The Rendezvous (14 page)

‘Hello, how are you? It's Vera.'

‘How nice to hear you,' the cool voice said on the other end. ‘I'm just fine. How's Joe?'

‘He's fine too,' Vera said. ‘Look, dear, I'm calling because I was out having lunch today and I saw a friend of yours. I wasn't sure whether you knew about it, so I thought I'd better tell you. Your lover boy was having a heavy date with Terese Bradford. Maybe I'm mistaken but they looked terribly involved to me.'

‘You're not mistaken, Vera. You're too right, as it happens. And you may as well know he's not the lover boy any more. I threw him out. If he wants an affair with her, he's welcome. I'm just so terribly sorry for Bob, that's all.'

‘So am I,' Vera said. ‘I always said she was a bitch. Darling, I'm so terribly sorry for you too – I hope you're not letting it upset you? He's not worth it, you know – none of them are.'

‘I'll get over it,' Julia said; she sounded perfectly cool. The other woman wouldn't be able to guess that she was taking the call on her bed, her head splitting and her eyes so swollen with crying and sleeplessness that she could hardly open them. She needed one full day to collect the pieces up and fit them together before she faced the world without Karl Amstat. It wasn't much, and she was brave in nasty situations. Her two divorces hadn't hurt as much as this disintegrated love affair.

‘Two years was quite a long time, anyway; we were both getting a little bored. Don't worry about me, sweetie. I don't give a damn, so next time you see him having a cosy tête-à-tête with somebody, you needn't bother to call.'

The receiver clicked in Vera's ear. Julia had hung up. That was how much she really cared. And she knew about Terese and him; that was why they had broken up. It would help to be able to throw that at Joe too, along with the other fantastic discovery she'd made. The spoiled little wartime heroine, with everyone running round protecting her. She laughed out loud, and went to mix herself a stiff Martini. She knew all about what had happened to Terese Masson because Joe had told her, expecting to enlist her sympathy. All he had done was make her jealous; only real fear of what he would do to her had prevented her from telling anybody else, even hinting at the truth to Terese herself. Once, urged on by an excess of spite, she had cornered the new bride and told her confidentially how glad her husband was that she and Bob were getting along so well. It had been quite a worry to him, advising Bob when it was wise to consummate the marriage. She had been very sympathetic, and said it all in an understanding whisper, one hand on her victim's arm. And she had got away with it, because Joe never did find out. But that was as far as she had dared to go. There had been a row over his seeing Terese in his consulting rooms; Vera had overheard his receptionist mentioning Terese's name when she asked to put through the call; the row became a real issue when he refused to say why she had come there. Vera hadn't learned anything; he had told her that it was private and medical and nothing to do with her. She had been left alone with her curiosity at war with her suspicion that it was just an excuse on the other woman's part, a way of attracting her husband's attention by playing on his professional sympathy. So brave. If you knew how she'd suffered. He'd start off by saying all that again and she was going to lead him into it. And then pull the rug out from under him.

She heard the front door open at seven-fifteen. When he came into the room she was pouring another drink out of the Martini jug.

‘Hi,' she said. ‘You're late – do you want a drink?'

‘I'm sorry, I was held up just at the last minute. I'd love one, darling.' He went over and she let him kiss her cheek in the meaningless ritual that was practised between them. If just once he took hold of her and really kissed her it would have been a help, but she'd rebuffed him too often to leave the impulse alive. When he made love to her now it was because he wanted it, like being hungry and taking something out of the ice-box. It was passionless desire, and it made them both miserable afterwards. She sat down and sipped her drink.

‘I'm tired,' he said. ‘It's been a hell of a day today. Patients right the way through, and never enough time, never enough time to really help!'

‘I don't know why you don't cut down that hospital work,' she said. ‘It only drains you and you only touch the fringe of most of these people's problems; you keep saying this, and you still go on. Personally I can't stand neurotics. They give me the creeps.'

