There was one bottle of whisky for the foreigners. Soft drinks and coffee for the Israelis. And on the roof terrace a huge hunk of cheese on a table.
It seemed to Bartlett that there were three main occupations at the party given by some of Raquel’s friends. Dancing, necking, and arguing about politics and the Arab crisis.
That evening first reports of an Egyptian commando raid across the Canal had been broadcast. There was a suggestion that the commandos had slit the throats of sleeping Israeli soldiers; on the terrace some of the girls discussed the raid with emotion approaching hysteria.
Bartlett tried to talk to Raquel’s friends but after initial pleasantries they lapsed into excited Hebrew. He felt inadequate and unhappy. He took a glass of whisky and a piece of cheese.
Raquel introduced him to an artist and an author of unspecified works. The author talked monotonously in laboured English about a revival of the stream of consciousness.
Bartlett said with spurious interest: ‘Have you had any of your novels published?’
The author said: ‘I am not interested in commercialising my art.’ He headed back into the crowded room where they were dancing to music from Hair.
Bartlett leaned against the chest-high roof wall and gazed down at the traffic far below. He had spent the afternoon making statements about the killing in the Dead Sea. He had told police about the attempt on his life the night before but they hadn’t been very interested.
A detective in an open-neck white shirt who reminded Bartlett of one of the original Israeli politicians said: ‘Have you any proof, Mr Bartlett?’
Bartlett produced the bullet from his pocket.
The detective examined it without interest and said: ‘Russian.’
‘So?’
‘Israel is full of captured arms and ammunition. As if our young people did not have enough to cause trouble with. The other month some young soldiers robbed a petrol station with their Uzi machine guns. Last week a diamond-polishing factory was held up in Rothschild Boulevard.’
Bartlett said: ‘I am not interested in your crime statistics. Last night an attempt was made on my life. Today an American was shot dead beside me. I believe that bullet may have been intended for me. And I don’t think it was one of the bullets fired from Jordanian territory because they were grouped together in front of me.’
The detective put the bullet in an envelope, put the envelope in a pink cardboard folder and wrote Bartlett on it. ‘I ask you,’ he said, ‘why should anyone want to kill you?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea. Perhaps you would be kind enough to find out for me.’
‘We can’t do much unless you can think of a motive, Mr Bartlett.’
‘Jealousy?’
The detective looked at him doubtfully. ‘Jealousy, Mr Bartlett. Why should anyone be jealous of you?’
Bartlett shrugged. ‘I have been out with an attractive Israeli girl. Her fiancé, perhaps?’
The detective looked amused. ‘I am telling you – if you go out with other men’s fiancées then you must expect to get shot. It is a Mediterranean custom, you understand.’
Bartlett said: ‘Do I really look like opposition for a hot-blooded Latin?’
The detective examined him. Finally he said: ‘You are different, Mr Bartlett. Our girls sometimes get a little tired of tough virile manhood.’
‘Thank you,’ Bartlett said. ‘Thank you very much.’
‘Do not be insulted, Mr Bartlett. You are an intelligent man, an attractive man, perhaps, to a certain sort of girl.’ He stood up to indicate that the interview was over. ‘And you also have manners and money that young Israeli men do not possess.’
Bartlett contemplated a scathing reply. But he did want the police to catch his pursuers. ‘You’ll do your best then?’
‘Of course,’ the detective said. ‘Just as Scotland Yard would do its best if an Israeli in London said that an attempt had been made on his life. Although, of course, the motive for such an attempt would be rather easier to understand.’ He pointed at his copy of Maariv.
‘What does it say?’
‘Merely that there was an attempt to blow up the Zim shipping line office in London. Unfortunately at the moment I cannot think of any motive for an attempt on the life of a British geologist in Tel Aviv.’ He opened the door of his office. ‘Unless of course it is jealousy – and I think we can discount that. Provided of course you have told me all the truth, Mr Bartlett.’
On the street below a cab pulled up and a man alighted. Another guest, Bartlett presumed. The sky was thickly smeared with stars; in the distance there was a steady drone of aircraft engines.
In the lounge Raquel was dancing with an Israeli with brown muscular arms and a lot of hair curling from the open neck of his grey woollen shirt. He had both arms round Raquel’s waist. Bartlett was perturbed by a tremor of jealousy. On the wall Moshe Dayan in oils, elfin-eared and black-patched, smiled approvingly at his young lions at play.
The group in which Raquel had left Bartlett was discussing the behaviour of extreme orthodox Jews. During the week a gang of them had wrecked the apartment of a Jewish pathologist from the United States who had carried out post-mortems in a hospital in Israel.
