‘Why on earth not?’ Bartlett said. ‘They’ll take at least half an hour to refuel the aircraft.’
‘You sound like an experienced traveller,’ the girl said.
‘I’ve flown a bit.’
‘Perhaps there are other reasons for the precaution.’
The aircraft bounced gently on the runway, settled, taxied, stopped. The disembarking passengers departed and with them went the gangsterish young man in the suede jacket.
‘Why’s he been allowed out?’ Bartlett said.
‘Perhaps he’s disembarking,’ the girl said.
‘But he’s Israeli, surely.’
‘Just because he looks like a Mafia bodyguard doesn’t necessarily mean he’s an Israeli.’
‘Look.’ Bartlett pointed at the tarmac. ‘He’s got into that Volkswagen.’ The blue Volkswagen began to circle the aircraft.
The girl shrugged.
Bartlett realised then and said: ‘He’s the guard, isn’t he? In case the Arabs try anything.’
The girl shrugged again. Bartlett watched the tankers refuelling the jet, the patrolling Volkswagen, the officer in El Al uniform scanning the perimeter of the airport with field glasses. He shivered, because someone had pulled the strings of the marionette headlines.
The embarking passengers arrived through the hooded gangway that led straight on to the aircraft. Outside the Volkswagen continued to circle like a lost insect. Then the Israeli in the suede jacket climbed out and returned to the aircraft looking rather sulky. The Boeing taxied to the end of the runway, climbed the bright sky and headed towards Tel Aviv, the Hill of the Spring.
Over the Greek islands, pumice stones in the flat water, Raquel Rabinovitz said to Tom Bartlett: ‘Are you married, Mr Bartlett?’
Bartlett finished the little bottle of red Avdat wine that he had ordered with his meal and smiled. ‘You would make an excellent geologist, Miss Rabinovitz.’
The girl sipped her black coffee. ‘You are trying to evade the point already.’
Bartlett said: ‘Your curiosity is formidable. Yes, I am married.’ He lit a cigarette with the gold Dunhill his wife had given him a decade ago and considered his marriage.
‘Could you not have brought your wife with you?’
‘She didn’t want to come,’ he said. ‘She had other things to do.’
Like drinking and eating and sleeping with a fur-headed Arab from the Jordanian Embassy. And discussing dear old Tom, poor old Tom, with him. No, Israel was decidedly not the country for Helen.
‘Is she English?’ the girl said.
‘No, American.’
‘And very beautiful?’
‘Very.’
With a sigh Raquel Rabinovitz changed the subject. ‘I too come from the States. My parents were Russian but they escaped after the last war because they knew what Communism was all about. They settled in New York. I was born there. Then one day my father said, “What for should we stay here when we are about to be given our own country?” And my mother said, “Wherever you go, Doron, then I go with you.” And so we came to Israel just in time for the first war against the Arabs.’
There didn’t seem any point in asking her questions because all information was supplied unsolicited. He said politely: ‘So you are not a Sabra, then?’
‘Not a true Sabra. But I am one at heart, I promise you.’
‘I believe you. How old are you?’
‘Twenty-three.’
‘And you served in the Army?’
‘Of course – all Israeli girls do.’
‘What did you do?’
Raquel Rabinovitz looked confused. As confusion seemed out of character Bartlett repeated the question.
‘I was a member of the Hiba,’ she said.
‘And what on earth is that?’
‘It is the section of the Army that does street police duty. It is very essential work.’
Bartlett laughed aloud. ‘So I’m having lunch with a policewoman?’
‘Is that so funny?’
‘Not really. Except that it was once my ambition …’
‘Your ambition to what?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Would you care for some more wine?’
‘No thank you. You will find that in Israel we have little need for artificial stimulants. Now, if you will excuse me, I think I will sleep a little.’
‘Of course. I’m sorry if I offended you.’
‘That’s all right, Mr Bartlett. We Israelis do not mind people laughing at us. It’s when they start shooting at us that we object.’ She closed her eyes and Bartlett thought that she looked surprisingly vulnerable for an ex-policewoman.
