The Little Drummer Girl

author of Smiley's People

"He's a normal Young man, this Yanuka," Lenny pleaded earnestly. "Tradesmen admire him. Friends admire him. That's a likable, popular person, Marty. Studies, likes to enjoy himself, talks a lot; he's a serious fellow with healthy appetites." Catching Kurtz's eye, he became a little foolish: "Now and then, it's hard to believe in this other side to him, Marty; trust me.

Kurtz assured Lenny that he fully understood. Then, over crackers, cheese and tea, the three professional static watchers gave Kurtz the full tour of Yanuka's lifestyle, quite disregarding the fact that for weeks now, Kurtz had been sharing every small sensation as it arose: Yanuka's phone calls in and out, his latest visitors, his latest girls. Lenny was bighearted and kind but a little shy of people he was not observing. He had wide ears and an ugly, overfeatured face, and perhaps that was why he kept it from the hard gaze of the world. He wore a big gray knitted waistcoat, like chain mail. In other circumstances, Kurtz could tire of detail very quickly, but he respected Lenny and paid the closest attention to everything he said, nodding, congratulating, making all the right expressions for him. Lace curtains hung across the window of the high-gabled gingerbread house right at the heart of fashionable Munich. It was dusk in the street and dusk in the flat also, and the place was pervaded with an air of sad neglect. An array of electronic and optical devices was crowded among the fake Biedermeier furniture, including indoor aerials of varying designs. But in the failing light, their spectral shapes only added to the mood of bereavement.

"Want to take a look, Marty?" Lenny suggested hopefully. "I can see by Joshua's smile there that he has a very nice perception of Yanuka tonight. Wait too long, he'll draw the curtain on us. What do you see, Joshua? Is Yanuka all dolled up for going out tonight? Who does he speak to on the telephone? A girl, for certain."

Gently pushing Joshua aside, Kurtz ducked his big head to the binoculars. And he remained a long time that way, hunched like an old sea dog in a storm, hardly seeming to breathe, while he studied Yanuka, the half-grown suckling.

"See his books there in the background?" Lenny asked. "That boy reads like my father."

"You have a fine boy there," Kurtz agreed finally, with his iron-hard smile, as he slowly straightened himself. "A good-looking kid, no question." Picking his gray raincoat from the chair, he selected a sleeve and pulled it tenderly over his arm. "Just be sure you don't marry him to your daughter. The next thing you know, she'll be planting bombs for him or his big brother."

Lenny looked even more foolish than before, but Kurtz was quick to console him: "We should be thankful to you, Lenny. And so we are, no question."

Having shaken hands with each man in turn, Kurtz added an old blue beret to his costume and, thus shielded against the bustle of the rush hour, strode vigorously into the street.

•

The baby of Kurtz's hastily assembled Munich team was Oded, a 23-year-old graduate of the prestigious Sayeret. The grandfather was a 70-year-old Georgian named Bougaschwili--Schwili for short. Schwili had a polished bald head and stooped shoulders and trousers cut for a clown--very low in the crotch and short in the leg. A black homburg hat, worn indoors as much as out, topped the quaint confection. Schwili had begun life as a smuggler and a confidence trickster, trades not uncommon in his home region, but in middle life, he had turned his trade to forgery of all kinds.

It was raining as they picked Kurtz up in the van again, and as the three of them drove from one glum spot to another, killing time before Kurtz's plane, the weather seemed to affect all three of them with its somber mood. Oded was doing the driving, and his bearded young face, by the passing lights, revealed a sullen anger.

"What's Yanuka got now?" Kurtz asked, though he must have known the answer.

"His latest is a rich man's BMW," Oded replied. "Power steering, fuel injection, five thousand kilometers on the clock. Cars are his weakness."

"Hired again?" Kurtz asked.

"Hired."

"Stay close to that car," Kurtz advised. "The moment he hands back his car to the rental company and doesn't take another one, that's the moment we have to know about immediately." They had heard this till they were deaf from it. They had heard it before they ever left Jerusalem. Kurtz repeated it nonetheless: "Most important is when Yanuka turns his car in."

Suddenly, Oded had had enough. Perhaps he was by youth and temperament more prone to stress than his selectors had appreciated. Perhaps, as such a young fellow, he should not have been given a job that needed so much waiting. Pulling up the van at the curbside, he yanked on the hand brake so hard he all but wrenched it from its socket.

"Why do we let him go through with this?" he demanded. "Why play games with him? What if he goes back home and doesn't come out again? Then what?"

"Then we lose him."

"So let's kill him now! Tonight. You give me the order, it's done!"

Kurtz let him rave on.

"We've got the apartment opposite, haven't we? Put a rocket across the road. We've done it before. An RPG-seven--Arab kills Arab with a Russian rocket--why not?"

Kurtz still said nothing. Oded might have been storming at a sphinx.

"So why not?" Oded repeated, very loud.

