Shake Off (14 page)

O
nce outside the KaDeWe we wandered up the Ku’Damm in the direction of the Europa Centre and the Kranzler Café. It was hot after the artificially cooled air of the department store. Abu Leila was smiling to himself. He held up his purchase of Turkish cigarettes, as if to explain his delight. I desperately wanted to stop and do some counter-surveillance, to pop into a shop with a big window and check out the people on the street to see whether I recognized anyone from the KaDeWe. Two German boys, ten or eleven years old, ran past us shrieking and shouting. We heard their parents call after them from behind us. The boys were whining for ice cream. Abu Leila laughed, saying, “A spell in Gaza would do them good, Michel. To appreciate what they have, yes?” He said something else but I couldn’t hear him over the sound of tourists and traffic. A motorcycle was revving nearby. I had to ask him to repeat himself and leaned in to him so I could hear his answer.

“I said that I think I will have to move from the GDR soon. Their ideology is built on absolutes, and absolutes can’t bend when the wind of change blows, they just snap.”

“Where would you go then?” I asked.

He shrugged, as if the question hadn’t occurred to him.

“It is your future I am more worried about, Michel.” We slowed down for an elderly woman in a red top walking in front of us, and I started to ask Abu Leila what he meant when the woman stumbled onto her knees. I instinctively bent forward to help her up, but then she fell forward again, her face hitting the pavement with a nauseous slap. She was lying motionless on the ground. Her underskirts were showing. I got down beside her and pulled her dress down over her legs. Then, while on my knees, I saw dark blood spreading on the pavement from under her body. I looked back up at Abu Leila, who was mouthing something that I couldn’t hear over the sound of an idling motorbike that had stopped nearby. He was holding out the copy of
Der Spiegel
to me. I saw someone in black leathers and a motorcycle helmet with a tinted visor step up behind him and point something at the back of his head. People were scattering in wordless panic. I reached up to warn him or to pull him down or something, but Abu Leila jerked and looked surprised then dropped to his knees. The newspaper fell and the cartons of cigarettes scattered onto the pavement, the open one spilling its contents. I worried that the packets would fall into the blood pooling on the pavement. The man in leathers took another step towards us and pointed again and Abu Leila nodded at me. His right eye exploded in a red mess onto the inside of his glasses. I tried to hold him up as he collapsed across the woman on the ground. The man in leathers was now properly visible to me: he was holding an automatic with a silencer. I tried to identify the model. A small wisp of blue smoke eased out of its long muzzle. Behind him another man, again in black leathers, sat astride a black 750cc Honda, its engine throbbing as it waited by the side of the road. The driver’s head was turned to us, but, like his companion, no face was visible beneath the dark visor of his helmet. The man with the pistol looked at me, at least I think he did, it was impossible to see what he was looking at, he may have been checking Abu Leila for life or looking at the things on the pavement. He stepped forward and shot again. I flinched and Abu Leila twitched in my arms. Someone screamed. The rider shouted,
“Yalla!,”
sounded his horn and revved the engine. The killer put the weapon inside his leather jacket, then turned and ran back to the bike, swinging himself onto the back and wrapping his arms around the driver’s midriff. The engine screamed horribly as the bike accelerated violently into the traffic, its front wheel leaving the ground momentarily. You could hear the bike for a long time in the distance.

A crowd had started to gather. I looked down to see the back of Abu Leila’s head, or what was left of it, and I was frozen, unable to function. He was growing heavy in my arms. A logical, KGB-trained part of my brain was telling me to get out of there. A fifteen-year-old part of me was making me stay put, to get underneath him and hold my breath, to play dead. The crowd grew bigger but kept a safe distance. I let Abu Leila sink down on top of the old woman. Still on my knees, I started to pick up the packets of Turkish cigarettes, then remembered the copy of
Der Spiegel
. I found it, still folded, a couple of meters away. No one came forward to help, I heard no “Let me through, I’m a doctor.” But a man called hysterically for the police and an ambulance, both at this stage redundant. Then a woman screamed, and I couldn’t understand the point of it, but it helped me to get up, helped me walk away from the man who had been my mentor and surrogate father. A father superior in many ways to my own poor uneducated dead father, also shot in the head.

Out-of-focus people were muttering and pointing and I could hear the sound of a siren because the Germans lose no time in ringing the authorities about the smallest thing. But this was not a small thing, and I pushed through half-hearted attempts to stop me leaving and broke into a run until I reached the entrance of Kurfürstendamm U-Bahn station, where I took the stairs three at a time and boarded the first northbound train.

