Triple

Q: But you can guess.

  A: Bosch. (READING INDETERMINATE)

  Q: Or Krantz?

  A: Perhaps. (TRUE)

  Q: Krantz is a good man. Dependable. How's his wife?

  A: Very well, I--(scream)

  Q: His wife died in 1958. Why do you make me hurt you? What did Schulz do?

  A: Went sightseeing for two days, then disappeared into the desert in a gray Mercedes.

  Q: And you burglarized his apartment.

  A: Yes. (TRUE)

  Q: What did you learn?

  A: He is a scientist. (TRUE)

  Q: Anything else?

  A: American. (TRUE) That's all. (TRUE) Q: Who was your instructor in training?

  A: Ertl. (READING INDETERMINATE)

  Q: That wasn't his real name, though.

  A: I don't know. (FALSE) No! Not the button let me think it was just a minute I think somebody said his real name was Manner. (TRUE) Q: Oh, Manner. Shame. He's the old-fashioned type. He still believes you can train agents to resist interrogation. It's his fault you're suffering so much, you know. What about your colleagues? Who trained with you?

  A: I never knew their real names. (FALSE)

  Q: Didn't you?

  A: (scream)

  Q: Real names.

  A: Not all of them--

  Q: Tell me the ones you did know.

  A: (no reply)

  (scream)

  The prisoner fainted.

  (pause)

  Q: What is your name?

  A: Uh . . . Towfik. (scream)

  Q: What did you have for breakfast?

  A: Don't know.

  Q: What is twenty minus seven?

  A: Twenty-seven.

  Q: What did you tell Krantz about Professor Schulz?

  A: Sightseeing . . . Western Desert . . . surveillance aborted . . .

  Q: Who did you train with?

  A: (no reply)

  Q: Who did you train with?

  A: (scream)

  Q: Who did you train with?

  A: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death--

  Q: Who did you train with?

  A: (scream)

  The prisoner died.

  When Kawash asked for a meeting, Pierre Borg went. There was no discussion about times and places: Kawash sent a message giving the rendezvous, and Borg made sure to be there. Kawash was the best double agent Borg had ever had, and that was that.

  The head of the Mossad stood at one end of the northbound Bakerloo Line platform in Oxford Circus subway station, reading an advertisement for a course of lectures in Theosophy, waiting for Kawash. He had no idea why the Arab had chosen London for this meeting; no idea what he told his masters he was doing in the city; no idea, even, why Kawash was a traitor. But this man had helped the Israelis win two wars and avoid a third, and Borg needed him.

  Borg glanced along the platform, looking for a high brown head with a large, thin nose. He had an idea he knew what Kawash wanted to talk about. He hoped his idea was right.

  Borg was very worried about the Schulz affair. It had started out as a piece of routine surveillance, just the right kind of assignment for his newest, rawest agent in Cairo: a high-powered American physicist on vacation in Europe decides to take a trip to Egypt. The first warning sign came when Towfik lost Schulz. At that point Borg had stepped up activity on the project. A freelance journalist in Milan who occasionally made inquiries for German Intelligence had established that Schulz's air ticket to Cairo had been paid for by the wife of an Egyptian diplomat in Rome. Then the CIA had routinely passed to the Mossad a set of satellite photographs of the area around Qattara which seemed to show signs of construction work--and Borg had remembered that Schulz had been heading in the direction of Qattara when Towfik lost him.

  Something was going on, and he did not know what, and that worried him.

  He was always worried. If it was not the Egyptians, it was the Syrians; if it was not the Syrians it was the Fedayeen; if it was not his enemies it was his friends and the question of how long they would continue to be his friends. He had a worrying job. His mother had once said, "Job, nothing--you were born worrying, like your poor father--if you were a gardener you would worry about your job." She might have been right, but all the same, paranoia was the only rational frame of mind for a spymaster.

  Now Towfik had broken contact, and that was the most worrying sign of all.

  Maybe Kawash would have some answers.

  A train thundered in. Borg was not waiting for a train. He began to read the credits on a movie poster. Half the names were Jewish. Maybe I should have been a movie producer, he thought.

  The train pulled out, and a shadow fell over Borg. He looked up into the calm face of Kawash.

