The Twisted Wire

Bartlett replaced the maps, tucked the briefcase under his seat, and relaxed. Then, after making an abortive effort to keep his mouth closed, he slept.

In front of him the Pole loosened his almost transparent grey tie and snored immediately. The American with the thick cropped hair dozed.

Only the official gunman remained completely alert as the Boeing approached the disputed territories of the Levant. And the pilot and the navigator.

Tom Bartlett was annoyed. ‘You must admit,’ he said, ‘that this is hardly an auspicious introduction to Israeli efficiency.’

‘It could happen with any airline,’ Raquel Rabinovitz said. ‘In fact El Al is one of the most efficient airlines in the world. Did you know that since the two Arab attacks they have carried more passengers than ever before?’

‘I didn’t know,’ Bartlett said. ‘Nor do I quite see what it’s got to do with the fact that they’ve lost my suitcase.’

‘Perhaps the London Airport porters forgot to load it. Or perhaps the Dutch unloaded it by mistake at Amsterdam.’

Bartlett smiled. despite his annoyance. ‘But no Israeli is to blame? Even though I personally handed it over to El Al?’ He prodded at the errant wing of his collar. He could feel sweat gathering beneath his tropical suit. He lit a cigarette. ‘It’s not your fault,’ he said. ‘You’ve done as much as you can. But everything I need for my stay here is in that case.’

‘I understand,’ she said. ‘But it could have happened on any airline.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘But is there anything more you can do?

‘I’ll see.’ She walked away, lithe and smart and aggressive.

Bartlett watched the other passengers pushing trolleys of luggage towards waiting business associates, Jewish mothers and predatory taxi drivers. He would have liked to have been in a receptive mood to assimilate the excitement and confidence he had sensed as he walked from the Boeing to the arrival lounge. But they had spoiled his pleasure by losing his suitcase.

He noticed that both the crewcut American and the Pole with the gold-rimmed spectacles were waiting around although they had picked up their baggage.

Raquel Rabinovitz returned smiling triumphantly with a customs official and the missing suitcase. ‘There,’ she said. ‘It was muddled up with the baggage off another flight. It could have happened anywhere in the world.’

‘Thanks,’ Bartlett said. ‘Thanks very much.’ And with uncharacteristic flippancy he added: ‘What a way to run an airline.’

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’ said the customs official.

‘I’m sorry,’ Bartlett said. ‘I was joking. I’m very grateful to you for finding my luggage.’

‘Perhaps,’ the customs official said, ‘you would be good enough to open your suitcase for me.’

Bartlett said: ‘Very well.’ He found his keys in his trouser pocket and opened the suitcase that was even older than his briefcase. He looked at his shirts and underclothes, his papers and his geologist’s tools. ‘I don’t think you need examine them too closely,’ he said. ‘Someone already has.’

TWO

Bartlett first suspected that he was being followed as, town guide in hand, he walked up Dizengoff Street from Dizengoff Circle where a fountain splashed and teenage soldiers with submachine guns on their shoulders munched peta crammed with meat and tehina and humus and stalked the happy soldier girls.

There was no proof; it was merely a new instinct awakened when he realised that his suitcase had been searched. Twice he spun round to surprise his pursuer. Each time he thought he noticed a furtive movement on the sidewalk. But he couldn’t be sure: it might have been the overactivity of this new instinct. And there was so much jostling movement in the street. He walked on past the small expensive shops, bookstalls garlanded with Time, Newsweek and Hebrew scandal magazines liberally bosomed and buttocked, past a dozen sidewalk cafés where tourists drank beer and Israelis sipped mineral waters.

Halfway up the broad thoroughfare Bartlett stopped at the Stern Café and ordered a Gold Star beer. It seemed to him in his new state of awareness that there were two oiled movements behind him as he turned into the café. But, of course, it was all ludicrous. Why should anyone want to follow a middle-ageing geologist who had flown to Israel to escape briefly from a fossilised routine and. a faithless wife to present a paper to a gathering of colleagues who would be transfixed to their seats by the familiarity of his material?

But if there was anyone shadowing him then, Bartlett reckoned, they would now be sitting at one of the cafés down the street from which they could observe him. He leaned back in his seat and, with incredulity and enjoyment, observed the inhabitants of the twenty-one-year-old country parading past him.

