“Mr. Hel?”
He switched off the radio and beckoned to the young woman standing in the doorway of the gun room. She was wearing fresh khaki walking shorts and a shortsleeved shirt with three top buttons open. As hors d’oeuvres go, she was a promising morseclass="underline" long strong legs, slim waist, aggressive bosom, reddish hair fluffy from recent washing. More soubrette than heroine, she was in that brief desirable moment between coltishness and zaftig. But her face was soft and without lines of experience, giving the strain she was under the look of petulance.
“Mr. Hel?” she said again, her tone uncertain.
“Come in and sit down, Miss Stern.”
She look a chair beneath a rack of metal devices she did not recognize to be weapons and smiled faintly. “I don’t know why, but I thought of you as an older man. Uncle Asa spoke of you as a friend, a man of his own age.”
“We were of an age; we shared an era. Not that that’s pertinent to anything.” He looked at her flatly, evaluating her. And finding her wanting.
Uncomfortable under the expressionless gaze of his bottle-green eyes, she sought the haven of small talk. “Your wife—Hana, that is—has been very kind to me. She sat up with me last night and—”
He cut her off with a gesture. “Begin by telling me about your uncle. Why he sent you here. After that, give me the details of the events at Rome International. Then tell me what your plans are and what they have to do with me.”
Surprised by his businesslike tone, she took a deep breath, gathered her thoughts, and began her story, characteristically enough, with herself. She told him that she had been raised in Skokie, had attended Northwestern University, had taken an active interest in political and social issues, and had decided upon graduation to visit her uncle in Israel—to find her roots, discover her Jewishness.
Hel’s eyelids drooped at this last, and he breathed a short sigh. With a rolling motion of his hand he gestured her to get on with it.
“You knew, of course, that Uncle Asa was committed to punishing those who committed the Munich murders.”
“That was on the grapevine. We never spoke of such things in our letters. When I first heard of it, I thought your uncle was foolish to come out of retirement and attempt something like that with his old friends and contacts either gone or decayed into politics. I could only assume it was the desperate act of a man who knew he was in his final illness.”
“But he first organized our cell a year and a half ago, and he didn’t become sick until a few months ago.”
“That is not true. Your uncle has been ill for several years. There were two brief remissions. At the time you say he organized your cell, he was combating pain with drugs. That might account for his crepuscular thinking.”
Hannah Stern frowned and looked away. “You don’t sound as though you held my uncle in much esteem.”
“On the contrary, I liked him very much. He was a brilliant thinker and a man of generous spirit—a man of shibumi.”
“A man of… what?”
“Never mind. Your uncle never belonged in the business of terror. He was emotionally unequipped for it—which of course says a good deal in his favor as a human being. In happier times, he would have lived the gentle life of a teacher and scholar. But he was passionate in his sense of justice, and not only for his own people. The way things were twenty-five years ago, in what is now Israel, passionate and generous men who were not cowards had few options open to them.”
Hannah was not used to Hel’s soft, almost whispered prison voice, and she found herself leaning close to hear his words.
“You are wrong to imagine that I did not esteem your uncle. There was a moment in Cairo sixteen years ago when he risked his safety, possibly his life, to help me. What is more significant, he also risked the success of a project he was devoted to. I had been shot in the side. The situation was such that I could not seek medical assistance. When I met him, I had gone two days with a wad of blood-soaked cloth under my shirt, wandering in the back streets because I didn’t dare try a hotel. I was dazed with fever. No, I esteem him a great deal. And I am in his debt.” Hel had said this in a soft monotone, without the histrionics she would have associated with sincerity. He told her these things because he thought that, in fairness to the uncle, she had a right to know the extent of his debt of honor. “Your uncle and I never met again after that business in Cairo. Our friendship grew through years of exchanging letters that both of us used as outlets for testing ideas, for sharing our attitudes toward books we were reading, for complaining about fate and life. We enjoyed that freedom from embarrassment one only finds in talking to a stranger. We were very close strangers.” Hel wondered if this young woman could understand such a relationship. Deciding she could not, he focused in on the business at hand. “All right, after his son was killed in Munich, your uncle formed a cell to aid him in his mission of punishment. How many people, and where are they now?”
“I am the only one left.”
“You were within the cell?”
“Yes. Why? Does that seem—”
“Never mind.” Hel was convinced now that Asa Stern had been acting in dazed desperation, to introduce this soft college liberal into an action cell. “How large was the cell?”
“We were five. We called ourselves the Munich Five.”
His eyelids drooped again. “How theatrical. Nothing like telegraphing the stunt.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Five in the cell? Your uncle, you, the two hit in Rome—who was the fifth member? David O. Selznik?”
“I don’t understand what you mean. The fifth man was killed in a café bombing in Jerusalem. He and I were… we were…” Her eyes began to shine with tears.
“I’m sure you were. It’s a variation of the summer vacation romance: one of the fringe benefits of being a committed young revolutionary with all humanity as your personal flock. All right, tell me how far you had got before Asa died.”
Hannah was confused and hurt. This was nothing like the man her uncle had described, the honest professional who was also a gentle man of culture, who paid his debts and refused to work for the uglier of the national and commercial powers. How could her uncle have been fond of a man who showed so little human sympathy? Who was so lacking in understanding?
Hel, of course, understood only too well. He had several times had to clean up after these devoted amateurs. He knew that when the storm broke, they either ran or, from equally cowardly impulses, shot up everything in sight.
Hannah was surprised to find that no tears came, their flow cauterized by Hel’s cold adherence to fact and information. She sniffed and said, “Uncle Asa had sources of information in England. He learned that the last remaining two of the Munich murderers were with a group of Black Septembrists planning to hijack a plane departing from Heathrow.”
“How large a group?”
“Five or six. We were never sure.”
“Had you identified which of them were involved in Munich?”
“No.”
“So you were going to put all five of them under?”
She nodded.
“I see. And your contacts in England? What is their character and what are they going to do for you?”
“They are urban guerrillas working for the freedom of Northern Ireland from English domination.”
“Oh, God.”
“There is a kind of brotherhood among all freedom fighters, you know. Our tactics may be different, but our ultimate goals are the same. We all look forward to a day when—”
“Please,” he interrupted. “Now, what were these IRA’s going to do for you?”
“Well… they were keeping watch on the Septembrists. They were going to house us when we arrived in London. And they were going to furnish us with arms.”
“‘Us’ being you and the two who got hit in Rome?”
“Yes.”
“I see. All right, now tell me what happened in Rome. EEC identifies the stuntmen as Japanese Red Army types acting for the PLO. Is that correct?”