by Ken Follett
Suza laughed. She had a sudden vision of Dickstein in a steamy bathroom, reaching down and effortlessly lifting her out of a hot bath full of soap bubbles. In the vision she was not a child but a grown woman with wet breasts and foam between her thighs, and his hands were strong and sure as he drew her against his chest. Then the kitchen door opened and her father came in, and the dream vanished, leaving only a sense of intrigue and a trace of guilt.
Nat Dickstein thought Professor Ashford had aged well. He was now bald except for a monkish fringe of white hair. He had put on a little weight and his movements were slower, but he still had the spark of intellectual curiosity in his eyes.
Suza said, "A surprise guest, Daddy."
Ashford looked at him and, without hesitation, said, "Young Dickstein! Well, I'm blessed! My dear fellow."
Dickstein shook his hand. The grip was firm. "How are you, professor?"
"In the pink, dear boy, especially when my daughter's here to look after me. You remember Suza?"
"We've spent the morning reminiscing," Dickstein said.
"I see she's put you in an apron already. That's fast, even for her. I've told her she'll never get a husband this way. Take it off, dear boy, and come and have a drink."
With a rueful grin at Suza, Dickstein did as he was told and followed Ashford into the drawing room.
"Sherry?" Ashford asked.
"Thank you, a small one." Dickstein suddenly remembered he was here for a purpose. He had to get information out of Ashford without the old man realizing it. He had been, as it were, off-duty, for a couple of hours, and now he had to turn his mind back to work. But softly, softly, he thought.
Ashford handed him a small glass of pale sherry. "Now tell me, what have you been up to all these years?"
Dickstein sipped the sherry. It was very dry, the way they liked it at Oxford. He told the professor the story he had given to Hassan and to Suza, about finding export markets for Israeli wine. Ashford asked informed questions. Were young people leaving the kibbutzim for the cities? Had time and prosperity eroded the communalist ideas of the kibbutzniks? Did European Jews mix and intermarry with African and Levantine Jews? Dickstein's answers were yes, no, and not much. Ashford courteously avoided the question of their opposing views on the political morality of Israel, but nevertheless there was, underlying his detached inquiries about Israeli problems, a detectable trace of eagerness for bad news.
Suza called them to the kitchen for lunch before Dickstein had an opportunity to ask his own questions. Her French sandwiches were vast and delicious. She had opened a bottle of red wine to go with them. Dickstein could see why Ashford had put on weight.
Over coffee Dickstein said, "I ran into a contemporary of mine a couple of weeks ago--in Luxembourg, of all places."
Ashford said, "Yasif Hassan?"
"How did you know?"
"We've kept in touch. I know he lives in Luxembourg."
"Have you seen him much?" Dickstein asked, thinking: Softly, softly.
"Several times, over the years." Ashford paused. "It needs to be said, Dickstein, that the wars which have given you everything took everything away from him. His family lost all their money and went into a refugee camp. He's understandably bitter about Israel."
Dickstein nodded. He was now almost certain that Hassan was in the game. "I had very little time with him--I was on my way to catch a plane. How is he otherwise?"
Ashford frowned. "I find him a bit . . . distrait," he finished, unable to find the right English word. "Sudden errands he has to run, canceled appointments, odd phone calls at all times, mysterious absences. Perhaps it's the behavior of a dispossessed aristocrat."
"Perhaps," Dickstein said. In fact it was the typical behavior of an agent, and he was now one hundred percent sure that the meeting with Hassan had blown him. He said, "Do you see anyone else from my year?"
"Only old Toby. He's on the Conservative Front Bench now."
"Perfect!" Dickstein said delightedly. "He always did talk like an Opposition spokesman--pompous and defensive at the same time. I'm glad he's found his niche."
Suza said, "More coffee, Nat?"
"No, thank you." He stood up. "I'll help you clear away, then I must get back to London. I'm so glad I dropped in on you."
"Daddy will clear up," Suza said. She grinned. "We have an agreement."