Kurtz did not spare him, but neither did he lose his patience: "Because he doesn't yet lead to his brother, Oded; that's why."

They drove Kurtz to the Olympic Village, to one of the dark underground car parks there, a favorite haunt for muggers and prostitutes of both sexes. The village is not a village at all, of course, but a marooned and disintegrating citadel of gray concrete, more reminiscent of an Israeli settlement than anything that can be found in Bavaria. From one of its vast subterranean car parks, they ushered him up a filthy staircase smeared with multilingual graffiti, across small roof gardens to a duplex apartment that they had taken, partly furnished, on a short let. Outdoors, they spoke English and called him sir, but indoors, they addressed their chief as Marty and spoke respectfully to him in Hebrew.

The apartment was at the top of a corner building and was filled with odd bits of photographic lighting and portentous cameras on stands. At its back on the south side was a spare bedroom four meters by three and a half, with a skylight let into the rake of the roof, which, as they carefully explained to him, they had covered first with blanket, then with hardboard, then with several inches of kapok wadding held in place with diamonds of black tape. Walls, floor and ceiling were similarly padded, and the result resembled a mix of a modern priest hole and a madman's cell. The door to it they had discreetly reinforced with painted steel sheeting and had built into it a small area of armored glass at head height, of several thicknesses, over which they had hung a cardboard notice saying Darkroom Keep Out and, underneath, Dunkelkammer Kein Eintritt! Kurtz made one of them enter this little room, close the door and yell as loud as he could. Hearing only a hoarse, scratching sound, he gave his contented approval.

•

Of the kidnaping, little need be said. With an experienced team, such things happen fast and almost ritualistically these days, or not at all. Only the potential scale of the catch gave it its nervy quality. There was no messy shooting or unpleasantness, just a straight appropriation of one wine-red Mercedes and its occupant, the driver, some 30 kilometers on the Greek side of the Turkish-Greek border. Shimon Litvak commanded the field team, and, as always in the field, he was excellent.

Oded, having duly reported the return of the hired car with no substitute in sight, followed Yanuka to the airport; and, sure enough, the next anyone heard of him was three days later in Beirut, when an audio crew operating from a cellar in the Palestinian quarter picked up his cheerful voice saying hullo to his sister Fatmeh, who worked at one of the revolutionary offices. He was in town for a couple of weeks to visit friends, he said; did she have an evening free? He sounded really happy, they reported: headlong, excited, passionate. Fatmeh, however, was cool. Either her approval of him was lukewarm, they said, or she knew her phone was tapped. Maybe both. In either case, brother and sister failed to meet.

He was picked up again when he arrived by air in Istanbul, where he checked into the Hilton on a Cypriot diplomatic passport and for two days gave himself to the religious and secular pleasures of the town. The followers described him as taking one last good draft of Islam before returning to the Christian commons of Europe. He visited the mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent, where he was seen to pray no fewer than three times, and afterward had his Gucci shoes polished once on the grassy promenade that runs beside the South Wall.

But his most devout concentration was reserved for the mosaic of Augustine and Constantine presenting their church and city to the Virgin Mary, for that was where he made his clandestine connection: with a tall, unhurried man in a windbreaker, who at once became his guide. Until then, Yanuka had resolutely refused such offers, but something this man said to him--added, no doubt, to the place and time of his approach--persuaded him immediately. Side by side, they made a second, cursory tour of the interior, dutifully admired the early unsupported dome, then drove together along the Bosporus in an old American Plymouth till they came to a car park close to the Ankara highway. The Plymouth drove off, Yanuka was once more alone in the world--but this time as owner of a fine red Mercedes, which he calmly took back to the Hilton and registered with the concierge as his own.

Yanuka did not go out on the town that night--not even to watch the celebrated belly dancers of the Kervansaray, who had so enchanted him the night before--and the next sighting of him was very early the following day, as he set off westward on the dead straight undulating road that leads over the plains toward Edirne and Ipsala. On such a road, the followers had no choice but to ride him astride, as it is called, with one car far out ahead and another far behind, hoping to God he would not plunge into some unmarked side turning, which he was quite capable of doing. But the deserted nature of the place gave them no option, for the only signs of life for miles at a time were tented gypsies and young shepherds. Reaching Ipsala, he fooled everybody by preferring the right fork into town instead of continuing to the border. Was he going to hand over the car? God forbid! Then what the hell did he want in a stinking little Turkish border town?

The answer was God. In an undistinguished mosque in the main square, at the very edge of Christendom, Yanuka once more commended himself to Allah--which, as Litvak said grimly afterward, was wise of him. Emerging, he was bitten by a small brown dog, which escaped before he could retaliate. That, too, was seen to be an omen.

