The Rainy Day Man: Contemporary Romance (Suspense and Political Mystery Book 1) (30 page)

I took the book from underneath the towel.  In addition to the desire to read, to delve into it, which a dim memory of the story aroused in me, there was something stirring in the thought that this was the reading matter the doctor had chosen to take with him on a journey from which he was not sure if and when he would return.  The old, tattered binding promised consolation in any situation which might develop.  I could envisage myself reading it happily at a dusty desk in my next enforced job or while waiting outside a disciplinary court, and even placing it on the shelf at home, beside the leather binding of the Plutarch I had received in Paris.  The basis of an old man's library.

"Now comes your part," Michel said.

I looked at him in embarrassment.  "I have nothing to say."

He watched me as I dug into my pocket and took out the copy of the letter, which was torn and damp with sweat. 

"Now it's yours," I lay the folded piece of paper on the suitcase.  Without looking at him, I went out and walked through the deep sand.  Yvonne, in the doorway of the house, did not move.  I put out the hand holding the book. 

"You agree to give it to me, don't you?"

She did not say anything.  Michel, behind me, remained silent as well.  After all, what was left to say or do?  Behind the house the soldiers lay in the trench, and each of us had something to hide.  Maybe that was the eternal formula for survival in Dura: every reality there had a counterpart, a more difficult, hidden reality.  Each secret paled beside the next, graver one.  Each of us - myself, the priest, Yvonne, Scheckler, the man in civilian clothes and even Michel - rested on our offenses, invisible stains which the war had revealed with the unerringness of an ultraviolet ray.

Only Anton was clean.

***

When I reached the road I lit a cigarette.  The ruin, at the top of the mountain, emitted the smell of cool ashes.  An engineering unit was clearing away obstacles at the entrance to no man's land.  On the outskirts of the new Friendship Square soldiers were guarding a barrier.  "Erja," they called to me from afar.  Had that word been included in the operational command issued that morning?

"It's okay," I replied and put one foot over the barbed-wire.

"No one's to go through, even if you're one of ours."

"Why?"

They answered with a shrug of their shoulders.  "That's the order."

My watch showed twelve minutes to two.  On the other side of the slowly emptying square stood the houses, as decorated and useless as empty gift boxes.  The man in civilian clothes was wandering around in front of them together with the family which had starred in the ceremony, only one out of the three hundred and fifty he had promised in the captain's office.  They seemed to be waiting for something. 

"What book is that?" one of the soldiers asked suddenly.

"Just a book."

"Can I see it?"

I handed it to him without taking my eyes away from the scene below.  The little girl rocked a doll in her arms.  The two boys threw a red ball to one another in a manner too strange, too precise.  An army bus groaned up Peace Boulevard.  The man in civilian clothes looked at his watch.  The family stood behind him as if on parade.  He walked forward, into the middle of the square, gesturing to them with his hand.  They moved away from the houses and smiled in the prearranged fashion. 

The soldier beside me turned the yellow pages of the book.  "It looks old."

The man in civilian clothes looked around the square.  His glance, dark and impenetrable, fell on me, then moved off to the bus, where a new group of photographers and journalists alighted.  Anyone who had missed the ceremony would be rewarded with pictures of the happy family at the entrance to its house, maybe even with the first account of the explosion. 

The soldier beside me grew bored.  "What's the book about?"

"A priest," I explained reluctantly, "who adopts a girl..."

"What's special about that?"

"She was blind and one day she opened her eyes and discovered that he..."  A long shiver went through me, followed by a weakness that almost sent me to my knees.  Like a shout decoded from a distance, the details, down to the very last one, formed a single solid picture.  It was all there, in the book.  How is it that the things which are closest to us are the least readily comprehensible?

The man in civilian clothes put out his hand to stroke the little girl's head.  His left hand!  I had no doubt that his heels were run down as well.  It suddenly occurred to me that the victory was mine, but I did not yet know what to do. 

I started calling to him.  "Listen! - Hey! - Wait!"  What was his name, actually?  And what was the priest's name, didn't it appear in the letter?  The captain's name?  Scheckler's first name?  How could I have lived my life to this moment without knowing anyone's name?  I cupped both my hands round my mouth.  "Ho!" I shouted.  He turned round and walked towards me.

