CHAPTER 9

“Allah akhbar ashadu an la ilaha Allah wa ashadu anna Mohammed rasul Allah,” the yearning cry of the muezzin came warbling from a loudspeaker in the distant El Aqsa mosque. The setting sun gilded the cluster of stone houses crowded over the hills with a rich patina, as of burnished gold. The metallic Dome of the Rock glowed like a burning ember in the brilliant tangerine dusk. The dome dominated the Temple mount, perhaps the holiest spot on earth. It had been built over the gray rock on which, as the legend has it, Abraham had prepared to sacrifice Isaac. That same rock had been the heart of the Holy of Holies of Solomon’s Temple, the resting place of the Ark of Moses. Jesus had called the Temple his “Father’s House” when he chased the moneylenders from its courtyard. Later, the prophet Mohammed had ascended to heaven from that very spot, the hoofprints struck by his horse still visible on the surface of the rock, according to the Moslems.

Close by the Zion gate stood the Dormition Abbey where the Virgin Mary passed into eternal sleep. Huddled against the abbey on Mount Zion was David’s tomb, which also contained the Coenaculum, the room in which Jesus celebrated the Last Supper. The rosy light painted the city with a glowing silence and Caine fancied he could almost hear the mumble of maariv prayers of black-robed Orthodox Jews at the Western Wall. Even the traffic along Rehov David Ha-melekh seemed subdued at the twilight hour, the electric Delek sign at a corner gas station burning white and solitary as an eternal light. Someone had to say it, and finally Temira, Amnon’s wife, brought it out, the cherry tip of her cigarette describing an arc in the gathering darkness as she took it from her mouth.

“Jerusalem the Golden,” she said.

They were sitting at a table on Amnon and Temira’s apartment balcony overlooking the city. Scattered on the table were the remains of the meal, plates of humus and tahini and kabob scraped clean with torn pieces of pita bread. They were sipping Turkish coffee from small demitasse cups, a drink Temira made with as much sugar as coffee.

The faint breath of the evening breeze cooled their skin, after the blistering afternoon heat of the khamsin, the hot, scouring wind that blew from the desert of Arabia. The word khamsin came from the Arabic word for “fifty,” because there were supposed to be fifty such days every year, when instead of the prevailing Mediterranean breeze the wind came hot and dry and full of static electricity from the desert. It was an oppressive and irritating wind and a law, dating from the days of Turkish rule and still on the books in Israel, stated that if a man murdered his wife after three consecutive days of khamsin, he was not to be charged, because no one could be expected to put up with nagging after three days of khamsin. Now the cool breeze had brought a sense of peace to the spectacular golden sunset, characteristic of the end of khamsin.

“The City of Peace,” Yoshua said without a trace of irony, putting his cup on the table with a faint clink. Perhaps he really believed it.

“Until the next time the PLO leaves a plastique calling card at a crowded bus station,” Caine said, stretching his frame restlessly against the chair. He lit a cigarette and watched the exhaled smoke form a cloud, twisted as a challah Sabbath bread, over the honey-colored city.

“We live in dangerous times,” Amnon pronounced sententiously.

“Words to live by,” Caine responded sarcastically, conscious of the irony that Amnon’s clichéd sentence, like all clichés, held a seed of truth.

“And so we do. This land has been a battleground for ten thousand years,” Amnon said pedantically, his triple captain’s bars gleaming like gold on his epaulets in the fading twilight. He lit a cigarette, his dark face glowing in the match flare like the head of Caesar on an ancient bronze coin. He had the tan skin and curly hair of the Moroccan Jews, with intelligent brown eyes and an intense manner that might have given him the appearnce of an Arab intellectual were it not for the Israeli Army officer’s uniform he wore.

“That’s the trouble with this country, it’s been gorged with soldiers and religious nuts for too long,” Temira put in, tossing her long dark hair with a nervous gesture. Amnon looked at her sharply, as though she were resurrecting a long-standing quarrel.

“The trouble with this country is that our very shortsighted God had Moses pick the only damn place in the Middle East where there isn’t any oil,” Yoshua said, grinning, and they all laughed.

That was what he liked best about the Jews, their finely honed sense of gallows humor, Caine realized, feeling himself relax for the first time in two weeks. They had been among the most frustrating weeks of his life and it felt good to be trying something positive again, even if it blew up in his face. And if the Israelis followed procedure, that’s exactly what would, happen. But he didn’t care anymore. Because unless they could give him a lead, it was all over anyway.