Jews from Iraq, the Yemen, Germany, Russia, Poland, Britain, America. Youthful Jews strutting with victory and self-sufficiency, more sexually aware than any young people Bartlett had seen; middle-aged and elderly Jews with indelible blue numbers on their arms and indelible suffering on their faces; preoccupied Jews wearing wide-brimmed black hats, long coats and curly beards, Jews wearing skullcaps, sun-glasses and desert tans.

He ordered another beer and watched a bus queue swarming into a single-decker bus as if it were a captured Russian tank. A little one-armed man with a chattering face leading a gaunt giant with a ruined face from café to café selling dishcloths – everyone gave a few agora but no one took the cloths.

A smart, middle-aged woman with large soft breasts beneath white lace sat at the table next to him, ordered an ice cream and offered herself to him for 175 Israeli pounds. ‘Fifty dollars,’ she added helpfully.

‘I’m English,’ Bartlett said. He looked at his watch. It was 11 a.m.

She took a small plastic conversion table from her handbag. ‘About twenty-one English pounds. And a few agora – but we won’t bother about those.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Bartlett said. ‘It is a little early for that sort of thing.’

‘You English,’ she said. ‘It’s never too early.’ She moved into a seat closer to him; she smelled faintly of spices.

Bartlett paid the old black-jacketed waiter, picked up his briefcase and started to turn left up the sidewalk. Then he swivelled on his heel and ran back in the direction he had come.

At the first café on the right he saw the Pole in the gold-rimmed spectacles trying to disappear behind a copy of a Hebrew morning paper. At the next café he spotted the crewcut American attempting a similar illusion behind a copy of Life magazine.

At the third café he saw Raquel Rabinovitz.

‘Shalom,’ she said. She was drinking a Coke through a straw.

‘Shalom,’ he said.

‘Sit down and have a drink in the Champs Elysée of Tel Aviv.’

‘I’ve already had one,’ he said.

‘Then have another.’ She snapped her fingers at a waiter. Tom Bartlett sat down.

‘I know it sounds far-fetched,’ he said. ‘But I’m sure I’m being followed.’

‘It is just coincidence,’ she said. ‘You forget that Tel Aviv is just a village compared with New York or London. Every tourist comes to Dizengoff. They say it is one of the most exciting streets in the world.’

Bartlett who was watching a tall Yemeni girl in a short leather skirt agreed. ‘But that hardly explains why my suitcase was searched.’

‘Perhaps an overzealous customs official opened it.’

‘But I had the key.’

‘All right – but I tell you I could open that lock with a teaspoon.’ She drained the Coke with a gurgle. ‘And I think I am right in presuming that you are not the tidiest of men. The suitcase looked to me just as you might have packed it.’

Bartlett shook his head. ‘My wife packed it. She is a very tidy woman. That’s how I know it had been searched.’

‘Ah.’ The conversation lapsed.

Bartlett considered telling her that yesterday he had overheard the President of the United States on the telephone. It seemed to him that the intercepted call might somehow be the key to the subsequent events. But he didn’t want her to think he was completely out of his mind. He opened his copy of the Jerusalem Post.

The girl leaned across and pointed at the four young faces peering from the front page. ‘There,’ she said. ‘That’s what it’s all about.’

The four soldiers had been killed in two days of artillery exchanges across the Suez Canal. Two of them at Kantara, two of them at Port Tawfik. Bartlett didn’t know what to say.

‘Every day,’ she said, ‘we see their faces. Alive one day, dead the next. Our young men, our future. Everyone you meet has had a relative or a friend or a neighbour killed since the truce. The world doesn’t realise what those communiqués mean to us Israelis. Two killed, three injured. In a way to a small nation like Israel such figures have as much impact as the American losses in Vietnam.’

‘I’m sorry for you,’ Bartlett said. He knew it sounded inadequate. Those young faces staring at him beside news from Cape Kennedy, above an advertisement welcoming two officials from the American board of the General Israel Orphans Home for Girls, Jerusalem, to Israel. He said: ‘It all seems so remote sitting here in the sunshine.’ He swallowed the warm dregs of his beer. ‘Do you see any end to it?’

‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘One day perhaps. When the Arabs realise that we will never be moved because the only place we can retreat to is the sea. One day when they realise how well we have treated the refugees in Gaza and elsewhere. One day when your governments leave us Jews to negotiate our own peace with the Arabs.’

