The Exchange: when a player sacrifices something for an opponent’s piece of lesser value he is said to be ‘the exchange down’.
Monday, November 4th
The first thing you see is the ‘No Entry’ sign. It’s on the corner of Friedrichstrasse and beyond that the whole thing is laid out. There is the little white hut sitting in the middle of the road with ‘US ARMY CHECKPOINT’ written in huge letters on the roof. Then above there is a flagpole flying the Stars and Stripes and there are always a few olive-and-white Taunus cars and jeeps about. There are some West German policemen standing around in long grey overcoats and Afrika Korps caps and inside the hut a couple of young pink-faced GI’s in starched khaki shirts write in a vast ledger and sometimes talk on the phone. There are lots of notices but the biggest one says, ‘You are leaving the American Sector’ and then says the same thing over again in French and Russian. Filing past that, prim old lady journalists go crowding up the short flight of steps that lead nowhere, like it’s the royal box for the last public hanging.
The wall itself is a shoddy breeze-block affair that looks as though one of the old ladies falling off the steps could tumble the whole thing from here to Potsdamerplatz. The West German policeman stands very near the wall on the West side and he lifts the long-hinged barrier for the traffic. On the Eastern side there are three solid concrete barriers that block three-quarters of the road’s width. Since the gaps they leave are staggered, a vehicle driven through has to zig-zag at full lock slowly past the barriers. That’s what the big hearse had to do after they had removed the coffin.
Six uniformed men were hastily pressed into service as coffin-bearers. There were Vopos, Grepos, policemen and soldiers stumbling along under the heavy weight and swinging their caps in their hands at arm’s length to help them keep their balance. A policeman at the front missed his footing at one moment and almost fell, but an elderly NCO began to sing out the time in the idiom of the old Army. They rested the coffin down on to the stretcher-like grid of the bier at the second barrier. The policeman who had nearly fallen wiped the inside of his shako and then held it up to adjust the cockade so that he didn’t have to look at the others.
It looked as though the DDR had chosen a representative of each of its services as they stood there dusting off their blue, green and grey shoulders where the coffin had left an epaulette of dirt. Beneath me on the American side of the barrier were thirty men, all dressed in khaki light-weight raincoats. Each of them had a strange-shaped leather box at his feet. There were boxes for bassoons and boxes for bass clarinets, boxes for French horns, trombones, violins and cornets. The kettledrums were wrapped in soft black velvet bags. Two girls stood among the men dressed in the same raincoats but wearing long white woollen stockings. From where they were standing below me they couldn’t see as well as I could. ‘Some kinda procession, ain’t it?’ one said.
‘Bringing a funeral through by the look.’
‘Say, ain’t that sump’n?’
Two of the musicians unlocked the leather cases and looked inside before locking them again. One of the men tapped the belly of a double bass and said, ‘Gee, I sure didn’t think I’d be toting a bull-fiddle when I moved in among the commies.’
The flautist got his instrument out of the case. ‘It’s as lethal in your hands as an M-60,’ he laughed and played a little riff. In the silence caused by the attention to the coffin, the passage he played was the only sane thing for a hundred yards in every direction and, even before the overtones of that had faded, an American MP shouted, ‘You want a goddam water-cannon to wash you across the sidewalk, fella? Put it away before they get the idea it’s a telescope.’
‘I told you not to point it at anyone,’ said the string player to ease the tension. The flautist said, ‘But I had the safety on.’
‘Here she blows,’ someone said.
They had the coffin back inside the long black unstreamlined hearse that looked very Al Capone-like especially with Stok standing on the running boards. Stok was dressed in his corporal’s uniform in order not to alert the newsmen who constantly gaze across the border from Checkpoint Charlie to the Friedrichstrasse Kontrollpunkt.
There were two wreaths with the coffin; they were great lifebelts of fir-tree leaves with intertwined flowers and huge decorative ribbons of silk with ‘Last greetings from old friends’ and the date printed across them. The driver drove very slowly, nodding feverishly at Stok every now and again. The hearse stopped again and the driver produced a map, unfolding it across the steering wheel. In the no-man’s land of the world, two men in a hearse were looking at a map and discussing where to make for.
Stok was talking energetically to the driver, who was probably a Red Army transport soldier, and the driver was nodding like mad. The glass panels at the sides were decorated with a complex engraved palm-leaf pattern, and the big coffin, chosen to give Semitsa room to stretch an elbow, could just be seen inside.
