‘I’ve hurt my back,’ he said again. I moved towards him but the foresight made that tiny movement again and I froze. His leg was crossed under him like a stone figure on a knight’s tomb. I saw the real, ageing man behind the careless young mask. He twisted his shaken body and, more slowly than I had ever seen him move before, he eased his feet over the edge of the bench towards the greasy floor. His voice was a soft growl, ‘Es irrt der Mensch, so lang er strebt.’
3
I watched him with that sort of hypnotic horror that venomous insects evoke, but between me and Johnnie Vulkan there was no glass. His feet took the weight of his body and his face took its pain. He groped along the bench towards me. I moved back. He stepped awkwardly as though his foot had gone to sleep, his muscles uncoordinated, his face twitching, but the Mauser always steady. His foot descended gently into the big tin of grease. Vulkan looked down at it. Now was the time to jump him. ‘I’ve ruined my suit,’ he said. The grease
spattered around his leg and the Oxford made loud squelching noises inside the tin. He stood with one hand on the bench, one foot in the tin of grease and the Mauser H SC pointed at my middle. ‘My suit,’ he said and he laughed gently, keeping his mouth wide open, like imbeciles and drunks do, until the laugh became a gurgle, like soap suds going down a kitchen sink.
The bare bulb was in my eyes, so it took me a few seconds to see the blood that was flowing out of his mouth. It was light pink and very frothy. He swayed, then crashed to the stone floor and the grease keg unstuck from his foot with a ‘chug’ and rolled across the garage, rattling as it struck the old debris, and bounced into the greasing pit. Johnnie was face-flat on the petrolshiny floor. His whole body contracted and arched like someone was pouring salt on to him, and then the flat of his hand slapped the concrete, making three loud cracks like pistol shots. Suddenly he was relaxed and still. Stuck fairly high on to Vulkan’s back was the thick oval of polished wood with the words ‘Schmidt’s of Soligen’, and under that, ‘the best drills in the world.’ Vulkan now had their complete range driven deep into his dead body.
It was all so in character. This little Faust, seeker of salvation by striving. This Sturm-und-Drang artist, with his two demanding masters, who tried to die with Goethe on his lips but was carried away by concern for his suit. I wondered whether
Samantha was Gretchen or Helena. There was no doubt about my role.
I stacked Stok’s pamphlets in a pile near the door and, buttoning my trenchcoat tight around me, I lifted Johnnie’s bloody carcass into the satinupholstered coffin. Death had cut him down to size and I could hardly recognize the man whose ankle showed a four-inch scar. I took a grease pencil from the medical kit and, after wiping the blood from his face, I wrote ‘1 G. Na Am’ on Vulkan’s forehead. I looked at my watch and wrote ‘18.15’ under it on the tanned skin. Anything that would increase the confusion when that box was opened was working in my favour.
I had only four of the screws in when I heard the lorry outside. The place seemed to smell of blood, which perhaps was my imagination, but I tipped a little petrol on the floor just to be on the safe side, and hid my bloodstained coat.
I swung the doors open. It was dark now and it had begun to snow. They drove in. I helped the driver unlock the rear doors of the truck. A figure stood inside the van holding an old Mark II Sten gun: a figure in a battered leather coat that bulged agreeably in just the right places.
‘Act your age, Sam,’ I said. ‘If there’s only three of us it’s going to be enough trouble lugging this thing into the truck. Lower that gun.’
She didn’t lower the gun. ‘Where’s Johnnie?’ she said.
‘Lower that gun, Samantha. If you’d seen as
many accidents as I’ve seen with those shoddy Sten guns you wouldn’t behave that way. Don’t they teach you anything in Haifa?’
She smiled, pulled the cocking handle back, pushed it up into the lock slot and lowered the gun. ‘Johnnie knows you’re here?’
‘Of course he does,’ I said. ‘This is Johnnie’s show, but you will never get away with your end of the deal.’
‘Maybe I won’t,’ she said, and leaned her face very close to mine, ‘but my pop became a piece of soap in this Goddamned country so I’m going to try.’ She paused. ‘We found out what happens if you don’t—six million of you amble forward gently to die without too much mess or inconvenience—so from now on we Jews are going to try. Maybe I won’t get away very far, but this boy…’ she stabbed a bright red fingernail towards the driver, ‘…is right behind, and behind him there are plenty more.’
