Triple (45 page)

Ken Folloff

stein leaned on the saffor's chest with an elbow, thinking: For God's sake,

this is too slowl

Sarno breathed out. The confusion in his eyes had turned to fear and panic.

He gasped again, about to increase his struggles. Dickstein thought of

calling the woman to help hold him down. But the second inhalation defeated

its purpose; the struggles were perceptibly weaker; the eyelids fluttered,

and closed; and by the time he exhaled the second -breath, he was asleep.

It had taken about three seconds. Dickstein relaxed. Sarne would probably

never remember it, He gave him a little more of the gas to make sure, then

he stood up.

He looked at the woman. She was wearing shoes, stockings, and garters;

nothing else. She, looked ravishing. She caught his gaze, and opened her

arms, , offering herself: at your service, sir. Dickstein shook his head

with a regretful smile that was only partly disingenuous.

He sat in the chair beside the bed and watched her dress: skimpy panties,

soft -brassiere, jewelry, dress, coat, bag. She came to him, and he gave

her eight thousand Dutch guilders. She kissed his cheek, then she kissed

the banknotes. She went out without speaking.

Dickstein went to the window~ A few minutes later he saw the headlights of

her sports car as it went past the front of the hotel, heading back to

Amsterdam.

He sat down to wait, again. After a while he began to feel sleepy. He went

into the next room and ordered coffee from room service.

In the morning Cohen phoned to say the first officer of the Coparelli was

searching the bars, brothels and flophouses of Antwerp for his engineer.

At twelve-thirty Cohen phoned again. The captain had called him to say that

all the cargo was now loaded and he was without an engineer officer. Cohen

had said, "Captain, it's your lucky day."

At two-thirty Cohen called to say he had seen Dieter Koch aboard the

Coparelli with his kitbag over his shoulder.

Dickstein gave Sarno a little more gas each time he showed signs of waking.

He administered the last dose at Six A.M. the following day, then he paid

the bill for the two rooms and left.

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When Same finally woke up he found that the woman he had slept with had

gone without saying goodbye. He also found he was massively, ravenously

hungry.

During the course of the morning he discovered that he had been asleep not

for one night, as he had imagined, but for two nights and the day in

between.

He had an insistent feeling in the back of his mind that there was

something remarkable he had forgotten, but he never found out what had

happened to him during that lost twenty-four hours.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, November 17, 1968, the Coparelli had sailed.

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Fourteen

What Suza should have done was phone any Israeli embassy and give them a

message for Nat Dickstein.

This thought occurred to her an hour after she had told her father that

she would help Hassan. She was packing a case at the time, and she

immediately picked up the phone in her bedroom to call Inquiries for the

number. But her father came in and asked her whom she was calling. She

said the airport, and he said be would take care of that.

Thereafter she constantly looked for an opportunity to make a clandestine

call, but there was none. Hassan was with her every minute. They drove

to the airport, caught the plane, changed at Kennedy for a flight to

Buffalo, and went straight to Cortone's house.

During the journey she came to loathe Yasif Hassan. He made endless vague

boasts about his work for the Fedayeen; he smiled oilily and put his hand

on her knee; he hinted that he and Eila had been more than friends, and

that he would like to be more than friends with Suza. She told him that

Palestine would not be free until its women were free; and that Arab men

had to learn the difference between being manly and being porcine. That

shut him up.

They had some trouble discovering Cortone's addressSuza half hoped they

would fail-but in the end they found a taxi driver who knew the house.

Suza was dropped off; Hassan would wait for her half a mile down the

road.

The house was large, surrounded by a high wall, with guards at'the gate.

Suza said she wanted to see Cortone, that she was a friend of Nat

Dickstein.

She had given a lot of thought to what she should say to Cortone: should

she tell him all or only part of the truth? Suppose he knew, or could

find out, where Dickstein was: why should he tell her? She would say

Dickstein was in dan-

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ger, she had to find him and warn him. What reason did Cortone have to

believe her? She would charm him-she knew how to do that with men his

age-but he would still be suspicious.

She wanted to explain to Cortone the complete picture: that she was

looking for Nat to warn him, but she was also being used by his enemies

to lead them to him, that Hassan was half a mile down the road in a taxi

waiting for her. But then he would certainly never tell her anything.

She found it very difficult to think clearly about all this. There were

so many deceits and double deceits involved. And she wanted so badly to

see Nathaniel's face and speak to him herself.

She still had not decided what to say when the guard opened the gate for

her, then led her up the gravel drive to the house. It was a beautiful

place, but rather overripe, as if a decorator had famished it lavishly

then the owners had added a lot of expensive junk of their own choosing.

