The Rainy Day Man: Contemporary Romance (Suspense and Political Mystery Book 1) (8 page)

             
When I reached the top I looked back.  The village lay stretched out on the edge of the abyss, looking terribly vulnerable.  The surrounding hills extended a green carpet on which the conflagrations of war had left dark stains, boils on the coat of a dog.  What explosion could I make that would impress anyone in this scorched land?

             
A marten flew out of the bushes and disappeared behind the walls of a ruined, roofless building.  A path of crushed grass led to the remains of the entrance.  I peeped in through the window.  The walls were charred, bonfires had blackened the last few floor tiles and the broad trunk of an oak was growing in the middle.  I jumped in.  Beyond the trunk of the oak, beside a wall which had been cleaned of soot, lay a straw mattress and a tattered blanket.  Cigarette stubs were scattered around it.

             
From the window I could look down at the back garden of the clinic.  The woman was there, hoeing the vegetable garden.  She was wearing a short, startlingly yellow dress.  Her shoulders were bare.  She straightened herself and pushed her hair into her headband.  I shaded my eyes with my hand, to see her better.  A pair of fighter planes thundered overhead to the west, to Beirut.  We both watched them.

              When I looked down again I saw the fire.

             
As fast as an illusion, brighter than the midday light, it spread along the main street of Dura like a big yellow tiger.  There were no voices or noises, no movement of an excited or panic-stricken crowd.  Everything was swallowed up in the gray-green expanse, everything apart from an enormous pile of flames which towered above the tops of the trees in the Athenaeum garden.

             
Seized by a sense of disaster, I jumped out through the window.  Going down the way I had come up meant losing about twenty minutes, and eye contact with the scene as well.  What was left, then, was the slope, which stretched out before me, strewn with rocks and the prickly bushes.  I broke a branch off the oak and plunged into the undergrowth.  A goat track wound down to the valley.  I ran along it, jumping up from time to time to look, until I landed on all fours in a coil of barbed wire.

             
First I extricated my shirt, one barb at a time.  Then my trousers.  Eventually I was free enough to apply my handkerchief to my knee and one of my arms, which were both bleeding.  On the other side of the fence was the vegetable garden of the clinic, empty and neatly hoed.  I lifted the barbed wire with the oak branch and crawled underneath it, smelling the watered earth and rotting vegetables.  Through the clinic window I could see the upper part of the medicine cabinet.  I advanced slowly between the furrows, along a narrow irrigation channel.  At the edge of the garden was a ridge of loose earth.  Beyond it lay the wadi at the outskirts of the village.  I climbed up to the ridge to look.

             
"You're crushing my radishes."

             
I turned round.  The woman was leaning on a short hoe.  Her wet hair hung down to her shoulders, dampening a kind of military shirt she was wearing on top of the yellow dress.  "I've just sown them," she said.

             
"I'm sorry..."

             
She did not reply.  I shuffled in the loose earth, trying to find the safest way down.  At every step my feet sank deeper.  She sighed impatiently. 

             
"Wait, don't move," she said and vanished with her familiar, labored walk.  When she returned she was carrying a wooden plank.  She threw it down at my feet.  "Now you can cross."

I felt quite ridiculous, spreading my hands out to the sides, balancing myself on the narrow board.  She waited in silence, her arms folded,
her fingers indicating irritation.  When I was down she bent and picked up the plank. 

"I hope I haven't caused too much damage," I said.

              She nodded in the direction of the barbed wire.  "You'd better leave the way you came. The dogs won't let you pass in front."

             
We walked to the fence together.  She looked at my bandaged knee, then at my arm.  Beneath her piercing gaze I went down on my belly and crawled out of the garden.  After that, as far as my painful knee would allow, I ran to the cover of the bushes.   

             
The goat-track led in only one direction - back.  In the ruined building I fell, panting, onto the straw mattress.  There was no longer any point in hurrying.  The sense of urgency was replaced by a great weariness.  What was it about the place which made me feel so helpless?  I searched through my pockets.  I had lost my packet of cigarettes.  I found my lighter.  I collected the stubs on the floor and arranged them in front of me according to size.  They were useless - old and squashed.

             
I lingered there for quite a while, this time thinking glumly about the man who had lain on the straw mattress smoking cheap cigarettes right down to the end.  Then I went out and hobbled down the path to Dura.  On the outskirts of the village the water truck picked me up.  I asked the driver for a cigarette.  He glanced at my bandaged knee and torn shirt, but asked no questions.

***

              Actually, Scheckler reported by phone to HQ in Nabatiya - nothing of any great significance had happened.  A few kids had made some holes in a petrol barrel, set it on fire with a rag and let it roll down from the petrol station at the top of the road until it burst through the gate of the Athenaeum.  Everything was back to normal.  The owner of the petrol station had been warned and the burned-down guard hut was being replaced and would be lined with sandbags.  A detailed list of the damage would be sent forthwith.

             
We were up in the office. In the courtyard below soldiers were still standing around strips of twisted iron lying in a puddle of water, according it the attention that my explosion was supposed to arouse.  A strip of melted soot ran along the asphalt of the road.

             
"What damage are you talking about?" I asked.

             
Scheckler put the receiver down.  "You could also use some extra cash on top of your little salary..."

             
I opened the desk drawer.  My salary slip was folded inside the brown envelope, as I had left it.

