by Adam Hall
Question: what would James Burdick not be prepared to do?
'It's amusing,' I nodded to de Jong.
'One thing I guarantee.' He leaned towards me and the beads of sweat on his pink face gleamed in the light of the oil lamp. 'It comes from a woman. The men are too proud of themselves!'
I assumed that Pat Burdick was the go-between. In most cases of hostage-and-demand the captor handles the communications but in cases where he knows his business he will leave the hostage to make the appeal directly, usually over a telephone or sometimes on tape. This is logical because the demands are usually made to a man-almost always the victim's father — and if he receives threats from another man his male aggressiveness comes into play and he considers himself challenged and will sometimes try to brave it out and urge the police to go in fighting on his behalf.
I had sufficient respect for Satynovich Zade to believe he was handling this operation professionally.
Daddy, they say I won't ever see you again.
In my trade we don't take things personally or if you want to put it another way we take things about as personally as a pilot does when he drops his bombs. But when I killed Zade it would be with a sense of satisfaction.
'Take it. I give you the damned thing!' said de Jong, He threw up his pink hands, laughing generously.
Shadia turned her head a degree to look at him, then looked at me again. It occurred to me that the cell had been making enquiries into the guests here: there were probably fifteen or twenty in the hotel. Their first question to the staff would concern the time of arrival here of each guest. I had arrived on the same day as Zade and there'd been nothing I could do about that.
'Thank you. It's a charming souvenir.'
I put the thing into my pocket to please him.
There were voices upstairs suddenly, and the men near the bar stopped talking and looked at the ceiling. For a moment the whole dining-room was quiet, then people began talking again. In five minutes Zade and Kuznetski came down again with the girl and crossed over to their table. She had been crying, but was making an effort to appear normal, and I don't think anyone would have noticed it unless they'd been watching her closely.
Flat white light came against the windows and a few people turned their heads and looked away again. In a moment distant thunder rolled.
'Have you been here when there is a storm?' asked de Jong.
'Yes.'
He wiped his pink face dry.
'I tell you something. This is the most poisonous climate in the entire world, it has the most poisonous insects and the most poisonous reptiles. But people come here. I come, and you come.' He drained his glass. 'This place has something, yes?'
'Yes. Something for everyone,'
The rain roared incessantly on the roof.
Light flared white in the room through the slats in the shutters, silvering her body for an instant. She said something but it was lost in the drumming of the thunder overhead. The building shook.
Then there was the warm light of the oil lamp again, glowing on her tawny skin and the mass1 of body hair as she writhed on the bed with her long legs, reminding me in colouring of a tiger lily because she was heavily freckled, reminding me too of Marianne, of the Villa Madeleine, because they both wanted the light on, and everything to be slow.
Shadia said something again, speaking in Polish with the Varsovie accent and laughing a little, perhaps afraid of the storm. She wanted me to put it here, and here, as she moved restlessly on the bed for me, her sweat slipping.
'I like it like this,' she said, 'with the storm.'
She was afraid of it. And probably of nothing else.
I remembered her now.
When Fogel had fired at point-blank range into the faces of the two Deuxieme Bureau men in Paris last year there'd been a woman involved, a native of Poland who had joined the new extremist group being formed in Athens. She had trained as usual in the Palestinian guerilla camps, in this case with the Japanese Red Army units. The only place in Europe where she refused to operate was Germany, and she would have nothing to do with the Baader-Meinhof group.
She was typical: restless the whole time and never stopping to enjoy a new sensation before we went on to the next. Nothing could satisfy her because she couldn't wait, couldn't give it time. I'd known these women before: they're afraid of letting go, and in the end the male streak in them sends them out into the streets with grenades to prove their point that they can't love and so they're going to hate.
She spoke in English sometimes against the drumming of the storm.
'Oh my God, darling.'
Nothing that meant anything.
Fierce light and almost immediate vibration as the thunder banged.
These were the more dangerous moments: when I couldn't hear anything but the storm. At these moments I watched the door.
She had been wandering in the courtyard, around midnight, knowing I would see her because I had to pass that way to my room. Van de Jong had been trying to talk me into becoming a part-time representative in his mail order business because I travelled quite a lot and seemed interested; it was excellent cover because his voice carried, and we had talked till twelve.
'Now,' she said in Polish, 'this time now.'
But of course it didn't work.
The force of the rain rattled the tiles overhead. The hotel was perfectly square, its four sides surrounding the courtyard; and the Spanish tiles sloped at a low angle, sending the flood of water into the guttering and forming cascades through the gaps where it had broken.
'Slowly,' she said, out of breath.
But her long hands were still restless and unsatisfied. Later she'd find more release in the orgasmic flash of a grenade.
The thunder came and I watched the door again.
Because this was a Venus trap.
'Oh darling,' she said in English, 'oh my God.'
The door was locked but there wasn't a bolt.
