In his second-floor room in the Dan Hotel the Polish Jew, Matthew Yosevitz, dismantled the rifle with the telescopic sights given to him in Jaffa by agents of El Fatah and ordered a pot of tea with lemon.
Then he lay down on the bed, stared out across the placid sea draped with orange Khamsin dust and considered his predicament.
He was twenty-seven years of age, a qualified geologist. with a growing international reputation, a trained assassin, an up-and-coming officer in the KGB, and a member of the Communist Party. But he was also a Jew and therein lay his predicament.
At the age of seven Yosevitz, whose parents had been killed in the war, had been taken from Warsaw to Moscow. There he was brought up as a Russian and a Communist. By the age of seventeen all traces of Semitism had ostensibly been expunged: he was a young Communist zealot and a fledgling member of the secret police. There was no treachery involved: it was merely that Communism was all he knew.
After aptitude tests held in the vaults of Lubyanka police headquarters opposite a toy shop in Moscow, Yosevitz was sent back to Warsaw to study geology and renew contacts with the Jewish community.
By these methods Communist agents were introduced into Israel as immigrants afire with Zionism. Each was schooled in the attitudes to present to the Israeli screening officers. When the immigrants had satisfied the Israeli security machine the Soviets assumed that they had established an agent in Israel. And that, Yosevitz now knew, was where the Soviets could well be making a considerable error of judgement.
When he arrived in Israel, Yosevitz phlegmatically resolved to carry out the bidding of his KGB colonel in Warsaw. The obstacles did not appear formidable – a pleasant but ingenuous English geologist, a known American agent, and probably an Israeli operator somewhere around. But even as he drove from Lod airport to Tel Aviv the instincts of Judaism began to awake – a heritage that could never be completely erased by any modern ideology; a heritage that suddenly germinated and blossomed on its own soil.
Yosevitz found he wanted to share the aloneness and swagger of the Israelis – but you couldn’t completely discard beliefs assimilated for twenty years. He wanted to help protect his land – but he had been briefed to undermine its protection. He was a Communist and a Jew. In other words, he thought, drawing the curtains across the orange afternoon, I am a dual personality, a schizophrenic.
A waiter brought the tea. A tough-looking man in his thirties with a handsome hawkish face. He didn’t look like a waiter.
Yosevitz said: ‘Just a minute.’
The waiter stopped at the door.
‘How long have you worked here as a waiter?’
‘Not very long, sir. I’m just helping out. Several of the staff have had to go on reserve duty in the Army.’
‘Why, is there anything particular happening?’ Yosevitz the spy wanted to know in case there was anything to report: Yosevitz the Jew wanted to know because of his involvement.
‘Not that I know of, sir.’
‘Much news today?’
‘Not a great deal, sir. An American businessman was shot dead in the Dead Sea.’
Yosevitz glanced at the violin case containing his rifle. The shot had synchronised nicely with the burst of fire from the Jordanian hills. He would have to get the rifle back to Jaffa in the evening. Before the party.
‘Poor bastard,’ Yosevitz said. He poured a cup of tea. ‘Can you see any end to all this?’
The waiter shrugged, powerful shoulders pushing his jacket out of shape. ‘Not until the terrorists stop attacking us. How can there be? And they won’t stop because Nasser and Hussein aren’t in control any more.’
‘You mean the guerrillas are dictating to the Arab leaders?’
The waiter looked quizzically at Yosevitz. ‘I said the terrorists. Of course they’re dictating. The Lebanese are scared stiff of them. And when Hussein was away El Fatah ordered the shelling of Eilat against his wishes.’
‘It sounds very depressing.’
The waiter said: ‘There will be another war. Another victory for the Jews.’
‘You sound as if you’re looking forward to it,’ Yosevitz said.
The waiter opened the door. ‘I am a soldier,’ he said. ‘We are all soldiers.’ He closed the door.
Yosevitz put on his wide-lapelled jacket and tightened the knot in his thin tie. He thought of all the expensive suits and silk ties in the hotel. He looked around his fine room and thought of the poverty of the barrack-block of apartments in which he had lived when he was a student at Moscow University. Yosevitz the Communist strapped his pistol under his jacket with deliberation and picked up the violin case.
But as he left the room he glanced at a copy of the evening newspaper on the bed. At the faces of two Jewish soldiers. Both dead. Yosevitz the schizophrenic walked wearily across the busy foyer to the street. Those who noticed the pale preoccupied young man in the gold-rimmed spectacles carrying a violin case presumed that he was mentally composing. In fact Matthew Yosevitz was debating whether or not to carry out his second killing of the day.
