Triple (3 page)

Ken Folleff

an elderly gray cat Ashford introduced her with the coy pride of a man who

has become a father in middle age.

'This is Suza," he said.

The girl said, "And this is Hezekiah."

She had her mother's skin and hair; she too would be beautiful. Cortone

wondered whether she was really Ashford's daughter. There was nothing of

him in her looks. She held out the cats paw, and Cortone obligingly shook

it and said,"How are you, Hezeldah?"

Suza went over to Dickstein. "Good morning, Nat. Would you like to stroke

Hezeklah?"

"She's very cute," Cortone said to Ashford. "I have to talk to Nat. Would

you excuse me?" He went over to Dickstein, who was kneeling down and

stroking the cat.

Nat and Suza seemed to be pals. He told her, "This is my friend Alan."

"We've met," she said, and fluttered her eyelashes. Cortone thought: She

learned that from her mother.

"We were in the war together," Dickstein continued.

Suza looked directly at Cortone. "Did you kill people?"

He hesitated. "Sure."

"Do you feel bad about it?"

"Not too bad. They were wicked people."

"Nat feels bad about it. Thairs why he doesn't like to talk about it too

much."

The kid had got more out of Dickstein than all the grown

ups put together. I

The cat jumped out of Suza's arms with surprising agility. She chased

after it. Dickstein stood up.

"I wouldn't say Mrs. Ashford is out of reach," Cortone said quietly.

"Wouldn't you?" Dickstein said.

"She can7t be more than twenty-five. He's at least twenty years older,

and I'll bet he's no pistol. If they got married before the war, she must

have been around seventeen at the time. And they don't seem

affectionate."

"I wish I could believe you," Dickstein said. He was not as interested

as he should have been. "Come and see the garden."

They went through the French doors. The sun was stronger, and the bitter

cold had gone from the air. The garden

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TRIPXE

stretched in a green-and-brown wilderness down to the edge of the river.

They walked away from the house.

Dickstein said, "You don't much like this crowd."

"The war's over," Cortone said. "You and me, we live, in different worlds

now. All this-professors, chess matches, sherry parties ... I might as

well be on Mars. My life is doing deals, fighting off the competition,

making a few bucks. I was fixing to offer you a job in my business, but

I guess rd be wasting my time."

"Alan. . ."

Listen, what the hell. Well probably lose touch now-rm not much of a

letter writer. But I wont forget that I owe you my life. One of these

days you might want to call in the debt. You know where to find me."

Dickstein opened his mouth to speak, then they heard the voices.

I,Oh . . . no, not here, not now . . ." It was a woman.

"Yesl" A man.

Dickstein and Cortone were standing beside a thick box hedge which cut

off a comer of the garden: someone had begun to plant a rnst e and never

finished the job. A few steps from where they were a gap opened, then the

hedge turned a right angle and ran along the river bank. The voices came

clearly from the other side of the foliage.

The woman spoke again, low and throaty. "Don't damn you, or I'll scream."

Dickstein and Cortone stepped through the gap.

Cortone would never forget what he saw there. He stared at the two people

and then, appalled, he glanced at Dickstein. Dickstein's face was gray

with shock, and he looked ill; his mouth dropped open as he gazed in

horror and despair. Cortone looked back at the couple.

The woman was Eila Ashford. The skirt of her dress VMS around her waist,

her face was flushed with pleasure2 and she was kissing Yasif Hassan.

13

One

The public-address system at Cairo airport made a noise like a doorbell, and

then the arrival of the Alitalia flight from Milan was announced in Arabic,

Italian, French and English. Towflk el-Masiri left his table in the buffet

and made his way out to the observation deck. He put on his sunglasses to

look over the shimmering concrete apron. The Caravelle was already down and

taxiing.

Towfik was there because of a cable. It had come that morning from his

"uncle" in Rome, and it had been in code. Any business could use a code for

international telegrams, provided it first lodged the key to the code with

the post office. Such codes were used more and more to save moneyby

reducing common phrases to single words-than to keep secrets. Towfiks uncWs

cable, transcribed according to the registered code book, gave details of

his late aunt's will. However, Towflk. had another key, and the message he

read was:

OBSERVE AND FOLLOW PROFESSOR FRIEDRICH SCHULZ ARRIVING CAIRO FROM MILAN

WEDNESDAY 28 FEBRUARY 1968 FOR SEVERAL DAYS. AGE 51 HEIGHT 180 CM WEIGHT

150 POUNDS HAIR WHITE EYES BLUE NATIONAL. ITY AUSTRIAN COMPANIONS WIFE

ONLY.

The passengers began to Me out of the aircraft, and Towfik spotted his man

almost immediately. There was only one tall, lean white-haired man on the

flight. He was wearing a light blue suit, -a white shirt and a tie, and

carrying a plastic shopping bag from a duty-free store and a camera. His

wife was much shorter, and wore a fashionable mini-dress and a blonde wig.

As they crossed the airfield they looked about them and

15

Ken Folio"

sniffed the warm, dry desert air the way most people did the &at time they

landed in North Africa.

The passengers disappeared into the arrivals hall. Towfik waited on the

observation deck until the baggage came off the plane, then he went inside

and mingled with the small crowd of people waiting just beyond the customs

barrier.

