The Old Boys

by Charles McCarry

  Soon after Norman came home from the war he sat down to a game of five-card stud with his Uncle Yeho and some of his Mossad friends. He cleaned them out.

  Yeho immediately saw his nephew’s possibilities. The kid was young and handsome and smart and already a cool experienced killer—as a soldier he had been an unusually competent sniper in Italy. This résumé would have made Norman interesting to Yeho even if he had had no other qualifications. His skill at poker made him special. Needing no other cover, he could go anywhere in the world and play cards with anyone, and because gamblers lived at night while the rest of the world slept, he could get away with just about any kind of operation.

  That very night, Yeho popped the question.

  “Norman made a condition,” Jack said. “He insisted on keeping whatever money he won at cards. Yeho said okay. How could he play without an incentive?”

  “And did he come out ahead?”

  “After a few years in the field he used his winnings to buy a small hotel in Miami Beach,” Jack said. “It didn’t really matter to Yeho where Norman lived, of course.”

  “Did he go on playing poker after he became a hotelier?”

  “Until he began to lose to younger players, but that didn’t happen until years later,” Jack said. “He played in high-stakes games all over the world. Norman met a lot of interesting people, rich Arabs and so on. Rich Germans, too.”

  Jack had something to tell me, but he expected me to ask for it.

  I said, “Tell me more about the rich Arabs and Germans.”

  “You can ask Norman when you see him again.” He looked at his watch. “Midnight. You know, Horace, I think you’d be better off staying here tonight. The monks will be glad to have you, and Norman does come by almost every day.”

  “What about tomorrow?”

  “We’ll see what we see,” Jack said. “Meanwhile, you’re welcome to stay here for a few days. The King David is a goldfish bowl.”

  “You want me to go into hiding?”

  “No, but you have nothing to gain by being conspicuous. I know you don’t care about security anymore, but Israel is full of Russians and not all of them are innocent returnees.”

  “Meaning?”

  “From what I’ve heard about what you and Harley were up to in Moscow, you may have created resentments in Russia.”

  I said, “Is this a warning on general principles or do you know something specific?”

  “There’s some local anxiety about your safety,” Jack said.

  “You’re telling me both the Russian mob and the Mossad are after me?”

  “Not the Mossad, as far as I know. Why should they be when you might have better luck than they’ve had so far in finding the missing bombs? They’d rather just watch you work.”

  “And Norman is the watcher?”

  “One of them, maybe,” Jack said. “But I think he represents an offer of friendship. A broker between two parties who have similar objectives.”

  The other party was Yeho’s old organization. I had never heard of anyone going into partnership with the Mossad and coming out ahead.

  I said, “A broker who belongs to the competition and just happens to be one of the best poker players in the world?”

  “Yes, but he’s also Norman.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning I really don’t think Norman is going to lie to a cousin of Paul Christopher’s or betray him,” Jack said. “He may have an agenda of his own, but he has his memories, too.”

  In his elliptical way Jack was saying that Norman was an Old Boy who lived by old principles. The Christophers, who had saved his family at the risk of their own lives, were his friends. So were their friends, and especially their families.

  We finished our breakfast. Jack said, “Why don’t you take the day off? Stay in your room and wait for Norman to show up. I have some things to do.”

  The monks did not speak to me, but they didn’t seem to mind my presence. After wandering around the monastery for half the morning looking at icons and books, I settled down in my cell with a novel I had brought with me. Around one o’clock I heard the monks shuffling by my door and then, drifting down the corridor, convivial sounds as they tucked into lunch. Jack had vanished and I felt diffident about going down to the refectory by myself. I ate an apple and went back to my book.

  An hour or so later came a tap on the door. My caller was Norman Schwarz, carrying a tray covered with a napkin.

  “The monks were afraid you might be faint with hunger,” Norman said. “And I have this for you.”