I stood near the doors, ready to jump off at every stop if necessary. Everyone who got on looked at me and took a step backwards. It was as if I carried the violence of what had happened with me. Was I being paranoid? It was only when the train was going through a tunnel that I saw, in my reflection in the glass of the door, dark stains on my face. I put a hand up and transferred blood to my fingers. Was it my own? I felt my head and body for possible holes or nicks, but concluded that the blood was Abu Leila’s and wiped it off with tissues with a trembling hand. Stupidly, I hadn’t gone through his pockets to remove anything incriminating. But at least I’d had the presence of mind to pick up the copy of
Der Spiegel
with the envelope inside. I started thinking that I should be going to my hotel to get my bag—I had my passport on me—but I wasn’t sure whether this was a good idea or not. I weighed up leaving the trail of an unpaid hotel bill, a plane ticket and an overnight bag (including a packet of codeine) against going back to pick them up, thereby remaining longer than necessary in West Berlin. It was a matter of hours, if not minutes, I reasoned, before the police had a description of me from the many witnesses, and it would soon be circulated to every official at every exit from West Berlin.

I got off at the end of the line and took a taxi straight to Tegel Airport, driven by a mercifully unsociable German who took the Autobahn agonizingly slowly. A motorcycle passed us, and I sank into my seat, feeling stupid for being a slow-moving target on an open road. I cleaned myself up some more, picking small bits of dried bloody matter from my clothes, one of which was a hair attached to a tiny piece of skin.

An hour later, after vomiting and cleaning up in the airport bathroom, I sat in a rumbling British Airways plane as it taxied onto the runway that would lead it into the sky
towards
London.

It was the first time I had looked forward to take-off.

I
made my way to King’s Cross without much thought for anything except getting to my room. I took the escalator from the underground two moving steps at a time. From the main-line train station I walked onto the street and stepped straight onto an open bus without even having to break my stride. It was getting dark when I got off the bus near Tufnell Park tube station, something I never did—usually getting out earlier at Kentish Town and walking. Inside the front door I stood for a moment, breathing hard in the darkening hall, listening to the sounds of the house. Helen would not be home as she was going to Turkey the next day and had planned to stay at her mother’s flat because it was nearer the airport, and besides, I was meant to be away. I got to my floor without seeing anyone, listened at her door but heard nothing, and listened at my own before opening it.

In my room I sat on the bed with the sodium glow of a street light coming in through the window and tried to filter the torrent of thoughts I’d suffered since leaving Abu Leila lying on the Ku’Damm in West Berlin, not four hours before. I couldn’t get a purchase on my thoughts; they were like black slippery eels in a tank. I dealt with them one by one. I put myself in the shoes of the West German police: I had left my bag in a Berlin hotel, and had left Berlin within an hour of Abu Leila’s death, buying a ticket with cash at the British Airways desk at Tegel. My bag, now sitting for the second night in a room booked only for one, had a British Airways return ticket for tonight in the name of Michel Anton. Records at Tegel would show that Michel Anton had actually left earlier in the day, soon after Abu Leila had been shot. Checks would soon show the frequency of my visits to West Berlin, and a routine inquiry with the Swiss would expose the fact that Michel Anton no longer existed but had died aged two. All this meant that Michel Anton from Geneva could be no more. Because they would connect the forged passport with a murdered Middle Eastern–looking man they would refer the matter to the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the federal intelligence service, who would no doubt make contact with their UK counterparts, since that is where I had gone. The bag in the hotel also contained an open pack of codeine tablets, which had a batch number on it. They would try to track these to a prescription at a pharmacy but would soon realize that they had been stolen. It was unlikely that my dealer could be tracked down, although he could provide no information about me even if he was; he knew me as Roberto, not Michel.

I went through these and other matters: like that
yalla
shouted by the bike rider. An Arabic urge to “come on,” “move it,” “let’s go.” Who were they? I tried to make sense of these threads, but I grew weary and took just two codeine from a new pack, bolting the door and lying down with my jacket and shoes still on. One of the slippery eels in my head kept reappearing as I disposed of the others one by one, although this became more difficult as the codeine took effect. It was a big one though, this eel, one that was uglier and more difficult to get hold of than any of the others. Even as more of the codeine metabolized into morphine I couldn’t expel it. I would have taken more codeine, but a corner of my brain nagged at me to remain in control. An hour later I was rocking my head, so I got up quickly and for the first time put on the lights. I made coffee and drank it, but the caffeine fought for head space with the morphine, and I veered between a calm and an anxious place. Stupidly I’d left the curtains open and went to close them; I was getting sloppy, and sloppy was dangerous.

