Carrion Comfort (77 page)

Men came in to clean and disinfect the carpet. A minute later the young woman came with a flashlight and took Harod’s elbow. He thrust her hand away. Maria Chen tried to touch him on the shoulder, but he turned his back on her and staggered down the stairs.

Twenty minutes later they landed at LAX. A driver and limousine met the plane. Tony Harod did not look back to watch the ebony 747 taxi and take off.

S
hortly before sundown, Saul and Natalie drove the rented Volkswagen northeast out of Tijuana. It was very hot. Once off Highway 2 the suburbs turned into a maze of dirt roads through villages of tin shacks and lean-tos sprawled between abandoned factories and small ranches. Natalie read from Jack Cohen’s hand-drawn map while Saul drove. They parked the VW near a small tavern and walked north through a cloud of dust and small children. Fires were burning on the hillside as the last of the blood-red twilight faded. Natalie checked the map and pointed to a path down a hillside littered with junk and small groups of men and women sitting by open fires or squatting in the dark under low trees. Half a mile north across the valley a tall fence glowed white against a black hillside.

“Let’s stay here until it’s really dark,” said Saul. He set down his suitcase and lowered a heavy knapsack to the ground. “There are supposed to be bandits working both sides of the border these days. It would be ironic to come this far and be killed by a border bandit.”

“It suits me to sit awhile,” said Natalie. They had walked less than a mile, but her blue cotton shirt was plastered to her skin and her sneakers were caked with dust. Mosquitoes whined past her ears. A single electric light glowing by a bar on the hill behind them had attracted so many moths that snow appeared to be falling in front of it.

They sat in exhausted silence for half an hour, worn out by thirty-six hours of flying by jet and commuter airline and by the constant tension of traveling under false passports. Heathrow Airport had been the worst— three hours’ layover under the gaze of security people.

Natalie was dozing despite the heat, insects, and her uncomfortable position squatting next to a large rock when Saul awoke her with a gentle hand on her shoulder. “They’re moving,” he whispered. “Let’s go.”

At least a hundred illegals were heading toward the distant fence in small shuffling groups. More bonfires had appeared on the hillside behind them. Far to the northwest were the twinkling lights of an American town; ahead lay only dark canyons and hillsides. A single pair of headlights disappeared to the east on some unseen access road on the American side of the fence.

“Border patrol,” said Saul and led the way down the steep trail and then up another hill. They were both panting audibly within minutes, sweating under their rucksacks and struggling with their large suitcases weighted with papers. Although they tried to remain separated from the others, they soon had to join a long line of sweating men and women, some speaking softly or swearing in Spanish, others plodding along in stolid silence. Ahead of Saul, a tall, thin man carried a seven-or eight-year-old boy on his back while a heavier woman carried a large cardboard suitcase.

The queue came to a stop in a dry riverbed twenty yards from a culvert that ran under the border fence and the gravel road beyond. Groups of three or four would spring across the streambed and disappear into the black circle of the culvert. There were occasional shouts from the other side and once Natalie heard a scream that must have come from just beyond the road. Natalie realized that her heart had been pounding for minutes and her skin was clammy with sweat. She took a grip on her suitcase and forced herself to relax.

The entire line of fifty or sixty people hid behind the rocks, bushes, and each other when a second border patrol vehicle came by and stopped. A bright spotlight swept across the arroyo and passed within ten feet of the pitiful thorn tree Natalie and Saul were trying to use for cover. Shouts and the slap of a gunshot from the northeast sent the car away at high speed, radio blaring in police English, and the line of illegals began its steady progress into the culvert once again.

Within minutes Natalie found herself crawling on all fours behind Saul, shoving the heavy suitcase ahead of her while her backpack banged against the corrugated roof of the tunnel. It was pitch black. The culvert smelled of urine and excrement and her hands and knees encountered moist softness interspersed with broken glass and bits of metal. Somewhere behind her in the stifling dark a woman or child began to cry until a man’s sharp voice bullied them into silence. Natalie was sure that the culvert led nowhere and that it would grow narrower and narrower, the rough ceiling coming down to crush them into the mud and excrement, the water rising over their faces . . .

“Almost there,” whispered Saul. “I see moonlight.”

Natalie realized that her ribs hurt from the panicked pounding of her heart and because she had been holding her breath. She exhaled just as Saul tumbled forward two feet to a rocky streambed and helped her out of the stinking pipe.