             
"I came across it by accident," he explained placidly.  "I was looking for something else."

             
"What the hell were you looking for in my drawer?"

             
He grinned.  "The doctor's letter."

             
"I delivered it."

             
"I know.  You were seen."

             
"So why were you looking?"

             
"I wanted to be sure."

             
I studied my salary slip.  Without the expenses and special allowances for living abroad  it really was meager.  For a moment I felt sorry for Hannah and Jonathan.  I slammed the drawer shut.

             
"What did the letter say?"  Scheckler asked.

             
I said nothing.

             
"You make such a fuss about secrets," he said dismissively, "as if they were important..."  The way he spoke hinted at an additional meaning beyond what was being said.  I waited patiently for him to continue.

             
He swallowed.  "I've been thinking about it the last few days.  Usually, when someone new comes, they send cables, check in advance if we have a bed, an office, a vehicle.  All you brought with you were your military papers.  It's as if... as if they just dumped you here..."

             
I examined his face carefully.  He spoke without spite.  His perpetual smirk had vanished.  His eyes were open and sincere beneath his rust-colored hair, which was stuck to his scalp with a generous portion of hair oil.  "But you needn't think it's so bad here," he added consolingly.  "Till I got here I tried all kinds of things too, I got to all kinds of places, but it was just in this hole that I got lucky..."

             
He got up, went over to the row of locked cupboards and found the right key in his bunch.  Behind a front of cardboard files marked "Secret" in red ink was a world of shiny nickel and plastic.  Suddenly he was holding a small transistor radio, which he put on my desk. 

             
"That's from me," he said nasally, "and if you need anything else..."

             
My lack of response embarrassed us both.  Silently he shuffled a few papers on his desk and went out into the dark corridor.  After a moment I could hear the usual shouts as he chided the mechanics, fawned on the drivers and complimented the cook.

             
I leaned back in my chair and thought.  More than anything else, his attempt at intimacy offended me.  It was based on the assumption that there was a similarity between us which was reflected in a shared exile.  The sense of affront was soon replaced by one of discomfort: was there something in his intimated feelings that I did not have the approval of my superiors?  Or was it just the surprise that people outside the system feel in view of the laconic, apparently niggardly relations between a distant agent and his operators?

             
One way or another, my sense of calm expectancy had been broken.  My existence in that place and my evaluation of myself depended on someone else's decision to act.  In my mind, Scheckler's life was about the lowest one could reach.  How did one raise oneself up from there?

             
Something heavy and bothersome weighed upon me, a remnant which had not been exhausted in the conversation with the priest.  Perhaps I had not been persistent enough, had cut off contact too quickly, not introduced myself appropriately or forgotten something essential which they had told me at the briefing.  A sudden sense of urgency led me to the garage supervisor's room.  I requested a vehicle for the afternoon.  He led me to a command car which was parked outside. 

             
"I don't know, you don't exactly belong to this unit.  I need some authorization..."

             
"Scheckler's authorized it," I assured him and climbed up into the seat.

***

       The priest's house was where I had guessed it would be: behind the church, in a pine wood.  A road wound from the square along the edge of the cliff before disappearing behind a high hedge.  I stopped the command car, climbed onto the bonnet and peered over the treetops into a tiny garden smelling of herbs.  The green Morris was parked in the shade of a fir tree.  The priest was poking around in its trunk with jerky, urgent movements.  Then he straightened up, locked it with a key he put in his habit and hastened along an uneven path of pebbles.

             
Something in the scene hinted of conspiracy.  I walked parallel to him along the hedge separating us, listening to the sound of his feet.  In front of the iron posts by the little gate I stopped to wave off a wasp.  Between the fingers protecting my face I saw him slip through the pine trees.  For a long moment I hesitated.  The garden and the trunk of the car were as intriguing to me as the place he was hurrying to.  I advanced to the gate, to peep into the house.  Something was shining in one of the windows.  Was it a light which had been left on or the reflection of the sun's rays?  At the back of the room I thought I saw a dark, square figure, perhaps a man leaning on a table and looking out?  The garden was out of the bounds, then.  I turned towards the wood.

             
The brown habit made him difficult to follow.  Once or twice I had to stop and wait until he emerged from among the trees.  He advanced in a straight line. When he emerged from the northern edge of the small wood, which touched the yard at the back of the church, he waited for a moment near a tree-trunk, then disappeared.

             
Now, there was only the empty churchyard and the back wall - gray, damp, scratched with chalk graffiti and children's drawings.  Above, at twice a man's height, were windows with frames lined with moss.  An impressive staircase led to what had once been a wide entrance but was now bricked up.  I took one step outside the line of the trees and drew back immediately: a boy appeared from around the corner of the building.  He was about fourteen years old, tall and dark.  His head was adorned with a mop of hair and he was wearing jeans and a vest with a faded print.  When he reached the part of the wall which was hidden by the bricked-up staircase he disappeared too, like the priest before him.

             
I waited with impatience and an eye on my watch.  One minute, two, three.  If the priest was the man, then this church, with its secret entrances, was the place.  But the reality which had seemed so simple and clear in Tel Aviv was fragile and uncontrollable now.  I wondered if he was watching me through one of the windows or a hole in the wall.  The chance of amending the blunders of yesterday's conversation was offset by the danger of frightening him even more.  After another moment's hesitation I turned back into the woods.