Part 24 (1/2)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.

As Harland moved towards Immigration at Beirut, acutely conscious that he would benefit from a shave, haircut and a new set of clothes, he noticed a group of three men standing a little way off from the visa counter. One nudged the other two to look in his direction.

Instead of making for the counter, he arrived in front of them and dropped his bag. 'h.e.l.lo there,' he said pleasantly. 'Tell me, are you Syrian or Lebanese intelligence?'

The men s.h.i.+fted and pretended not to understand.

'I was hoping one of you could give me a ride into town.' He searched their faces expectantly. 'No takers? Oh well. Just in case you're wondering, I'm with the United Nations. Robert Harland, Special Adviser to Secretary-General Benjamin Jaidi.' He opened his pa.s.sport and offered it to them. They looked the other way and began to walk off, one flicking worry beads, the other two finding the need to consult their cell phones.

He moved to the kiosk to pay his twenty-five dollars for the visa, then to the counter where his pa.s.sport received a little stamp showing a sailing barque. Finally he pa.s.sed through Immigration and Customs and made for the taxi rank, where a shabby Mercedes waited in the warm summer night.

Both Benjamin Jaidi and Sir Robin Teckman had told him to go to Beirut and, most importantly, it was the only place Eva Rath would agree to meet him when he phoned the number Teckman had given him. The reaction of his vanished partner had been surprising: she offered neither an expression of astonishment about his finding her, nor remorse for her disappearance, but simply forbade him to visit the apartment block in Shabazi Street, Tel Aviv, where she now lived with her mother. She had told him that Hanna Rath was now in her last weeks and she would not stand for Harland disturbing her peaceful end.

As the Mercedes b.u.mped through the vast new developments in the central district that had risen on the ruins of Beirut's civil war, Harland found he was curiously at ease with the situation. The pain of her rejection of him had in the last week or so miraculously ebbed away. He was now concerned only with getting answers about her behaviour. Of course he now understood she must have left to look after her mother, who as one of the few Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in the Czech Republic, had presumably gone to Israel to die. But there were other aspects of Eva's departure which Teckman had told him about. SIS was certain that she was working for Mossad in a capacity requiring her to move between London, New York and Tel Aviv, possibly as a courier. Having been trained by StB, the security services in communist Czechoslovakia, then by the KGB spy school, Eva would have interested Mossad high command. Harland imagined she must have done a deal that allowed her mother to live the remainder of her days in Tel Aviv with medical a.s.sistance, in exchange for Eva's talents as a spy. It was unsurprising to him. If he'd been asked to describe the unseen parts of his lover, the first would be her need to deceive, the second was her habit of placing herself beyond control by vanis.h.i.+ng, and the third was the unbreakable bond with her mother, Hanna. These were to a very large degree the drives of Eva Rath, although the things that had attracted him when he was barely twenty were her nimble intelligence and startling, intimate beauty.

Why hadn't she told him? Why not explain? She could never reasonably have doubted his devotion to her. It had spanned nearly three decades and, even in the long period when their son Tomas was growing up and he had no idea of his existence or where she was, he had still nursed his love for her.

But now, as he thought of her, he felt strangely unburdened. He was amused by things, which quite apart from anything else accounted for his twitting the graveyard s.h.i.+ft of intelligence officers at the airport, usually an unwise move.

He arrived at the Playlands Hotel - specified by Eva and suggested by Teckman - and checked in. There were no messages for him and he tramped off to his bedroom in the southern wing of the hotel where he poured two miniatures from the fridge into a gla.s.s and took it into the shower. Fifteen minutes later he was standing on the balcony letting his hair dry in the sea breeze, when there was a knock at the door. He opened it to Eva, who stood in the corridor with a tight, drained smile. He instinctively bent down, took her by the shoulders and let his lips skate across each of her cheeks.

'You'd better come in,' he said.

She circled a finger in the air, which he took to mean that the room was probably bugged, and they walked through to the balcony.

'Where the h.e.l.l did you go?' he said, unable to hide the anger of fifteen months. This was not how he'd planned it.

'Bobby, don't start...'

'Don't start! I thought you were dead. I searched everywhere. You just walked out with no explanation, no idea of the hurt you caused me or the effort I would put into finding you.'

'I knew you would eventually.'

'I didn't - Teckman did. You remember him?'

'Of course. I worked for them, like you, Bobby.'

He shook his head, wondering at his own earlier nonchalance about seeing her.