He had escaped from Paraguay following the same route Mengele had used. Abandoning the Ford on a side street of Porto Merdes on the Brazilian side of the Paraná, he had taken a river launch to Puerto Iguassú. From there he had hopped a local flight to Buenos Aires to meet with Judge Luque.

The judge was a slender, aristocratic man who proved to be sympathetic, but not very helpful. He could only confirm what Caine already knew. Mengele hadn’t been sighted in more than six years. Caine promised to keep in touch if he found anything and caught the morning Aerolineas flight to Bariloche.

It was high summer in Bariloche, the streets and cafés thronged with festive crowds up from Buenos Aires for the Bavarian beer and clear mountain air. German and Spanish were the languages he heard as he brushed by couples in shorts, who spent the time between heavy sauerbraten meals shopping for camera film and sunburn lotion, and every afternoon at three, an oom-pah-pah band gave a concert in the small town square.

But Caine couldn’t exactly share the holiday mood, because he was dirty from the minute he had checked into the Lorelei, an Alpine chalet with a wooden facade carved into more curlicues than an Afro hairdo. The first time they came at him was on the curving mountain road on the way to Cerro Catedral, its snow-capped peak sparkling in the bright sunshine. Two blond young men in a BMW had tried to force his rented Mustang over the precipice at the edge of the road. He had managed to throw the Mustang across the road in a racing skid that brought him hard against the cliff face, badly denting the fender. His hands were still clenched around the wheel as he watched the BMW disappear around a curve, leaving a cloud of exhaust fumes hanging over the road like a memory.

The second time was more serious. It was evening during the dinner-hour promenade in the plaza, the couples talking and flirting while the boisterous sounds of the serious beer drinkers resounded from the sidewalk cafés. He knew they weren’t kidding this time because it was a front-and-rear tail and when he tried to reverse, so that he could flush and tail one of them and find out what it was all about, he discovered that it was a four-man box. They were serious and professional, the two blond men from the BMW and the two older types. They took their time because they knew exactly what they were doing, and he knew he wasn’t going anywhere.

The Foster cover was blown wide open and the only chance he had was to get out. Somewhere he had cut one corner too many and the word had gone out, probably from Paraguay. Like a spider sensing an intruder by tremblings in the web, Mengele had become aware of his inquiries and had given orders. The hunter had become the prey.

What made it all the more frustrating was that there was no clue to Mengele’s whereabouts in Bariloche. But that didn’t matter anymore because the town had become a death trap for him. His only chance lay in sticking with the crowd. As he threaded his way through the promenade, like a desperate halfback, he latched onto a pretty blond waitress in a dirndl sitting at a café with some friends. They needed a ride to a house party in the hills and the next thing he knew, they all piled into the Mustang. Later he was able to slip out of the party around the time that it got to the jumping-in-the-pool stage. He left the waitress delicately snoring on a pile of clothing in one of the bedrooms, her skirt pulled up over her hips and a naked bleary-eyed young man tugging at her sleeping legs, trying to separate them.

In the morning Caine was able to take the airport bus, hugging the security of the crowd, and safely boarded the first flight back to Buenos Aires. From there he had connected to Madrid, being careful to always keep a crowd between him and the two tails.

The two blond men from the BMW stayed with him all the way to Madrid, where they peeled off. He knew it wasn’t because they had lost interest. They wouldn’t do that until he had a paper tag tied to his big toe in the deep-freeze box of some local morgue. They were Judas goats, there to identify him to whoever had picked up the contract to terminate him. The fact that they were gone only meant that someone new had picked up the tag. And they weren’t playing for baseball cards, because whoever took over had been good and Caine had been unable to spot him until Rome, when he made a break at the taxi stand at Fiumicino Airport. The tail was a tall, well-dressed Mediterranean type with wraparound sunglasses and chiseled features that must have wowed the Scandinavian girls who came to disco on the Costa Brava. He hurriedly grabbed the taxi right behind Caine’s.

