The Rainy Day Man: Contemporary Romance (Suspense and Political Mystery Book 1) (3 page)

             
"There must be another place where they need a man with experience, someone who can operate alone."

             
He laughed drily.  The friendliness he had displayed at the party in Paris was missing now. 

             
"Don't take this personally.  As a citizen, you should even be pleased; we've grown from that stage when a few pioneers could found a town in the desert and a solitary agent could settle accounts with a bomb.  We have an army which can provide a solution for every situation."

I squinted at the set of pens at the center of the desk, the files,
the outgoing mail tray.

"You've got to get me out of here."  Those words were a kind of code, touching a very basic collegiality which was the only thing we shared after all those years.

              He looked at the tip of his pencil as if seeking advice.  A crease appeared in his forehead. 

             
"Maybe...  Maybe there'll be something..."  I was already nodding my assent.  "I'm not promising anything..."

             
Another nod.  A handshake.  My gratitude, the pride of a benefactor in his eyes and, primarily, the exultation which overcame me on the way home:  I was about to regain something I had almost lost.

***

              That night, in the thickness of the dark, I tried to speak to Hannah's alienating back.  At dawn I awoke to the sound of her voice. 

             
"Why are you really going?" she asked.

             
"It's my job.

             
She put her warm hand on my cheek:  "You have another job now, less dangerous;  a second career."

             
I turned over onto my back.  "Do you know what I do there?"

             
"You've never told me."

             
"I hand out mail," I said in a low voice.

             
Her eyes were open wide, her hair tousled, revealing a small, shell-like ear which once, in my distant youth, I had admired.

             
"There's a room there through which all the mail, every scrap of paper sent within the system, passes.  The people who send and receive it have no names, only numbers.  The people sitting in the room have lists of correspondents from one to sixty.  Those are the less secret ones.  I sort the telegrams for correspondents from sixty to one hundred.  In the next room sits someone who knows the most secret ones: one hundred and above..."

             
"It sounds like a very responsible job, more responsible than running around the streets of all kinds of cities all over the world..."

             
"I shrivel when I read the telegrams of the people who are running around all kinds of cities all over the world..."

             
"It'll pass, once you get used to it..."

             
"You don't understand," I said, with a feeling of growing despair.  "It's my identity, the only way I can identify myself when I wake up in the morning and ask, Who am I?"

             
"And then," her face wore her psychologist's look and her voice changed accordingly, "what do you reply to yourself?"

             
I touched my chest.  "I am a veteran, the coolest and most experienced sapper in the service..."

             
"Coolest," she smiled.  "Daddy said that in the office they doubt whether you have any emotions or feelings.  He said that..."

             
I turned my back on her and took a book from the bedside table to read in the bathroom. 

             
She pulled it away from me:  "Don't hide behind your books.  At least admit that I have nothing to offer compared to the fantasy of cops-and-robbers and the books you take with you everywhere..."  Her voice dropped.  She moved into a personal world of bitterness and pain. 

             
"I have invested in you, Danny Simon, I have invested my youth... my soul.  I've learned to manage and run a house and raise kids alone, and when you were kind enough to show up, given you all the little secrets of my body too...  Those were my savings, which you emptied from one holiday to the next, from one year to the next, in order to spend it on the bombs you make in miserable flats, hotel rooms and all kinds of places that no one else goes to.  I've known for quite a while that I won't get any profit from it, but all the same, I keep hoping I'll get something back, a tiny, shrunken remnant of the capital..."

             
On the other side of the wall Jonathan's alarm clock rang.  She buried her head deep in the pillow.  "They won't let you," she comforted herself in a hard voice.

             
I rummaged through the cupboard, looking for socks:  "They can't stop someone who wants to so badly..."

             
"In order to advance you need more than to want..."

             
Now would come the usual conversation, a kind of regular ceremony in which I would be stripped of my rank.  I dressed quickly, but not quickly enough.  Hannah sat up straight in the middle of the bed: 

             
"It wasn't by chance that you were passed over for promotion."  Her flesh was bursting out of all the apertures of her nightdress, like a soufflé which had gotten out of the cook's control.  "It wasn't by chance that you were passed over for promotion all those years, in spite of Daddy's help..."

             
"Perhaps because of your father's help..."

             
"It's easy for you to blame him," she gasped malevolently, "but it's not his fault, it's something in you.  Once, when you had just started working there and I went to cry on his shoulder, he said to me, 'There are two kinds of people doing that work:  people with ability and those with lost souls.  If your husband is one of the first he'll advance and be a wonderful success.  If he's one of the others, another restless adventurer, take consolation that they get burned out quickly.  The system tires of them...' "

             
Jonathan passed the door, a shadowy figure through the dim glass.  I hopped on one foot, putting my shoes on standing up. 

             
"They haven't tired of me," I murmured.

