‘So here’s the sad fact,’ he said, and drew a long breath. ‘If some of those Palestinians, whose rights you have both been so bravely defending, have their way, you will make no speech at all on the twenty-fourth of this month in Freiburg. In fact, Professor, you will never make a speech again.’ He paused, but his audience showed no sign of interrupting. ‘According to information now available to us, it is evident that one of their less academic groups has singled you out as a dangerous moderate, capable of watering the pure wine of their cause. Just as you described to me, sir, but worse. A protagonist of the Bantustan solution for Palestinians. As a false light, leading the weak-brained into one more fatal concession to the Zionist jackboot.’
But it took far, far more than the mere threat of death to persuade the Professor to accept an untested version of events.
‘Excuse me,’ he said sharply. ‘That is the very description of myself which appeared in the Palestinian press after my speech at Beer Sheva.’
‘Professor, that is precisely where we got it from,’ said Kurtz.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
She flew into Zürich in early evening. Storm flares lined the runway and blazed before her like the path of her own purpose. Her mind, as she had desperately prepared it, was an assembly of her old frustrations, matured and turned upon the rotten world. Now she knew there was not a shred of good in it; now she had seen the agony that was the price of Western affluence. She was who she had always been: an angry reject, getting her own back; with the difference that the Kalashnikov had replaced her useless tantrums. The flares sped past her window like burning wreckage. The plane touched down. But her ticket said Amsterdam, and theoretically she had still to land. Single girls returning from the Middle East are suspect, Tayeh had said, at her final briefing in Beirut. Our first task is to give you a more respectable provenance. Fatmeh, who had come to see her off, was more specific: Khalil has ordered that you acquire a fresh identity when you arrive.
Entering the deserted transit lounge, she had the feeling of being the first pioneer ever to set foot there. Canned music played but there was nobody to hear it. A smart shop sold chocolate bars and cheese, but it was empty. She went to the lavatory and considered her appearance at leisure. Her hair bobbed, and dyed a vague brown. Tayeh himself had hobbled round the Beirut flat while Fatmeh butchered it. No make-up, no sex appeal, he had ordered. She wore a heavy brown suit and a pair of vaguely astigmatic spectacles to scowl through. All I need is a boater and a crested blazer, she thought. She had come a long way from Michel’s revolutionary poule de luxe.
Give my love to Khalil, Fatmeh had told her as she kissed her goodbye.
Rachel was standing beside her at the next basin, but Charlie saw straight through her. She didn’t like her, didn’t know her, and it was sheer coincidence that Charlie put her open handbag between them, her packet of Marlboros on top, in the way that Joseph had instructed her. And she didn’t see Rachel’s hand either, swapping the Marlboros with a packet of her own, or her quick, reassuring wink in the mirror.
I have no life but this one. I have no love but Michel and no loyalty except to the great Khalil.
Sit as close to the departures board as you can get, Tayeh had ordered. She did so, and from her little case took a book on Alpine plants, broad and slim like a schoolgirls’ annual. Opening it, she perched it on her lap at an angle that allowed the title to be seen. She was sporting a round badge saying ‘Save the Whale’ and that was the other sign, said Tayeh, because from now on Khalil requires that there always be two things: two plans, two signs, in everything a second system in case the first fails; a second bullet in case the world is still alive.
Khalil trusts nothing the first time, Joseph had said. But Joseph was dead and buried long ago, a discarded prophet from her adolescence. She was Michel’s widow and Tayeh’s soldier and she had come to enlist in the army of her dead lover’s brother.
A Swiss soldier was eyeing her, an older man carrying a Heckler & Koch machine pistol. Charlie turned a page. Hecklers were her favourite. At her last weapon-training session she had put eighty-four shots out of a hundred into the storm-trooper target. It was the top score, men or women. Out of the corner of her eye she saw that he was still looking at her. An angry idea struck her. I’ll do to you what Bubi once did in Venezuela, she thought. Bubi had been ordered to shoot a certain Fascist policeman as he came out of his house in the morning, a very favourable hour. Bubi hid in a doorway and waited. His target carried a gun under his arm, but he was also a family man, forever romping with his kids. As he stepped into the road, Bubi took a ball from his pocket and sent it bouncing down the street towards him. A kid’s rubber ball – what family man would not instinctively bend down to catch it? As soon as he did, Bubi stepped out of his doorway and shot him dead. For who can fire a weapon while he is catching a rubber ball?
