Triple (22 page)

TRIPLE

their opposing views on the political moralit~ of Israel, but nevertheless

there was, underlying his detached inquiries about Israeli problems, a

detectable trace of eagerness for bad news.

Suza called them to the kitchen for lunch before Dickstein had an

opportunity to ask his own questions. Her French sandwiches were vast and

delicious. She had opened a bottle of red wine to go with them. Dickstein

could see why Ashford had put on weight

Over coffee Dickstein said, "I ran into a contemporary of mine a couple

of weeks ago-in Luxembourg, of all places:'

Ashford said, "Yasif Hassan?"

"How did you knowT'

"We've kept in touch. I know he lives In Luxembourg."

"Have you seen him muchr' Dickstein asked, thinking: Softly, Softly.

"Several times, over the years." Ashford paused. "It needs to be said,

Dickstein, that the wars which have given You everything took everything

away from him. His family lost all their money and went into a refugee

camp. Res understandably bitter about Israel."

'Dickstein nodded. He was now almost certain that Hassan was in the game.

"I had very little time with him-I was on my way to catch a plane. How is

he otherwise?"

Ashford frowned. "I find him a bit - . . distrait," he finished, unable

to find the right English word. 'Sudden errands he has to run, canceled

appointments, odd phone calls at all times, mysterious absences. Perhaps

it's the behavior of a dispossessed aristocrat."

"Perhaps," Dickstein said. In fact it was the typical behavior of an

agent, and he was now one hundred percent sure that the meeting with

Hassan had blown him. He said, "DO you see anyone else from my year?"

"Only old Toby. He's on the Conservative Front Bench now."

"Perfectf" Dickstein said delightedly. "He always did talk Me an

opposition spokesman-pompous and defensive at the same time. I'm glad

he's found his niche."

Suza said, "More coffee, Nat?"

"No, thank you." He stood up. "Ill help you clear away, then I must get

back to London. I'm so glad I dropped in od

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"Daddy will clear up," Suza said. She grinned. "We have an agreement."

"I'm afraid it is so," Ashford confessed. "She won't be anybody's drudge,

least of all mine." The remark surprised Dickstein because it was so

obviously untrue. Perhaps Suza didn't wait on him hand and foot, but she

seemed to look after him the way a working wife wouldL

"niwalkinto town with you," &=a said. "Let me get my

Ashford shook Dickstein's hand. "A real pleasure to see you, dear boy,

a real pleasure."

Suza came back wearing a velvet jacket. Ashford saw them to the door and

waved, smiling.

As they walked along the street Dickstein talked just to have an excuse

to keep looking at her. The jacket matched her black velvet trousers, and

she wore a loose cream-colored shirt that looked like silk. Like her

mother, she knew how to dress to make the most of her shining dark hair

and perfect tan skin. Dickstein gave her his arm, feeling rather

old-fashioned, just to have her touching him. There was no doubt that she

had the same physical magnetism as her mother: there was that something

about her which filled men with the desire to possess her, a desire not

so much like lust as greed; the need to own such a beautiful object, so

that it would never be taken away. Dickstein was old enough now to know

how false such desires were, and to know that Eila Ashford would not have

made him happy. But the daughter seemed to have something the. mother had

lacked, and that was warmth. Dickstein was sorry he would never see Suza

again. Given time, he might ...

Well. It was not to be.

When they reached the station he asked her, "Do you ever go to London?"

"Of course," she said. "rm going tomorrow."

"What forTI

."To have dinner with you," she said.

When Suza's mother died, her father was wonderful.

She was eleven years of age: old enough to understand death, but too

young to cope with it. Daddy had been calm and comforting. He had known

when to leave her to weep alone and when to make her dress up and go out

to lunch.

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Quite unembarrassed, he had talked to her about menstruation and gone with

her cheerfully to buy new brassieres. He gave her a new role in life: she

became the woman of the house, giving instructions to the cleaner, writing

the laundry list, handing out sherry, on Sunday mornings. At the age of

fourteen she was in charge of the household finances. She took care of her

father better than Eila ever had. She would throw away worn shirts and

replace them with identical new ones without daddy ever knowing. She learned

that it was possible to be alive and secure and loved even without a mother.

Daddy gave her a role, just as he had her mother; and, like her mother, she

had rebelled against the role while continuing to play it.

He wanted her to stay at Oxford, to be first an undergraduate, then a

graduate student, then a teacher. It would have meant that she was always

around to take care of him. She said she was not smart enough, with an

uneasy feeling that this was an excuse for something else, and took a job

that obliged her to be away from home and unable to look after Daddy for

weeks at a time. High in the air and thousands of miles from Oxford, she

served drinks and meals to middleaged men, and wondered if she really had

changed anything.

