The Sun Chemist (29 page)

He showed up presently – not by the way he’d approached. He’d swung round the house. He was making no attempt at concealment. He was talking to himself, quite loudly, and
flapping
his arms. He was walking in an odd, stumping fashion, without particular haste.

There was an area of light before the jetty and he got to it and stood looking about. He was rubbing his face, rubbing it all over. He began patrolling up and down, covering the approach to the jetty. He came gradually out of the light, and stopped, to my relief.

He called, ‘Igor! You are making a terrible mistake, Igor.’

There was a bleating quality to his voice as if he were giving an unaccustomed public address, and his arms were still
flapping
.

‘Do you want to destroy a life, Igor? Do you want to do that?’

I looked about and wondered what to do if he came on. The immediate locality offered some leeway. A number of small walls and stumps stood about. It would be possible to crawl out of it, if one did it slowly: sideways, in the direction from which he had come, the direction of Foka Hirsch’s …

If it not a life without merit, Igor. You don’t have all the facts. Let me explain the facts, Igor. Only, for God’s sake, I can’t stand yelling here all night! ‘he said, with something like a return to normality.’ Look, you have had a shock. I
understand
that. You don’t want to talk with me. But at least answer, so I know you are there.’

Quite. And so would he be, moments later.

I’d been outthinking the wrong man. This was no Patel, by no means so fertile or subtle in plan or suggestion. He rarely
suggested
anything. He waited for things to happen. I recalled Michael Sassoon telling me of a similar pattern in his career. There had been no flights of intuition – just slogging work and some luck. He had never predicted snags. As snags showed up, he had demolished them, and moved on to the next. His experimental initiatives had been similarly simple, with plenty of loopholes. When loopholes showed up, he had covered them.

As this evening: I remembered him opening the door to me. He’d had a towel on. Well, he’d just had a shower, and probably needed one after his cruise through the orange groves (and so did I; I could smell myself sweating in the unpleasantly humid night). He must have been as shaken as I, but he’d let me do all the work, blinking slowly as I came out with the heaven-sent scenario featuring Patel.

He’d gone on letting me do it. With only the slightest nudge here and there, I’d convinced myself I’d be better off with him at the concert than running about Rehovot telling my story to security men. He’d let me cleverly box Patel out of the ring; had responded to all my initiatives calmly and cautiously, awaiting
what God might send next. Except that the news of Patel at the Wix had shaken him. A very nasty loophole. I remembered him laboriously working out the implications. Patel had by-passed his house; had gone from the Wix to the Sassoons’; had seen him, then. Well, it was a loophole, and it needed covering.
Perhaps
it was while worrying how to do it that he had slipped into his rash disclosure.

And this was much worse. The Patel problem was capable of solution. (He could claim, after all, that he was doing what Patel was doing: following somebody who was following me – an insane enough spectacle but not impossible.) What he had told me offered no loophole. This was a cast-iron snag of the kind requiring obliteration.

I watched the strange tanklike figure flinging his arms as he continued to harangue me. ‘Igor, please answer me. I know you’ll regret it otherwise. I need your help. I need advice! How could I harm you? You surely know me well enough. Believe me, Igor!’

It was hard to know what to believe. It was hard to believe that this enormously distinguished man could have got himself in such a mad position, anyway. But distinguished men were getting themselves in mad positions everywhere. President Nixon was in one at the moment. Willy Brandt, a wiser and better-conditioned man (they’d even given him a Nobel Prize for being so good and kind), was in another: a trusted adviser had turned out to be a spy. In a world where the wise so ludicrously stumbled and the beggars were buying the banks, it seemed as well to keep all options open. So I thought Ham had better tell me about his elsewhere. I was already moving elsewhere, past a low wall and a pedestal and a fallen pillar. After about fifty yards, I looked back and saw him still haranguing me in the darkness, and continued forward, on my stomach.

I crossed the main street at its darkest point and cut across to the north of the town. Plain sailing here: hardly anything excavated. I came to hummocky land that wasn’t excavated at all,
grass still bushy from the winter rains, and went briskly across it. There was a ruined watchtower on the skyline, which looked a useful observation point. I made for it.

