"They tell me you are getting a new job soon, down in Wiesbaden," Schulmann remarked, still in German, when these mating ceremonies were behind them. "Some desk job. Bigger but smaller, I hear. They say you are too much man for the people here. Now that I have seen you, and seen the people-well, I am not surprised."
Alexis tried not to be surprised either. Of the details of a new appointment nothing had been said-only that one would be forthcoming. Even his replacement by the Silesian was still meant to be a secret; Alexis had not had time to breathe a word of it to anyone, not even his young girlfriend, with whom he conducted rather meaningless phone calls several times a day.
"That's the way it goes, huh?" Schulmann remarked philosophically, speaking as much to the river as to Alexis. "In Jerusalem, believe me, a man's life is equally precarious. Upstream, downstream. That's the way it goes." He seemed a little disappointed, all the same. "I hear she's a nice lady too," he added, once again crashing in upon his companion's thoughts. "Attractive, bright, loyal. Maybe she's too much woman for them."
Resisting the temptation to turn the occasion into a seminar upon the problems of his own life, Alexis directed the conversation towards this morning's conference, but Schulmann answered vaguely, remarking only that technicians never solved anything, and that bombs bored him. He had asked for pasta and ate it the prisoner's way, using his spoon and fork automatically, not bothering to look down. Alexis, afraid to interrupt his flow, kept as quiet as he knew how.
First, with an older man's ease of narrative, Schulmann embarked upon a mildly worded lament about Israel's so-called allies in the anti-terror business: "Back in January, when we were running a quite different investigation, we called on our Italian friends," he declared, in a voice of homey reminiscence.
"Showed them some nice proofs, gave them some good addresses. Next thing we knew, they had arrested a few Italians, while the people that Jerusalem were after sat safe back home in Libya looking bronzed and rested, waiting for their next assignment. That was not what we had intended." A mouthful of pasta. A dusting of the lips with the napkin. Food is fuel for him, thought Alexis; he eats so that he can fight. "In March, when another matter came up, it was the same story exactly, but that time we were dealing with Paris. Certain Frenchmen were arrested but nobody else. Certain officials got some nice applause too, and, thanks to us, promotion. But the Arabs"-he made a large, indulgent shrug. "Expedient it may be. Sound oil policy, sound economics, sound everything. Justice it isn't. And justice is what we like." His smile broadened, in direct contrast to the scale of the joke. "So I would say that we have learned to be selective. Better tell too little than too much, we have decided. Somebody is nicely disposed towards us, has an impressive record-a fine father in his background, like yours-with him we will do business. Guardedly. Informally. Between friends. If he can use our information constructively for himself, advance himself in his profession a little-all the-better that our friends should obtain influence in their professions. But we want our half of the deal. We expect people to deliver. Of our friends we expect this particularly."
It was the nearest Schulmann ever came, that day or later, to stating the terms of his proposition. As to Alexis, he did not state anything at all. He let his silence declare his sympathy. And Schulmann, who understood so much about him, seemed to understand this too, for he resumed their conversation as if the bargain had been struck and they were squarely in business together.
"A few years ago now, a bunch of Palestinians raised a certain amount of hell in my country," he began reminiscently. "Normally these people are low grade. Peasant kids trying to be heroes. They sneak over the border, lie up in a village, get rid of their bombs, run for safety. If we don't catch them first time out, we catch them the second, if there is one. The men I am speaking of were different. They were led. They knew how to move. How to stay clear of the informants, cover their tracks, make their own arrangements, write their own orders. First time in, they hit a supermarket in Beit She'an. The second time a school, then some settlements, then another shop, till it became monotonous. Then they started ambushing our soldiers hitchhiking home on leave. A lot of angry mothers, newspapers. Everyone saying, 'Get these men.' We listened for them, put the word out everywhere we knew. We discovered they used caves in the Jordan Valley. Lay up. Lived off the land. Still we couldn't find them. Their propaganda people called them the heroes of Commando Eight, but we knew Commando Eight inside out and Commando Eight could not have lit a match without us hearing of it comfortably ahead of time. Brothers, the word said. A family enterprise. One informant counted three, another four. But brothers for certain and operating out of Jordan, which we knew already.