‘OK,’ I said. She was right. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what the chances are. ‘Plenty more,’ she said. I nodded.
The military-style leather coat suited her. It suited the aggressive boyish stance that she had picked up along with the machine-gun. She leaned an elbow against the van and fanned her fingertips across her cheek as though the coat was the latest fashion and the machine-gun a photographer’s prop.
‘You should have told me that you were in on it.’
‘Over that telephone of yours?’ I said.
‘I saw the newspapers,’ she said. ‘We were careless.’
‘Is that what you call it?’ I said.
‘I suppose the man downstairs burgled my flat too.’
‘There’s no doubt,’ I said.
‘Haifa thought your people had done it.’
I shrugged and made the international sign for money with the index finger and thumb. ‘How much of it’s in German money?’ I asked.
‘It all is,’ she said, ‘all Deutsche marks.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘We have to pay the people at the mortuary for the turn-round there.’ She was still a little suspicious.
‘He’s had one gramme of sodium amytal.’ I waved towards Vulkan’s medical supplies and the coffin. ‘He’s sleeping quietly, we didn’t use the oxygen, but Johnnie said to take the unit and antidote with you. I’ve marked the dose and time on his forehead so even if you forget to warn the people you pass him to, you’ll be OK.’
She nodded and put down the gun and tried to push the coffin. I said, ‘He’ll be out for eight hours solid.’
‘It’s heavy,’ she said.
‘There’s just one little thing,’ I said, ‘before we put him into your van. I would like the money here.’ I held out my hand as Stok had done to me. She went to the cab and from a large leather handbag produced a bundle of new 100 DM notes.
She said, ‘You realize there is nothing to stop me blasting you and taking Semitsa.’ The driver came around the back of the lorry. He was carrying the gun, not aiming it, just carrying it.
‘Now you know why Johnnie isn’t here,’ I said.
Her face showed great relief. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I might have known he’d think of that. He’s “Mr Angle”: Johnnie Vulkan.’ She gave me the money like she was sorry to see it go.
‘It’s extortion, ghoul,’ she said. ‘He’s not worth this much.’
‘That’s what the Roman soldiers said to Judas,’ I said. I put the money into my raincoat pocket and we all began to heave at the coffin.
There was a time when I thought we weren’t going to get it in, but slowly it inched into the truck. When it was far enough in for the rear doors to close (and we tried three times before it was) we stood there drinking in the smell of petrol by the deep lungful without enough energy to speak. I poured a big shot of Johnnie’s Glenlivet whisky into the small plastic cups that he had been thoughtful enough to provide in his kit. My whole body suddenly began to shake. The neck of the whisky bottle chattered against the cup in a tiny shudder of sound. I saw Sam and the driver watching me. ‘Bottoms up,’ I said and poured the smoky malt fluid into my bloodstream.
Sam said, ‘You told those French cops that I was working for the Krauts.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I have an unpleasant sense of humour.’
‘You knew I was working for the Israeli Intelligence.’
‘Is that who you work for?’ I said in mock innocence.
‘Um,’ she said and sipped her whisky. The driver was watching us both.
‘It’s all a game for you,’ she said, ‘but it’s life and death for us. Those Egyptians have so many Kraut scientists working for them that their laboratory instruction manuals are printed in German as well as Arabic. With this guy we can really even things up.’
‘Enzymes,’ I said.
‘Let’s not kid each other any longer,’ she said. ‘Sure in Israel we can use Semitsa’s knowledge of insecticides, but that’s not half the story and you know it.’
I didn’t say anything. She buttoned her leather coat tighter around her chin. ‘These insecticides Semitsa is working on are nerve gases! They’ve had lots of horticultural workers go crazy already. They attack the nervous system, they say they’re the most deadly substances known to man. It’s true, isn’t it?’
She needed to know. ‘It’s true enough,’ I said.
She spoke more quickly, relieved to know that her assignment was as important and factual as she wanted to believe. ‘One day those Egyptians are going to come back,’ she said. ‘One day soon. When they come they are going to have weapons that those Kraut scientists have built for them.
Our people in the
nahals
4
have got to pack a punch.’ There was a sharp click of plastic as she put down the empty whisky cup. ‘That’s why nothing that you or I could think or do stood a chance. This is something that could be the finale of the Jewish nation; no one is more important than that.’
‘If I’d known you were that keen I would have let you collect him from the Adlon.’