"What are you doing?" he asked sharply, gesturing towards the journalists.

"Get me out of here."

He nodded at the soldiers as I jumped over the barbed-wire barrier. 

"Seven minutes to two," I said.

"Yes," he answered in a concerned tone, glancing towards the reporters in the square behind him.

"You did a marvelous job."

He permitted himself a small, happy smile.  "You were okay too, in the end..."

"No, no," I rejected the compliment.  "Your work is much more difficult, preparing, supervising and even managing to jump over there," I nodded towards the mountain, "and conduct a little search..."

The brightness went out of his eyes.

"The thing you were looking for," I took the book out of the soldier's hand, "is here, in my hand."

He pursed his mouth tensely.

"He destroyed the letters, it seems, but the real thing is in the books, and they are there, shelves of them."

He swallowed and looked at the soldiers.

"Are you looking for someone?" I went closer to him. "Someone to send quickly with orders to burn the entire library?  Arrest the woman too?  Maybe me?" 

On a parallel track in my mind all the events of the last few weeks were falling into place.

"It won't help.  In another few minutes this village will never again be anonymous.  More important, it’s filled with people, each of whom understands a part of the picture, components of a dormant bomb just waiting for a tiny spark, a nosy reporter, or maybe a commission of inquiry..." 

His face took on a violent expression and I added, "I know what you're thinking now: 'The priest can be spirited away - we'll frighten the woman - the boy will go away sooner or later and the blind girl was only a diversion'...but, " I put my hand on his arm, "you've forgotten me.  I won't keep quiet."

He shook my hand away.  "Why?"

"Because I'm sick of living in a bubble of bad weather and supplying destruction and misery to order.  I don't want to belong to what's about to happen."  I glanced at my watch.  Two minutes to go.  The journalists lined up at the door of the bus.  I started walking towards them.

"And what will happen then?" he said behind my back in a surprisingly soft voice. "After you've revealed everything you know?  You'll be a hero for a few days, maybe you'll go down in history...  What will you do when it's all over and no one is interested in you anymore? To what will you get up each morning?" 

He waved his short arm at the lowering sky.  "You can't escape from that weather, Simon.  You've become accustomed to living there.  Even if you sometimes have a little dream about sunny days, you really know that you don't have a chance of surviving them.  They'll erode you till you die of a surfeit of satisfaction..." 

With a few small steps he crossed the distance I had managed to put between us.  "I know what's happened to you here during the last few weeks.  Everyone has periods like that, and in the end everyone comes home.  After so many years you can't expect any major changes..."

"Nonsense.  Anything can change..."

"No, not everything.  Look at the people around you, soldiers, public figures, journalists, politicians, even some of the locals.  In another minute they'll see history being made.  Suppose one of them could change something now, at this very minute, by pressing a button, do you think he'd do it?"  He shook his head vigorously.  "No.  The chances are that he'd be scared, sweat and miss the moment.  People learn to trust the tracks they're on, even if they are random, and full of mistakes, even when the mistakes are given all kinds of grand names and one has to fight a war to defend them..."

I looked at him in surprise.  This was not the sort of thing I had expected to hear from a small, rotund and obedient man.  He smiled shyly, almost apologetically, just as a rapid rush of air came from the front row of houses.  A very economical, precise flame emerged from the roof, twisting regularly.  The happy family, photographers who had not yet reached the bus and soldiers in the area retreated to the edge of Friendship Square.  Leaflets fluttered on the waves of hot air and landed at their feet.

"Anton Khamis?" a journalist asked in surprise, writing the name in his notebook.  The fire caught the adjacent buildings.  Tremendous heat rose up and hung in the air, mixed with the smell of burning wood.  A convoy of military vehicles raced up from the center of the village.  A helicopter emerged from behind the mountain.  This time only the Chief of Staff was in it.

  The journalists photographed him as he examined the collapsing ceilings with a grave expression.  From a transmitter affixed to the back of a jeep an initial report was conveyed to the Prime Minister, who was already on his way to Jerusalem.  The soldiers began rounding up the local inhabitants in an improvised pen at the edge of the square.  The Chief of Staff, against the background of the bus, gave a first television interview. 

"We are preparing to respond, even if we have to advance our forces beyond no man's land..."  Huge trucks appeared once more on the road winding up from the valley.  This time they were laden with tanks.