Finally, to everyone's relief, he returned (continued on page 88) Little Drummer Girl (continued from page 80) to the main road. The frontier crossing there is a hostile little place. Turk and Greek do not meet easily. The area is mined indiscriminately on both sides; terrorists and contrabandiers of all kinds have their illegal routes and purposes; shootings are common and are seldom spoken of. A sign on the Turkish side says Have A Good Trip in English, but there is no kind word for departing Greeks. First come the Turkish insignia, mounted on a military board; next, a bridge over slack green water; next, a nervous little queue for the Turkish emigration formalities, which Yanuka tried to bypass on the strength of his diplomatic passport--and, indeed, succeeded in doing, thus hastening his own destruction. Next, sandwiched between the Turkish police station and the Greek sentries, comes a no man's land of 20 yards or so, where Yanuka bought himself a bottle of duty-free vodka and ate an ice cream in the café, watched by a dreamy-looking, long-haired lad called Reuven, who had been eating buns there for the past three hours. The final Turkish flourish is a great bronze bust of Atatürk, the visionary and decadent, glowering into the hostile Greek plains. As soon as Yanuka had passed it, Reuven hopped onto his motorcycle and transmitted a five-dot signal to Litvak, who was waiting 30 kilometers inside the Greek border--but outside the military area--at a point where traffic had to slow to a walking pace because of construction work. He then hurried to join the fun.

They used a girl, which was common sense, considering Yanuka's proved appetites, and they gave her a guitar; which was a nice touch, because these days, a guitar legitimizes a girl even if she can't play it. A guitar is the uniform of a certain soulful peaceability, as their recent observations in another quarter had reminded them. They wavered about whether to use a blonde girl or a brunette, knowing his preference for blondes but aware also that he was always ready to make an exception. In the end, they came down in favor of the dark girl on the grounds that she had the better backside and the saucier walk, and they posted her where the road works ended. The road works were a godsend. They believed that. Some of them even believed that God--the Jewish one--rather than Kurtz or Litvak, was masterminding their entire luck.

First there was tarmac; then, without warning, there was coarse blue chipping the size of golf balls but a lot more jagged. Then came the wooden ramp with yellow scarecrow lights blipping along it, speed limit ten kilometers and only a madman would have done more. Then came the girl the other side of the ramp, plodding along the pedestrian walkway. Keep moving just as you are, they said; don't tart around, but trail your left thumb. Their only real worry was that because the girl was so pretty, she might hole up with the wrong man before Yanuka appeared to claim her. A particularly helpful feature of the spot was the way the sparse traffic was separated by a temporary divide. There was about a 50-yard wasteland between the eastbound and westbound lanes, with builders' huts and tractors and every kind of junk spread over it. They could have hidden an entire regiment in there without a soul being the wiser. Not that they were a regiment. The team was seven strong, including Litvak and the decoy girl. The five others were lightly dressed kids in summer rig and track shoes, the sort who can stand about all day staring at their fingernails with no one ever asking why they don't speak--then flash into action like pike before returning to their lethargic contemplations.

The time was by now midmorning; the sun was high, the air dusty. The rest of the traffic consisted of gray lorries laden with some kind of lime or clay. The polished, wine-red Mercedes--not new but handsome enough--stood out in such company like a wedding car sandwiched between rubbish trucks. It hit the blue chip at 30 kilometers an hour, which was too fast, then braked as the rocks started popping against the underbody. It mounted the ramp at 20, slowing to 15, then ten; and as it passed the girl, everybody saw Yanuka's head turn to check whether the front of her was as good as the back. It was. He drove for another 50 yards till he reached the tarmac, and for a bad moment, Litvak was convinced he would have to invoke the fallback plan, a more elaborate affair that involved a second team and a faked road accident 100 kilometers on. But lust or nature or whatever it is that makes fools of us had its way. Yanuka pulled up and lowered his electric window, poked out his handsome young head and, full of life's fun, watched the girl walk luxuriously toward him through the sunlight. As she drew alongside, he inquired of her whether she intended to walk all the way to California. She replied, also in English, that she was heading "kind of vaguely" for Salonica--was he? According to the girl, he replied, "As vaguely as you like," but no one else heard him, and it was one of those things that are always disputed after an operation. Her eyes--her features altogether--were really most alluring, and her slow, enticing motion claimed his complete attention. What more could a good Arab boy ask after two weeks of austere political retraining in the southern hills of Lebanon than this beguiling jeans-clad vision from the harem?

It must be added that Yanuka was slim and extremely dashing in appearance, with fine Semitic looks that matched her own, and that there was an infectious gaiety about him. Consequently, a mutual scenting resulted of the kind that can take place instantly between two physically attractive people, where they actually seem to share a mirror image of themselves making love. The girl set down her guitar and, true to orders, wriggled her way out of her rucksack and dumped it gratefully on the ground. The effect of this gesture of undressing, Litvak had argued, would be to force Yanuka to do one of two things: either to open the back door from inside or else to get out of the car and unlock the boot from outside. In either case, he would lay himself open to attack. In some Mercedes models, of course, the boot lock can be operated from inside. Not in this one. Litvak knew that. Just as he knew for certain that the boot was locked and that there was no point in offering him the girl on the Turkish side of the border, because--however good his papers might be, and they were good--Yanuka would not be stupid enough to compound the risk of a frontier crossing by taking aboard unattested lumber.