At midnight I was pacing up and down, still in my jacket—I could feel the bulk of the envelope rescued from Abu Leila sticking into my ribs. What to do with it? Who to give it to? I paced up and down some more, until I turned the light out and went into the hall. I listened at Helen’s door, although I knew she wasn’t there. I went down to the garden and fetched the lock-picking set from the abandoned cooker.

Her curtains were open and the light from the street lamps filled her room with the same unpleasant yellow as mine. I kept the lights off and lay on her bed and smelled her pillow; it was the herbal smell of her shampoo. I breathed in and I breathed out. Sometimes I could hear a car or a bus on the high street. I heard a car door close, but gently, as if they didn’t want to wake anyone up. Considerate, I thought. I was beginning to relax in Helen’s room. Did Abu Leila have a family that needed to be notified? What had happened to his body, was it already being cut up in an autopsy? What was it he was going to tell me about my future? To my surprise I started to cry. I buried my face in Helen’s pillow to muffle the noise. I cried like I was fifteen and had lost my family all over again. After a couple of minutes I stopped and sat up—I wasn’t crying for Abu Leila, I was crying for myself. It was loathsome self-pity.

I wiped my eyes. Something bothered me about the sounds I’d heard outside. I wondered why, following the closure of a car door, a car engine hadn’t started; nor had I heard it drive up and park beforehand. I heard a creaking on the stairs. A soft step, the groan of a floorboard, then silence. It couldn’t be Zorba. I took soft steps of my own to Helen’s door and I heard the slip of metal on metal, a slow keying of a lock, or maybe the racking of pins, not on Helen’s lock but on mine next door. Then I heard my door click open and probably two people go in, judging by the time it took for the door to close behind them. My heart sounded, and I crept back to the bed and listened at the wall.

They were quiet, professional; they didn’t speak or make much noise. Maybe a squeak of a drawer, a pressing of bed springs, nothing that you would hear if you hadn’t got your ear pressed against the wall. They spent fifteen minutes searching for something in there, then the noises stopped and I heard them leave, gently closing the door behind them. I went back to Helen’s door, terrified that they would try to come into her room. I desperately looked for a bolt, but none had been fitted: stupid, stupid Helen. What about all the stuff under the bath, what if they searched the bathroom? But then I heard that creak on the stairs again and the front door clicking shut. I hadn’t heard them come in but they had probably wedged it open, and besides, I had been blubbing like a baby. At the window I saw two men dressed in dark clothes walk down the road. They stopped by a car with a silhouette in the driver’s seat, and one of them opened the door. The courtesy light didn’t come on as the door opened, because people on a nighttime stake-out always disable it. The other man walked on and he was betrayed by the slope of his shoulders as he went. I watched him until he disappeared around the corner. It was the pale-faced man I had last seen outside Foyles.

T
he car was still there half an hour later. A dirty Golf, although I couldn’t discern the color under the yellow street light. I could make out the number plate; if they believed they hadn’t been seen they would still use it. It scared me, knowing that they had come into my room when they thought I’d be in it. They must have followed me here, since I’d stupidly done no proper countersurveillance from King’s Cross and nobody knew where I lived—not even Abu Leila, and SOAS had only a PO box in their records. They’d entered my room when they thought I was asleep, no doubt detecting which room I was in when I’d put the light on without closing the curtains. I was a victim of my own ineptitude. They must have thought I’d disappeared and perhaps were hoping I’d return. This meant that they might know about the back entrance, since my friend who had gone around the corner would have found the path running down behind the gardens by now. No doubt he was watching where it came onto the street, with someone at the other end. I took them to be the competition: Mossad agents wanting the envelope. I desperately wanted to get out.

It was starting to get light when I went into the bathroom. I didn’t go into my room, assuming they had placed something in it that would tell them if I did: either a microphone or a motion detector, something connected to the door, maybe. I unscrewed the panel on the side of the bath. I emptied the zip-lock case onto the floor, taking an inventory: the
Le Monde
article, one Greek passport, my Lebanese passport and £3,500. My Swiss passport and the fat envelope were still in my jacket. My first priority would be to go and empty my safety deposit box.