A hundred yards from the floodlit tourist centre of Jaffa where the most ancient history seemed to be contemporary, Yosevitz sat with two Arabs in a cellar beneath a defunct brothel and listened to the voice of El Fatah broadcast from Cairo.
Yosevitz understood a little of the broadcast. The two Arabs listened intently, talking excitedly, smoking incessantly. The voice on the radio, exhorting all refugees to rise against the Israelis who had driven them out of their homeland, stopped. A more furtive voice replaced it.
‘What’s he saying?’ Yosevitz said. The senior of the two El Fatah agents signalled to him to be silent and lit another cigarette. An American cigarette, Yosevitz noted. The voice changed again and the Arab whose name was Hamid switched off the radio.
Yosevitz said: ‘Well?’
Hamid said: ‘It was in code. Part of it was addressed to me, Blue Lion, as I am known on these broadcasts.’
Yosevitz lit an Israeli cigarette. ‘Was there any message for me?’
Hamid was a powerful man with greying, fuse-wire hair and a Nasser smile. ‘I have been told to leave the Englishman, Bartlett, to you.’
‘Good. That simplifies matters.’
Hamid lit a new cigarette with the stub of the old. ‘I am not too happy about it,’ he said.
Yosevitz’s words froze into chips of ice. ‘Really, why is that?’
The second Arab who possessed all the sycophancy of a dirty postcard vendor shrank into the shadows of the dimly lit cellar.
Hamid said: ‘Because you are a Jew.’
Yosevitz took out his pistol and fitted the silencer on to the barrel. ‘In case it has escaped you,’ he said, ‘I am also a senior officer in the KGB. I am here as a representative of the Soviet Union to assist the Arab nations regain their heritage. Do you really wish to question my role here?’
‘I do not question your ability. But it seems strange that you, a Jew, should be working for our cause.’
‘It is impossible to have a Russian national here since the Soviet Union broke off diplomatic relations with Israel.’
‘Then why not let the Arabs do your work? Our organisation here has a good record. The explosion in the supermarket at Jerusalem – three hundred pounds of TNT and thirty pounds of gelignite – and the bomb at Tel Aviv bus station. All the time our organisation is gaining power.’
‘You did lose the war,’ Yosevitz said.
‘We did not. The leaders and armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria lost the war. We are the true representatives of the Arab people.’
Yosevitz weighed the pistol in his hand. The act of killing had never bothered him. He didn’t enjoy it; it was his job – if he didn’t perform the execution then someone else would. In every killing he had perpetrated, the cause had been more important than the person. At the moment Yosevitz the Jew considered the cause of Zionism more important than the life of Hamid the Arab, although he knew he wouldn’t kill him.’Why then do you fight among yourselves?’ he said.
Hamid spread wide his hands. ‘Every organisation has its disagreements.’ He showed his teeth – half smile, half snarl. ‘Even the Kremlin.’
Yosevitz put down his gun and polished his spectacles. Once he had wounded a man instead of killing him because the lenses had been blurred. ‘Do you think you could do this job better than me?’
‘It is not difficult to kill.’
‘There is more to this than killing. The killing is incidental.’ He put his spectacles on again. ‘What is your opinion of the National Front for the Liberation of Palestine?’
‘Amateurs,’ Hamid said promptly.
‘And you really think that you can all operate as Fedayeem with so much disagreement among you?’
Hamid said: ‘El Fatah is the true voice of the Arab people. And that is what they feel.’ He pointed to a poster on the wall. It said: This is the way to liberation of my homeland. And so, my brothers, I’ll fight on. Above the caption an Arab commando was disposing singlehanded of four Israeli soldiers.
The poster, Yosevitz thought, was rather pitiful. He said: ‘First, Hamid – to quote a Western saying – you must put your own house in order.’
‘No,’ Hamid said. ‘First we must drive the Israelis into the sea.’
Once again instincts as old as the prophets stirred within Yosevitz. Casually he pointed the pistol at Hamid’s head.
Hamid said: ‘There was, by the way, a personal message for you over the radio.’
Yosevitz lowered the pistol. ‘What was it?’
‘It was merely to tell you that your wife and two children were in good health and looking forward to your return to Warsaw.’
Yosevitz slipped the pistol back into the shoulder holster. Sometimes, he thought, you couldn’t fault the Soviet system.
He walked back to the tourist centre and caught a cab back to Tel Aviv. As the cab left behind the mosques and mildewed terraces and penetrated the neon aureole of Tel Aviv, Yosevitz the Communist sneered at such flamboyant prosperity; at the same time Yosevitz the Jew revelled in the self-sufficiency of the Promised Land.
He leaned forwards and told the driver to take him to the apartment block in Gordon Street where the party to which Bartlett had been invited was taking place.