I began to sweat very slightly. I was on to him, was reading him pretty clearly now. But his reactions were coming altogether too fast. I looked along the row at him, and found he was looking at me, face still glistening. I felt mine glistening more, with the sheer strain of trying to outthink him.
Barenboim, Menuhin, and Stern had taken their homage below, and with great good humor now embarked on something of a fugal nature. So did I. I had the glimmering of something as the piece ended and the orchestra limbered up for the last item (also well chosen, a final salute to the ship of state on its twenty-sixth year: Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage), and was on my feet applauding with the rest of them as the concert ended.
‘Let the air out of a tire,’ I said to Ham.
‘Goddam it, I can’t do that.’
‘I’m not going in that car with him.’
‘But–’
‘Do it, Ham. Please do it.’
Marie-Louise passed; then Patel. He took my arm urgently as he stood in the aisle. ‘I must talk with you, Igor.’
‘Of course,’ I said, and opened my arms to Felicia and gave her a tremendous hug. I gave Marta one, too, and then Connie. Patel got himself bundled down the steps during this. He called, ‘Igor!’ His face was quite greenish. ‘We will meet below?’
‘Of course we will.’
No help for it; but I saw that I had an arm round both Connie and Marta as we did so. There was still a considerable scrum of people, but as we got into the lane numbers of them streamed off to the buses. In the lane, Ham didn’t seem to know what was for the best. He started off in front with Marie-Louise, but then dropped uncertainly behind as he saw what Patel was doing. Patel was very weirdly running about there, unable to decide which end of the threesome to attach himself to.
‘Igor, we must talk,’ Patel said.
‘All right.’
‘Alone, please.’
‘Ram, what is the big secret?’ Connie said.
‘Ah, men’s talk!’ Patel said, with a gruesome attempt at gaiety.
‘But we’re going in the same car,’ I said.
‘Ah, I had forgotten,’ Patel said. He said it at about the moment that Ham, dropping behind, came into earshot.
Several hundred people were moving along the road to the car park, and we stood around in a loose cluster when we got there. Ham stood around, too, until I gave him a look and he wandered off.
He was away for what seemed a long time, which Connie fortunately filled in with illuminating comments on the Crusader town for the benefit of a couple of Americans in her party. We were standing just outside it, the massive walls floodlit from the dry moat below. Connie gave all the facts about Richard Lionheart and Saladin, and also about Louis IX, who had rebuilt the walls, and then Sultan Baybars I, who had finally stormed them in the Arab conquest of 1265. Not much had happened since until the Israelis had excavated and found it all still there, and had put it back in position again, together with a box office to greet tourists at the business end of Louis IX’s moat.
Ham returned toward the end of the dissertation, and he was smiling. ‘Aren’t we going to a party?’ he said.
The group split up, and I reluctantly let Connie and Marta go, and placed a protective arm round Marie-Louise instead as we went to the car.
‘Well, goddam it!’ Ham said as we neared it.
‘What is it?’
‘Have I got a flat?’
‘A flat?’ I studiously examined the car. He had got it flat as a pancake.’ I do believe you have,’ I said.
‘Oh, no!’ Marie-Louise said.
‘Oh, yes.’ He was down on his haunches. ‘That’s very flat.’
‘You can’t mend a flat,’ Marie-Louise said.
‘You don’t have to mend the goddam thing. You just change the wheel.’
‘When did you change a wheel?’
‘I can change a wheel,’ I said.
‘We’ll both change it. You two go on with the others.’
‘I will help,’ Patel said.
‘No, no. Hey, Connie!’ Ham yelled.
The argy-bargy had gone on considerably too long; the Sassoons had already cruised by. Connie came slowly up, headlights on. ‘Are you in trouble?’ she said.
‘A flat. Can Marie-Louise and Ram squeeze in?’
‘Of course.’
‘I will stay,’ Patel said. His face had a drenched look in the headlights.
‘We’d get in each other’s way. Carry on.’