"We put a team together, went after them-people we call the Sayaret, small teams, hard-hitting men. The Palestinian commander was a loner, we heard, and very disinclined to give his trust to anybody outside his family. Sensibly paranoid about Arab treachery. We never found him. His two brothers were not so nimble. One had a soft spot for a little girl in Amman. He walked into some machine-gun fire leaving her house one morning. The second made the mistake of calling up a friend in Sidon, inviting himself for a weekend. The Air Force blew his car to pieces as he drove down the coast road."
Alexis could not suppress a smile of excitement. "Not enough wire," he murmured, but Schulmann chose not to hear him.
"By then we knew who they were-West Bankers from a grape-growing village near Hebron, fled after the war of '67. There was a fourth brother, but he was too young to fight, even by Palestinian standards. There were two sisters, but one of them had died in certain reprisal bombings we had to carry out south of the Litani River. That didn't leave much of an army. All the same, we kept looking for our man. We expected him to collect reinforcements, come back at us. He didn't. He ceased trading. Six months passed. A year. We said, 'Forget him. Most likely his own people have killed him, which is normal.' We heard the Syrians had given him a rough time, so maybe he'd died. A few months back, we picked up a rumour he'd come to Europe. Here. Put himself a team together, several of them ladies, mostly German, young." He took another mouthful, chewed and swallowed thoughtfully. "He was running them at arm's length," he went on when he was ready. "Playing the Arab Mephisto to a bunch of impressionable kids," he said.
At first, in the long silence that followed, Alexis could not make Schulmann out. The sun, high above the brown hills, shone directly into the window. In the resulting brilliance it was hard for Alexis to read his expression. Alexis moved his head and took another look at him. Why this sudden milky clouding of the dark eyes? he wondered. And was it really the sunlight that had bleached Schulmann's skin of colour, leaving it cracked and sickly like something dead? Then, in a day filled with bright and sometimes painful perceptions, Alexis recognised the passion which till then had remained hidden from him: here in the restaurant; down there in the sleepy spa town with its sprawling ministerial cantonments. As some men may be seen to be in love, so Schulmann was possessed by a deep and awesome hatred.
Schulmann left that evening. The remnants of his team hung on for two more days. A farewell celebration, with which the Silesian was determined to mark the excellent relations traditionally existing between the two services-an evening get-together, with white beer and sausages-was quietly sabotaged by Alexis, who pointed out that since the Bonn Government had chosen that very day to drop heavy hints about a possible forthcoming arms deal with the Saudis, it was unlikely their guests would be in festive mood. It was perhaps his last effective act in office. A month later, as Schulmann had foretold, he was shunted off to Wiesbaden. A back-room job, theoretically a promotion, but one that gave less rein to his capricious individuality. An unkind newspaper, once counted among the good Doctor's supporters, sourly recorded that Bonn's loss would be the television viewer's gain. His one consolation indeed, at a time when so many of his German friends were hastily giving up their claims on him, was the warm little handwritten note of good wishes, postmark Jerusalem, that greeted him on his first day at his new desk. Signed "As ever, Schulmann," it wished him luck and looked forward to their next meeting, whether private or official. A wry postscript hinted that Schulmann too was not having the easiest of times. "Unless I deliver soon, I have an uncomfortable feeling I shall be joining you," it said. With a smile, Alexis tossed the card into a drawer where anyone could read it, and no doubt would. He knew exactly what Schulmann was doing and admired him for it: he was laying the innocent basis for their future relationship. A couple of weeks later, again, when Dr. Alexis and his youthful lady went through an anticlimactic wedding ceremony, it was Schulmann's roses, of all the gifts, that gave him the greatest joy and the greatest amusement. And I didn't even tell him I was getting married!