The Little Drummer Girl (4 page)

"Was ist Anbau?"the Silesian muttered grumpily at his assistant, making everyone sit up and hunt for a translation.

"Annexe," Alexis called in reply before the rest, and won restrained laughter from the knowing, and less restrained irritation from the Silesian supporters' club.

"Annexe," the Silesian repeated in his best English and, ignoring the unwelcome source, slogged blindly on.

In my next life I shall be a Jew or a Spaniard or an Eskimo or just a fully committed anarchist like everybody else, Alexis decided. But a German I shall never be--you do it once as a penance and that's it. Only a German can make an inaugural lecture out of a dead Jewish child.

The Silesian was talking about the suitcase.  Cheap and nasty, of a type favoured by such unpersons as guest workers and Turks.  And Socialists, he might have added. Those interested could read about it in their folders or study the surviving fragments of its steel frame on the buffet table. Or they could decide, as Alexis had decided long ago, that both bomb and suitcase were a blind alley. But they could not escape listening to the Silesian, because it was the Silesian's day and this speech was his victory-roll over the deposed libertarian enemy, Alexis.

From the suitcase itself, he passed to its contents. The device was wedged in place with two sorts of wadding, gentlemen, he said. Wadding type no.1was old newspaper, shown by tests to have come from the Bonn editions of the Springer press over the last six months--and very suitable too, thought Alexis. Type 2 was a sliced-up army-surplus blanket similar to the one now demonstrated by my colleague Mr. somebody from the state analytical laboratories. While the scared assistant held up a large grey blanket for their inspection, the Silesian proudly reeled off his other brilliant clues. Alexis listened wearily to the familiar recitation: the crimped end of a detonator... minuscule particles of undetonated explosive, confirmed as standard Russian plastic, known to the Americans asC4 and to the British as PE and to the Israelis as whatever it was known as... the winder of an inexpensive wristwatch... the charred but still identifiable-spring of a domestic clothespeg. In a word, thought Alexis, a classic set-up, straight out of bomb school. No compromising materials, no touches of vanity, no frills, beyond a kiddy-kit booby trap built into the inside angle of the lid. Except that with the stuff the kids were getting together these days, thought Alexis, a set-up like this one made you quite nostalgic for the good old-fashioned terrorists of the seventies.

The Silesian seemed to think so too, but he was making a dreadful joke about it: "We are calling this the bikini bomb!" he boomed proudly. "The minimum! No extras!"

"And no arrests!" Alexis called out recklessly, and was rewarded with an admiring and strangely knowing smile from Schulmann.

Brusquely bypassing his assistant, the Silesian now reached an arm into the suitcase and with a flourish extracted from it a piece of softwood on which the mock-up had been assembled, a thing like a toy racing-car circuit of thin, coated wire, ending in ten sticks of greyish plastic. As the uninitiated crowded round to take a closer look, Alexis was surprised to see Schulmann,hands in pockets, leave his place and amble over to join them. But why? Alexis asked of him mentally, his gaze fixed shamelessly upon him. Why so leisurely suddenly, when yesterday you had hardly the time to look at your battered watch? Abandoning his efforts at indifference, Alexis slipped quickly to his side. This is the way you make a bomb, the Silesian was suggesting, if you are cast in the conventional mould and want to blow up Jews. You buy a cheap watch like this one--don't steal it, buy it at a big store at their peak shopping time and buy a couple of things either side of it to confuse the assistant's memory. Remove the hour hand. Drill a hole in the glass, put a drawing-pin in the hole, solder your electric circuit to the head of the drawing-pin with heavy glue. Now the battery. Now set the hand as close to the drawing-pin, or as far from it, as you wish. But allow, as a general rule, the shortest possible delay, in order that the bomb shall not be discovered and disarmed. Wind up the watch. Make sure the minute hand is still working. It is. Offer prayers to whoever you imagine made you, poke the detonator into the plastic. As the minute hand touches the shank of the pin, so the contact completes the electrical circuit and if the Lord is good, the bomb goes off.

To demonstrate this marvel, the Silesian removed the disarmed detonator and the ten sticks of demonstration plastic explosive and replaced them with a small light-bulb suitable for a hand-torch.

"Now I prove to you how the circuit works!" he shouted.

