Shake Off (13 page)

A
bu Leila’s voice came down the phone in reassuring cadences, even in his bad German.

“Don’t worry about it, Michel, we carry on as planned.”

I was in a call box near Archway underground station, a short bus journey from Tufnell Park. Abu Leila was referring to the Cambridge meeting. I reminded him that venues and accommodations were all sorted.

“When is the first board meeting?” I asked.

“We’ll discuss that face to face. Let’s meet in Paris next Tuesday.” Meeting in Paris next Tuesday meant meeting in Berlin the day after tomorrow.

“That’s fine, I’ll get back to you when I have a flight booked,” I said, which meant I would ring him when I was in Berlin. “What about the competition?” I asked. “They’re showing great interest in the business at the moment.”

“Don’t worry about them. They have probably lost interest. Just bring the product samples. Bring them to Paris.” He paused and I heard him light up—I could almost smell the tobacco. “Are you in London?”

I hesitated. Why was he asking me a question he knew I wouldn’t answer?

He didn’t wait for an answer, however, and asked, “Have you looked at the samples?”

“No, of course not,” I said, surprised that he needed to ask. “Why would I?”

“It is important that you bring them to me as you found them.”

To avoid detection I decided to stay in Tufnell Park until I traveled to Berlin, on the basis that the competition, if they were still on my tail, wouldn’t be looking for me there. I figured that Abu Leila’s reassurances that they had lost interest were just that, reassurances, and I thought it irresponsible of him to make them. It was possible, although unlikely, that they knew they had missed their chance and gone home. I walked home from the phone box, choosing to reflect on Helen instead of the conversation I’d had with Abu Leila, which left me feeling uneasy.

Last night and this morning Helen and I had spent in Tufnell Park, either making love (although that’s not what she called it) or talking. That was when I had confronted her about being with Zorba, after giving her what I thought was enough time to bring it up on her own. She said that she’d bumped into him after seeing Maria and it was hardly worth mentioning. Why, she explained (after making clear that she was under no obligation to explain anything), would she have asked me along if she was planning to see Niki? I had no answer to that, and she didn’t give me a chance to think of one, distracting me with a pre-breakfast “treat” in her bed. Afterwards, though, when she had gone to the
toilet
, I came up with at least three alternative scenarios, which involved her changing her mind about seeing Maria when I’d said I wouldn’t be going with her. Two of these scenarios involved her having sex with Zorba (once in his office), while the third involved them arranging to meet in Turkey for a holiday together. This last one gave me the most heartache and was given added credence when she told me, in our by now ritual post-sex bath, that she would be going to Turkey after all. It was only for a week, and Zorba wouldn’t be going, as he would be on holiday with his wife in Greece. It was after this news that I got out of the bath and went for a walk to call Abu Leila.

As I neared home I thought it might be prudent to test the emergency entrance to the house. I also decided to tell Helen my true feelings for her. I turned off Fortress Road onto the street that connected to mine. Halfway before my street I stopped to tie my shoelace and, when I was sure no one else could see me, ducked into a narrow passage that ran along the bottom of my garden. At one time there must have been gates to the gardens either side, to allow access to them, but over the years these had been fenced over, or, like the one leading to my house, been padlocked on the house side. Except that some time ago I had picked the rusty padlock, leaving it unlocked and in situ, so that from the house it still looked locked. The path ran through to another street that came off Fortress Road but was so clogged with overflowing bushes and trees, as well as debris thrown from gardens, that you couldn’t actually see all the way down it. This meant once you were on the path you couldn’t be seen from the streets at either end.

The garden to my house was a neglected, overgrown rectangle into which nobody ever set foot. The owner didn’t maintain it, using it to dump unwanted furniture and rusting appliances. It was a discarded cooker, with weeds sprouting from underneath, that served as one of my caches. I removed a dirty plastic packet from a cavity in its back. Inside was a thin leather case. Inside that, the steel flat-lock picks and the torque wrenches were in pristine condition, like dental instruments.

Once I had the back door open (twenty-five seconds; Vasily would be proud) I kept it from closing with a piece of cardboard and replaced the picking set in its hiding place. Back inside, I was on the ground floor next to the stairs, the front door being at the opposite end of the hall. I closed the back door behind me, went up to my floor and tapped on Helen’s door. My nerves jangled; I knew what I wanted to say to her but just not how I would go about it.

She opened the door, newspaper in one hand. “Are you still sulking,
ma belle?
”

“I don’t want to fight with you,” I said.

