THRILLER: The Galilee Plot: (International Biological Terror, The Mossad, and... A Self-contended Couple) (6 page)

The time was exactly 11.00
a.m. when the telephone ripped through our tranquillity with a sharp, dry and
insistent ring.

My wife picked up the
receiver. I stood facing her, watching the drastic changes affecting her face,
which suddenly turned pale, a clear, unnatural pallor, such as I hadn’t seen
before then. Her hand gripping the receiver shook, once and then once more. The
expression on her face was suddenly that of a small animal, closely pursued by
a predator. I waited for the end of the conversation and eventually it came.
The receiver was replaced on the cradle with a weary, ponderous movement, as if
it weighed half a ton.

“What’s up?” I asked, troubled
to the last fibre of my nervous system, still in full working order.

“Someone has been asking
about you, he wants you to go down to meet him, to discuss something important
and extremely urgent. The reception clerk says the man looks suspicious to her.
Apparently an Arab – according to her guess and judging by the name she read in
his passport: Abd Rahman. She reckons the best thing to do is tell him you’re
not in your room, or you don’t want to see him…”

Well, this was it, this
was what Shmulik warned me about. In the “Combat Squads” we had learned that
when you go out to meet an enemy, you should make sure you have equality of
forces, carry a gun in your pocket at least. Of course, the best advice was to
try to occupy a position of decisively superior strength.

“It seems to me, the best
thing,” – my wife commented, sensing my indecision, “is to accept the clerk’s
advice. She sounded scared out of her wits…”

“She’s as nervous as a
baby mouse!” I said without thinking.

“I hope you’re not
intending to go down there!”

“That is the most
appropriate thing to do!” I declared provocatively, “After all, no one’s going
to dare to kidnap me or attack me in front of witnesses.” I opened a
counter-offensive, relying on the axiom that the best form of defence is attack.
“The detective novels you read and the suspense films you watch, have broken
down all the barriers of logic in your muddled mind.”

My wife was silent for a
long moment.

It was easy to guess at
the struggle going on in her heart, everything revolving around the question,
how to stop me going down to the hotel reception, where the fragile clerk was
sitting, scared to death; this was actually a good reason for not panicking,
because if a kidnapper or hired assassin came, he would make a point of presenting
a reassuring appearance, and on no account would he arouse fear or draw any
kind of attention, thus jeopardising his project.

I decided to go down
although I realised that my decision was based, in part, on a childish need to
prove myself, to reassure my wife and perhaps to teach her, for future
reference, that no purpose is ever served by panic and hysteria. I put on heavy
boots, bearing in mind that if fisticuffs should ensue, any kick from a boot
such as this, designed for climbing in the Alps, would put a leg in plaster for
an appreciable time.

“I’ll be right back!” I
announced with a smile, intended to express unshakable confidence in the
cultural tradition of the world, and to put firmly in their place all the
action and suspense programmes which cram the television screens to the point
of suffocation.

My wife tried to convince
me that if she were to accompany me, the meeting would take on the cachet of
official family business, and this would have a profoundly calming effect.

“I don’t think there’s
going to be any need for that kind of calming,” I commented, “and you would
just be adding to the tension and unease. When all’s said and done, look at the
name my visitor has chosen for himself: ‘Rahman’, i.e. ‘merciful’. It’s a name
that speaks for itself.”

I bolstered my wife’s
faltering spirits with reassurances and expressions of confidence, and left the
room. I went down in the lift, then along a narrow, dimly-lit corridor to the
hotel reception. Behind the desk stood the young duty clerk, and when she saw
me she nearly fainted. I looked around. In one of the armchairs sat a man,
whose appearance immediately explained the reception clerk’s unconventional
behaviour.

The face was long, but not
over-long and not narrow – in fact, long, broad and swarthy, scored by two deep
grooves, with a crease in the cheek that was scorched by the desert sun. The
eyes blazed. This was a Bedou with a lot of self-confidence, as if located in
his natural environment – the desert. My quick glance unnerved him for a
split-second. The first sentence that sprang into my mind, clear and acute,
was: “He’s done this before.” He has already committed murder, and there’s no
reason for him to sitting here other than for purposes of murder. And the only
logical conclusion to be drawn from this, the simple, numbing and inevitable
conclusion, is that
he’s here to murder me
. In my efforts to keep
control of myself, I was alert to every one of my movements. I felt confidence
and absence of fear, to a degree that could be considered unnatural. There was
logic in this and a kind of assurance, capable of convincing one Abd Rahman,
who had just arisen from the depths of Hell.