She gave me a playful punch on the arm. ‘You think we couldn’t have done it? If there’s one thing we know something about, it’s cities divided by a wall. We’ve had a wall across Jerusalem ever since I was a kid. We’ve mastered every technique there is for getting over, round, through and under it.’
I opened the rear doors of the truck and heaved the two dark shiny wreaths in. ‘From old friends,’ one of them said. It had hooked itself over a coffin handle. ‘We don’t want those,’ said Sam.
‘You take them,’ I said. ‘You don’t know when you are likely to need a wreath from old friends. None of us does.’
Sam smiled and I slammed the truck doors. I opened the garage doors with their carefully oiled bolts and I waved good-bye solemnly as the truck moved slowly forward. Sam was smiling out of her leather coat. Behind her head I could see the big polished box that contained the mortal remains of John Vulkan and just for a moment I felt like
calling this over-confident child back. It’s OK to have soft feelings knowing that years of training preclude me from obeying them.
‘Bis hundertundzwanzig,’
5
I said gently. The car lurched forward and Sam had to twist her head to keep me in sight. ‘Mazel Tov,’ she called back. ‘My darling ghoul.’ Florins of snow hit the ebony windscreen and slid gently down the warm glass. The driver flipped his lights on to reveal long yellow cones of fast-moving snow. I closed out the sound of the engine and promised myself another Glenlivet whisky; it wasn’t cold but I had the shivers again.
HANNA STAHL alias SAMANTHA STEEL
Monday, November 4th
Snow already, Samantha Steel thought. What kind of winter was it likely to be? Whatever kind of winter, it would be good to be back in her flat in Haifa, where from the bedroom window umbrella pines framed the intense blue water of the bay, and the whitewashed walls reflected back a glare too bright to look at, even in December.
She watched the big snowflakes hitting the grimy streets as they passed through the Reinickendorf district of Berlin. The whisky had warmed her and she was quite capable of dropping off to sleep. She pressed her face about with her hands, stretching the cheeks and pummelling her eyes. What a relief that it was all over, there had been so many traps and pitfalls. Now she felt torn, shredded, used—sexually used almost. She combed her hair through her fingers. It was soft and young; fine silky hair. She let it fall against her neck like
murmurs of love. She dragged it up again, her eyes closed; it was like taking a warm shower, combing her hair through her fingers. It would be nice to have it blonde again. She felt her whole body drift into relaxation.
She would like to see Johnnie Vulkan again before she got on the plane; not for any romantic reason, he was just the sort of tough self-sufficient character that had no attraction for her at all. Vulkan was a big phoney. He wasn’t even German, in spite of the way he always called Berlin his home town. He was a Sudeten German—you could hear it in his voice when he was angry. She didn’t like him but she had to admire him. He was a professional; by any standards he was a professional. Just to see him work was a pleasure.
The Englishman was the exact opposite. There were times when she could have ‘gone for’ the Englishman, nearly did in fact. Given other circumstances, where there was no element of business involved, it all might have been different. She wished she had known him many years ago when he was at his red-brick university, this provincial boy wandering through the big city of life. She envied him his simplicity and briefly wished she had been the girl next door in Burnley, Lancs—wherever
that
was! He was cuddly, kind and malleable, he would make the sort of husband who wouldn’t fight about her dress allowance all the time.
Why the English used men like that in Intelligence work was something she would never
understand. Amateur. That basically was why the English would never be good at doing anything: they were amateurs. Such amateurs that finally someone standing by couldn’t watch their bungling any longer, and took over. That’s what America had done in two World Wars. Perhaps it was all part of a vast British conspiracy. She giggled. She didn’t think so.
The driver offered his cigarettes. She looked round and tapped the coffin to make sure it was still there. She never trusted things she couldn’t see and touch. Thank goodness Johnnie had supervised the morphia dosage and the details, the Englishman would forget or get it wrong. He had to be led, that Englishman. She had found exactly the same thing in her relationship with him. He has to have someone around like Johnnie Vulkan; or Samantha Steel, she added to herself. He would make a good father. Vulkan could perhaps be moulded into a good escort but the English guy would have been a good father to their children. She compared her memories of the two of them as though they were fighting some sort of tournament for her favours. She snuggled deeper in the seat and pulled her coat collar up to her eyebrows to think about that—to keep it more secret.