Connie and Marie-Louise saw that this happened, and Patel left with a rather despairing look; he was on somebody’s knee as the car pulled out.
‘You certainly have some cute ideas,’ Ham said. ‘Can you change a wheel?’
‘Well, bugger the wheel!’ I said. An enormous wave of relief was sweeping over me as I realized the strain I’d been under. I’d been under it for hours, with nobody apparently understanding. Ham still didn’t seem to understand. In the massive silence, the floodlit walls exuded a healing calm. ‘Ham, this is the most incredible thing,’ I said.
‘Well, it is. I didn’t like to say it.’
I looked at him. ‘You didn’t believe me?’
‘Well – something obviously happened. But –’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ I told him of Meyer and the incident at the Wix.
His face creased up at this. ‘What the hell was he going round and round the Wix for?’
‘Well, there’s no doubt it was him. He was after me.’
‘At the Wix?’
‘He must have thought I’d gone that way. It’s not such a crazy idea. You can get out to the avenue there, people likely to be around. Anyway, that’s what he did.’
‘He went from the Wix,’ Ham said, slowly working this out, ‘and passed our house and went to the Sassoons’?’
‘He must have thought I’d got to your place.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, he knew I was going there. He rang to ask if I’d arrived.’
‘Marta must have told him. He didn’t know earlier. He assumed you were going with her. He said so when he called in the morning to ask if he could come with us. He’d been chewing my ear about Marta, so I didn’t bother to disillusion him – some nonsense you don’t need to –’
‘I do know. Marie-Louise told me.’
‘Oh. Well,’ he said.
We were walking, and I lit a cigarette. We had the night to ourselves. It was marvelous just to walk and think in it without pressure; except that Ham had become characteristically occupied with the logistical problems of the Wix and the Sassoons. Had I been so obtuse about Hopcroft’s danger? Probably.
‘I could have been killed!’ I said.
‘Oh, Igor, come on.’
‘What else could he have wanted?’
‘You said it wasn’t you. You said that.’
‘He’d have preferred me out of the place, it’s true. He phoned to see … But where did he get the key? Help a bit, Ham.’
‘Well, I don’t know where he got the key.’
‘And what was he after if not me?’
‘God knows. Perhaps the letter?’
‘The letter?’ It was so long ago I’d almost forgotten it. ‘There was no letter,’ I said.
‘There wasn’t?’
‘There was no P.S. We made it up. The idea was to trap him.’
‘Well, it looks as if it worked,’ he said.
‘But he was supposed to go to the archives for it.’
‘Maybe that’s why he didn’t.’
‘So why the House?’
‘Well, goddam it, I don’t know. The copy, maybe?’
‘What copy?’
My jitteriness was making him jittery. ‘Any copy. Didn’t Marta think there was a copy?’
I remembered it just as he said it; her questions in the car. Oh, my God, it couldn’t be. ‘You don’t think – I mean Marta and … It’s ridiculous.’
‘Well, of course it is,’ he said.
So it was, and I told myself how ridiculous it was, the idea of Marta and Patel, the one casting suspicion on the other, in order to distract attention from … Except. Except, I thought sickly, the key. Marta had often been in a position to extract my key, and have it copied, and handed over to … And attention then directed to her so that I wouldn’t invite her on the chosen day … Nonsense, of course. Such nonsense that I changed the subject right away. I heard myself gabbling. ‘He wasn’t in the place two minutes. He must have come in and right away started working up – Damn it, he was after me!’
‘Hey, now, Igor!’
‘Ham, I’m not going there!’ I’d suddenly remembered the garden at Hirsch’s. People would be drifting about it with drinks in this season: a shadowy subtropical place. He’d been taken off balance by the ploy with the tire. But he knew I was evading him now. He knew. He wouldn’t let it happen again. ‘We’d better shoot right back to the security people!’ I said.
‘And make a public scandal before hearing what Meyer has to say? After all, no harm was –’
‘He wanted to kill me!’
