The Rendezvous (15 page)

Some had been left to expiate in their own way; their victims had not been predominantly Jewish, and Israel didn't undertake the vengeance of other races. A man in Joe's position was an invaluable contact; he met people from all sections of the community in the course of his hospital work, many of them of German extraction; once or twice he had picked up some piece of information and sent it on. Once he had established that a man on their wanted list was dead, through the weeping confessions of his daughter under sodium-pentothal injections. He had died in Chile, before they could get him into the States, and she was being treated for a severe depressive condition as a result of having a former S.S. major as a father. Joe had treated her with sympathy and shaken hands with her on her discharge from hospital. Israeli Intelligence had taken her father's name off their list.

Now they would begin to check that list against the name of Amstat, when his cable arrived, while enquiries began at the University, places where he had lived, people he had known. It might take weeks, or even months. It depended on how well his tracks had been covered over, and whether he was genuine or not. Joe buzzed his secretary and the first patient came into his consulting room. There was nothing more to do but wait.

‘Darling, I think I'll go down to the house tomorrow. I want to pick up some clothes, and see that everything's all right. I'll come back on Thursday.' Terese had rehearsed it all before he came home, and it seemed quite natural when she said it. Bob was busy that evening, going through papers connected with their trust. He was expecting his sister Ruth and the family lawyer within the next quarter of an hour and he didn't pay much attention to what his wife was saying.

‘Of course, sweetheart, that's fine. I'll call you.' He looked up for a minute to smile at her; he thought she looked strained, almost unhappy.

‘Don't rush back for me, darling, if you're tired. Stay a couple of days if you want. I'm up to my eyeballs in all this stuff. Maybe it'll sort itself out quickly and we can take off for Portugal. How about that?'

‘Don't worry about it,' she said. ‘We can go any time. And don't call me tomorrow, I'll probably ring the Phillipses up and ask myself round to dinner. I'll call you. Here's Ruth now, Robert. I'll leave you all in peace.' She stopped midway in the hall to kiss her sister-in-law and shake hands with the lawyer, and then she went into her bedroom to pack for Chicago.

He met her at the airport; they had travelled separately, and he had spent the day trying to work, which was impossible because he couldn't keep his mind on the department store and office block, or his patience with the demands of his clients. He wasn't in the right mood for designing eighteen storeys with a cubic footage of forty thousand feet in an area of an arc. He had bought flowers for the apartment, red and white and pink roses, and then found there weren't enough vases, so he sent one of the girls in the company office of his client out to get some. She had brought them back and he didn't have time to take them to the apartment before meeting Terese at the airport. They were still in the back of the hire car, wrapped up.

He took her case – it was a light travelling valise, with her initials on it – and threw it into the boot, among the vases, and neither of them said anything. The apartment was small, in a discreet modern block on the outskirts of town, and it was on rent while the department-store deal was going through. It was easier than hotels, which were always booked and where Amstat found the service inadequate, and there was a service restaurant which supplied meals in his room if he preferred to eat and work in peace. He opened the front door and stood aside to let her go in. ‘It's not very elegant,' he said, ‘but we can be alone. We can have dinner up here too.' She walked into the living room slowly and looked round; she saw his roses, and she turned to him suddenly and held out both hands.

‘It's full of flowers, Karl. Far too many flowers, darling. You needn't have done it.'

‘I bought some vases too,' he said. He kissed her hands one after the other. ‘But I left them in the car, of course. I haven't been able to concentrate at all today. I thought every moment you'd ring and say you'd changed your mind.'

‘I nearly did,' Terese said. ‘Several times I nearly called you. But I didn't, did I?'

‘No.' He drew her close and put his arms around her. They didn't kiss, they just stood and held each other. ‘Thank God you didn't. I couldn't have borne it if you changed your mind. I've got some champagne too; let's drink it!'

‘You open it while I unpack,' she said. ‘Then I must put a call through to the house at Boston and tell the housekeeper I'm staying the night with some friends, the Phillipses, in case Robert calls. I told him I was going there. I told him not to phone me, but he might. I want to get it over before we have our drink together, Karl.'

‘You feel guilty?' he asked her. ‘I can understand that.'

‘If I let myself,' she said it simply, ‘but it's wearing off, every minute I'm with you, I feel it less and less. It's only the details that are sordid, like telling lies to the servants. I won't be long. Is there a phone in the bedroom?'

‘Yes, it's through there.'

He had put flowers in the bedroom too; a large bunch lay on a chair still in their wrapping, waiting for the vases he hadn't had time to put them in. She tore the paper and saw that they were already dying. Her little case was on the bed; she opened it, and then shut it again; she put the telephone call through first and after a few minutes she was on the line to her housekeeper, making the explanation which would satisfy Bob if he telephoned her. It was sordid, as she had said; lying was sordid, laying deceitful little trails so that her husband wouldn't know she was in bed with someone else, making love to them, instead of going out to dinner with the Phillipses in Boston.

She had tried not to do it; she had gone to Joe Kaplan for help and to Bob himself; she had made up her mind to keep away from Amstat because she couldn't trust herself if they went on meeting. It had all failed, and she was there with him, coming nearer and nearer the inevitable conclusion, and nothing could stop it now. If this was really love, then she had lived all her life without knowing it, not even having the shadow, much less the substance. She was miserable because of Bob, but she was happy too, frightened and expectant, but committed past any chance of turning back. She loved Karl Amstat. It sounded so trite, so simple. It meant lies, dishonesty and adultery, and when she thought of Bob she could only take refuge in making sure he never knew, that no matter what the subterfuge, he would be protected. She could bear the guilt of this association, so long as she never saw the knowledge of it on his face. She began to take her clothes out of the valise; there was a dress to wear for the next day, and a lightweight suit for the flight back, the gold-and-ivory toilet set Ruth had given her as a Christmas present after she had been married five years. It was like a mark of acceptance, as if the Bradford family had decided she was going to last. And there was the nightdress and négligée she had bought the day before, made of pure silk satin and costing a thousand dollars from Lord and Taylor. She had gone there deliberately instead of to Bergdorfs', because she paid by cheque and she didn't want the nightdress on her charge account. She didn't want Robert to pay for it or see her in it. It was probably ridiculous. When you took a lover you didn't go to bed in white like a bride. You came to him naked, experienced.