Caine made the break in the middle of a colossal Roman traffic jam, the Fiats honking and climbing the sidewalks. He handed a wad of lire to the driver, then jumped out of the taxi and weaved his way through the bedlam of horns and noisy Italian comments on his ancestry to a department store, where he picked up a Tyrolean-style hat and raincoat, then added a false mustache to change the image. He left the department store by a side entrance after quickly scanning the crowd for Mr. Sunglasses. Although Caine appeared to have lost him, he knew that he would have to jump back into the frying pan to catch his connecting flight. Fiumicino was the red zone, where they would try to pick him up again. He waited under the big Cinzano sign for the Alitalia flight to Ben-Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv, booked under his own name, until he felt reasonably sure he was clean by the time he boarded.

Things were becoming a little too hairy, he thought. When they forced you to use your own ID to change the image, it was time to start reaching for the rip cord. Then he remembered the stamps and C.J., her long lithe legs opening to him and the little cry of pleasure when he entered her. It was all his if he could pull it off. He remembered the old Gypsy and knew that he no longer had any choice in the matter. He had to go on with it, no matter how many alarm bells he set off, or what kind of nasty little back-alley death they had planned for him.

“Are you done, Signore?” the Alitalia stewardess with the dark eyes that matched her uniform was asking him, gesturing at the pinkish melting ice cubes that was all that was left of his Campari and soda.

“Si, grazier.”

“Prego.”

He had telephoned Yoshua from Ben-Gurion Airport and it was Yoshua, whom he had worked with on the Abu Daud job in Paris, who had set him up for this evening’s meeting with Amnon Sofer, a Mossad staff intelligence officer. So far as Yoshua knew, Caine was still working for the Company. Caine let him believe that and Yoshua didn’t press him. One of the advantages of being a spy is not having to do a lot of talking about your work.

“Retribution,” said Amnon quietly, picking a speck of tobacco from his lip. Myriad pinpoints of light began to blink on in the gathering darkness, the hills dotted with them like the bivouac fires of an invading army. The air had grown cold and soon they would have to move inside.

“An eye for an eye. The biblical injunction still applies,” Yoshua said. Temira began to clear away the dishes and take them inside.

“To be sure, to be sure,” Amnon murmured, raising his eyebrow as a signal to Yoshua to leave them alone. Yoshua got up and went inside and Caine could hear the musical babble of Hebrew as Yoshua began talking with Temira. He became aware of the sound of a radio newscast being turned on. The announcer was mentioning the names of politicians and using the word shalom, so Caine assumed that he was saying something about peace talks. Amnon pulled a cigarette out of his pack of Dubek’s, Caine struck a match, and they both lit up. Smoking was a national epidemic-among the excitable Israelis, Caine observed.

“Why is the Company suddenly interested in Mengele? And why does your being here have to be unofficial?” Amnon said.

“I’m an operative, not the DCI. They only tell me what to do, not why.” Caine shrugged.

“Retribution,” Amnon said again. “We’ve been trying to get away from that policy for a long time, since the days of Isar Harel.”

“That’s not what Yoshua thinks. ‘An eye for an eye,’ he said. And the hate in his eyes was real enough.”

“Get any two Jews together and you’re bound to get at least three opinions on everything. Anyway, Yoshua doesn’t make policy.”

“Don’t tell me the policymakers don’t have to take men like Yoshua into account.”

“I remember someone once asked Levi Eshkol—blessings on his memory—how it felt to be prime minister. Eshkol replied, ‘You try being prime minister of a country with three million prime ministers,’” Amnon said, chuckling.

“Are you trying to tell me that the Mossad no longer has any interest in the Nazis?”

“Let’s just say that we have all the present enemies we can handle. We don’t need to go around trying to dig up enemies from the past,” Amnon observed mildly. The pale crescent moon hung over the city like an Islamic omen, as if to underscore what Amnon was saying.

“Don’t tell me the Jews have decided to forgive and forget the malachos mavet of Auschwitz,” Caine retorted.

Amnon smiled at Caine’s clumsy Hebrew pronunciation. Then he sighed and shook his head, the cigarette tip glowing like a tiny beacon in the shadows of his face. His sad Jewish eyes examined Caine’s face carefully.

“Im eshkahaich Yerushalaim, If I forget thee, O Jerusalem. No, we haven’t forgotten, or forgiven,” he said at last.