The hearse moved slowly again and one Grenzpolizist was walking ahead of it, brandishing the documents like a royal flush. Two East German soldiers, leaning against the flower boxes and talking, made a joke about the hearse and then straightened their jackets and walked away in case they should be reprimanded. Overhead a US Army helicopter clattered along the line of the wall, saw the hearse and circled, watching the activity around it. It crossed. One of the two GIs stepped out from the glass-sided box to salute a captain who had just arrived in a white Taunus with a spotlight and the words ‘Military Police’ on its side.
The GI waved the hearse forward and, as the western barrier was flipped open, the captain leaned into the shop downstairs and shouted ‘Let’s go, feller’ to me. I turned away from the window, but not before taking one last look at Stok. He grinned and held his clenched fist in the air – a salute from worker to worker across the last frontier of the world. I grinned back and gave him the same salute in return. ‘Let’s go,’ I heard the captain say again. I rattled down the ancient creaking staircase and jumped into the Taunus. By now the hearse was way down near the canal. The captain pumped the accelerator and jammed the siren on. ‘Hoo-haw, hoo-haw,’ the doleful bray had the traffic pulling aside and halting at the roadside.
‘This isn’t the St Patrick’s Day Parade,’ I said irritably. ‘Switch the bloody thing off, can’t you? Didn’t anybody tell you that this mission is secret?’
‘Then why collect me in this carnival wagon?’
He flipped the siren off and it died with a whimper. ‘That’s better,’ I said.
‘It’s your funeral, bud,’ said the officer. He drove in silence, overtaking the hearse at the Tiergarten, at which stage of its journey it was attracting no attention at all.
At the address in Wittenau Johnnie was awaiting me. ‘Wittenau,’ I thought; to a Berliner the word is invariably linked with the lunatic asylum here. The car stopped in a sordid street.
It had perhaps been a shop at one time or maybe a tiny warehouse, but now it was a garage. There was a large wooden double door big enough to back in a lorry – or a hearse. At the rear there was a heavy bench with a metal-working vice and a few simple rusty tools and junk that the previous tenant had abandoned. As I opened one half of the door a thin shaft of daylight connected me with Johnnie Vulkan – like a carpet unrolling across the stone floor to where he was leaning against the bench. The single unshaded light bulb that looked so infirm in the daylight became newly significant in the darkness. I shot the large rectangular bolts and noticed how smoothly they moved into their oiled slots. There was grease underfoot too, and that smell of carbonized oil and spilt petrol that hangs around motor-car repair places.
The light was directly above Vulkan’s head and his eye-sockets were great piratical patches of darkness and under his nose was a moustache of shadow. He put a cigarette into his mouth and it gleamed under the light.
Johnnie was watching me intently. He removed the unlit cigarette.
‘Get through to London?’ he asked.
‘Just fine – clear as a bell.’
‘What did they say?’
‘They said “Unanimous agreement”, the code word. What did you expect them to say?’
‘Just checking,’ said Johnnie.
I squinted at him in an obvious sort of way. ‘Do you know something that I don’t know, Johnnie?’
‘No. Honest. Just checking. You got the documents in the name of Broum?’
‘Yes.’
‘Spelt correctly?’
‘Knock it off will you,’ I said. ‘I’ve got them.’
Johnnie nodded and ran his fingers through his hair and carefully lit his cigarette with an expensive lighter. He began to recount the plan to himself to be sure he remembered it.
‘They’ll go to the mortuary first. They will put him into a station wagon there. It should take at least another forty minutes.’ We had both disussed the plan a dozen times. I nodded. We smoked in silence until Johnnie threw his cigarette butt on to the floor and stepped on it carefully. In the area around his feet the white rectangles of flattened cigarette ends were strewn like confetti. Overhead I heard the rattle of the low-flying helicopter which was watching the movement of the hearse between Checkpoint Charlie and the West Berlin mortuary.
As my eyes grew more accustomed to the darkness I could see the junk that had accumulated in the building. There was a disembowelled motorcar engine with old torn gaskets hanging off it. The cylinder head had been hastily slid back on to its bolts without being seated and it rested drunkenly upon the engine. Beyond it was a heap of bald tyres and some dented oil drums. Vulkan had looked at his watch so often that he finally tucked his shirt cuff under the gold rim to make it easier to glimpse the time. He heaved deep sighs and every now and again he would go up to the engine and kick some part of it gently with the very tip of his hand-lasted Oxfords.
‘There’s a funeral,’ he said.