The situation reminded me
of an incident from the distant past. On behalf of the “Combat Groups”, I was
given the task, along with Georgi,  a rustic lad and former partisan, of
following a certain suspect as closely as was possible, and finally, arresting
him and taking him in for interrogation at the nearest militia headquarters. So
we trailed along behind the “subject” who – so it seemed – paid us no
attention, and made no attempt whatsoever to shake us off. The surveillance
began at about nine in the evening. At ten-fifteen the “subject” went into a
tavern and came out a few moments later. We resumed our pursuit. The “subject”
arrived at an isolated house in the outskirts of the town. He knocked on a
heavy, rough-hewn door, three knocks carefully spaced out, obviously a
pre-arranged signal. The door opened and the “subject” disappeared behind it.
The house also had a narrow window, neglected and dirty. Georgi assigned me to
watch this while he guarded the door and the plan was, if anything happened, I
was to cover him. The cool, late-autumn night began to oppress our over-tired
bodies. We stood there from about ten-thirty until two in the morning. Then the
door opened with an indignant creak and the “subject” came out. Without a
moment’s hesitation, Georgi approached the subject, showed him his ID card and
told him to put his hands on the battered peaked-cap that he wore on his head.
The “subject” did as he was told. He raised his left hand and laid the palm on
his battered cap; his right hand however travelled down the cheaply tailored
overcoat as far as the pocket, pulled out a bottle and brandished it in the
air, with the obvious intention of bringing it down on Georgi’s head.

At that very moment Georgi
drew his pistol. The expression on his face immediately put that same sentence
into my mind: “He’s done this before” – he knows what it is to shoot a man at a
range of half a metre, or point-blank. Sure enough a gunshot was heard, which
later I was to describe as the shot of a marksman. The bullet hit the
brandished bottle, smashing it to pieces, and the liquid it contained spilled
over the arm of the one who had been waving it, exuding a strong smell of
concentrated alcohol. The man was stunned. His first, instinctive and
unexpected reaction was to kneel at Georgi’s feet, with an outburst of
hysterical weeping, accompanied by belches.

Later we discovered that
the man with the bottle wasn’t the sinister envoy of western Anglo-American
imperialist reactionaries, intent on subverting the firm foundations of the
enlightened socialist regime in Bulgaria, but just someone who kept a mistress
in that isolated house. When visiting his mistress, he had not forgotten to
stop at that tavern on the way and buy strong liquor, and with typical and
depressing Bulgarian thrift, as the bottle hadn’t been emptied, he was taking
the remainder for himself. He had come under suspicion after missing three of
the obligatory weekly meetings, which all supporters of the regime were
supposed to attend, and when he was not found at home, the process was set in
motion. It can well be imagined how astounded the man must have been by what
awaited him outside, on leaving the house of his mistress.

Mr Rahman, sitting there
in the armchair in the hotel lobby, he too had certainly done this before.

I turned to the clerk. And
then a shot was heard, ringing in my ears and deafening them completely, all at
once and for a long time to come, and seeming to set the hotel reeling, quiet
as it was at this hour of the day. Quickly I moved probing hands over my body.
I wasn’t injured. I turned to look at Mr Rahman and was struck dumb with
amazement. Mr Rahman had fallen from his armchair, hitting his head hard
against the parquet floor of the lobby. A spreading bloodstain, surrounding his
scalp like a halo, testified that he had been shot in the head.

Without a moment’s delay,
the fragile clerk alerted the police, who rapidly appeared on the scene with
all the noisy paraphernalia  that is inevitable in cases such as these:
Hollywood-style sirens of police vehicles and speeding ambulance. The police
had to cope with the hotel guests, who had come downstairs on hearing the
gunshot which had brought their quiet routine to such an abrupt end. Among them
was my wife, who managed to utter an authentically Israeli crisis-call, its
content indefinable. She was soon to be relieved and satisfied, seeing me
healthy and whole.

The cops were gathering
statements and they asked me to come in for questioning, immediately if
possible. I reassured my wife and rode with her in the spacious and comfortable
police car, no siren blaring this time. The ambulance crew loaded Abd Rahman,
or rather his corpse, in their vehicle and whisked him away to the pathology
lab.

