Amos Faglin, who closed the door behind them,
was taller and thin to the point of uneasiness. His face was
crowded with difficult angles—the cheekbones and the shelf over his
eyes seemed to jut out like the corners of carved stone blocks, and
his jaw could have been drafted with a straightedge and a pair of
calipers. He had blue eyes that never seemed to rest. His wife and
two daughters lived in Haifa, but he hadn’t seen them in nearly a
year. Like Hirsch. he had fought in Syria with the Palmach and,
like Hirsch, he was a smuggler. His specialty, however, was
weaponry—he was an expert in small arms and explosives, which he
regularly shipped in boxes marked Agricultural Implements to his
father-in-law’s warehouses in Jaffa. Unlike Hirsch, he was not a
celebrity. The British, so far as was known, remained unaware of
his existence.
“Did you have your look?”
“Yes, and so did he.”
Jerry Hirsch was standing beside a small
table beneath the room’s only window; his hand rested on the lid of
the portable coffee pot that was kept there, as if he were testing
to see if it could still be warm. It wasn’t—nobody had made any
coffee since that morning, and it was a quarter to ten at night—so
he lifted his fingers away with great delicacy.
“He was sitting out in the lounge in his
dinner jacket, listening to a crowd of fiddle players. He had us
spotted the second we came into the room. He seemed to know all
about us; we might as well have had “Haganah” printed in white
letters down the lapels of our jackets. He watched us watching him
for a minute or so, and then he seemed to get bored and turned back
to his concert. I’ll give him that—he doesn’t rattle easy.”
Dessauer visibly brightened. It seemed to
make him feel better that Hirsch had been impressed by the man who
had taken away his gun and broken his nose. He was about to say
something when a glance from Leivick made him close his mouth with
a snap.
“He is not small,” Faglin added as he sat
down on the bed. He took off his hat and set it beside him on the
coverlet, quite as if he hoped to stay there forever. “I would hate
to feel those hands around my neck. Shall we kill him?”
The expression on his face suggested it was
not something to which he looked forward.
“We are not murderers, Amos. We don’t even
know if this man poses a threat to us.”
“He certainly posed a threat to Gerhart
Becker.” Jerry Hirsch laughed soundlessly at his own joke. He was
crouched on the floor, pawing through the contents of his suitcase
until he came up with a carton of American cigarettes. “What a way
to kill a man—do you suppose he was trying to make it look like a
suicide?”
Mordecai shook his head. He had been giving
the matter a good deal of thought since Itzhak had come back with
his broken nose.
“No—a man who hangs himself isn’t found with
his hands tied behind his back. Is it your impression our friend
would be careless enough to overlook a detail like that?”
Now it was Hirsch’s turn to shake his
head.
“Precisely. And I have trouble with the idea
that Hagemann would order one of his old subordinates—his personal
servant, in fact—killed in such a manner. SS men deserve the
courtesy of a bullet, and Hagemann is the type to be very
scrupulous about observing such little niceties.”
“Also there is the fact that he saw fit to
spare our Itzekel.” Faglin treated the young man to a weary
contemptuous smile. There was nothing personal in it. Like Leivick
he understood that Dessauer had to be impressed with the magnitude
of his failure if there was to be any hope of his developing into a
dependable operative.
“Yes, there is that.”
Mordecai pushed himself away from the dresser
and began measuring out teaspoons of coffee into the pot. He was
dreadfully hungry. Except for the war years, he had always been a
heavy man, and it might be tomorrow morning before any one of this
crew thought about food. Coffee was better than nothing.
“Which leaves us with the question, what does
he want? Hagemann is murdering his old associates, but this one
doesn’t seem to be part of that. And now we find him dressed up as
a Norwegian army officer and checking into the records of Displaced
Persons. What name, by the way, is he using at the hotel?”
“Christiansen.” Faglin, who was watching with
more than routine interest as Leivick made the coffee, glanced down
at his hand, just as if he were checking a memorandum written
across the back of his thumb. “Inar Christiansen.”
“Good God! Well, what would you expect?”
