The Rainy Day Man: Contemporary Romance (Suspense and Political Mystery Book 1) (15 page)

             
"Your legs..." I guessed gingerly.

             
"Only one, the left one."

             
"Was it a fracture...?"

             
"Shrapnel."  She went out into the darkness to look for the basket.  Now her limp was pronounced.  She was unable to hide it, or perhaps there was no longer any point.

             
"How?  When?" I asked toward the direction in which she had disappeared.

             
"In the summer, ten years ago, in Beirut."  She picked up the basket.  "Palestinians, maybe terrorists, lived in the next building.  Your planes attacked it," she replaced the remaining cake in the basket.  "There is no one to blame.  That's war.  Two days before they had placed a bomb in a Jerusalem cinema.  A week later they attacked a bus in Tel Aviv..."

             
In the torchlight, her wounded leg in its white plastic sandal, looked ridiculous, sunk as it was crookedly into the carpet of dried grass.  I felt suddenly grateful that she hadn't been hurt by one of my devices.  A sour wave welled up and stuck in my throat, which was still dry from the cake.  I coughed and choked, investing all my energies in overcoming my desire to get away from there, to disappear before I was sick.

             
"There's water here."  She began walking with her customary controlled, hopping step, dragging the basket with her.  The torch lit the way in the thick foliage beyond the structure, higher and higher.  I noticed the rushing of a stream only after we were already standing in its waters.  Yvonne took off her sandals and held them in her free hand.  How could I rid myself of the socks and shoes on my feet?  Her legs in the stream were suddenly illuminated: long toes, slender ankles, brown knees.  On one ankle was a gold chain, delicate as a thread of silk.  The irritation in my throat was replaced by a hardening at my groin.

             
Water was flowing from a small hollow in the rock - the gentle mother of the stream, of the irrigation canal in the vegetable garden, of the ribbon of the river in the wadi.  With that wave-like arching of her body, she moved aside.  I gestured to her that she should drink first.  She shook her head.

             
Still choking, I lurched forward into the screen of water.  The cold beat at my head, inside my mouth, my body, my heart.  I was on the verge of tears.  Her laughter, completely unexpected, astonishing, rang in my ears together with the sound of the stream on my head.

             
I did not have anything with which to wipe my mouth.  There was only the napkin in the basket, but she did not offer it and merely laughed again.  This time I felt that her laugh was sympathetic.  A little happiness and maybe just animal gratitude enveloped me. 

             
We went back through the stream the same way we had climbed up.  On our left the structure reared up, as bulky as a mountain monster.  The tree which grew through the roof scraped the sky. She stopped and bent to do up her sandals.  By the light of the rising moon I saw her vertebrae again as they protruded through the material of her blouse.  I held out a hand which was too short and heavy, and touched her.

             
She straightened up.  There was no mistaking the tone of her voice, unsteady, anxious.

             
"Do you know how to get back from here?"  She moved the basket to the bank of the stream, placing it carefully, seriously, like a promissory note which had to be honored.  She drew a round box from inside it. 

             
"This shouldn't get mixed up with the food."  I peered at it through water dripping from my hair, and she added hesitantly.  "I found it next to his bed.  He used it in the last few days.  Maybe he needs it..."

    
              Before I could think of what to say to summon up the magic once again, she disappeared.  The stream became a muddy ditch again, the foliage alongside it thorns.  The basket rested among them, supremely superfluous.  Slowly, treading heavily, I emerged from the water carrying the basket.  The twigs creaked briefly, like the snap of handcuffs.  With relief I made out the outline of the command car, waiting faithfully beneath a tree.  I climbed into the driver's seat, turned the ignition and switched on the lights.  There was no need to get out and check:  both had been smashed.

             
Angrily, I raced down the mountain, driving blindly alongside the refugee camp.  I crossed the church square and rolled down the winding road to the Athenaeum.  The guard at the gate looked at the smashed head lights with interest.  From inside the building I could hear the sound of men's chanting. "Lord of the universe, who ruled..."  The Sabbath service.  The voice of the garage supervisor, cracked and breathless, spoiled the unity of the choir.  How could I go in there, dripping wet, carrying a picnic basket?

             
I turned the command car around in the courtyard.  A little bit forward, then backward.  I honked at the guard, drove back through the gate and turned left onto the road down to the valley.  After a mile or two I pulled over at the edge of the abyss.