  From a string shopping bag he produced a package containing clean socks and underwear, a razor and toothbrush, and a secondhand sweater old enough and large enough to have been made for Goliath. Apparently Jack had asked him to do some shopping. Again I noticed his small hands. His Uncle Yeho, whom he did not otherwise resemble, had been a tiny man. Imagine a hairy tenyear-old.

  Under the napkin I found a bowl of soup based on last evening’s roast lamb, a chunk of bread, a slab of cheese, a jug of water.

  “Eat,” Norman said.

  While I chewed, he talked. Norman had vivid memories of Lori Christopher as she had been after she came ashore by night in Palestine.

  “She had been emptied out,” Norman said. “Everything she had been before Heydrich had run down some psychological drainpipe. She was alive, yes, and apart from being thinner and very, very quiet, she was the same as she had been in Berlin. Back then she had crackled with intelligence, exuded vitality. She was still beautiful, but you felt that she was someplace else emotionally. And so she was—she was between her last self and her next self.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you,” I said.

  “Before the war, even with the Nazis in power, she had been a reckless person. She said whatever came into her head, she did what she wanted. She had everything—an ancient name, enough money, beauty, a husband she loved, Paul. She lost all that, even ownership of her own body. So she was not the woman she had been, and never could be that woman again.”

  “This is speculation?”

  “No,” Norman said. “She told me this.”

  “Whatever for? Were you her psychiatrist?”

  “No,” Norman said. “Her lover.”

  I could not have been more astonished if he had pulled out a pistol and shot me with it.

  It was Lori who started the affair. She had been staying with the Schwarzes in Jerusalem. Norman was on terminal leave from the army. One night she simply got into his bed. In Norman’s experience it was usually the woman who made the first move, but this surprised him. There was not that much difference in their ages. He was in his early twenties; she was still in her thirties. But the last time he had seen her he had been a boy and she had been Paul’s mother.

  “I was startled,” Norman said, “but I was young and she woke me out of a sound sleep in which I was probably dreaming of a girl, so I didn’t think twice. She had the body of a girl, she smelled like a girl, but she had the sexual intelligence, the bed language, of a woman to whom nothing is new and nothing is forbidden.”

  This was my aunt he was talking about. I was quite uncomfortable.

  I said, “You told Paul this?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why are you telling me?”

  “You have a reason to know and no reason not to be told,” Norman said. “And I assume you can keep a secret.”

  Norman fell in love with Lori. “I was under no illusions,” he said. “She didn’t love me. She couldn’t have been better to me in bed and in every other way if she had loved me. But she didn’t.”

  “Your parents didn’t notice what was going on?”

  “I saw little smiles on their lips. Mothers like their sons to get laid. My parents were old-fashioned radical socialists, believers in free love. To them, sex was like eating an ice-cream cone on a hot day. Who doesn’t like ice cream?”

  “If she didn’t love you and she was still in shock from what ha
d happened with Heydrich, what was she getting out of it?”

  “She was burning a bridge.”

  “Using you?”

  “Asking me to collaborate.” Norman stopped talking, bit his lip, looked at the crucifix on the wall of my cell. “I had no idea that I was still so sad about all this,” he said. “Give me a moment.”

  In a lifetime of listening to secrets, I had seldom before encountered one that shook me up as this one was doing. Human beings, women in particular, step out of character all the time and do unpredictable things. If Norman had been telling me about anyone else, short of my own mother, I would not have been shocked. But Lori Christopher—Paul’s mother, my uncle’s wife— had been the heroine in a romance that had transfixed me and the rest of the Hubbards and Christophers for half a century. It was a surprise to discover that this maid of the mists had been flesh and blood after all, and that she had been trying to run away from the husband and son who had spent their lives believing that she was waiting for them to find her.

  “Anyway,” Norman said. “I would have done anything for her. There was no other woman like her. I don’t mean her looks or her mind or the sex, even though all of it was wonderful. It was what it came wrapped up in—profound sorrow, never mentioned, not even in the form of a sad face or a tear. But always there. Accepted. Her fate.”