‘They give most people the creeps,' he said slowly. ‘That's their trouble. They're sick and they're in pain, and it doesn't show like a cancer or a broken leg. It doesn't arouse pity, mental sickness, and it should, Vera. It's agony for so many of them, and it's dressed up in the most unsympathetic disguises like aggression, delusions or withdrawal. You can see how normal people just get mad at them, or else decide they don't want to know any more.'

‘I guess I'm very normal, then,' she said.

‘There's no reason why you shouldn't be,' he said. ‘But they're special to me, these people. I love them, because I can sense their suffering. And that's what they need – to be reached, understood, even if it is only for twenty minutes. I'll never give up the hospital. I couldn't.'

‘The trouble with you,' his wife said, ‘is that you get so emotionally involved. Doctors aren't supposed to get too close to their patients. You talk about loving a crowd of psychotics as if you were Jesus Christ or something. I should be careful, darling, you got involved once before and that didn't do you any good.'

He looked up at her sharply. ‘What the hell do you mean – involved. Involved with whom?'

Vera finished her drink and set down the glass. ‘Mrs. Bradford. Brave, Resistance heroine rescued from the Gestapo's clutches. Or whatever the guff was.' She reached over and took a cigarette and lit it.

His reaction was that of a man who was too tired to react at all. He put his head back, took off his glasses and sighed deeply.

‘Oh God,' he said, ‘are we going to have that again this evening? Think of a new angle, Vera, for Christ's sake. It's like a record. On and on and on.'

‘You know you're right,' she said, ‘that's just how I feel about the whole subject. I go on saying she's a spoilt phoney, and you go on saying she's some kind of symbol, like a female General de Gaulle! I still say she's a phoney!'

‘Vera, you are the biggest bitch sometimes. I've had a bad day – I told you. But you want to attack me about Terese Bradford. Okay, attack me. Let's have it, and get it over. Maybe we can have dinner and look at television afterwards. Just let me get another drink first.'

‘If you weren't so sensitive about her,' she said, ‘you wouldn't make me so bloody mad. But you're too busy analysing other people to think about what your own wife feels – that goes without saying. I just brought it up because I happened to see her today, and I didn't like what she was doing. Bob, believe it or not, is someone I really admire. He's a good guy. He's kind, he's straight – and she's cheating him with Karl Amstat.'

‘I don't believe you,' Joe said slowly. He put his glasses back on and pulled himself up in the chair.

‘Oh, I don't expect you to,' she said. ‘It doesn't fit in with the picture, does it? She's not the sort who goes behind her husband's back and sleeps with another man? Well, I saw her having lunch with him today, holding hands and playing footsie in front of the whole damned restaurant. It was coming out of their ears!'

‘Did she see you?'

‘Did she hell – she wasn't looking anywhere but into his big blue eyes. And suppose we accept that she's gone off the track – suppose we drop the chastity angle about how delicate she was, that poor silly boob had to wait months before the great Dr. Kaplan would even let him touch her.' She had got up and was standing in front of him, her hands clenched into fists, years of hate and jealousy pouring out of her mouth. ‘Let's accept you were wrong about that! If she suffered so much during the war, if she was tortured and all the rest of it, how can she go to bed with a German, tell me that!'

‘I don't understand you,' Joe Kaplan said. ‘Amstat's a Swiss.'

‘Oh no, he's not.' Vera stood there and laughed at him; it was her triumph, her sudden hindsight of a forgotten conversation that gave her the knife and she was going to drive it in. ‘It shocks you, doesn't it?' she said. ‘Well, it shocks me, and I'm not Jewish. They didn't murder six million of my people.'

‘Why do you say he's German?' her husband said. ‘Why, Vera?'

‘Because I was educated in Berne; I spent five years there, learning to be a nice young lady and speak good French and all the rest. That's where he said he was born and brought up. We talked about it that first night at the Bradfords', and I kept meaning to tell you. He's never seen Berne in his life. I mentioned the Magnus Hotel, and he went right in, saying how nice it was, and how his family used to lunch there on a Sunday. All very convincing, very cosy. Except they pulled the Magnus down in 1947, and he told me he left home and went to the Argentine in 1952. He said they had their farewell dinner at the Magnus, just before he left. No, darling he's a phoney too. It's like me telling someone all about the Waldorf five years after it was demolished. He's a German, covering up. Maybe she liked what they did to her – if they ever did it. Where are you going? Joe – where are you going?'

