Borg let his disappointment show. "Is that all Towfik could manage?" Suddenly there was anger in the soft voice of the Arab. "Tbe kid died for you," he said. "IM thsink him in heaven. Did he die in vain?" "He took this from Schules apartment." Kawash drew a hand from inside his coat and showed Borg a small, square box of blue plastic. Borg took the box. "How do you know where he got it?" "It has SchuWs fingerprints on it. And we arrested Towfik right after he broke into the apartment." Borg opened the box and fingered the light-proof,envelope. It was unsealed. He took out the photographic negative. Ile Arab said, "We opened the envelope and developed the film. It's blank." With a deep sense of satisfaction, Borg reassembled the box and put it into his pocket. Now it all made sense; now he understood; now he knew what he had to do. A train came in. "You want to catch this oner' he said. Kawash frowned slightly, nodded assent, and moved to the edge of the platform as the train stopped and the doors opened. He boarded, and stood just inside. He said, "I don't know what on earth the box is." Borg thought, You don't like me, but I think you're just great. He smiled thinly at the Arab as the doors of the subway train began to slide shut. "I do," he said.
Chapter Two
The American girl was quite taken with Nat Dickstein. They worked side by side in a dusty vineyard, weeding and hoein& with a light breeze blowing over them from the Sea of Galilee. Dickstein had taken off his shirt and worked in shorts and sandals, with the contempt for the sun which only the city-born possess. He was a thin man, small-boned, with narrow shoulders, a shallow chest, and knobby elbows and knees. Karen would watch him when she stopped for a break-which she did often, although he never seemed to need a rest. Stringy muscles moved like knotted rope under his brown, scarred skin. She was a sensual woman, and she wanted to touch those scars with her fingers and ask him how he got them. Sometimes he would look up and catch her staring. mid he would grin, unembarrassed, and carry on working. His face was regular and anonymous in repose. He had dark eyes behind cheap round spictacles of the kind which Karen's generation liked because John Lennon wore them. His hair was dark, too, and short: Karen would have liked him to grow it. When he grinned that lopsided grin, he looked younger, though at any time it was hard to say just how old he might be. He had the strength and energy of a young man, but she had seen the concentration-camp tattoo under his wristwatch, so he could not be much less than forty, she thought. He had. arrived at the kibbutz shortly after Karen, in the summer of 1967. She had come, with her deodorants and her contraceptive pills, looking for a place where she could live out hippy ideals without getting stoned twenty-four hours a day. He had been brought here in an ambulance. She assumed he had been wounded in the Six-Day War, and the other kibbutzniks agreed, vaguely, that it was something like that
His welcome had been very different from hers. Karen's reception had been friendly but wary: in her philosophy they saw their own, with dangerous additions. Nat Dickstein returned like a long-lost son. They clustered around him, fed hun soup and came away from his wounds with tears in their eyes. If Dickstein was their son, Esther was their mother. She was the oldest member of the kibbutz. Karen had said, "She looks like Golda Meir's mother," and one of the others had said, "I think she's Golda's father," and they all laughed affectionately. She used a walking stick, and stomped about the village giving unsolicited advice, most of it very wise. She had stood guard outside Dickstein's sickroom chasing away noisy children, waving her stick and threatening beatings which even the children knew would never be administered. Dickstein had recovered very quickly. Within a few days he was sitting out in the sun, peeling vegetables for the kitchen and telling vulgar jokes to the older children. Two weeks later he was working in the fields, and soon he was laboring harder than all but the youngest men. His past was vague, but Esther had told Karen the story of his arrival in Israel in 1948, during the War of Independence. Nineteen forty-eight was part of the recent past for Esther. She had been a young woman in London in the first two decades of the century, and had been an activist in half a dozen radical left-wing causes from suffragism to pacifism before emigrating to Palestine; but her memory went back further, to pogroms in Russia which she recalled vaguely in monstrous nightmare images. She had sat under a fig tree in the heat of the day, varnishing a chair she had made with her own gnarled hands, and talked about Dickstein like a clever but mischievous schoolboy. "Mere were eight or nine of them, some from the university, some working men from the East End. If they ever had any money, they'd spent it before they got to France. They hitched a ride on a truck to Paris, then jumped a freight train to Marseilles. From there, it seems, they walked most of the way to Italy. Then they stole a huge car, a German Army staff car, a Mercedes, and drove all the way to the toe of Italy." Esther's face was creased in smiles, and Karen thought: She would love to have been there with them. "Dickstein had been to Sicily in the war, and it seems he knew the Mafia there. They had all the guns left over from the war. Dickstein wanted guns for Israel, but he had no money. He persuaded the Sicilians to sell a boatload of submachine guns to an Arab purchaser, and then to tell the Jews where the pickup would take place. They knew what he was up to, and they loved it. The deal was done, the Sicilians got their money, and then Dickstein and his friend stole the boat with its cargo and sailed to Israell" Karen had laughed aloud, there under the fig tree, and a grazing goat looked up at her balefully. "Wait," said Esther, "you haven't heard the end of it Some of the university boys had done a bit of rowing, and one of the other lot was a docker, but that was all the experience they had of the sea, and here they were sailing a fivethousand-ton cargo vessel on their own. They figured out a little navigation from first principles: the ship had charts and a compass. Dickstein had looked up in a book how to start the ship, but he says the book did not tell how to stop it So they steamed into Haifa, yelling and waving and throwing their hats into the air, just like it was a varsity rag--and ploughed straight into the dock. "lley were forgiven instantly, of course-the guns were more precious than gold, literally. And that!s when they started to call Dickstein The Pirate'." He did not look much like a pirate, working in the vineyard in his baggy shorts and his spectacles, Karen thought. AN the same, he was attractive. She wanted to seduce him, but she could not figure out how. He obviously liked her, and she had taken care to let him know she was available. But he never made a move. Perhaps he felt she was too young and innocent. Or maybe he was not interested in women. His voice broke into her thoughts. "I think we've finished." She looked at the sun: it was time to go. "You've done twice as much as me." 'Tm used to the work. Ive been here, on and off, for twenty years. 'Me body gets into the habit." They walked back toward the village as the sky turned purple and yellow. Karen said, "What else do you do-when you're not here?" "Oh ... poison wells, kidnap Christian children." Karen laughed.