In the event, he selected the course they had all voted most desirable. Instead of simply reaching back an arm and unlocking one door manually, which he could have done, he chose, perhaps in order to impress, to operate the central locking device, thereby releasing not one but all four doors together. The girl opened the rear door nearest her and, remaining outside, shoved her rucksack and guitar onto the back seat. By the time she had closed the door again and started on her languid journey toward the front, as if to sit beside him in the passenger seat, one man had a pistol to Yanuka's temple while Litvak himself, looking his most frail, was kneeling on the back seat, holding Yanuka's head from behind in a most murderous and well-informed grip while he administered the drug that, as he had been earnestly assured, was the best suited to Yanuka's medical record; there had been worry about his asthma in adolescence.

The thing that struck everyone afterward was the soundlessness of the operation. Even while he waited for the drug to take its effect, Litvak distinctly heard the snap of a pair of sunglasses above the rumpus of the passing traffic and, for a dreadful moment, feared it was Yanuka's neck, which would have ruined everything. At first, they thought he had somehow contrived to forget or shed the false-number plates and papers for his onward journey, till they found them, to their pleasure, neatly fitted into his smart black grip under several (continued on page 146) Little Drummer Girl (continued from page 88) handmade silk shirts and flashy ties.

Another glory of the operation--not of anyone's devising but Yanuka's--was that the target car had heavily smoked windows to prevent the common people from seeing what went on inside. This was the first of many instances of the way in which Yanuka became the victim of his own plush life-style. To spirit the car west and then southward after this was no headache; they could probably have driven it quite normally without a soul noticing. But for safety's sake, they had hired a lorry purportedly conveying bees to a new home. There is quite a trade in bees in that region, Litvak reasoned sensibly, and even the most inquisitive policeman thinks twice before intruding upon their privacy.

The only really unforeseen element was the dogbite: What if the brute had rabies? Somewhere, they bought some serum and injected him just in case.

•

With Yanuka temporarily removed from society, the vital thing was to make sure nobody, in Beirut or anywhere else, noticed the gap. They knew already that he was of an independent and carefree nature. They knew he made a cult of doing the illogical thing, that he was celebrated for altering his plans from one second to the next, partly on a whim and partly because he believed, with reason, that that was the best way to confuse his trail. They knew of his recently acquired passion for things Greek and of his proven habit of chasing off in search of antiquities while in transit. On his last run, he had gone as far south as Epidaurus without so much as a by your leave from anyone--a great arc, right off his route, for no known reason. Those random practices had, in the past, rendered him extremely hard to catch. Used against him, as now, he was, in Litvak's cool judgment, unsavable, for his own side could keep no better check on him than his enemies. The team seized him and wafted him from view. The team waited. And in all the places where it was able to listen, not one alarm bell rang; there was not a whisper of unease. If Yanuka's masters had a vision of him at all, Litvak cautiously concluded, then it was of a young man in his prime of mind and body, gone off in search of life and--who knows?--new soldiers for the cause.

•

"You have six days with Yanuka, maximum," Kurtz had warned his two interrogators. "After six days, your errors will be permanent, and so will his."

It was a job after Kurtz's heart. If he could have been in three places at once rather than merely two, he would have kept it to himself, but he couldn't, so he chose as his proxies these two heavy-bodied specialists in the soft approach, famous for their muted histrionic talents and a joint air of lugubrious good nature. They were not related, nor, so far as anybody knew, were they lovers, but they had worked in unison for so long that their befriending features gave a sense of duplication.

At first, Kurtz had treated them harshly, because he envied them and was of a mood to regard delegation as defeat. He had given them only an inkling of the operation, then ordered them to study Yanuka's file and not report to him again until they knew it inside out. When they had returned too quickly for his liking, he had grilled them like an interrogator himself, snapping questions at them about Yanuka's childhood, his lifestyle, his behavior patterns--anything to ruffle them. They were word-perfect. So, grudgingly, he had called in his literacy committee, consisting of Miss Bach, the poet Leon and old Schwili, who in the intervening weeks had pooled their eccentricities and turned themselves into a neatly interlocking team. Kurtz's briefing on that occasion was a classic of the art of unclarity.

"Miss Bach here has the supervision, holds all the strings," he had begun. After 35 years of it, his Hebrew was still famously awful. "Miss Bach monitors the raw material as it comes down to her. She supplies Leon here with his guidelines. She checks out his compositions, makes sure they fit the over-all game plan for the correspondence." If the interrogators had known a little before, they knew less now. But they kept their mouths shut.