Someone was trying to pick her up. Pipe smoker, pigskin shoes, grey flannels. She felt him hover, and advance.
‘I say, do excuse me, but do you speak English?’
Standard issue, middle-class English rapist, fair-haired, fifty, and tubby. Falsely apologetic. No, I don’t, she wanted to reply to him; I just look at the pictures. She hated his type so much she was nearly sick on the spot. She glowered at him, but he was a stayer, like all his kind.
‘It’s simply that this place is so awfully desolate,’ he explained. ‘I wondered if you’d care to have a drink with me? No strings. Do you good.’
She said no thank you, she nearly said, ‘Daddy says I mustn’t speak to strangers,’ and after a while he strode away indignantly, looking for a policeman to report her to. She returned to her study of the common edelweiss, listening to the place fill up, one pair of feet at a time. Past her to the cheese shop. Past her to the bar. Towards her. And stop.
‘Imogen? You remember me. Sabine!’
Look up. Pause for recognition.
A jolly Swiss headscarf to hide the bobbed hair dyed a vague brown. No spectacles, but if Sabine were to put on a pair like mine, any bad photographer could make twins of us. A large carrier bag by Franz Carl Weber of Zürich dangled from her hand, which was the second sign.
‘Gosh. Sabine. It’s you.’
Get up. Formal peck on cheek. How amazing. Where are you going?
Alas, Sabine’s flight is just leaving. What a pity we can’t have a girlish talk, but that’s life, isn’t it? Sabine dumps carrier bag at Charlie’s feet. Keep an eye for me, darling. Sure, Sabs, no problem. Sabine vanishes into Ladies. Nosing inside bag, boldly, as if it were her own, Charlie draws out gaily covered envelope with ribbon round it, detects outline of a passport and air ticket within. Smoothly replaces it with own Irish passport, air ticket, and transit card. Sabine returns, grabs bag – must dash, exit right. Charlie counts twenty and returns to loo, roosts. Baastrup Imogen, South African, she reads. Born Johannesburg three years and one month later than me. Destination Stuttgart in one hour and twenty minutes’ time. Goodbye Irish colleen, welcome to our tight-arsed little Christian racist from the outback, claiming her white-girl’s heritage.
Coming out of the Ladies, she found the soldier once more looking at her. He saw it all. He’s on the verge of arresting me. He thinks I’ve got the runs, and doesn’t know how right he nearly is. She stared at him until he walked away. He just wanted something to look at, she thought as she once more dug out her book on Alpine flowers.
The flight seemed to take five minutes. An out-of-date Christmas tree stood in Stuttgart’s arrivals hall and there was an air of family bustle and everybody going home. Queuing with her South African passport, Charlie studied the photographs of wanted women terrorists and had a premonition that she was about to see her own. She passed through immigration without a blink; she passed through green. Approaching the exit, she saw Rose, her fellow South African, lounging on a rucksack, half asleep, but Rose was as dead as Joseph or anyone else for her and as invisible as Rachel. The electric doors opened, a swirl of snow hit her face. Pulling
up her coat collar, she hurried across the broad pavement towards the car park. Fourth floor, Tayeh had said; far left corner and look for a foxtail on the radio aerial. She had pictured an extended aerial with a bold red fox’s brush waving from the top of it. But this foxtail was a scruffy nylon imitation on a ring, and it lay dead as a mouse on the little Volkswagen bonnet.
‘I’m Saul. What’s your name, honey?’ said a man’s voice close to her, in soft American. For a dreadful moment she thought Arthur J. Halloran alias Abdul had come back to haunt her, so that when she peered round the pillar she was relieved to find a fairly normal-looking boy propped against the wall. Long hair, Bean boots, and a fresh, lazy smile. And a ‘Save the Whale’ badge like hers pinned to his wind-cheater.
‘Imogen,’ she replied, because Saul was the name Tayeh had told her to expect.