A sickening but ovious enough fact hit me at the watchtower. The watchtower was set in the wall. The wall continued round, as did the moat. The Crusader town was enclosed on three sides; the sea was on the fourth, and the Crusaders had
controlled
the sea (which accounted for so many of them being under slabs in the West instead of the East). There was no way out in this direction.

I remembered Ham having said as much: ‘You’re not going anywhere Igor.’ But wait. He’d been here and I hadn’t; on the other hand, I was the historian and he wasn’t. I knew enough to recall that Crusader strongholds had more than one gate. They had gates in all walls: postern gates at the least, for surprise sorties. I set out to look for one.

The watchtower was a shade to seaward; no need for sorties this way, so I beat to landward and, to my satisfaction, within minutes came on a finger post, which read clearly in the
moonlight
, ‘
TO NORTH POSTERN
.’ This was where the knowledge came in, and what put the historians that touch ahead at the post.

The finger post pointed farther east, and I scurried along there, peering at the wall. Its character changed presently: the ground dipped away and the keying of the masonry altered to accommodate the arch and the steps down. At the same moment, I saw another sign, fingering directly at it – also clear, but not quite so clear. This was because there were more words on it, and they were smaller. It took some time to decipher all the small words: ‘
NORTH POSTERN – NOTE SORTIE EXIT
COMPLETELY
BLOCKED, PROBABLY DURING ASSAULT OF BAYBARS I
(1265).’

Well, bugger Baybars, and also Louis IX, the bungling fool. He deserved to have lost, and I was glad he had. Getting his sortie exit blocked. He’d blocked me, anyway. It was true I wasn’t going anywhere. Also, where the devil was Ham?

In the last excited minutes I hadn’t thought about him, but he surely wouldn’t still be haranguing me in the darkness. I came
out of the dip in the ground and looked about. There was an arrow slit in the wall above the postern, and the remains of a little guard position; the rest of it was on the ground amid other debris from the wall.

I climbed up it, keeping in the shadow of the wall, and had a good look all round. Nothing was moving in the Crusader town. I watched for several minutes, perfectly still, and then inched cautiously higher and looked along the wall.

It sloped away several hundred yards toward the sea. Bits of it had broken off, and through the gaps I could glimpse the floodlit moat below – a good forty feet below, flat and dry and
hard-looking
. I couldn’t see the end of the moat. I could see where the wall ended. A hump of masonry loomed distantly, evidently the remains of a tower. It took some moments of peering to see that it probably was in the water; a faint luminescence indicated foam in that direction.

Hope began to swell. Of course. The whole lot ended in the water: tower, wall, moat. All Louis’s works ended in the water. The water didn’t even seem far below. It ought to be possible to get to the tower and either clamber down or swim round to the beach on the other side – the Foka Hirsch side …

I came down off the wall and set off there briskly. I found I was going downhill, which made sense. Everything made sense now. I’d had to march uphill
to
the North Postern. From on top I’d seen the wall going downhill. It followed the lie of the land. It was possible that the whole thing sloped gently into the water, without cliffs or obstructions or further nonsense out of Louis; also without the need to climb anywhere. I’d done enough climbing for one night, also crawling, skiing and free-falling, not to speak of probably mile upon mile of steady running.

I came cautiously out to land’s end and saw it didn’t quite slope gently into the sea. There was a cliff of sorts, twenty feet or so, well-bouldered, nothing to a man of my experience. The beach looked trickier. It was boulder-studded, too. The boulders were set in a continuous drift of cobbles, huge ones, like giant sugared almonds, pale in the moonlight and dappled with tar; it was evidently on the tanker route from Ashkelon. Not easy to teeter, probably slither, along to where I could see lights
twinkling
from the Foka Hirsch belt to northward. It could take an hour. Where would he be in an hour?

Not continuing to harangue me in the darkness, anyway.
Distraught
he might be, but stupid he wasn’t. It wouldn’t take an age for him to review the options open to me. How long after that before he spied me delicately picking a way along this
ankle-twisting
and slimy beach?

