very different then. He glanced at her, then stood upright with a look of terror on his face and shouted: 'You should be oldl' and then his breakfast went down the wrong way and he began to cough and sputter. The servant grabbed Suza from behind, pinning her arms in a painful grip; then let her go and went to pound Cortone on the back. 'What did you do?' he yelled at her. 'Vhat did you do, for Christ's sake?' In a peculiar way this farce helped calm her a little, She could not be terrified of a man who had been so terrified of her. She rode the wave of confidence, sat down at his table and prepared herself coffee. When Cortone stopped coughing she gaid, 'She was my mother.' ,'My God,' Cortone said. He gave a last cough, then waved the servant away and sat down again. 'You're so Me her, bell, you scared me half to death.' He screwed up his eyes, remembering. 'Would you have been about four or five years old, back in, um, 1947?' 'That's right' 'Hell, I remember you, you had a ribbon in your hair. And now you and Nat are an item.' She said, 'So he has been here.' Her heart leaped with joy. '!Maybe,' Cortone said. His fxiendliness vanished. She realized he would not be easy to manipulate. She said, 'I want to know where he is.' 'And I want to know who sent you hem' 'Nobody sent me.' Suza collected her thoughts, struggling to hide her tension. 'I guessed he might have come to you for help with this ... project he's working on. The thing is, the Arabs know about it, and theyll kill him, and I have to warn him . Please, if you know where he is, please help me.' She was suddenly close to tears, but Cortone was unmoved. 'Helping you is easy,' he said. 'Trusting you is the hard part.' He unwrapped a cigar and fit it, taking his time. Suza watched in an agony of impatience-- He looked away from her and spoke almost to himself. 'You know, there was a time when I'd just see something I wanted and I'd grab it. It's not so simple anymore. Now I've got all these complications. I got to make choices, and none of them are what I really want I don't know whether it!s the way things are now or if it's me.' He turned again and faced her. 'I owe Dickstein my life. Now I have athance to save his, if you're telling the truth This is a debt of honor. I have to pay it myself, in person. go what do I do?' He paused. Suza held her breath. 'Dickstein is in a wreck of a house somewhere on the Mediterranean. It's a ruin, hasn't been lived in for years, so theres no phone there. I could send a message, but I couldn't be sure it would get there, and Me I said, I have to do this myself, in person.' He drew on the cigar. 'I could tell you where to go look for him, but you just might pass the information on to the wrong people. I won't take that risk.' 'What, thenT'Suza said in a high-pitched voice. 'We have to help him!
'I know that,' Cortone said imperturbably. 'So I'm going there myself.' 'Ohl' Suza was taken by surprise: it was a possibility she had never considered. 'And what about you?' he went on. 'I'm not going to tell you where I'm headed, but you could still have people follow me. I need to keep you real close from now on. Let's face it, you could be playing it both ways. So I'm taking you with me.' She stared at him. Tension drained out of her in a flood, she slumped in her chair. 'Oh, thank you,' she said. Then, at last, she cried.
They flew first class. Cortone always did. After the meal Suza left him to go to the toilet. She looked through the curtain into economy, hoping against hope, but she was disappointed: there was Hassan's wary brown face staring at her over the rows of headrests. She looked into the galley and spoke to the chief steward in a confiding voice. She had a problem, she said. She needed to contact her boyfriend but she couldn't get away from her Italian father, who wanted her to wear iron knickers until she was twenty-one. Would he phone the Israeli consulate in Rome and leave a message for a Nathaniel Dickstein? Just say, Hassan has told me everything, and he and I are coming to you. She gave him money for the phone call, far too much, it was a way of tipping him. He wrote the message down and promised. She went back to Cortone. Bad news, she said. One of the Arabs was back there in economy. He must be following us. Cortone cursed, then told her never mind, the man would just have to be taken care of later. Suza thought: Oh, God, what have I done?