I sat down facing a young
and energetic investigating officer who asked questions that were pertinent,
although awfully standard. Country of origin? Was this the first time I had
been a guest in the hotel?

“The eleventh time”

“How often?”

“Every year.”

“Enemies – at home or
here?”

“None that I know of.”

“Did you see who shot Mr
Abd Rahman?”

“No,” I replied with a
deep and emphatic sigh of relief and admitted I was curious myself to know
this; after all, as the clerk had reported, it was me that Mr Rahman wanted to
see.

“That’s what complicates
everything,” the young officer declared with obvious unease.

Here I saw fit to diffuse
the tense atmosphere by translating the assassin’s name for the officer’s
benefit:

“The name Abd Rahman,” I
explained, “means servant of God who is full of mercy.” The cop digested this,
impressed:

“What weird names these
people have,” he commented – to demonstrate his lack of concern, also his
appreciation of someone who understands such a complicated language as Arabic
and last but not least, to prove himself a man with a sense of humour,
something not typical of  cops in general and of Swiss ones in particular.

“If,” the officer added,
“we knew that someone was tailing Mr Rahman, and got his shot in first, we’d be
wiser. We found a heavy revolver in Mr Rahman’s pocket, loaded, of Swiss
manufacture,” he saw fit to inform me.

“In other words – he
bought the gun in Switzerland?” I asked innocently.

The officer nodded.

“Do we know where from?” –
more affected innocence.

“From a shop,” the young
man replied with engaging simplicity.

“So anyone who wants, can
buy a heavy Swiss revolver – just from a shop?”

“If he pays the price for
it,” the cop nodded, “and gives proof of identity and has a good reason for
wanting it.”

I didn’t ask any more
questions.

“Anyway, the mystery man
who tailed Mr Rahman saved your life. Take care, Sir,” he saw fit to warn me,
with an earnest expression on his young face – “you won’t always have such an
efficient guardian angel on hand!”

“Many thanks,” – I thanked
him and thanked him again, “If you catch the shooter, please pass on my deep
and sincere appreciation and the gratitude of my family.”

“I promise we’ll do that,”
the young cop smiled, standing and holding out a fleshy, heavy and cold hand.
He shook my hand and my wife’s, warmly and sincerely, and added: “You have good
reason to celebrate. Champagne would seem to fit the occasion – unless you have
some objection to alcohol.”

“To champagne, never! Can
we invite you to join us for a glass?”

“Thanks very much. I’m
addicted to champagne, but not just now.”

The young police officer
phoned. In his opinion and on the basis of his professional judgment, it was
most advisable that I should have a professional bodyguard, at least until the
end of my holiday. He recommended to me a young man who was experienced, loyal
and conscientious, named Karl. Karl would come to the hotel this afternoon, and
he hoped I would appreciate the exceptional efforts he was making to guarantee
my safety and security, and not reject his services.

He concluded with all
kinds of salutations and promises, waited about half a minute for my response
and when none came, wished me a good afternoon and cut the connection, with all
the delicacy appropriate to a police officer.

Karl was a youth of about
seventeen-eighteen. Thin and wiry, muscular, with an intelligent look about
him. He offered his services “pursuant to a conversation with the police
commander”, for the same fee that he charged everyone: one hundred francs per
day. I hesitated. It didn’t seem to me his services were vital. I felt a
certain affection towards him, the affection of a grandfather towards his
grandson, but nothing more. Was it worth paying a hundred francs a day for
this? I didn’t turn him down out of hand. I said, I would weigh up his offer.
At first sight he seemed suitable, but there were other factors to be
considered. At this point young Karl tried to meet me halfway:

“I’m not allowed to reduce
the fee. What I can promise, is to do a reliable job whichever days I’m
guarding you. You can be secure in the knowledge that no one will dare get too
close to you.” We parted with a firm handshake. About an hour later, there was
a call from the hotel reception. A girl called Irena was looking for me, to
discuss something of importance to both of us. I announced that I would be
coming down within a quarter of an hour at the most, if Madame Irena was
prepared to wait. The immediate answer was: she was prepared.

“Take care you don’t get
tangled up in anything,” my wife advised.