A bouncy, aggressive girl said: ‘They are crazy people. They have no feeling for Israel. They should have all power taken from them.’ She cut herself a large portion of cheese and stuck it in her mouth. ‘Don’t you agree?’
‘Certainly,’ Bartlett said. ‘Of course they should.’
‘You don’t sound very sure.’
‘I don’t know much about the ins and outs of the Jewish religion.’
‘You’re American?’
‘No, British.’
‘Ah,’ she said, as if that explained his ignorance. ‘My brother was killed by the British. Just after the last world war. He was trying to smuggle immigrants into Israel. You know – Exodus and all that.’
‘I’ve read the book,’ Bartlett said.
‘I don’t hold any of this against you,’ she said. ‘We like the British.’
‘I’m glad.’
‘We learned a lot from you.’
‘So did everyone,’ Bartlett said.
‘Have you heard the news tonight?’
‘About the Egyptian commando raid?’
She nodded. ‘Don’t you worry, my friend. For every Israeli soldier killed three Egyptians will die.’ She sipped rapidly at her glass of fizzy orange. ‘I promise you.’ Her voice broke with emotion.
Bartlett felt very English and unemotional and inadequate. ‘I’m sure you will,’ he said.
‘But it doesn’t matter to you, of course.’
‘It does,’ he said. ‘But not as much as it matters to you.’
‘Are you pro-Arab?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m not.’
‘A lot of people in Britain are.’
‘A minority.’
‘That’s not what I’ve read.’
‘I’m sorry about what you’ve read.’
Raquel returned with her hairy-chested partner. He had a friendly white smile and shook hands as if he were gripping a bucking machine gun. ‘This is my very good friend Elisha,’ Raquel said. ‘He was a colonel in the Army. Now he paints. Those are some of his paintings on the wall.’ She pointed at a series of cubist patterns surrounding Moshe Dayan. ‘What do you think of them, Thomas?’
‘It was, he reflected, the first time she had called him by his first name. It also occurred to him that she was trying to make Elisha jealous. ‘They’re very … virile,’ he said.
Elisha said: ‘What do you do, Mr Bartlett?’
‘I’m a geologist,’ Bartlett said.
‘That must be very interesting,’ Elisha said. Bartlett knew from experience that this observation was often the end of the conversation. He nodded and reached for the whisky bottle on a table on the terrace. The need for a second drink made him feel decadent amongst so much cheese and mineral water.
Another young man with very curly hair and curly sideburns joined them, serious and unspeaking.
Raquel said: ‘This is Shlomo. He is a poet. He only speaks when the words come to him.’ Her voice became confidential. ‘If he does not like you he will leave.’
‘And if I don’t like him?’
Raquel smiled suddenly. ‘Let’s dance,’ she said. ‘They’re playing an oldie.’
Not so old, he thought. Fly Me to the Moon. He remembered dancing it once with his wife on their wedding anniversary in Churchills. Before he had realised the truth. ‘Is that your boyfriend?’ he said.
‘Who, Shlomo?’
‘No, Elisha.’
Her cheek was against his. ‘He was once,’ she said. ‘We were on the same Kibbutz together. But you can get some very false relationships in the Kibbutzen. People are thrown together whether they like it or not.’
‘And you didn’t like it?’
‘I didn’t mind it,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t love him. But that was a long time ago.’
He wanted to ask her if she had slept with him. But the question would be masochistic – and impertinent.
Around them couples nestled close together. Kissing, fondling, hardly moving. Watched by the one bright-painted eye of Moshe Dayan.
Raquel followed his gaze. ‘A great man,’ she said.
Bartlett nodded.
‘Every girl has a photograph of him on their wall. They love him, you see.’
The music changed and the aggressive girl with the agitated breasts began to dance beside them with Shlomo the poet. Shlomo moved his arms vaguely but didn’t speak.
‘Let’s go back on the terrace,’ Bartlett said.
All the cheese had gone but the whisky bottle was still half full. Bartlett poured some more in his glass.
Raquel said: ‘You drink too much.’
‘Not really,’ Bartlett said. ‘But I don’t feel too sure of myself here tonight.’
‘You don’t like my friends,’ Raquel said dramatically.
‘I don’t dislike them. It’s just that they’re all much younger than me.’
‘You sound like an old man and you’re not. I think your wife has made you feel older than you are. What is she like?’
‘I told you once – she’s beautiful.’
‘That tells me nothing. What sort of beauty is it? I should think she is blonde and very pale. Not the full-blooded beauty of an Israeli girl.’
‘I thought,’ Bartlett said, ‘that you wanted to talk about soil irrigation and the geology of the Negev.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘So we will talk about soil irrigation. But not at a party. Am I right already in my description of your wife?’