‘Lift the hood, Imogen. Put your suitcase right inside. Now look around, see who you see. Anybody bothering you?’
She gave the parking hall a leisurely inspection. In the cab of a Bedford van plastered with crazy daisies, Raoul and a girl she could not see properly were halfway to consummation.
Nobody, she said.
Saul opened the passenger door for her.
‘And fix your seat belt, honey,’ he said as he got in beside her. ‘They got laws in this country, okay? Where you been, Imogen? Where’d you get your suntan?’
But little widows bent on murder do not engage strangers in small talk. With a shrug, Saul switched on the radio and listened to the news in German.
The snow made everything beautiful, and the traffic cautious. They drove down the helter-skelter and joined a ribbon-built dual carriageway. Fat flakes raced into their headlights. The news ended and a woman announced a concert.
‘Care for this, Imogen? It’s classical.’
He let it play anyway. Mozart from Salzburg, where Charlie had been too tired to make love to Michel on the night before he died.
They skirted the high glow of the city, and the snowflakes wandered into it like black ash. They mounted a clover-leaf and below them, in an enclosed playground, children in red anoraks were playing snowballs by arc-light. She remembered her kids’ group back in England, ten million miles ago. I’m doing it for them, she thought. Somehow Michel had believed that. Somehow we all do. All of us except Halloran, who had ceased to see the point. Why was he so much on her mind? she wondered. Because he doubted, and doubt was what she had learned to fear the most. To doubt is to betray, Tayeh had warned her.
Joseph had said much the same.
They had entered another country and their road became a black river through canyons of white field and laden forest. Her sense of time slipped, then her sense of scale. She saw dream castles and train-set villages in silhouette against the pale sky. The toy churches with their onion domes made her want to pray, but she was too grown-up for them, and besides religion was for weaklings. She saw shivering ponies cropping bales of hay, and remembered the ponies of her childhood one by one. As each beautiful thing went by, she cast her heart after it, trying to attach to it and slow it down. But nothing stayed, nothing left an imprint on her mind; they were breath on polished glass. Occasionally a car overtook them; once a motorbike raced by and she thought she recognised Dimitri’s retreating back, but he was beyond the range of their headlights before she could be certain.
They mounted a hilltop and Saul began to put on speed. He swung left and crossed a road, then right, bumping down a track. Felled trees lay either side, like frozen soldiers in a Russian newsreel. Far ahead, Charlie began to make out a blackened old house with high chimney stacks, and for a second it reminded her of the house in Athens. Frenzy, is that the word? Stopping the car, Saul dipped his headlights twice. From what seemed to be the centre of the house, a hand-torch winked in return. Saul was looking at his wristwatch, softly counting the seconds aloud. ‘Nine – ten – got to be now,’ he said, and the distant light winked once more. Leaning across her, he pushed her door open.
‘Far as we go, honey,’ he said. ‘It was a great conversation. Peace, okay?’
Suitcase in hand, she selected a rut in the snow and started walking towards the house with only the snow’s pallor and the strips of moonlight through the trees to show her the way. As the house drew nearer, she made out an old clock tower with no clock, and a frozen pond with no statue on the plinth. A motorcycle glinted under a wooden canopy.
Suddenly she heard a familiar voice addressing her with conspiratorial restraint: ‘Imogen, take care from the roof. If a piece of roof hits you, it will kill you immediately. Imogen – oh, Charlie – this is too absurd!’ The next moment, a soft strong body had emerged from the darkness of the porch to enfold her own, only slightly hampered by a torch and an automatic pistol.
Seized by a flood of ridiculous gratitude, Charlie returned Helga’s embrace. ‘Helg – Christ – it’s you – great!’
By the light of her torch, Helga guided her across a marble-floored hall of which half the stones had already been removed; then cautiously up a sagging wooden staircase with no banister. The house was dying, but someone had been hastening its death. The weeping walls were smeared with slogans in red paint; door handles and light fittings had been plundered. Recovering her hostility, Charlie tried to withdraw her hand, but Helga grasped it as of right. They passed through a succession of empty rooms, each big enough to hold a banquet. In the first, a smashed porcelain stove, stuffed with newspaper. In the second, a hand printing-press, thick with dust, and the floor around it ankle-deep with the yellowed newsprint of yesterday’s revolutions. They entered a third room and Helga trained her torch on a mass of files and papers flung into an alcove.