I went down to reception.
Waiting there was a pretty young Swiss, by which I mean a girl overflowing with
youth, energy and health and something more, that could be defined as
integrity, since her body was the lithe body of a woman, with nothing wasted
about it. Everything was in its place, having the right shape and the precise,
classical proportions. Making her acquaintance was easy. We went down to the
café. I ordered herbal tea, she – a glass of mineral water.

“Awfully sorry to be
bothering you,” Irena began with an apology in English that was colloquial and
at the same time, vehement in tone. She went on to explain that she was Karl's
girlfreind. “I may as well come straight to the point and tell you, that if you
agree to employ him, and this is something that’s very important to him, and in
a moment I’ll explain why, I’ll be happy to pay half of the cost. Karl is a
very talented lad. His grandfather was the most senior police officer not only
in Zurich, but in the whole canton of Zurich. In other words: his grandfather
was the Zurich police chief. Highly respected, a man of knowledge and
experience, quick on the uptake. He was killed in the line of duty! (The last
sentence was spoken with emphatic tribal pride.) Karl’s father was a senior
police officer in Zurich too. Karl thought he’d be taken on in the Zurich force
and he’d make his career there, more or less automatically. For some reason, up
until now he hasn’t been accepted. I don’t want to go too deeply into things,
because these are really family matters and it doesn’t seem right to involve strangers
in them… Friends and relatives are worried about Karl and from time to time
they throw him a little bone and this makes Karl happy, ridiculously happy.
Karl,” she went on to say with a bitter kind of smile, “has a personality
completely different from the personalities of his ancestors. He’s
enthusiastic, impulsive sometimes, with the vision of a poet, not always
capable of behaving in a rational manner, and those are the traits in him that
I’m madly in love with, but they trip him up all the time. All the same, he’s
determined to be a cop and he’s not giving up on it, and I’m sure that you,
Sir, will appreciate his unconditional loyalty, his tireless devotion to duty,
in all circumstances. Karl’s happiness is so important to me.”

“Why is that?” I asked,
and at that moment I seemed to myself to be identifying with the stolidity of
outlook that is supposedly typically Germanic.

“Because I love him! I
know it’s a cliché, but he’s the one and only love of my heart!”

I was silent for a moment,
as was she.

“Tell him he can start
from tomorrow.”

“He’ll think that’s
suspicious, I’m sure you understand, Sir. I don’t want him to know anything
about this meeting we’re having, not even the slightest hint.”

“I’ll tell him myself.”

“You’ve made my day, and
my week, maybe more.”

I phoned Karl. Next day,
he began trailing around after me, with dedication surpassing the proverbial
dedication of Saint Bernard dogs.

My wife sensed, and
commented on the fact, that the amiable Swiss boy was shadowing us tirelessly.
Next Saturday we visited the flea market. Karl, who was supposed to be seeing
but unseen, certainly kept a keen eye on anyone coming close to us, but he was
also clearly visible to anyone who wanted to see him. And so it happened, that
at about two in the afternoon, there was a commotion behind us. Blows were
exchanged, and the police were called.  Karl was arrested along with a
swarthy individual, a man with a long moustache, who later turned out to be a
peace-loving visitor from Qatar, who made the mistake that day of wearing his
traditional national costume, thereby arousing the suspicions of Karl, who did
not hesitate to knock him to the ground with a few well-aimed punches, and to
check out his body with lightning speed, in search of concealed weapons, which weren’t
there. We met the next day. He was very sorry about the trouble he had caused,
unintentionally. We both realised that the connection between us was at an end.
I paid him what I owed him, and later I refused to accept Irena’s contribution.
I wished her a brilliant marriage. We were unanimous in believing Karl was a
youth of outstanding qualities, and she was lucky to have him. The police
officer apologised and promised, without being asked, to find some other way of
keeping an eye on us.

Every morning we used to
go up to the top floor of the “Co-op” store located in “Saint Annahoff”, to
drink decaffeinated cappuccino and plan the day ahead. We found a table under a
huge, curtained window; the area covered by the curtain could be widened or
reduced by turning handles. We liked this table, especially because of the
two-seater bench which we found very comfortable.  Like us and not far
from us – every morning an older couple used to sit, and almost in the centre
of the room was a woman in early middle-age who said she was American, and had
apparently been sent to Switzerland for psychiatric treatment. Sometimes we
exchanged greetings, sometimes not. The café was pleasant, the
cappuccino excellent, to my wife’s taste as well, and the place served as a
good starting point for a day of leisure in Zurich, and for the objectives we
had set ourselves. And this morning, the American woman took out a camera and
aimed it at us. The trauma of Abd Rahman and of the shooting was still very
fresh, the wound still open. I had heard of “cameras” that fired bullets at the
objects they were aimed at.

