They left without speaking to the cuckold, Professor Ashford, who was in a comer deep in conversation with a graduate student. They went to the George for lunch. Dickstein ate very litfle but drank some beer. Cortone said, 'Listen, Nat, I don't know why you're getting so down in the mouth about it.' I mean, it just goes to show shes available, right?' 'Yes,' Dickstein said, but he did not mean it. The bill came to more than ten shillings. Cortone paid it. Dickstein walked him to the railway station. They shook hands solemnly, and Cortone got on the train. Dickstein walked in the park for several hours, hardly noticing the cold, trying to sort out his feelings. He failed. He knew he was not envious of Hassan, nor disillusioned with Eila, nor disappointed in his hopes, for he had never been hopeful. He was shattered, and he had no words to say why. He wished he had somebody to whom he could talk about it Soon after this he want to Palestine, although not just because of Eila.
In the next twenty-one years he never had a woman; but that, too, was not entirely because of Efla.
Yasif Hassan drove away from Luxembourg airport in a black rage. He could picture, as clearly as if it were yesterday, the young Dickstein: a pale Jew in a cheap suit, thin as a girl, always standing slightly hunched as if he expected to be flogged, staring with adolescent longing at the ripe body of Eila Ashford, arguing doggedly that his people would have Palestine whether the Arabs consented or not. Hassan had thought him ridiculous, a child. Now Dickstein lived in Israel, and grew grapes to make wine: he had found a home, and Hassan had lost one. Hassan was no longer rich. He had never been fabulously wealthy, even by Levantine standards, but he had always had fine food, expensive clothes and the best education, and he had consciously adopted the manners of Arab aristocracy. His grandfather had been a successful doctor who set up his elder son in medicine and his younger son in business. The younger, Hassan's father, bought and sold textiles in Palestine, Lebanon and Transiordan. The business prospered under British rule, and Zionist immigration swelled the market. By 1947 the family had shops all over the Levant and owned their native village near Nazareth. The 1948 war rained them. When the State of Israel was declared and the Arab armies attacked, the Hassan family made the fatal mistake of packing their bags and fleeing to Syria. They never came back. The warehouse in Jerusalem burned down; the shops were destroyed or taken over by Jews; and the family lands became 'administered' by the Israeli government Hassan had heard that the village was now a kibbutz. Hassan's father had lived ever since in a United Nations refugee camp. The last positive thing he had done was to write a letter of introduction for Yasif to his Lebanese bankers. Yasif had a university degree and spoke excellent English: the bank gave him a job. He applied to the Israeli government for compensation under the 1953 Land Acquisition Act, and was refused. He visited his family in the camp only once, but what he !aw there stayed with him for the rest of his life. They lived in a hut made of boards and shared the communal toilets.
They got no special treatment: they were just one among thousands of families without a home, a purpose or a hope. To see his father, who had been a clever, decisive man ruling a large business with a firm hand, reduced now to queuing for food and wasting his life playing backgammon, made Yasif want to throw bombs at school buses. The women fetched water and cleaned house much as al-ways, but the men shuffled around in secondhand clothes, waiting for nothing, their bodies getting flabby while their minds grew dull. Teenagers strutted and squabbled and fought with knives, for there was nothing ahead of them but the prospect of their lives shriveling to nothing in the baking heat of the sun. The camp smelled of sewage and despair. Hassan never returned to visit, although he continued to write to his mother. He had escaped the trap, and if he was deserting his father, well, his father bad helped him do it, so it must have been what he wanted. He was a modest success as a bank clerk. He had intelligence and integrity, but his upbringing did not fit him for careful, calculating work involving much shuffling of memoranda and keeping of records in triplicate. Besides, his heart was elsewhere. He never ceased bitterly to resent what had been taken from him. He carried his hatred through life like a secret burden. Whatever his logical mind might tell him, his soul said be had abandoned his father in time of need, and the guilt fed his hatred of Israel. Each year he expected the Arab armies to destroy the Zionist invaders, and each time they failed he grew more wretched and more angry. In 1957 he began to work for Egyptian Intelligence. He was not a very important agent, but as the bank eXpanded its European business be, began to pick up the occasional tidbit, both in the office and from general banking gossip. Sometimes Cairo would ask him for specific information about the finances of an arms manufacturer, a Jewish philanthropist, or an Arab millionaire; and if Hassan did not have the details in his bank's files he could often get them from friends and business contacts. He also had a general brief to keep an eye on Israeli businessmen in Europe, in case they were agents; and that was why he had approached Nat Dickstein and pretended to be friendly.