“Look I don’t know what the Company is running or why. My job is to locate Mengele. Period. If there’s more, they’ll tell me when the time comes. We work strictly on a need-to-know basis, you know that. But I doubt that retribution has anything to do with it. The Company isn’t given to subscribing to Jewish philanthropies. Whatever it is, it’s strictly top drawer, ‘For your eyes only,’ because otherwise we’d be running it through channels. Now do you have a lead on the son of a bitch or don’t you?” Caine said irritably, standing up. He had played his trump and all he could do was hope that his manufactured anger was convincing.

“All right, you make your point. Sit down, chaver. Please,” Amnon said placatingly. “I was just feeling you out. We Jews have to argue about everything, didn’t you know that?” Amnon said with a wink. Caine couldn’t help himself. He let out a snort of laughter and sat down.

He pulled on his jacket. The night had grown cold. “What have you got?” he asked.

“Do you know Feinberg?”

“Only by reputation. Didn’t he supply the key lead for the Eichmann snatch?”

“Also Wiese, the Butcher of Bialystok, Ehle, the Mauer brothers, Franz Stangl, the commander of Treblinka, and dozens more. Feinberg operates the Jewish Relief Center in Vienna. No, he is the Jewish Relief Center.”

“What about him?”

“He came to us about three months ago and told us he might have a lead on Mengele. But he said it would require a large bribe. I believe fifty thousand Deutschmarks was mentioned.”

“What happened?”

“Fifty thousand marks is a lot a money, chaver. We don’t have billions to play with like the CIA,” Amnon said with a touch of bitterness. “Anyway, we kicked around the idea and decided not to pursue it. Our resources in money and manpower were already stretched to the breaking point.”

“Why didn’t you come to us?”

Amnon looked at him scornfully.

“Didn’t you say yourself that the Company isn’t given to subscribing to Jewish philanthropies. Besides, if the Americans or anybody else had ever really gone after Mengele, he would have been brought around the corner a long time ago. Mengele has survived because of official indifference, that’s all. Just indifference.”

“Well, we’re not indifferent now. And I’ve got the money. So do me a favor and let Feinberg know I’m coming. And chaver,” Caine said sharply, “this conversation never happened.”

The two men got up and shook hands. Then, almost as if it had been rehearsed, they both looked out at the pale, jumbled lights of Jerusalem, the stars hanging in the night sky, like a heavenly mirror of the city.

“It’s a pleasure doing business with you, Adon,”— Amnon hesitated briefly, searching his memory for the name Caine was using—“Foster.”

They drove in silence down from the Judean hills toward Tel Aviv, situated on the coastal plain that had been the Via Maris, the pathway of armies since long before recorded history, because it was the only route across the mountains and deserts that separated the ancient empires of Africa and Asia. The car radio was tuned to Israeli pop music broadcast from Kol Yisrael. The music struck Caine as pleasant but a little repetitious. All the songs seemed to sound alike. It was a little like having bad sex, he thought. The sensation isn’t unpleasant, but you’re not sorry when it’s over. Every so often Yoshua glanced away from his driving and over at Caine, as though he wanted to say something but was waiting for Caine to begin.

The headlights picked out the ancient wrecks of World War II vintage armored cars and burnt-out truck chassis that littered the sides of the road. During the 1948 War of Independence the Israelis had tried desperately to run the blockade of this road to reach besieged Jerusalem. After the war they had painted the wrecks with blood-red antirust paint, garlanded them with flowered wreaths, and left them beside the road as memorials. There were times, Caine thought, when it was impossible to escape the notion that the world was nothing but a vast graveyard.

“Do you have any children?” Yoshua asked, and Caine knew that he was thinking about a recent terrorist incident in Metulla where two children had been killed. For a moment the image of Lim, laughing and pregnant in a field of flowering poppies, flashed into his mind. Then he remembered the first time he had seen Lim’s daughter, sitting motionless on the porch of the hut and staring out into the rain. He tried to push the image away and forced himself to think of C.J., as she looked in the flickering glow from the fireplace, her long blond hair cascading over them like a shower of golden silk.

“No,” he said.

“That’s the worst, that’s where they really get you. When they get the children,” Yoshua said grimly, and Caine suddenly realized that Yoshua was too emotional for this business. Maybe the Israelis knew it too and that was why they had called him back from Paris.

“That’s not the worst,” Caine said and regretted it as soon as he said it, because he couldn’t stop it now. It was like releasing the cork in a bottle of champagne and the images began to spill over, the old tightness closing on his chest like a vise. “Then what is?”

