup d’état. But sailors? He thought about the man Bauté, who had spoken to him on the beach at La Baule; and then about Elleck flying in to have dinner with Lasserre, and joined by Culundis, who had already supplied arms and, Ephraim was pretty certain, soldiers, to Umm Al Amnah.
He still smarted over the way Elleck had treated him after the Osirak raid. He had completely ripped him off. He was sure that a second rip-off was under way. Somewhere, at the end of the bizarre line, there had to be a massive profit in all of this for Elleck. But how? What was there with a tiny country like Umm Al Amnah? It did have a coastline on the Persian Gulf, but not much of one. There was the Libya connection, but there was nothing particularly unusual in that; Libya meddled in the affairs of a lot of countries, with and without their leaders’ approval. He remembered the report about the Umm Al Amnah’s registered fishing dhow drifting loose in the Persian Gulf with a cargo of nuclear mines, and a chill went through his body. Was that the connection? Was he going to be forced to order the sailors to commit some act of aggression — some massive terrorist act of sabotage?
He went to the window and looked out; it was dark, with the lights of the traffic moving down below him. He should call the Prime Minister and level with him, he knew, that was his best bet. He had a repugnant obsession, and it had finally caught up with him. It was not right that he should put his country at risk to protect himself. His time was nearly over in any event; a year or two more, and he would be expected to retire. He had no further ambitions for himself. He was tired; he wouldn’t mind stepping down now. He needed a rest. A long, long rest.
He tried to think how the Prime Minister might react, and each time he drew a blank. He had no idea. A fear suddenly struck him that the Prime Minister would go for the complete hard line, call his blackmailer’s bluff, and he shuddered. He thought about his wife and children, going through the rest of their lives, his children with their brilliant careers ahead of them, tarnished forever with the fact that they came from a man who liked to make love to dead boys. Necrophiliac. He shuddered. They would be destroyed; there was no doubt. Ami, his eldest son, already a captain in the army: Nathan, who had passed through law school with a first and had joined the top law firm in Israel; Helene, his daughter, engaged to the son of the Chief Rabbi.
While parents around the world despaired so often of their children, he and his wife Moya could sit in the evenings, when they were alone together, and reflect on their fortune that their children not only were healthy but were intelligent and successful. It was the careers of his children and, one day, the arrival of grandchildren, that he and Moya had to look forward to. He turned away from the window; not for his country, not for anything, did he want to give that up; not for anything would he destroy their lives. Ephraim clenched his fists in anger. It was the greed of Elleck, the man whose life he had saved in Auschwitz, that had put him in this position, he was certain of that. This was Elleck’s way, forty years later, of showing his gratitude.
Ephraim marched back over to his desk, stood beside it, and dialled the number of Eisenbar-Goldschmidt in London. Being a major control centre, the switchboard was manned through the night. The girl who answered informed him that Baenhaker had left over an hour ago. He tried Baenhaker’s home number: it rang several times, without answer; he hung up. He then dialled Chaim Weisz’s number in Paris; to his mixed relief, his chief of French operatives answered.
‘Good evening, Montclair!’ said Ephraim, using Weisz’s identifying code.