‘One day when you give up some of the land you captured?’

She looked at him contemptuously. ‘What land do you suggest we give up?’

Bartlett opened his mouth to reply but he was stopped by a crack as loud as overhead thunder. He jumped. ‘What on earth was that?’

‘A supersonic bang. An aircraft passing through the sound barrier. We get them all the time.’ Amusement softened the contempt. High above Tel Aviv, two Mirage jets headed south in the general direction of Cairo. She lit a cigarette with theatrical calm and said: ‘We will never give up Jerusalem, the Golan Heights or the West Bank. Perhaps we may negotiate the return of some of the Sinai.’

‘You seem very hard,’ he said.

‘All Israelis are hard. We have to be.’ A wisp of warm wind stirred her fringe and the sunlight found gold in the ocean depths of her eyes. ‘Do you realise that not so long ago you and I would have been fighting each other?’

‘When the British were in occupation?’

She nodded.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you would have been a policewoman, not a soldier.’

They walked up Dizengoff, under the dark green trees, past the police station, to the area where the small, dusky shops were crammed with sausages, matzos, humus, slabs of compressed apricots, dried fish, bottles of wine, pickled herrings and cucumbers, fat olives, halva and peta; where butchers found pork and bacon beneath bloodless steaks; where greengrocers polished and piled their peppers, apples and thick-fleshed Jaffas with pride.

They turned left down a side street where every square yellow building housed an advocate, a dentist or a doctor. For most of the way Raquel sulked. But on the corner of Hayarkon, the seafront road, she turned swiftly and surveyed the street behind them. It was empty except for a vendor pushing a cart loaded with a glistening hillock of strawberries. The emptiness of the street seemed to placate her. ‘There,’ she said. ‘What did I tell you?’

Bartlett said: ‘I must have been mistaken.’ But he knew he hadn’t been.

They walked back into town along Hayarkon. Past the Hilton Hotel, past the British Embassy sporting the grubbiest-looking Union Jack that Bartlett had ever seen. On the town beaches the young men batted balls to each other with bats like aircraft marshallers’ indicators; the summer sound of ball on bat was as drowsily monotonous as the clicking of knitting needles.

Outside the Dan Hotel, Bartlett said: ‘Would you care to have dinner with me?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. She stood on the steps worrying about the invitation.

‘I’m an Englishman,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t expect me to insist.’

‘I think you are laughing at me all the time.’

Bartlett was contrite. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was very rude.’

‘I think perhaps we have a lot to talk about.’

‘I’m sure we have,’ Bartlett said.

‘Like soil irrigation. And the potential of the Negev. I am looking forward to your address in Jerusalem, Mr Bartlett.’

‘You will be there?’

‘Of course. I made arrangements to collect tickets this morning.’

Bartlett took the initiative and was surprised at himself. ‘Then we will discuss our common interests over dinner this evening.’

She smiled and Bartlett thought he detected relief that the decision had been taken from her. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘But first we must see the bonfires.’

‘What bonfires?’

‘Tomorrow is May 6, Lag Ba‘Omer, a Jewish holiday, Mr Bartlett. Tonight there will be bonfires all over Tel Aviv. It is just like your Guy Fawkes night. Except that there are no fireworks.’

‘Very well, Miss Rabinovitz. I’ll look forward to it.’

‘Be here at six,’ she said. ‘I’ll pick you up in my car.’

She ran down the steps and stopped a passing sherut. Bartlett took his key and walked past the tiny art gallery towards his ground-floor room. As he walked down the corridor his new instinct told him that he would discover that his room had been searched: His new instinct was right.

THREE

The first attempt on Bartlett’s life was made as he and Raquel wandered among the bonfires blazing on the bank of the narrow and muddy River Yarkon to the north of the city. Around the corner a queue formed for the Swedish film Elvira Madigan; from a jetty looped with fairy lights couples rowed into the gurgling, loving night: high above, the red light of an airliner moved among the thick stars.

But the children were concerned only with their fires pluming sparks and spitting with the fat venom. They roasted potatoes in their jackets, drank mineral waters and made black coffee.

Bartlett pointed to the top of one of the bonfires. ‘What’s that?’ he said.

Raquel who was wearing a dark blue trouser suit said: ‘It is nothing. Just some old heirloom they are burning.’

