The Twisted Wire
Page 6
‘You would be a very formidable barrister in cross-examination,’ Bartlett said.
‘Always you try and evade the point. Am I right? Is she blonde – and anaemic?’
‘She’s blonde,’ Bartlett said.
‘But you’re not happy with her.’
‘Good grief. I didn’t say that.’
‘But you don’t deny it.’
‘What did you learn in America about soil irrigation?’
Raquel sighed. ‘You have a strange approach to women, Mr Bartlett.’
‘You called me Thomas just now.’
‘Israeli men have a much more direct approach. There is no flirtation. If a young man and a woman are attracted to each other they sleep together.’
Bartlett tossed back his whisky as the generation gap inserted itself between them. A warm breeze slunk in from the darkness and rustled the leaves of a vine investigating the outside wall of the apartment. ‘I suppose that’s the most sensible way,’ he said. He hoped she would say that she didn’t agree with such practical courtship.
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t referring to you and me.’
‘Of course not,’ he said. He didn’t know whether he was relieved or disappointed.
‘Where do you go tomorrow?’
‘Jerusalem – to stay. And the conference opens the day after.’
‘Are you scared? It seems to me that someone is determined that you should not give this address.’
‘Yes,’ Bartlett said. ‘I am scared. Particularly since Everett was shot this morning. The Israeli statement blames it on snipers across the border. I don’t think it was. I think someone this side of the border was trying to shoot Everett or me.’
‘Who do you think it was?’
The aggressive girl joined them. ‘I’ve just met another geologist,’ she said. ‘He said he’d like to meet you.’
Her companion held out his hand and said: ‘I am very pleased to meet you, Mr Bartlett. My name is Matthew Yosevitz.’
Raquel drove her little Fiat as if it were a dodgem and stopped reluctantly at red traffic lights. Bartlett watched pedestrians, rear lamps and headlights swerving past and wondered if Yosevitz was trying to follow them. He didn’t envy him.
‘What did you think of Yosevitz?’ he said. He spoke elaborately because he was a little drunk.
‘I tell you I do not think anything of him; Raquel said. ‘He is a bore.’
‘He is also trying to kill me,’ Bartlett said.
‘Why should you think that?’
‘He was on the aircraft. He was booked on at the last moment. He was following me in Dizengoff. I think I saw his face in the darkness by the River Yarkon. And tonight he. turned up at that party. Who invited him anyway?’
‘No one I think. Esther – that’s the girl who was dancing with Shlomo – opened the door and he was just standing there. So, of course, she invited him in. She cut up a Peugeot taxi with accomplishment.
‘Where did you learn to drive?’ he said.
‘In the Army,’ she said.
‘No wonder you won the war,’ he said.
‘I am only trying to lose this Yosevitz for you. Because you say he is trying to kill you and because I think he is a very boring man.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘To a discotheque. So that you can see how Israelis enjoy themselves.’
‘I think I’ve seen that already.’
‘You can get a drink there, too. I know how you like to drink.’
‘I’ve had three whiskies,’ he said.
‘Two too many,’ she said.
He put arm in front of his face as the headlights of a bus peered into the Fiat. Then he pondered on Yosevitz.
What did he want? And what had Everett wanted? At the party Bartlett had explored Yosevitz’s geological knowledge. Matthew Yosevitz was a young geologist whose international reputation was steadily burgeoning; but Bartlett’s new awareness warned him that this man might be an imposter. It took Bartlett less than a minute to establish that the man who was pursuing him was no fake. In fact he suspected that Yosevitz’s knowledge of the Precambrian crystalline rocks in the Southern Sinai and the Basaltic lava from the Miocene Age in the West was more extensive than his own. He tried him on the Middle Cretaceous limestone formations in the North but couldn’t fault him.
As Raquel had suggested, the answer was probably connected with the address Bartlett was delivering to the Geological Society. But that seemed harmless enough.
Raquel parked the car as if they had stopped on the brink of a precipice. They ran across the still-busy road into a club where a Scotch cost two dollars, where bright lights stuttered, where only town criers could have competed with the juke-box music.