"I'm afraid it is so," Ashford confessed. "She won't be anybody's drudge, least of all mine." The remark surprised Dickstein because it was so obviously untrue. Perhaps Suza didn't wait on him hand and foot, but she seemed to look after him the way a working wife would.
"I'll walk into town with you," Suza said. "Let me get my coat."
Ashford shook Dickstein's hand. "A real pleasure to see you, dear boy, a real pleasure."
Suza came back wearing a velvet jacket. Ashford saw them to the door and waved, smiling.
As they walked along the street Dickstein talked just to have an excuse to keep looking at her. The jacket matched her black velvet trousers, and she wore a loose cream-colored shirt that looked like silk. Like her mother, she knew how to dress to make the most of her shining dark hair and perfect tan skin. Dickstein gave her his arm, feeling rather old-fashioned, just to have her touching him. There was no doubt that she had the same physical magnetism as her mother: there was that something about her which filled men with the desire to possess her, a desire not so much like lust as greed; the need to own such a beautiful object, so that it would never be taken away. Dickstein was old enough now to know how false such desires were, and to know that Eila Ashford would not have made him happy. But the daughter seemed to have something the mother had lacked, and that was warmth. Dickstein was sorry he would never see Suza again. Given time, he might . . .
Well. It was not to be.
When they reached the station he asked her, "Do you ever go to London?"
"Of course," she said. "I'm going tomorrow."
"What for?"
"To have dinner with you," she said.
When Suza's mother died, her father was wonderful.
She was eleven years of age: old enough to understand death, but too young to cope with it. Daddy had been calm and comforting. He had known when to leave her to weep alone and when to make her dress up and go out to lunch. Quite unembarrassed, he had talked to her about menstruation and gone with her cheerfully to buy new brassieres. He gave her a new role in life: she became the woman of the house, giving instructions to the cleaner, writing the laundry list, handing out sherry on Sunday mornings. At the age of fourteen she was in charge of the household finances. She took care of her father better than Eila ever had. She would throw away worn shirts and replace them with identical new ones without daddy ever knowing. She learned that it was possible to be alive and secure and loved even without a mother.
Daddy gave her a role, just as he had her mother; and, like her mother, she had rebelled against the role while continuing to play it.
He wanted her to stay at Oxford, to be first an undergraduate, then a graduate student, then a teacher. It would have meant that she was always around to take care of him. She said she was not smart enough, with an uneasy feeling that this was an excuse for something else, and took a job that obliged her to be away from home and unable to look after Daddy for weeks at a time. High in the air and thousands of miles from Oxford, she served drinks and meals to middle-aged men, and wondered if she really had changed anything.
Walking home from the railway station, she thought about the groove she was in and whether she would ever get out of it.
She was at the end of a love affair which, like the rest of her life, had wearily followed a familiar pattern. Julian was in his late thirties, a philosophy lecturer specializing in the pre-Socratic Greeks: brilliant, dedicated and helpless. He took drugs for everything--cannabis to make love, amphetamine to work, Mogadon to sleep. He was divorced, without children. At first she had found him interesting, charming and sexy. When they were in bed he liked her to get on top.
He took her to fringe theaters in London and bizarre student parties. But it all wore off: she realized that he wasn't really very interested in sex, that he took her out because she looked good on his arm, that he liked her company just because she was so impressed by his intellect. One day she found herself ironing his clothes while he took a tutorial; and then it was as good as over.
Sometimes she went to bed with men her own age or younger, mostly because she was consumed with lust for their bodies. She was usually disappointed and they all bored her eventually.
She was already regretting the impulse which had led her to make a date with Nat Dickstein. He was depressingly true to type: a generation older than she and patently in need of care and attention. Worst of all, he had been in love with her mother. At first sight he was a father-figure like all the rest.
But he was different in some ways, she told herself. He was a farmer, not an academic--he would probably be the least well-read person she had ever dated. He had gone to Palestine instead of sitting in Oxford coffee shops talking about it. He could pick up one end of the freezer with his right hand. In the time they had spent together he had more than once surprised her by not conforming to her expectations.
