The Pure (2 page)

He thought about a battle from the Lebanon campaign. His unit had been staging a counter-attack. As they advanced he had felt so strong, part of a single massive being made up of air support, artillery, tanks, infantry units. Invincible. Together they had gone forward, firing like madmen, scattering the enemy, reducing them to the occasional flash of machine-gunfire here, a cluster of isolated silhouettes there, a solitary truck trying to turn back. But then – suddenly – at a certain indefinable moment, the tables had turned. He had looked around and found that he was alone. His comrades, his air support, were nowhere to be seen; his artillery was nothing but a distant thudding. And all around him swarmed the enemy. The flashes of machine-gunfire had become unified, coordinated, and figures with RPGs were materialising everywhere. He had stumbled backwards, firing as he retreated, ducking to protect his head, his eyes, his jaw, as bullets whined past him, kicked up the ground beneath his feet. On his own, disorientated, dislocated from his system of support. No comrades, no back-up, no security. This was how he felt now, with a girl he didn’t know, in a flat somewhere in London.

‘Let’s get into bed,’ she said quietly.

‘I’m fine here.’

He looked at her, this woman from another world, this person he did not know, her breasts splayed and her pubic hair a dark tangle against his leg. He wondered who her parents were, if she had siblings. He wondered how her life would end. Her fringe was at all angles, she looked ridiculous. Her hand was cupped over his belly, and like this she fell asleep.

When her breath was deep and rasping, Uzi got silently to his feet. He felt sorry. He went into the bathroom and washed among the unfamiliar toiletries, all covered in Hungarian script. The toyshop smell was stronger in here, perhaps it was shampoo or something. For a long time he looked at himself in the mirror, his grizzled, worry-furrowed face with its sandpaper smudge on his cheeks and neck. He examined the cyst on his shoulder. Outside, cars went past. Israel felt a million miles away. The alcohol lay hot and heavy in his belly and his mouth was dry. He tiptoed back into the bedroom. The girl had turned on to her front, hugging herself like a child. She must have been quite drunk, to fall asleep like that. She was lying in front of the door. He thought of moving her into the bed, but he didn’t want to wake her. He gathered his sweaty clothes together, dressed and nudged the door open. She sighed and rolled over, but didn’t wake up. He kissed her gently, incongruously. Then he slipped out the door, through the catacombs and into the street.

The morning was humid and he did not feel as if he was entering fresh air. Already he was out of breath. He took a cigarette out of his pocket but he didn’t light it. His fists were clenched. He still had a feeling of dread, and almost turned back to check that the girl was still alive. His vision became blurred; he could feel tears on his cheeks. Then his inner ear began to itch, and he knew the voice was coming.

‘Good morning, Uzi. How are you today?’ it said – as always – in Hebrew. He thought it had a sarcastic tone. He thought it knew what he had just been doing, thinking, feeling. But he couldn’t be sure.

‘Leave me alone,’ he replied. ‘Just leave me alone for today, all right?’

The voice fell silent. It could be respectful like that.

The sky was swollen and dark with humidity. Uzi pulled out his phone – no missed calls, no texts, and the time was 07:23. How stupid he had been to think it was possible to forget. London. Another day. He saw a bus stop and walked to it. Rain began to fall.

When Uzi awoke later that day, it was 2.30 p.m. and his body was covered in bars of sunshine. His ears were still ringing from the music in the club, and he had a hangover. There had been no nightmares – a pleasant surprise. He fumbled on the floor beside the bed, found his cigarettes. He smoked one, screwed it into the porcupine of butts in the ashtray. Then he turned on to his side and tried to go back to sleep. But his ear began to itch again.

‘Uzi, we need to talk.’

‘I told you, leave me alone,’ he mumbled into his pillow. ‘I haven’t got the strength to talk to you today.’

There was a pause while the voice considered.

‘OK. I’ll give you a break. For today. Believe in yourself.’

The Kol was always saying that. The itch in his ear gradually receded and he breathed a sigh of relief. Many people had these kind of voices, he knew they did. But for him, he thought, it was different. He only ever had one voice, and he called it the Kol, meaning ‘the voice’ in Hebrew. Always it was female, very calm, almost hypnotic, with a metallic edge. Occasionally the voice sounded older, usually when things got serious. Sometimes it would leave him alone for days on end, leave him to his own devices. Other times it would be with him all day, nagging from his left ear like a fishwife. Often it made him crazy. And it always tried to make him talk back.