"We've done our bit," the man in civilian clothes said.  He was looking at me with a worried expression.

"Yes," I said wearily and walked back to lean against the side of his car.

Now there was relief on his face.  "We'll see what we can do to help you..."

It was a moment of reward that was devoid of joy or elation.  I looked across the barbed-wire fence, where a few dozen villagers were sitting in rows, legs folded beneath them.  Only the priest was standing, leaning on the branch of a tree, his face displaying severity and calmness, as the doctor's letter had instructed him.  I saw myself as he saw me: a wicked weather forecaster escaping in a small car from the storm he had anticipated.  To escape to where?  To what? 

"Maybe Paris..." I said aloud hesitantly, "my former job..."

The man in civilian clothes answered immediately, as if he had been expecting me to say just that:  "It will be hard for you. After all, you’ve changed."

"It will be more difficult anywhere else."

Silently he opened the car door.  In front of us, in a row, shuffled a soldier leading the old man, who was leading the blind girl into the pen.

"What can you see, Father?" the girl asked in her musical voice.

"Winter," the old man said.  "Here it comes."

As if to endorse his statement, the wind now turned into a storm that plunged into the village with the speed of a wounded bull.  With it came the large, heavy drops of the first rains, falling like the vanguard of something worse to come.

PART THREE: THE HAPPINESS OF OTHERS

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

By spring it all seemed to have settled.  From the heights of the little flat I had rented near the Place d'Italie all the roads that stretched away from Paris looked long and promising.  Once a fortnight Jonathan wrote a brief but not hopeless letter, my replacement from the previous spring had been sent elsewhere and Hannah's lawyer was polite whenever he phoned to make the final arrangements.

Only the nights were not yet under control.  My sleep was disturbed by nervous waking; memories, and wild thoughts dominated the hours until dawn.  Nonetheless, I allowed three weeks to pass before I went near the two-story building at Number One the Alley of the Iron Chick and, from the dimness of a café opposite, on the other side of Boulevard Menilmontane, watched what was going on.

It was as the concierge had described it: a side entrance with a yellowish staircase and a well-locked door, outside which a pile of letters had accumulated, and a bookshop occupying the entire first floor.  In the shop window was a notice which read: "Bibliophil S.A. - Main Warehouse," and inside, the two people she had mentioned were working: one plump, short and dark, the other tall, thin and with a rust-colored walrus mustache.

The plump one spent his time by the door behind what looked from the outside like an old cash register.  His colleague ran around a maze of shelves hidden behind plywood screens, emerging from time to time in the front part of the shop to place small, well-packed parcels on the counter beside the cash register.  From time to time messengers appeared and took the parcels to cars waiting with engines running.  I kept a precise record on the serviette.  Everyone who entered left.  The two employees, who arrived at nine in the morning, left exactly at four in the afternoon.

The fourth day of my vigil was a Saturday.  The shop closed at noon.  As I was about to pay the waiter a taxi stopped in front of the closed shutter.  Whoever had arrived in it did not stop to pay, but got out and stood sorting through a bunch of keys.  A raincoat made it difficult to discern whether it was a man, a woman or a boy.  In the other hand was a small leather bag and a basket of groceries.  The taxi disappeared and the person bent over the lock, then raised the shutter deftly and disappeared behind it.

I ordered another coffee and waited.  The street filled with the usual Saturday afternoon strollers of a working-class neighborhood, workers on their day off, boys on bicycles, women with strollers.  The café grew too crowded.  I left, crossed the road and strolled slowly past the shutter.  It was fully closed and locked from the inside.  I turned into the courtyard and walked silently up the stairs.  The pile of letters at the foot of the door did not seem to be there by chance.  As I picked a few of them up I thought I saw a thin strip of light under the door.

I went back to the courtyard.  Behind the house was the electricity box.  I opened it.  The lens in the control hatch had been covered with black paint.  I looked up:  the washing lines were empty, the chimney smokeless and the shutters closed, as I expected.

But when I turned to go the wall came to life.  I pressed my ear to the plaster.  A gentle flowing sound came from the pipes.  I hurried to the road and bent down by the manhole outside the shop door.  Beneath the metal cover came the sound of flowing water.

