The Devil's Breath (28 page)

‘And you did? You’ve done it?’

‘Sure. I’m Jewish. My father’s Jewish. German Jewish. My whole goddamn family’s Jewish. Five, six years back I went to Israel, a tourist for Chrissakes, a face on the bus. But … I don’t know—’ he shrugged again, attacking another sandwich ‘—when it happens, the trick is to recognize it. Most people don’t. The moment comes, you think it’s indigestion. It’s not indigestion. It’s your life changing.’ He beamed at Emery. ‘My life changed. I made
aliyah
. I went home.’

‘But you’re still here.’

‘Sure. This month. Last month. Most of the summer.’ He reached for the rest of the sandwich, his mouth still full. ‘I teach. I’m an academic. I go where the work is, where the money is. Also, I’m still studying. People like me don’t do degrees, we collect them. Just now, I’m doing the last one, positively the last one.’ He grinned. ‘You believe that?’

Emery smiled, not answering for a moment. Then he leaned forward, ignoring the proffered sandwich. ‘But Israel?’ he said. ‘You live in Israel? You have citizenship?’

Weill nodded. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Plus I have a two-roomed apartment in Haifa. You know about prices in Israel? Real estate? Food? Automobiles?’ He shook his head. ‘You wanna beer?’

He got up and walked back to the car without waiting for an answer, returning with four bottles of Rolling Rock. The jeans didn’t fit properly, too big, too baggy, and the T-shirt was hanging out at the back. He sat down again. ‘What do you want to know?’ he said. ‘You want to know about Lenny Gold? Why I knew him? How I knew him?’

‘Yes.’

‘He came and talked on a course I ran. I invited him over.’

‘Here? In Israel?’

‘MIT.’ Weill nodded north, towards Boston. ‘The IAF people gave me his name. Israeli Air Force. They said he was truly excellent. They were right.’

‘These courses you run, you teach. These degrees.’ Emery frowned. ‘What field?’

‘Avionics. Ballistics. Advanced aircraft design. The whole shoot. Research meets business meets technology.’ He paused and licked his fingers. ‘Tough stuff.’

‘And Gold?’

‘The best. The very best.’ He paused, abruptly reflective, a bottle of Rolling Rock halfway to his mouth, watching Emery carefully. ‘Nice guy, too.’

The beer gone, they walked around the rest area. Weill had come to know Gold well. Academically he was a natural. He was tough-minded, witty, and had a rare gift for translating his own commercial experience into a series of brisk one-hour lectures. Weill’s students had rated him highly. They liked his lack of bullshit and his insistence on exploring the bottom line. They admired the licence he’d won for himself, two decades of innovatory avionics designwork, the very best guy in the field. And they liked his irreverence, his joky, bitter-sweet asides about the excesses of the defence industry. Invited back for
subsequent appearances, Gold had stayed with Weill, sharing the house he rented out at Falmouth. They’d sat up late, summer nights, six packs of Coors and the stir of the ocean through the open patio doors. Though they came at issues from different angles, they’d had lots in common. They were both sceptical about aspects of the US Defence establishment. They both admired what the Israelis had achieved with a tenth of the money and a hundred times the motivation. And they were both able to gauge that point when you stopped talking business or academia for politics and got on to the things that really mattered.

Strolling slowly back towards the car, Emery paused. ‘What about last year?’ he said. ‘After Lola’s accident?’

Weill aimed a half-hearted kick at an empty Coke can. He hadn’t mentioned Lola at all. Not once. ‘She was a lush,’ he said, ‘the cross he had to bear.’

‘Did he say that?’

‘Never. The guy was loyal as hell. But I’d seen it. I’d met her. I knew. She was an accident waiting to happen.’ He shook his head. ‘And it did.’

‘And Gold? What did it do to him?’

‘Broke his heart. Truly. That’s what I never understood about the man. How he could … with that woman …’ He shook his head again, stopping, looking down. There was a long silence. Then they began to walk again, towards the cars.

‘He stopped working for the Israelis …’ Emery said.

‘Yeah.’

‘Why?’

‘They wouldn’t pay him what he wanted.’

‘How much did he want?’

‘Lots.’

‘But the Israelis paid him lots.’

Weill looked at him briefly and shook his head. ‘Not enough,’ he said.

‘So where did he go?’

Weill stopped again and looked hard at Emery, one hand up, shading his eyes against the sun. ‘Is that what you’ve come to ask?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

Emery didn’t answer for a moment. Then he shook his head. ‘I can’t tell you,’ he said, ‘except that it’s important.’