Maybe Nat Dickstein will break the pattern, she thought.
And maybe I'm kidding myself, again.
Nat Dickstein called the Israeli Embassy from a phone booth at Paddington Station. When he got through he asked for the Commercial Credit Office. There was no such department: this was a code for the Mossad message center. He was answered by a young man with a Hebrew accent. This pleased Dickstein, for it was good to know there were people for whom Hebrew was a native tongue and not a dead language. He knew the conversation would automatically be tape-recorded, so he went straight into his message: "Rush to Bill. Sale jeopardized by presence of opposition team. Henry." He hung up without waiting for an acknowledgment.
He walked to his hotel from the station, thinking about Suza Ashford. He was to meet her at Paddington tomorrow evening. She would spend the night at the flat of a friend. Dickstein did not really know where to begin--he could not remember ever taking a woman out to dinner just for pleasure. As a teenager he had been too poor; after the war he had been too nervous and awkward; as he grew older he somehow never got into the habit. There had been dinners with colleagues, of course, and with kibbutzniks after shopping expeditions in Nazareth; but to take a woman, just the two of you, for nothing more than the pleasure of each other's company . . .
What did you do? You were supposed to pick her up in your car, wearing your dinner jacket, and give her a box of chocolates tied with a big ribbon. Dickstein was meeting Suza at the train station, and he had neither car nor dinner jacket. Where would he take her? He did not know any posh restaurants in Israel, let alone England.
Walking alone through Hyde Park, he smiled broadly. This was a laughable situation for a man of forty-three to be in. She knew he was no sophisticate, and obviously she did not care, for she had invited herself to dinner. She would also know the restaurants and what to order. It was hardly a matter of life and death. Whatever happened, he was going to enjoy it.
There was now a hiatus in his work. Having discovered that he was blown, he could do nothing until he had talked to Pierre Borg and Borg had decided whether or not to abort. That evening he went to see a French film called Un Homme et Une Femme. It was a simple love story, beautifully told, with an insistent Latin-American tune on the soundtrack. He left before the movie was halfway through, because the story made him want to cry; but the tune ran through his mind all night.
In the morning he went to a phone booth in the street near his hotel and phoned the Embassy again. When he got through to the message center he said, "This is Henry. Any reply?"
The voice said, "Go to ninety-three thousand and confer tomorrow."
Dickstein said, "Reply: conference agenda at airport information."
Pierre Borg would be flying in at nine-thirty tomorrow.
The four men sat in the car with the patience of spies, silent and watchful, as the day darkened.
Pyotr Tyrin was at the wheel, a stocky middle-aged man in a raincoat, drumming his fingernails on the dashboard, making a noise like pigeons' feet on a roof. Yasif Hassan sat beside him. David Rostov and Nik Bunin were in the back.
Nik had found the delivery man on the third day, the day he spent watching the Jean-Monnet building on the Kirchberg. He had reported a positive identification. "He doesn't look quite so much of a nancy-boy in his office suit, but I'm quite sure it's him. I should say he must work here."
"I should have guessed," Rostov had said. "If Dickstein is after secrets his informants won't be from the airport or the Alfa Hotel. I should have sent Nik to Euratom first."
He was addressing Pyotr Tyrin, but Hassan heard and said, "You can't think of everything."
"Yes, I can," Rostov told him.
He had instructed Hassan to get hold of a large dark car. The American Buick they now sat in was a little conspicuous, but it was black and roomy. Nik had followed the Euratom man home, and now the four spies waited in the cobbled street close to the old terraced house.
Rostov hated this cloak-and-dagger stuff. It was so old-fashioned. It belonged to the Twenties and Thirties, to places like Vienna and Istanbul and Beirut, not to western Europe in 1968. It was just dangerous to snatch a civilian off the street, bundle him into a car, and beat him until he gave you information. You might be seen by passersby who were not afraid to go to the police and tell what they had observed. Rostov liked things to be straightforward and clear-cut and predictable, and he preferred to use his brains rather than his fists. But this delivery man had gained in importance with each day that Dickstein failed to surface. Rostov had to know what he had delivered to Dickstein, and he had to know today.