‘You would be a very formidable barrister in cross-examination,’ Bartlett said.
‘Always you try and evade the point. Am I right? Is she blonde – and anaemic?’
‘She’s blonde,’ Bartlett said.
‘But you’re not happy with her.’
‘Good grief. I didn’t say that.’
‘But you don’t deny it.’
‘What did you learn in America about soil irrigation?’
Raquel sighed. ‘You have a strange approach to women, Mr Bartlett.’
‘You called me Thomas just now.’
‘Israeli men have a much more direct approach. There is no flirtation. If a young man and a woman are attracted to each other they sleep together.’
Bartlett tossed back his whisky as the generation gap inserted itself between them. A warm breeze slunk in from the darkness and rustled the leaves of a vine investigating the outside wall of the apartment. ‘I suppose that’s the most sensible way,’ he said. He hoped she would say that she didn’t agree with such practical courtship.
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t referring to you and me.’
‘Of course not,’ he said. He didn’t know whether he was relieved or disappointed.
‘Where do you go tomorrow?’
‘Jerusalem – to stay. And the conference opens the day after.’
‘Are you scared? It seems to me that someone is determined that you should not give this address.’
‘Yes,’ Bartlett said. ‘I am scared. Particularly since Everett was shot this morning. The Israeli statement blames it on snipers across the border. I don’t think it was. I think someone this side of the border was trying to shoot Everett or me.’
‘Who do you think it was?’
The aggressive girl joined them. ‘I’ve just met another geologist,’ she said. ‘He said he’d like to meet you.’
Her companion held out his hand and said: ‘I am very pleased to meet you, Mr Bartlett. My name is Matthew Yosevitz.’
Raquel drove her little Fiat as if it were a dodgem and stopped reluctantly at red traffic lights. Bartlett watched pedestrians, rear lamps and headlights swerving past and wondered if Yosevitz was trying to follow them. He didn’t envy him.
‘What did you think of Yosevitz?’ he said. He spoke elaborately because he was a little drunk.
‘I tell you I do not think anything of him; Raquel said. ‘He is a bore.’
‘He is also trying to kill me,’ Bartlett said.
‘Why should you think that?’
‘He was on the aircraft. He was booked on at the last moment. He was following me in Dizengoff. I think I saw his face in the darkness by the River Yarkon. And tonight he. turned up at that party. Who invited him anyway?’
‘No one I think. Esther – that’s the girl who was dancing with Shlomo – opened the door and he was just standing there. So, of course, she invited him in. She cut up a Peugeot taxi with accomplishment.
‘Where did you learn to drive?’ he said.
‘In the Army,’ she said.
‘No wonder you won the war,’ he said.
‘I am only trying to lose this Yosevitz for you. Because you say he is trying to kill you and because I think he is a very boring man.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘To a discotheque. So that you can see how Israelis enjoy themselves.’
‘I think I’ve seen that already.’
‘You can get a drink there, too. I know how you like to drink.’
‘I’ve had three whiskies,’ he said.
‘Two too many,’ she said.
He put arm in front of his face as the headlights of a bus peered into the Fiat. Then he pondered on Yosevitz.
What did he want? And what had Everett wanted? At the party Bartlett had explored Yosevitz’s geological knowledge. Matthew Yosevitz was a young geologist whose international reputation was steadily burgeoning; but Bartlett’s new awareness warned him that this man might be an imposter. It took Bartlett less than a minute to establish that the man who was pursuing him was no fake. In fact he suspected that Yosevitz’s knowledge of the Precambrian crystalline rocks in the Southern Sinai and the Basaltic lava from the Miocene Age in the West was more extensive than his own. He tried him on the Middle Cretaceous limestone formations in the North but couldn’t fault him.
As Raquel had suggested, the answer was probably connected with the address Bartlett was delivering to the Geological Society. But that seemed harmless enough.
Raquel parked the car as if they had stopped on the brink of a precipice. They ran across the still-busy road into a club where a Scotch cost two dollars, where bright lights stuttered, where only town criers could have competed with the juke-box music.
Bartlett waited until the records were changing and said: ‘What will you have?’
‘A whisky, please.’ She looked at him challengingly.
‘Are you sure?’
‘There’s no point in you getting drunk by yourself.’
‘I’m not getting drunk. just a little tight perhaps. Do you blame me after what’s happened today?’
‘I don’t blame you,’ she said. ‘I’ve been living in New York for two months and I know that many people have to drink to communicate. Here in Israel it is different. There is so much vitality that no one has to drink. That is why the drinks are so expensive – Israelis buy one and sit with it all night.’ She began to clap her hands to the music. ‘Come let’s dance.’