They might have a key but it wasn't material: they would need approximately the same amount of time to open the door with a key as to smash it inwards. I had estimated from three to four seconds for them to reach me from the passage outside, including the opening of the door. That was long enough but only if I stayed alert.
Her thighs twisted again under me.
'Where was this?' I asked her.
In the glow from the oil lamp the tattooed number showed blue on her skin.
'Auschwitz,' she said.
'You were only a child.'
'Yes. Four years old.'
Light flashed and this time she cried out and I held her close so that she'd feel less afraid, my feelings ambivalent and impossible to relate: she was a female of the species and we were making what kind of love we were able and I wanted to protect her from the storm, but I would put the chances at fifty-fifty that she'd brought me in here to get me killed.
'Oh my God, darling.'
She seemed to think this was an English idiom.
In the tropical heat of the room she smelled fresh and magnificent, the animal scents pouring from her body. If it weren't for this I would have been useless to her because the libido was having to compete with the forebrain and the forebrain was concerned with a possible threat to life. I didn't think she would have brought an unknown male to her room because she was bored with the members of the Kobra cell or because they were bored with her frustrated carnality, driving her to take anyone available. Nymphomania is a common mechanism of women terrorists, often expressed in lesbianism but not always; and Shadia could simply be on a sex trip tonight, trying to relieve her tension: the cell was in touch with the Secretary of Defense and some kind of rendezvous might have been agreed and the most dangerous phase in this situation is the rendezvous. James Burdick could draft in a regiment of marksmen to the point of exchange and they knew that.
But I preferred to assume this was a Venus trap.
They can work both ways.
'How did you bruise your shoulder like this?'
'In a car smash,' I said.
'Where?'
'London.'
Normally the trap is one way because the woman — or sometimes the boy — doesn't know anything classified: the object is simply entrapment. But Shadia was more than the routine bait: she was informed and had access to almost limitless intelligence within the Kobra cell, or they wouldn't have needed her at the rendezvous.
She lay quiet, jerking a little when the next flash came, then lying still again. The rain was a steady roaring: we couldn't see it because of the shutters; it could have been anything, a thousand drummers.
'Are you here for a story?' she asked me, close to my ear.
'What sort of story?'
'I mean are you a journalist?'
She spoke in Polish all the time now.
'No. I'm a shipping agent.'
'Of course. They told me.'
Three seconds.
'Who did?'
But don't sound too interested because you don't mind people asking questions about you.
'The manager.'
Pass off.
'He's a very good chap-he's given me a lot of advice about the shipping situation. Apparently the Booth Line's got it pretty well sewn up.'
'He is a nice man, yes. With that wife-have you seen her?'
'Yes.'
'Oh God, what a face!' She paused. 'Maybe if I asked him, he might — ' she used her fingers on me and the bed shook to her low laughter.
Flash.
The thunder took a little time now. The sound of the rain seemed less.
I watched the door.
'I thought you were a journalist,' she said.
There wouldn't be any specific action I could take because they wouldn't come singly but in the three to four seconds available I could reach the knife and swing her in front of me, the point at her throat.
She didn't know I'd seen the knife. It was in the top drawer and I'd left the drawer an inch open because the handle wasn't easy to pull. She had been a few minutes in the bathroom, earlier; it was only a paper knife but adequate.
'Why should I be?' (Why should I be a journalist?)
She let it go but came back to it later and took it the whole way, letting out information and feeling it for the response, then letting some more out, like a thin-drawn line: the American girl was 'quite famous' and she and her friends were 'looking after her' and didn't want any journalists snooping around, so forth.
For ten or twelve minutes she worked within the precise confines of the Kobra cover released to the press and made only two small mistakes: she didn't ask me how I'd arrived in Lagofondo and invite a slip; and she didn't ask me if I'd booked ahead at this hotel. She could have passed off both questions in a loose ad lib context: they'd had trouble getting seats on the Panair plane; and the hotel had tried to give them double rooms because there were no singles left; or any one of a dozen variations.
I filled in as necessary: I thought they were a linguist group because I'd overheard some of their conversation in the dining-room (because that was why they'd taken their meals there: to be overheard); it would be a pleasure to meet the quite famous young American girl (appropriate interest theme); my firm had an option on a small-boat charter operation in Bermuda and I might be called out there at any time (gratuitous but useful as projected cover: I would have, to leave here when Kobra did, and might do it overtly at least as far as the first airport in transit.) In the absence of data I was assuming two things and both could be wrong and one could be fatal if wrong: that the exchange of the hostage wouldn't take place in Brazil, and that she hadn't brought me here to pin me for killing but to tap me for information.
'It's going away,' she said, 'the storm.'
'Yes.'
She moved again, throwing her long hard body across mine and covering my face with her hair, talking incessantly in her own tongue, goading herself to the edge of frenzy in the heat of the night and lying still, in the end, lying still with the tears streaming in the glow of the lamp. 'I hate you,' she said.
'I know.'
'Do you know why?'
'Yes. The thing is,' I said, 'you won't let yourself.'
Then the phone began ringing.