“Welcome back to America,” he whispered as they gathered their bags and ran for the darkened safety of an arroyo where murderers and thieves undoubtedly lay in wait for some of the night’s hopeful immigrants.

“Thanks,” Natalie whispered back between gasps for air. “Next time, I’m going direct even if it means flying People’s Express.”

Jack Cohen was waiting for them at the top of the third hill. Once every two minutes he had blinked the headlights of the old blue van he had parked there and that had been the beacon that brought Natalie and Saul in. Cohen shook hands with Saul and then Natalie and said, “Come, we must hurry. This is not a good place to park. I brought the things you asked for in your letter and I have no wish to explain them to the Border Patrol or the San Diego police. Hurry.”

The rear of the van was half filled with boxes. They threw their luggage in back, Natalie took the passenger’s seat, Saul sat in a low crate behind and between the two front seats, and Jack Cohen drove. They bounced along dirt ruts for half a mile, turned east onto a gravel road, and found an asphalt county road headed north. Ten minutes later they were descending an access ramp to an Interstate highway and Natalie felt displaced and dis-oriented, as if the United States had changed in various and subtle ways during the three months of her absence.
No, it was more like I’ve never lived here at all
, she thought as she watched suburbs and small shopping malls pass her window. She stared at the streetlights and cars and wondered at the incredible fact that thousands of people here were going about their evening business just as if nothing was happening— as if men and women and children were not crawling through shit-filled culverts ten miles from these comfortable middle-class homes, as if sharp-eyed young Sabras were not right at that minute riding armed guard on the boundaries of their kibbutzim while masked PLO killers— boys themselves— oiled their Kalashnikovs and waited for dark, as if Rob Gentry was not dead, murdered, dead and buried, as finally unreachable as her father who used to come in every evening to tuck her in bed and tell her stories about Max, the inquisitive Dachshund who was always . . .

“Did you get the gun in Mexico City where I told you to?” asked Cohen.

Natalie startled awake. She had been dozing with her eyes open. She felt the novacaine high of total fatigue. There was the muted roar of jet engines in her ears. She concentrated on listening to the two men.

“Yes,” said Saul. “No problem, although I was worried about what would happen if the
federales
found it on me.”

Natalie worked to focus her eyes to better see the Mossad agent. Jack Cohen was in his early fifties but seemed older, older even than Saul, especially now that Saul had shaved his beard and let his hair grow. Cohen’s face was thin and pockmarked, set off by large eyes and a nose that obviously had been broken more than once. He had thin white hair that looked as if he had tried to trim it himself and given up before the job was done. Cohen’s English was fluent and idiomatically correct but overlaid with an accent that Natalie could not place— it was as if a West German had been taught his English from a Welshman who had learned his from a Brooklyn scholar. Natalie liked Jack Cohen’s voice. She liked Jack Cohen.

“Let me see the gun,” said Cohen.

Saul pulled a small pistol from his waistband. Natalie had had no idea that Saul had a weapon. It looked like a cheap cap pistol.

They were alone in the left lane of a bridge. No one was behind them for at least a mile. Cohen took the pistol and threw it out the window, over the railing toward the dark ravine below. “It would probably have exploded the first time you tried to use it,” said Cohen. “I was sorry I suggested it, but it was too late to wire you. You’re right about the
federales
— papers or no papers, if they found that gun on you they would have hung you up by the
cojones
and checked in every second or third year to make sure you were still moaning. Not pleasant people, Saul. It was the damn money that made me think it was worth the risk. How much money did you end up bringing in?”

“About thirty thousand,” said Saul. “Another sixty is being wired to a bank in Los Angeles by David’s attorney.”

“Is it yours or David’s?” asked Cohen. “Mine,” said Saul. “I sold a nine-acre farm I’ve had near Netanya since before the War of Independence. I figured that it would be foolish to try to get to my New York savings account.”

“You figured correctly,” said Cohen. They were in a city now. Mercury vapor lamps passed lighted rectangles over the windshield and made Cohen’s ugly-handsome face look yellow. “My God, Saul,” he said, “do you know how hard it was to get some of those things on your shopping list? One hundred
pounds
of C-4
plastique
! Compressed air gun. Tranquilizer darts! Good God, man, do you know that there are only six suppliers in the entire United States that sell tranquilizer darts and that you have to be a certified zoologist to have the
foggiest
idea of where to find these places?”

