The Heat of Ramadan, page 22
“Of course.” The girl smiled as she pecked at a keyboard. “Where are you coming from, please?”
“Rome, by way of Tel Aviv.”
“Your purpose?”
“Business.”
“For how long, please?”
“A week maybe.”
“And where will you stay?”
“I don’t know. Any suggestions?”
“Anything to declare?” The girl just continued her litany.
“Just myself.”
She smacked his passport with a metal stamper and grinned broadly. “There is a tourist help desk on the main floor. Willkommen und auf Wiedersehen.”
“Thank you.”
He was in. He took his bag and walked. He played the tune again in his head and tried very hard not to think about the last time he had been at Munich International. He was ready to bet his life that Kentworth Air had lost its operating license for German airspace.
There was a small Wechselstube window for rapid currency exchanges just next to a row of rental car desks vying for customers. Eckstein changed one hundred U.S. dollars for deutsche marks and went straight to Hertz, where he used a Bank Leumi VISA card and rented a red Opel Kadett compact wagon.
The car was delivered to him outside of the terminal. He threw his bag into the rear seat and drove almost to the last Ausgang sign at the airport outskirts. Then he cut back and parked it in a long-term lot. He took the bag, left the newspaper, locked the car and dropped the keys to the pavement, toeing them behind a wheel. He had no intention of using the Opel again. He had created his first dead lead.
He took the bus into town.
* * *
Munich was not the same city, although only a year and a half had passed. The images frozen in Eckstein’s memory were of snow-slickened streets under a purple-grey Bavarian sky, the sidewalk cafés empty of tourists and the Münchners shrouded in wool and leather, bent under the assaults of winter. Now it was midsummer and the city was bright, flowery and festive, full of playful foreigners who gave joy to their German hosts as they swilled thousands of Maas tankards of beer and happily surrendered their dollars and pounds and francs to this Bavarian Disneyland.
Eckstein’s first feeling was nearly disappointment, for he wished to be greeted with a proper gloom to match his mood of frustration and vilification. Yet as he passed over the Isar and saw the hundreds of nudists frolicking on its stony banks, he knew that he would always be schizophrenic when it came to the land of his birth. He hated Germany, and he loved it.
When he had worked as a team leader here, there had been occasional lulls in operations. Sometimes you simply had to wait for the next event, a move by the opposition, and you could visit the endless museums, take in a play or a concert, and even indulge your lust if you did so with care and anonymity.
But this time, Munich was like an old battlefield upon which some very bad things had transpired. It was a place you never wanted to visit again until you were too old to feel the pain, yet you suddenly realized that you’d dropped a precious family heirloom in the bloody earth and you had to go back and root it out.
Munich was the only place for him to begin again. If Amar Kamil was operational, there was one man in Munich who might know about it. This time it would be all business. No time to enjoy the city, the weather or the people. Eytan had planned every step in his head, and he would move so quickly that he would arrive and be gone like the Föhn—the dry wind from the Alps that gave everyone a brief, irritating headache and then disappeared in a wash of welcome rain.
He got off the bus outside the Hauptbahnhof and walked into the massive station, making one quick weaving pass through the thousands of travelers awaiting their trains. As he pushed through the throng, never looking behind him, he began to do something he had not done in a long, long time. He began to pray.
“Let it be there, God. Please. Just let it still be there.”
When you began training with AMAN, you were in awe of your instructors, expecting them to know everything and teach you every trick of the trade. But as you went along, you realized that your bosses were just humans. They learned from their mistakes and rarely made them twice, yet someone was always inventing a new, potentially fatal error.
Once in Argentina a nervous young Mossad agent had forgotten his cover name because it was not inexorably linked to his subconscious. That never happened again, as all the services revamped their cover policies, making sure that agents’ noms de guerre were organic and unforgettable. In Poland, an AMAN operative had once been completely strip-searched, revealing underwear manufactured in Ashkelon. Now, the closets of all Israeli agents were full of foreign-made clothes, devoid of even a cotton fiber that had been grown east of Cyprus.