Walking home from the railway station, she thought about the groove she was

in and whether she would ever get out of it

She was At the end of a love affair which, like the rest of her life, had

wearily followed a familiar pattern. Julian was in his late thirties, a

philosophy lecturer specializing in the pre-Socratic Greeks: brilliant,

dedicated and helpless. He took drugs for everything-cannabis to make love,

amphetamine to work, Mogadon to sleep. He was divorced, without children.

At first she had found him interesting, charming and sexy. When they were

in bed he liked her to get on top. He took her to fringe theaters in London

and bizarre student parties. But it all wore off: she realized that he

wasn't really very interested in sex, that he took her out because she

looked good on his arm. that he liked her company just because she was so

impressed by his intellect. One day she found herself ironing his clothes

while he took a tutorial-, and then it was as good as over.

Sometimes she went to bed with men her own age or

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younger, mostly because she was consumed with lust for their bodies. She was

usually disappointed and they all bored her eventually.

She was already regretting the impulse which had led her to &ake a date

with Nat Dickstein. He was depressingly true to type: a generation older

than she and patently in need of care and attention. Worst of all, he had

been in love with her mother. At first sight he was a father-figure like

all the rest

But he was different in some ways, she told herself. He was a faimer, not

an academic--he would probably be the least well-read person she had ever

dated. He had gone to Palestine instead of sitting In Oxford coffee shops

talking about it He could pick up one end of the freezer with his right

hand. In the time they had spent together he had more than once sur. prised

her by not conforming to her expectations.

Maybe Nat Dickstein will breA the pattern, she thought.

And maybe rin. kidding myself, -

Nat Dickstein called the Israeli Embassy from a phone booth at Paddington

Station. When he got through he asked for the Commercial Credit Office.

There was no such department: this was a code for the Mossad message

center. He was answered by a young man with a Hebrew accent. This pleased

Dickstein, for ft was good to know there were people for whom Hebrew was a

native tongue and not a dead language. He knew the conversation would

automatically be tape-recorded, so he went straight into his message: "Rush

to Bill, Sale jeopardized by presence of opposition team. Henry~" He hung

up without waiting for an acknowledgment.

He walked to his hotel from the station, thinking about Suza Ashford. He

was to meet her at Paddington tomorrow evening. She would spend the night

at the flat of a friend. Dickstein did not really know where to begin-he

could not remember ever taking a woman out to dinner just for pleasure. As

a teenager he had been too poor; after the war he had been too nervous and

awkward; as he grew older he somehow never got into the habit There had

been dinners with colleagues, of course, and with kibbutzniks after shop-

ping expeditions in Nazareth; but to take a woman, just the two of you, for

nothing more than the pleasure of each otheescompany...

What did you do? You were supposed to pick her up in

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your car, wearing your dinner jacket, and give her a box of chocolates

tied with a big ribbon. Dickstein was meeting Suza at the train station,

and he had neither car nor dinner jacket. Where would he take her? He did

not know any posh restaurants in Israel, let alone England.

WaWng alone through Hyde Park~ he smiled broadly. This was a laughable

situation for a man of forty-three to be in. She knew he was no

sophisticate, and obviously she did not care, for she had invited herself

to dinner. She would also know the restaurants and what to order. It was

hardly a matter of life and death. Whatever happened, he was going to

enjoy it.

There was now a hiatus in his work. Having discovered that he was blown,

he could do nothing until he had talked to Pierre Borg and Borg had

decided whether or not to abort. That evening he went to see a French

film called Un Homme et Une Femme. It was a simple love story,

beautifully told, with an insistent Latin-American tune on the

soundtrack. He left before the movie was halfway through, because the

story made him want to cry; but the tune ran through his mind all night.

In the morning he went to a phone booth in the street near his hotel and

phoned the Embassy again. When he got through to the message center he

said, '9[his is Henry. Any reply?"

The voice said, "Go to ninety-three thousand and confer tomorrow."

Dickstein said, "Reply: conference agenda at airport information."

Pierre Borg would be flying in at nine-thirty tomorrow.

The four men sat in the car with the patience of spies, silent and

watchful, as the day darkened.

Pyotr Tyrin was at the wheel, a stocky middle-aged man in a raincoat,

drumming his fingernails on the dashboard, makIng a noise like pigeone

feet on a roof. Yasif Hassan sat beside him. David Rostov and Nik Bunin

were in the back.

Nik had found the delivery man on the third day, the day he spent

watching the Jean-Monnet building on the Kirchberg. He had reported a

positive identification. "He doesn't look quite so much of a nancy-boy

in his office suit, but I'm quite sure iirs him. I should say he must

work here."

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