Ian St James Compendium - Volume 1

by Ian St. James

  "You've seen Farida?" It was the first time Suzy referred to her as anything other than Mama. I nodded.

  "And I've met my uncle," she said defiantly. "Negib Katoul called to see me yesterday."

  "So I heard."

  "And you've lied to me - for all these years!"

  "About what?" I needed to know exactly what Negib had told her.

  "As if you didn't know!" she sneered, shouting the words and causing the gang at the big table to mutter dangerously.

  "Suzy, why don't we go home and talk about this?"

  "I haven't got a home. The Jews stole it along with my country and—"

  "Your mother's worried sick about you."

  "She's not my mother! Are you still going to lie to me? Even about who I am?"

  "Who does Negib say you are?"

  "My name is Suzy Katoul. Katoul, Katoul, damn you! It's a name you should remember, it's a name you helped steal from me. You stripped me of my inheritance, Europeanised me, kidnapped me from my people and—"

  "Suzy, don't be such a damn little fool." My own temper boiled over. "Everything that's been done has been done for your own good—"

  "Including bringing me to France I suppose? Instead of-—"

  "Your father died so that you could come to France."

  Her face went as white as paper. "Idris Muhair was not my father. He was a weak bourgeois - he was a traitor to his people—"

  "He stood up to a mob! A mob that murdered him! He was a brave man—"

  "Don't you dare say that! How dare you talk of brave men! The brave men are fighting now to win our land back from the Jews."

  "Fighting's not the way."

  "Tell that to the bloody Jews!" She stood up, trembling so violently that her whole body shook with temper. In a sudden movement she reached for my glass and jerked it upwards. The wine stung my eyes and ran down my face onto my collar.

  "Suzy, we've got to talk!" I said desperately, but she was already turning to rejoin her companions. I rose to follow her, but four of the men detached themselves from the big table and surrounded me, hands on my shoulders to push me back into my chair. I heard the click of a switch-blade and a voice in my ear said, "You will sit down and order another bottle of wine."

  The patron served it silently. Suzy was already outside the cafe, flanked by the rest of her companions. The four who remained watched me carefully over the rim of their glasses and we sat for what seemed hours without exchanging a word. And all the while the switch-blade was held an inch from my throat.

  Nobody intervened, nobody sent for help. Instead they pretended not to notice. The old men began another game of chess and the Englishman sweet-talked his paw back under the girl's skirt. For all the attention paid to us we could have been some kind of mural. Finally they left, but not without warning me about what they would do to me next time.

  I paid the bill, complimented the patron on his clientele and went back to see Farida. And six years were to pass before I saw Suzy again.

  I felt dog tired. Ross and Elizabeth had joined in, and the four of them fired a never-ending stream of questions at me. Describe this - remember that - dates, names, places, people. My head ached from the relentless demands made on my memory.

  "You're telling us that four young thugs frightened you off?" Ross demanded. "You gave up as easily as that?"

  "I didn't say that."

  "It sure as hell sounded that way."

  "I tried to see her again. I even got beaten up trying if that proves anything."

  "Why didn't you go to the police?"

  "What good would it have done? She had left home - left Farida's apartment. And shortly afterwards she even left Paris."

  Ross nodded, and when he spoke the words came softly, like a sty prosecutor preparing a trap. "And of course if you'd gone to the police they might have been curious about how she got into France in the first place?"

  "Possibly - but that wasn't a consideration."

  "So what was?" he snapped.

  "I told you. I just didn't think it would do any good. And - and there was Farida's position to consider as well."

  "Her papers you mean?"

  "I suppose so."

  "Come on Harry! Come on! This isn't some two-bit investigation about a forged passport. We're trying to stop this screwed-up bitch from wiping out a million people! For Chrissakes, get your act together."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Stop holding back. Jesus Christ, do I have to spell it out? We want the whole picture. That's what that's supposed to mean. The whole picture Harry. Like were you and Farida keeping house together?"