But the Kol had promised to leave him alone for today, and he was going to make the most of it. He pressed his head into the pillow as deeply as he could and allowed his mind to drift. It didn’t take long for sleep to close in on him. That was when the nightmare came. He should have known it. Brussels, gleaming diplomatic Brussels. His hand stretching out before him like a pale trident. The cold slap of his palm against the girl’s sternum as he shoved her with all his strength. Her face, stretched by a languid terror as she fell in slow motion backwards into the road. Her hair flicking in ropes and tendrils against the night sky as her head hit the windscreen of an oncoming Mercedes; the snarl of acceleration, the flinging body, the black bonnet. The single cry. His first kill for the Office.

At 3.30 p.m. he awoke again, and this time he got up. Music was playing somewhere, he could hear it coming through the floorboards. He took a strawberry mousse from the fridge, peeled the lid and spooned it into his mouth. Then he turned on his two televisions; they had to be used together, as one had no picture and the other had no sound. He parted the curtains and looked out into the summer’s afternoon, scratching his woolly head. A group of children were clustered around a smashed bus stop, kicking a lump of concrete. He closed the curtains again, lit another cigarette. Compulsively, he placed his foot against a leg of the coffee table and nudged it, feeling the weight; heavy, too heavy for a regular table. There was no sign it had been tampered with. His ‘slick’ was secure.

In the bathroom, he unscrewed the showerhead and rattled it over the sink, then scraped at it a few times with a spoon. He’d read that dirty showers contain dangerous levels of mycobacterium avium, which if inhaled can rot the lungs. When satisfied, he dropped his cigarette butt sizzling in the toilet and had a cold shower. Snail-like, he slipped back into the shell of his clothes, shaking the moisture from his head.

It was hot in the flat. Something about the quality of the heat made him think back to the summers of his youth. That summer when, at the age of fourteen, he had won the national junior shooting prize, scoring 197 out of 200 with an old Shtutser rifle. His parents told everyone about it; he had been the envy of the entire Gededei Noar Ivri, the Battalion of Hebrew Youth. The beginning of an illustrious career, he thought bitterly.

The kill, the Brussels night, appeared in his mind; he blocked it out. He thought about the Hungarian girl. He had a headache. In the kitchen he swallowed an aspirin without water, then, finding the capsule still sharp in his oesophagus, filled a glass and drank. It was as if a furnace was raging inside him, and the water was turning to steam. He refilled the glass and took a key from a drawer. He was ravenous, his soul was hungry. Leaving the glass forgotten on the counter, he left the kitchen, unlocked the spare bedroom and entered.

The room was filled with an unmoving, fragrant cloud, and the windows were blacked out. He could hear the hum of his small machines. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, a dozen wooden structures were revealed, like balsa wood wardrobes, their walls made of white sheets pinned up with thumbtacks. Concertina pipes looped lazily on to the ground and out the window. Carefully, he opened one of the boxes and dazzling light spilled out, blanching his face. He reached inside.

The plants, set amongst reflective silver sheeting, were full and supple. He inspected the leaves closely, pinching and twisting them in his fingers: the white hairs had begun to turn reddish brown, almost ready to be harvested. Their roots were threaded into a bed of pebbles, through which a mechanical pump sent bursts of chemical solution. Hydroponic cultivation. Complicated but more efficient, and no soil needed. He spent a few minutes going from box to box like a zookeeper, checking the temperature and humidity gauges, then the extractor fans and pumps. He got some chemicals from the bathroom and replenished the plastic reservoir in the corner of the room, checking that the timer was running properly. Finally he opened the airing cupboard in the corner, took out some drying trays, divided a pile of desiccated buds into eighths, and bagged them up. Casting a final eye over everything, he left the room and locked the door behind him.

He put on some aftershave, jeans and a linen jacket, turned off the televisions and went out, carrying his crop in a rucksack. Pickings would be rich tonight. One deal, one thousand pounds. But first there was the matter of that bastard Avner. He checked his phone and there was a text waiting, the first for days. It said: c u 4 ok? Reluctantly, he replied: ok.