The moon was behind cloud and it was almost totally dark and I didn't see the thing until it sprang up with a screech right in front of me with one of its wings hitting my face as it took off.
I lay perfectly still for ten minutes, listening for any sounds from below. Faint voices rose but then- tone hadn't changed: they assumed it was normal for a buzzard to screech in the night. The bloody things were black and they roosted on the tiles and I'd known that and I should have been prepared for them and I wasn't I began moving again, testing each tile before I put my weight on it Some of them made slight cracking sounds as my movement displaced them, and I stopped every time it happened.
The doctor hadn't arrived yet Within twenty minutes I judged I was above the room where they were talking. I couldn't tell whether they were in Pat Burdick's room but assumed they were not; I couldn't hear Shadia's voice and further assumed she was in the girl's room, keeping her company until the doctor came. When the phone had rung she'd got off the bed and taken it a little distance so that I couldn't hear the caller's voice. In a few seconds she'd hung up and got her bath robe and left me without saying anything.
It had been too dangerous to try getting close to the Kobra quarters because the corridors were open to the courtyard and without visual cover so I phoned a complaint through to the desk about the noise people were making and the man at the switchboard said the little Americana was ill with a fever and the medico had been summoned from Manaus.
I moved again on the tiles, lying on one side and resting my ear on the baked clay surface. The voices were no louder because there was too much space between the overlapping curves; but I could hear occasional words, some in Polish and a few in poor English with a Spanish accent: Ramirez. From what I'd seen of the Kobra cell, Zade was the leader and Kuznetski his second in command. Ramirez was specifically a technician, as an expert on explosives; Ventura appeared to be the least disciplined member of the group and I'd heard Zade cut him short once or twice in the dining-room when he'd begun straying from the conversational subjects appropriate to their cover. Sassine talked very little but I didn't have the impression that he was intimidated by either Zade or the group as a whole: I put him down as a slow-burn operator who preferred listening and assessing what was said. Shadia had given nothing useful away when I'd been in her room but she had the reputation of being a ruthless and dedicated activist and a formidable adjunct to any task force; I suspected she had joined the group on account of some sexual involvement, probably with Zade.
I turned and lay on my back, cupping my hands backwards in front of my ears and resting my elbows. By 02:13 I'd picked up and put together a dozen phrases, mostly in Polish and probably spoken by Zade and Kuznetski; and it was clear that some kind of crisis had arisen and the inference was that it concerned Pat Burdick's fever.
At 02:13 a Volkswagen arrived outside the front of the hotel and I heard the doctor being shown to the room below the part of the roof where I was lying. He began speaking in Portuguese but had to switch to English when they didn't understand.
Various routine questions, some of which I heard distinctly because he spoke slowly for them: how long had the young lady been in Brazil, were there any symptoms of fever, aching of the bones, vomiting, before arriving in this country, so forth.
He stayed for twenty-five minutes and soon after he left I could hear Zade's voice speaking into a telephone: he became angry and lapsed once or twice into Polish; then I thought I could hear the fainter voice of the Burdick girl, answering rapid questions. From a sharp word here and there in Polish I understood that a call had been made, or was to be made, to Washington DC. By the tone of the voices there was some degree of dissension about this.
I went on listening.
Above me the stars were enormous in a clea
ring sky, and to the south the moon drifted in layers of light cloud, sending pale illumination along the the rooftops. Not far to my left I could make out a black squat form jutting upwards: this was the habitual roosting place of the buzzard and it was prepared to accept my presence so long as I didn't go too close again.
More voices from below, several together: a heated discussion concerning 'schedules', 'hospital', 'charter service', 'nursing', and various other less informative words. Manaus was mentioned two or three times, and Washington once.
Then a new phase began: the voices almost died away and there were the muffled bangs of doors and the click of catches. A tap was run for a few seconds and then shut off. A cistern was flushed. The general impression was of haste and I began crawling across the humped tiles to the far corner, where the vines ran from the roof to the communal balcony below.
There was no direct access to either of the windows of my room and I had to walk along a dozen yards of the exposed balcony but they were too busy over there to mount any kind of lookout. The hair was still intact across the join of the door and the post, and I went inside with only a token degree of caution because no one could have got in through either window without my hearing them from the roof. I closed the door but left it unlocked because I believed the Kobra cell was professional, or at least composed of professional individuals, and there were some gaps in their thinking that worried me.
There were still a few things in the suitcase I'd bought in Belem and I distributed them on the chair and the dressing table and left the case on the stand with the lid open, because they'd sent Shadia to check me out and that meant I was suspect and if I were suspect they ought not to leave the hotel without making sure where I was. The bed had only a sheet on it but I rolled up one of the Indian rugs and made a forty-five degree kink in it and put it under the sheet, bunching the pillow and pulling down the mosquito net to cover the bed.
This was routine and my movements were directed mostly by habit; reinforced by experience and training: to leave this room without attending to these details would be like driving a car through a surveillance zone without checking the mirror.