There seemed to be a lot of servants. One of them led Suza upstairs,

telling her that Mr. Cortone was having late breakfast in his bedroom.

When she walked in Cortone was sitting at a small table, digging into

eggs over and homefries. He was a fat man, completely bald. Suza had no

memory of him from the time he had visited Oxford, but he must have

looked very different then.

He glanced at her, then stood upright with a look of terror on his face

and shouted: "You should be oldl" and then his breakfast went down the

wrong way and he began to cough and sputter.

The servant grabbed Suza from behind, pinning her arms in a painful grip;

then let her go and went to pound Cortone on the back. "What did you do?"

he yelled at her. 'Vhat did you do, for Christ's sake?"

In a peculiar way this farce helped calm her a little, She could not be

terrified of a man who had been so terrified of her. She rode the wave

of confidence, sat down at his table and p6ared herself coffee. When

Cortone stopped coughing she gaid, "She was my mother."

,'My God," Cortone said. He gave a last cough, then waved the servant

away and sat down again. "You're so Me her, bell, you scared me half to

death." He screwed up his

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Ken Follett

eyes, remembering. "Would you have been about four or five years old, back

in, um, 1947?"

"That's right"

"Hell, I remember you, you had a ribbon in your hair. And now you and Nat

are an item."

She said, "So he has been here." Her heart leaped with joy.

'!Maybe," Cortone said. His fxiendliness vanished. She realized he would

not be easy to manipulate.

She said, "I want to know where he is."

"And I want to know who sent you hem"

"Nobody sent me." Suza collected her thoughts, struggling to hide her

tension. "I guessed he might have come to you for help with this ...

project he's working on. The thing is, the Arabs know about it, and

theyll kill him, and I have to warn him . Please, if you know where he

is, please help me."

She was suddenly close to tears, but Cortone was unmoved. "Helping you

is easy," he said. "Trusting you is the hard part." He unwrapped a cigar

and fit it, taking his time. Suza watched in an agony of impatience-- He

looked away from her and spoke almost to himself. "You know, there was

a time when I'd just see something I wanted and I'd grab it. It's not so

simple anymore. Now I've got all these complications. I got to make

choices, and none of them are what I really want I don't know whether

it!s the way things are now or if it's me."

He turned again and faced her. "I owe Dickstein my life. Now I have

athance to save his, if you7re telling the truth This is a debt of honor.

I have to pay it myself, in person. go what do I do?" He paused.

Suza held her breath.

"Dickstein is in a wreck of a house somewhere on the Mediterranean. It's

a ruin, hasn't been lived in for years, so theres no phone there. I could

send a message, but I couldn't be sure it would get there, and Me I said,

I have to do this myself, in person."

He drew on the cigar. "I could tell you where to go look for him, but you

just might pass the information on to the wrong people. I won't take that

risk."

"What, thenT'Suza said in a high-pitched voice. "We have to help himl-

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"I know that," Cortone said imperturbably. "So I'm going there myself."

"Ohl" Suza was taken by surprise: it was a possibility she had never

considered.

"And what about you?" he went on. "I'm not going to tell you where I'm

headed, but you could still have people follow me. I need to keep you real

close from now on. Let's face it, you could be playing it both ways. So I'm

taking you with me."

She stared at him. Tension drained out of her in a flood, she slumped in

her chair. "Oh, thank you," she said. Then, at last, she cried.

They flew first class. Cortone always did. After the meal Suza left him to

go to the toilet. She looked through the curtain into economy, hoping

against hope, but she was disappointed: there was Hassan's wary brown face

staring at her over the rows of headrests.

She looked into the galley and spoke to the chief steward in a confiding

voice. She had a problem, she said. She needed to contact her boyfriend but

she couldn't get away from her Italian father, who wanted her to wear iron

knickers until she was twenty-one. Would he phone the Israeli consulate in

Rome and leave a message for a Nathaniel Dickstein? Just say, Hassan has

told me everything, and he and I are coming to you. She gave him money for

the phone call, far too much, it was a way of tipping him. He wrote the

message down and promised.

She went back to Cortone. Bad news, she said. One of the Arabs was back

there in economy. He must be following us.

Cortone cursed, then told her never mind, the man would just have to be

taken care of later.

Suza thought: Oh, God, what have I done?

From the big house on the clifftop Dickstein went down a long zigzag flight

of steps cut into the rock to the beach. He splashed through the shallows

to a waiting motorboat, jumped in and nodded to the man at the wheel.

The engine roared and the boat surged through the waves out to sea. The sun

had just set. In the last faint light the clouds were massing above,

obscuring the stars as soon as they appeared. Dickstein was deep in

thought, racking his

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