Stateless (13 page)

Focused as she was on the elderly woman, Judita did not see Colonel Pickford stop and watch her as he surveyed the lines of people. The old woman was quickly moved on by a solider and Judita hunched her shoulders and retreated further into her scarf to blend back in.

Suddenly the officer's clipped British voice called her out. ‘You! Girl. Come here.'

She turned, and saw Colonel Pickford, standing next his car, pointing at her. ‘Come here.' When she delayed, he shouted out, ‘Immediately, when I give an order!'

Judita walked over to where the colonel was standing. She wanted to stare him in the face, not to flinch or show any sort
of deference. But she knew better, knew her mission was too important, so she lowered her eyes as it flashed in her mind that the officer was the same height as Beria. And that didn't seem to be the only similarity.

‘What's your name, girl?'

Judita told him. He then asked more questions about her origin and she told him her story, a story she'd learned by heart in her training in Moscow.

‘So, you come from Ruskie Land, do you? And how did you get here?'

She explained that she had managed to escape from Leningrad during the Nazi siege, crossed the border into Finland and had hidden in the woods. She'd made her way into Norway, where she'd been looked after by a family of evangelical Lutherans; then she had been given money for passage to Trieste in Italy, now that the Fascists had been defeated. Wanting to emigrate to Palestine, here she was. It seemed an extraordinary story and yet was entirely consistent with any that the people getting onto the British army trucks could tell.

‘And you speak a number of languages?' said the colonel.

Judita was angry with herself, knowing that because she'd helped out the old woman it had made her stand out, and the officer must have heard her speaking in Russian, German and Czech.

‘All these damn refugees from everywhere but Timbuktu! I need a girl like you in my office.'

With that he turned to his sergeant, and said officiously, ‘See that this girl is fed and washed, and then bring her to my quarters.'

The sergeant saluted, and barked, ‘Yes, sir.'

Colonel Pickford got back into his car, and his driver roared away, leaving the sergeant, Judita and some soldiers on the dock. Everybody else had been taken away. The sergeant escorted
Judita to a small truck. She remained silent, eyes downcast, yet her mind raced through scenarios of what might lie ahead.

As they were walking, much to her surprise, the solider said to her softly, ‘Listen, love. I got nothing against you Yids. Okay. But – ' The solider stopped, cutting himself off mid-sentence, and looked around before continuing. ‘Look . . . Just do what he fuckin' says, alright? And then he'll leave you alone and you can go back to your people. Like it never happened.'

Judita imagined the confusion such an instruction might have had on any other young girl fresh off the ship. But she understood perfectly what he was saying. Though she did wonder if this solider had tried to warn or even help others. She considered staying silent but instead, seizing the small chance to understand her enemy better, said, ‘Why are you telling me this?'

‘What?' The soldier was genuinely surprised by the question. But Judita wanted to probe the nervous young man.

‘He's your commander, so why do you tell me this? Aren't you loyal to him?'

‘I don't know. It just ain't right. This army's a fuckin' joke. Just an old boys' club. Them fuckin' officers do what they like and we take the bullets and run their errands.' The soldier looked Judita in the eye for the first time. ‘I got a girl back home. We're gettin' engaged when this palaver's over. It ain't right what he does to the refugees. They're just kids. He shouldn't do it, that's all. I just wanted to warn ya. Just do what he says and then forget about it . . .'

‘I understand. And thank you. Your girl in England. She's lucky to have a man like you.'

An hour later, washed and fed, Judita was shown to the top floor of the officers' quarters. The sergeant knocked on the door, and nodded to the colonel. He smiled at Judita, pleased that she'd scrubbed up so nicely. She was, indeed, very pretty. One of the perks of the job, he had convinced himself, especially when he'd been stuck in this disgusting, stinking hell hole of a baking country when he should have been commanding a force of men, beating the living daylights out of the Krauts, or tending his roses back in Wimbledon.

Judita entered his quarters. They were sparsely furnished, no pictures on the walls, nor photographs on the credenza. It was the archetype of a bachelor's apartment, cold, austere and friendless. The colonel barely invited her in. He hardly said a word to her or acknowledged her presence. Instead, he acted like a medieval warlord, nodding at her to take a seat on the distressed lounge, the bottom sagging close to the floor, the cushions looking dusty and unkempt.

He came over and sat next to her. This was no seduction, no smiling gentleman plying her with drinks or soothing her nerves with soft lilting words. To Judita it even felt very far removed from the drunken diplomat in the Moscow bar all those months ago.

He put his arm around her shoulder, and pulled her into him. ‘You know why you're here, don't you, girl?'

Judita said nothing but held his gaze.

‘Play your cards right, and I can do a lot for you. If you're a good girl and please me, I can arrange to have you set free and you can join your other Jew friends in Tel Aviv or wherever you want to go. But act like a little fool and things will go very poorly for you. Do you understand me? I have the power to send you back to wherever I choose; and if you don't do as I say, you'll be very very sorry.'

Judita's mind was desperately working out what to do next. Her training in Moscow stood her in good stead because the one thing she didn't do was panic.

‘Good. Now, get your clothes off, my little Jew, and go inside into the bedroom. I'll be in there shortly. Lie on the bed; don't get in it because I've just had clean sheets put on.'

She stood, and walked towards the bedroom. As she crossed the floor, her eyes urgently searched for something she could use to protect herself. She deliberately walked slowly so that in those brief moments, she took in the landscape of where she was. As she passed by a simple kitchenette, with little more than a sink, a cupboard and a gas ring with a kettle, she saw what she wanted.