  “You didn’t find this in any way theatrical?”

  “Are you serious? She didn’t have a theatrical atom in her being. She was a person to whom the unbearable had happened, a person who had been in the power of maniacs. What had actually happened to her was already a nightmare. What was there to embroider?”

  Lori told him the story of the Amphora Scroll, showed it to him sealed in its glass cylinder, described its contents.

  “She must have trusted you.”

  “She had good reason,” Norman said. “I have never told anyone that it existed from that day to this.”

  “Not even your Uncle Yeho?”

  Norman was not at all surprised by the question. “Not even him,” he said. “What Lori told him, I don’t know.”

  I said, “Lori knew Yeho Stern?”

  “He came to our house for dinner every sabbath so he could light matches and make phone calls without giving offense to the orthodox. He was a chain-smoker in those days and there was always somebody he had to talk to.”

  “He met Lori in your parents’ home?”

  “They met through my parents, but earlier, I think.”

  “In Berlin?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You don’t know for certain?”

  “With Yeho nobody knew anything for certain,” Norman said.

  “Did you ever ask Lori?”

  “I never asked anybody any questions about anything having to do with Yeho,” Norman said.

  3

  In the winter of 1945–46, a bitter one all over the Old World, Norman awoke one morning in Jerusalem to find Lori gone. In true Christopherian fashion, there were no good-byes. She left a letter, addressed jointly to him and his parents.

  “What the letter said, essentially, was thanks for the hospitality and good-bye forever,” Norman said. “No hint of where she was going or why. Of course I knew why. My mother and father didn’t. They were shocked by her bad manners. For a minute or two what she had done turned Lori back into a German for them. Then they remembered who she was and what she had done.”

  Travel in those days, especially in the Middle East, was no simple matter. The British still controlled Palestine and its frontiers. They were already nervous about the work of Yeho Stern and other Zionist activists—the smuggling of European Jews into Palestine, terrorist incidents designed to frighten the British out of the country. As far as Norman knew, Lori still had no papers. In 1945 the chances of a German national, no matter how heroically anti-Nazi, moving freely across borders were close to zero. Unless she had help. Fortunately Norman was in a good position to ask the right person about this. As first light broke, he woke up his Uncle Yeho, pounding on the door of his room in the Old City. This was risky business.

  “Yeho was not happy to see me,” Norman said. “He came to the door with a big revolver in his hand. At the time, of course, he was considered the most dangerous terrorist in Palestine. But when I explained, he was sympathetic. He had the facts at his fingertips, of course.”

  According to Yeho, Lori had acquired a Red Cross passport identifying her as a displaced Czech. She had left for Haifa to board a Lebanese freighter, the Amin Gulgee, that was bound for the Persian Gulf. Norman arrived that same morning, an hour before the ship sailed, and bought deck passage to the last port of call.

  “Lori and I met on the deck as soon as the ship was beyond the twenty-kilometer limit,” Norman said. “She was not happy to see me, but short of throwing me overboard there wasn’t much she could do about my presence. She must have known that Yeho had a hand in the situation, just as I suspected that she owed her Red Cross papers and who knew what else to him.”

  The Amin Gulgee was not built for speed or comfort, but the weather was cool by the standards of the region, and the long wallowing sun-scorched passage through the Red Sea and around the Arabian peninsula was pleasant enough. There was no possibility of lovemaking and very little opportunity for conversation. Lori shared a cabin with ten other women. The deck where Norman slept teemed with seamen and passengers day and night.

  They disembarked at Bandar-e ‘Abbas, the first port of call in Iran. The journey had taken more than a month.

  “The British were thin on the ground in that part of Persia and anyway I had a British passport,” Norman said. “So after paying bribes we went ashore without difficulty. However, this was Balochistan. A woman could not travel alone. Lori agreed that we would pose as man and wife. She had acquired a chador aboard ship and she put this on. I look enough like a generic Semite to pass for an Arab or even a Baloch.”