They all turned to look at Itzhak Dessauer,
the source of this odd interjection. He was smiling behind his
bandages, apparently quite proud of himself.
“It may even be his real name,” Faglin went
on, as if determined to ignore the interruption. “This is the first
time we have been this near to him—perhaps we could manage a set of
fingerprints.” He shrugged his shoulders wearily, as if he really
couldn’t imagine why they should bother.
“Perhaps we could even ask him to pose for a
portrait,” Jerry Hirsch added. His eyebrows were working up and
down
à la
Groucho Marx—it was his method of signaling
irony.
“Jerry’s right. He’s been one step ahead of
us ever since we first became aware of him last April in Brazil. He
doesn’t bear toying with. Do you want some of this?”
Leivick held out a coffee cup to Amos Faglin,
grasping it by the rim with his middle finger and thumb. Faglin
accepted it somewhat grudgingly.
“Then what do you have in mind we should do
about him, Mordecai? If he isn’t one of Hagemann’s thugs, then why
does he do their work for them? He’s killed two members of the
Fifth Brigade that we know of—he’s practically making a career of
it.”
“A man does not have to be working for
Hagemann to have good reason for killing former SS men.” Leivick
smiled and shrugged, as if admitting to some ludicrous family
infirmity. “Who should know that better than us?”
Faglin tasted his coffee and made a face as
if either he didn’t like it or the subject of Inar Christiansen was
beginning to bore him.
“Then if he wants Hagemann himself, he’s
competition. It could be we should kill him after all.”
This was not a line of argument which Leivick
wished to encourage, so he smiled.
“As you said yourself, that might not be
easy. Since the indications are he’s no amateur, anything of the
kind could turn into an expensive proposition, and I’d hate to lose
any of you boys.”
“Then what?”
Faglin and Hirsch, the men of action,
exchanged an impatient glance. They shared the soldier’s view of
things. They had little tolerance for dilemmas.
Mordecai Leivick s smile began to take on a
fixed quality.
“Then what, Mordecai?” Hirsch also accepted a
cup of coffee, but set it down on the dresser while he finished his
first cigarette. He wasn’t an absent-minded smoker, he seemed to
prefer savoring his vices in isolation. “He isn’t likely to go
away, and we can’t ignore the man forever. What are we supposed to
do about him?”
Leivick didn’t like the way they were all
staring at him. It was on occasions like this that he wished he had
emigrated to America and gone into the jewelry business with his
late wife’s cousin. But no, he had to be a nation builder—and now
they were all expecting an answer.
Well, they were right to expect it. After
all, he took his orders from Tel Aviv, but they took theirs from
him.
“Maybe we should ask him,” he said finally,
wondering if he hadn’t taken leave of his senses.
. . . . .
Having allowed himself to be captured by the
wild hope that there might be someplace along his route where he
could buy something to eat, Leivick was crushed with disappointment
to find that, for the most part, the street lights hadn’t been
turned on. But what should he expect in a city under military
occupation? Most of the buildings had been gutted by the Allied
bombing—people had other things to think about besides
nightlife.
Leivick had seen ruined cities before. They
gave him no feeling of satisfaction, even when they were German. He
wasn’t awed, or even oppressed. He was merely hungry.
Perhaps Christiansen, if he didn’t kill him
or call the porter to have him thrown out of that fancy hotel where
he was staying, could be prevailed upon to order up a couple of
sandwiches from room service.
Would Christiansen kill him? He thought not.
Itzhak Dessauer had gone after the man with a gun and hadn’t
suffered anything worse than a broken nose—and richly deserved too.
And less than three hours later, Hirsch and Faglin had seen him
quietly sipping his coffee and listening to the hotel’s evening
entertainment. He hadn’t spared Itzhak because he was afraid of
retribution—according to Hirsch, he didn’t seem the type to be
afraid of anything. He just wasn’t a homicidal maniac.
So Leivick wasn’t worried about his life, he
was merely worried. Mr. Christiansen, if that was really his name,
was an imponderable.
It was over an hour’s walk to the hotel, and
as he pushed through the revolving door Leivick was glad to be in
out of the wind.