             
As if to prove it, the mail crossing my desk contained a telegram from the Manpower Department that gave Daniel Simon a posting to a village in Lebanon.  The same afternoon the person who was to replace me arrived carrying an evening paper and an auricula plant.  At four I was summoned for a briefing.

Right from the start there was something abnormal.  I was summoned to the Head's office, and not, as might have been expected, to the Briefing Room.  On his desk,
which had been cleared of all its usual objects, lay two large envelopes.  Around the desk stood the Head and two other people I did not know.  When I came in they all looked me over.  The Head smiled.  His smile had regained the warmth which had been missing in our previous meeting and which had probably been stored somewhere since the burial in Paris. 

"This is Simon," he said with a sweep of his hand.  "Come in, sit with us." 

The moment my behind made contact with the hard seat the two others turned round and left the room.

             
We were left alone.  The Head peeled the glue off the flap of the first envelope. 

             
"So, we've found you something," he said half to himself.  He shook the envelope and a folded map fell out.  When it was spread out it revealed a mountainous area crisscrossed at the center by a network of black pencil lines.  The Head passed his hand over them as if stroking a scar. 

             
"No man's land," he said regretfully.  "We couldn't go on from here, all our forces were diverted to Beirut."

             
"Dura," I deciphered out loud the tiny letters which encircled a tiny, almost invisible, point of habitation.

             
He didn't hear, or perhaps it was not yet time to refer to it. 

             
"...But we'll be back.  We must straighten the line."  The pen in his hand drew a blue path on the paper.  "We'll just get ourselves organized in the coastal area and further forward, as far as this road..."  He bent to examine a fragile line which wound between the peaks.  "Of course, it's almost certain that at the crucial moment, when it'll be necessary to move, there'll be opposition.  People will preach at us that war is a terrible thing and that we mustn't attack without being attacked..."  He looked at me with a sudden movement.  "And here," he said, rousing himself, "you can help."

             
I waited tensely until he found his place on the map again.

             
"Dura," he pointed ceremoniously, "as you said..."  He had the talent of making his ideas seem as if you'd been waiting for them to happen all your life.  "Something small, the kind of thing you do so well.  Not harmful but impressive, not painful but convincing.  Slightly primitive, a little rural, an impression that it's been done by a local underground...  And, most important," he raised his finger, "there should be something left that can be shown to journalists..."

             
"Do you think the world will buy that...?"

             
"The world will buy anything that's in the right wrapping.  We'll take care of that.  We'll add some schmaltz here and there, one or two human interest stories..." 

             
"I've never been involved in something like this, blowing up something in our territory..."

             
His face froze in mid-expression between friendliness and reprobation.  "What's the difference?" he asked sharply.  "In the past you hit the enemy directly.  Now you'll convince other people that they have to be hit."

             
"I'm really harming our people, cheating them..."

             
"I'd call it guidance, maybe even education. A kind of help we give to those who are mistaken and can't see the threat in the distance..."  The look in his eyes was one of complete sincerity, almost a sense of mission.  "Why should we wait for a tragedy when it's too late to react?  Better a small, harmless bomb, a convincing disturbance at the moment which suits us best..."  He folded up the map thoughtfully. "If there is some deception involved, it's no different to what one does to prevent someone committing suicide..."  He fell silent.  The map rested securely in the envelope in his hand.  His other hand was at his desk drawer.  The way he stood indicated expectancy, an invitation to a decision.

             
"I don't know," I said.  "I've got to think."

             
With a gentle, suggestive movement, his head moved in negation.  "This thing has got to be finalized now.  When you leave here you'll either be in it or out of it, but not in the middle."

             
I had one brief minute.  But instead of thoughts all I had were sensations.  I felt the concrete beneath the carpet, behind the white plaster on the walls, above the ceiling.  It moved around me as if in a constant shrinking process.  On its surface hovered his proposal:  a path of light along which I could fly out before complete darkness came.  What reason did I have for not doing it?  To what extent had I known the overall picture, the true results of the things I had done in the past?  Wasn't that always how things had been, and I had paid by deliberately ignoring them and refraining from knowing the high price of freedom, of life far away from Hannah and home?

              I nodded in assent.

             
He jerked into life and turned to the other envelope.  It contained several large photographs of an imposing two-story building surrounded by a well-tended garden. 

             
"We're there now.  That might also be an appropriate target for you.  Nothing will happen if you carefully peel a few ornaments off the plaster.  The main thing is that none of our people get hurt."

             
"And what about the local people?"

             
"They always get hurt, don't they?"  He looked straight at me.  "At any rate, our man there will help you decide.  Don't do anything before consulting him."

             
"Our man?" I asked in surprise.

             
"He's been there for many years, completely independent and experienced.  You can rely on him.  He'll make contact with you."  He smiled.  "Presumably, he'll notice you before you identify him."

             
"Maybe he will and maybe he won't."

             
He gave me another of his long looks.  "The main thing is that you should be careful.  He's been there a very long time and has an important position there.  In fact, he's one of the two most important people in the village."