I looked at him quizzically. ‘That’s what’s delaying the transfer at the mortuary, a real funeral.’ I looked at my watch. ‘There’s no delay,’ I said, ‘and if it doesn’t arrive for another five minutes they will still be on time according to the schedule.’
We both stood there in the dismal light of the bare bulb when suddenly Johnnie said, ‘I was in prison once in the next street to this one.’
I offered him a Gauloise and lit one myself and, when we had finished lighting them and having that first inhalation that makes you dive for a cigarette, I said, ‘When was that?’
‘Spring of 1943,’ said Vulkan.
‘What charge?’
Johnnie grinned and stabbed the shadows with his cigarette. ‘I was a communist, Roman Catholic Jew, who had deserted from the Army.’
‘Is that all?’ I said.
Vulkan gave a sour smile. ‘I can tell you,’ he said, ‘it was grim. There wasn’t much to eat for heroes in 1943 – for prisoners …’ He drew on his cigarette and the garage was full of the pungent aroma of French tobacco, and he drew on his cigarette again like this was all some complex dream he was dreaming while really he was in prison just a few year-yards away.
He rubbed two fingers of his left hand and then put them under his armpit as you do when you’ve hit them with a hammer – put them into some dark, warm place where they can stay for ever and never come out into the daylight.
‘Defined areas,’ said Vulkan suddenly. ‘Defined areas of hatred.’ His voice was firm and yet seemed to originate from another time and another place, almost like a voice speaking through a medium, a voice that was just using the larynx and sound apparatus of Vulkan’s body. ‘It’s easy then. When I was first arrested I was badly knocked about.’ He made that motion of the hand that in some Latin parts of the world is a sign of pure joy: he flung his hand around on the end of his wrist like he wanted it to spin away into a corner. He held it up to me and I saw the skin grafts along the last two fingers. ‘It wasn’t so bad for me, those beatings. The French had arrested me; they were so anxious to demonstrate to their German masters how well they had learned from them. Those Frenchmen were the most evil men I had ever seen – they were sadists, I mean really, in the medical sense of the word. When they beat me they beat me for their own special sexual delight and just by being beaten I was participating in a sexual relationship with them – you understand me?’
‘I understand,’ I said.
‘It was filthy,’ he said. He clawed at his lip to find a shred of tobacco and finally spat heartily. I waited to see if he was going to continue; for a minute or so I thought he would say no more. Then he said, ‘But it was uncomplicated for me. I could understand that a Frenchman felt hate for a German.’ He stopped speaking again and I guessed that the conversation was proceeding in his head. ‘The French prisoners were worse off because they …’ He stopped talking again and his eyes were fixed on something from another time and place. ‘But the first time I was ill-treated by a German – I don’t mean pushed to one side or knocked off a chair, deliberately and systematically tortured, beaten – it was … I don’t know, it threw me out of equilibrium. That’s why the communists were almost the last to crack, they were able to cling to their “in” group, they had sharply defined areas to hate.’
I said, ‘Most prejudice tends to operate against groups that it’s easy to recognize. It’s no accident that minorities only suffer where the prejudice has had time to develop its power of detection. Mexicans don’t have trouble in New York City; it’s down on the Mexican border they run into it. Pakistanis are honoured guests in Birmingham, Alabama. It’s in Birmingham, England, that they run into prejudice.’
‘That’s it,’ said Johnnie. ‘Well, after the war, communists had the best chances of rehabilitation. They’d always known that the forces of reaction (that’s to say non-communists) were swine, so nothing had surprised them. The Jews had known about anti-Semitism for a few centuries. It was the ones who had suffered at the hands of their own people who were faced with an insoluble enigma. The Frenchman who had been tortured by other Frenchmen, the Italian partisan captured by the Italian fascists. We have this terrible thing to live with.
‘I have more in common with the Germans than with any other nation on the earth. I’ve lived among them, I understand them in ways I could never get to understand you, no matter if I was chained to you from now until the day I die. But I never go into a roomful of Germans without thinking to myself: is there a man here who tortured me? Is there a man here who killed my friends? Is there a man who just stood beyond the door while I screamed and believed that nothing outside of my torn body was real? Is there a woman here who was the daughter of such a one, a sister or mother of such a man? And such is the power of mathematical reasoning that I am sure that often the answer has been “Yes” if only I had known.’ He spat again in some sort of cathartic endeavour.
Johnnie spoke suddenly. ‘They might pull some sort of trick,’ he said.
‘Could be,’ I agreed.