When Uzi arrived at the café in Primrose Hill, Avner Golan was waiting for him, sitting at a table in the corner, nursing a latte in a glass. Uzi hated the sight of a latte in a glass. Whoever thought of a latte in a glass should be shot. He was feeling jumpy. It was dangerous to arrive at a meeting point when your contact was already there. On operations, if you arrived and your contact was there waiting, you cancelled the meeting. It was forbidden even to go to the bathroom and leave your contact at the table, for who knows what they could be doing in your absence? But he fought his instinct. This was Avner, he reminded himself, just Avner. Granted, a bastard through and through, but one of the few people that could, to some extent, be trusted.

Uzi knew that under his arms and in the centre of his back were ovals of darkness. He didn’t care. He gave Avner a cursory comrade’s embrace and sat down, taking out a packet of cigarettes.

‘Ah, my brother. You’re still wearing your old clothes,’ said Avner – for some reason he was speaking in French – taking the corner of Uzi’s jacket in his fingers. ‘Paranoid as ever.’

Uzi snatched his jacket away. Sewn into the corners were little lead weights, making it possible to swing it open with a twist of the body and draw your weapon in a single movement. They had both perfected the movement years ago in training: swing draw, swing draw, swing draw. (The famous ‘Israeli draw’, where the sidearm was snatched from the holster with an empty cartridge and racked at the same time, was slower. For the Office, it had to be quick: swing draw.)

‘This jacket suits me fine,’ said Uzi, replying also in French. ‘You’re the one who won’t speak on the phone. Who always wants to meet in four eyes.’

‘Meet in four eyes? You’re still using the jargon, my brother. It’s over for you now, don’t you get it? You’ve quit. Now you’ve got to let it go.’

‘A man can’t let go of himself. You know that.’

‘A man can, Adam. A man can let go of his old self.’

‘Uzi. Call me Uzi.’

‘You’re embarrassed to use the name your mother gave you?’

‘Fuck you.’

‘We can’t play those games any more, I’m telling you. This is real life.’

There was a pause as they both, instinctively, scanned the room, with practised casualness.

‘You look well, Avner.’

‘I am well. Wish I could say the same about you.’

‘You could,’ said Uzi testily.

‘Your French is as good as ever.’

‘Yeah, thanks.’

‘I thought French would be nice for today. A creative language.’

Uzi shrugged and fingered his cigarette packet. Avner’s iPhone bleeped.

‘Why can’t you stop using these children’s toys?’ said Uzi. ‘With you it’s always Apple this, Apple that. Always the latest one.’

‘I’ve ordered you a double espresso,’ said Avner.

‘Do you have a light?’

‘This is England, remember?’

‘Shit.’

Uzi, riled and hot, put away his cigarettes. The waitress arrived with his coffee. She was surly, beautiful, with a pencil in her hair. Uzi imagined her in an army uniform; she glanced at him and looked away. He stirred a sugar cube in, drank it in a single draught. It burned his tongue and he liked that. Steadied, he turned back to his companion.

Avner Golan had the air and physique of a paratrooper. His prominent nose and teeth, coupled with his rather narrow face, gave him a deceptive air of friendliness. He and Uzi had joined the Office in the same cohort; fifteen people were recruited every three years, if enough good candidates could be found (for each of the fifteen, five thousand had been rejected). Seven of their contemporaries had failed the final tests for one reason or another; two had been assigned to the Shiklut department, as audio intel analysts; two, Uzi and Avner, had become Katsas, operational in the field; and rumour had it that Golding, the most religious of the group, had become a Kidon – an assassin.

‘We’re brothers, Adam,’ said Avner. ‘You should come and work with me. I’m running a business now.’

‘You’re no longer shovelling shit for London Station?’

‘Sure, I’m still doing that. But the money stinks, and I’ve got debts. So on the side I have a legitimate business.’

‘Legitimate,’ Uzi repeated sardonically. ‘Sure. You’ve been a bastard ever since I’ve known you.’

‘What about you? Are you still making money how I think you’re making money?’ asked Avner.

‘Very little changes,’ said Uzi, ‘even when everything’s different.’

‘You’re small fry, Adam. You’ve become small fry.’

‘That’s all I want right now. Small money. Nothing big.’

‘I’ll get some off you before you leave,’ said Avner.