Triple (6 page)

Ken Folleff

"Military Intelligence were bodyguarding a VIP, and they spotted the kid

tailing them. Military don't have operational personnel in the city, so

they asked my department to pick him up. It was an official request."

"God damn," Borg said feelingly. "What happened to himro

"I had to do it by the book," Kawash said. He looked very sad. "rhe boy was

interrogated and killed. His name was Avrarn Ambache, but he worked as

Towfik el-Masiri."

Borg frowned. "He told you his real name?"

"He's dead, Pierre."

Borg shook his head irritably: Kawash always wanted to linger over personal

aspects. "Why did he tell you his name?"

"Were using the Russian equipment-the electric shock and the lie detector

together. You're not training them to cope with it."

Borg gave a short laugh. "If we told them about it, wed never get any

fucking recruits. What else did he give awayr'

"Nothing we didn't know. He would have, but I killed him first."

"You killed him?"

"I conducted the interrogation, in order to make sure he did not say

anything important. All these interviews are taped now, and the transcripts

filed. We're learning from the Russians." The sadness deepened in the brown

eyes. "Why-would you prefer that I should have someone else kill your

boysr'

Borg stared at him, then looked away. Once again he bad to steer the

conversation away from the sentimental. "What did the boy discover about

Schulz?"

"An agent took the professor into the Western Desert."

"Sure, but what for?"

"I don't know."

"You must know, you're in Egyptian Intelligence!" Borg controlled his

irritation. Let the man do things at his own pace, he told himself;

whatever information he's got, he'll tell.

"I don't know what they're doing out there, because they've set up a

special group to handle it," Kawash said. "My department isn't informed."

"Any idea why?"

The Arab shrugged. "I'd say they don't want the Russians to know about it.

These days Moscow gets everything that goes through us."

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Borg let his disappointment show. "Is that all Towfik could manage?"

Suddenly there was anger in the soft voice of the Arab. "Tbe kid died for

you," he said.

"IM thsink him in heaven. Did he die in vain?"

"He took this from Schules apartment." Kawash drew a hand from inside his

coat and showed Borg a small, square box of blue plastic.

Borg took the box. "How do you know where he got it?"

"It has SchuWs fingerprints on it. And we arrested Towfik right after he

broke into the apartment."

Borg opened the box and fingered the light-proof,envelope. It was unsealed.

He took out the photographic negative.

Ile Arab said, "We opened the envelope and developed the film. It's blank."

With a deep sense of satisfaction, Borg reassembled the box and put it into

his pocket. Now it all made sense; now he understood; now he knew what he

had to do. A train came in. "You want to catch this oner' he said.

Kawash frowned slightly, nodded assent, and moved to the edge of the

platform as the train stopped and the doors opened. He boarded, and stood

just inside. He said, "I don't know what on earth the box is."

Borg thought, You don't like me, but I think you're just great. He smiled

thinly at the Arab as the doors of the subway train began to slide shut. "I

do," he said.

33

Two

The American girl was quite taken with Nat Dickstein.

They worked side by side in a dusty vineyard, weeding and hoein& with a

light breeze blowing over them from the Sea of Galilee. Dickstein had

taken off his shirt and worked in shorts and sandals, with the contempt

for the sun which only the city-born possess.

He was a thin man, small-boned, with narrow shoulders, a shallow chest,

and knobby elbows and knees. Karen would watch him when she stopped for

a break-which she did often, although he never seemed to need a rest.

Stringy muscles moved like knotted rope under his brown, scarred skin.

She was a sensual woman, and she wanted to touch those scars with her

fingers and ask him how he got them.

Sometimes he would look up and catch her staring. mid he would grin,

unembarrassed, and carry on working. His face was regular and anonymous

in repose. He had dark eyes behind cheap round spictacles of the kind

which Karen's generation liked because John Lennon wore them. His hair

was dark, too, and short: Karen would have liked him to grow it. When he

grinned that lopsided grin, he looked younger, though at any time it was

hard to say just how old he might be. He had the strength and energy of

a young man, but she had seen the concentration-camp tattoo under his

wristwatch, so he could not be much less than forty, she thought.

He had. arrived at the kibbutz shortly after Karen, in the summer of

1967. She had come, with her deodorants and her contraceptive pills,

looking for a place where she could live out hippy ideals without getting

stoned twenty-four hours a day. He had been brought here in an ambulance.

She assumed he had been wounded in the Six-Day War, and the other

kibbutzniks agreed, vaguely, that it was something like that

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TRIPLE

His welcome had been very different from hers. Karen's reception had been

friendly but wary: in her philosophy they saw their own, with dangerous

additions. Nat Dickstein returned like a long-lost son. They clustered

around him, fed hun soup and came away from his wounds with tears in

their eyes.

If Dickstein was their son, Esther was their mother. She was the oldest

member of the kibbutz. Karen had said, "She looks like Golda Meir's

mother," and one of the others had said, "I think she's Golda's father,"

and they all laughed affectionately. She used a walking stick, and

stomped about the village giving unsolicited advice, most of it very

wise. She had stood guard outside Dickstein's sickroom chasing away noisy

children, waving her stick and threatening beatings which even the

children knew would never be administered.