She turned, and asked, ‘Sir, might I have a glass of water?'

He was reading a report, but looked up momentarily, nodded and went back to his reading.

She turned on the tap, and while the glass was filling, the sound of the running water masked what her hand was doing. She slipped a short and fairly blunt knife from the cutlery drawer and pushed it up into the sleeve of her dress. She was amazed that this nasty little British man could be so arrogant as to give her, a hostage to his power, free run of the place. It was madness, but to her advantage. How could he be so stupid? Had the others girls he had brought here been so weak willed, so broken, as to blithely capitulate? Was he so conceited as to think each would simply comply?

After Judita had finished drinking, she put the glass back in the sink, and went into the bedroom. She stood behind the door and waited for the colonel to think that she'd done as instructed.

Standing behind the door, she heard him walking across the floor. She saw the handle of the door turning. She waited for him to come through. He entered with his back to her, walking
into the bedroom, looked for her on the bed, assuming she'd be naked, her legs open, waiting for him.

She was certainly waiting.

Judita observed his posture and saw a man with no conception of being in any danger, a man accustomed to safety and power. The very opposite of the refugees who had trundled off the boats only hours earlier. If this was the British in Palestine, then they would surely lose in the fight ahead.

The colonel walked forward to the base of the bed, then looked around the room. Judita had been trained in many forms of armed and unarmed combat in Moscow. She had also been schooled in her limitations – she would never have size or strength to overcome a large man, but she would always have speed and she could manufacture surprise. Although she was diminutive, here and now she had speed, surprise and a knife.

She sprang forward, whipping her arm around the colonel's chin, her hand over his mouth. With her other hand, she twisted his neck as viciously as she could, not enough to snap the spine but enough to jolt his balance and shock his mind into panic, his body into an agony of pain. Using the weight of her body, throwing herself onto his back, his head at a murderously twisted angle, he was unstable and fell headlong to the floor. Acting quickly, she retrieved the knife from her sleeve.

She grasped it, and stabbed it sharply, through the gap between the jacket and trousers of his uniform, underneath his ribcage, tearing apart his diaphragm, and sticking the sharp point of the otherwise dull knife into his heart. She'd chosen a dull blade with a sharp point because she wasn't using it to cut, but to pierce. The accuracy with which she drove the blade up through his body overcame its lack of sharpness.

Hand still gripping his mouth tightly, she held his body firmly as she felt it twitch for a couple of moments, as though he was struggling before his heart stopped beating. Then he
became a dead weight and to any observer he could have been asleep on the floor at her feet. She waited for three long minutes for his heart to completely stop beating before she stabbed him twice more. She sliced his carotid artery and then thrust the knife once again up through his chest into his now un-beating heart. In her training, she'd been taught to ensure that a victim was definitely dead, and never to assume that the first strike had killed him. And the reason she'd waited for the heart to be completely still was so that when she sliced the artery in his neck, it didn't spurt blood over the walls and the floor, which a beating heart would have caused. But the little British bastard was well and truly dead. She dragged his heavy body across the floor, opened the wardrobe, and stuffed him inside, closing the door. Then she straightened the mat in front of the bed, and covered the small stain of his blood and urine with some of his clothing from the drawers to make it look like he was just a messy individual. Anybody walking in and casually looking for the colonel would see nothing out of place.

Hopefully, it would take some time for his quarters to be searched. But now Judita had blood on her hands. She returned to the kitchen, where she washed her hands carefully with carbolic soap and water, dried them, and then checked herself to ensure that there wasn't any blood on her or that she wasn't unkempt when she left the quarters and met the sergeant, who was under orders to return her to the camp.

She still had an hour to wait. So she sat down on the dusty couch, and read some of the colonel's papers. But they appeared to be very low-level stuff, just basic administration, an order from Whitehall about costs, efficiency and dispersal of troops. He might be a colonel, but outside of the army, he'd probably be some minor office bureaucrat. He was a nonentity, and the power he'd exercised over her and other girls must have been the most exciting part of his day.

Judita rubbed her eyes hard so that they turned pink, so the decent sergeant would assume that she'd been crying. She hoped he wouldn't be blamed when the colonel's body was discovered.

Central Israel

161 CE

H
is mouth was full of mud and his lungs were bursting for air, his limbs little more than dead weights desperately trying to crawl up the riverbank. But Abram was alive.

How long had he been beneath the surface of the water? It was so calm on top, yet the undertow had carried him far, far from the village. At first, he'd struggled, but then he'd let the strong current carry him away from Abimelech and the others.

How far had he drifted? These things he didn't know. But he knew he was certainly alive. Abimelech's grip, the followers of Jesus on the riverbank, were now an event of his immediate past, something that had happened far away up the river. Surely they now believed him to be dead, as he had believed until the Lord Almighty had caused him to cough, and then struggle to the surface for air. And the moment he choked, he knew he must be alive because the gasping cough had awakened his senses. Floundering in the river, he'd somehow managed to paddle to the side, and with a final almighty effort, he'd climbed the bank and now he felt God's sun on his body.

Abram lay there for a long time, long enough for his shirt to dry out on his back and become brittle with caked mud. He forced himself to roll over and, pushing himself up with one hand, felt a short stab of pain. He looked at his arms and saw the mud was dark with dried blood. He didn't remember the injury but from the irregular tear it looked to be the work of a branch or rock he must have bounced off as the current swept him away. He looked back to the river, and continued to wonder why the surface was so smooth and bland, yet the current below was so strong. Was that why Abimelech had held him so tightly?