“The worst are the things we do ourselves,” Caine said, wondering how it was that Yoshua didn’t know that. Wasn’t it Yoshua himself who had said, “In the end we are all murderers”? And then it didn’t matter because he was remembering Teu La. He remembered how Dao had looked at him, with that strange mixture of curiosity and indifference, as though Caine had been a spoiled child throwing a temper tantrum, when he had argued furiously against the raid. Even as he had shouted and threatened, he could sense Dao deciding whether it was worth having him killed. Maybe that thought had held him back. Maybe that was why he hadn’t tried to kill Dao right then and there.

There was no military reason for it, he remembered shouting. There was no reason at all, because the pull-out had already begun and their only function was to distract Charley to cover the withdrawal. Except that reasons no longer mattered in a world where everything was falling to pieces, while the diplomats at the Paris peace talks had already spent more than a year debating the shape of the table for the parley.

Dao had stood there, swaying and dangerous, his eyes bloodshot from the corn liquor. All of them drunk and miserable in the fetid heat of the bush, the mosquitoes rising around them in clouds thick as mist. They had been savagely mauled for two solid days in the Plain of Jars by the heavy mortars of a full Pathet Lao division, supported by VC artillery. By the third day they were using bodies to make breastworks to crouch under, the bodies bloated black and green with the heat and the unforgettable stench of death that permeated every breath. They burrowed under the damp earth and piles of bodies like insects, the constant explosions blowing the limbs of the living and the dead into an endless rain of bleeding flesh.

When they finally escaped into the bush, it was more of a stampede than a retreat, and when they collected at the fallback site, a muddy clearing thick with snakes and land crabs, they had fallen on the corn liquor with the desperation of desert travelers on oasis water. There were barely two hundred of them left, most of them strangers to him, with the hollow eyes and rabid glare of a pack of starving dogs. Perhaps that was why it had happened. Or perhaps it was because of the wounded they had had to leave behind, like Vang, with his belly ripped open, holding his own intestines in his hands, like strings of sausages. Or Pao, stumbling blindly among the shell holes, talking to himself about getting home for the rice harvest, with one eye ripped completely away and the other eyeball hanging down his cheek from its empty red socket. Or Lynhiavu, who caught a bullet with Caine’s name on it, except that he had turned away for a second and when he turned back, Lynhiavu was lying there with a faint Buddha-like smile on his face and his brains dripping out of a hole in his head the size of a baby’s fist. Or perhaps … well, perhaps it didn’t matter why.

“It’s murder, Dao,” Caine had shouted.

Dao blinked at him like a sleepy owl, then shrugged and took another swig from the jug, stumbling and falling into the mud.

“So it’s murder, so what,” Dao had muttered thickly. “What do you think war is, you stinking, fucking Yankee? War is murder, not one of your Anglo-Saxon fucking games with rules. There are only murderers and victims,” he howled. “Murderers and victims!” grabbing an M-16 and emptying the magazine in Caine’s direction, except that he was so drunk that all he did was prune a few trees, their leaves fluttering to the ground like wounded birds.

They were nearing Latrun, the silhouette of the old Arab fort on the hill a dark shadow against the starry night. In ’48 Latrun had been held by the Arab Legion to cut off the Jerusalem road. In the end the Haganah had been reduced to attacking the escarpment with green, untrained troops, but all they had managed to do was to soak the wheatfields with blood. Human blood was the one commodity that never seemed in short supply, Caine mused. In the end the Haganah had been forced to build the legendary “Burma road,” across the mountains, to outflank the Latrun salient.

“What do you Americans know about the worst, anyway?” Yoshua was saying. “War and terrorism are something you watch over dinner on the seven o’clock news, just before the football highlights.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Caine said indifferently, wishing to God he would shut up. Turning his eyes back to the road, Yoshua flicked his lights and passed an army Jeep on a blind curve. Caine closed his eyes for a moment, with the thought that all Israeli drivers are born fatalists.

Well, what would a fatalist make of Teu La? he wondered. They had attacked the hamlet at dawn, sending a patrol down to the ravine on the opposite side of the village, to cut off any chance of escape. The terrified peasants of Teu La had hidden Pathet Lao arms and. guerrillas, and as Lao tribesmen, they had always had a basic sense of superiority to the Hmong, whom they regarded as little better than savages. It had gone beyond war, Caine realized as the Meos moved into the village. It had degenerated into a tribal conflict, a chance to settle old scores.

