With the van's engine still running, he watched her across the forecourt to the lighted entrance. The box was heavier than she had expected and claimed both her arms. The lobby was empty, the lift stood waiting, but she didn't take it. The staircase was narrow and twisting, the carpet worn to the thread. The canned music had a panting insinuation, the fuggy air reeked of cheap scent and stale tobacco smoke. At the first landing, an old woman called "Gruss Gott" to her from inside her glass cubicle but did not raise her head. It seemed to be a place where unexplained ladies came and went a good deal.
At the second landing, she heard music and female laughter; at the third she was overtaken by the lift and wondered why he had made her take the stairs, but she had no will any more, no resistance; her words and actions had all been written for her. The box was making her arms ache, and by the time she entered the fourth-floor corridor the ache was her greatest concern. The first door was a fire exit and the second, right beside it, was marked 5. The lift, the fire exit, the stairs, she thought automatically; he always has at least two things.
She knocked on the door, it opened, and her first thought was: Oh Christ, typical, I've mucked it up; because the man who stood before her was the man who had just driven her here in the Coca-Cola van, minus his hat and left glove. He took the box from her and laid it on the luggage stand. He took off her spectacles, folded them, and handed them back to her. When he had done that, he again unslung her shoulder bag and emptied its contents onto the cheap pink eiderdown, much as they had done to her in London when they put the black glasses on her. About the only other thing in the room apart from the bed was the briefcase. It was lying on the washstand, empty, its black mouth turned towards her like an open jaw. It was the one she had helped to steal from Professor Minkel, back in that big hotel with the mezzanine, when she was too young to know any better.
An utter calm had descended over the three men in their operations room. No phone calls, even from Minkel and Alexis; no desperate recantations over the cipher link with the Embassy in Bonn. In their collective imagination the whole tortuous conspiracy seemed to be holding its breath. Litvak sat slumped despondently in an office chair; Kurtz was in some kind of sunny dream, his eyes half closed, smiling like an old alligator. And Gadi Becker, as before, was the stillest of them, staring self-cri tically into the gathering dark, like a man examining all the promises of his past life-which had he kept? Which broken?
"We should have given her the homer this time round," Litvak said. "They trust her by now. Why didn't we give her the homer? -wire her up?"
"Because he'll search her," Becker said. "He'll search her for weapons and wires and he'll search her for a homer."
Litvak roused himself enough to argue. "So why do they use her? You're crazy. Why use a girl you don't trust-for a job like this?"
"Because she hasn't killed," said Becker. "Because she's clean. That's why they use her, and that's why they don't trust her. For the same reason."
Kurtz's smile became almost human. "When she's made her first kill, Shimon. When she's no longer a novice. When she's the wrong side of the law forever, an illegal unto death-then they'll trust her. Then everybody will trust her," he assured Litvak contentedly. "By nine o'clock tonight, she'll be one of them-no problem, Shimon, no problem."
Litvak remained unconsoled.
twenty-five
Once more, he was beautiful. He was Michel full-grown, with Joseph's abstinence and grace and Tayeh's unbothered absolutism. He was everything she had imagined when she was trying to turn him into somebody she was looking forward to. He was broad-shouldered and sculptured, with the rarity of a precious object kept from sight. He could not have walked into a restaurant without the talk dying round him, or walked out of it without leaving a kind of relief in his wake. He was a man of the outdoors condemned to hiding in small rooms, with the pallor of the dungeon in his complexion. He had drawn the curtains and put on the bedside light. There was no chair for her and he was using the bed as a carpenter's bench. He had tossed the pillows on the floor beside the box and sat her in her place while he went to work, and he was talking all the time that he worked, half to himself and half to her. His voice knew only attack: a thrusting, forward march of thoughts and words.
"They say Minkel's a nice person. Maybe he is. When I read about him, I too said to myself-this old fellow Minkel, maybe he's got some courage to say those things. Maybe I would respect him. I can respect my enemy. I can honour him. I have no problem concerning this."
Having dumped the onions in a corner, he was fishing out a succession of small packages from the box with his left hand and unwrapping them one by one while he used his right to hold them down. Desperate to concentrate on something, Charlie tried to commit the whole lot to memory, then gave up: two new supermarket torch batteries in a single pack, one detonator of the type she had used at the fort for training, with red wires sprouting from the crimped end. Penknife. Pliers. Screwdriver. Soldering iron. A coil of fine red wire, steel staples, copper thread. Insulating tape, a torch bulb, assorted lengths of wooden dowelling. And a rectangular piece of softwood as a base for the device. Taking the soldering iron to the handbasin, Khalil plugged it into a nearby power point, causing a smell of burning dust.
"Do the Zionists think of all the nice people when they bomb us? I don't think so. When they napalm our villages, kill our women? This I doubt very much. I do not think the terrorist Israeli pilot, sitting up there, says to himself, those poor civilians, those innocent victims.' " He talks like this when he is alone, she thought. And he is alone a lot. He talks to keep his faith alive; and his conscience quiet. "I have killed many people whom I would no doubt respect," he said, back at the bed. "The Zionists have killed many more. But I kill only for love. I kill for Palestine and for her children. Try to think like this also," he advised her piously, interrupting himself as he glanced at her. "You are nervous?"
"Yes."
"It's natural. I too am nervous. Are you nervous in the theatre?"
"Yes."
"It is the same. Terror is theatre. We inspire, we frighten, we awaken indignation, anger, love. We enlighten. The theatre also. The guerrilla is the great actor of the world."
"Michel wrote me that too. It's in his letters."
"But I told it to him. It was my idea."
The next parcel was wrapped in oil paper. He opened it with respect. Three half-pound sticks of Russian plastic. He laid them in pride of place at the centre of the eiderdown.
"The Zionists kill for fear and for hate," he announced. "Palestinians for love and justice. Remember this difference. It is important." The glance again, swift and commanding. "You will remember this when you are afraid? You will say to yourself 'for justice'? If you do, you will no longer be afraid."
"And for Michel," she said.
He was not entirely satisfied. "And for him also, naturally," he conceded, and from a brown paper bag shook two household clothespegs onto the bed, then brought them to the bedside light to compare their simple mechanisms. Observing him from so near, she noticed a patch of creased white skin where the cheek and lower ear seemed to have been melted together and cooled again.
"Why do you put your hands over your face, please?" Khalil enquired, out of curiosity, when he had selected the better peg.
"I was tired for a moment," she said.
"Then wake up. Be alert for your mission. Also for the revolution. You know this type of bomb? Did Tayeh teach it to you?"