‘Have this.' He came in with the glass of champagne in his hand. ‘Darling heart, you look so worried. Don't be afraid of me, please.'

‘I'm not, Karl. Look – this is what I bought.'

He picked up the exquisite white silk, and laid it back on the bed. Everything she did was what he hoped she'd do. All his life he had maintained a certain prudery where women were concerned. It was part of his background to associate a respectable relationship with going to bed in some kind of covering. And this was respectable; this woman was as special to him as if he had just married her in the church in Frankfurt where his father had married his mother and he had been christened and confirmed. They might have been on their honeymoon in a hotel on the Rhine, with magnificent views outside the windows and flowers in the bridal suite. That was what he had tried to do, make up for what might have been. That was what the roses meant, filling the impersonal, American apartment bedroom with the scent and colour of the past they had never had. There had been no marriage, no house to buy, no wife and children to come home to; nothing but a day to day existence in semi-shadow, with nothing to live for except life itself and nothing to look back on but destruction. His parents were dead; his home was rubble. He had had nothing for the first ten years out of the twenty since the war, and now he had his career, his alias, his niche in a society which only accepted him because he was a liar. Terese and what was going to happen between them was the only real thing he had known since the war ended. This was not going to be like Julia Adams, who took off her clothes without any shame at all, and demonstrated how clever she was at making the most of their desire as if it were admirable to know the tricks of love.

‘It's beautiful,' he said. ‘And you will look beautiful in it. Come and have the champagne in the other room.' This too was how it should be; he had never felt so German, so much himself. He even made her a little bow before he took her hand. A man did not hurry these things, or behave with vulgar haste, however much he wanted her. He waited, he courted her properly, and then when the time came his dominion in love would be complete.

‘You must think me an awful fool,' she said. They were sitting side by side, drinking with their glasses held between them like a barrier. ‘I've been married for fifteen years and I'm so nervous, it's ridiculous! I don't know what to do – how to behave.'

‘It's not ridiculous to me,' he said. ‘I like it. A woman should be nervous – just a little. I'm going to make you very happy, my darling. You've nothing to fear, you can trust me completely. I shall look after you.'

‘It's the first time,' she said, defending herself. ‘If I'd done this before it would be different. Oh, Karl, I hope to God I don't disappoint you.' He lifted the bottle; it was empty. He took the glass away from her and leaning forward he kissed her deeply in the mouth. He didn't let her speak and he was very gentle.

‘Come to bed with me, Terese.' She put her arms round his neck and shut her eyes.

‘Take me there.'

It was like flying when it began, like the sensation in dreams of having wings and soaring high above the earth. They moved together, ascending together towards the summit and its unbearable goal of physical and emotional explosion, and in the same seconds they reached the point of momentary disintegration, with its total loss of identity and sense of separate being. He heard her cry out through the sound of his own triumph. So far had he lost himself in what they were experiencing that the words he had spoken to her in the final throes of making love were said in German. But her sound went on, and now the pitch of it was changing from the indescribably joyous cry of satisfied female love to a fierce and penetrating scream. It was a scream of conscious terror, and emerging from it came the single word repeated over and over as she began to fight and beat her fists against him. ‘You! You!'

6

‘Ah, good evening, David. Good to see you. Come and sit down. My wife has left coffee for us and some of her excellent chocolate cake.'

Jacob Hoffmeyer was in his sixties; he ran a flourishing export business in the centre of Buenos Aires and he and his family had settled in the Argentine in the late 1930s, during the Nazi persecution. He had arrived with nothing, but the fanatical capacity for work which made his race so many enemies had resulted in a thriving business and a large house in the prosperous suburban area of the city. Jacob and his wife and their five year old daughter had left Germany in time. Every relative on both sides of their family who stayed behind in the hope that things would settle down, went to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Jacob had established this personally when he returned to Germany after the war. He had searched for them all; his parents who were old when he left, his wife's relations, three brothers with their wives and children, and some cousins, his wife's widowed mother and sister – they had all been taken and they were all dead. He had come back to Buenos Aires, to his business and his nice house, and the rabbi had held the service for the dead for him and his wife in the city's principal synagogue. Two years later they made a trip to Israel, and since then Jacob had been a active agent for Israeli Intelligence.

David Klein was in his thirties; he had been working for Hoffmeyer for the past three years and he was an expert at the kind of tiring leg work which was beyond the older man's capacity. He had tramped the city, making enquiries about Karl Amstat, and he had come to Hoffmeyer's house to report.

He helped himself to coffee, ate a piece of the rich Viennese cake, and then produced his notes.

‘A Karl Amstat was enrolled at the University here in 1955; he was a student of Diego Bolsa. His academic record was good, he got his degree in architecture and passed out at the end of his four-year course. He was registered as a Swiss national, born in Berne in 1921.'

‘That would make him – forty, forty-one now,' Hoffmeyer said. ‘That checks with the New York query.'

‘He had no family here,' David Klein said. ‘He lived in a boarding house in the Aruña district for two of the four years, I checked there and they didn't remember him very well. Said he kept to himself. Then he moved to another place nearer the University, slightly more expensive, a pensione with full terms. Same story again; a nice, quiet man, spent his time studying, and never brought any friends back.'