Saul grinned. “Sorry, but you can’t complain, Jack. You see you’re our resident deus ex machina.”

Cohen smiled ruefully. “I don’t know about deus,” he said, “but I’ve certainly been run through the machina. Do you know that I’ve used up two and a half years of accumulated leave in running your little errands?”

“I’ll try to make it up to you someday,” said Saul. “Have you had further problems with the director?”

“No. The call from David Eshkol’s office settled most of that. I hope that twenty years after my retirement that I have pull like that. Is he well?”

“David? No, he’s not well after two heart attacks, but he is busy. Natalie and I saw him in Jerusalem five days ago. He told us to give you his best.”

“I only worked with him once,” said Cohen. “Fourteen years ago. He came out of retirement then to direct the operation where we snatched an entire Russian SAM site right out from under the Egyptians’ noses. It saved a lot of lives during the Six Day War. David Eshkol was a brilliant tactician.”

They were in San Diego now and Natalie watched with a strange sense of detachment as they turned onto Interstate Five and drove north.

“What are your plans for the next few days?” asked Saul.

“Get you installed,” said Cohen. “I should be back in Washington by Wednesday.”

“No problem,” said Saul. “Will you be available to give advice?”

“At any time,” said Cohen, “providing you answer one question.”

“What is that?”

“What’s really going on here, Saul? What is the bottom line connection between your old Nazi, this group in Washington, and the old woman in Charleston? No matter which way I put it together, it makes no sense. Why would the U.S. government harbor this war criminal?”

“They’re not,” said Saul. “Groups in the government are trying to find him as hard as we are, but for their own purposes. Believe me, Jack, I could tell you more, but it would do little to enlighten you. Much of this affair goes beyond logic.”

“Wonderful,” Cohen said sarcastically. “If you can’t tell me more, there is no hope of my getting the agency involved, no matter how much everyone respects David Eshkol.”

“That is probably for the best,” said Saul. “You saw what happened when Aaron and your friend Levi Cole became involved. I have finally realized that there will be no trumpet blast and charge of cavalry over the hill in the nick of time. In a real sense, I have deferred action for decades while waiting for the cavalry to arrive. Now I realize that this is something I must do . . . and Natalie feels the same.”

“Bullshit,” said Cohen. “Yes,” agreed Saul, “but all of our lives are governed by a certain degree of faith in bullshit. Zionism was blatant bullshit a century ago, but today our border— Israel’s border— is the only purely po liti cal boundary that is visible from orbit. Where the trees end and the desert begins, there ends Israel.”

“You’re changing the subject,” Cohen said flatly. “I’ve done these things because I liked your nephew and loved Levi Cole like a son and I believe you’re after who killed them. This is true?”

“Yes.”

“And the woman you think has returned to Charleston, she is part of it, not a victim?”

“Part of it, yes,” said Saul. “And your Oberst is still killing Jews?”

Saul hesitated. “He is still killing innocent people, yes.”

“And this
putz
in Los Angeles is involved?”

“Yes.”

“All right,” said Cohen, “you will continue to have my help, but some day there will be an accounting.”

“If it helps,” said Saul, “Natalie and I have left a sealed letter with David Eshkol. Even David does not know the details of this nightmare. If Natalie and I die or disappear, David or his executors will open the letter. They are directed to share the contents with you.”

“Wonderful,” Cohen said again. “I can hardly wait until you are both dead or missing.”

They drove in silence toward Los Angeles. Natalie dreamed that she and Rob and her father were walking through the Old Section of Charleston. It was a beautiful spring evening. The stars burned behind palmettos and new buds; the air smelled of mimosa and hyacinth. Suddenly a dog with a light-colored head on a dark body came from out of the darkness and growled at them. Natalie was afraid, but her father told her that the dog only wanted to make friends. He knelt and extended his right hand for the dog to smell it, but the dog bit it, bit and kept chewing, growling and swallowing until the hand was gone, his arm was gone, and then her father was gone. The dog had changed then, become much larger, while Natalie realized that she had grown smaller, become a little girl. The dog turned on her then, its incongruously white head glowing in the starlight, and she was too terrified to turn or run or scream. Rob touched her cheek and stepped in front of her just as the dog leaped. It struck him in the chest and knocked him down. As they struggled Natalie noticed that the dog’s strange head was growing smaller, disappearing. Then she realized that the dog had chewed and burrowed its way through Rob’s chest. She could hear the noise of its eating.