‘Sure.’ Weill was still looking at him, his eyes shadowed beneath the raised hand. ‘So who do you work for? The Government? Some insurance company?’ He paused. ‘Tel Aviv?’

Emery smiled. ‘The Government,’ he said. ‘Call it the Government.’ He paused. ‘You knew the guy. You knew him well. You were buddies. You knew the business, too. You knew the options he had. Where a guy like him might go.’ He paused again. ‘So tell me. Where
did
he go? What happened?’

Weill looked at Emery for a moment longer. Then the hand came down and he shook his head. ‘Guy died. That’s what happened. Guy died in a hotel room up in New York City.’

‘With a hooker.’

‘Sure. With a hooker.’

‘That make you angry?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Guy wasting himself like that?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You miss him?’

‘Yeah.’

Weill started walking again, very slowly, his head down. Emery fell into step beside him, saying nothing. Finally, Weill stopped again. ‘You know what it is to be close to someone?’ Emery smiled, warmed by the irony. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘as it happens.’

‘
Really
close to them?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you’ll know how I felt about Lenny. He was wasted on the lush. He was wasted on the hooker. Great guy.’ He shook his head. ‘Totally fucking wasted.’

Weill stooped to the picnic table, retrieving the empty bottles of Rolling Rock. Emery watched him tossing them into a waste-bin, one after the other, crash, crash. ‘That last year …’ he said again. ‘Who did he work for?’

The last bottle hit the bottom of the waste-bin. Weill wiped his hands on the backs of his jeans, still staring at the bin. ‘I tell you that …’ he said slowly, ‘and I’m …’ He shook his head, letting the sentence expire.

‘But it wasn’t the Israelis?’

There was a long silence. A big truck ground past on the highway, the dust settling slowly behind it. Emery put the question again. Finally, Weill looked up. His eyes were puffy behind the thick pebble-glasses. ‘I told you already,’ he said. ‘The Israelis wouldn’t pay what he wanted. They never pay that kind of money. I told you. The country’s fucked.’

‘So he went somewhere else?’

‘Of course. The guy had to. Lola like that.’

‘Selling the same deal. Selling what he knew.’

‘Sure.’ Weill nodded. ‘Selling himself. Selling whatever.’

‘All the stuff he’d picked up on the West Coast?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And in Tel Aviv?’

Weill looked at him for a long time, tussling with some private decision. Then, abruptly, he extended a podgy hand, a brief sweaty touch, before turning away and lumbering back towards his car. Getting in, gunning the engine, nosing on to the highway, he didn’t once look back. Emery stood by the picnic table, watching the Corvette accelerating away. Minutes later, walking back to his own car, he was still smiling.

*

McVeigh, dreaming of Billy, heard the footsteps outside the hut. He opened one eye. It was still dark. He inched his wrist from beneath the single sheet and checked his watch. Half-past three. The footsteps were louder now, heavy boots on the line of paving-stones that marked the path to his door. The footsteps paused, very close, and McVeigh was barely upright, one foot feeling for the tiled floor, when the door crashed open.

McVeigh, crouching on the edge of the bed, squinted into the beam of a powerful torch. Beyond the torch, invisible in the darkness, he heard a soft laugh, far from pleasant. For a moment nothing happened, then something landed at his feet and the disc of light followed it slowly down the line of McVeigh’s
naked body to the floor. McVeigh looked down. A pair of old working gloves, the ends of the fingers frayed and open.

The torch snapped off. A voice came out of the darkness, guttural, gruff, male. ‘Four o’clock,’ it said. ‘
Hader ochel
. You come.’

The figure turned and pulled the door open, and in the faint spill from the security floodlights McVeigh saw someone tall and broad. The face had a beard, and in his left hand, loosely gripped, was a small sub-machine-gun. The mesh door crashed shut again, and the footsteps receded briefly before pausing at another hut, a knocking this time, a word or two of Hebrew and a sleepy acknowledgement from inside. Work, thought McVeigh, reaching for his jeans, letting the adrenalin settle back into his system, thinking again of the man’s laugh, and the slow drift of the torch beam, a message all the plainer for being unvoiced.

Twenty minutes later, McVeigh joined the mêlée of sleepy kibbutzniks at the back of the dining-hall. There were trucks parked in the darkness, their engines already running, their headlights on. Someone shouted a name and there was an answering bark of laughter, then figures began to clamber into the backs of the trucks. The trucks were open at the back, and when they began to move, lurching on to the tarmac road that wound down the hillside to the valley floor, it was suddenly colder.