The sun came up hot and bright into an unblemished blue sky, the dawn evanescent and brief as a single heartbeat. Birds were chirping among the palm fronds and the lazy hum of insects rose from the dried mud fields. Although they were drunk and exhausted, the Hmong moved purposefully into position, just as he had trained them. When Dao gave the signal, they charged headlong, screaming the old war cries, two to a hut. The procedure was always the same. First the grenade tossed into the hut and they hit the ground, flattening themselves against the explosion. Before the smoke cleared, they would leap inside to spray the hut with a carbine, just in case the grenade hadn’t got the attention of those inside. Then matches or a lighter were applied to the thatched sides and roof and then they sprinted to the next hut.

In a little while all of the huts were burning, sending an acrid column of smoke up to stain the empty sky. The air was full of screams and war cries and the sounds of firing as Caine jogged toward the ravine, sweat stinging his eyes. There were only a few old men trapped in the ravine, pulling their rags about their bodies as though the cloth could protect them from bullets. All the rest were women and children, wailng incomprehensibly as if they were being punished for doing something wrong. The women pressed the children close to their bodies with trembling arms, their eyes wide and desperate.

Half-a-dozen tribesmen had cornered a pretty Lao girl, her chest heaving and wet with sweat. They were laughing as they ripped her clothes off and pinned her face down over the body of an old woman. Her thin buttocks quivered as they began to take turns mounting her, arguing about whether to start first with her vagina or her anus.

When Caine reached the edge of the ravine, the shooting had already started. Dao was still drinking from the jug and every so often he would stagger to his feet and fire his M-16 into the ravine, the M-16 that Caine had given him. One of the Meo grabbed an infant from its mother, made a funny face to make the baby laugh, then threw the baby into the air and shot it before it hit the ground. A few of them had tied an old man to a tree near the ravine and were shooting their crossbows at him, being careful to avoid a fatal shot. The old man twisted and groaned as one by one, the arrows snicked into his body, until there were so many arrows sticking out of him, he looked like a medieval fresco of the martyrdom of St. Stephen.

They were still firing into the ravine, which was a tangled mass of blood and bodies, limbs still thrashing, like a scene that could only be painted by Goya. A wounded moon-faced woman with a small boy in her arms was trying to scramble out of the ravine, her hand desperately clutching at a tuft of grass. Dao leaned over, as though to help her, placed the muzzle of the M-16 against the child’s head, and fired. The head exploded into a thousand fragments and the woman fell back with a scream that went on till Dao fired again.

Caine raised his M-16 and brought Dao into his sights. Dao turned to look at him, his eyes dark and opaque, but he didn’t raise his gun. Instead he just shrugged and shouted.

“They’re Communists, Tan Caine. That’s all. Just Communists. Then we kill them. Then they’re nothing. Nothing at all.”

Caine tried to squeeze the trigger, but he couldn’t because it didn’t matter anymore, because nothing did. And because he knew that in some way he had brought them to this. They’re ours, he thought bitterly. We’re the ones who paid them and taught them how to fight a civilized war. That’s how it happens. Once the killing starts, there’s no place to draw the line. He threw his M-16 into the ravine and turned away. As he walked, a refrain from a song Country Joe had sung at Woodstock kept running through his mind until he thought he would literally go mad with it. Round and round it went with the numbers, like a children’s nursery rhyme:

And it’s one-two-three

What are we fighting for?

Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,

The next stop is Vietnam.

He saw one of the tribesmen dismount the motionless body of the raped girl, and apparently dissatisfied, he pulled an old .45 automatic out of his belt and blew half her head off.

“How did your talk with Amnon go?” Yoshua wanted to know.

“Okay,” Caine said wearily. Give it a rest, will you? Just give it a rest, he told himself. He lit a cigarette and rolled the window down a few inches to let the smoke escape out to the rush of cold night air. The images fled back into the night of the soul, like the smoke drawn away by the suction created by the car’s speed. Yoshua slowed down as they entered Rehovot, site of the Weizmann Institute, where much of the work on the Israeli nuclear project went on. The streets were filled with noisy young people in shorts, milling in front of movie houses and sipping ubiquitous bottles of gazoz soda pop.

“When you left Paris, was Claude still doing business?” Caine asked. Yoshua pounded irritably on the horn at the driver in front of him, who had the chutzpah to wait for the light to turn green before starting to move.