She smiled and started to undo the buttons on her jeans. “Good—shall we use your room or mine? Your mattress is firmer.”

I shook my head. “No, not that—I just want to talk.”

“I’m only joking, silly.” She opened her door wide and let me in, patting my behind as I passed her. I felt belittled by this action. I sat in her armchair and she sat cross-legged on her bed, spreading out the newspaper in front of her as if to read it. “OK, Mr. Serious, tell me off then, but I’d really prefer some punishment.”

“Everything is about sex with you,” I said.

She looked surprised. This wasn’t how I’d planned to tell her how I felt, to try to explain my jealousy.

“I think you take things a little too seriously, Michel.” She looked over to the window, then back at me. “Sometimes, I have to say, you are a little too intense. It could scare a girl off.”

It was my turn to be surprised. We sat in silence for a bit, all thoughts of my saying anything now gone.

“So when are you going to Turkey?” I asked. I hadn’t thought to ask in the bath, being more upset at the fact that she had left it so long before telling me than that she was actually going—I had already resigned myself to that. She licked her finger before turning a sheet of newspaper.

“Saturday,” she said, without looking up. How was she going to arrange a visa that quickly? I watched her holding her hair back from her face with one hand so she could read the paper, her lips slightly pursed in concentration. With her other hand she fiddled with a thin gold chain around her neck.

At this moment I was certain that I loved her. At this moment I also knew she had been planning to go to Turkey all along and that all these arrangements would have been made some time before; no one just flies off to look at burial sites in Turkey without arranging it with the authorities. Zorba was probably not going to Greece with his wife at all. All this went on in my head, of course, but I didn’t see the point in saying any of it out loud. Instead I slumped down in the chair. Besides, I was going to Berlin tomorrow, and had to think of a way to explain my absence just two days before she was off to Turkey.

O
f course I lied to Helen. My uncle, the distant relative I’d told her lived in Berlin, had taken ill. I had no problem lying to her since she was, no doubt, lying to me. I assumed that she was going to Turkey with her tutor and, had I thought it would do anything other than end our fledgling relationship, would have found proof and confronted her with the evidence. Her outward brashness hid something, I believed; I would catch it periodically in her eyes, when she relaxed her guard. I didn’t know what it was, something to do with her father, I supposed, but it made me feel protective of her. Of course I didn’t think her tutor cared about any of this and I believed, despite having no evidence to prove it, that he was taking advantage of her.

I disembarked at Tegel after a sweaty landing and checked into a budget hotel, favored by backpacking students, near Checkpoint Charlie. You had to share toilets, but it was anonymous and had a quick turnover of guests. Once I’d stowed my bag in my room I looked like everyone else, in my worn Levis and T-shirt, as they gathered outside consulting guidebooks. I rang Abu Leila in East Berlin and he told me he would come over in the morning, we would meet at the KaDeWe.

“I need cigarettes,” he said. “I can’t get Turkish cigarettes here—the East Germans make their cigarettes with cow shit.” He told me to bring the envelope with me. I checked for it in my jacket and wondered why he was coming over to the West, but it was not the sort of thing you could ask him, like the many other things I couldn’t ask. I’d have thought it was safer for him in the East; West Berlin was crawling with agents from every country. But then East Berlin was crawling with Stasi, so you had to take your pick.

It was dusk as I walked through Kreuzberg and towards the river and Hallesches Tor, where many people were congregating. They were all coming out of the U-Bahn station, exiting on the south side of the river. I followed the crowd and crossed the bridge towards the park, where there was some kind of fair going on. Shawarma and doner kebab stalls were plentiful, and there was
tabla
playing, Egyptian belly dancing, people selling halva, falafel, Turkish Delight. A man in full Bedouin dress was leading a magnificent white stallion, giving children rides. Off to one side, a group of people were roasting a whole sheep on a spit. There were also Caribbean rum stalls, salsa dancing groups, tacos with refried beans and cocktails with umbrellas. Anarchists were smoking hashish, old Turkish men were smoking
nargileh
s. This was a gathering of communities celebrating their culture through food, drink, song and dance. This was a carnival of exiles giving thanks to West Berlin for being a refuge. There were information stalls with pamphlets and posters. About the Communist Party of Iraq, about the plight of the Kurds, the genocide of the Armenians, a stall celebrating the recent withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan and supporting the Mujahideen—how Vasily would have cussed. Vegetarians promoted the virtues of pulses and vegetables, waving away the smoke of barbecuing chicken with their leaflets. Someone gave me a pamphlet telling me how the Romanian people were suffering under Nicolae Ceau
ş
escu, and I looked for Antanasia, my old university girlfriend, on their stall, but of course she wasn’t there.