  "If you mean what I think—"

  "Damn right I do! Your marriage never worked from the word go, Harry, so who was putting out for you? Were you so busy screwing the ass off Farida that—"

  "No I was not!"

  "Temper, temper, Harry," he taunted. "So just who was giving it to her?"

  "Nobody was."

  "How can you be sure? Was she a nun or something? Is that what she told you?"

  "No it damn well isn't. We never discussed it. She was widowed, her whole life revolved around Suzy, she was in her late forties by then anyway—"

  "And life had passed her by," Ross sighed. For a moment the tension seemed to drain out of him. He slumped in his chair like a tired fighter at the end of a hard round. Next to him Elizabeth watched me with those curious green eyes, while LeClerc and the doctor waited to pounce. I felt like a goldfish in a tank full of sharks.

  Ross hunched forward in his chair. "Shortly after that she turned up in West Germany, you know that don't you?"

  "I do now, but I didn't then."

  "Where she met Ulrike Meinhof."

  "I suppose so."

  "You suppose so," Ross said heavily. "Dammit, they both wrote for Konret, didn't they?"

  I nodded wearily. "If you know why bother to ask?"

  "What's Konret?" The doctor asked.

  "It was a magazine," LeClerc explained. "Political articles mixed up with Playboy type centrefold."

  "Che Guevara with tits. Let Karl Marx help your orgasm," Ross summed up. "Secretly financed by the East Germans - they channelled a million marks into it via Prague. Meinhof used to be Konret's star columnist. Married its publisher, a guy called Klaus Rohl and left him in '68 to join Baader in West Berlin."

  The doctor looked surprised. "That Meinhof. The Baader Meinhof gang. I didn't know Suzy Katoul was mixed up with them."

  "She knew Meinhof," Ross qualified. "How much she was involved is hard to say." He turned back to me and injected a note of sarcasm into his voice. "Unless you know all about that?"

  I shook my head. "I lost touch with her until '74. Even when we met again, she was reticent about the missing years. And I suppose I was so relieved to have found her again - and found her so apparently normal, that I never probed very hard. It seemed best to - well, best to let sleeping dogs lie."

  Ross studied me with brooding eyes. "So you claim you met her again in '74. Where was that?"

  November 5th, 1974. In England children celebrated a Catholic terrorist's attempt to blow up Parliament and in France I buried Farida at the little churchyard of St. Augustine de la Salle on the outskirts of Paris. Rain lashed down from a leaden sky and the scent of woodsmoke drifted across from a bonfire in an adjoining garden. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. Grief, loneliness, despair and death - it seemed Farida's life had been that empty. Even death mocked a life so inconsequential that only three mourners stood at the graveside - the Algerian neighbour who had sent for me and the French concierge from the apartment building. They huddled against me as we listened to the priest's teeth chatter in the biting cold and when it was over we trudged back to the church, our heads bowed and eyes slit against the dust flung up by the swirling wind. I thanked them for being there and sent them away in the car I had hired. I can't remember now why I didn't go with them, but I stood on the steps to the church and thought about the one person who might have com
forted Farida in her failing years. And when I looked up she was there, half-hidden in the gloom of the entrance with her face turned toward me. For the craziest moment I thought she was Haleem. A trick of the light and the mood I was in, but the resemblance was uncanny.

  "Hello, Harry." Even the voice was an echo twenty years old.

  I was suddenly angry. "You should have been here."

  "I was," Suzy said. "But in the church, not at the graveside. I forfeited that right years ago."

  By then my surprise had faded enough for me to notice the details. like the assured way she carried herself and the cut of the black suit under the unbuttoned mink coat.

  "It's too late to say sorry to Farida," she said. "But can't I say sorry to you?"