‘Igor, calm down –’
‘He knew I was there. He just didn’t know where. He went hunting from room to room –’
‘But if he phoned first –’
‘I don’t know that he did. Anybody could have phoned. Connie could have phoned.’
‘Okay, she could. Forget the phone. It doesn’t mean he was after you.’
‘There’s nothing else he can have –’
‘The bloody copy!’
‘There was no copy.’
‘But he didn’t know it.’
‘So why didn’t he look for it?’
‘Maybe he did’
‘I tell you he wasn’t in there two minutes. He went in, and I wasn’t there, and he came out after me!’
‘Maybe you’d frightened him. Maybe he’d found you just had been there.’
‘Ham, he knew it.’
‘It doesn’t follow. He could have gone looking for this goddam letter, and discovered you weren’t working with the period, but with 1952, and the desk lamp still warm, and realized – Well, God knows what he realized. Couldn’t it have been like that?’
‘Well, it could. It could,’ I said. But I said it a bit late. With something very like a heart attack, I’d suddenly wondered how he knew all this about 1952 and desk lamps. In the brief pause, and a rapid review of all I’d told him, no desk lamps showed up. No 1952, either. I felt myself beginning to vibrate all over. Even my teeth began to chatter.
‘Of course it could,’ he agreed. But he agreed a bit late, too. There was a tone of somewhat ominous kindliness in his voice, as of a man who has also taken a point, and that it was all rather a pity. It certainly was.
I was grinding out my cigarette at that moment, which seemed to be an exceptionally long one. The next, I was halfway up the wall, having sprung there. I could hardly see for fright, and was by no means clear where I was going. If tonight’s experience showed anything, though, it was that after discoveries of a certain kind it was as well to be elsewhere. The early moments tended to be the significant ones in getting there.
Chapter Fifteen
Louis IX had put it up and Baybars I had knocked it down and Igor the Quick went up what was left of it like a cat. I’d landed on a low wall, which ran up, via a long buttress, to a flight of crumbling steps. I scrambled up them in blind panic to a little parapet, and cocked a leg over, and saw solid footing and dropped down to it.
I was in a watchtower. I had a single petrified look over the parapet and saw Ham looking up at me, quite a long way below, with his mouth open. He was at the other side of the moat. I’d crossed the moat! I was in the Crusader town. He’d so soon be in it with me that I looked wildly round for another way out.
There was a slitlike hole in one wall of the watchtower, and I went through it, into an evil little chamber with a triangular embrasure and an arrow slit. I scurried through this one, too, into an opposite hole, with steps going down. Little men, medieval ones, even with their helmets on, and I ducked just in time. The place was like mine-workings; coffinlike passages, fetid smell. The cracked uneven steps descended into a corridor, very long and narrow. Bewilderingly, it was set high on the wall of a big stone hall. The hall was vaulted and arched, with stone tracery above and a stone floor below, a good thirty feet below. The corridor was a sentry walk, just about one man wide. I could see all this because bars of light were coming in. There were embrasures the length of the sentry walk, and the floodlight from outside was shining through the arrow slits.
The sentry walk was an open gallery that commanded not only the scene outside but the hall below. Its open side was fenced by a sagging chain, and a notice above warned that the National Parks Authority wouldn’t be responsible if anyone fell over.
I read the notice from the first embrasure, into which I’d immediately stuffed myself. I saw right away what I’d have to do. He’d come scrambling up behind me, and without allowing him the benefit of the brief survey I had made, I would shove him over the chain. Then I’d go below and see what could be done about him. He wouldn’t be able to do much about me, not after alighting from thirty feet. That’s what I would do, and I held my breath and waited for him to do his part of it.
He didn’t do it, and I couldn’t hear what he was doing. I couldn’t hear him at all. I hadn’t heard him when he’d been outside Chaimchik’s room – just the squeak of his shoes on the marble plaza when he’d come after me, very fast.