              On Monday morning I was at the café at eight-thirty.  At five to nine the two assistants climbed up the steps from the Metro station.  The plump one held the two briefcases while his colleague struggled with the lock.  The letters forming the sign "Bibliophil S.A." shook as the shutter rose and hit the doorframe.  A moment later the light went on over the cash register indicating that the shop was open for business.

I crossed the road and went in.  The air inside did not have that fragrance of ink, paper and glue which characterizes places housing a great many books.  At the ends of several shelves which protruded from the plywood screen were piled a dozen or so well-wrapped parcels.  The plump man was munching a sandwich.  The tall one was reading a paper.  They both looked at me.  Neither of them asked me what I wanted.

"I'm looking for a book..."

"We sell only wholesale and by order," the tall one explained.

"Two thousand copies," I responded to the challenge.  "For a readers' club..."

The plump man inspected me with a lazy, almost sleepy, look.  The tall one ran along the counter. 

"By all means," he took a small pamphlet out of a drawer.  "This is our list. And these are the instructions..."

             
The list ran to about forty pages, filled with names of books presumably never written and writers apparently never born. 

             
"What about this one?"   I pointed at random to, "Ancient Weapons in the Modern World," by A. Mulinovsky.

The plump man jabbed his finger at the page of instructions.  "The books will be supplied," the first one went on, "in the quantities and on the dates to be determined by the supplier."

In other words, never.  Suddenly the resistance my presence aroused was so clear and palpable that the tall man turned to lift the end of the counter and see me to the door.  I took Gide's book out of my coat pocket and put it down in front of him.

They exchanged glances.

I pointed to the ceiling.  "I want to talk to the person who lives upstairs..."

The tall man bent over to look at the binding, careful not to touch it.

"I have regard for him."

He opened his mouth to say something, but someone on the other side of the wall forestalled him. 

"Let him come up," said a voice which was thickened and distorted by the plywood screen.

The tall man gestured unwillingly toward the rear.  The dust swirling around the empty shelves and the echo of my footsteps on the stone floor reminded me of a church in a remote village somewhere in the east, which was very close at that moment, so close that the figure standing in the darkness at the top of the stairs seemed to have always been waiting for me.

I raised my head to him.  "Up or down?"

He did not reply, simply turned to descend carefully, one step at a time.  When he was half way down I could see that his cheeks had become sunken and his flesh dry.  A slight swelling of his youthful lips and something light and clear in his eyes were all that remained of the tranquil, well-fed expression of Anton
Khamis.

***

This time it was he who gestured towards the outside.  Before he went out he lingered by the door and peered into the street.  Then he began to walk along Boulevard Menilmontane.  I accompanied him from behind, staying about ten paces back.  The Napoleonic gate of the
Pѐ
re Lachaise cemetery was closed with its magnificent lattice gate.  He went in through the pedestrian gate.  The gatekeeper approached with a map.  He rejected it with a wave of his hand.  I hurried after the retreating doctor along the main avenue.  The gatekeeper growled something and shrugged his shoulders.

He went up the steps leading to the musicians' plot and I lost him in the complex of ancient graves and enormous trees.  I stopped at a fork from which several shady lanes led.  Along one of them I could see footprints on the layer of moisture.  I went that way.  After walking a while I found him sitting with hunched shoulders on the stone edge of a tombstone.  Behind him two stone cherubs looked as though they were about to take flight.      

"It's quiet here," he said.

I went closer, wondering if he was referring to the spot where we were, the neighborhood he had chosen to live in, or Paris in general.  He clasped his fingers, tense and distracted. 

"How are things there?"

I hesitated.  "I think you succeeded..."  What did he know of all that had happened?  "They think you're a wonderful person, a hero..."

His gaze wandered to the book in my hand.  "When did you realize?"

"Only at the last moment," I tapped the binding.  "This story, about a priest who takes a blind girl into his house and then falls in love with her..."

He grimaced uncomfortably.

"It was very clever," I said encouragingly and sat down next to him.  "The letter, the book and the priest's afternoon diversions, three components which could explode only when combined.  Anyone reading the letter would think that the sentence about the blind was a proverb or, at the most, something connected with the blind girl who lived in the cellar.  The book on its own also seems innocent.  Reading matter for your journey.  Even someone reading the discovery of the priest's perversion couldn't tell anything about you.  Only in one place could the meeting of all the components take place, and only one person would interpret it as a message: a sin for a sin, silence for silence..."