‘Do you have a pistol or a knife?’
‘I don’t think they are likely to try that sort of trick,’ I said.
‘Do you have a pistol or a knife or a persuader?’
‘I have a persuader,’ I said. ‘Two hundred dollars in singles.’
‘The Americans,’ said Johnnie. He walked over to the old engine. ‘You shouldn’t have told the Americans,’ he said.
‘How would we have got it past Checkpoint Charlie?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he said petulantly and kicked his collection of cigarette ends to the far corners of the building.
He turned his back to me and began to toy with the junk on the bench, setting up some monstrous chess game. He tapped the rusty sparking plugs and squeezed valve springs in the palm of his hand. At the side of the bench was a thick polished oval of wood. There were twelve different sizes of drill stuck into it like matches in a peg board. Johnnie amused himself throwing the springs over the shiny drills. ‘Schmidt’s of Solingen,’ it said on a scroll around the wooden base. ‘Best drills in the world.’
He arrived right on time, the same Red Army driver in a black station wagon. He rapped at the ancient wooden doors, but the joins in the woodwork were so warped that we had both already seen the car arrive and back up to the doors. Johnnie moved quickly. The doors swung back smoothly, the car chugged back in as far as the bench. Then the gigantic coffin slid out of the back of the car with just the three of us pulling. Johnnie and I one on each side and the Russian at the front of the car, bracing himself on the dashboard and pushing the end of the coffin with the soles of his boots. It wasn’t very dignified but it was smooth and fast. As soon as the coffin was on to the bench the Russian stepped round to the driver’s seat and came back bearing the two gigantic wreaths that I had seen on top of the hearse. There were great sprays of lilies and chrysanthemums and a bright red ribbon with ‘Letzter Gruss’ printed on it in Gothic script. ‘Take those back,’ said Johnnie to the young Russian. The Russian said he couldn’t and there was a small argument.
The Russian said he had tried to leave them at the mortuary but they didn’t want them and he couldn’t take them back through Checkpoint Charlie or it would seem highly suspicious. Johnnie argued in fluent Russian but it didn’t do him any good: the boy wouldn’t take the wreaths away with him. The more Johnnie swore, the more the Russian shrugged. Finally Johnnie turned away and the Russian jumped into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. I opened the doors and the boy gunned the motor and gave the car full lock as he sped out into the street and away towards the border.
Johnnie had climbed on the bench by the time I had turned round. He was using one of the big rusty screwdrivers to scratch the wood-filler from the sockets above the countersunk screws. He was so frantic in his haste that he had been working feverishly for five minutes or more before he noticed that I wasn’t helping.
‘Get the items out of my case,’ he said.
There were two small suitcases. One was a midwife’s set adapted to take an oxygen bottle. In the other case Johnnie had put a bottle of Glenlivet malt whisky, one of those sand hot-water bottles that keep hot for hours, a heavy sweater, sal volatile, smelling salts, a box containing a hypodermic needle and four small ampoules of megimide, four vials of aminophylline and a dark bottle that I guessed was nikethamide – a circulatory stimulant – a mirror to detect breathing, a short Piorry’s wooden stethoscope, a thermometer, a pen torch suitable for examining pupils, and a marking pencil.
‘It’s really complete,’ I said. ‘You take this pretty seriously, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Vulkan. He hadn’t removed his coat and he was sweating profusely. Sometimes in the exertion of the work his head would set the bare bulb swinging and all the shadows would dance crazily and his face glistened with sweat as I remembered it glistening with rain.
‘That’s the last one,’ he said.
‘Just like the last scene of Romeo and Juliet,’ I said and Vulkan said ‘Yes’ over his shoulder and started to chip at the seam where the lid and bottom joined, but I doubt if he even heard what I said.
‘Help me,’ he said. He began to strain at the heavy lid. It must have been inlaid with lead for it was so heavy to move that at first I felt sure that there were still some screws holding it – then it began to move.
‘Look out,’ shouted Vulkan and the bottom end of the lid fell on to the bench, missing our toes by only inches. The crash was ear-splitting and the vibration rocked the bench. At first the shadow of the coffin lid obscured the view, but, when it slid away, even Vulkan could cling to his hopes no more.
‘Six reasons why the Deutsche Demokratische Republik should be represented in the West.’ There were hundreds of them, stacks and stacks of leaflets stuffed into the huge coffin – Stok’s last joke. I climbed down to the floor.