The islands disappeared and a few parachutes of cloud appeared between the aircraft and the empty sea. Bartlett picked up the green and gold booklet containing 101 words of Hebrew – ‘the mother tongue of many Israelis whose mothers knew it not’. He discovered that El Al meant upward, which was reassuring. He put the booklet away with Flying Kosher and took his maps out of his old brown leather briefcase.
Ras Abu Radeis, Waddi Firan, St Catherine’s Monastery. Mountains the colour of rusting iron, morning air that smelled of sharp herbs, wadis green with palms that looked like moss from the granite peaks, wells filled with ice that had never frozen. When he had last visited the Sinai – ten or eleven years ago – it had been in the hands of the Egyptians. Not even the Israelis could have changed it very much.
Bartlett replaced the maps, tucked the briefcase under his seat, and relaxed. Then, after making an abortive effort to keep his mouth closed, he slept.
In front of him the Pole loosened his almost transparent grey tie and snored immediately. The American with the thick cropped hair dozed.
Only the official gunman remained completely alert as the Boeing approached the disputed territories of the Levant. And the pilot and the navigator.
Tom Bartlett was annoyed. ‘You must admit,’ he said, ‘that this is hardly an auspicious introduction to Israeli efficiency.’
‘It could happen with any airline,’ Raquel Rabinovitz said. ‘In fact El Al is one of the most efficient airlines in the world. Did you know that since the two Arab attacks they have carried more passengers than ever before?’
‘I didn’t know,’ Bartlett said. ‘Nor do I quite see what it’s got to do with the fact that they’ve lost my suitcase.’
‘Perhaps the London Airport porters forgot to load it. Or perhaps the Dutch unloaded it by mistake at Amsterdam.’
Bartlett smiled. despite his annoyance. ‘But no Israeli is to blame? Even though I personally handed it over to El Al?’ He prodded at the errant wing of his collar. He could feel sweat gathering beneath his tropical suit. He lit a cigarette. ‘It’s not your fault,’ he said. ‘You’ve done as much as you can. But everything I need for my stay here is in that case.’
‘I understand,’ she said. ‘But it could have happened on any airline.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘But is there anything more you can do?
‘I’ll see.’ She walked away, lithe and smart and aggressive.
Bartlett watched the other passengers pushing trolleys of luggage towards waiting business associates, Jewish mothers and predatory taxi drivers. He would have liked to have been in a receptive mood to assimilate the excitement and confidence he had sensed as he walked from the Boeing to the arrival lounge. But they had spoiled his pleasure by losing his suitcase.
He noticed that both the crewcut American and the Pole with the gold-rimmed spectacles were waiting around although they had picked up their baggage.
Raquel Rabinovitz returned smiling triumphantly with a customs official and the missing suitcase. ‘There,’ she said. ‘It was muddled up with the baggage off another flight. It could have happened anywhere in the world.’
‘Thanks,’ Bartlett said. ‘Thanks very much.’ And with uncharacteristic flippancy he added: ‘What a way to run an airline.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir?’ said the customs official.
‘I’m sorry,’ Bartlett said. ‘I was joking. I’m very grateful to you for finding my luggage.’
‘Perhaps,’ the customs official said, ‘you would be good enough to open your suitcase for me.’
Bartlett said: ‘Very well.’ He found his keys in his trouser pocket and opened the suitcase that was even older than his briefcase. He looked at his shirts and underclothes, his papers and his geologist’s tools. ‘I don’t think you need examine them too closely,’ he said. ‘Someone already has.’
TWO
Bartlett first suspected that he was being followed as, town guide in hand, he walked up Dizengoff Street from Dizengoff Circle where a fountain splashed and teenage soldiers with submachine guns on their shoulders munched peta crammed with meat and tehina and humus and stalked the happy soldier girls.
