Shake Off (20 page)

I
had to hit him again, as he collapsed to one knee, because he tried to get up. This time he slumped onto his front, his hands trapped beneath him. I turned him over and dragged him by his arms into the trees so that Helen wouldn’t see him, then searched him for a radio. I found it in an inside pocket and turned it off, throwing it into the woods. He also had a Canadian passport on him, which I pocketed. I removed his belt and tied his hands behind him, just in case he regained consciousness soon. His undone trousers had been yanked down when I’d dragged him so I pulled them off and threw them into the woods. Then I went to get Helen.

She took the wheel of the Renault and complained that the gear stick came out of the dashboard. I couldn’t help so I left her to it. We trundled off. I looked in the glove compartment. I saw no clue as to the identity of the driver, but I doubted whether he was Canadian. I checked the passport, which had an unmemorable name that I forgot as soon as I read it.

“Where are we going?” Helen asked.

“When does the first ferry to the mainland leave?” I asked. It was after midnight.

“Five in the morning, I think.”

“Then I don’t know,” I said. The Renault’s headlights lit up the hedges and stone walls as we made our way along the narrow road.

“I know where we can go,” she said. She turned left and we climbed a winding road, then we dropped and climbed again and she drove slowly through a sleeping hamlet and down a dirt road for five minutes. The Renault did not have the suspension for it—it vibrated and rattled; I imagined nuts and bolts falling off it like in a cartoon. Then she pulled off onto a tarmac road that was blocked by a barrier. She told me to get out and open it, which I did, letting her through before closing it. A big sign warned trespassers of the dangers of entering. She drove past me and the headlights picked out some run-down buildings, not ruins in the ancient sense but relatively new buildings that had been abandoned and neglected. She drove the Renault between two of them and killed the engine. I caught up with her as she got out of the car.

“What is this place?”

She explained that we were in an abandoned village that was built in the fifties to house the expected population boom due to the growing oil industry.

“Turned out it was all happening on the other side of Scotland,” she said. “I used to come up here with the butcher’s boy sometimes.” It was too dark to tell if she was teasing. “There’s a small ferry terminal in the village we’ve just been through, it goes west rather than east towards Glasgow, but I thought that would be a good thing.” She peered at me in the dark. “Have I done good?”

“You’ve done good.” I hugged her. We stood like that for a moment. Then she broke free and told me to follow her.

We moved between the houses and went through a doorway with no door. The front wall of the building was missing, revealing a wide view of a loch. We were high up, with an excellent panorama of the starlit water.

“We can see when the ferry leaves the other side. We’ll have plenty of time to get down to the port,” she said. She told me that once over the water we could drive north and connect with the mainland, then head back east. “I’m assuming you’ll want to get back to civilization?”

“I do feel more in control where there’s public transport,” I said. We dragged an old sofa over to face the view and sat down.

“Let’s rest,” she said. “We can hear and see any cars for miles.” We put on extra clothes against the cold. She lay down with her head on my lap. “People come up here to neck,” she said.

“Neck?”

“Kiss and grope,” she said.

“Ah yes, the irresistible butcher boy.”

She laughed and squirmed on the sofa, trying to find a comfortable position on the semi-exposed springs. I laughed too, but felt jealous of this butcher boy.

“What’s the plan, Michel?”

“To get through the night, and to catch the ferry,” I said. I had no real plan beyond making sure Helen was safe. A car noise echoed off the hills and we saw lights several kilometers away light up the road below. They disappeared over the hill and it went quiet.

“My family were shot,” I said, looking out at the black water. She started to raise her head but I gently held it down. “No, please stay there, don’t look at me. Don’t say anything.” She relaxed and I stroked her hair, traced the outline of her ear. “We were having dinner on the second night of the massacre you read about, and some men came into the house, smashed the door off its hinges. The funny thing is we would have opened it if they’d knocked, because we didn’t know what was going on at the time, the scale of it anyway.” I could envisage that last meal, a meal I hadn’t eaten since. I could taste the fried onions. “We were taken outside and lined up against the wall. All the men, that is, and me. Mama, my mother, was held back. They made her watch when they started to shoot us—she had to watch it.” I stopped to regain control of my voice; I could feel it slipping away from me. I traced Helen’s jawline with my finger, pushed her hair behind her ear. “My father knocked me down, when the shooting started, and fell on top of me, or maybe he threw himself on me, I don’t know, but it’s how I survived.” The clouds parted and the moon emerged, just a half-moon, but bright enough to light up the other side of the loch. “I could feel him breathing for a while, and I could hear Mama screaming. I should have moved, done something, I don’t know.” Helen shook her head on my lap. My thigh grew damp and I looked down to see tears dripping from her eyes straight onto my jeans. I stroked her forehead. “One man was in charge, who gave the orders. He told them to shut my mother up.” I took in some air because I’d forgotten to breathe, and Helen took my hand from her face and clutched it hard to her chest. “They took her inside the house,” I said.