His gaze wandered over the graves.

"The priest..."

"I was afraid he'd begin to reconstruct," he said in a low voice, "to investigate.  I was afraid of what would happen to Michel after all the years he had trusted me as if I were his real father..."

I remembered the copy of the letter I had given the boy.  "It would have been easier if you had let me in on things..."

"They said you'd understand on your own."

It was evident that he knew nothing of what had happened between Yvonne and me.  His controllers had fed him, as was customary, only with what they wanted him to have. 

"I might not have," I said gently.

"I asked about you in the months I've been hiding.  In a sense, it all depended on you and I had nothing better to alleviate my irritability."  He smiled apologetically as he listed my good qualities.  "They told me that you were experienced and professional, an intelligent man who had lived for many years under a different identity and always did what you were told to do in the best possible way..."

I could understand the villagers' affection for him.  His face displayed genuine, convincing innocence.  "I don't even know your real name," I said cautiously.

He raised his eyebrows in a gesture of acceptance.  "I've almost forgotten it too in all the years I've been Khamis..."

If he was pretending, he was first-rate.  "Since when is that?"

He thought for a moment.  "Since ‘46."

The more natural his answers were, the more disbelief took hold of me.  I slid along the rough stone to his side. 

"How..." I asked sympathetically, "How did you get into this?"

"I was a child," he replied with no hesitation, "alone on a kibbutz.  My parents had been killed on the border, when we fled from Syria with a group of other Jews.  When I was seventeen, someone came and asked for me one day.  He brought regards from a distant uncle of my mother's and suggested that I might go to study in Beirut.  Medicine sounded appropriate, a profession with good pay, status, honor.  At first I didn't guess a thing, I was grateful and the people who came from time to time to sleep in my flat or the fact that my name became Anton Khamis didn't bother me..."  He breathed deeply.  "I don't know if I'm allowed to..."

I offered him a cigarette.  He declined.  "In fact, I know the rest," I said through the cloud of smoke.  "In ‘47 you began to participate in debates and go to meetings to create the required impression, and in ‘48 or nine you went to the border and waited until a group arrived that would suit you..."

He wet his lips.  "The way you put it..."

"That's how it was, wasn't it?"

"It began like that.  Afterwards he was my friend."

Even here, having successfully emerged from the quagmire of his life, he managed to seem fragrant and pure.  That was something unfair to me and to others I had known who had done similar work and paid the price in spiritual suicide and the loss of the capacity to trust.  It was even more annoying when I thought that Yvonne had preferred him to me. 

"He was such a good friend," I said, "that instead of confessing to him you probably threatened to blackmail him if he ever revealed the truth about you..."

"I couldn't take chances..."  Now there was true pain in his face, of a kind refined by nights of loneliness.  "That doesn't detract from the fact that he was very close to me and Dura was my home and Michel..."  His voice broke.

"...And your wife."  I wouldn't give up.

"Yvonne.  She wasn't my wife."

I didn't bother to look surprised.  "How much of all this did she know?"

"Nothing."  He leaned back against the headstone.  "I made sure she didn't know.  All the years I lived alone, in secret, receiving my orders in parcels of books and reporting back via the transmitter... The night I was knifed I nearly broke, I was on the verge of telling her.  I put disinfectant ointment on the wound, bandaged it somehow and sat in an abandoned building up there, on the mountain.  I knew it would be my last night in Dura, maybe the night before last.  There was so much to do.  To go back, find the transmitter and destroy it, burn the books with all the information they contained, leave money..."

The wind stirred up dust at the top of the tombstone and laid it gently on his shoulders and hair. 

"Don't think I wasn't ready.  I had been thinking for years about the end, I had planned it.  When the invasion began and they asked me to gather information prior to your mission I had the feeling that would be my last action in Dura.  But that night, knowing the moment had arrived, together with the pain of the wound, paralyzed me.  I did none of the things I should have done.  I had an emergency transmitter hidden in a hollow tree right in the middle of the ruin.  I took it out and sent the signal to Tel Aviv.  Then I sat down to write the letter.  You were already on your way and two days later you arrested me..."