  “You spoke the local languages?” I asked.

  “Enough Palestinian Arabic to be understood by other people who didn’t speak it very well,” he said. “Lori just kept mute inside the chador, as any Muslim woman would. Everyone assumed we were what we said we were.”

  Then as now there were no railroads and virtually no roads in those parts. Air travel was far in the future. Norman and Lori took an ancient bus to Kerman, a journey of about two hundred miles as the crow flies.

  “We traveled as the worm wiggles, assuming a worm could live in that dehydrated wilderness,” Norman said. “Half the time there was no road. Everyone would get out and push. The bus stopped at dark and we slept inside it until sunrise, when the starter would grind and wake us up. This was always a moment of suspense while the ancient diesel engine made up its mind to fire up. It took five days to get to Kerman, but when we got there we were welcomed, naturally, by a friend of Yeho’s.”

  It was Lori who had the man’s name and address and the spoken phrase in Hebrew that told him that she was under Yeho’s protection.

  “This fellow, Ibrahim by name, was in the caravansary business,” Norman said. “His inn was a hollow square made of tin sheets that buckled and boomed in the wind. Inside the square was a courtyard with a well. Dozens of camels were hobbled in this space. Swarms of huge black flies fed on their manure. It was stark, I tell you—not a pane of glass or a screen in the place. Sun beating down on a metal roof, the flies and the stench and dust drifting into the room on a delightful desert breeze that was the temperature of blood. Lori swathed in that chador.”

  Until they saw the camels and the ruffians who owned them, Norman and Lori intended to join a caravan headed eastward toward Afghanistan. This was Lori’s plan, or as much of it as she cared to reveal.

  “Ibrahim was horrified,” Norman said. “‘They already know you are not Muslims,’ he said in Hebrew, so that Lori would not understand. ‘These people are primitive. They will kill you on the second night and take the woman. They will pass her around, make a slave of her and beat her, and when she w
ears out they will leave her naked in the desert to die.’”

  Norman was convinced. He knew savages when he saw them, and so did Lori. But she still wanted to travel by caravan.

  “She simply had no fear,” Norman said. “It wasn’t that she wanted to die, but danger just didn’t matter to her. This would have been strange in a man. In a woman it was uncanny. It was enough to make you wonder if a fortuneteller had described some other fate to her and, out of character as it seemed, she believed what the cards had told her.”

  Norman feared that he would wake up one morning and find her gone again. Ibrahim forestalled this by providing alternative transportation before night fell on the day he delivered his warning.

  “Who knows where he found it, but Ibrahim found us an old British truck,” Norman said. “Prewar vintage, but it ran.”

  Ibrahim dealt in firearms as in many other things, and from him Norman and Lori bought two old but serviceable English sporting rifles, one equipped with a scope, and five hundred rounds of ammunition. Also water and spare gasoline in goatskins, a small tent with carpets in which, they soon discovered, a metropolis of fleas dwelt, and three sheep, a ewe to be milked and two wethers to be killed and eaten. All this did not come cheap— Ibrahim was a businessman, after all—but Lori paid for it with an open hand.

  “Money seemed to be as irrelevant to her as caution, as though it was something that she wasn’t going to need much longer,” Norman said.

  In the bazaar in Kerman, Norman bought men’s clothes for both of them. Lori wore her chador until they were well out of town, but then ordered Norman to stop the vehicle and went behind some rocks. She came back as a slender youth in pantaloons and baggy caftan, her bobbed hair concealed beneath a turban that she somehow knew how to wind. She no longer moved like a woman or even like a European, but like the fellaheen she had evidently been studying aboard the Amin Gulgee and ashore in Balochistan. On the ship and the journey from the sea to Kermin she acquired a deep tan, and though she was more golden-skinned than most Balochi, in addition to being gray-eyed, she might—with a cloth across her face—pass for a boy whose mother had spent a night with an Englishman or a blue-eyed Afghan.