By now the sun was fiercely bright and the heat and humidity smothered them like a woollen blanket dipped in hot water.
They sought the shade of the takamaka gratefully, and sat close together on the sand staring out across the unruffled waters of the lagoon to the silhouette of the main island, five miles away. At this range and angle there was no sign of the buildings nor of the jetty,
and Peter had an illusion of the primeval paradise with the two of them the first man and woman on a fresh and innocent earth.
Magda’s next words dispelled that illusion entirely.
“Who ordered you to kill me, Peter? How was the command given? I
must know that before I tell you about myself.”
“Nobody,“he answered.
“Nobody? There was no message like the one you received ordering you to kill Parker?”
“No.”
“Parker himself or Colin Noble? They did not order you to do it or suggest it?”
“Parker expressly ordered me not to do it. You were not to be touched until you could be taken in jeopardy.”
“It was your own decision?” she insisted.
“It was my duty.”
“To avenge your daughter?” He hesitated, would have qualified it, then nodded with total self-honesty. “Yes, that was the most part of it, Melissa-Jane, but I saw it also as my duty to destroy anything evil enough to envisage the taking of 070, the abduction of Aaron Altmann and the mutilation of my daughter.”
“Caliph knows about us. Understands us better than we understand ourselves. I
am not a coward, Peter, but now I am truly afraid.”
“Fear is the tool of his trade,” Peter agreed, and she moved slightly, inviting physical contact. He placed one arm about her bare brown shoulders and she leaned lightly against him.
“All that you told me last night was the truth, only the inferences and conclusions were false. Papa’s death, the lonely years with strangers as foster-parents of that period my clearest memories are of lying awake at night and trying to muffle the sound of my weeping with a false blanket. The return to Poland, yes, that was right, and the Odessa school all of that. I will tell you about
Odessa one day, if you truly want to hear it ?”
“I don’t think I do,
he said.
“Perhaps you are wise; do you want to hear about the return to
Paris?”
“Only what is necessary.”
“All right, Peter. There were men.
That was what I had been selected and trained for. Yes, there were men-” She broke Off, and reached up to take his face between her hands,
turning it so she could look into his eyes. “Does that make a difference between us, Peter?”
“I love you, “he replied firmly.
She stared into his eyes for a long time looking for evidence of deceit, and then when she found none, “Yes. It is so. You really mean that.” She sighed with relief and laid her head against his shoulder,
speaking quietly with just that intriguing touch of accent and the occasional unusual turn of phrase.
“I did not like the men, either, Peter. I think that was why I
chose Aaron Altmann. One man, yes I could still respect myself-” She shrugged lightly. “I chose Aaron, and Moscow agreed. It was, as you said, delicate work. First I had to win his respect. He had never respected a woman before. I proved to him I was as good as any man, at any task he wished to set me. After I had his respect, all else followed-” She paused and chuckled softly. Life plays naughty tricks.
I found firstly that I liked him, then I grew to respect him also. He was a great ugly bull of a man, but the power … A huge raw power,
like some cosmic force, became the centre of my existence.” She lifted her head to touch Peter’s cheek with her lips in reassurance. “No.
Peter, I never came to love him. I never loved before you. But I
stood in vast awe of him, like a member of a primitive tribe worships the lightning and the thunder. It was like that. He dominated my existence more than a father, more than a teacher, as much as a god but less, very much less than a lover. He was crude and strong. He did not make love, he could only rut and tup like the bull he was.” She broke off and looked seriously at him. “Do you understand that, Peter?
Perhaps I explained it badly?” No,” he assured her. “You explained it very well.”
“Physically he did not move me, his smell and the hairiness. He had hair on his shoulders and like a pelt down his back.
His belly was bulging and hard as iron-” She shivered briefly. ” But I had been trained to be able to ignore that. To switch off something in the front of my brain.
Yet in all other ways he fascinated me. He goaded me to think forbidden thoughts, to open vaults of my mind that my training had securely locked. All right, he taught me about power and its trappings. You accused me of that, Peter, and I admit it. The flavour of power and money was to my taste. I like it. I like it very much indeed. Aaron introduced me to that. He showed me how to appreciate fine and beautiful things, for he was only physically a bull and he had a wonderful appreciation of the refinements of life he made me come completely alive. Then he laughed at me. God, I can still hear the bellow of his laughter, and see that great hairy belly shaking with it.” She paused to remember it, almost reverently, and then she chuckled her own husky little laugh.
“My fine little communist lady,”” he mocked me. “Yes, Peter, it was I who was deceived, he had known from the beginning who I was. He also knew about the school at Odessa. He had accepted me as a challenge, certainly he loved me or his version of love, but he took me knowingly and corrupted my pure ideological convictions. Only then did I learn that all the information which I had been able to pass to
Moscow had been carefully screened by Aaron.
He doubled me, as I had been sent to double him. He was Mossad,
but of course you know that. He was a Zionist, you know that also.
And he made me realize that I was a Jewess, and what it meant to be that. He showed me every fatal flaw in the doctrine of Universal
Communism, he convinced me of democracy and the Western Capitalist system and then he recruited me to Mossad-” She stopped again, and shook her head vehemently.
To believe that I could have wished to destroy such a one. That I
could have ordered his abduction and mutilation Towards the end, when he was getting weak, when the pain was very bad, that was the closest
I
ever came to loving him, the way a mother loves a child. He became pathetically dependent upon me; he used to say the only thing that could lull the pain was my touch. I used to sit for hours rubbing that hairy belly feeling that awful thing growing bigger inside him each day, like a cauliflower or a grotesque foetus. He would not let them cut it. He hated them, “butchers” he called them. “Butchers with their knives and rubber tubes ”” She broke off and Peter realized that her eyes were filled with tears. He hugged her a little more firmly and waited for her to recover.
“It must have been about this time that Caliph made contact with
Aaron. Thinking back I can remember the time when he became suddenly terribly agitated. It made little sense to me then, but he held long diatribes about right-wing tyranny being indistinguishable from tyranny of the left. He never mentioned the name Caliph, I do not think Caliph had yet used that name and I do believe that Aaron would eventually have told me of the contact if he had lived. It was -the way e was,
even with in detail, me, he could be as wary and subtle as he could be overpowering. He would have told me of Caliph but Caliph saw to it that he did not.” She pulled away from Peter’s arms so she could again see his face.
“You must understand, cheri, that much of this I have learned only recently in the last few weeks. Much of it I