"Once Miss Bach has approved a composition, she calls a conference with Leon, here, and Mr. Schwili jointly." It had been 100 years since anyone had called Schwili "mister." "At this conference are agreed the stationery, are agreed the inks, the pens, the emotional and physical condition of the writer inside the terms of the fiction. Is he or she high or low? Is he or she angry? With each projected item, the team considers the fiction in all its aspects."

Gradually, despite their new chief's determination to imply his information rather than impart it, the interrogators had begun to discern the outlines of the plan they were now part of. "Maybe Miss Bach will also have on record an original sample of handwriting--letter, postcard, diary--that can serve as a model. Maybe she won't." Kurtz's right forearm batted either possibility across the desk at them. "When all these procedures have been observed, and only then, Mr. Schwili forges. Beautifully. Mr. Schwili is not merely a forger, he is an artist," he warned--and they had better remember it. "Questions?"

Smiling their meek smile, the interrogators assured him they had none.

"Start at the end," Kurtz barked after them as they trooped out. "You can go back to the beginning later if there's time."

Meetings had been taken up with the tricky issue of how best to persuade Yanuka to fall in with their plans at such short notice. Psychologists were called in, peremptorily listened to and shown the door. A lecture on hallucinatory and disintegrating drugs fared better, and there was a hasty hunt for other interrogators who had used them with success. Their orders agreed, Kurtz had dispatched the interrogators to Munich ahead of time to set up their lighting and sound effects and rehearse the guards in their role. They arrived looking like a two-piece band, with heavy luggage clad in dimpled metal and suits like Satchmo's. Schwili's committee followed a couple of days later and settled themselves discreetly into the lower apartment, giving themselves out as professional stamp dealers here for the big auction in the city. The neighbors found no fault with that story. Jews, they told one another, but who cares these days? Jews had been normalized long ago. And, of course, they would be dealers; what else did one expect? For company, apart from Miss Bach's portable memory-storage system, the committee had tape recorders, earphones, crates of tinned food and a thin boy called Samuel the pianist to man the little teleprinter that was linked to Kurtz's own command set. Samuel wore a very large Colt revolver in a special pocket of his quilted kapok waistcoat, and when he transmitted, they heard it knocking against the desk, but he never took it off.

•

The star they were all poised to receive flew into Munich punctually the same evening by way of Cyprus. No flashing cameras celebrated his arrival, for he was got up as a stretcher case attended by an orderly and a private doctor. The doctor was genuine, if his passport was not; as to Yanuka, he was a British businessman from Nicosia being rushed to Munich for heart surgery. A file of impressive medical papers bore that out, but the German airport authorities paid them not a glance. One uncomfortable sight of the patient's lifeless face told them all they needed to know. An ambulance rushed the party in the direction of the city hospital but, in a side street, turned off and, as if the worst had happened, slipped into the covered courtyard of a friendly undertaker. At the Olympic Village, the two photographers and their friends were seen to manhandle a wicker laundry basket marked GLASS Delicate from their battered minibus to the service lift; and, no doubt, said the neighbors, they were adding one more extravagance to their already inflated stock of equipment. There was amused speculation about whether or not the stamp dealers down-stairs would complain about their tastes in music; Jews complained of everything. Upstairs, meanwhile, they unpacked their prize and, with the doctor's help, established that nothing had been broken during the voyage. Minutes later, they had laid him carefully on the floor of the padded priest hole, where he could be expected to come round in about half an hour, though it was always possible that the lightproof hood that they had tied over his head would retard the waking process. Soon after that, the doctor departed. He was a conscientious man and, fearing for Yanuka's future, had sought assurances from Kurtz that he would not be asked to compromise his medical principles.

Sure enough, in less than 40 minutes, they saw Yanuka pull against his chains--first the wrists and then the knees, and then all four together, like a chrysalis trying to burst its skin--till, presumably, he realized that he was trussed face downward on the mattresses, for he paused and seemed to take stock, then let out a tentative groan. After which, with no further warning, all hell broke loose as he gave vent to one anguished, sobbing roar after another, writhed, bucked and generally threw himself about with a vigor that made them doubly grateful for his chains. Having observed this performance for a while, the interrogators withdrew and left the field to the guards until the storm raged itself out. Probably, Yanuka's head had been crammed with hair-raising stories about the brutality of Israeli methods. Probably, in his bewilderment, he actually wanted them to live up to their reputation and make his terrors come true. But the guards declined to oblige him. Their orders were to play the sullen jailers, to keep their distance and inflict no injury, and they obeyed them to the letter, even if to do so cost them dear--Oded, the baby, in particular. From the moment of Yanuka's ignominious arrival in the apartment, Oded's young eyes had darkened with hatred. Each day that passed, he looked more ill and gray, and by the sixth, his shoulders had gone rigid just from the tension of having Yanuka alive under their roof.

At last, Yanuka seemed to drop off to sleep again, and the interrogators decided it was time to make a start, so they played sounds of morning traffic, switched on a lot of white light and together brought him breakfast--though it was not yet midnight--loudly ordering the guards to unbind him and let him eat like a human being, not a dog. Then they themselves solicitously untied his hood, for they wanted his first knowledge of them to be of their kind, un-Jewish faces gazing at him with fatherly concern.