Then I came upon a stall that had the Palestinian flag draped over it. It was staffed by four German students who wore
keffiyeh
s like the
fedayeen
had when they’d left Beirut in 1982, just weeks before the massacre. One of them, a thin pale woman, thrust a pamphlet under my nose. On the cover was a picture of bodies in the street after the massacre in my camp, bloated and obscene. I had seen these photos before, I had some of them in my safety deposit box. I had even seen the beginning of some film footage that I hadn’t been able to watch all the way through for fear I’d see the people I had left lying there. The pale girl was saying something to me in German.

“The perpetrators have never been brought to justice for this crime—have you heard of it?” I nodded numbly, looking at the leaflet. She continued, “Many people were killed, many disappeared. The Israelis, under the command of the Zionist general, Sharon, surrounded the camp and fired flares over it all night, to help the people who did this.” I remembered the flares; I had stood outside our house watching them turn night into day. Mama had called me in to our last supper, my father and uncles looking serious, my mother looking tired but forcing herself to be cheerful.

“Will you sign our petition?” the girl was asking. She thrust something under my nose. I studied it but could not figure out what the petition was for. Was it to bring Sharon to justice? Was it to charge the killers? Different strains of music were fighting for my attention, different smells, different languages. People were shouting and laughing. I looked at the picture of the dead bodies again; they were on the main Sabra Street. I had walked down that street many times, to my UNRWA school, to the dirt patch that served as a football pitch. I was jostled back to the present by two drunk young Turks, who pushed by arm in arm, looking back at me and giggling. The girl in the
keffiyeh
was talking again, shrugging and looking at her colleagues. It appeared that I was shaking my head; I would not sign anything, no petition could fix this. She was trying to take the clipboard back but I couldn’t let go without explaining.

“I’m tracking the killers down,” I told them in German. “I already know some of their leaders’ names.” Try as I might, I couldn’t keep the clipboard steady in my hand. “When I find them I’m going to bring them to justice.” Now I couldn’t keep my voice steady either. “I’m going to kill them. I know how to do it—I’ve been trained.”

I let out a bark of a laugh, feeling a strange detachment from myself as if I had escaped my own body. I let go of the clipboard and handed her the leaflet. She grinned stupidly and the others were quiet behind the stall. I smiled, but they didn’t smile back. One of the young men spoke.

“Go on now, we don’t want any loonies here.”

I didn’t understand who he was talking to; I looked around to see who he was talking to.

“Go on, fuck off, dopehead.” I looked around again but saw no one else at the stall.

I walked back through the fair and left the noise and the color and the smells. I ended up back in my hotel. In my small room, I took three codeine and went to bed, despite feeling hungry. It was half past five. At six o’clock I got up and took a fourth tablet.

I
woke with a hole in my stomach; I hadn’t eaten since lunchtime yesterday. I was half-asleep still, in a post-codeine stupor. I had overslept and had no time for breakfast before my
tref
with Abu Leila. I taped the fraying envelope to the middle of yesterday’s
Der Spiegel
newspaper, puzzling, as I went through my pre-meeting shake-off routine, over my outburst at the stall yesterday, and feeling embarrassed by it. It had come from nowhere. I wasn’t going to kill anyone, so why had I said those things? Things I locked away in my safety deposit box and in my head. It was as if they had just leaked out. I put it down to tiredness and stress and concentrated on the practicalities of my
tref
.

Abu Leila and I had agreed to meet in the KaDeWe department store, a huge building on the Ku’Damm. It was similar in scale to the Harrods store in London. On the top floor was a food emporium that featured many stalls, like an upscale indoor street market. Instead of Bratwurst, doners and the chips with curry sauce that you might find at any street
Imbiss
,
they sold caviar, oysters and steak tartare. You could find hundreds of types of sausage here, a hundred varieties of beer, a hundred different breads and, more importantly, in the tobacco section, every brand of cigarette made in the world, judging by the range on offer. I found Abu Leila sitting at a Turkish-themed stall drinking coffee. He was the only person there, and was chatting in Turkish to the man behind the counter, sharing some joke. When I sat down Abu Leila nodded and the Turk, dressed in black with a full-length white apron and a red fez on his head, poured me a Turkish coffee. He raised the coffee pot high above the small cup so that it was filled with a long stream. He then disappeared to the other side of the kiosk and started to polish the spotless counter. I needed something to eat but didn’t want to ask for it now that he had gone.