‘It doesn’t look like you’ll need your hot-water bottle,’ I said to Vulkan, and for just one split second reflexes pulled his face into a smile, but only for a second. ‘They can’t,’ he said. ‘They dare not, they promised – your Government must take action.’ I suppose I laughed again, for Vulkan became past all rational argument.
He held his splayed fingers before his face like he was studying an invisible hand of cards. ‘You and Stok,’ he said, over-salivating slightly. ‘You planned this.’
‘He doesn’t consult me,’ I said. Vulkan was still standing on the bench three feet higher than I was.
‘But you are not surprised,’ Vulkan shouted.
‘I’m not in even the slightest way surprised,’ I said. ‘That Red Army boy didn’t even hang around to get a signature. Let alone for forty thousand pounds. I’d never believed any part of the whole deal, but that really convinced me. It’s about time you came to grips with reality, Johnnie; there is no Santa Claus. People just don’t give away anything for nothing. What could Stok gain?’
‘Then why did he go to all this trouble?’ said Johnnie. He leaned down and moved some of the leaflets around in the coffin as though he thought he might find Semitsa in there if he dug deep enough.
‘He arrested four boys from the Gehlen set-up, didn’t he?’
‘Five,’ said Johnnie. ‘Another failed to report in this morning.’
‘Exactly,’ I said, ‘and you got a little extra pay and some expenses and London will read your report and say what a good boy you have been.’
‘And you, you slimy bastard. What’s your angle?’
‘I have my methods, Watson,’ I said. ‘I’ve been arranging the Berlin hit parade and you’ve slipped five notches to nowhere. You and that girl thought you had a nice deal, didn’t you? Well, your big mistake was trying to exploit me as a part of it. Papers,’ I said. I picked up a couple of the pamphlets from inside the coffin and let them flutter to the floor. ‘There are the only papers you’re getting, they aren’t made out in the name of Broum but on the other hand there are probably no spelling errors.’
‘You——’ said Vulkan and from his superior position on the bench-top tried to kick my head in. I backed off.
‘I’ll tell you your trouble, Johnnie,’ I said from a safe distance. ‘You’ve become a professional phoney. You’ve become so good at pretending to be different that you have lost contact with your identity. You’ve learnt so much jargon that you don’t know which side you are on. Every time you move through the frontier of space you slip through the frontier of time. Perhaps you like that. OK. Be a Waldgänger,1 but don’t expect me to pay your expenses. Be a freelance, but don’t expect a salary. You would be playing along with me now if you were smart. Stok’s boys won’t have anything more to do with you, you are poison to Gehlen …’
‘Through you,’ Vulkan shouted. ‘You messed up Gehlen.’
‘You are poison to Gehlen,’ I continued. ‘And if you foul up with me there isn’t a place left in the whole world where they would let you get a sniff of a job. You are dead, Johnnie. Dead and you don’t know it. Dead and you can’t afford the funeral expenses. Get clever!’
There was a long silence broken only by Johnnie’s feet knocking against a valve.
‘I always return the things I am given,’ said Johnnie menacingly, ‘and that especially includes good advice.’ He reached into his jacket and I saw his fingers flicker as he eased them around his ugly little Mauser H SC. ‘I’ve planned this operation for fifteen years and I’ve worked out every conceivable contingency, including Semitsa’s non-arrival. That’s unfortunate but it won’t impede the remainder of the programme, whether you choose to stand in the way or not, because this time they are going to be building the barbed wire through you.’ He clicked the gun casing to show he meant business. Now we both knew the gun was ready loaded and cocked.
‘The girl and I did a deal,’ Vulkan went on. ‘Her interests and my interests complement each other: there is no conflict. Her side of the deal has gone on the rocks but that’s too bad. I’m going to cut my losses. I need four days without you sounding off your big mouth. It’s going to cost me eighty pounds per day to keep you on ice so you can see that I’m prepared to be out of pocket – because I could have you knocked off for one hundred pounds.’
‘Listen, Johnnie,’ I said in an all-good-pals-together sort of voice, ‘cut me in. I can get back that photo of you in prison clothes with Mohr.’
‘You lying bastard,’ said Johnnie.
I said, ‘It’s the papers you want?’
Johnnie said softly, ‘If you don’t have them I’ll kill you. You know that, don’t you?’
What could he do in four days? Knowing Vulkan, I could risk a guess. ‘Can you get the money and be clear in four days?’ I asked.
‘I told you I’ve been planning this for fifteen years. I laid the claim ages ago. I have three lawyers and a witness standing by – I …’ he smiled ‘… talk too much,’ he finished. I began to see the pattern but I didn’t want that to be the last thing I ever saw.
