But like Ashmead’s people who, once they’d agreed to sign on, had snapped to with drill-team precision and let Beck brief them on specifics, everyone had to understand exactly what was expected of him and be willing to do precisely what he was told.
Even Chris Patrick, with whom he was having dinner, was going to have to realize that.
Chapter 6
Spying for Beck on her fellow reporters that afternoon in the English-style bar across from the Overseas Press Club in the Old City was beginning to make Chris Patrick feel slimy.
The world was dying around her, and she was worried about ethical conduct, the repercussions of the disinformation she’d been spreading for no better reason than personal advantage, and whether the tiny.25 caliber Colt automatic she’d bought and now carried everywhere in her purse would really do the job, if she dared to try it.
She’d rather count on it than on the mercifully clear film badge she now wore next to her press pass or the clip-on Geiger counter attached to her belt, or any other placebo Beck had given her, including the once-over of her apartment by one of his people: Chris Patrick had watched her mother die of cancer; she had no intention of reliving the experience, or living it. But everybody said that was what was in store for all the “lucky” survivors—everybody in the press corps, everybody who favored places like this and got drunk earlier than they’d used to, grousing now about the chances of getting some real money—not paper or plastic—so they could get out of Israel and about the transAtlantic phone calls they couldn’t seem to make to their home offices like a bunch of shell-shocked refugees which, by and large, they were.
In the Mandate gloom of the Disraeli Bar’s Happy Hour, she was nursing a beer and staring at herself in the mirror, sandwiched between a BBC stand-up correspondent and a friend of his from the Manchester Guardian, trying to determine if she looked like a spy, if there was anything feral or furtive about her face.
But it was her same old face that peered back, tired but still gamin; not the face of somebody who would sell out friends and colleagues just to get laid. But that was what she was doing, she told herself harshly—it wasn’t Beck’s patriotic pep talk, his influential position, or his power base—none of that mattered any more. It was Beck himself—who had offered to take control of her life when she no longer wanted it, who was free from doubt and burning with purpose when everything seemed doubtful and purposeless—for whom she spied. When he’d left town, she’d panicked, though he’d told her he would. She’d called the consulate every day like a shameless teenager, using one excuse after another, but he was never there and she’d thought he was avoiding her.
Then the honey-haired Sabra girl had knocked on her door carrying a box full of filters, mechani cal parts, rolls of silver tape and a message: “Yes, he’s just back now. He sent me to see to your windows; also, your air conditioner. Call him to make certain, yes; it’s perfectly all right; I’ll wait here.”
By then Chris had been resentful of Beck, of the way he’d used her and discarded her. The appearance of the beautiful, deep-eyed Sabra at her door, calling him “he” in that way women had, made Chris Patrick achingly jealous. But when Beck took her call and she heard the pause, then the protectiveness in his voice as he made her describe her visitor, then his subterranean amusement, she was lost all over again—headlong in love, and bereft of a single bit of information worth his attention.
By tonight, she had to have something good, to prove to him she’d never doubted, although she’d done nothing but doubt, for tonight he was taking her to dinner: “Let’s make a celebration of it; wear something glitzy and I’ll show you what a government expense account can do.”
She should have been shopping for something suitable, a designer original like his wife might have; maybe she could still charge it to the bureau and reimburse them later, if there was anyone left in accounting back home to question her expenditures.
Instead, she’d panicked—she had nothing to report—and come down to the bar where she lurked like a fat spider, listening to her friends with new ears.
“This, then,” said the Brit on her right, with whom she’d spent a night behind sandbags in Samaria taking Syrian fire and comfort in each other, “is assuredly the meaning of life.” He was holding up an empty glass laced with beer foam in a pigskin-gloved hand.
It was a press-corps riff, a long-standing game they played: a spent AK round that had penetrated your luggage, the ubiquitous yellow grit regrinding your camera lenses, a spike order for a story you’d sweated blood to write—all of these, at one time or another, were declared to be the one true meaning of life, then discarded in favor of some subsequent oracle.
“What is?” she rose to the Brit’s bait desultorily. “That?” She sniffed at the glass. “Only if it’s full.” And then she pumped him: “What about the casualty estimates—if you don’t like mine, what’s your guess?”
“Christine,” he called her that because he’d screwed her, this lord’s nephew, “it can’t be that your sources have all dried up, can it? Is that what you’re on about?” He leaned close enough to sniff her hair: “It’s not cricket, you know, to grieve openly when your country is summarily demoted—take a leaf from our book; we’re professionals at the stiff upper lip.” Then, louder, his head drawing back, to include the rest of the newsies at the bar: “My sources say the US casualty count is about fifty-five million and rising steadily; they’ll never admit to that, of course. But we’ll know better after the fact-finding tour. I’d give my sodding peerage to be on that plane—”
“Yours, is it, now?” she quipped, filing away the data. “Was Knightsbridge nuked too, then?”
“Rule Britannia, no,” he said it like profanity: “We NATO blokies walked away without a scratch—from the big stuff, at least; we’ve just the weather- borne radiation to worry about. A diplomatic victory, thanks to the—”
A soft mid-European accent intervened: “NATO refused to fire its missiles, used the hot line to let Moscow know their position—and the Warsaw Pact, too, deliberately delayed firing…. It’s either the first step toward European independence of the superpowers or flagrant treaty violations by former allies and satellites, depending on whose rhetoric one chooses to believe.”
Chris could see the speaker in the bar mirror: a dark, brooding Mediterranean type who could have been Greek or Semitic, with a stocky, muscular body of the sort they breed on the Aegean or the kibbutz and which always looks uncomfortable in city clothes, and a shock of black curls; on his jacket pocket, his ID said Jerusalem Post, NY.
The Brit scowled down at him with all the intimidating superiority of the Empire: “You’re the new one, aren’t you? What in bloody hell, if you don’t mind me asking, is the use of putting on a new boy for the New York edition when New York is—”
“Elint; everybody calls me Elint,” said the newcomer brightly, thrusting out a browned hand—remarkable in that it was not gloved when everyone but Chris, it seemed, wore gloves now, even indoors—that took the Brit’s pale, limp one in a surprise attack, pumped it smartly, and then went on to seize Chris’s and draw it to his lips.
She hated men who kissed your hand; the gesture blew away all the years of struggling toward women’s rights in one dismissive moment.
“Elat?” she repeated what she thought she’d heard; his badge said “Levy.”
“Elint,” he corrected firmly as he lowered her hand but didn’t release it; his eyes burned on her like an Arab’s, black and smouldering. “And you are the famous Christine Patrick, my idol, my role model among the Western—”