‘I’m too old for that sort of dancing,’ he said.
She pulled at his arm. ‘You don’t have to do anything. You talk as if you were about sixty.’
Bartlett drank deeply of his Scotch and followed her on to the tiny floor. She swayed and shimmied, turned and twisted, while he stood self-consciously and unhappily moving his hips.
‘That’s very good,’ she said. She wore a short blue suede skirt and a floral blouse. She looked very tanned in the winking light; he felt very pale.
The explosion came as the Beatles’ guitars and drums started up. The floor shook and a glass fell off a table. The music stopped.
Bartlett said: ‘A supersonic bang?’
Raquel shook her head. ‘Not at this time of night.’
The shirt-sleeved young men and miniskirted girls were running for the door. The tourists stayed in their seats: explosions hadn’t been mentioned in the brochures.
Raquel said: ‘Come on.’
He followed her into the street. Together they followed the crowd running up Dizengoff.
The sidewalks were littered with daggers of broken glass and there was a smell of cordite in the warm air. They turned left up Keren Kayemet. The police and fire engines had beaten them to it.
In front of a four-storey apartment block stood the smoking wreckage of a car. All the windows in the block had gone. A man and a woman sat on the sidewalk nursing bloodied arms.
Raquel said: ‘You stay there – I’ll find out what happened.’
Bartlett stood with the crowd, sniffing the gunpowder smells, absorbing the fear and excitement that would soon be converted into hatred. There was, he thought, little hope.
Raquel ran across the arena cleared by the police. ‘They say the explosives were in the car,’ she said. ‘An Arab must have parked it here and fled. He was probably supposed to leave it somewhere more important. I guess he lost his nerve. He also parked it outside an empty apartment block and left it to explode at a time when there was hardly anyone in the street. Thank God it is only Arabs that we have to deal with.’
‘Is anyone hurt badly?’
‘No one. A few people were cut by flying glass. That was all. I expect they are rounding up Arab suspects already.’
A press photographer took flashlight pictures.
‘Associated Press,’ Raquel said. ‘I know him.’
‘Good grief,’ Bartlett said. ‘What a day.’
She laughed suddenly and it occurred to Bartlett that he had not heard her laugh before: laughter had not seemed to be part of her insistent, inquisitive nature. He said: ‘What are you laughing about?’
‘I am sorry.’
‘But what are you laughing about?’
She put her head on his shoulder and he smelled her hair and her perfume. ‘You must forgive me. But all of a sudden I am thinking that perhaps you think this bomb was intended for you.’
Bartlett laughed without enthusiasm. ‘Perhaps it was,’ he said.
‘You must not make me laugh so,’ she said. ‘It is not right at this moment. But it is good just the same. I do not think that we laugh enough.’
A saloon car nosed its way into the floodlit arena. The chatter of the crowd faded. A door opened and Moshe Dayan stepped out.
Raquel said: ‘Isn’t he wonderful?’
‘He certainly got here quickly,’ Bartlett said.
Raquel sighed. ‘He is Israel’s greatest security risk. Time and time they are telling him not to expose himself like this. But he takes no notice. It is not in his character, you see.’
Dayan in grey slacks and white open-neck shirt talked to the police and firemen. He was smaller than Bartlett had imagined. Elf and brigand combined. Showman, warrior and leader. Bartlett noticed that he was smiling beneath his pirate’s patch and presumed that he was joking about Arab inefficiency. Dayan climbed back into the saloon and was driven away.
‘Come on,’ Bartlett said, ‘let’s go. I think I’ve had enough for one day.’
She dropped him outside the Dan Hotel and kissed him softly on the cheek.
‘Shalom,’ he said.
‘Shalom, shalom,’ she said.
The little car accelerated down Hayarkon. Bartlett walked across the foyer and asked for his key.
The porter said: ‘Ah, Mr Bartlett. I have been worrying about you.’
‘Worrying? Why?’
‘Because someone has been trying to persuade me to get your briefcase out of the safe. He said you had authorised him to take it out.’
‘I authorised no one.’
The porter smiled knowingly. ‘I thought as much,’ he said.
‘And you didn’t give it to him?’
‘Of course not, Mr Bartlett.’
‘Who was this man?’
‘Another guest, Mr Bartlett. An American gentleman who arrived this afternoon from London.’
‘Thank you,’ Bartlett said. ‘Thank you very much. I’ll see you before I leave.’
As he walked down the corridor towards his room he wondered if it had been searched again. It hadn’t. He fell asleep almost immediately.