‘Mohr is the witness,’ I said. ‘You met him in Hendaye and told him that Samantha was a Shinbet2 agent after him for war crimes. You told him that you could call her off if he did as you told him over the next day or so. Mohr saw Broum die. He’s important to …’
‘Shut your crummy mouth,’ said Vulkan. ‘I’m a Waldgänger, just like you said.’ He walked along the bench, the light glistening on his face. He walked slowly, picking his way among the set of drills, the mallets and rusty sparking plugs and little tin boxes of nuts and bolts, his shiny shoes moving, hesitating and placing themselves down like little flying saucers playing tag on a desolate landscape.
Every now and again he flexed his fingers before easing them back around the handle of the pistol. I had seen Vulkan use that gun on the range; I knew he could put the whole eight-shot magazine into a six-inch group before I could swing open even one door-bolt. It seemed as though an hour went by as he moved along the bench but it probably wasn’t more than forty-five seconds. That’s the theory of relativity, I thought.
‘Get them,’ said Vulkan.
I had the big manilla envelope in my raincoat pocket. It had the royal coat of arms on the outside and ‘Home Office’ printed in prim roman letters across the corner. On the front was a white label that said that to help the war effort one should use envelopes as many times as possible. I moved towards the bench and handed the envelope to Vulkan who reached down with his left hand to take the corner.
‘Careful,’ he said, in a genuinely solicitous voice. ‘I want no complications at all. Let alone shooting you.’ I nodded. ‘I like you,’ he added.
‘That puts a new complexion on the whole thing,’ I said.
The envelope had one of those little card circles that you wind string round. If you don’t know what I mean, believe me you need two hands to open it, because that’s the important point. Vulkan kept his finger on the trigger but held the corner of the envelope with his gun hand, using his left hand to unravel the string. It’s the timing that was so important, because as soon as the string is unravelled you need two hands for only as long as it takes to get your hand inside and around the papers. Added to this factor was the risk that the longer I stayed there the more chance there was of Vulkan moving me back to a safe distance.
Vulkan’s knee was level with the top of my head. I judged my distance with care. There is a groove in the fibula just below the knee where the lateral popliteal nerve passes close against the bone. A sharp blow here paralyses the lower leg – ‘dead man’s leg’ we called it in the school playground.
‘They are all falling out,’ I shouted suddenly in panic. ‘The papers.’ Johnny clutched the bottom of the envelope as I pushed it – and the gun – upwards away from my cranium. I jabbed at his knee. I hit but not accurately enough. My head sang like a massed-voice choir as the nasty sharp front edge of the magazine hit the side of my head. I had already begun to fall back. Again I punched out, scarcely able to see Vulkan’s leg for the bright crimson pain that sang its song in the empty echo chamber of my head.
I felt him go. He toppled like a felled redwood, the spilled papers spinning and drifting all around him. The crash of his body collapsing full-length across the bench was followed by the clatter of dislodged junk. An insurance renewal slip fell like a sycamore seed into the open tin of grease. ‘I’ve hurt my back,’ he said urgently; but training won out and the Mauser stayed firmly in his fist. Its chamfered snout made a little circling motion like a clerk’s pencil just about to write. I waited for the bang.
‘I’ve hurt my back,’ he said again. I moved towards him but the foresight made that tiny movement again and I froze. His leg was crossed under him like a stone figure on a knight’s tomb. I saw the real, ageing man behind the careless young mask. He twisted his shaken body and, more slowly than I had ever seen him move before, he eased his feet over the edge of the bench towards the greasy floor. His voice was a soft growl, ‘Es irrt der Mensch, so lang er strebt.’3
I watched him with that sort of hypnotic horror that venomous insects evoke, but between me and Johnnie Vulkan there was no glass. His feet took the weight of his body and his face took its pain. He groped along the bench towards me. I moved back. He stepped awkwardly as though his foot had gone to sleep, his muscles uncoordinated, his face twitching, but the Mauser always steady. His foot descended gently into the big tin of grease. Vulkan looked down at it. Now was the time to jump him. ‘I’ve ruined my suit,’ he said. The grease spattered around his leg and the Oxford made loud squelching noises inside the tin. He stood with one hand on the bench, one foot in the tin of grease and the Mauser H SC pointed at my middle. ‘My suit,’ he said and he laughed gently, keeping his mouth wide open, like imbeciles and drunks do, until the laugh became a gurgle, like soap suds going down a kitchen sink.