  Then the composure cracked wide open and we were in each other's arms. All the anger died in that instant. Perhaps I realised how much I had missed her and just what she meant to me. And maybe how lonely I was - with a failed marriage behind me and a way of life which provided a million acquaintances, but no real friends. The only family I had known since childhood had been Farida - and Suzy Katoul.

  Her chauffeur drove us back to Paris. The smart car and the mink coat were the first clues I had to her new lifestyle. The apartment at 14 Avenue de Friedland was the next - a Canaletto in the lobby and a Rouault and a Guardi in the drawing room. When I finished admiring the place she indulged my preference for whiskey, served herself a cognac and we settled down to talk. It had just turned noon then, and crazy as it sounds we almost talked the clock round. She prepared a snack lunch and we went out to dinner in the evening and then back to her place. When I got over how grown-up she was, it was time to question the material possessions.

  "I'm a purchasing agent," she said. "For half a dozen businesses in the Middle East." She gave me the names of a couple of them but no bells rang - at least not then.

  Had my schedule permitted I might have stayed even longer, but I was due to entertain a visiting congressman in London the next day, so at just after midnight I left. But we promised to stay in touch. Finding each other after a gap of six years seemed like discovering another part of ourselves - or at least it did to me. I was in Paris every second month or so and she was sometimes in London - so though we never made a firm date it was on the cards for us to meet again soon. And I looked forward to it.

  The following evening I had my first brush with Special Branch. Three of them arrived at my flat with a search warrant. You can argue all you like with Special Branch, but they have a knack of getting what they want in the end - which was to take my place apart and rebuild it.

  "So what were you looking for?" I asked when they finished.

  The boss man grinned. "Guns would have been best, though any kind of explosives would have been useful. Failing that, forged passports, unexplained stocks of currency, even drugs at a push."

  "I'm sorry to disappoint you," I said coldly.

  "We'll get over it. Nothing surprises us in this job."

  "Is that so?"

  "Well, take you for example. You've just been to Paris right? Mind telling me why?"

  "Only if you'll tell me what this is all about."

  His agreement was less positive than I had hoped, but nonetheless I told him, "I've been to the funeral of an old friend."

  "Anything else?"

  "It's your turn."

  "Suzy Katoul, Mr. Brand - you spent twelve hours with her and forgot to mention it."

  "So what? Anyway, how do you know?"

  "Friends of ours told us. They watched you go into her flat and saw you come out again." He smiled broadly. "It's all very simple."

  "You mean her apartment's under observation?"

  "Surveillance we call it."

  "For what reason?"

  He seemed the slightest bit surprised. "Terrorist activities. You're not going to tell us you don't know who she is?"

  "Of course I know who she is!" As my astonishment faded my temper boiled over. "Terrorist activities? You must be completely—"

  "You know she's involved in politics," he said sharply.

  "She used to be involved in student politics, and—"

  He laughed outright at that. "I'd say she's graduated, Mr. Brand. Suzy Katoul is the European end of the Palestinian Marxist Front - and they're very grown up."

  "She's a highly successful businesswoman who's—"

  "Purchasing agent for some big shots in the Middle East?" he cocked his head to one side. "Oh yes, she's that as well. A very busy little lady isn't she - one way and another."

  He had to be telling the truth. Christ, I was angry! Angry with him and his goons for turning my flat over, angry with Suzy for not telling me, and above all angry with myself for not anticipating something like this. All I needed to do was remember the last time I had seen her. All those people in that cafe - all politicals, every single one of them.

  I phoned her when they left. "Why the bloody hell didn't you tell me?"

  "Harry, believe it or not I was pleased to see you." She hesitated and then said firmly, "But well, is it really any of your business?"

  "The police seem to think so."

  "Oh that," she dismissed it. "That's nothing - harassment that's all. I get it all the time."

  "You mean you know they watch your apartment?"

  She laughed. "Harry, I've even had them in for a drink. It works both ways, you know. Like now - them tapping the line helps establish your innocence. I mean, even they can tell outraged indignation when they hear it."