'Then why not tell me in the first place? You only had to explain about your mother. I'd have understood.' He examined her in the light from the illuminated swimming pool beneath them. Her hair was much shorter and as yet unflecked with grey. She was using less make-up than before and had put on a pound or two that showed in her cheeks. If anything, it made her look younger. 'You look good,' he said quietly. 'Really, a lot better than you did in New York.' He stopped, studied her, then exploded. 'Jesus. . . are you incapable of understanding what I felt for you?'

'And you?' she asked, calmly turning towards the sea. 'Did it occur to you to ask what I was going through in New York?'

'But I did. I tried to talk about Tomas with you. You said so little that I thought you... Look, I tried. You know that.'

'I knew no one. Only you. You were the one person who knew what I had been through. I had no other witness to my life in New York. Do you understand what I mean? No one who knew that I'd lost Tomas and what that meant to me.' She stopped. 'It was never going to work, Bobby. Never. We... our love...'

'Was overwhelmed by circ.u.mstances,' he said.

She grimaced. 'Yes, if you want to put it that way. But it was also destroyed by you, Bobby. You didn't know how to talk to me. Maybe that's because there was an inequality between us. I lost my son; you hardly knew yours. He was an acquaintance for a few weeks. That's all.' Her jaw clamped shut and her eyes welled with tears.

He touched her on the shoulder. 'It's okay,' he said.

'No it isn't!' she hissed, recoiling from him. 'That's the point. It's not okay. I'm not English. I have to be able to talk about this and be with someone who understands what his death means to me now - today. It doesn't go, you know. It doesn't just end like that.'

'I'm sorry,' he said, moved by the pain flaring in her eyes. 'I admit this is a failing of mine, but I wasn't responsible for his death. I did everything to try to save him.' He paused. 'And you know if you and your mother had not been so close to Viktor Lipnik, Tomas would never have seen the things he did in Bosnia. He wouldn't have been a danger to Lipnik. It was Viktor Lipnik - your lover - not I, who killed Tomas...'

'Don't!' she said. A pa.s.sionate hatred pa.s.sed across her face. Without looking down, she felt for the arm of the metal chair and sat at the table.

'I'd like some vodka if you have some.' This was unlike her. He had only ever seen her drink wine. He went to the minibar, resolving to be calm.

When he returned with the drinks, he laid his hand on the table near hers. 'Eva, I'd have done anything to keep you with me. Anything. You knew how much I loved you. You should have helped me, shown me how to talk and listen to you.'

'You can't tell a man this. Either he knows or he doesn't know. You don't, Bobby. That's why I stopped loving you.' She paused to consider this. 'No, that's not true. I didn't stop loving you. There are many parts of you that are wonderful; it was just that my love for you was not deep enough to tolerate the way you were ignoring me.'

The self-evident truth of this stung Harland. That was exactly why she had left. She hadn't told him because she had been hurt and resented him.

'Christ, I'm sorry,' he said. 'Really, I don't know how to make it-'

'It's no use. You are what you are. I know why you're like this. You went through a lot when you were tortured, and with your cancer. That's why you're so bad at talking. You should have seen someone at the time. It's gone so deep.'

'I did. But that wasn't the reason I was so bad with you. I didn't know what to say. You erected a pretty impenetrable wall. You know that.'

'Yes,' she said, her head nodding in agreement. 'I know.'

They drank in silence, then he asked about her mother.

'She has cancer. It moves very slowly, but each day she is reduced in some way. The doctors are very good and we have two nurses who stay at the apartment, so I can leave when it's necessary. They have been good to...' She stopped when her voice cracked.

'It's very distressing - your only living relative.'

'I find that the strangest part,' she said, moving her head from side to side so that the sea breeze reached her neck.

Harland nodded. 'Well, you have my sympathy. I do understand what she means to you.'

She nodded thanks, lit a cigarette and looked at him more softly. 'Why are you in the Middle East?'

'Trying to hook up with Jaidi. They were due here yesterday but they aren't leaving Damascus until tomorrow.'

'Teckman called me before you. Did you know that?'

'So you wouldn't be caught on the hop,' he said. 'That was the right thing to do.'

'But this is not the first time you've been in the Middle East this year, is it? We heard that the UN talked to Hamas three months ago. Was that you?'

He shrugged. 'If I was talking to Hamas, I couldn't tell you about it, Eva.'

'I didn't say talking - present tense. I said talked.'