McVeigh stood near the rear of the lead truck, the gloves tucked into the waistband of his jeans, bracing himself with one hand against the constant lurch and sway as the driver pulled the big vehicle round a succession of hairpin bends. The truck was packed with men and women, all ages, rough working clothes, patterns and colours bleached by the sun. No one said very much, no one smiled, and when McVeigh looked slowly around, curious to see whether he could recognize the face with the beard, no one followed his gaze. Central Line, he thought glumly. Just one more working day.

Minutes later the truck picked up speed, following the road across the valley floor. Left and right there were orchards, thousands of apple trees in orderly rows, and when the trucks
stopped and the men and women clambered out, it felt instantly warmer. Behind them in the east, the darkness was beginning to lighten, the mountains skylined against a cold, hard dawn.

The kibbutzniks divided into gangs, trudging off into the trees. McVeigh stayed by the roadside, waiting for instructions, recognizing the odd face here and there, finally attaching himself to an older man with a haversack. Amongst the trees the grass was shin-high and wet with dew.

A half-mile walk took McVeigh deep into the orchards. A dozen people stood round a trailer. A canvas tarpaulin was folded back and inside the trailer was half-f of apples. Beside the trailer, on the ground, was a pile of metal baskets. The old man with the haversack began to distribute them, squatting on the ground beside the pile, tossing them left and right without a word. McVeigh caught the last one, copying everyone else, adjusting the diagonal strap across his chest and shoulders, fitting the basket against his belly. The group disappeared into the trees, every man and woman collecting a light aluminium ladder. McVeigh followed them, finding a ladder for himself, and a line of trees laden with fruit. The gloves, when he put them on, were a perfect fit. His hands were nearly back to normal, the blisters burst, the flesh newly pinked beneath.

The work went on for hours, a steady rhythm, top of the ladder, the basket filled and refilled, each new load of apples carried back through the trees and dumped into the trailer. In a curious way, McVeigh liked the work, the monotony of it, the lack of interference, the way the warmth gradually stole back into the landscape, the valley flooding with light, the sun raising the sweat on his back and shoulders. It was, he knew, the price of staying on the kibbutz. To get to Cela, to work towards the conversation he knew he had to have, he was obliged to pick apples. It was as simple as that.

Last night, walking back from the school, she’d agreed to meet him again. The arrangement was loose, they’d probably run into each other at lunch, once the day’s work was over. Afterwards, maybe, there’d be time to talk. Knowing there was no point in hurrying the thing, McVeigh had nodded and accepted her whispered ‘Goodnight’ with a smile. As she’d
stepped into her father’s house, pushing open the unlocked door, he’d called after her, remembering about Billy. He wanted to get in touch with the boy, tell him that everything was OK, and she’d hesitated for a moment in the darkness, thinking about it, promising to try and find him a phone. The name Billy, the sound of it, for some reason made her smile. McVeigh had noticed the reaction two or three times already. The smile was utterly spontaneous, a sunny, uncomplicated thing, and McVeigh grinned to himself now, thinking about it.

Below, in the orchard, people were beginning to gather by the trailer. There’d been no signal, nothing formal, but the baskets were coming off, and small glasses were being passed around from the old man’s haversack, and a boy had appeared through the trees with a metal urn. He joined the group by the trailer, squatting over the urn, filling the glasses with something thick and black.

Smelling the coffee, McVeigh reached for a final cluster of apples. He was up in the very crown of the tree, his feet wedged in the branches below. He dropped the last apple into the basket and began to ease his body down, his feet feeling instinctively for the top of the ladder. Not finding it, he looked down. A face was gazing up at him. The beard was black and the eyes were steady. There was a basket, half-f, around the man’s belly, and his left hand held McVeigh’s ladder, upright, in the long grass. The two men looked at each other for a moment or two, then the man smiled, a cool, hard smile, a warning, and let go of the ladder. The ladder fell sideways into the grass and the man turned away, walking back towards the trailer, loosening the strap around his shoulder, pulling it over his head. McVeigh, still up the tree, watched him empty the basket into the trailer and then shout across to the boy with the coffee urn. The boy nodded, pouring a fresh glass, getting to his feet, giving him the coffee. As he did so, he gestured towards McVeigh’s tree, saying something in Hebrew, a question of some kind, and the man with the beard laughed, shaking his head, his eyes on McVeigh again, the glass tilted in a contemptuous salute. Same voice, McVeigh thought. Same voice as this morning. The torch at the door. The gun slung from the shoulder. He looked at the man
for a moment longer, returning the stare, then shrugged and reached for another apple.