“I didn’t know you spoke Turkish,” I said to Abu Leila. He had three twelve-pack cartons of Turkish cigarettes on the counter beside his coffee; he had done his shopping. Grey bags hung under his eyes. I put
Der Spiegel
on the counter between us but he ignored it.

“How are things with you?” he asked, breaking open one of the cartons and taking out a new flat packet. I told him I was fine—I did not mention my strange episode yesterday at the fair, nothing would be served by it, it was an aberration. I was glad when we started to talk business; the fake Turkish surroundings were reminding me that Helen would soon be in Turkey with Zorba. I briefed Abu Leila about the Cambridge house, told him that if I was to be responsible for security then I needed to lay down some rules. He lit up and blew out some smoke.

“OK, tell me what you need.”

So I told him what I needed: that no one would leave the house except with my permission, that no wives or mistresses should be contacted, or worse, brought to Cambridge.

“One of the party is a woman,” he broke in. “I assume she would be subject to the same rules?”

“Of course,” I said, annoyed at the interruption. I continued that coming by air from Amsterdam was possible, with a private charter.

He interrupted again: “I’m not keen on using Schiphol; the competition has a big station in the El Al airport facility.”

“I’m sure there are other airports one can fly from…” I trailed off. It struck me that he didn’t look that interested in what I had to say about security arrangements. I was disappointed with his attitude, as he was always telling me that PLO officials never paid enough attention to security and I had gone to a lot of effort to put the whole thing together. I decided to persevere.

“There is another thing,” I said. “It would be good for me to have help with this—when people arrive, I mean. I can’t cover all the angles on my own. I need someone at the station, at the house. I need a car and a driver—”

Abu Leila raised his hand. “No way can all that happen, Michel. This needs to stay small. I can’t trust anyone else with this. You’ll have to do the best you can do.” That, as Jack would say, took the wind out of my sails. To make things worse he asked me to write down the address of the house, which I did, and he put the piece of paper in his wallet without reading it.

“Tell me about Ramzi, and”—patting the newspaper with the envelope in it—“the story of this.” The kiosk man came over and gave Abu Leila a refill, fawning over him as if he was a regular. I asked him for a not very Turkish pretzel. When he’d gone, Abu Leila turned to me expectantly. I briefed him as best I could, recalling word for word my conversation with Ramzi, as I would have put it in my report had I been able to complete it. When I was finished, Abu Leila looked at me, then took off his glasses to clean them with the napkin that was under his coffee cup. I nibbled at my pretzel.

“You have given a good account as always, Michel.” He put his glasses back on.

“Doesn’t this change the Cambridge meeting in any way?” I asked.

Abu Leila shrugged. “I’m not sure. It depends. Tell me about the driver.”

“The driver?”

“You said Ramzi told you a new driver brought them from Ramallah to the crossing. Did he describe him?” I put my pretzel down and described him as Ramzi had: a thin, balding Palestinian with a small scar that prevented hair growth on his chin. When I was done, Abu Leila looked into his cup and I had no clue as to whether I’d portrayed someone he knew or not. Then he drained his coffee and left money on the counter before picking up the newspaper. He stared at me in a way I had not experienced before. It felt uncomfortable, like I was being studied under a microscope. I had the sensation that he looked like someone different, someone I didn’t know, like when I caught glimpses of
Helen
looking much older.

“Did you open the envelope?” That took me aback; it was the second time he’d asked this question. But he continued to stare at me, not changing his expression.

“Of course not,” I said, blushing and looking away, knowing it was a weakness even as I did so. “I would never do such a thing.”

His face regained its usual smile and he stood up, clapping me on the back. “Of course you wouldn’t. Let us walk down the Ku’Damm and look at the women in their summer dresses.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I asked. We never walked together down the street; our meetings were all in safe houses, restaurants, cafés and museums, and we always left separately.

“If your time is up, Michel, your time is up, it is God’s will.” I was confounded at his unlikely fatalism, it was a negation of everything I had been taught. I was going to argue but then he said, “We’ll just walk up to the Kranzler. We need to talk about your future, Michel, and I want to do it in a real café,” waving at the Turkish stall, “not a fake.”