  The Arab said, "Thank you for coming." He always said that.

  Borg ignored it: he never knew how to respond to thanks. He said, "What's new?"

  "I had to pick up one of your youngsters in Cairo on Friday."

  "You had to?"

  "Military Intelligence were bodyguarding a VIP, and they spotted the kid tailing them. Military don't have operational personnel in the city, so they asked my department to pick him up. It was an official request."

  "God damn," Borg said feelingly. "What happened to him?"

  "I had to do it by the book," Kawash said. He looked very sad. "The boy was interrogated and killed. His name was Avram Ambache, but he worked as Towfik el-Masiri."

  Borg frowned. "He told you his real name?"

  "He's dead, Pierre."

  Borg shook his head irritably: Kawash always wanted to linger over personal aspects. "Why did he tell you his name?"

  "We're using the Russian equipment--the electric shock and the lie detector together. You're not training them to cope with it."

  Borg gave a short laugh. "If we told them about it, we'd never get any fucking recruits. What else did he give away?"

  "Nothing we didn't know. He would have, but I killed him first."

  "You killed him?"

  "I conducted the interrogation, in order to make sure he did not say anything important. All these interviews are taped now, and the transcripts filed. We're learning from the Russians." The sadness deepened in the brown eyes. "Why--would you prefer that I should have someone else kill your boys?"

  Borg stared at him, then looked away. Once again he had to steer the conversation away from the sentimental. "What did the boy discover about Schulz?"

  "An agent took the professor into the Western Desert."

  "Sure, but what for?"

  "I don't know."

  "You must know, you're in Egyptian Intelligence!" Borg controlled his irritation. Let the man do things at his own pace, he told himself; whatever information he's got, he'll tell.

  "I don't know what they're doing out there, because they've set up a special group to handle it," Kawash said. "My department isn't informed."

  "Any idea why?"

  The Arab shrugged. "I'd say they don't want the Russians to know about it. These days Moscow gets everything that goes through us."

  Borg let his disappointment show. "Is that all Towfik could manage?"

  Suddenly there was anger in the soft voice of the Arab. "The kid died for you," he said.

  "I'll thank him in heaven. Did he die in vain?"

  "He took this from Schulz's apartment." Kawash drew a hand from inside his coat and showed Borg a small, square box of blue plastic.

  Borg took the box. "How do you know where he got it?"

  "It has Schulz's fingerprints on it. And we arrested Towfik right after he broke into the apartment."

  Borg opened the box and fingered the light-proof envelope. It was unsealed. He took out the photographic negative.

  The Arab said, "We opened the envelope and developed the film. It's blank."

  With a deep sense of satisfaction, Borg reassembled the box and put it into his pocket. Now it all made sense; now he understood; now he knew what he had to do. A train came in. "You want to cat
ch this one?" he said.

  Kawash frowned slightly, nodded assent, and moved to the edge of the platform as the train stopped and the doors opened. He boarded, and stood just inside. He said, "I don't know what on earth the box is."

  Borg thought, You don't like me, but I think you're just great. He smiled thinly at the Arab as the doors of the subway train began to slide shut. "I do," he said.

  Chapter Two

  The American girl was quite taken with Nat Dickstein.

  They worked side by side in a dusty vineyard, weeding and hoeing, with a light breeze blowing over them from the Sea of Galilee. Dickstein had taken off his shirt and worked in shorts and sandals, with the contempt for the sun which only the city-born possess.

  He was a thin man, small-boned, with narrow shoulders, a shallow chest, and knobby elbows and knees. Karen would watch him when she stopped for a break--which she did often, although he never seemed to need a rest. Stringy muscles moved like knotted rope under his brown, scarred skin. She was a sensual woman, and she wanted to touch those scars with her fingers and ask him how he got them.

  Sometimes he would look up and catch her staring, and he would grin, unembarrassed, and carry on working. His face was regular and anonymous in repose. He had dark eyes behind cheap round spectacles of the kind which Karen's generation liked because John Lennon wore them. His hair was dark, too, and short: Karen would have liked him to grow it. When he grinned that lopsided grin, he looked younger; though at any time it was hard to say just how old he might be. He had the strength and energy of a young man, but she had seen the concentration-camp tattoo under his wristwatch, so he could not be much less than forty, she thought.