That was it. I couldn’t tell Helen any more. I could remember the rest in vivid detail, because I’d heard it all going on. I knew exactly what had happened to Mama. After some time it had gone quiet, my father had grown heavier, then stopped breathing. I couldn’t tell Helen any more of it; I didn’t want to poison her ears. Instead I said, “This man, the officer who gave orders, they called him Roberto.”

“Roberto. Yes of course,” she said. “Roberto,” she repeated, as if it was an unfamiliar or foreign word. She patted my hand. I think she understood something that I couldn’t articulate. Soon her grip relaxed and she fell asleep. It grew cold and my leg went to sleep but I didn’t want to wake her.

The moon moved across the loch and I tracked its path when it was revealed by the clouds. Things became clearer. The sky turned grey and a mist layered the still water, like a thick but incredibly light blanket. A small boat went right to left, out to sea, plowing a v-shaped furrow. Helen stirred and turned onto her back, looking up at me. My legs had gone to sleep. Her eyes were bleary, and the corner of her mouth was crusty with dried spittle.

“It’s not your fault, you know,” she said, in a voice croaky with sleep. “You did the right thing that day. It was what your mother would have wanted you to do. You do know that, don’t you?”

I nodded. She was right, but I had needed someone to tell me. I wiped the corner of her mouth.

She smiled. I could hear a thrumming coming off the hills on the other side of the loch. She touched my face.

“The ferry’s coming,” she said.

H
elen drove north for a couple of hours after crossing the loch—we’d been the only ones on the ferry apart from a couple of locals and a post van. She grasped the wheel with white knuckles, leaning forward in the seat, peering through the rain-smeared windscreen. The rain droned on the roof, occasionally sending me to sleep until we braked or turned and I would wake up. Helen would apologize for these interruptions and I would drop off again.

At lunchtime we stopped for breakfast at a roadside place used by truck drivers, filling ourselves with hot tea, fried eggs and sausages.

“Did you miss the tablets last night?” she asked.

“If I have the same distractions we had last night every night then I won’t need them at all,” I told her.

She laughed and mopped her plate, then drained her tea. “Michel, where are we going?”

“Glasgow, then London. Back to civilization, as you call it.” After lunch Helen drove on, this time east. She was starting to sag in her seat. We were on main roads now. Rejuvenated by dozing and food, I formulated a plan, a plan based on the constraints I was under. I had burned most of my options back at the cottage, only my Lebanese passport remained, with a student visa that ran out in a couple of weeks. It was true that I had lots of money, and I could hole up somewhere, buy documents, a weapon even. But I was worried about Helen and whether I had exposed her to danger. Then there was the matter of the envelope digging into my ribs. I looked at her, but she was intent on the road, pale with fatigue. On the outskirts of Glasgow I saw a shopping center. I told her to stop there.

We needed new clothes to disguise ourselves. I particularly wanted Helen to look different, as one of the agents had spoken to her up close and they possibly had photos of us. I gave her money and told her to buy things she wouldn’t usually wear. We split up, and I bought new shoes and an expensive suit that I wore out of the shop. In the changing room I took the envelope out of my old jacket and weighed it in my hands. It was frayed and sweat-stained, with one corner worn away. I put it in my new jacket. In a newsagent I bought a
Daily Telegraph
and an oversized card—it had a drawing of a small bear with a plaster on its forehead, and inside was written in cursive script, “Get well soon!” In the toilets I wrote, in Arabic, “He who has health has hope; and he who has hope has everything,” stuffed twenty $1,000 bills inside the card, then wrote Ramzi’s name and work address at UCH on the front, marking it personal and confidential. Hopefully they would use the money for their medical charity. They would probably realize who it was from, but I hoped they would still accept it for what it was. I posted the card outside, then went to the coffee shop, where I’d agreed to meet Helen.

Over coffee I opened the newspaper (more to hide behind than anything) and inside was a small piece about Abu Leila, although it didn’t mention him by name. It said the reason for the shooting on the Ku’Damm was still unknown and that the man was still unidentified. The German police said they had no leads but were ruling nothing out, including a terrorist link. It was a hundred words of lather, except for a sentence about the old woman who was killed, who turned out not to be so old but just disabled, a professor of physics visiting from Frankfurt. I could see no mention of Mossad or the PLO, or that Abu Leila had had someone with him. Had the murder happened behind closed doors then it probably wouldn’t have reached the press, or would have been suppressed for security reasons. But because it had happened in broad daylight in front of so many people it was difficult to hide. I was in no doubt that the killers wanted it known that they had struck, to send a message to others, perhaps those who were planning to
attend
the Cambridge meeting.