"Don't you ever put these things on him again," one of them said quietly to the guards in English and, with an angry heave, symbolically tossed both hood and chains into a corner.

The guards withdrew--Oded, in particular, with theatrical reluctance--and Yanuka consented to drink a little coffee while his two new friends looked on. They knew he had a raging thirst, because they had asked the doctor to induce one before he left; so the coffee must have tasted wonderful to him, whatever else was mixed into it. They knew also that his mind was in a state of dreamlike fragmentation and therefore undefended in certain important areas--for instance, when compassion was on offer. After several more visits conducted in this way, some with only minutes between them, the interrogators decided it was time to take the plunge and introduce themselves. In outline, their plan was the oldest in the game, but it contained ingenious variations.

They were Red Cross observers, they said in English. They were Swiss subjects but resident here in the prison. What prison, where, they were not at liberty to reveal, though they gave clear hints it might be in Israel. They produced impressive prison passes in well-thumbed plastic cases, with stamped photographs of themselves and red crosses done in wavy lines, as on bank notes, to prevent easy forgery. They explained that their job was to make sure that the Israelis observed the rules for prisoners of war laid down by the Geneva Convention--though, God knew, they said, that wasn't easy--and to provide Yanuka's link with the outside world insofar as prison regulations allowed this. They were pressing to get him out of solitary and into the Arab block, they said, but they understood that "rigorous interrogation" was to start any day and that until then, the Israelis intended, willy-nilly, to keep him in isolation. Sometimes, they explained, the Israelis simply lost themselves in their own obsessions and forgot about their image completely. They pronounced interrogation with distaste, as if they wished they knew a better word. At this point, Oded came back in, as instructed, and pretended to busy himself with sanitation. The interrogators at once stopped speaking until he left.

Next, they produced a big, printed form and helped Yanuka complete it in his own hand: name here, old fellow; address; date of birth; next of kin, that's the way; occupation, well, that would be student, wouldn't it?; qualifications; religion; and--sorry about all this, but it's regulations. Yanuka complied accurately enough, despite an initial reluctance, and this first sign of collaboration was noted downstairs with quiet satisfaction.

Taking their leave, the interrogators handed Yanuka a printed booklet setting out his rights in English and, with a wink and a pat on the shoulder, a couple of bars of Swiss chocolate. And they called him by his first name, Salim. For an hour, from the adjoining room, they watched him by infrared light as he lay in the pitch-darkness, weeping and tossing his head. Then they raised the lighting and barged in cheerfully, calling out, "Look what we've got for you; come on, wake up, Salim, it's morning."

It was a letter, addressed to him by name, postmarked Beirut, sent care of the Red Cross and stamped Prison Censor Approved. From his favorite sister, Fatmèh. Schwili had forged it; Miss Bach had compiled it; Leon's chameleon talent had supplied the authentic pulse of Fatmeh's censorious affection. Their models were the letters Yanuka had received from her while he was under surveillance. Fatmeh sent her love and hoped Salim would show courage when his time came. By time, she seemed to mean the dreaded interrogation. She had decided to give up her boyfriend and her office job, she said, and resume her relief work in Sidon, because she could no longer bear to be so far from the border of her beloved Palestine while Yanuka was in such desperate straits. She admired him; she always would; Leon swore it. To the grave and beyond, Fatmeh would love her gallant, heroic brother; Leon had seen to it. Yanuka accepted the letter with pretended indifference, but when they left him alone again, he fell into a pious crouch, with his head turned nobly sideways and upward, like a martyr waiting for the sword, while he clutched Fatmeh's words to his cheek.

"I demand paper," he told the guards, with panache, when they returned to sweep out his cell an hour later.

He might as well not have spoken. Oded even yawned.

"I demand paper! I demand the representatives of the Red Cross! I demand to write a letter under the Geneva Convention to my sister Fatmeh! Yes!"

These words also were favorably greeted downstairs, since they proved that the literacy committee's first offering had gained Yanuka's acceptance. The guards slunk off, ostensibly to take advice, and reappeared bearing a small quire of Red Cross stationery. They also handed Yanuka a printed list of advice to prisoners explaining that only letters in English would be forwarded "and only those containing no hidden message." But no pen. Yanuka demanded a pen, begged for one, screamed at them, wept, all in slow motion; but the boys retorted loudly and distinctly that the Geneva Convention said nothing about pens. Half an hour later, the two interrogators bustled in, full of righteous anger, bringing a pen of their own stamped For Humanity.

Scene by scene, this charade continued over several more hours while Yanuka, in his weakened state, struggled vainly to reject the offered hand of friendship. His written reply to Fatmeh was a classic--a rambling three-page letter of advice, self-pity and bold postures: "My darling sister, in one week now I face the fateful testing of my life at which your great spirit will accompany me."