These things were basic, yet the additional nuances were picked up along the way.
Zvi Pearlman had been an encyclopedia of such survival tips, sort of a professional guardian angel to Eytan’s Team. ‘Harry Webber’ had always warned Eytan about the fallibility of Headquarters. They could make mistakes, and you had to have your own secrets, your own reserves in case everything came apart on you. You had to have an insurance policy. Eytan hoped his policy was still in effect.
“Let it still be there.”
He walked out of the station and into the Bahnhofplatz. Crowds of tourists swarmed around him, chattering like conventioneers in Babel. At the corner of Schutzenstrasse, Schlammers was still there. Now, if only they had not renovated.
He walked straight for the café and pushed inside, past the crowded tables, his guts constricting as his suitcase banged against his knee. He went into the men’s room and waited for a customer to finish his business and leave the corner stall.
Eytan stepped in, locked the door and held his breath. The window looked the same. Maybe the frame was freshly painted, but the walls were still cracked and crumbly. He put his hands under the sill and felt along the slight separation between the wood and the lower wall.
His fingers stopped. He gripped, then pulled, and the laminated Deutschesbank card, along with the small key taped to it, popped out. He looked at it and then held it to his chest, raising his eyes to the ceiling and saying a silent Todah.
The Deutschesbank branch was just to the left of the Stachus. Eytan ignored the clusters of pretty girls perched around the huge fountain, and he did not hear the music of a brass quartet that encouraged the beer drinkers in the Karlsplatz. He marched into the bank and went straight back to the officers’ desks, holding out the customer card as he greeted a tall, slim German in a grey summer suit.
“Morgen,” Eytan said in a clipped, businesslike tone. “Ich würde gern mein Schliessfach sehen, bitte.”
“Ein Moment, bitte, Herr Eckhardt.” The officer took the card. He went to the file drawers and returned with a pained expression. “I am afraid the payments on your safe deposit are in arrears, sir.”
“Yes, but my box is still intact, I expect.”
“Natürlich.” The young officer snapped even more erect, as if offended by the suggestion that Deutschesbank might violate its own regulations.
“Wie viel?” Eckstein opened his wallet.
“Eighty marks, I’m afraid.”
Eckstein paid the sum without hesitation and he was led down a curved stairwell to a guarded vault. The young officer opened a small vestibule and offered Eytan a seat at a wooden desk. Then he returned with the steel box and left the room.
It was there. All of it. Five thousand marks in a sealed envelope, which Eytan divided and placed in three of his pockets. The brown paper package was untouched as well. He felt the familiar L shape of the Beretta inside, yet he did not open it. He put the package into a side pocket of his jacket. The final packet was the most important, for he could not go on stalking around Munich as an Israeli national. Nearly two years before, Eytan had taken all of his German papers—passport, driver’s license, military ID card—and paid 1,500 U.S. dollars to have them duplicated by an underground forger in Hamburg. The artist could not, of course, reproduce the infrared markings on the passport pages, but for everyday use and for leaving Germany, the document would suffice.
He stripped the packet, putting the smaller documents into his wallet and the German passport in the inside breast pocket of his jacket. He reached into his pants pocket and drew out a handful of pfennig coins, dropped them into the box and locked it. When he moved the heavy little safe, the coins made a sufficiently mysterious rattle. He wanted Deutschesbank to think he was making deposits rather than withdrawals.
He rang the buzzer to recall the young bank officer.
Back in the sunshine and the cacophony of the Karlsplatz, Eckstein felt considerably refreshed and optimistic. He did not hesitate, knowing exactly where he was going, with hardly a limp in his gait as he strode back the way he had come, into the Hauptbahnhof and through the pressing crowd. He took no evasive action, for if he were being “curiosity tailed”—as was sometimes the case when West German BND randomly selected an interesting foreigner—any movements that pegged him as a professional would cause his watchers to stick to him like bees on halva. He had no teammates to perform diversions for his sake, so he would save his best gambits for later.
