The Rainy Day Man: Contemporary Romance (Suspense and Political Mystery Book 1) (27 page)

I quickly scribbled letters and numbers on the notepad he gave me.

"Good," he said, encouraged by what looked to him like cooperation.

I added another five letters to the formula.  He folded the notepad up and stuck it into his back trouser pocket. 

"Tomorrow morning you'll have the material," he said, getting into his little car.

As he drove off I suppressed a smile.  The formula in his trouser pocket contained an invention of my own: the five letters represented a special liquid which would slowly break down to give the Butyllithium solution a chemical stability which would continue to increase.  Whoever prepared the solution would have to ascertain how many hours were left until the planned explosion. From that moment, with the precision of a stopwatch, the color of the material would reveal how much time was left.   During the first twelve hours of its life it would be blue.  Between the thirteenth and fifteenth hours it would be emerald green.  Around the seventeenth hour it would start turning yellow, and from the twentieth hour a transparent eddy would spread through it, starting at the bottom, to where the dead molecules would flow constantly.  By approximately the twenty-fourth hour the matter in the container would lose its flammability, becoming merely a lazy, colorless solution.

The small control of time which I had managed gave me a sense of power and achievement.  In the evening I would have the suitcase.  But without additional proof it would become a two-edged sword: together with the bribe that Scheckler had taken it could be said that it was nothing more than war booty.

If I could only find one unequivocal scrap of evidence to indicate that Anton had been handed over to the detention camp.  Once more, I went through all the facts: the strange letter he had left, full of puzzling hints, the vague testimony of the soldiers who had taken him to the camp and who had long since been dispersed to other units, a crossed-out entry in the storeroom book; a reprimand in the file of an anonymous army doctor who had administered tests to a prisoner...

Almost like a vicious reminder of my powerlessness, the blind girl passed in the street, her hand tied by a rope to the arm of the old man leading her.  The man in civilian clothes honked his horn as his car overtook them.  He seemed to nod to the old man in greeting.  From the church tower came the priest's six dull, metallic clangs.  The blind girl and her guide stopped to listen.  Perhaps, with her sharpened sense, she could discern in the uncoordinated chimes the despair, pain and self-hatred of someone who had betrayed his neighbors, cheated his flock and collaborated for years with the people who had eventually taken his best friend away.

I remembered the first night of the curfew, his vehement denial, the disappearance of the transmitter from the boot of his car.  My mind wandered to the other figure, the one I had seen twice through the window.  For the first time it occurred to me that it might have been the man in civilian clothes.  I remembered the two-day-old newspaper that he had had with him the day before, when I had seen him for the first time.  Where had he hidden if not in that isolated house, the house of our local agent?  How had he known about the kitbag I had hidden in the rabbit warren if he had not watched me from there?  Who, if not he, knew about my discovery of the transmitter and made sure to remove it from the boot of the Morris?

I wondered what the priest had received for his services and whether now, in the shadow of events about to happen, there was still a chance that a desire to cleanse his conscience might fit in with my need to clear my name.  I turned to the command car, parked in the corner of the courtyard, under a plastic cover.  There was no longer anyone to forbid me using it.  I took one sheet off, then another.  The touch of the painted metal aroused memories of distant nights on the top of the mountain.  The keys were in the ignition.  I turned them, put the car into gear and rolled slowly across the courtyard.  The captain watched me in silence from the entrance to his tent.  The guard at the gate removed the chain as a matter of routine.  The people in the street had long since stopped staring.

In the priest's house there was the usual light as well as the bent figure at the table
who could be seen in the window.  I looked through the hedge until I had no doubt that this time it was the priest, wearing a woolen habit without a collar.

As before, I ran along the path and called him.  He did not answer.  Perhaps he hoped to escape through some secret door to perform his miracle of the emergence from the wood.  I stood on my tiptoes and tapped on the window, which opened gently inwards at my touch.

"I'm sorry to disturb you," I called out.  "I must talk to you."

He still did not answer.

"About Anton.  It's urgent..."

No reply.  By what crazy vow had he undertaken to remain silent in this fashion?  It would never absolve him.  I leaned on the stone windowsill and pulled myself up with an effort. 

"There's no time," I called to his back.  "This time you must speak to me."

The wind which came in from outside ruffled the pages of the book in front of him.  He did not set them straight.  I threw a leg over the windowsill and landed on the floor. 

"Excuse me," I touched his shoulder.

He collapsed.

It was more than a collapse.  It was a disintegration accompanied by an unusual and loud noise: the clatter of five or six wooden sticks which had been nailed together.  The habit lay on the floor like a deflated tent, and a squashed cushion, which had created the illusion of a head, rolled into a corner.  For a moment I experienced a sense of satisfaction.  In such circumstances I preferred tricks to mysteries.

I went out through the main door and ran across the wood.  Torn newspapers and the remains of army tins were lying around the courtyard behind the church.  The rear of the house of prayer was as closed and secretive as it had been that afternoon when I had followed the priest there.  I went up the stairs straight to the middle of the wall and felt the stones which closed up the entrance.  They were firm and solid and looked as if they had been set on top of one another for many years.  I returned to the courtyard.  Beneath the staircase was a low hollow which smelled of urine.  The remains of a concrete surface ended in a small wooden door.  I listened, peered back into the empty courtyard and stopped again to listen.  Then I tried the door.  It was not locked.

Inside was a tense silence.  I walked carefully along the strip of light that came from the open door, feeling my way past statues of saints, piles of broken furniture and crates of mildewed books.  When I had moved in about ten paces a shadow flitted from one of the corners and ran out.

He was naked and agile, carrying his clothes in a bundle close to his chest.  Even so I recognized him by his mane of black hair, his narrow shoulders and the chocolate color of his body against the open door.  I remembered him both from the café, where he had bought an enormous quantity of cigarettes, and from a day earlier, when he had vanished from my sight into the same courtyard from which he had now escaped.