I left the house through the back door and went through the garden to the gate at the end. I listened for a bit, then opened it slowly. I heard nothing, so I went into the alley. I could have gone either way and come out on one of the roads leading from mine to Fortress Road, but I had to assume that both would be covered. I would go straight through instead. I climbed the fence opposite and walked up the tended garden to the back of the house. The lights were off, which hopefully meant they were still asleep. If I’d wished for a side alley that led to Fortress Road I was disappointed—all the houses on the road were terraced; I would have to go through the house. I still had my set of picks on me after using them on Helen’s door. I got through the back door and closed it quietly behind me. It was nearly half past five, and some people get up that early. I was in the kitchen—a family room with an enormous refrigerator covered with children’s drawings and magnetic letters. It was very quiet, until the refrigerator came to life with a shudder and started grumbling. I moved slowly into the hall, thankful for the wall-to-wall carpet, and studied the front door: bolted from the inside. The front door they bolt, but not the more vulnerable back one. The staircase was opposite the front door, and I looked up it to see darkness at the top.

Two bolts were on the door, top and bottom, and I pulled the top one slowly through its eye, pressing the door to reduce the friction and noise. I had it undone when a noise made me jump.

“Who are you?” A small child, a girl, sat halfway up the stairs, a blanket in her hands. She wasn’t upset or frightened, more curious than anything. She held the blanket up to her cheek and rubbed it between her fingers.

“I’m nobody. I’m just leaving,” I said softly, and put my finger to my lips, giving her a smile. I undid the bottom bolt more quickly than the top, then opened the door. Coats were on pegs by the door, and I chose a raincoat, along with a cap; any disguise at this stage would be useful. I waved at the girl and stepped onto the street, closing the door gently behind me.

I crossed the empty road and turned right, walking
towards
Kentish Town—I figured they would have someone outside Tufnell Park since it was the nearest station. I pulled the cap over my eyes as I passed the junction to the street with the alley on it. If they had anyone waiting for me, that was one of the places they would be. Within ten minutes I was on the platform at Kentish Town, and within fifteen I was on the first train heading into central London.

I was hit by a memory of Abu Leila. We were in West Berlin, at a small restaurant that did a Moroccan lamb and date tagine he was fond of. Abu Leila had just told me that I belonged to a big family. At first I thought he was talking about my dead family, which, relatively speaking, wasn’t that big.

“We are a family of uprooted gypsies, outsiders wherever we go. And although we wander alone, this inability to fit in, to be accepted, is what binds us together.” He was drinking from a liter-sized stein of beer and there was a glisten in his eyes—it wasn’t often I saw him drink. “We are roaming warriors, Michel, lost in a world that cares only about its immediate needs.” He had gone on in this vein for a few minutes, then he’d said something that distracted me from my food. “One day you may find yourself looking for these fellow travelers, but they will not be where you think they are. Sometimes when travelers congregate in a place they call home and settle down they lose their identity, they become something different, something soulless.”

“What do you mean?” I’d asked. Was he talking about Palestinians in general, or people like him and me, invisible even to those Palestinians openly engaged in the struggle for a homeland?

“I’m talking about a soulmate, my son. A soulmate could be an unlikely person that you may not at first recognize as a soulmate. A true soulmate may not be of your world.”

He’d lost me, he seemed to be talking about more than one thing, and I didn’t press it; a liter of beer does not sit well with a burdened man, and Abu Leila had never been a drinker. A smoker, yes, but not one to wallow in alcohol-
​induced
self-pity. That was the first time it had occurred to me that he might actually be a lonely man. Now he was dead.

I stayed on the Northern Line until Stockwell, and went back north again on the Victoria Line to Green Park, then southbound on the Piccadilly Line to Knightsbridge, where I got off. The people on the trains had started out as black and Asian, people on their way back from night shifts or doing early cleaning shifts. They slumped in their seats and slept, and had I not been on full alert I would have joined them. The numbers and ethnic mix increased at each change until, by the time I emerged above ground opposite Harrods, it was rush hour and the train was full.

Although employees were entering Harrods, it wasn’t yet open to customers, so I sat in a small café on a side street. It was full of breakfasting taxi drivers and the smell reminded me that I hadn’t eaten anything except a pretzel since yesterday morning. I ordered a bacon sandwich and a mug of tea. I needed to let someone know about Abu Leila. People must be wondering what had happened to him. Arrangements would need to be made, networks dismantled, the envelope given to someone. The only thing I could think to do was to contact the PLO in London and let them have the envelope. Since it was somewhere I avoided, I didn’t know who to speak to, but I knew there would be a security officer, someone who would know what to do, who to tell.

What I also hoped, as I drained my tea, was that the same person would tell me who I should now report to, what I should do next, and how best I could use my experience and training for the good of the cause. There was the small matter of making contact. Phoning them was out of the question, and besides, I didn’t have a name. Somehow I would need to get a letter to them.

I looked around at the breakfasting taxi drivers.