Bartlett fished his spectacles from his breast pocket. ‘It can’t be a Guy, surely.’

Raquel pulled at his arm. ‘It is nothing, I promise you.’

Bartlett peered at the effigy. ‘He might be nothing to you,’ he said. ‘But he means a lot to a few million Egyptians. That’s Nasser those kids are burning. I thought this was supposed to be some sort of religious celebration connected with the Passover.’

‘Just a childish prank,’ she said. She led him away. ‘For an absent-minded professor you seem to notice a lot.’

‘It’s my training,’ he said. ‘Staring at rocks all the time. That’s how I noticed that my room had been searched this afternoon.’

‘Not your suitcase again,’ she said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘They left that alone this time.’ He picked up a twig smouldering at one end and lit a cigarette. ‘You don’t believe me, do you, Miss Rabinovitz?’

‘It would take more than you have so far told me to make me believe that someone is after you.’ She peered at him, firelight flickering on her inquisitive features. ‘Is there something more you should tell me, Mr Bartlett?’

‘Nothing,’ he said.

His instinct, his reactions, and the shot all synchronised. In the darkness beyond the bonfires, in the paint-smelling waste where the skeletons of old ships yearned for the quick waters, he noticed a small shine of light like a brass knob on a black door. His instinct told him: gold-rimmed spectacles. Then a blur of face and a gleam of silver as slight as a minnow in deep water. A gun, his instinct said. He felled Raquel with one arm and hit the ground beside her. The bullet hit the fire beside them with a dusty thud.

Raquel twisted away from him. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Have you gone crazy?’

‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘You stay there.’

No one seemed to have heard the shot among the cracking embers. A few children gazed in astonishment at the two of them lying on the ground. Keeping low he ran towards the edge of the darkness. But there was no one there, although he thought he heard running footsteps and the sound of rotting wood breaking.

The girl joined him, dusting ash from her trouser suit. ‘And now I suppose you’re going to say someone was shooting at you,’ she said.

‘They were.’

‘This is getting beyond a joke.’

‘I entirely agree,’ he said. ‘Come on, I need a drink.’

They went to an open-air café where men played chess on black-and-white oilcloth spread on the tables. Bartlett ordered a Scotch, Raquel Rabinovitz a Carmel gin and tonic. ‘You’re driving me to drink,’ she said.

‘You still don’t believe me?’

‘I didn’t hear a shot. And I can’t think why anyone should be after you if your mission to Israel is so innocent.’ Beside them an excited chess player slapped his queen down with no respect for royalty. ‘What can anyone be after? Whatever it is it’s not in your suitcase and it’s not in your room. Perhaps it’s in your briefcase. Where is your briefcase?’

‘It’s at the hotel,’ he said.

‘In your room?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘In the hotel safe.’

‘Why do you put your briefcase in the hotel safe if you’ve got nothing to hide?’

It was difficult to explain. A hardening determination to defeat those who were pursuing him. The excitement of a mysterious challenge as he approached middle-age after a life of preoccupation with sedimentary, metamorphic and igneous rocks. Pure perversity. ‘I didn’t see why they should have it all their own way,’ he said.

‘If you’re so convinced that an attempt has been made on your life why do you not tell the police?’

‘Because, like you, they would not believe me.’

He finished his Scotch. Down the road the bonfires were dying and the children were fishing for potatoes in the glowing ash. They gave him an idea.

‘After we’ve had dinner,’ he said, ‘I can prove to you that someone wants to kill me.’

‘On your life?’

‘On my life,’ he said.

The first course at Yunis, the open-air Arab restaurant in the ancient adjoining city of Jaffa, named after Japhet, one of Noah’s sons, was served a minute after they sat down. The Arab proprietor apologised for the delay.

They sat at an unsteady table covered with oilcloth. A cat sat in the branches of a tree growing to one side of the courtyard waiting for night birds; behind them a party of exuberant Israelis in town from a border Kibbutz got drunk on Coke and fizzy orange; in front of them two elderly American tourists and their wives regarded everyone with affection.

They ate humus and tehina dips with peta, hot red Turkish salad and mixed salad, and drank white Avdat wine. They had reached the barbecued fish and the second bottle of Avdat when the crewcut American came up to their table. ‘Pardon me for interrupting your meal,’ he said.