I made my way back to the door, to close it.  Only then did I remember one who I had now trapped in the dark.  Was that what it was all about?  The unexplained afternoon disappearances, the dummy at the window, the stealing in and out of the house, the lying, the pretense, the constant need to be on guard?

The smell of urine from the outside made the situation even more pitiable.  It was pathetic to think about love in those conditions.  I wondered about the pressure exerted on him when we had recruited him, and how it was that lust was one of the cardinal sins while treachery was not.

I went back to the middle of the room, bumping into all the objects and ritual junk I had taken care to circumvent before.  The air was full of short breaths, tiny movements of air, the careful, sensitive shuffle of soles on the floor. 

"Let's make it short," I said into the darkness.  "I've got a few things to ask, then I'll go away and forget everything that doesn't interest me."

The noise stopped.  Had he found a comfortable position or been stricken with fear upon realizing that I knew that he was there?  I crouched down and listened.  What was he doing?  Shrinking in fear, writhing in shame, sitting still in the hope that I would go, wondering how I had found him out, praying for the miracles he had always wanted to believe in, planning something?

The idea of his planning something aroused me, and also dispelled a great deal of my compassion.  He needed time so that I would get tired of waiting or draw the conclusion that I had been wrong and there was no one else in the cellar. 

"I know you're here," I called, to dispel any such notion he might have.  "I've been to your house."

He did not respond.  Something of my confidence began to crumble. "Your dummy disintegrated," I added, sounding like a death announcement.  In a certain sense it was.  Some things in his life would not be as they had been in the past.

I took another step or two forward into the silence, then jumped back.  Something had touched my forehead, light and fluttering like the movement of an insect.  It was a very thin nylon cord which I pulled with a lack of caution which was most inappropriate for an explosives expert.  Yellow light poured from a bulb hanging in the middle of the room.

This was a real advantage, which brought us back to the old game: one position against another, one gain against another.  He did not reveal himself, but I could sense his restlessness.  I left the lamp and crouched on the floor, in the center of the circle of light.

My lack of caution was nourished by the assumption that if he was armed he would have tried to reach me before, when I had been standing against the background of the open door.  Still, I was worried to some extent.

"I think we're in a similar situation," I began to establish my demand for cooperation.  "We are both burdened by the same subject."

Nothing.

"There are developments in connection with Anton."

No response to that either.

"Hell," I said, partly out of calculated logic, partly out of exasperation, "you're entrenching yourself in your little affair, when the real problem is what you did all the years to your trusting flock, to your neighbors who lived with you, to your best friend..."

One of the walls responded with a slight rustle, something between a chance scratching and a movement indicating discomfort.  I waited, attentive, in the middle of the circle of light.  The rustle grew stronger, gathering direction and strength and becoming the familiar shuffling of sandals on the floor. 

"I've already told you," a hoarse voice said, "I am not your agent."

"I didn't believe you then and I don't believe you now..."

He was very near.  I thought I saw the edge of his habit appearing and disappearing in the flickering circle of light. 

"There are too many signs," I called out to him, turning my head parallel to what I surmised to be his movements around me.  "The transmitter, Anton's arrest..."

Now I did see his feet, naked in the leather sandals, pressing painfully against the straps. 

"I may be guilty of his arrest," the echoing space turned his voice into a dull roar, "but I was never your agent."

"Let's not waste time," I said, tired.  "Everything points to it..."

He remained silent for a moment.  Then said, "For years now I've known that there was an Israeli spy in Dura.  I sometimes picked up Morse transmissions on my radio or saw signals by flashlight at night.  Once a low-flying plane dropped something in the fields..."  His voice wandered around me in circles as he stepped towards the line of light.  "When the war broke out I began to worry.  More and more planes appeared.  I knew that he was signaling to them and I was afraid that one day he would direct them straight to us.  I told Anton everything.  Michel heard too and began spending nights outside, lying in wait.  One evening, a few weeks ago, the boy came to me and told me about a fresh path he had found on the mountain, not far from the summit.  We drove to the clinic in the Morris.  Anton was not there.  The woman said that he had gone to visit a patient.  Michel and I climbed the path.  At the top stood a man in a heavy raincoat dealing with something that looked like a box.  Michel had a knife.  He shouted:  'Stop.'  The man bent down and Michel threw the knife and hit him in the shoulder.  The man disappeared into the bushes.  We were sure he was dead, but when we got to the place all we found was a transmitter and the bloodstained knife."

Now he was behind me, not far from my back.  I turned round slowly.  "What happened after that?"

"We went back to the clinic.  An hour later Anton arrived and suggested that we wait and see if anyone came to receive treatment for a knife wound.  But by midnight no one had come, so I went home.  Two days later you arrived, Anton was arrested and the man from the mountain never appeared..."

"Don't you have any idea, even a guess, who it was?"

"The coat covered everything.  I do not understand why he was wearing it in the middle of the summer."

I did.  It was the transmitter aerial, sewn as metal mesh into the lining.

One other thing still had to be clarified.  "You said that you were guilty..."

He hesitated.  "If I had been cleverer, we could have vanished down the path to the center of the village into the market alleys.  Presumably this man was watching us from the undergrowth.  He could not have mistaken Michel, and he thought that I was Anton..."  There was sadness in his voice.  Sorrow had displaced his arrogance, not fear or any pressure I had tried to exert on him.  "Anton realized it that night," he added.  "He was worried.    Only after he had been arrested did I realize that Anton had known that the spy would not rest until he'd gotten him out of here."  He breathed deeply.  "As usual, he did not try to save himself - he did not want to harm Michel or me..."