He exited the station, walked straight up Seidlstrasse to the corner of Marsplatzstrasse. The medium-size, economy-class hotel called the Württemberger Hof was still at Number 5. At this time of the year there was hardly a room to be had in Munich, but the hotel had not earned its nickname Wursthaus for nothing. German businessmen frequently rented the rooms for one purpose only, and as their liaisons with their secretaries or girlfriends only lasted for an hour or so at lunchtime, a room could be had for the night if you knew what you were doing.
Eckstein maneuvered his bag through the front door into a cool, darkened lobby. The reception desk was to the left; a few padded chairs sat out on the dark maroon carpet around low glass tables. There was a small newsstand across the lobby, three stairs leading up to a coffee shop, a bank of elevators further on, and finally, another exit at the far end. Fine.
Three Japanese businessmen sat bobbing their heads at one another around one of the tables. Behind the main desk, a very large, bald Bavarian looked uncomfortable in a green uniform coat that hadn’t fit him for years. That was good. Eckstein could be bold and bawdy with this man. He walked up to the desk and grinned.
“Guten Tag. Ist heute nicht ein schöner Tag?”
“Guten Tag, mein Herr.” The clerk’s expression was already apologetic. “Ja, ein schöner Tag, aber . . .”
Eckstein passed quickly from the weather to business, knowing full well what the answer would be. “Haben Sie ein Einzelzimmer?”
“I am very sorry.” The fat man placed his hands together, begging forgiveness. “We have no singles. Nor doubles. We have nothing.”
“Ja. Natürlich,” said Eckstein without a hint of annoyance. He opened his wallet, looked around conspiratorially, and stuffed a fifty-mark note into the surprised clerk’s hands. “You know, I just need it for the night,” he whispered. “I’ll be out by morning.” He pointed to an empty chair in the lobby. “I’ll just be over there. Let me know when someone’s finished fucking.”
He winked and walked away, leaving the stunned German staring after him. He carried his bag to the newsstand, bought a pack of Rothmans and a copy of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and took up his position. Within a quarter of an hour he had a room on the third floor.
He stayed in the room for less than ten minutes, hardly noticing the decor as he showered, washed his hair, and scrubbed off the nervous sweat from his travels. He realized that he had to get some fuel, soon, for he had been too edgy to eat on his flight. He dressed again in the same clothes, tie and all, left his suitcase on the bed and went shopping.
He walked back to the Stachus and through the arches of the Karlstor. The pedestrian way on Neuhauser was jammed with summer visitors. Musicians in Lederhosen oompahed for pfennig, and swarms of hungry Münchners and tourists laughed through the great swigs of “liquid bread.” To Eckstein, it was just backdrop.
In an apothecary he first bought a sewing kit. In a camping store, he acquired a short stainless-steel knife with a clip-on holster, and a black nylon knapsack. He found a German franchise of the American Gap and he nearly had to wrestle with a couple of pretty college students to get at a pair of black Levi’s.
Finally, he held his breath as he paid 280 marks for a black leather Alpine jacket. It had metal crossbuckles and a rich green lining, a stiff standing collar and it closed across the chest like a suit of armor. He suppressed the realization that it would only be usable on perhaps ten winter evenings in Jerusalem, and he would probably be too embarrassed to wear it there anyway.
At last, hauling a massive shopping bag that made his bad leg wobble, he bought a summer straw hat. He stopped, sweating like a sheepdog in Florida, at a small beer garden. With the hat plopped on the back of his head, he stood and ate a greasy Weisswurst, and he swore he could hear his stomach acids devouring it as he drowned the sound with a Reichelbräu in a glass tankard.
Now there was still something Eckstein needed, and he had no idea where to get it and no time for research. He waited for a short while, examining the crowd, until three young men drew abreast of him. They wore leather jackets, various pins and jewels in freshly acquired wounds, and their hair was violently spiked and colored. Eckstein stepped forward and boldly asked for advice.