  That shut me up so completely that I was still thinking of an answer when she giggled: "Testing, one, two, three. Harry and Monsieur Le Spook - are you both still there? This is Suzy Katoul signing off— over and out." And she hung up.

  I got used to it. When I next visited her she even took me to the window and pointed out the guard on duty. He sat reading a magazine in the front seat of a blue Renault parked on the other side of the road. Suzy blew him a kiss and shut the blinds.

  "Okay, Harry, I'll make a deal with you. You've got your work and I've got mine. Mine's what I live twenty-four hours a day. Total immersion, got it? I'm not a kid, I'm twenty-seven years old, Charles de Gaulle is dead and there aren't any barricades on the boulevards this year. Since I left home the French have got fat, the British got lazy, the Germans got rich and the Yanks got Nixon. Added together, the West hasn't got a philosophy worth stuffing in a Christmas cracker!"

  Her scornful look defied interruption. "Meanwhile, one and a half million people live in camps and are deprived of the most basic right of all - the right to return to their own homes! And the world doesn't want to know. Well, I'm one of the lucky ones. You and Farida got me out and for that I'm grateful - even if I once thought differently. But my life belongs to the people in those camps and I'll not stop fighting until the Palestinians return home. And I'll tell you something else - there'll be damn all peace in the Middle East until they do!"

  We never discussed politics after that. She was dedicated to Palestinian Liberation - it was that simple. We met whenever I visited Paris, shared meals together, exchanged gifts at Christmas and that was that. It was half a loaf if you like - she was my family again but on her terms. I can only guess at the kind of life she led - she rarely talked about it, other than places we had in common, cities we had both visited, restaurants we had dined in, those kinds of things. She knew a surprising amount about art and was a collector in a minor way, and while on my travels I would look out for things likely to be of interest to her. We went to the theatre once in. London and saw a couple of films together - it was that kind of relationship - non-political, as I said at the very beginning.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  "Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him."

  Charles de Gaulle, October 1st, 1962

  The Fourth Day

  0845 Friday

  Molly Malone was actually singing. She had no voice to speak of and she sang for nobody's pleasure but her own, b
ut she was actually singing. Such a simple thing, but she couldn't remember when last she had been happy enough to sing. Days, weeks, months and years had strung together into a drab backcloth against which they lived their existence; sometimes, it seemed, without so much as a spark of joy to lighten the gloom. But this morning was different. This morning she had already cleared the crockery and washed the pots and pans, and cleaned the stove and tidied the kitchen. And this morning she felt ten years younger.

  Silly really, to feel like a girl again because of such little things. Yet wasn't it the little things in life which made all the difference? Mick's bonus of a few hundred pounds would come in handy when they got it, God knows the money was needed right enough, but it was the difference in Mick that was important. He had got his self respect back. It was the importance of the job as much as the money being paid for it, she knew that. To drive one of those trucks all the way to Germany and back was a job for a man, a whole man, not the fading husk he'd been turning into for the last year or more.

  Yesterday she had worried and harboured fears that his strength might run out. She had been afraid he would overtax himself, but in bed last night he had laughed at her fears and overtaxed himself in other ways. Just remembering made her weak at the knees, so that she sat down quickly and smiled about her like a cat that had stolen the cream. It was years since they had made love that way, so long that she had forgotten the excitement of it, so long that his tenderness had brought tears to her eyes.

  And this morning she was having her hair done for the first time in years. Mick's orders, so that she looked her best for tonight. And she was to buy a new shirt for the boy and shoes for herself. Money helped, but it was more than that. She knew it was. It was the joy of living with a man again, a husband and a father who was at peace with himself, a man with his self-respect back, who would ruffle the boy's hair and look at her with love in his eyes. That's what mattered. Molly glanced at the alarm clock, counting the minutes until he returned for his breakfast - and she started to sing again.