Bartlett looked up and waited. The American hesitated. Then he said: ‘I wasn’t too sure when I first saw you come in. But I guess we were on the same plane together yesterday.’

Bartlett wiped up the last of the humus with his peta. ‘I believe we were,’ he said. ‘And you were in Dizengoff this morning.’

‘I sure was. What a street that is. It’s got Piccadilly and the Via Veneto licked.’ He paused, looking from Bartlett to Raquel and back again. ‘Say, do you mind if I join you in a glass of wine?’

Bartlett, who did mind, tried to appeal silently to Raquel. She said brightly: ‘Of course not. Please sit down.’ But he already had. He ordered another bottle of wine and said: ‘My name’s Everett. Harry Everett. It’s sure good to see a familiar face.’

‘Familiar since yesterday,’ Bartlett said.

Raquel said: ‘Are you here on vacation, Mr Everett?’

Everett shook his square, friendly face. ‘No, business I’m afraid. A two-day visit. That’s why I’ve gotten myself a seat on Mr Bartlett’s tour for the geologists tomorrow. So I can see some of the country before flying back to the States.’

Bartlett diverted the gaze of the fish head towards another table and said: ‘How did you know my name, Mr Everett? How did you know I was going on a tour tomorrow? And why did you fly here from London instead of New York if, as you imply, your business is in America?’

Everett looked surprised. ‘Gee,’ he said. ‘Are you from the FBI?’ He smiled boyishly.

‘No,’ Bartlett said. ‘Are you?’

‘No, sir. I’m an architect. There have been some last minute hang-ups on a new hotel my company is building out at Herzliya. I got your name from the Dan Hotel because I’m staying there too. Another coincidence, I guess. Anyway, I saw you walking out of the hotel today and I asked reception who you were because I thought we might get together for a drink sometime. He said you were here for a conference on geology at Jerusalem. Then I remembered reading in the local paper that all you geologists were going to be taken on a tour of Israel tomorrow even though it’s a holiday. So I made me a few calls and wangled myself a trip.’ He patted his thick chopped hair proudly.

Bartlett ran his fingers through his own untidy hair and imagined he could feel the thicker texture of the grey strands. He was aware that Everett was much nearer to Raquel’s age group than he was. He decided to leave as soon as possible. He turned to Raquel. ‘Shall we bother with coffee?’

‘Yes please,’ she said.

Bartlett controlled his irritation. They drank Turkish coffee from thick cups while Everett talked informatively about the effect of salt and sunshine on the façades of seafront hotels in the Eastern Mediterranean. The effect was not good, Bartlett gathered, as he examined Everett’s façade. A face so honest that it had to be devious, strong freckled hands, blue Brooks Brothers suit, thin tie with thin black and red stripes, square-toed black shoes. Bartlett called for the bill.

‘Hey,’ Everett said, ‘at least let me pay for the wine.’

Bartlett shook his head. ‘Buy me a drink tomorrow – at the Dead Sea.’

As they walked out Everett held Bartlett’s arm so that Raquel drew ahead of them. ‘Tom,’ he said as if a lifelong friendship had been crystallised into the last hour. ‘Can I have a chat with you later? Alone.’

‘What on earth for?’

‘I can’t tell you now. But it’s very important.’

Bartlett allowed his annoyance to surface. ‘Not tonight,’ he said. ‘As you can see I’m out with a girl. A very attractive girl. I might be in my dotage as far as you are concerned but I can assure you that it is not my intention to spend the rest of the night discussing the geological characteristics of the Beit Shean Valley with her.’

But Everett’s manner had changed. His fingers were tight around Bartlett’s forearm and his candid, campus features were suddenly ruthless. To Bartlett the change was as frightening as suddenly glimpsing cruelty in a child. ‘Tonight,’ Everett said.

His insistence encouraged the perversity in Bartlett’s nature. ‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow on the trip,’ he said. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me there’s a lady waiting for me outside.’

Everett’s face relaxed. He replaced his mask of naïveté and patted his hair. ‘Okay Tom,’ he said. ‘Till tomorrow.’

They walked into the street where cats waited for scraps and children waited for agora. Raquel was sitting at the wheel of her small Fiat.

As Bartlett walked towards it an old Ford V8 came rocking down the dark, narrow street. He flattened himself against the wall as it swept past.

Raquel said: ‘I suppose you think that was another attempt on your life.’

‘Not necessarily.’