“No!” I protested
vehemently, remembering the warnings of Shmulik and the young police officer,
and the lessons learned from my own experience. She paused for a moment, and
then asked my wife:

“Why is he objecting?”

“He has reasons of his
own, but” – my wife pointed out, “it is normal to ask permission before taking
someone’s picture.” The lady turned to me:

“May I take a picture of
the two of you?” The voice was gentle, thoroughly amiable. I answered in a tone
of offended dignity:

“I’d much rather you
didn’t.”

The middle-aged couple
turned to stare at me with a pair of question-marks, which soured the
atmosphere completely.

A more modest question
mark was posed by my wife, who lost no time, turned to the American lady and
asked in her fluent English:

“Why do you want to take
our picture?”

The woman softened:

“I’m going home and I want
to preserve some memories. You and your husband are among the more pleasant
ones. Does your husband find me intolerable?”

“Heaven forbid!” my wife
exclaimed, putting the treatment before the injury. The woman was quick to draw
her conclusions:

“Then he likes me?” – her
hard features glowed, with something like infinite satisfaction, curing all
ills, psychological ones too. My wife suddenly found herself straying into a
minefield. A rapid retreat seemed the logical solution in these circumstances.

“Yes, he likes you.”

“So why does he object to
me taking his picture and keeping it as a souvenir?”

My wife said the first
thing that came into her head, which was in fact what she believed to be the
truth:

“He lived for many years
under a communist regime and as you know, everyone there suffers to some degree
from chronic paranoia.”

Any reaction on the part
of the ailing American lady could have been expected, even a violent assault on
my wife or on me or on both of us. But it seemed that the Swiss were treating
her condition with their typical dedication and expertise.

“Yes,” the American lady agreed
without hesitation, “Joe Stalin was paranoid too.”

“That’s right,” my wife
backed her up with excessive warmth and added by way of emphasis: “No one comes
out from under a communist regime without a touch of paranoia in his heart.”

Later, she admitted to me
that she was telling the truth as she had experienced it and that she had been
rather surprised by my reaction, exceeding any logical boundaries, and added:
“It’s true that we have to be careful after the incident with Mr Abd Rahman,
but here everything is calm… We’ve known those people for more than a month now
and they’ve known us.”

“All the same,” I
retorted, “you have no conception of the other reality.”

“You mean the communist
reality?”

I had no option but to
confirm this. The atmosphere had been spoiled, and we agreed that it was time
to leave the café.

The next day we happened
to be in the area. I asked my wife to wait for me while I went to the familiar
toilets.

“Take care, don’t let the
American lady see you!”

“No need to worry!” I
assured her. The moving staircase carried me up four floors to the familiar
café. I stood in the doorway and glanced briefly at our regular table –
with the two-seater bench. A corpulent, middle-aged American man was sitting
there. The “American lady” moved across, stood behind him, and with undisguised
anger, began pulling back curtains and opening windows. Wind and sun flooded
in, swamping the American who tried in vain to compress his big body. I turned
to the toilets. On the way out I met the large American, who scanned me with a
suspicious look, and asked:

“Are you Swiss, sir?”

“No.”

“Tourist?”

“Yes.”

“Me too. These Swiss guys
– weird or what?”

“I don’t think so,” I gave
my honest opinion.

“I just sat down for a few
minutes in this café” – he pointed with his heavy chin at “our” seat,
now deserted. “Some lady comes along, don’t know if she’s quite sane or not,
tries every which way she can to make me move. I asked her – why? She said –
you’re taking the place of a charming couple who may be arriving here soon.
Isn’t that crazy?” the American asked in a self-righteous voice.

“Crazy,” I agreed, and
hurriedly took my leave of him, running to the downward escalator.

My wife responded to the
story:

“Poor woman! She’s going
to be keeping our place for us for days to come. She’ll be so disappointed!
Let’s hope it doesn’t interfere with her psychiatric treatment – you and your
communist paranoia!”

I shared this hope.