He turned at the door; he looked very pale with dark circles under his eyes; his glasses were off and he was polishing them as he stood in the aperture. ‘Nowhere, Vera. Just to my dressing room to change my clothes. Call me when dinner's ready, will you?'

‘Is that all?' she demanded. ‘Is that all you can say …?'

‘What more do you want?' He asked the question quietly. ‘She's sleeping with a German. You're right about him, Vera. If he made that mistake about the hotel, you're probably right about him. I don't see that it's any of our business any more.' He went out and shut the door, quietly without slamming it. There was a sense of anticlimax that was worse than any scene between them. She went back and sat down and wondered what she'd actually achieved.

‘Would you repeat that please?' Kaplan checked as the operator read back the cable he had phoned through. ‘Cable Urgent Rate to Hoffmeyer, Meyerexport, Buenos Aires. Please check credentials Karl Amstat, Swiss national, architectural graduate University of B.U. arrived Argentine fifty-two. Age around forty, Aryan appearance, no distinguishing marks. Applying for job and thorough character research essential. Regards, Kaplan.'

‘Fine,' Joe said. ‘Thank you.' He put the phone back and looked at his appointment book for the morning. He hadn't done anything last night; he had had dinner with Vera and they had watched a programme on medical research in Asia and seen an old Claudette Colbert movie. She had said nothing and neither had he; he had been thinking very carefully what he should do, and the more he considered it the more certain his course of action became. There was no Hotel Magnus standing when Amstat said he had his farewell family dinner there. There could be a dozen explanations for the mistake, but he personally couldn't think of one that satisfied him. Except what Vera had said, without knowing what she was really saying. Amstat was a German, pretending to be Swiss. If Terese had disregarded his advice and was cheating on her husband, that hurt and angered him, but it was not important, compared with the incidental information Vera had uncovered for him. If Amstat were masquerading under a false nationality, then this was very important to Joe Kaplan indeed. He had been working for the Israeli Intelligence ever since it came into being after the establishment of the State of Israel. His family had strong Zionist sympathies and he had contributed and collected money for his people which Vera knew nothing about. She knew nothing about his involvement with the Jewish Intelligence organisation, and she wouldn't have believed it if he had been fool enough to tell her. As a native-born American he could see the incongruity of the situation. In fact the Israelis' was probably the most efficient and ruthless intelligence service in the world, with agents in every country and a trained commando corps whose abilities had first attracted public notice when they kidnapped Adolf Eichmann. They had taken the big fish alive, but scores of the minnows in the murder pool had faced a summary execution in quiet places all over the world. And there was a long list of names still unaccounted for, a series of old, unspeakable crimes to be avenged in the name of millions of dead. Cousins, uncles, parents, brothers and sisters – their ashes mingled with the atmosphere, for ever absorbed into the air from the chimneys of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and a dozen other places of immortal horror. Their bones were buried in Russia, in Poland, in woods and fields and the shattered ruins of ghettoes: their blood cried in the language of the Israelis under the tyranny of Egypt, and Joe Kaplan heard the cry.

‘I'm shocked,' his wife had said. ‘And I'm not Jewish. They didn't murder six million of my people.' If Amstat was a German, then he might have only one reason to hide out; other reasons, criminal activities of other kinds didn't interest Joe or involve Israel. They weren't exactly part of Interpol. But if he owed the Jewish people justice, he would pay what he owed. Hoffmeyer was the principal contact in Buenos Aires; most of the war criminals who had escaped had taken refuge in the South Americas, many had even got their wives and families over afterwards to join them. They too had organisation behind them, and money, and it had successfully absorbed men who should have stood before the court at Nuremburg. They had taken refuge in Africa too, exchanging the concentration-camp experimental laboratories for the primitive bush hospitals.