The basket, on the seat beside me, was still covered with the silly napkin.  The detention camp was in front of me, one of the clusters of lights in the valley.  In another few days, a week, two weeks at the most, Anton
Khamis would return home, angry and humiliated.  The woman whose husband he was not would limp toward him on her long feet, shake her hair and talk to him in her soft, lilting voice.  Maybe she would let him caress her face.  Why should he have the basket?  Which of them would remember the basket and the journey it had made to the detention camp in the hands of someone called Danny Simon?

             
I hate useless investments.

             
I pulled it onto my wet knees.  Beneath the box was the serviette which covered the rest of my cake and half a dozen plastic containers filled with various kinds of food.  I opened one of them.  The prison warders did this too.  Rice - the warmth of foreign houses and the pungent smell of a spice.  I tasted a bit, then some more.  In a frenzy of sudden hunger I opened the other containers.  I dipped my finger in sauce, slurped some sour milk, tore strips off a piece of roast mutton with my teeth.  I did not taste the food, I felt only its weight and volume in the space it filled in my body.

             
I could scarcely stand.  My stomach was distended, my muscles as taut as the clothes which had dried on my body.  I threw the basket with its contents into the chasm.  After that I turned to the box.  The lid burst and a trickle of something viscous and scented oozed slowly down my arm.  The letters on the label shimmered in the light from the dashboard:  "OINTMENT FOR DISINFECTION AND WOUND HEALING, MANUFACTURED BY CIGMA FRANCE.  INGREDIENTS: NEOMYCIN CREAM 0.5%, BUTYL PARABEN 0.3%, ODOUR AND COLOUR ADDITIVES."

             
The food rose in my gullet with a terrible burning, together with an alien, annoying presence.  Vincent had awoken to acknowledge the contents of the box.  I was not pleased to see him.  He echoed within me, hollow, slick and unnatural, like a child interrupting the conversation of adults.  Nothing but insipidness was left of the longing I had had for him in the morning.

CHAPTER SIX

It was the same night, silent and getting cooler.  For two hours, maybe longer, I slept curled up on the damp seat.  I woke up and vomited over the side, finding no relief.  Dew moistened my clothes.  The command car was sweating as well.  Somewhere a cock crowed.  A donkey rebuked it with a weary bray.  I peered behind me at the mountain-top, looking for the gentle glow of the dawn. I could not see the summit of the sycamore.  Had it wandered into Anton Khamis' dream that night?

             
I was restless, anticipating the morning, while at the same time fearing the heat and the light it would bring.  I turned the key.  A rattle rent the night.  The clutch slipped and the engine died.  I made another attempt; this time it was successful.

             
There was no light in any house.  No door was open.  The smashed headlights could not brighten the pale glow of the stone thresholds or the bunches of garlic drying on balconies.  I turned towards the Athenaeum; by the light of the lamp in the guard hut, I could see drops of ointment on the floor of the car.  I honked for the guard as I wiped away the drops with my finger and transferred them carefully to the box.

             
Another wave of pressure passed through my stomach.  Unthinkingly I gave a long, plaintive fart, and felt ashamed.  I hit the horn again, for no reason, to shatter the dreadful silence.  This time the noise was hoarse and fragmented, horrifying me too.  I was like a wandering ghost seeing itself in the mirror, aware of a painful shattering within me while helpless to stop it.  The guard was taking forever.  The world grew fuzzy.  Maybe, at last, the night had vanquished the wind:  the Corinthian edge of the Athenaeum roof drifted in and out of my vision in soft waves.  In the sharp glare of the courtyard spotlights the trees wandered from one spot to another.  The phone line from the guard hut seemed cut in the two.  Fibers hung like the nerves of an amputated arm.  I laid my head on the steering wheel, then awoke with a start immediately.

             
The phone line really was cut.

             
Slowly, so as not to aggravate the pain spreading through my head, I went down the iron steps, stepped over the chain and walked into the middle of the courtyard.  I stopped next to the place where the line had been cut, wondering where to begin looking for the evil, whatever it might be.  The Athenaeum, with its dark windows and the stump of the cable between it and the hut, was wrapped in the sadness of one who has let a drowning man slip out of his grasp. 