Nobody doubted that it worked, most knew the thing by heart, but for a moment, all the same, it seemed to Alexis that the bystanders shared an involuntary shudder as the bulb cheerily winked its signal. Only Schulmann appeared immune. Perhaps he really has seen too much, thought Alexis, and the pity has finally died in him. For Schulmann was ignoring the bulb completely. He remained stooping over the mock-up, smiling broadly and contemplating it with the critical attention of a connoisseur.

A parliamentarian, wishing to display his excellence, enquired why the bomb did not go off on time. "This bomb was fourteen hours in the house," he objected, in silky English. "A minute hand turns for one hour at most. An hour hand for twelve. How do we account, please, for fourteen hours in a bomb that can only wait twelve maximum?"

For every question, the Silesian had a lecture ready. He gave one now, while Schulmann,still with his indulgent smile, started to probe gently around the edges of the mock-up with his thick fingers, as if he had lost something in the wadding below. Possibly the watch had failed, said the Silesian. Possibly the car journey to the Drosselstrasse had upset the mechanism. Possibly the Labour Attaché, in laying the suitcase on Elke's bed, had jolted the circuit, said the Silesian. Possibly the watch, being cheap, had stopped and restarted. Possibly anything, thought Alexis, unable to contain his irritation.

But Schulmann had a different suggestion, and a more ingenious one: "Or possibly this bomber did not scrape enough paint off the watch hand," he said, in a kind of distracted aside as he turned his attention to the hinges of the facsimile suitcase. Hauling an old service penknife from his pocket, he selected from its attachments a plump spike and began probing behind the head of the hinge-pin, confirming to himself the ease with which it could be removed. "Your laboratory people, they scraped off all the paint. But maybe this bomber is not so scientific as your laboratory people," he said as he snapped his knife shut with a loud clunk. "Not so able. Not so neat in his constructions."

But it was a girl, Alexis urgently objected in his mind; why does Schulmann say he suddenly, when we are supposed to be thinking of a pretty girl in a blue dress? Unaware apparently of how--for the moment, at least--he had upstaged the Silesian in the full flight of his performance,Schulmann transferred his attention to the home-made booby trap inside the lid, gently tugging at the stretch of wire that was stitched into the lining and joined to a dowel in the mouth of the clothespeg.

"There is something interesting,Herr Schulmann?"the Silesian enquired, with angelic self-restraint. "You have found a clue, perhaps? Tell us, please. We shall be interested."

Schulmann pondered this generous offer.

"Too little wire," he announced as he returned to the buffet table and hunted among its grisly exhibits. "Over here you have the remains of seventy-seven centimetres of wire." He was brandishing a charred skein. It was wound on itself like a woollen dummy, with a loop round its waist holding it together. "In your reconstruction, you have twenty-five centimetres maximum. Why are we missing half a metre of wire from your reconstruction?"

There was a moment's puzzled silence before the Silesian gave a loud, indulgent laugh.

"But,Herr Schulmann--this was spare wire," he explained, as if reasoning with a child. "For the circuitry. Just common wire. When the bomber had made the device, there was evidently wire over, so he--or she--they threw it into the suitcase. This is for tidiness, this is normal. It was spare wire," he repeated."Übrig. Without technical significance. Sagihm doch übrig."

"Left over," someone translated needlessly. "It has no meaning, Mr. Schulmann. It is left over."

The moment was past, the gap had sealed, and the next glimpse Alexis had of Schulmann,he was poised discreetly at the door, in the act of leaving, his broad head turned part way towards Alexis, his watch arm raised, but in the manner of somebody consulting his stomach rather than the time. Their eyes did not quite meet, yet Alexis knew for certain that Schulmann was waiting for him, willing him across the room and saying lunch. The Silesian was still droning on, the audience still standing aimlessly round him like a bunch of grounded airline passengers. Detaching himself from its fringe, Alexis tiptoed quickly after the departing Schulmann. In the corridor,Schulmann grasped his arm in a spontaneous gesture of affection. On the pavement--it was a lovely sunny day again--both men took off their jackets and Alexis afterwards remembered very well how Schulmann rolled his up like a desert pillow while Alexis hailed a taxi and gave the name of an Italian restaurant on a hilltop on the far side of Bad Godesberg. He had taken women there before, but never men, and Alexis, in all things the voluptuary, was always conscious of first times.