Helen arrived wearing a knee-length skirt and a fitted top, carrying lots of bags. I’d never seen her in a skirt before. I suggested she do something with her hair.

“Don’t you like my hair then?” she said in mock distress.

“It’s one of the first things that attracted me to you,” I said.

“Really?” She sounded dubious. “So it was nothing to do with the fact that I wasn’t wearing anything but a towel?”

“Were you not? I didn’t notice.”

I was rewarded with a punch on the arm. She tied her hair back as best she could and put a baseball cap on, pulling the short tail over the strap at the back. We spent half an hour dithering over sunglasses, then went to buy two small cases.

“Why don’t we just share one suitcase?” she asked.

“It’s just better to have two,” I replied, explaining that we might have to split up to avoid detection.

We transferred our belongings to the new cases in the Renault, which I’d decided we should leave behind; we’d spent more time in it than common sense dictated. It made us, as Jack would have said, stick out like a sore thumb. The competition would have reported it stolen, just so the police could do their work for them: all they would have to do was monitor police radio to determine where it was spotted.

“We’ll get a taxi from here,” I told Helen.

“To the station?”

“No, to the airport.”

In the taxi Helen rummaged in her new handbag and removed a tattered book. She blushed. “It’s for you.” The love poems of Kahlil Gibran, a well-worn edition. “I noticed you had a copy in Tufnell Park. I thought you might like another, since you can’t go back there. It’s not in Arabic, of course, but my mother doesn’t really read Arabic, which is why she has this one, so if you could make do with an English edition until—”

I kissed her for the first time in too long. It lingered and her lips were like warm butter. We held hands until we arrived at the departures building at Glasgow Airport.

I paid the driver and we put on our sunglasses. Inside, the place was busy with holidaymakers.

I took Helen’s hand and led her to a table near a lone public phone box. I went to the phone and memorized the number written under the handset. I sat down opposite Helen and scanned the area as best I could. I wanted to kiss her again but I needed to stay strong, stay cool and professional. Instead of kissing her I took off my sunglasses, then hers. I held her hands, stroking the smooth skin with my thumbs.

“I’m going to check out flights and buy tickets,” I said. “Then I’m going to ring you on the phone box behind me when I’ve sorted everything out. If it’s busy I’ll ring back three minutes later.”

“Can’t I come with you?”

I maintained eye contact and shook my head. “They’ll be looking for us together. It’s safer if we split up and meet on the plane. If anyone comes to talk to you then tell me when I ring.” Strands of her hair had escaped her small ponytail so I tucked them under the cap. “If I don’t phone in the next hour, then I want you to go to a police station, preferably a big one.”

“I thought you said the police would be of no help?” she said.

“You want to ask to speak to a Special Branch officer. Be insistent that it’s someone from Special Branch, tell them you have information about foreign agents on British soil.” Special Branch officers were the eyes and ears of MI5 on the ground. Vasily said that MI5 was filled with university-graduate desk analysts, and that Special Branch were the people who did the legwork. I wrote down the license plate numbers and descriptions of the Golf and the Renault. Under the table I put the piece of paper with the car numbers on it inside the Canadian passport I’d taken from the agent. I then slipped the passport into the middle of the
Daily Telegraph,
which I told her to put in her bag.

“When you have the attention of a Special Branch officer, tell him you have information relating to Israeli agents who are active in the UK. Give him the piece of paper with the license plate numbers and the Canadian passport. Tell him the truth about everything, about me, everything I’ve told you.”

She nodded. I was hoping MI5 wouldn’t be happy that Mossad agents were running around on their turf. Nor would the Canadians be pleased if they were using forged or stolen Canadian passports. At the very least it would cause logistical problems for them. Maybe, if I was lucky, a minor diplomatic incident.

I fiddled with the big watch on her wrist.

“Helen?” my voice was close to breaking. It leaked out of me, this softness, and I had to plug the leak. I surveyed the area for faces, checked for people standing on their own, talking into their sleeves or collars, listening to headphones, reading newspapers. I started to feel more in control.

“Ma belle?”

I stared at the second hand on her watch then looked up. “You should know that I hate flying,” I said.

She put her hands on my cheeks and squeezed slightly. “Don’t worry, I’ll hold your hand,” she said.

“You’re an angel.”

“Yes I am. Don’t you bloody forget it.”

“I won’t.”

I smiled, picked up my case and got up and walked away without looking back.