Hassan thought Dickstein's story was probably true. In his shabby suit~ with the same round spectacles and the same inconspicuous air, he looked exactly like an underpaid sale with a product he could not promote. However, there was that odd business in the Rue Dicks the previous night: two youths, known to the police as petty thieves, had been found in the gutter savagely disabled. Hassan had got all the details from a contact on the city police force. Clearly they had picked on the wrong sort of victim. Their injuries were professional: the man, who had inflicted them had to be a soldier, a policeman, a bodyguard . . . or an agent After an incident like that, any Israeli who flew out in a hurry the next morning was worth checking up on. Hassan drove back to the Alfa Hotel and spoke to the desk clerk. 'I was here an hour ago when one of your guests was checking out;'he said. 'Do you remember?' 'I think so, sir. Hassan gave him two hundred Luxembourg francs. 'Would you tell me what name he was registered under?' 'Certainly. sir.' The clerk consulted a file. 'Edward Rodgers, from Science International magazine.' 'Not Nathaniel Dickstein?' The clerk shook his head patiently. 'Would you just see whether you had a Nathaniel Dickstein, from Israel, registered at all?' 'Certainly.' The -clerk took several minutes to look through a wad of papers. Hassan's excitement rose. If Dickstein had registered under a false name, then he was not a wine salesman--so what else could he be but an Israeli agent? Finally the clerk closed his fae and looked up. 'Definitely not, sir.' 'Thank you.' Haman left. He was jubilant as he drove back to his office: he had used his wits and discovered something important. As soon as he got to his desk he composed a message.
SUSPECTED ISRAELI AGENT SEEN HERE. NAT DICKSTEIN ALIAS ED RODGERS. FIVE FOOT SIX, SMALL BUILD, DARK HAIR, BROWN EYES, AGE ABOUT 40.
He encoded the message, added an extra code word at its top and sent it by telex to the banles Egyptian headquartem It would never get there: the extra code word instructed the Cairo post office to reroute the telex to the Directorate of General Investigations. Sending the message was an anticlimax, of course. There would be no reaction, no thanks from the other end. Hassan had nothing to do but get on with his bank work, and try not to daydream. Then Cairo caged him on the phone. It had never happened before. Sometimes they sent him cables, telexes, and even letters, all in code, of course. Once or twice he had met with people from Arab embassies and been given verbal instructions. But they had never phoned. His report must have caused more of a stir than he had anticipated. The caffer wanted to know more about Dickstein. 'I want to confirm the identity of the customer referred to in your message,' he said. 'Did he wear round spectacles?' 'Yea.' 'Did he speak English with a Cockney accent? Would you recognize such an accent?' 'Yes, and yes.' 'Did he have a number tattooed on his forearm?' 'I didn't see it today, but I know he has it ... I was at Oxford University with him, years ago. I'm quite sure it is him.' 'You know him?' There was astonishment in the voice from Cairo. 'Is this information on your file?' 'No, Irve never-Y 'Then it should be,' the man said angrily. 'How long have you been with us?' 'Since 1957.' 'Mat explains it those were the old days. Okay, now listen. This man is a very important ... client. We want you to stay with him twenty-four hours a day, do you understand?' 'I caWt,' Hassan said miserably. 'He left town.' 'Where did he go?' 'I dropPed him at the airport. I don't know where he went.* 'Then find out. Phone the airlines, ask which flight he was on, and call me back in fifteen minutes.' TJUPLE
'I'll do my best---r 'I'm not interested in your best,' said the voice from Cairo. 'I want his destination, and I want it before he gets there. Just be sure you call me in fifteen minutes. Now that we've contacted him, we must not lose him again.' 'I'll get on to it right away,' said Hassan, but the line was dead before he could finish the sentence. He cradled the phone. True, he had got no thanks from Cairo; but this was better. Suddenly he was important, his work was urgent, they were depending on him. He had a chance to do something for the Arab cause, a chance to strike back at I ast. He picked up the phone again and started calling the airlines.
Chapter Four
Nat Dickstein chose to visit a nuclear power station in France simply because French was the only European lan guage he spoke passably well, except for English, but En gland was not part of Euratom. He traveled to the power station in a bus with an assorted party of students and tour ists. The countryside -slipping past the windows was a dusty southern green, more like Galilee than Essex, which had been 'the country' to Dickstein as a boy. He had traveled the world since, getting on planes as casually as any jet-setter, but he could remember the time when his horizons had been Park Lane in the west and Southend-on-Sea in the easL He could also remember how suddenly those horizons had receded, when he began to try to think of himself as a man, after his bar mitzvah and