Not a good idea. On the whole such a lousy one that I cudgeled my tired brains and tried to think of others. I could creep back the way I’d come, retracing my footsteps in the dark – except that there was no way of telling precisely where he was in it. The basilisk could wait a long time. Time was not one of the things working for me. The night seemed to be getting lighter.

I was suddenly aware that it didn’t only seem to be getting lighter. It
was
getting lighter. You could see more in it. The moon was coming into its own as other lights went off. Three went off simultaneously on the jetty, and I looked there. People and cars were still moving on it. Not so many now, of course. Still. The jetty. If he had given up the notion of the jetty …

In much confusion, not knowing if it made sense to be stuck on the beach, I began clambering down to it. I got there and waited a moment at the bottom, looking back in case he might be clambering down, too, and put myself behind a boulder twenty or thirty yards away. The journey there convinced me right away that the beach was out. The ankle I’d wrenched hours earlier – only
hours
earlier? – came signaling back strongly. I felt it grinding away as I crouched and looked about.

There was a mutter of water all around as it washed gently over the shingle. A calm swell, very calm – possible even for me to swim. I was a poor swimmer, had a horror of the sea, of
getting
swept out in it. I’d been swept out once at Sochi, on the Black Sea, had had to be dragged out. But it was no distance to the jetty: barely ten minutes. There was an obstruction on the way and I peered at it. A long line of stone columns, toppled over, were lying in the sea, glittering in the moon. The remains
of Herod’s V.I.P. jetty – which had in some way offended
Baybars
?

I followed the line of it to the beach. There was a tiny crescent of white sand there, evidently a result of the breakwater effect of the fallen columns. Something moved on the sand, and my heart missed a beat.
Was
it moving? It was. While moving, it stayed in one place. A dog pawing at something? Prolonged peering revealed not a dog, but two people intent on becoming one. They became two presently, and kneeled, holding each other’s
shoulders
and laughing: a girl and a boy. She gave him a quick kiss and angled herself into a bikini, and he into a pair of shorts, and I poised there, anxious to spread the good news of my presence but held back by a certain ticklishness in the situation. While I hesitated, they ran into the sea.

I watched them swim easily to the fallen pillars, and heave themselves over, and swim on to the jetty. They didn’t get out, but splashed round to a beach beyond.

Well, I could do that. It was visible, though. Of course, they hadn’t tried to conceal themselves; they had laughed and called to each other in the water.

I slowly took my jacket and shirt off, and then my shoes and socks, and my trousers. I kept my underpants. The little bay flashed and glittered like silver in the moonlight. I teetered down the beach toward it. It only took a teeter or two to see that shoes were needed after all, so I returned and put them on again and crouched in a low shamble, and entered the water like that.

The sea was warm, scarcely cooler than the humid night, and I suddenly realized I was desperately thirsty. I’d drunk nothing since the glass of Scotch earlier in the evening. The water lapped limpidly about me as I went farther out. It was shallow, still well-cobbled, so I shambled a good way, till the sea bed began to shelve, and then abruptly fell away, and I was levitating in it, my shoes suddenly like little rafts of lead.

The glitter all about was dazzling: totally unreal and hypnotic. I kept myself well down in it and turned and looked back. After the brilliance, the floodlighting was positively mellow, the
Crusader
town with its three walls open to the sea like an enormous theatrical set. I bobbed in the water and looked at the whole length of it, and wondered how the devil I’d got away with it, scurrying up and down there like a demented beetle. The whole area seemed fully exposed in bland hazy lighting. However, I knew it wasn’t. There were plenty of pools of darkness there, and he was in one of them.

I’d drifted nearer the columns, and I paddled myself away. Even in the trancelike state induced by the glitter, I knew it wasn’t a good idea to put a moving object near a fixed one. I would appear a small moving object, true, something the size of a football, a piece of flotsam, not very visible. Just then a piece of flotsam floated by, an old waterlogged basket. It actually touched me before I noticed it.