‘You know what my friend and I do here, Imogen?’ she demanded, suddenly raising her voice. ‘My friend is too fantastic. She is Verona and her father was a complete Nazi. A landlord, an industrialist, everything.’ Her hand relaxed, only to close again round Charlie’s wrist. ‘He died, so we are selling him for revenge. The trees to the tree destroyers. The land to the land destroyers. The statues and furniture to the flea market. If it is worth five thousand, we sell for five. Here was her father’s desk. We chopped it with our own hands and burned it in a fire. For a symbol. It was the headquarters of his Fascist campaign – he signed his cheques from it, made all his repressive actions. We broke it up and burned it. Now Verona is free. She is poor, she is free, she has joined the masses. Is she not fantastic? Perhaps you should have done this too.’
A servants’ staircase climbed crookedly to a long corridor. Helga went quietly ahead. From above them, Charlie heard folk music and smelt the fumes of burning paraffin. They reached a landing, passed a row of servants’ bedrooms, and stopped before the last door. A light shone beneath it. Helga knocked and spoke something softly in German. A lock was turned and the door opened. Helga went in ahead, beckoning Charlie after her. ‘Imogen, this is Comrade Verona.’ A note of command had entered her voice. ‘Vero!’
A plump, distraught girl waited to receive them. She wore an apron over wide black trousers and her hair was cut like a boy’s. A Smith & Wesson automatic in a holster dangled over her fat hip. Verona wiped her palm on her apron and they exchanged a bourgeois handshake.
‘One year ago, Vero was completely Fascistic like her father,’ Helga remarked with proprietorial authority. ‘A slave and a Fascist together. Now she fights. Yes, Vero?’
Dismissed, Verona relocked the door, then took herself to a corner where she was cooking something on a camping stove. Charlie wondered whether she was secretly dreaming of her father’s desk.
‘Come. Look who is here,’ said Helga, and swept her away down the room. Charlie looked swiftly round her. She was in a large attic, the very one she had played in countless times on holidays in Devon. The feeble lighting came from an oil lamp dangling from a rafter. Thicknesses of velvet curtain had been nailed across the dormer windows. A jolly rocking-horse strutted along one wall; beside it stood a governess’s blackboard on an easel. A street
plan was drawn on it; coloured arrows pointed to a large rectangular building at its centre. On an old ping-pong table lay remnants of salami, black bread, cheese. Clothes of both sexes hung drying before an oil fire. They had reached a short wooden stair and Helga was marching her up it. On the raised floor two waterbeds were laid side by side. On one, naked to the waist and lower, reclined the dark Italian who had had Charlie at gunpoint that Sunday morning in the City. He had spread a tattered coverlet across his thighs, and she noticed the broken-down parts of a Walther automatic lay around him while he cleaned them. A transistor radio was playing Brahms at his elbow.
‘And here we have the energetic Mario,’ Helga announced with sarcastic pride, prodding his genitals with her toe. ‘Mario, you are completely shameless, you know that? Cover yourself immediately and greet our guest. I order you!’
But Mario’s only response was to roll himself playfully to the edge of the bed, inviting whoever wished to join him.
‘How’s Comrade Tayeh, Charlie?’ he asked. ‘Tell us all the family news.’
Like a scream in church, a phone rang: the more alarming because it had never crossed Charlie’s mind they might possess one. Seeking to raise her spirits, Helga was proposing they drink Charlie’s health, and making a palaver of it. She had balanced glasses and a bottle on a bread board and was in the act of bearing them ceremoniously across the room. Hearing the ring, she froze where she stood, then in slow motion set down the bread board on the ping-pong table, which happened to be close. Rossino switched off his radio. The phone stood alone on a small marquetry table that Verona and Helga had not yet burned; it was of the old hanging type, with the earpiece separate. Helga stood over it but made no effort to lift the earpiece. Charlie counted eight long peals before it stopped. Helga remained where she was, staring at it. Stark naked, Rossino walked nonchalantly down the room and helped himself to a shirt from the clothesline.
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