Bartlett waited until the records were changing and said: ‘What will you have?’
‘A whisky, please.’ She looked at him challengingly.
‘Are you sure?’
‘There’s no point in you getting drunk by yourself.’
‘I’m not getting drunk. just a little tight perhaps. Do you blame me after what’s happened today?’
‘I don’t blame you,’ she said. ‘I’ve been living in New York for two months and I know that many people have to drink to communicate. Here in Israel it is different. There is so much vitality that no one has to drink. That is why the drinks are so expensive – Israelis buy one and sit with it all night.’ She began to clap her hands to the music. ‘Come let’s dance.’
‘I’m too old for that sort of dancing,’ he said.
She pulled at his arm. ‘You don’t have to do anything. You talk as if you were about sixty.’
Bartlett drank deeply of his Scotch and followed her on to the tiny floor. She swayed and shimmied, turned and twisted, while he stood self-consciously and unhappily moving his hips.
‘That’s very good,’ she said. She wore a short blue suede skirt and a floral blouse. She looked very tanned in the winking light; he felt very pale.
The explosion came as the Beatles’ guitars and drums started up. The floor shook and a glass fell off a table. The music stopped.
Bartlett said: ‘A supersonic bang?’
Raquel shook her head. ‘Not at this time of night.’
The shirt-sleeved young men and miniskirted girls were running for the door. The tourists stayed in their seats: explosions hadn’t been mentioned in the brochures.
Raquel said: ‘Come on.’
He followed her into the street. Together they followed the crowd running up Dizengoff.
The sidewalks were littered with daggers of broken glass and there was a smell of cordite in the warm air. They turned left up Keren Kayemet. The police and fire engines had beaten them to it.
In front of a four-storey apartment block stood the smoking wreckage of a car. All the windows in the block had gone. A man and a woman sat on the sidewalk nursing bloodied arms.
Raquel said: ‘You stay there – I’ll find out what happened.’
Bartlett stood with the crowd, sniffing the gunpowder smells, absorbing the fear and excitement that would soon be converted into hatred. There was, he thought, little hope.
Raquel ran across the arena cleared by the police. ‘They say the explosives were in the car,’ she said. ‘An Arab must have parked it here and fled. He was probably supposed to leave it somewhere more important. I guess he lost his nerve. He also parked it outside an empty apartment block and left it to explode at a time when there was hardly anyone in the street. Thank God it is only Arabs that we have to deal with.’
‘Is anyone hurt badly?’
‘No one. A few people were cut by flying glass. That was all. I expect they are rounding up Arab suspects already.’
A press photographer took flashlight pictures.
‘Associated Press,’ Raquel said. ‘I know him.’
‘Good grief,’ Bartlett said. ‘What a day.’
She laughed suddenly and it occurred to Bartlett that he had not heard her laugh before: laugh
ter had not seemed to be part of her insistent, inquisitive nature. He said: ‘What are you laughing about?’
‘I am sorry.’
‘But what are you laughing about?’
She put her head on his shoulder and he smelled her hair and her perfume. ‘You must forgive me. But all of a sudden I am thinking that perhaps you think this bomb was intended for you.’
Bartlett laughed without enthusiasm. ‘Perhaps it was,’ he said.
‘You must not make me laugh so,’ she said. ‘It is not right at this moment. But it is good just the same. I do not think that we laugh enough.’
A saloon car nosed its way into the floodlit arena. The chatter of the crowd faded. A door opened and Moshe Dayan stepped out.
Raquel said: ‘Isn’t he wonderful?’
‘He certainly got here quickly,’ Bartlett said.
Raquel sighed. ‘He is Israel’s greatest security risk. Time and time they are telling him not to expose himself like this. But he takes no notice. It is not in his character, you see.’
Dayan in grey slacks and white open-neck shirt talked to the police and firemen. He was smaller than Bartlett had imagined. Elf and brigand combined. Showman, warrior and leader. Bartlett noticed that he was smiling beneath his pirate’s patch and presumed that he was joking about Arab inefficiency. Dayan climbed back into the saloon and was driven away.