             
The hut.  How could I have missed it?  The radio which was not playing the usual night music, the soldier on duty who had not appeared.  I ran there.  The door was closed, the shutter down.  I tried the handle.  Locked.  Someone had bent the mechanism by force.  A light dusting of chalk remained at the spot where a stone had been banged against the metal.  I heaved with my shoulder, kicked, rattled the handle again, to no avail.  I raced to the command car and jerked the arm off the jack.  I pushed it into the crack between the handle and the door frame and pulled with all my might.  The door responded with a creak of its hinges.  Another pull.  The sound of splintering wood.  It was open.  Inside the hut thick darkness covered something unknown, hard.  Again I hurried to the command car, to bring a torch.

First I saw the face, dark, blank, covered with a liquid sheen, like an internal organ protruding from a body.  After that the blood, not a lot but in the right places: the nostrils, the corner of the mouth, the scalp.  Finally the fear: concentrated in the body, in the way it was huddled at the end of the camp-bed, pressed into a corner of the room, enclosed within
itself with folded limbs.

             
Terror also had a name, written on the wall haltingly, in crooked letters, by an unpracticed hand:

GIVE BACK ANTON KHAMIS

              There was no time to think about the message.  My thoughts wandered from the soldier to the open door, from the oppressiveness of the tiny room to the help I could ask of the people sleeping in the big building.  At the same time I felt the first, tentative touch of guilt.

             
With my hands behind my back, I bent over the victim.  Something, the flutter of an eyelid, the almost imperceptible movement of a line in his face, indicated life.  I forced his jaw open.  Two teeth lay on his tongue in a mixture of saliva and blood.  I raked them out with my fingers, pulled his legs until his entire body was stretched out on the bed.  I pressed his chest twice, to make breathing easier, and moved his arms up and down.

             
The soldier began to breathe heavily, staring into my face with swollen eyelids.  His arm came up in a defensive motion.  I pushed it away with a firm hand, almost offended. 

             
"Don't be afraid."

             
I still had to call the others.  In my mind's eye I could see the looks they would give, hear the things that would be said afterwards, in their dormitories and in the garage.

             
With weary steps I walked back to the command car, reached my hand out to the wheel and leaned on the horn.  The noise adapted itself to the circumstances; in it was a heartrending, imploring sound.  One by one, the windows of the Athenaeum opened.  Somebody looked out from the door.  A bell rang.  With a sense of relief I crouched down on the steps of the car and closed my eyes, to rest.

             
The garage supervisor was the first to arrive.  His gray hair was transparent in the light of the spotlight, revealing the virginal skin of his scalp.  He could only murmur:  "I knew it, I knew it."  He glanced painfully at the blind front of the command car, then into the trunk, where the tools lay in a jumble.  His mechanic's soul brought an expression of shock to his face.  Weakly, I gestured behind my shoulder, where the door was swinging on its hinges in the night wind.  At the same time, there was a rush of activity, shouts flew in the air.  Everyone from the Athenaeum pressed passed me, nearly touching my head, which was bent forward.

             
Two soldiers brought the wounded man out on a stretcher.  One of his arms trailed at the side.  His shoes had been removed and placed between his legs.  The smell of medication and sedatives wafted towards me.  The medic warned the men to be careful, but there was no need.  Those thick, hairy arms wielded the wooden frame with immense love, with the tenderness of comrades-in-arms.  I felt a certain resentment, the grudge of someone used to falling alone.

             
Gloomily, I noticed the beginning of daybreak.  The lines of the mountain became clearer above us.  On the stairs, as I went to my room, I unbuttoned my shirt.  In the doorway I took it off and sank onto the bed in my trousers, dirty and exhausted.  For two hours I struggled with the fragments of a thought which disturbed my sleep.  Eventually, painfully tense, I awoke.

I had something urgent to do.

              The duty officer in the communications room agreed to cooperate.  Something in my crumpled, harassed appearance must have indicated urgency.  He dialed an exchange, and we waited.  The duty officer doodled numbers in the margin of the newspaper spread in front of him, as he held the earphone.  The headline read: 'P.M. in Knesset: Tourism and Trade Accords with Lebanon Soon.' It seemed our days in the Athenaeum were numbered.  Now, at the other end of the line they were asking questions. 

             
"Try to find him," the duty officer insisted.  "It's urgent."  I thanked him with a movement of my head.  He listened for another moment, then held the receiver out to me.

             
"Who's speaking?" I asked suspiciously.

             
"Me, Scheckler..."

             
"Your voice sounds different..."             

             
"Yours sounds the same..."  Now I could hear the familiar nasal tone.  "They've already told me everything..."