Dickstein had recovered very quickly. Within a few days he was sitting

out in the sun, peeling vegetables for the kitchen and telling vulgar

jokes to the older children. Two weeks later he was working in the

fields, and soon he was laboring harder than all but the youngest men.

His past was vague, but Esther had told Karen the story of his arrival

in Israel in 1948, during the War of Independence.

Nineteen forty-eight was part of the recent past for Esther. She had been

a young woman in London in the first two decades of the century, and had

been an activist in half a dozen radical left-wing causes from suffragism

to pacifism before emigrating to Palestine; but her memory went back

further, to pogroms in Russia which she recalled vaguely in monstrous

nightmare images. She had sat under a fig tree in the heat of the day,

varnishing a chair she had made with her own gnarled hands, and talked

about Dickstein like a clever but mischievous schoolboy.

"Mere were eight or nine of them, some from the university, some working

men from the East End. If they ever had any money, they'd spent it before

they got to France. They hitched a ride on a truck to Paris, then jumped

a freight train to Marseilles. From there, it seems, they walked most of

the way to Italy. Then they stole a huge car, a German Army staff car,

a Mercedes, and drove all the way to the toe of Italy." Esther's face was

creased in smiles, and Karen thought: She would love to have been there

with them.

"Dickstein had been to Sicily in the war, and it seems he

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Ken Folleff

knew the Mafia there. They had all the guns left over from the war.

Dickstein wanted guns for Israel, but he had no money. He persuaded the

Sicilians to sell a boatload of submachine guns to an Arab purchaser, and

then to tell the Jews where the pickup would take place. They knew what he

was up to, and they loved it. The deal was done, the Sicilians got their

money, and then Dickstein and his friend stole the boat with its cargo and

sailed to Israell"

Karen had laughed aloud, there under the fig tree, and a grazing goat

looked up at her balefully.

"Wait," said Esther, "you haven't heard the end of it Some of the

university boys had done a bit of rowing, and one of the other lot was a

docker, but that was all the experi.ence they had of the sea, and here they

were sailing a fivethousand-ton cargo vessel on their own. They figured out

a little navigation from first principles: the ship had charts and a

compass. Dickstein had looked up in a book how to start the ship, but he

says the book did not tell how to stop it So they steamed into Haifa,

yelling and waving and throwing their hats into the air, just like it was

a varsity rag--and ploughed straight into the dock.

"lley were forgiven instantly, of course-the guns were more precious than

gold, literally. And that!s when they started to call Dickstein The

Pirate'."

He did not look much like a pirate, working in the vineyard in his baggy

shorts and his spectacles, Karen thought. AN the same, he was attractive.

She wanted to seduce him, but she could not figure out how. He obviously

liked her, and she had taken care to let him know she was available. But he

never made a move. Perhaps he felt she was too young and innocent. Or maybe

he was not interested in women.

His voice broke into her thoughts. "I think we've finished."

She looked at the sun: it was time to go. "You've done twice as much as

me."

'Tm used to the work. Ive been here, on and off, for twenty years. 'Me body

gets into the habit."

11ey walked back toward the village as the sky turned purple and yellow.

Karen said, "What else do you do-when you're not here?"

"Oh ... poison wells, kidnap Christian children."

Karen laughed.

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TRIPLE

Dickstein said, "How does this life compare with Californiar,

"This is a wonderful place," she told him. "I think theres a lot of work

still to be done before the women are genuinely equal."

"That seems to be the big topic at the moment."

"You never have much to say about it."

"Listen, I think you're right; but it's better for people to take their

freedom rather than be given it."

Karen said, "That sounds like a good excuse for doing nothing."

Dickstein laughed.

As they entered the village they passed a young man on a pony, carrying a

rifle, on his way to patrol the borders of the settlement Dickstein called

out, "Be careful, Yisrael." The shelling from the Golan Heights had

stopped, of course, and the children no longer had to sleep underground;

but the kibbutz kept up the patrols. Dickstein had been one of those in

favor of maintaining vigilance.

-rm going to read to Mottie," Dickstein said.

"Can I comer,

"Why not?" Dickstein looked at his watch. "We've just got time to wash.

Come to my room in five minutes."

They parted, and Karen went into the showers. A kibbutz was the best place

to be an orphan, she thought as she took off her clothes. McAtie's parents

were both dead-the father blown up in the attack on the Golan Heights

during the last war, the mother killed a year earlier in a shoot-out with

Fedayeen. Both had been close friends of Dickstein. It was a tragedy for

the child, of course; but he still slept in the same bed, ate in the same

room, and had almost one hundred other adults to love and care for him-he

was not foisted onto unwilling aunts or aging grandparents or, worst of

all, an orphanage. And he had Dickstein.

When she had washed off the dust Karen put on clean clothes and went to

Dickstein's room. Mottie was already there, sifting on Dickstein's lap,

sucking his thumb and listening to Treavure Island in Hebrew. Dickstein was

the only person Karen had ever met who spoke Hebrew with a Cockney accent.

His speech was even more strange now, because he was doing different voices

for the characters in the story: a high-pitched boy's voice for Jim, a deep

snarl for Long John

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