  He had arrived at the kibbutz shortly after Karen, in the summer of 1967. She had come, with her deodorants and her contraceptive pills, looking for a place where she could live out hippy ideals without getting stoned twenty-four hours a day. He had been brought here in an ambulance. She assumed he had been wounded in the Six-Day War, and the other kibbutzniks agreed, vaguely, that it was something like that.

  His welcome had been very different from hers. Karen's reception had been friendly but wary: in her philosophy they saw their own, with dangerous additions. Nat Dickstein returned like a long-lost son. They clustered around him, fed him soup and came away from his wounds with tears in their eyes.

  If Dickstein was their son, Esther was their mother. She was the oldest member of the kibbutz. Karen had said, "She looks like Golda Meir's mother," and one of the others had said, "I think she's Golda's father," and they all laughed affectionately. She used a walking stick, and stomped about the village giving unsolicited advice, most of it very wise. She had stood guard outside Dickstein's sickroom chasing away noisy children, waving her stick and threatening beatings which even the children knew would never be administered.

  Dickstein had recovered very quickly. Within a few days he was sitting out in the sun, peeling vegetables for the kitchen and telling vulgar jokes to the older children. Two weeks later he was working in the fields, and soon he was laboring harder than all but the youngest men.

  His past was vague, but Esther had told Karen the story of his arrival in Israel in 1948, during the War of Independence.

  Nineteen forty-eight was part of the recent past for Esther. She had been a young woman in London in the first two decades of the century, and had been an activist in half a dozen radical left-wing causes from suffragism to pacifism before emigrating to Palestine; but her memory went back further, to pogroms in Russia which she recalled vaguely in monstrous nightmare images. She had sat under a fig tree in the heat of the day, varnishing a chair she had made with her own gnarled hands, and talked about Dickstein like a clever but mischievous schoolboy.

  "There were eight or nine of them, some from the university, some working men from the East End. If they ever had any money, they'd spent it before they got to France. They hitched a ride on a truck to Paris, then jumped a freight train to Marseilles. From there, it seems, they walked most of the way to Italy. Then they stole a huge car, a German Army staff car, a Mercedes, and drove all the way to the toe of Italy." Esther's face was creased in smiles, and Karen thought: She would love to have been there with them.

  "Dickstein had been to Sicily in the war, and it seems he knew the Mafia there. They had all the guns left over from the war. Dickstein wanted guns for Israel, but he had no money. He persuaded the Sicilians to sell a boatload of submachine guns to an Arab purchaser, and then to tell the Jews where the pickup would take place. They knew what he was up to, and they loved it. The deal was done, the Sicilians got their money, and then Dickstein and his friend stole the boat with its cargo and sailed to Israel!"

  Karen had laughed aloud, there under the fig tree, and a grazing goat looked up at her balefully.

  "Wait," said Esther, "you haven't heard the end of it. Some of the university boys had done a bit of rowing, and one of the other lot was a docker, but that was all the experience they had of the sea, and here they were sailing a five-thousand-ton cargo vessel on their own. They figured out a little navigation from first principles: the ship had charts and a compass. Dickstein had looked up in a book how to start the ship, but he says the book did not tell how to stop it. So they steamed into Haifa, yelling and waving and throwing their hats into the air, just like it was a varsity rag--and ploughed straight into the dock.

  "They were forgiven instantly, of course--the guns were more precious than gold, literally. And that's when they started to call Dickstein 'The Pirate.' "

  He did not look much like a pirate, working in the vineyard in his baggy shorts and his spectacles, Karen thought. All the same, he was attractive. She wanted to seduce him, but she could not figure out how. He obviously liked her, and she had taken care to let him know she was available. But he never made a move. Perhaps he felt she was too young and innocent. Or maybe he was not interested in women.

  His voice broke into her thoughts. "I think we've finished."

  She looked at the sun: it was time to go. "You've done twice as much as me."

  "I'm used to the work. I've been here, on and off, for twenty years. The body gets into the habit."

  They walked back toward the village as the sky turned purple and yellow. Karen said, "What else do you do--when you're not here?"

  "Oh . . . poison wells, kidnap Christian children."

  Karen laughed.

  Dickstein said, "How does this life compare with California?"