The bare bulb was in my eyes, so it took me a few seconds to see the blood that was flowing out of his mouth. It was light pink and very frothy. He swayed, then crashed to the stone floor and the grease keg unstuck from his foot with a ‘chug’ and rolled across the garage, rattling as it struck the old debris, and bounced into the greasing pit. Johnnie was face-flat on the petrol-shiny floor. His whole body contracted and arched like someone was pouring salt on to him, and then the flat of his hand slapped the concrete, making three loud cracks like pistol shots. Suddenly he was relaxed and still. Stuck fairly high on to Vulkan’s back was the thick oval of polished wood with the words ‘Schmidt’s of Soligen’, and under that, ‘the best drills in the world.’ Vulkan now had their complete range driven deep into his dead body.
It was all so in character. This little Faust, seeker of salvation by striving. This Sturm-und-Drang artist, with his two demanding masters, who tried to die with Goethe on his lips but was carried away by concern for his suit. I wondered whether Samantha was Gretchen or Helena. There was no doubt about my role.
I stacked Stok’s pamphlets in a pile near the door and, buttoning my trenchcoat tight around me, I lifted Johnnie’s bloody carcass into the satin-upholstered coffin. Death had cut him down to size and I could hardly recognize the man whose ankle showed a four-inch scar. I took a grease pencil from the medical kit and, after wiping the blood from his face, I wrote ‘1 G. Na Am’ on Vulkan’s forehead. I looked at my watch and wrote ‘18.15’ under it on the tanned skin. Anything that would increase the confusion when that box was opened was working in my favour.
I had only four of the screws in when I heard the lorry outside. The place seemed to smell of blood, which perhaps was my imagination, but I tipped a little petrol on the floor just to be on the safe side, and hid my bloodstained coat.
I swung the doors open. It was dark now and it had begun to snow. They drove in. I helped the driver unlock the rear doors of the truck. A figure stood inside the van holding an old Mark II Sten gun: a figure in a battered leather coat that bulged agreeably in just the right places.
‘Act your age, Sam,’ I said. ‘If there’s only three of us it’s going to be enough trouble lugging this thing into the truck. Lower that gun.’
She didn’t lower the gun. ‘Where’s Johnnie?’ she said.
‘Lower that gun, Samantha. If you’d seen as many accidents as I’ve seen with those shoddy Sten guns you wouldn’t behave that way. Don’t they teach you anything in Haifa?’
She smiled, pulled the cocking handle back, pushed it up into the lock slot and lowered the gun. ‘Johnnie knows you’re here?’
‘Of course he does,’ I said. ‘This is Johnnie’s show, but you will never get away with your end of the deal.’
‘Maybe I won’t,’ she said, and leaned her face very close to mine, ‘but my pop became a piece of soap in this Goddamned country so I’m going to try.’ She paused. ‘We found out what happens if you don’t – six million of you amble forward gently to die without too much mess or inconvenience – so from now on we Jews are going to try. Maybe I won’t get away very far, but this boy …’ she stabbed a bright red fingernail towards the driver, ‘… is right behind, and behind him there are plenty more.’
‘OK,’ I said. She was right. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what the chances are. ‘Plenty more,’ she said. I nodded.
The military-style leather coat suited her. It suited the aggressive boyish stance that she had picked up along with the machine-gun. She leaned an elbow against the van and fanned her fingertips across her cheek as though the coat was the latest fashion and the machine-gun a photographer’s prop.
‘You should have told me that you were in on it.’
‘Over that telephone of yours?’ I said.
‘I saw the newspapers,’ she said. ‘We were careless.’
‘Is that what you call it?’ I said.
‘I suppose the man downstairs burgled my flat too.’
‘There’s no doubt,’ I said.
‘Haifa thought your people had done it.’
I shrugged and made the international sign for money with the index finger and thumb. ‘How much of it’s in German money?’ I asked.
‘It all is,’ she said, ‘all Deutsche marks.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘We have to pay the people at the mortuary for the turn-round there.’ She was still a little suspicious.
‘He’s had one gramme of sodium amytal.’ I waved towards Vulkan’s medical supplies and the coffin. ‘He’s sleeping quietly, we didn’t use the oxygen, but Johnnie said to take the unit and antidote with you. I’ve marked the dose and time on his forehead so even if you forget to warn the people you pass him to, you’ll be OK.’