What a fool I’d been! Not Patel following me. Ham had been following me. Patel had been following him; had probably come on the strange scene during his night exercise. When I’d vanished in the heaps of spoil, he’d probably continued following him, had gone round and round the Wix looking for him, until stopped by the security guard. He’d probably been trying to tell me so all evening. With consummate cunning I’d got rid of him, of everybody, had carefully maneuvered Ham back into the position he’d been in shortly before losing me at the atom-smasher.
I heard him suddenly below. A stone snicked and I craned forward and saw him. He was walking in the hall. There wasn’t a gate to the hall; simply an entry arch. He had come over the bridge and passed the box office and just walked in. He’d evidently been here before, knew the place. I didn’t.
There was no other sound. He padded through the hall, peering upward to the far end. I suddenly realized, with some horror, that in craning forward I’d placed a large head of myself in the bar of light on the opposite wall, and froze in case he noticed.
He was peering at a flight of steps, now visible against the far wall, and evidently running down from the sentry walk. The walk didn’t end at the wall but continued through a slit in it, probably along the battlements to the next watchtower. He was peering there, up the steps. Presently he began climbing them and went out of sight.
In much panic I immediately began tiptoeing out of the embrasure to go back the way I’d come. I tiptoed off on the right foot and nearly went over on my face as the left failed to follow. It was wedged in the arrow slit. I felt my head drench with sweat. I tugged, twisted, wrenched, without avail; and just as well because within seconds there was a movement below and he was there again, looking up. He looked right at me, without seeing me, a measuring glance, the length of the sentry walk, and then round again to the opposite wall. A curve of indigo showed another open arch there. He went rapidly through it.
I slipped my foot out of the shoe, and then bent and screwed the shoe out as well, and put it back on and wiped the sweat out of my eyes and wondered what to do. To get outside again wasn’t such a magnificent option: big empty car park, long empty road. The road led into a far-flung web of other roads snaking through the sand dunes overlying Herod’s suburbs. We’d got lost there in the dark at Christmas while trying to find Foka Hirsch’s. He could easily appear on one of the roads moments after me, if not before. I remembered his turn of speed.
Still, I could
n’t stay here. His wits were all away at the moment. When he’d got them back, he’d return for a proper check. He’d evidently calculated I hadn’t run along the battlements. I made haste in that direction, and at the far end saw the flight of steps going down and the open arch, and saw why he’d guessed I’d gone out that way. It was the quickest way out. Experience had shown him that when pursued I ran. He wasn’t to know that a more basic reaction was to hide myself somewhere. His return measuring glance was probably to see how far I could have run in the time. He’d certainly left the hall at the double himself.
I went cautiously through the slit and saw why he’d concluded I hadn’t gone this way. It didn’t go anywhere, ruined battlements, just a broken platform, evidently the remains of another watchtower, and a flight of exterior steps running down from it: they were badly deteriorated, more like a rocky track. I stepped carefully down them, and in. a moment or two came out to a scene of considerable eeriness.
A bit of moon was up and a hazy glow, reflected from the floodlighting, hung like a luminous cloud above the town evacuated by the Crusaders. The excavators had removed the sand of centuries, and here it was, more or less as left, in a hurry, in 1265, after Baybars had sacked it. The Arabs hadn’t altered it much. They hadn’t done anything with it much. They’d just left it.
All about there was a large confusion of excavated streets, buildings, bases of things, bits of statues. It had been a garrison town, and the paving of the main street was scored and grooved to prevent the cavalry mounts slipping. The grooves glinted now in the electric radiance of another century. Some of the men who’d made it in the last dash down this street to the harbor now lay under slabs in English and European churches, and people took brass rubbings of their sedate effigies. Those little men would have found their way around this place, which was more than I could.
‘Igor,’ Ham said.
He said it from not far away. I couldn’t tell how far or in which direction. I was in deep shadow in the lee of the hall, but I froze.
The Sun Chemist Page 26