He did a lot of waiting. That was something they did not teach you-how to

wait. You learned to handle guns, memorize maps, break open safes and kill

people with your bare hands, all in the first six months of the training

course; but there were no lectures in patience, no exercises for sore feet,

no seminars on tedium. And it was beginning to seem like There is something

wrong here beguming to seem Lookout lookout beginning to--

There was another agent in the crowd.

Towfik's subconscious bit the fire alarm while he was thinking about

patience. The people in the little crowd, waitIng for relatives and friends

and business acquaintances off the Milan plane, were impatient. They

smoked, shifted their weight from one foot to the other, craned their necks

and fidgeted. There was a middle-class family with four children, two men

in the traditional striped cotton galabiya robes, a businessman in a dark

suit, a young white woman, a chauffeur with a sign saying FORD MOTOR

COMPANY, and-

And a patient

Like Towfik, he had dark skin and abort hair and wore a European-style

suit. At first glance he seemed to be with the middle-class family-just as

Towfik would seem, to a casual observer, to be with the businessman in the

dark suit. The other agent stood nonchalantly, with his hands behind his

back, facing the exit from the baggage hall, looking unobtrusive. There was

a streak of paler skin alongside his nose, like an old war. He touched it,

once, in what might have been a nervous gesture, then put his hand behind

his back

question was, had he spotted Towfik?

Towfik turned to the businessman beside him and said, "I never understand

why this has to take so long." He smiled, and spoke quietly, so that the

businessman leaned closer to hear him and smiled back; and the pair of them

looked like acquaintances having a casual conversation.

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rRIPLE

7be businessman said, "The formalities take longer than the fliOV

Towfik stole another glance at the other agent. The man stood in the same

position, watching the exit. He had not attempted any camouflage. Did

that mean that he had not spotted Towfik? Or was it just that he had

second-guessed Towfik, by deciding that a piece of camouflage would give

him away?

The passengers began to emerge, and Towfik realized there was nothing he

could do, either way. He hoped the people the agent was meeting would

come out before Professor Schulz.

It was not to be. Schulz and his wife were among the first little knot

of passengers to come through.

7be other agent approached them and shook hands.

Of course, of course.

The agent was there to meet Schulz.

Towfik watched while the agent summoned porters and ushered the Schulzes

away-, then he went out by a different exit to his car. Before getting

in he took off his jacket and tie and put on sunglasses and a white

cotton cap. Now he would not be easily recognizable as the man who had

been waiting at the meeting point.

He figured the agent would have parked in a no-waiting zone right outside

the main entrance, so he drove that way. He was right. He saw the porters

loading the Schulz baggage into the boot of a five-year-old gray

Mercedes. He drove on.

He steered his dirty Renault on to the main highway which ran from

Heliopolis, where the airport was, to Cairo. He drove at 60 kph and kept

to the slow lane. The gray Mercedes passed him two or three minutes

later, and be accelerated to keep it within sight. He memorized its

number, as it was always useful to be able to recognize the opposition's

cam

The sky began to cloud over. As he sped down the straight, palm-lined

highway, Towfik considered what he had found out so far. The cable had

told him nothing about Schulz except what the man looked like and the

fact that he was an Austrian professor. The meeting at the airport meant

a great deaI, though. It had been a kind of clandestine VIP treatment.

Towfik had the agent figured for a local: everything pointed to that-his

clothes, his car, his style of waiting. 7bat 17

Ken Folleff

meant Schulz was probably here by invitation of the government, but either

he or the people he had come to see wanted the visit kept secret.

It was not much. What was Schulz professor of? He could be a banker, arms

manufacturer, rocketry expert or cotton buyer. He might even be with Al

Fatah, but Towfik could not quite see the man as a resurrected Nazi.

Still, anything was possible.

Certainly Tel Aviv did not think Schulz was important: if they had, they

would not have used Towfik, who was young and inexperienced, for this

surveillance. It was even possible that the whole thing was yet another

training exercise.

They entered Cairo on the Shari Ramses, and Towfik closed the gap between

his car and the Mercedes until there was only one vehicle between them.

The gray car turned right on to the Comiche al-Nil then crossed the river

by the 26 July Bridge and entered the Zamalek district of Gezira island.

There was less traffic in the wealthy, dull suburb, and Towfik became

edgy about being spotted by the agent at the wheel of the Mercedes.

However, two minutes later the other car tamed into a residential street

near the Officers' Club and stopped outside an apartment block with a

jacaranda, tree in the garden. Towfik immediately took a right turn and

was out of sight before the doors of the other car could open. He parked,

jumped out, and walked back to the corner. He was in time to see the

agent and the Schulzes disappear into the building followed by a

caretaker in galabtya struggling with their luggage.

Towfik looked up and down the street. There was nowhere a man could

convincingly idle. He returned to his car, backed it around the corner

and parked between two other cars on the same side of the road as the

Mercedes.

Half an hour later the agent came out alone, got into his car, and drove

off.

Towfik settled down to wait.

It went on for two days, then it broke.

Until then the Schulzes behaved like tourists, and seemed to enjoy it.

On the first evening they had dinner in a nightclub and watched a troupe

of belly-dancers. Next'day they did the Pyramids and the Sphinx, with

lunch at Groppi!s and

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