This news, too, was the subject of a special bulletin: "Send me everything," Kurtz had told Miss Bach. "No silences. If nothing's happening, then signal to me that nothing is happening." And to Leon, more fiercely: "See she signals me every two hours, at least. Best is every hour."

Yanuka's letter to Fatmeh was the first of several. Sometimes, their letters crossed; sometimes, Fatmeh answered his questions almost as soon as he had put them and asked him her own questions in return.

•

For hour upon hour, the two interrogators chatted with Yanuka with unflagging geniality, fortifying him, as he must have thought, with their stolid Swiss sincerity, building up his resistance against the day when the Israeli henchmen dragged him off to his inquisition. First, they sought his opinions on almost everything he cared to discuss, flattering him with their respectful curiosity and responsiveness. Politics, they shyly confessed, had never really been their field: Their inclination had always been to place man above ideas. One of them quoted from the poetry of Robert Burns, who turned out, quite by chance, to be a favorite of Yanuka's. Sometimes, it almost seemed they were asking him to convert them to his own way of thinking, so receptive were they to his arguments. They asked him for his reactions to the Western world now that he had been there for a year or more. They asked him about his childhood--his parents, his home in Palestine. They listened with unflinching sympathy to his stories of Zionist atrocities and to his reminiscences about his days as goalkeeper of his camp's victorious football team in Sidon.

They built on what they had already established--on fear, on dependence and on the imminence of the fearful Israeli interrogation still to come. So first they brought him an urgent letter from Fatmeh, one of Leon's briefest and best: "I have heard that the hour is very near. I beg you, I pray you, to have courage." They switched on the lights long enough for him to read it, switched them off again and stayed away longer than was customary. In the pitch-darkness, they played to him muffled screams, the clanging of distant cell doors and the sounds of a slumped body being dragged in chains along a stone corridor. Then they played the funeral bagpipes of a Palestinian military band, and perhaps he thought he was dead. Certainly, he lay still enough. They sent him the guards, who stripped him, chained his hands behind his back and put irons on his ankles. And left him again. As if forever. They heard him whispering, "Oh, no," on and on.

They dressed Samuel, the pianist, in a white overall and gave him a stethoscope and had him listen, without interest, to Yanuka's heart rate. All in the dark, still, but perhaps the white coat was just visible to him as it flitted round his body. Again they left him. By the infrared light, they watched him sweating and shuddering; and, at one point, he appeared to contemplate killing himself by butting his head against the wall, which in his chained state was about the only uninhibited movement he could make. But the wall was a foot deep in foam rubber, and if he had beaten himself against it all year, he would have had no satisfaction from it. They played more screams to him, then made an absolute silence. They fired one pistol shot in the darkness. It was so sudden and clear that he bucked at the sound of it. Then he began howling, but quietly, as if he couldn't get the volume to rise.

That was when they decided to move.

First, the guards walked into his cell, purposefully, and lifted him to his feet, one arm each. They had dressed themselves very lightly, like people prepared for strenuous activity. By the time they had dragged his shaking body as far as the cell door, Yanuka's two Swiss saviors had appeared and blocked their way, their kindly faces the very picture of concern and outrage. Then a long-delayed, passionate argument broke out between the guards and the Swiss. It was waged in Hebrew and, therefore, was only partly comprehensible to Yanuka, but it had the ring of a last appeal. Yanuka's interrogation had still to be approved by the governor, said the two Swiss: Regulation six, paragraph nine, of the convention laid down emphatically that no intensive duress could be applied without the authority of the governor and the presence of a doctor. But the guards could not give a fig for the convention, and said so. They had had the convention till it was coming out of their noses, they said, indicating where their noses were. There was nearly a scuffle. Only Swiss forbearance prevented it. It was agreed, instead, that they would all four go to the governor now for an immediate ruling. So they stormed off together, leaving Yanuka in the dark yet again, and quite soon he was seen to hunch up to the wall and pray, though he could have had no earthly idea, by then, where the East was.

Next time, the two Swiss returned without the guards but looking very grave, indeed, and brought with them Yanuka's diary, as if, small though it might be, it somehow changed things completely. They also had with them his two spare passports--one French, one Cypriot--which they had found hidden under the floorboards, and the Lebanese passport on which he had been traveling at the time of his kidnaping.

Then they explained their problem. Laboriously. But with an ominous manner that was new to them--not threatening but warning. At the request of the Israelis, the West German authorities had made a search of his apartment in central Munich, they said. They had found this diary and these passports and a quantity of other clues to his movements over the past few months, which they were now determined to investigate "with full vigor." In their representations to the governor, the Swiss had insisted that such rigor was not legal and not necessary. They had made the governor a proposal: Let the Red Cross place the documents before the prisoner and obtain his explanation for the entries. Let the Red Cross, in decency, invite him, rather than force him, as a first step, to prepare a statement--if the governor wished, a written one in the prisoner's own hand--of his whereabouts during the past six months, with dates, places, whom he had met, where he had stayed and on what papers he had traveled. If military honor dictated reticence, they said, then let the prisoner honestly indicate this at the appropriate points. Where it did not--well, at least it would buy time while their representations continued.