‘Come on,’ Bartlett said, ‘let’s go. I think I’ve had enough for one day.’
She dropped him outside the Dan Hotel and kissed him softly on the cheek.
‘Shalom,’ he said.
‘Shalom, shalom,’ she said.
The little car accelerated down Hayarkon. Bartlett walked across the foyer and asked for his key.
The porter said: ‘Ah, Mr Bartlett. I have been worrying about you.’
‘Worrying? Why?’
‘Because someone has been trying to persuade me to get your briefcase out of the safe. He said you had authorised him to take it out.’
‘I authorised no one.’
The porter smiled knowingly. ‘I thought as much,’ he said.
‘And you didn’t give it to him?’
‘Of course not, Mr Bartlett.’
‘Who was this man?’
‘Another guest, Mr Bartlett. An American gentleman who arrived this afternoon from London.’
‘Thank you,’ Bartlett said. ‘Thank you very much. I’ll see you before I leave.’
As he walked down the corridor towards his room he wondered if it had been searched again. It hadn’t. He fell asleep almost immediately.
EIGHT
From his room in the Intercontinental Hotel, Bartlett gazed down into the walled city of Jerusalem. The strengthening morning sunlight burnished the Dome of the Rock, Islam’s third holiest shrine, and somewhere among the jostling buildings, warmed the Western Wall, the Via Dolorosa, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – the shrines of Jewry and Christianity. Jerusalem was the Koran and the Bible with Testaments old and new bound in stone. A city sacred to a billion and a half people.
And yet, Bartlett thought, the history of the city of Abraham, David and Solomon, of Mohammed and Jesus Christ, was written in blood. Persians, Macedonians, Egyptians, Ptolemies – they had all ruled it until the Maccabean rebellion restored it to the Jews in 17 B.C. – or B.C.E. as the Jews put it. Then the Romans, the Byzantines, the Persians again, Arabs and Seljuks, Crusaders, Mongols, Mamelukes, Turks, British, Jordanians. Then, in 1967, the Jews again.
Bartlett observed from a distance and tried to be awed. He failed. The view was somehow ordained – a colour slide of Jerusalem, the Eternal City. He could hear a guide as sonorous as a psalm. It was instructional religion, a magnificent tableau, a vast crib.
He stubbed out his cigarette and turned away from the window. He had to go into the city now before cynicism took root; alone, away from the organised tour arranged for the geologists. You had to feel Jerusalem, not have it explained to you biblical chapter and verse.
He unpacked his suitcase rapidly and looked at his watch. It was 10 a.m. He had three hours before the official lunch and five hours before the conference was due to begin.
He walked along the Jericho Road and King Solomon Street. The air smelled of coffee and cedar wood. He passed a few Arab children, a donkey, a group of extreme Orthodox Jews who looked like black crows from a distance, an Egged tourist bus parked at the roadside while its tourists took snaps of a camel.
At the Damascus Gate he walked past the pleading taxi drivers into the walled city. He held his briefcase very tightly.
Bartlett took the right fork inside the gate along the Suq Khan Ez-Zeit in the Christian quarter. It seemed to him very much like any other Arab town. The alley roofs squeezing the sky, the gabbling crowds patrolling the alleys, the postcard sellers, the shops like coal cellars stuffed with sweetmeats, hot bread, wooden camels, brassware, meat moving with flies; the coffee shops, the smokers of hubble-bubble pipes, the pestilence of guides, the fighting children, the tourists as quick on the draw with their cameras as gunfighters with their guns.
One guide was more insistent than the others. A heavily built Arab in an open-neck blue shirt beneath a lightweight, blue suit. Bartlett thought he looked a bit like Nasser.
‘No thank you,’ he said ‘I don’t want a guide.’
The Arab caught hold of Bartlett’s arm. ‘You will not be disappointed. Very cheap. I will show David’s Tower, the pool of Bethesda where Jesus healed the cripple, the El Aqsa Mosque which. was presented by the noble Saladin in 1168.’