On the drive they barely spoke. Schulmann admired the view and beamed about with the serenity of one who has earned his Sabbath, though it was midweek. His plane, Alexis recalled, was scheduled to leave Cologne in early evening. Like a child being taken out from school, Alexis counted the hours this would leave them, assuming Schulmann had no other engagements, a ridiculous but wonderful assumption. At the restaurant, high up on the Caecilian Heights, the Italian padrone made a predictable fuss of Alexis, but it was Schulmann who quite rightly enchanted him. He called him"Herr Professor" and insisted on preparing a big window table that could have seated six. Below them lay the old town, beyond it the winding Rhine with its brown hills and jagged castles. Alexis knew that scenery by heart, but today, through the eyes of his new friend Schulmann,he saw it for the first time. Alexis ordered two whiskies. Schulmann did not object.

Gazing appreciatively at the view while they waited for their drinks to arrive,Schulmann finally spoke: "Maybe if Wagner had left that fellow Siegfried in peace, we might have had a better world of it, after all," he said.

For a moment, Alexis could not understand what had happened. His day till then had been crowded; he had an empty stomach and a shaken mind. Schulmann was speaking German! In a thick, rusted Sudeten accent that grizzled like a disused engine. And speaking it, moreover, with a contrite grin that was both a confession and a drawing-together in conspiracy. Alexis let out a small laugh,Schulmann laughed too; the whisky came and they drank to each other, but with none of the heavy German ceremony of "look, sip and look again," which Alexis always found too much, especially with Jews, who instinctively saw something menacing in German formality.

"They tell me you are getting a new job soon, down in Wiesbaden,"Schulmann remarked, still in German, when these mating ceremonies were behind them. "Some desk job. Bigger but smaller, I hear. They say you are too much man for the people here. Now that I have seen you, and seen the people--well, I am not surprised."

Alexis tried not to be surprised either. Of the details of a new appointment nothing had been said--only that one would be forthcoming. Even his replacement by the Silesian was still meant to be a secret; Alexis had not had time to breathe a word of it to anyone, not even his young girlfriend, with whom he conducted rather meaningless phone calls several times a day.

"That's the way it goes, huh?"Schulmann remarked philosophically, speaking as much to the river as to Alexis. "In Jerusalem, believe me, a man's life is equally precarious. Upstream, downstream. That's the way it goes." He seemed a little disappointed, all the same. "I hear she's a nice lady too," he added, once again crashing in upon his companion's thoughts. "Attractive, bright, loyal. Maybe she's too much woman for them."

Resisting the temptation to turn the occasion into a seminar upon the problems of his own life, Alexis directed the conversation towards this morning's conference, but Schulmann answered vaguely, remarking only that technicians never solved anything, and that bombs bored him. He had asked for pasta and ate it the prisoner's way, using his spoon and fork automatically, not bothering to look down. Alexis, afraid to interrupt his flow, kept as quiet as he knew how.

First, with an older man's ease of narrative,Schulmann embarked upon a mildly worded lament about Israel's so-called allies in the anti-terror business: "Back in January, when we were running a quite different investigation, we called on our Italian friends," he declared, in a voice of homey reminiscence.

"Showed them some nice proofs, gave them some good addresses. Next thing we knew, they had arrested a few Italians, while the people that Jerusalem were after sat safe back home in Libya looking bronzed and rested, waiting for their next assignment. That was not what we had intended." A mouthful of pasta. A dusting of the lips with the napkin. Food is fuel for him, thought Alexis; he eats so that he can fight. "In March, when another matter came up, it was the same story exactly, but that time we were dealing with Paris. Certain Frenchmen were arrested but nobody else. Certain officials got some nice applause too, and, thanks to us, promotion. But the Arabs"--he made a large, indulgent shrug. "Expedient it may be. Sound oil policy, sound economics, sound everything. Justice it isn't. And justice is what we like." His smile broadened, in direct contrast to the scale of the joke. "So I would say that we have learned to be selective. Better tell too little than too much, we have decided. Somebody is nicely disposed towards us, has an impressive record--a fine father in his background, like yours--with him we will do business. Guardedly. Informally. Between friends. If he can use our information constructively for himself, advance himself in his profession a little--all the-better that our friends should obtain influence in their professions. But we want our half of the deal. We expect people to deliver. Of our friends we expect this particularly."