Here they ventured to offer Yanuka--or Salim, as they now called him--some private advice of their own. Above all, be accurate, they implored him as they set up a folding table for him, gave him a blanket and unchained his hands. Tell them nothing you wish to keep secret, but make absolutely certain that what you do tell them is the truth. Remember that we have our reputation to maintain. Think of those like yourself who may come after you. For their sakes, if not for ours, do your best. The way they said this suggested somehow that Yanuka was already halfway to martyrdom. Quite why seemed not to matter; the only truth he knew by then was the terror in his own soul.

It was thin, as they had always known it would be. It was farfetched but the best they could think of. And there was a moment, quite a long one, in which they feared they had lost him. It took the form of a straight, unclouded stare at each of them as Yanuka seemed to shake aside the curtains of delusion and look out clearly at his oppressors. But clarity had never been the basis of their relationship, and it wasn't now. As Yanuka accepted the proffered pen, they read in his eyes the supplication that they should continue to deceive him.

It was on the day following this drama--around lunchtime in the normal scheme of things--that Kurtz arrived.

To Kurtz himself went the task of going back to the beginning. But first, seated comfortably in the downstairs apartment, he called in everyone except the guards and let them brief him, in their own style and at their own pace, on the progress so far. He examined their exhibits and listened appreciatively to tape recordings of crucial moments and watched with admiration as Miss Bach's desk computer printed out one day after another of Yanuka's recent life in green type on its television screen: dates, flight numbers, arrival times, hotels.

When Kurtz had done all this--it was by then evening--he changed into a plain Israeli army uniform with a colonel's badges and a few grimy campaign ribbons above the left pocket and generally reduced his external self until he was the epitome of any military remittance man turned prison officer. Then he went upstairs and tiptoed spryly to the observation window, where, for some time, he watched Yanuka very closely. Then he sent Oded and his companion downstairs with orders that he and Yanuka should be left with their privacy.

Speaking Arabic in a gray, bureaucratic voice, Kurtz began asking Yanuka a few simple, dull questions, tiny things: where a certain fuse came from or an explosive or a car; or the exact spot, say, where Yanuka had planted a certain bomb. Kurtz's detailed knowledge, so casually displayed, was terrifying to Yanuka, whose reaction was to shout at him and order him to keep quiet for reasons of security. Kurtz was puzzled by this.

"But why should I keep quiet?" he protested with the glazed stupidity that comes over people who have spent too long in prison, whether as guards or as inmates. "If your great brother won't keep quiet, what secrets are there left for me to preserve?"

He asked this question not as a revelation at all but as the logical outcome to a piece of common knowledge. While Yanuka was still staring wildly at him, Kurtz told him a few more things about himself that only his big brother could have known. There was nothing magical about this. After weeks of sifting through the boy's daily life, monitoring his phone calls and his correspondence--not to mention his dossier in Jerusalem from two years back--it was no wonder if Kurtz and his team were as familiar as Yanuka himself was with such minutiae as the safe addresses where his letters went to earth, the ingenious one-way system by which his orders were handed to him and the point at which Yanuka, like themselves, was cut off from his own command structure. What distinguished Kurtz from his predecessors was the evident indifference with which he referred to these items and his indifference, also, to Yanuka's reaction.

"Where is he?" Yanuka began screaming. "What have you done with him? My brother does not talk! He would never talk! How did you capture him?"

The deal was done in moments. Down-stairs, as they crowded round the loudspeaker, a kind of awe settled over the entire room as they heard Kurtz, within three hours of his arrival, sweep away Yanuka's last defenses.

"As governor, I am limited to matters of administration," he explained. "Your brother is in a hospital cell downstairs; he is a little tired; naturally, one hopes he will live, but it will be some months before he can walk. When you have answered the following questions, I shall sign an order permitting you to share his accommodation and nurse him to recovery. If you refuse, you stay where you are." Then, to avoid any mistaken notions of chicanery, Kurtz produced for Yanuka the Polaroid color photograph they had rigged showing the barely recognizable face of Yanuka's brother peering out of a bloodstained prison blanket as the two guards carried him away from his interrogation.

But there again, the genius of Kurtz was never static. When Yanuka really started talking, Kurtz immediately grew a heart to match the poor boy's passion; suddenly, the old jailer needed to hear everything that the great fighter had ever said to his apprentice.

Yanuka talked. And by the time Kurtz returned downstairs, the team had obtained pretty well everything from him that was obtainable.

"Yanuka pulled up and lowered his window and watched the girl walk luxuriously toward him."

"He had given them only an inkling of the operation, then ordered them to study Yanuka's file."