Bartlett shook his arm free. ‘I said no. Now clear off.’
At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre belief and reverence began to assert themselves. The site of Calvary. He joined nuns and priests and sightseers in the devout darkness. Greek Orthodox, Christian Arab, Catholic, Protestant. Many with different ideas about the exact siting of the Cross. But that didn’t seem to matter: one God embraced the Church and perhaps the whole city.
Outside the Arab who looked like Nasser was waiting for him. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘I will take you to the Western Wall – or the Wailing Wall as it is called.’ He quoted from a guide book experiencing considerable trouble with pronunciation. ‘It is the age old place of Jewish lamentation and prayer for its restoration.’
‘Are you implying that you brought me here to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre?’
The Arab gave his toothy dictator smile. ‘I am only too pleased to help.’
It seemed vaguely to Bartlett that he was only acting the part of guide. ‘Listen here,’ he said. ‘You didn’t lead me here. Nor are you leading me anywhere else. Even if you follow me right round Jerusalem you’re not getting a penny. Understand?’
The Arab smiled. ‘This way to the Western Wall,’ he said.
They walked along the Bab El-Silsileh Road to the courtyard in front of the great yellow-slabbed wall. The Arab stopped on the edge of the courtyard. Bartlett took a cardboard hat from an official and went up to the wall in the section reserved for men. They stood, hands pressed. against the old stone, praying, lamenting. Bartlett imagined the jubilation and emotion of the victorious Israeli troops when they saw the Wall in 1967. Again awe and reverence settled upon him.
The Arab was waiting for him on the perimeter of the courtyard. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘I shall show you the Dome of the Rock from which Mohammed ascended into heaven.’
‘You’ll show me nothing,’ Bartlett said.
‘Perhaps a cup of coffee first?’
Bartlett’s reply was not in accord with the mood and the scene and he felt ashamed of it. The Arab was unperturbed.
Bartlett walked quicker without observing where he was going. The Arab walked beside him.
‘If you don’t clear off,’ Bartlett said, ‘I’ll call the police.’
The Arab smiled encouragingly. The mixture of fear and excitement that had accompanied Bartlett since the phone call in his Sussex home heightened. He walked faster; so did the Arab.
There was no one in the lane of ruined, tooth-stump houses except a few children. The Arab stretched out a hand towards Bartlett’s briefcase. The smile had been erased and one hand was inside his jacket.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ Bartlett said.
‘The briefcase, please. Quickly. I have a gun here.’
Bartlett began to walk away.
‘Stop.’
Bartlett turned and saw the Luger in the Arab’s hand. He stopped. The children sensing excitement. stood beside the Arab.
Bartlett said: ‘Can you please tell me what’s going on? I’ve got no money in there, you know.’
‘I know that. Now please give it to me.’
‘To hell with you,’ Bartlett said.
‘I have warned you. I intend to get it before the Russians.’ His finger tightened on the trigger. Then perhaps they will stop making us feel small.’ He moved closer and prodded the barrel of the big pistol in Bartlett’s ribs. ‘They say that we cannot do anything properly. I will show them. The briefcase, please.’
The three ragged children watched happily; one playing with the buttons of a shirt like a pyjama jacket, another picking his nose.
Bartlett said: ‘You’re too late. The police are here.’
The Arab turned and Bartlett thought how easy it would be to rabbit-punch him. But he was accomplished in geology not karate.
The Arab swore and turned to run. The Israeli police caught him.
One of the policemen said: ‘What is the trouble, sir?’
Bartlett smiled because they spoke like London policemen. Except that they wore dark peaked caps and drill shorts and shirts and they were darker than the Arab. He said: ‘This man was trying to steal my briefcase.’
‘Was he now?’ The senior policeman talked rapidly in Arabic then turned back to Bartlett. ‘He says he is merely showing you Jerusalem. He says he made no attempt to steal your briefcase. He says he thinks you have gone a little mad. The sun perhaps.’