From the big house on the clifftop Dickstein went down a long zigzag flight of steps cut into the rock to the beach. He splashed through the shallows to a waiting motorboat, jumped in and nodded to the man at the wheel. The engine roared and the boat surged through the waves out to sea. The sun had just set. In the last faint light the clouds were massing above, obscuring the stars as soon as they appeared. Dickstein was deep in thought, racking his brains for things he had not done, precautions he might yet take, loopholes he still had time to close. He went over his plan again and again in his mind, like a man who has learned by heart an important speech he must make but still wishes it were better. The high shadow of the Stromberg loomed ahead, and the boatman brought the little vessel around in a foamy arc to stop alongside, where a rope ladder dangled in the water. Dickstein scrambled up the ladder and on to the decL IMe ship's master shook his hand and introduced himself. Like all the officers aboard the Stromberg, he was borrowed from the Israeli Navy. They took a turn around the deck. Dickstein said, 'Any problems, captain?' 'She's not a good ship,' the captain said. 'Shes slow, clumsy and old. But weve got her in good shape.' From what Dickstein could see in the twilight the Stromherg was in better condition than her sister ship the Coparellt had been in Antwerp. She was clean, and everything on deck looked squared away, shipshape. They went up to the bridge, looked over the powerful equipment in the radio room, then went down to the mess, where the crew were finishing dinner. Unlike the officers, the ordinary seamen were all Mossad agents, most with a little experience of the sea. Dickstein had worked with some of them before. They were all, he observed, at least ten years younger than he. They were all bright-eyed, well-built, dressed in a peculiar assortment of denims and homemade sweaters; all tough, humorous, well-trained men. Dickstein took a cup of coffee and sat at one of the tables. He outranked all these men by a long way, but there was not much bull in the Israeli armed forces, and even less in the Mossad. The four men at thi table nodded and said hello. Ish, a gloomy Palestine-born Israeli with a dark complexion, said, 'ne weather's changing.' 'Don't say that. I was planning to get a tan on this cruise.' The speaker was a lanky ash-blond New Yorker named Fein-* berg, a deceptively pretty-faced man with eyelashes women envied. Calling this assignment a 'cruise' was already a standing joke. In his briefing earlier in the day Dickstein had said the Coparellt would be almost deserted when they hijacked it. 'Soon after she passes through the Strait of Gibraltar,' he had told them, 'her engines will break down. The damage willbe such that it can!t be. repaired at sea. The captain cables the owners to that effect-and we are now the owners. By an apparently lucky coincidence, another of our ships will be close by. She's the Gil Hamilton, now moored across the bay here. She will go to the Coparellf and take off the whole crew except for the engineer. Then shes out of the picture: shell go to her next port of call, where the crew of the Copparelli will be let off and given their train fares home.'~ They had had the day to think about the briefing, and Dickstein was expecting questions. Now Levi Abbas, a short, solid man-'built like a tank and about as handsome,' Feinberg had said-asked Dickstein, 'You didn't tell us how come you're so sure the Coparelli will break down when you want her to.' 'Ah.' Dickstein sipped his coffee. 'Do you know Dieter Koch, in naval intelligence?' Feinberg knew him. 'Hes the Coparelli's engineer.' Abbas nodded. 'Which is also how come we know well be able to repair the Coparelli. We know what!s going to go wrong. ' 'Rtight.' Abbas went on. 'We paint out the name Coparelli, rename her Stromberg, switch log books, scuttle the old Stromberg and sail the Coparelli, now called the Stromberg, to Haifa with the cargo. But why not transfer the cargo from one ship to the other at sea? We have cranes.' 'That was my original idea,' Dickstein said. 'It was too risky. I couldn!t guarantee it would be possible, especially in bad weather.' 'We could still do it if the good weather holds.' 'Yes, but now that we have identical sister ships it will be easier to switch names than cargoes.' Ish said lugubriously, 'Anyway, the good weather won't hold.' The fourth man at the table was Porush, a crewcut youngster with a chest Me a barrel of ale, who happened to be married to Abbas's sister. He said, 'If it's going to be so easy, what are all of us tough guys doing herer' Dickstein said, 'I've been running around the world for the past six months setting up this thing. Once or twice rve bumped into people from the other side-inevitably. I don't think they know what we're about to do ... but if they do, we may find out just how tough we are.' One of the officers came in with a piece of paper and apProached Dickstein. 'Signal from Tel Aviv, sir. The Coparefli Just passed Gibraltar.- 'Thaes it,' said Dickstein, standing up. 'We sail in the Morning.'
Suza Ashford and Al Cortene changed planes in Rome and arrived in Sicily early in the morning. Two of Cortone's cousins were at the airport to meet him. There was a long argument between them; not acrimonious, but nevertheless loudly excitable. Suza could not follow the rapid dialect properly, but she gathered the cousins wanted to accompany Cortone and he was insisting that this was something he had to do alone because it was a debt of honor. Cortone seemed to win the argument. They left the airport, without the cousins, in a big white Fiat. Suza drove, Cortone directed her on to the coast road. For the hundredth time she played over in her mind the reunion scene with Nathaniel: she saw his slight, angular body; he looked up; he recognized her and his face split in a smile of joy; she ran to him; they threw their arms around each other-, be squeezed her so hard it hurt; she said, 'Oh, I love you,' and kissed his cheek, his nose, his mouth ... But she was guilty and frightened too, and there was another scene she played less often in which be stared at her stony-faced and said, 'Vhat the hell do you think you're doing here?' It was a little like the time she bad behaved badly on Christmas Eve, and her mother got angry