Vulkan was the worst sort of womanizer and had some idea that women were an inferior race; he had used that word—
Männerbund
—too; the bond that unites men, comradeship—her mother had told her that that was a dangerous sign. Men
can get away with that sort of attitude in this country where there had been nearly two million surplus women in 1945. He would have got the shock of his life in Israel, where women were really gaining a place for themselves.
She lit the cigarette. Her hands shook. It was natural, it was the after-effect of all the work and worry, but there was still the airport to deal with. If she was still in this sort of condition when they got there she would let the driver handle it; he was unimaginative enough to be calm, thank goodness. ‘Where are we?’ she asked.
‘There’s the Siegessäule,’ said the driver and pointed to the tall monument to ancient victories that stabbed into the Tiergarten like a pin through a green butterfly. He detoured to avoid the police cars that always sat around at the base of it. ‘Not far now.’
‘Thank goodness,’ she shivered. ‘It’s damn cold in here,’ she said.
The driver said nothing but they both knew it wasn’t cold in there.
She went back to thinking about the Englishman; it was a nice warm pretence to indulge in and quite academic, now that she would never see him again. He smelled good; she thought smell was important. You could tell a lot about a man by his smell and the taste of his mouth. His smell wasn’t particularly masculine. Not like Vulkan—all tobacco and untanned-leather smells, which she knew came from a bottle, ever since she had
looked for aspirins that night and found his hairnet. She laughed. The Englishman smelled of something softer; more like warm yeasty bread, and sometimes he tasted of cocoa.
She remembered that night, it was the night she decided she would never understand men. Vulkan had made love to her in his usual fashion, which was like a specialist performing major surgery. She had promised to buy him some rubber gloves and he had made some wisecrack about her acting like she was anaesthetized. It was about three o’clock in the morning when she had found not only the hair-net but the parts for the half-finished string quartet. Vulkan. King Vulkan. The way he delighted in his big, secret-agent, undercover life. She ought to have told him that the secretive attitude he had about his intellectual life was a guilt syndrome centred upon his parents. Vulkan preferred to think it was ‘the mental casualties of war’. Phoney.
Why was the car stopping? She looked out at the densely packed traffic jam. It was a miserable town full of men in ankle-length overcoats and big hats. As for the clothes the women wore, they were unbelievable, she had hardly seen a well dressed woman all the time she had been here.
She wasn’t worried about the traffic jam, there was ample time, she had worked out the schedule to allow for such things. The van crept forward a little then stopped again. It was as bad as New York. She wondered whether to visit her mother
at Christmas. It was a lot of expense and she had only recently been there. Mothers, however, had some special metaphysical regard for Christmas. Perhaps she should ask her mother to come to Haifa. The traffic had begun to move again, there was a cream double-decker bus slewed across the road. An accident. The road was probably slippery with the snow. At first the big flakes had melted as they hit the ground but now they were beginning to build up a white pattern. People too were wearing lace shawls of snowflakes. The driver switched the windscreen wipers on. The motor whined in a monotonous rhythm.
There was a fire engine and a lot of people in the centre of the road. It could take ages at this rate. She leaned back to relax. The taste of the whisky recurred in her throat. She recounted the programme in her mind from the moment they had backed the truck through the doors of the Wittenau garage. Haifa had told her to let the money go only if she had to. It would make them suspicious, they had said. She wished she had bargained with the Englishman now: what had he said about ‘That’s what the Roman soldiers said to Judas’? It was a typical sour English remark. She should have just taken the coffin at gunpoint. It had been in her mind to do so at one time. It was Johnnie Vulkan who had forced her hand, by not being there. He was probably watching from a window across the road. You had to admire Vulkan. He was a real professional.
It was quite dark now, dark with the claustrophobic weight of the cloud from which dirty flakes of snow fell relentlessly. That’s better; they were edging forward again now. Great lights illuminated the foremen operating the jacks under the bus. One fireman was kneeling in a great pool of oil, so was a policeman. Now she could see what had happened. The fireman was talking to an old man whose legs were under the wheels of the bus. They were trying to take the banner he was holding away from him but the old man was gripping it tightly. The policeman waved them past. The old man wouldn’t let go. The snow covered his face. The banner said, ‘No man can serve two masters. Matthew vi. 24.’
‘This is Schöneberg,’ said the driver. Tempelhof must be just ahead.