             
"We've got to find him.  It's all becoming serious...  It would be a pity if there was a tremendous stink here because of a mistake in registration..."

             
"Don't worry..."  The rest of the sentence was lost in a series of noises.

             
"What?"

             
"I said, don't worry.  Tomorrow everything will be okay.  I can't discuss it on the phone, but the matter is being dealt with..."  More noises.  "There won't be any more problems..."

             
The promise sounded too heavy. 

             
"When are you coming?" I asked.

             
He was impatient.  "I told you, tomorrow, and everything will be all right..."

             
A long static was followed by silence. 

             
"We've been cut off."  I presented the receiver to the duty officer.  He flicked a switch and listened in his headphones.

             
"Shall I try again?"  he asked.  I hesitated for a moment, then shook my head and went out.  Again I wondered whether I should contact Tel Aviv and report that the place was getting too stormy for what had been planned.

             
But I suddenly realized that something else was really bothering me.  Something closer, within my grasp, a perfectly simple truth which had come to me in my sleep and then slipped away.  I stood in the direct sunlight for another moment, narrowing my eyes, and then, led by the memory of the dream, turned towards the guard hut.

             
There were two soldiers there, scrubbing and painting.  In the daylight the scene was less ghastly.  The bloodstained bed had been removed, the phone line repaired.  Only a few letters of the message on the wall still showed through the layers of damp whitewash.  The rest lay in flakes on the floor.  I picked up a few flakes and felt them.  Then I scraped some whitewash off the wall with my fingernail.  Not a lot, but enough to know where I had seen that weak green paint before.

             
And in a sudden recollection of dusk in the pine wood with the smell of sour apples, I realized that what the priest had been holding yesterday, the two copper containers linked by a tube, a piston and a valve, had been neither a vacuum cleaner nor a spray pump, but a homemade, rural version of a paint spray gun.

***

              Only in the shower did I relax.  What remained was the unease of uncertainty. I washed my clothes and hung them in the courtyard to dry.  The soldiers watched me from the windows.  From the other side of the fence, from the growing refugee camp, they watched too.  For a moment I constituted a link, a transmission station of stares, in which the two forces - the one which did not fear to wear a uniform and the one which concealed the uniform beneath an innocent, civilian exterior - crossed.  Was the priest also a link?  One hand extended to Tel Aviv, blowing the horn with the hunters, and the other toward the fox, striking and running and striking again?

             
It was important for me to know it all, in full and without delay.

             
The command car was parked in the entrance courtyard.  The garage supervisor was fixing it himself.  Two new lights were already installed.  Other scars had been removed with a dash of paint.  I did not dare ask for it again.  I walked slowly past, hoping that maybe he would offer it to me.  He glanced at me then immediately turned to pick up the hood.  A few more steps and I was outside.

             
Nobody outside paid any attention to me either.  Not openly, at any rate.  At the top of the road I discovered a short cut, a path that went through the rocky courtyards of the houses and connected the two arms of the arc made by the main road.  Already in the distance it was possible to see the closed shutters of the priest's house.  As I came near, I saw that the gate was wide open, the courtyard deserted.  Between the legs of a rickety table a net was stretched, and three rabbits cowered among some cabbage leaves.  Where could I begin?  The green Morris was parked beneath the fir tree, as it had been yesterday and on that unexpected afternoon.  I opened the trunk; inside lay engine parts mixed with oiled tools.  I moved them aside.  Underneath was a piece of gray tarpaulin wrapped around something solid and tied with a rope.  When I felt between its folds I could sense the coolness of metal and a set of buttons.  I memorized the way the rope was tied, then untied the knots and found a transmitter.

             
It was a simple transistor radio which had also been adapted to transmit, and operated on five penlight batteries.  The frequency selector had been fixed to the middle of the scale with a screw, to save transmission time.  I memorized the frequency, 165, and packed it away again the way it had been.  After that I sat down at the edge of a trough that overflowed with scrap-iron.

             
Half of my hypothesis had been verified.  The priest was indeed reporting to someone.  Perhaps on the basis of the frequency, I could discover to whom.  I wondered what I should hope for.  His affiliation with a hostile side would require investigations.  The information he had transmitted would be examined.  In any event the operation would be postponed, perhaps cancelled.  An affiliation with us, on the other hand, would raise questions about his involvement in the recent attack.  Whatever happened, the debilitating, humiliating waiting would continue, until he was kind enough to reveal himself.