He found the shop on the far side of the Promenade Platz, just north of the Frauenkirche. An odd assortment of students and harmless-looking punks were gathered near the descending stairwell.
There were ten chairs in the shop, and business was brisk, but Eckstein’s timing was lucky as one of the barbers snapped his filthy cover cloth and freed a young man who had just been shorn nearly to the skull. The boy stood up, looked in the mirror, rubbed his bristling scalp and said, “Ja! Das ist sehr schön!” His two friends laughed and pushed him as he tipped the barber.
Eckstein felt like a zebra at the Vienna Riding Academy, and certainly the clientele, who were all at least ten years his junior, did nothing to ease his discomfort. The girls giggled and the young men made unsubtle remarks, the word Grossvater repeated more than once. Eytan just smiled and made his way to the free chair.
The barber was past forty himself, yet he was dressed in accordance with the current fad, wearing black leather trousers and a torn sweatshirt. If his clientele had been aliens he would have rented a spacesuit.
“Entschuldigen Sie, mein Herr.” The barber stood away from the chair, shrugging and slightly embarrassed. “But I don’t think I can help you.” He clearly did not wish to be caught giving a regular haircut.
“Oh, I’m sure you can,” said Eckstein as he took the seat. “I want it short and punk, please.”
The barber remained frozen. “Pardon?”
“Yes.” Eckstein continued to smile. He leaned forward and stuffed his shopping bag under the mirrored counter. “You see, for ten years my wife has been asking me to change my style. ‘For God’s sake, Johann,’ she says. ‘I’m sick of that boring haircut. You want me to dress sexy?’ she says. ‘So I dress sexy. You want me to wear high heels, so I wear them.’” He was imitating his wife’s voice, a low, sexy, Bavarian drawl.
The barber had begun to smile, understanding his growing role in the conspiracy.
“So, I say,” Eckstein pounded the armrest, “let’s give her what she wants!”
“Ja!” A girl with high blue spikes on her head blurted from one of the chairs. “Give her what she wants!”
“Ja!” A young man joined in. “Gib es ihr!” His friends growled with the double entendre.
“So?” Eckstein said.
“So?” The barber picked up a pair of electric shears as he closed in with a laugh. “Short and punk?”
“And blond.”
“You are already fairly blond.”
“Blonder,” said Eckstein, and he closed his eyes and settled in for the ride.
* * *
He walked back into the Württemberger Hof with his straw hat pulled low over his head, and he went straight into an elevator and up to his room. He locked and bolted the door, checked the closets and bathroom out of habit. Then he stripped out of his clothes and emptied all of his pockets, arranging his documents on the brown coverlet of the bed.
He dumped the contents of his shopping bag and opened the new Alpine jacket, laying it out on the floor like a freshly hunted carcass for the skinning. With the short steel knife, he slit open the green lining, fifteen centimeters near the zipper at the bottom left flap of the jacket. He took his Israeli passport, identity card, driver’s license and his only shekel notes, sealed them in a hotel envelope and slipped them into the lining. He double-stitched the wound with green thread from the sewing kit.
He pulled a black T-shirt from his suitcase and cut three gashes in it across the chest. He also removed a pair of black Adidas sneakers and a pair of metal-framed Ray Bans.
Five minutes later he stood before the tall mirror on the bathroom door.
His reflection was ominous, black from sneakers to jeans to jacket. His spiked blond hair stood out against his Jerusalem tan, and with the sunglasses on he reminded himself of a character from a Mel Gibson film, the name of which he could not remember.
His marks and his German passport and papers found homes in the various pockets of his new costume. His straw hat, denuded wallet and newspapers were closed in a plastic laundry bag which he stuffed under the bed. He estimated that no one would clean under there for at least a week.
He emptied his suitcase, refolded his meager wardrobe, and filled the knapsack. There was enough of him in there to switch identities back—if he could find some hair dye at the appropriate juncture. The empty case fit nicely into a lonely corner of the single closet.