There was no proof; it was merely a new instinct awakened when he realised that his suitcase had been searched. Twice he spun round to surprise his pursuer. Each time he thought he noticed a furtive movement on the sidewalk. But he couldn’t be sure: it might have been the overactivity of this new instinct. And there was so much jostling movement in the street. He walked on past the small expensive shops, bookstalls garlanded with Time, Newsweek and Hebrew scandal magazines liberally bosomed and buttocked, past a dozen sidewalk cafés where tourists drank beer and Israelis sipped mineral waters.
Halfway up the broad thoroughfare Bartlett stopped at the Stern Café and ordered a Gold Star beer. It seemed to him in his new state of awareness that there were two oiled movements behind him as he turned into the café. But, of course, it was all ludicrous. Why should anyone want to follow a middle-ageing geologist who had flown to Israel to escape briefly from a fossilised routine and. a faithless wife to present a paper to a gathering of colleagues who would be transfixed to their seats by the familiarity of his material?
But if there was anyone shadowing him then, Bartlett reckoned, they would now be sitting at one of the cafés down the street from which they could observe him. He leaned back in his seat and, with incredulity and enjoyment, observed the inhabitants of the twenty-one-year-old country parading past him.
Jews from Iraq, the Yemen, Germany, Russia, Poland, Britain, America. Youthful Jews strutting with victory and self-sufficiency, more sexually aware than any young people Bartlett had seen; middle-aged and elderly Jews with indelible blue numbers on their arms and indelible suffering on their faces; preoccupied Jews wearing wide-brimmed black hats, long coats and curly beards, Jews wearing skullcaps, sun-glasses and desert tans.
He ordered another beer and watched a bus queue swarming into a single-decker bus as if it were a captured Russian tank. A little one-armed man with a chattering face leading a gaunt giant with a ruined face from café to café selling dishcloths – everyone gave a few agora but no one took the cloths.
A smart, middle-aged woman with large soft breasts beneath white lace sat at the table next to him, ordered an ice cream and offered herself to him for 175 Israeli pounds. ‘Fifty dollars,’ she added helpfully.
‘I’m English,’ Bartlett said. He looked at his watch. It was 11 a.m.
She took a small plastic conversion table from her handbag. ‘About twenty-one English pounds. And a few agora – but we won’t bother about those.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Bartlett said. ‘It is a little early for that sort of thing.’
‘You English,’ she said. ‘It’s never too early.’ She moved into a seat closer to him; she smelled faintly of spices.
Bartlett paid the old black-jacketed waiter, picked up his briefcase and started to turn left up the sidewalk. Then he swivelled on his heel and ran back in the direction he had come.
At the first café on the right he saw the Pole in the gold-rimmed spectacles trying to disappear behind a copy of a Hebrew morning paper. At the next café he spotted the crewcut American attempting a similar illusion behind a copy of Life magazine.
At the third café he saw Raquel Rabinovitz.
‘Shalom,’ she said. She was drinking a Coke through a straw.
‘Shalom,’ he said.
‘Sit down and have a drink in the Champs Elysée of Tel Aviv.’
‘I’ve already had one,’ he said.
‘Then have another.’ She snapped her fingers at a waiter. Tom Bartlett sat down.
‘I know it sounds far-fetched,’ he said. ‘But I’m sure I’m being followed.’
‘It is just coincidence,’ she said. ‘You forget that Tel Aviv is just a village compared with New York or London. Every tourist comes to Dizengoff. They say it is one of the most exciting streets in the world.’
Bartlett who was watching a tall Yemeni girl in a short leather skirt agreed. ‘But that hardly explains why my suitcase was searched.’
‘Perhaps an overzealous customs official opened it.’
‘But I had the key.’
‘All right – but I tell you I could open that lock with a teaspoon.’ She drained the Coke with a gurgle. ‘And I think I am right in presuming that you are not the tidiest of men. The suitcase looked to me just as you might have packed it.’
Bartlett shook his head. ‘My wife packed it. She is a very tidy woman. That’s how I know it had been searched.’
‘Ah.’ The conversation lapsed.
Bartlett considered telling her that yesterday he had overheard the President of the United States on the telephone. It seemed to him that the intercepted call might somehow be the key to the subsequent events. But he didn’t want her to think he was completely out of his mind. He opened his copy of the Jerusalem Post.