She nodded and put down the gun and tried to push the coffin. I said, ‘He’ll be out for eight hours solid.’
‘It’s heavy,’ she said.
‘There’s just one little thing,’ I said, ‘before we put him into your van. I would like the money here.’ I held out my hand as Stok had done to me. She went to the cab and from a large leather handbag produced a bundle of new 100 DM notes. She said, ‘You realize there is nothing to stop me blasting you and taking Semitsa.’ The driver came around the back of the lorry. He was carrying the gun, not aiming it, just carrying it.
‘Now you know why Johnnie isn’t here,’ I said.
Her face showed great relief. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I might have known he’d think of that. He’s “Mr Angle”: Johnnie Vulkan.’ She gave me the money like she was sorry to see it go.
‘It’s extortion, ghoul,’ she said. ‘He’s not worth this much.’
‘That’s what the Roman soldiers said to Judas,’ I said. I put the money into my raincoat pocket and we all began to heave at the coffin.
There was a time when I thought we weren’t going to get it in, but slowly it inched into the truck. When it was far enough in for the rear doors to close (and we tried three times before it was) we stood there drinking in the smell of petrol by the deep lungful without enough energy to speak. I poured a big shot of Johnnie’s Glenlivet whisky into the small plastic cups that he had been thoughtful enough to provide in his kit. My whole body suddenly began to shake. The neck of the whisky bottle chattered against the cup in a tiny shudder of sound. I saw Sam and the driver watching me. ‘Bottoms up,’ I said and poured the smoky malt fluid into my bloodstream.
Sam said, ‘You told those French cops that I was working for the Krauts.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I have an unpleasant sense of humour.’
‘You knew I was working for the Israeli Intelligence.’
‘Is that who you work for?’ I said in mock innocence.
‘Um,’ she said and sipped her whisky. The driver was watching us both.
‘It’s all a game for you,’ she said, ‘but it’s life and death for us. Those Egyptians have so many Kraut scientists working for them that their laboratory instruction manuals are printed in German as well as Arabic. With this guy we can really even things up.’
‘Enzymes,’ I said.
‘Let’s not kid each other any longer,’ she said. ‘Sure in Israel we can use Semitsa’s knowledge of insecticides, but that’s not half the story and you know it.’
I didn’t say anything. She buttoned her leather coat tighter around her chin. ‘These insecticides Semitsa is working on are nerve gases! They’ve had lots of horticultural workers go crazy already. They attack the nervous system, they say they’re the most deadly substances known to man. It’s true, isn’t it?’
She needed to know. ‘It’s true enough,’ I said.
She spoke more quickly, relieved to know that her assignment was as important and factual as she wanted to believe. ‘One day those Egyptians are going to come back,’ she said. ‘One day soon. When they come they are going to have weapons that those Kraut scientists have built for them. Our people in the nahals4 have got to pack a punch.’ There was a sharp click of plastic as she put down the empty whisky cup. ‘That’s why nothing that you or I could think or do stood a chance. This is something that could be the finale of the Jewish nation; no one is more important than that.’
‘If I’d known you were that keen I would have let you collect him from the Adlon.’
She gave me a playful punch on the arm. ‘You think we couldn’t have done it? If there’s one thing we know something about, it’s cities divided by a wall. We’ve had a wall across Jerusalem ever since I was a kid. We’ve mastered every technique there is for getting over, round, through and under it.’
I opened the rear doors of the truck and heaved the two dark shiny wreaths in. ‘From old friends,’ one of them said. It had hooked itself over a coffin handle. ‘We don’t want those,’ said Sam.
‘You take them,’ I said. ‘You don’t know when you are likely to need a wreath from old friends. None of us does.’
Sam smiled and I slammed the truck doors. I opened the garage doors with their carefully oiled bolts and I waved good-bye solemnly as the truck moved slowly forward. Sam was smiling out of her leather coat. Behind her head I could see the big polished box that contained the mortal remains of John Vulkan and just for a moment I felt like calling this over-confident child back. It’s OK to have soft feelings knowing that years of training preclude me from obeying them.
‘Bis hundertundzwanzig,’5 I said gently. The car lurched forward and Sam had to twist her head to keep me in sight. ‘Mazel Tov,’ she called back. ‘My darling ghoul.’ Florins of snow hit the ebony windscreen and slid gently down the warm glass. The driver flipped his lights on to reveal long yellow cones of fast-moving snow. I closed out the sound of the engine and promised myself another Glenlivet whisky; it wasn’t cold but I had the shivers again.