“The Claudes of the world never go out of business,” Yoshua pronounced.

Caine was getting a little tired of Yoshua’s brand of saloon philosophy, the kind they print on cocktail napkins. The memories were getting to him, he realized, and he was on the verge of telling Yoshua to stuff it. He held himself back, realizing that that wasn’t a good idea; the last thing in the world he wanted was to get the Israelis interested in him any more than they already were. Only Amnon and Yoshua knew him here and he was hoping they would let it go at that.

He thought about Claude, whom he knew only by hearsay as an independent counterfeiter from Marseille who impartially produced documents for the Sûreté Nationale and the Corsican gangs, with a fine lack of distinction for anything except the price. He had first heard of Claude from the suave plainclothesman from the rue des Saussaies who had arranged for his exit from France after the Abu Daud hit. He wanted to get Claude started on a new cover for him even before he saw Feinberg. By now the Foster cover was as effective a bit of camouflage as a red flag waved in front of a bull.

Yoshua dropped him off at the Dan Hotel on the crowded Tel Aviv beachfront. Along Rehov Hayarkon near the hotel entrance, miniskirted girl soldiers walked hand-in-hand with tanned boyfriends, street cafés echoed with boisterous shouts and shabby moneychangers clustered like flies around the tourists, offering to exchange dollars for Israeli pounds at black-market rates that were quoted daily in the Jerusalem Post. When he was back in his room, Caine called the international operator and left word for her to call him when she had made the connections to L.A. and Marseille. Then he stripped off his clothes, took a long shower, and went to bed.

He dreamed he was back at the Moonglow with C.J., the surf pounding at the pilings as though they were about to be washed out to sea. He was telling her that he couldn’t marry her, because he already had a wife, someone he had left behind in Asia. Her blue eyes were wet and shiny and she was saying something, but he couldn’t hear her because the damn telephone was ringing and then he came awake, dripping with sweat, as though surfacing from the sea and fumbled for the phone by his bed. The international operator had finally put his call through, he realized grabbing the receiver. The dull roar of surf came through the earpiece. It was like holding a seashell to his ear.

“This is Wasserman, who is this?” he heard Wasserman’s voice say.

“This is an open line, so let’s keep it brief,” Caine said, hoping that the transatlantic traffic was busy tonight. These days if you want to pass something on the telephone, you might as well take out a full-page ad in the Times.

“How’s it going?” Good, he thought. Wasserman had picked up his cue. Now let’s see if he picked up the tab.

“We’ve got a solid lead on that lost consignment of angels, but it’s going to be expensive to cover the tariff.”

“How expensive?”

“Thirty-five K.” The extra money might come in handy. Sitting down to play with less than you can afford to bet is the surest way to guarantee losing, Caine thought.

“That’s some tariff,” Wasserman said, pausing to consider.

“In for a penny, in for a pound. It’s part of the deal.”

“Nobody likes a shnorrer,” Wasserman said, and Caine pictured him in the office, glancing at the Monet and lighting a cigar, enjoying his brief moment of power for all it was worth. Where was C.J. now? Caine wondered, feeling a sudden pang of hatred for Wasserman.

“The goods are worth the price,” Caine said harshly.

“Is this absolutely necessary?” Wasserman replied equally harshly, and Caine felt that he was hearing the man’s true voice for the first time. It was a legitimate question—perhaps the only legitimate question that Wasserman could ever ask him, since Wasserman didn’t know how the game was going, or what the Scoreboard read.

“Do you think I’d risk a call if it weren’t?”

“How do we arrange the transfer of funds?” And Caine felt himself breathing again. He could almost smell his quarry and he badly wanted the game to go on. Perhaps Wasserman had felt it too. In for a penny in for a pound, he thought, a surge of relief coursing through his veins like a shot of alcohol.

“With a certified letter-of-credit bearer bond, sent to me, care of poste restante in Vienna.”

“Don’t be such a chozzer next time,” Wasserman said with a good-natured tone. He knew Caine must be on to something or he would never have risked a call.

“Shalom,” Caine said, and hung up. He was smiling as he lit a cigarette and leaned his head on his hands against the headboard of the bed. For no reason, a quote from Shakespeare’s Richard III had popped into his mind:

“God take King Edward to his mercy,/And leave the world for me to bustle in!”