It was like a different world inside. The
carpets were clean and the brass polished, there was an air of
prosperity and fashion such as Leivick had almost forgotten was
possible. He crossed the lobby—glad, under the watchful eye of the
concierge, that he had thought to wear his best suit—and began his
assault on the stairway. Christiansen’s room, as they had already
established, was on the fourth floor.
In Prague, before the war, when he had been
an attorney for the Ministry of Public Works, sometimes he and his
wife would come to a hotel like this for dinner. Life had been
comfortable in Prague, very agreeable, right up to 1938. Right up
to Treblinka.
Now he wondered how he could ever have been
so naive.
He was tired by the time he reached the final
flight of stairs, tired in both flesh and spirit. It had been a
long day, and he was fifty, and everything seemed a trifle unreal.
Perhaps he simply disliked being reminded that there were places
where the old life still continued. Perhaps, finally, that was why
he had turned down his wife’s cousin’s offer and had gone instead
to Israel, where they were building a whole new order of existence,
where there were no ghosts except among the living.
And then, suddenly, he felt better. He stood
there with his hand on the balustrade, and a strange, sad, somehow
comforting emotion took possession of him, and he lost the sense of
wandering through emptiness. It was several seconds before his
conscious mind took note of the music.
No more than a wisp of sound, it floated
through he still corridor, hanging in the air like smoke. A cello,
full of melancholy dignity. Someone was playing the radio.
And then suddenly the melody broke off in
middle of a phrase, and the phrase was repeated, shaped just a
little differently. It wasn’t a radio—one of the guests was playing
to himself, and not at all badly either.
Leivick listened, hardly breathing,
entranced. The grandeur of the prelude, full of double stops and
quavering trills, gave way to a jolly, dancelike tune that
transformed itself, without so much as a pause for breath, into a
sinuous aria executed at blinding speed, the notes slipping eerily
into one another as if all played on a single string.
I wonder how he manages it, Leivick thought.
And then it occurred to him that the music was coming from behind
Christiansen’s door. It had stopped even before he raised his hand
to knock.
“Come in—it isn’t locked.”
Leivick tried the knob, which turned easily
in his hand. Hotels always kept their doors locked, simply as a
matter of habit; one had to press the button on the mortise plate
or the door would lock automatically as soon as it had swung shut.
Therefore, he had been expected. He pushed the door open, but
didn’t cross the threshold. He would wait and see.
What he saw was a man sitting in a chair—and,
yes, he was every bit as big as Faglin had claimed. His sleeves
were rolled up over arms matted with blond hair, and his left hand
held both the neck of the cello that rested against his knees and,
between the first and middle fingers, the bow. In his right hand
was a British army revolver of familiar pattern. It was pointed
straight at Leivick’s chest.
“You play very beautifully, Mr. Christiansen.
Shall I come inside, or do you plan to shoot me from this
distance?”
“I said, ‘Come in.’”
With some misgivings, Leivick stepped forward
a few paces and allowed the door to close behind him. Christiansen
didn’t move; the pistol continued to line up on Leivick’s chest.
Nothing had changed, except that now he was firmly inside the trap.
He held on to his hat brim with both hands, as if to give assurance
of his good behavior.
“Mr. Christiansen,” he said finally, “do you
suppose I could prevail upon you to put that thing away? If I had
meant you any harm I would hardly have come here alone.”
“Are you alone?”
Even sitting, Christiansen managed to convey
the impression of being extremely tall. There was something
intimidating about his very stillness—he hardly seemed even to be
breathing. The eyes in his hard, handsome face were as impassive as
ice.
“Yes. I’m alone. Quite alone. Do you imagine,
Mr. Christiansen, that we would storm you in your hotel room?”
“I haven’t any idea.”
The muzzle of the pistol came up a fraction
of an inch, as if he were correcting his aim—now, Leivick
concluded, the bullet would probably catch him square in the
throat.
“All I know is that suddenly you people are
crawling all over me. The kid I took this off of didn’t give the
impression he wanted my autograph.”