Pyotr Tyrin said, "I wish he would come out."
"We're in no hurry," Rostov said. It was not true, but he did not want the team to get edgy and impatient and make mistakes. To relieve the tension he continued speaking. "Dickstein did this, of course. He did what we've done and what we're doing. He watched the Jean-Monnet building, he followed this man home, and he waited here in the street. The man came out and went to the homosexual club, and then Dickstein knew the man's weakness and used it to turn him into an informant."
Nik said, "He hasn't been at the club the past two nights."
Rostov said, "He's discovered that everything has its price, especially love."
"Love?" Nik said with scorn in his voice.
Rostov did not reply.
The darkness thickened and the street lights came on. The air coming through the open car window tasted faintly damp: Rostov saw a swirl or two of mist around the lights. The vapor came from the river. A fog would be too much to hope for in June.
Tyrin said, "What's this."
A fair-haired man in a double-breasted jacket was walking briskly along the street toward them.
"Quiet, now," Rostov said.
The man stopped at the house they were watching. He rang a doorbell.
Hassan put a hand on the door handle.
Rostov hissed: "Not yet."
A net curtain was briefly drawn aside in the attic window.
The fair-haired man waited, tapping his foot.
Hassan said, "The lover, perhaps?"
"For God's sake shut up," Rostov told him.
After a minute the front door opened and the fair-haired man stepped inside. Rostov got a glimpse of the person who had opened up: it was the delivery man. The door closed and their chance was gone.
"Too quick," Rostov said. "Damn it."
Tyrin began to drum his fingers again, and Nik scratched himself. Hassan gave an exasperated sigh, as if he had known all along that it was foolish to wait. Rostov decided that it was time to bring him down a peg or two.
Nothing happened for an hour.
Tyrin said, "They're spending an evening indoors."
"If they've had a brush with Dickstein they
're probably afraid to go out at night," Rostov said.
Nik asked, "Do we go in?"
"There's a problem," Rostov answered. "From the window they can see who's at the door. I guess they won't open up for strangers."
"The lover might stay the night," Tyrin said.
"Quite."
Nik said, "We'll just have to bust in."
Rostov ignored him. Nik always wanted to bust in, but he would not start any rough stuff until he was told to. Rostov was thinking that they might now have to snatch two people, which was more tricky and more dangerous. "Have we got any firearms?" he said.
Tyrin opened the glove box in front of him and drew out a pistol.
"Good," Rostov said. "So long as you don't fire it."
"It's not loaded," Tyrin said. He stuffed the gun into his raincoat pocket.
Hassan said, "If the lover stays the night do we take them in the morning?"
"Certainly not," Rostov said. "We can't do this sort of thing in broad daylight."
"What, then?"
"I haven't decided."
He thought about it until midnight, and then the problem solved itself.
Rostov was watching the doorway through half-closed eyes. He saw the first movement of the door as it began to open. He said: "Now."
Nik was first out of the car. Tyrin was next. Hassan took a moment to realize what was happening, then he followed suit.
The two men were saying goodnight, the younger one on the pavement, the older just inside the door wearing a robe. The older one, the delivery man, reached out and gave his lover's arm a farewell squeeze. They both looked up, alarmed, as Nik and Tyrin burst out of the car and came at them.
"Don't move, be silent," Tyrin said softly in French, showing them the gun.
Rostov noticed that Nik's sound tactical instinct had led him to stand beside and slightly behind the younger man.
The older one said, "Oh, my God, no, no more please."
"Get in the car," Tyrin said.
The younger man said, "Why can't you fuckers leave us alone?"
Watching and listening from the back seat of the car, Rostov thought: This is the moment they decide whether to come quietly or make trouble. He glanced quickly up and down the darkened street. It was empty.
