He quickened his pace, with the policeman at his heels.
“It looks as though they’ve got him away,” he said hoarsely.
The two men hurried — but with circumspection — down the long corridor and peeped into the room. It was indeed the cell as described so painstakingly by Grete, but the scene in it was a singular one.
Attached to the high iron bar which held a radiator in place hung the body of the German, his neck twisted grotesquely on one side. He had died clumsily, by slow strangulation. Two figures were busy with an old sheath knife, severing the cord which held him to the iron bar. Neither seemed armed and, when the policeman barked “Hands up!” they merely turned frightened white faces upon him before ignoring the challenge and continuing feverishly to try and wrest their captive away from the death he had designed for himself. The Englishmen sheathed their pistols, as if struck dumb by this strange scene, and walked slowly into the radius of the light with an air of vague uncertainty.
Günther Schiller’s body, in its strange dislocated posture, looked shrunken and twisted — like the body of a bird of prey nailed to a barn door. His face, puffy and contorted, was the colour of cigar ash. The black tip of his tongue stuck out of his swollen lips.
This scene, which to Lawton was merely grotesque, offered the policeman a professional and academic interest.
“Well, well, well!” he cried cheerfully. “The poor bugger miscalculated the drop. A foot and a half isn’t enough. He should have waited for me.”
This gross pleasantry only added to the grotesqueness of the scene. Now the rope gave, and there was a soft plump noise as the body of Günther Schiller scratched down the wall and pitched forward into the arms of his gaolers. They laid him on the floor and, between them, made a desultory sort of inspection to see whether there was any hope of reviving him. But it was obviously a hopeless task.
The policeman uttered a muffled expletive and turned on Lawton to say:
“Now I’m beginning to wish we hadn’t come. I suppose we can’t ignore this.”
He took out his notebook, sat down at the table and looked vaguely around him. The two Jews, having abandoned their efforts to revive the body, carried it to the low bunk in the corner and disposed it there, crossing the arms on the breast, covering its face with a cloth. Then they turned humbly round to face the policeman, who said with an air of massive reluctance:
“I suppose I’ll have to put you under arrest.”
Lawton, who had been absentmindedly reflecting on the scene — in his mind’s eye he could see the strained white face of Grete hovering near the office telephone — suddenly took a step forward and said brusquely, imperiously:
“Has he no papers? Did he leave nothing?”
He made a gesture of inconsequential exasperation in the air. Was this all that was left of Günther Schiller?
“Identity cards, passports, letters?… he had begun to shout incoherently.
The two gaolers shook their heads and spread their hands. One of them said:
“He was captured from Cairo last week. All his papers were destroyed.”
He smiled a weak, ingratiating smile.
The policeman crooked a huge finger at them and interposed with his heavy toneless voice:
“You come over here, you two, and sit down. Now I want to know your names and ’ow it ’appened.”
He had reverted to type — had become a country bobby again. He produced an indelible pencil and dabbed at his long pink tongue with it. The pencil left a purple mark in the centre of it. Laboriously he began to write.
Lawton watched for one second, consumed by an intense irritation and the feeling almost of despair.
“Was it really Günther Schiller?” he asked sharply.
And the two gaolers nodded. Then turning to the policeman, Lawton said:
“Well, Duff, I can leave the case to you, I take it. There’s nothing more for me to do here. I’ll be back at HQ if you want me.”
Duff nodded sagely, and Lawton re-entered the dark corridor, closing the door carefully behind him. When he was halfway down the staircase the dark window suddenly burst into a blaze of coloured light. For one wild moment he thought that someone was firing tracer bullets, and in his mind’s eye he saw the searchlights bracketing Tobruk harbour with a stream of molten rocket fire pouring up into the night sky.
“What the devil!” he said, and stopped to look out over Jerusalem. “Who the devil is sending up fireworks?”
Showers of golden drops slowly dispersed on the dark velvety skin of the night sky above the city. It was only when he reached the street that the explanation came to him. He heard the slow murmur of a crowd which was gathering in the street, the low murmur of chanting which was to swell gradually into a tumult of enthusiasm. While they had all been thinking about other things, Israel had been born.
Excited voices passed the news along the street. There was a tapping at shutters, tapping on doors. Voices cried: “UNO voted 33 to 13! We’ve won!” Some children raced along the street beating on saucepans with sticks, and chanting: “33 to 13, 33 to 13!”
Lawton found his duty driver crouched over the car radio, listening to the tail end of the BBC news.
“That’s done it, Sir,” he said. “They’ve won the UNO vote.”
Lawton didn’t reply, but climbed into the car with a dispirited air and allowed himself to be driven back to his office.
The thought of Grete afflicted him; he dreaded the coming interview. Mentally he rehearsed various ways of breaking the news to her, dismissing them one after the other as foolish or inadequate. Should he perhaps just walk in and say, “He’s dead and he’s taken his secret with him.” That would sound melodramatic. Or should he simply say, “I have bad news for you. Please remain calm.”
For a moment, hovering between these various possibilities, he was tempted to turn coward and ring her up. Nevertheless, he found himself at last opening the door of his office and confronting the figure that rose to meet him from the ugly leather armchair. He found that he did not need to speak. She divined everything from his expression. As he stood staring at her, she read his face with its expression of commiseration like a book.
“It’s something bad, isn’t it? What is it, is he dead?”
He nodded.
“Did the Jews…?” She stopped and bit her lip.
“Suicide,” said Lawton tersely, finding his voice. Then she echoed the word on a sharp, plaintive note. She had turned pale now and whispered:
“Did he leave any message?”
“None,” said Lawton bitterly. “Nothing. Not a trace.”
She swayed and he caught her by the forearm and put her firmly down in the armchair. Here she sat, staring in a dazed abstraction at the further wall, completely still, except that her fingers plucked and picked at a tassel on the chair.
Lawton, feeling all at once clumsy, crossed to his desk and from the bottom of it extracted a bottle of whisky and a siphon of soda. He mixed a stiff drink, and without a word put it into her hand. She raised it to her lips and her teeth chattered against the rim of the glass. Then suddenly she burst out:
“I can’t believe it!”
“Drink that up,” said Lawton.
He was walking up and down before her on the carpet now, slowly, like a monomaniac. His face looked lined and tired. Outside, the night sky above Jerusalem had begun to hiss and crackle and change colour. He drew the heavy curtains and they found themselves staring out on an extraordinary night panorama of light and smoke.
She did not appear to care enough to ask the cause of this explosion of coloured light. He took the glass from her hand, put it on the desk and said: