"So what's her motivation? She's not Jewish. She's not anything. She's theirs. Forget her!"
Hearing Kurtz stir beneath his blanket, Litvak lifted his voice higher to include him.
"If she's ours still, why did she give Rachel a blank cigarette packet at the airport, tell me that? Weeks on end among that rabble and she doesn't even write us a note when she comes out again? What kind of agent is that, who is so loyal to us?"
Becker seemed to be looking for his answer in the far mountains. "Maybe she has nothing to say," he said. "She's voting with her actions. Not her words."
From the shallows of his sparse camp bed, Kurtz offered drowsy consolation. "Germany makes you jumpy, Shimon. Ease off. What does it matter who she belongs to, so long as she keeps showing us the way?"
But the effect of Kurtz's words was the opposite of their
465
intention. In his self-tormenting mood, Litvak sensed an unfair alliance against him, and it made him wilder still.
"And if she breaks down, confesses? If she tells them the whole story, Mykonos till here? Does she still show us the way?"
He seemed set upon collision; nothing else would satisfy him.
Lifting himself on one elbow, Kurtz took a harsher tone. "So what do we do, Shimon? Give us the team solution. Suppose she has gone over. Suppose she has blown the entire operation from breakfast to dinner. You want me to call Misha Gavron, say we're finished?"
Becker had not abandoned the window, but he had turned himself round once more and was watching Litvak thoughtfully down the room. Staring from one to the other of them, Litvak flung out his arms, a very wild gesture to make before two such static men.
"He's somewhere out there!" Litvak cried. "In a hotel. An apartment. In a doss house. He must be. Seal off the town. Roads, the railway. Buses. Have Alexis put a cordon round. Search every house till we find him!"
Kurtz tried a little kindly humour: "Shimon, Freiburg is not the West Bank."
But Becker, interested at last, seemed anxious to pursue the argument. "And when we have found him?" he said, as if he hadn't quite got his mind around Litvak's plan. "What do we do then, Shimon?"
"Then we find him! Kill him! The operation's over!"
"And who kills Charlie?" Becker asked, in the same perfectly reasonable way. "Us or them?"
Suddenly there was more going on in Litvak than he could handle on his own. Under the tensions of the past night and of the day to come, the whole knotted mass of his frustrations, male and female, swam suddenly to the surface of his being. His face coloured, his eyes blazed, as one thin arm struck out towards Becker in accusation. "She's a whore and she's a Communist and she's an Arab-lover!" he shouted, loud enough to be heard through the partition wall. "Dump her. Who cares?"
If Litvak was expecting Becker to make a fight of it, then he was disappointed, for the most Becker offered was one quiet nod of confirmation, as if everything that he had been thinking about Litvak for some time had now been demonstrated. Kurtz had pushed away his blanket. He was sitting on the bed in his underpants, head forward while he rubbed the tips of his fingers in his short grey hair.
"Go take a bath, Shimon," he ordered quietly. "A bath, a nice rest, some coffee. Come back around midday. Not before." A phone was ringing. "Don't answer that," he added, and lifted the receiver himself while Litvak, in mute self-horror, watched him from the doorway. "He's busy," Kurtz said, in German. "Yes, this is Helmuth, who's speaking?"
He said yes; then yes again; and well done. He rang off. Then he smiled his ageless, mirthless smile. First to Litvak, to console him, then to Becker also, because at that moment their differences were unimportant. "Charlie arrived at the Minkels' hotel five minutes ago," he said. "Rossino's with her. They're having a nice breakfast together, well ahead of time, just the way our friend likes it."
"And the bracelet?" said Becker.
Kurtz liked this part best. "On her right wrist," he said proudly. "She has a message for us. She's a fine girl, Gadi, and I congratulate you."
The hotel had been built in the sixties when the catering industry still believed in large, milling lobbies with soothing illuminated fountains and gold watches under glass. A wide double staircase rose to a mezzanine, and from the balcony table where they sat, Charlie and Rossino had a view of both the main door and the reception. Rossino was wearing a middle-management blue suit, Charlie her South African girl guide's uniform and her wooden Christ-child from the training camp. The lenses of her spectacles, which Tayeh had insisted should be real, made her eyes ache when it was her turn to watch. They had eaten eggs and bacon because she was ravenous, and now they were drinking fresh coffee while Rossino read the Stuttgarter Zeitung and periodically regaled her with facetious news items. They had driven into town early and she had almost frozen to death riding pillion. They had parked at the railway station, where Rossino had made enquiries, and they had come on to the hotel by taxi. In the hour they had been here, Charlie had watched police outriders deliver a Catholic bishop, and return with a delegation of West Africans in tribal costume. She had watched a busload of Americans arrive and a busload of Japanese depart; she knew the check-in procedure by heart, right down to the name of the chasseur who grabbed the suitcases from the new arrivals as they came through the sliding doors, loaded them on their little trolleys, and hovered at a yard's distance while the guests filled in their registration forms.
"And His Holiness the Pope plans a tour of all Fascist South American states," Rossino announced from behind his newspaper as she stood up. "Maybe this time they finish him off. Where are you going, Imogen?"
"To piss."
"What's the matter? Nervous?"
The women's room had fluttering pink lights over the hand-basins and soft music to drown the whirr of the ventilators. Rachel was putting on her eye shadow. Two other women were washing. One door was closed. Brushing past her, Charlie pressed the scribbled message into Rachel's waiting hand. She cleaned up and returned to the table.
"Let's get out of here," she said, as if the relief had changed her mind. "It's ridiculous."
Rossino lit a thick Dutch cigar and deliberately blew the smoke into her face.
An official-looking Mercedes drew up and disgorged a bunch of dark-suited men with name badges on their lapels. Rossino had started to make an obscene joke about them when he was interrupted by a bellboy calling him to the telephone: Signo: Verdi, who had left his name and five marks with the concierge, was required in cabin 3. She sipped her coffee, feeling the heat of it all the way down her chest. Rachel was sitting with a boyfriend under an aluminium palm tree, reading Cosmopolitan. The boyfriend was new to her and looked German. He was clutching a document in a plastic folder. There were twenty-odd people sitting around, but Rachel was the only one she recognised. Rossino had returned.
"The Minkels arrived at the station two minutes ago. Grabbed themselves a blue Peugeot cab. Should be here any moment."
He called for the bill and paid it, then took up his newspaper once more.
I shall do everything once, she had promised herself as she lay waiting for the morning; everything will be a last time. She repeated it to herself. If I sit here now, I shall never have to sit here again. When I go downstairs, I shall never have to come up again. When I leave the hotel, I shall never return.
"Why don't we just shoot the bastard and be done with it?" Charlie whispered, with a sudden welling up of fear and hatred as she once more fixed her gaze upon the entrance.
"Because we want to stay alive to shoot other bastards," Rossino explained patiently, and turned a page. "Manchester United lost again," he added complacently. "Poor old Empire."
"Action," said Charlie.