The girl leaned across and pointed at the four young faces peering from the front page. ‘There,’ she said. ‘That’s what it’s all about.’
The four soldiers had been killed in two days of artillery exchanges across the Suez Canal. Two of them at Kantara, two of them at Port Tawfik. Bartlett didn’t know what to say.
‘Every day,’ she said, ‘we see their faces. Alive one day, dead the next. Our young men, our future. Everyone you meet has had a relative or a friend or a neighbour killed since the truce. The world doesn’t realise what those communiqués mean to us Israelis. Two killed, three injured. In a way to a small nation like Israel such figures have as much impact as the American losses in Vietnam.’
‘I’m sorry for you,’ Bartlett said. He knew it sounded inadequate. Those young faces staring at him beside news from Cape Kennedy, above an advertisement welcoming two officials from the American board of the General Israel Orphans Home for Girls, Jerusalem, to Israel. He said: ‘It all seems so remote sitting here in the sunshine.’ He swallowed the warm dregs of his beer. ‘Do you see any end to it?’
‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘One day perhaps. When the Arabs realise that we will never be moved because the only place we can retreat to is the sea. One day when they realise how well we have treated the refugees in Gaza and elsewhere. One day when your governments leave us Jews to negotiate our own peace with the Arabs.’
‘One day when you give up some of the land you captured?’
She looked at him contemptuously. ‘What land do you suggest we give up?’
Bartlett opened his mouth to reply but he was stopped by a crack as loud as overhead thunder. He jumped. ‘What on earth was that?’
‘A supersonic bang. An aircraft passing through the sound barrier. We get them all the time.’ Amusement softened the contempt. High above Tel Aviv, two Mirage jets headed south in the general direction of Cairo. She lit a cigarette with theatrical calm and said: ‘We will never give up Jerusalem, the Golan Heights or the West Bank. Perhaps we may negotiate the return of some of the Sinai.’
‘You seem very hard,’ he said.
‘All Israelis are hard. We have to be.’ A wisp of warm wind stirred her fringe and the sunlight found gold in the ocean depths of her eyes. ‘Do you realise that not so long ago you and I would have been fighting each other?’
‘When the British were in occupation?’
She nodded.
&nbs
p; ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you would have been a policewoman, not a soldier.’
They walked up Dizengoff, under the dark green trees, past the police station, to the area where the small, dusky shops were crammed with sausages, matzos, humus, slabs of compressed apricots, dried fish, bottles of wine, pickled herrings and cucumbers, fat olives, halva and peta; where butchers found pork and bacon beneath bloodless steaks; where greengrocers polished and piled their peppers, apples and thick-fleshed Jaffas with pride.
They turned left down a side street where every square yellow building housed an advocate, a dentist or a doctor. For most of the way Raquel sulked. But on the corner of Hayarkon, the seafront road, she turned swiftly and surveyed the street behind them. It was empty except for a vendor pushing a cart loaded with a glistening hillock of strawberries. The emptiness of the street seemed to placate her. ‘There,’ she said. ‘What did I tell you?’
Bartlett said: ‘I must have been mistaken.’ But he knew he hadn’t been.
They walked back into town along Hayarkon. Past the Hilton Hotel, past the British Embassy sporting the grubbiest-looking Union Jack that Bartlett had ever seen. On the town beaches the young men batted balls to each other with bats like aircraft marshallers’ indicators; the summer sound of ball on bat was as drowsily monotonous as the clicking of knitting needles.
Outside the Dan Hotel, Bartlett said: ‘Would you care to have dinner with me?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. She stood on the steps worrying about the invitation.
‘I’m an Englishman,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t expect me to insist.’
‘I think you are laughing at me all the time.’
Bartlett was contrite. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was very rude.’
‘I think perhaps we have a lot to talk about.’
‘I’m sure we have,’ Bartlett said.
‘Like soil irrigation. And the potential of the Negev. I am looking forward to your address in Jerusalem, Mr Bartlett.’
The Twisted Wire Page 2