  "This is a wonderful place," she told him. "I think there's a lot of work still to be done before the women are genuinely equal."

  "That seems to be the big topic at the moment."

  "You never have much to say about it."

  "Listen, I think you're right; but it's better for people to take their freedom rather than be given it."

  Karen said, "That sounds like a good excuse for doing nothing."

  Dickstein laughed.

  As they entered the village they passed a young man on a pony, carrying a rifle, on his way to patrol the borders of the settlement. Dickstein called out, "Be careful, Yisrael." The shelling from the Golan Heights had stopped, of course, and the children no longer had to sleep underground; but the kibbutz kept up the patrols. Dickstein had been one of those in favor of maintaining vigilance.

  "I'm going to read to Mottie," Dickstein said.

  "Can I come?"

  "Why not?" Dickstein looked at his watch. "We've just got time to wash. Come to my room in five minutes."

  They parted, and Karen went into the showers. A kibbutz was the best place to be an orphan, she thought as she took off her clothes. Mottie's parents were both dead--the father blown up in the attack on the Golan Heights during the last war, the mother killed a year earlier in a shoot-out with Fedayeen. Both had been close friends of Dickstein. It was a tragedy for the child, of course; but he still slept in the same bed, ate in the same room, and had almost one hundred other adults to love and care for him--he was not foisted onto unwilling aunts
or aging grandparents or, worst of all, an orphanage. And he had Dickstein.

  When she had washed off the dust Karen put on clean clothes and went to Dickstein's room. Mottie was already there, sitting on Dickstein's lap, sucking his thumb and listening to Treasure Island in Hebrew. Dickstein was the only person Karen had ever met who spoke Hebrew with a Cockney accent. His speech was even more strange now, because he was doing different voices for the characters in the story: a high-pitched boy's voice for Jim, a deep snarl for Long John Silver, and a half whisper for the mad Ben Gunn. Karen sat and watched the two of them in the yellow electric light, thinking how boyish Dickstein appeared, and how grown-up the child was.

  When the chapter was finished they took Mottie to his dormitory, kissed him goodnight, and went into the dining room. Karen thought: If we continue to go about together like this, everyone will think we're lovers already.

  They sat with Esther. After dinner she told them a story, and there was a young woman's twinkle in her eye. "When I first went to Jerusalem, they used to say that if you owned a feather pillow, you could buy a house."

  Dickstein willingly took the bait. "How was that?"

  "You could sell a good feather pillow for a pound. With that pound you could join a loan society, which entitled you to borrow ten pounds. Then you found a plot of land. The owner of the land would take ten pounds deposit and the rest in promissory notes. Now you were a landowner. You went to a builder and said, 'Build a house for yourself on this plot of land. All I want is a small flat for myself and my family.' "

  They all laughed. Dickstein looked toward the door. Karen followed his glance and saw a stranger, a stocky man in his forties with a coarse, fleshy face. Dickstein got up and went to him.

  Esther said to Karen, "Don't break your heart, child. That one is not made to be a husband."

  Karen looked at Esther, then back at the doorway. Dickstein had gone. A few moments later she heard the sound of a car starting up and driving away.

  Esther put her old hand on Karen's young one, and squeezed.

  Karen never saw Dickstein again.

  Nat Dickstein and Pierre Borg sat in the back seat of a big black Citroen. Borg's bodyguard was driving, with his machine pistol lying on the front seat beside him. They traveled through the darkness with nothing ahead but the cone of light from the headlamps. Nat Dickstein was afraid.

  He had never come to see himself the way others did, as a competent, indeed brilliant, agent who had proved his ability to survive just about anything. Later, when the game was on and he was living by his wits, grappling at close quarters with strategy and problems and personalities, there would be no room in his mind for fear; but now, when Borg was about to brief him, he had no plans to make, no forecasts to refine, no characters to assess. He knew only that he had to turn his back on peace and simple hard work, the land and the sunshine and caring for growing things; and that ahead of him there were terrible risks and great danger, lies and pain and bloodshed and, perhaps, his death. So he sat in the corner of the seat, his arms and legs crossed tightly, watching Borg's dimly lit face, while fear of the unknown knotted and writhed in his stomach and made him nauseous.