Three Short Novels 1955–1965: Theo and Kia, Zoyhaique, Privateer

By William Palmer

In the spring of 2018 at the age of eighty-one, the author attacked a stack of manuscripts that had sat on various shelves for over fifty years. Three short novels, some stories, and many fragments made a dusty pile many inches high.

Privateer, the earliest novel, had been written while at Harvard and published in the literary magazine MSS in 1974. In this work, an armed merchant ship in the aftermath of World War II sails into New York harbor to wreak havoc on the lives of a brother and sisterPrimo and Mariewho live in a brothel by a live-chicken market.

Zoyhaique, started at Harvard and finished in the navy, a novel of revolution in a South American country, follows the life of Hensoldt, a German with a checkered past and his coconspirators.

Theo and Kia, started in the navy and finished at Hopkins, chronicles the loves of Theo, an agent working it appears for the Israelis hunting down apparent Nazis for a bounty, and Kia, whose relation to the Third Reich is ambiguous.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984547118

William Palmer

William Palmer, emeritus professor at The Ohio State University, was born in 1937 and educated in New York City schools, at Harvard, and at The Johns Hopkins University where he earned a doctorate in physics. At Harvard while a physics major he took writing courses from John Hawkes and Albert Guerard. His early works of fiction were published in the Harvard Advocate, Audience, genesis west, and MSS. After Harvard he continued scribbling while in the U.S. Navy for three years where he served as CIC officer and navigator. Literary output persisted as a sideline while in graduate school at Hopkins but was put aside soon after when family and professional career made inroads on his time. In 2004, four years after his retirement, he published a memoir, Blood and Village (Xlibris), about his parents and early life.

Book preview

Theo and Kia A Love Story

CHAPTER ONE

THEO AND KIA

Theo Fassaert was a small Dutch Jew with crooked teeth and a rotten yellow smile. His pockets were filled with encrypted cables from Tel Aviv and he entered the Grand Bretagne with the soapy taste of Greek brandy on his lips and a little black Beretta in the pit of his arm. It was the first time the diamond courier had worn a dinner jacket: Americans stared, like the international fools they were, and Fassaert sought the cover of a potted plant to survey the tables, to study the lighting. It was a perfect place to die, better than the rubble of the Acropolis, better than Hadrian’s Gate. He tapped a waiter on the shoulder, drilling with his index finger, asking if he had seen the tall girl with the white arms. The waiter shrugged, looked back at his shoulder, and smiled broadly. He was a Greek, a waiter, used to such things.

You would not have missed her—never.

The waiter smiled again. I have a second cousin, a taxi drive away…, but the small Jew was already tripping down the marble well of steps, searching out the bar, the American Bar, where surely there were boisterous Germans and reeling sailors and the magnificent wealthy Greeks, serene and untouched by yet another barbaric invasion.

Theo pushed the glass door open and he knew then by the merest blur, through the blue smoke and in the semi-darkness, that it was his Kia with the fine light haze of hair on her naked legs. (He remembered an afternoon in the Parthenon with the soft light of the sun behind her.) She wore a yellow dress, sleeveless, and her escort stared at the curve of her arms. Theo recalled the line of a song, scowling: Ärme so hübsch und gesund, the Swabian dialect, the yodeling and Lederhosen and the dark green of the vineyards. The Jew was old enough to remember the Mosel in September, and his face flushed with a heat in the nape of his neck. Servatius, her escort, was a typewriter salesman.

He ordered brandy at the bar and it was better than the one he had drunk outside under the flashing Ouzo sign—but not good enough. An old vision returned, a field of minute mushrooms formed at the base of his tongue and his voice went flat with fear. He reached inside his jacket to the hot pit of his arm, for comfort, for peace. And then Kia called, in her Bremen Deutsch, and the typewriter salesman smiled. It would be an evening of smiles. All was going well. Theo carried his brandy to their table.

In a flash, in the uncertain steps between the bar and the dark corner, he knew exactly what the three of them would speak of, graduates all of some institute of commerce and language, the diamond agent, the salesman, the multi-lingual secretary, joined in the cradle of western civilization. "Die dreckiche Griechen." Lumps of cold gruel vanished in his throat. He was ready to laugh, to be clever.

It was hard to see why she gained so much pleasure from introducing the two men, moving her skirt aside to make room for Fassaert. Servatius smiled, questioned, had they met in Naples or perhaps Cairo? He wore tinted glasses as though he were a middle aged Greek, and Theo knew he was the kind of man he sought, large and fleshy, with a wife somewhere in Frankfurt or Munich to whom he was habitually unfaithful. And then he saw the man, lying on the dirty yellow sheets of a second rate hotel with red sores on his calves where the garters had been, rubbing the bridge of his nose with the glasses put aside.

Theo waited for Kia to look away—he could not look into the eyes of this woman – and then said, "Sind Sie Landsmann? speaking to both man and woman, opposing the two of them against himself. It was an old habit. No, no, not exactly," Kia said, touching his arm, dismissing the subject with that touch, friendly, motherly, flirtatious—he could not tell. The woman confused him. He recalled that first drive in the shared taxi between Piraeus and Athens when he pointed out and explained to her the great hill in the dusk ahead: how she had asked that series of unending questions, touching his knee again and again to gain his attention. Her gestures, her hands were those of a sister—or perhaps a prostitute.

You’ll show us Athens tonight, won’t you, Theo, she said. Her eyes drifted from face to face of the men at the tar. Servatius shifted uneasily in his chair. Chaperone Theo: he was pleased with himself and pleased with Kia. She had made him an obstacle to the German’s vague anticipations. And Theo saw that he would not take to the cup, suffer the experiment, without some kind of persuasion. The typewriter salesman smiled. We would be honored.

They ate in the cabaret of the Seven Brothers, where Kia did a handkerchief dance with a young Greek, slipping further and further from Servatius dreams. In the taxi on the way to the nightclub she sat in the heat between the two men in their crumpled suits, smelling as fresh as the morning as if in disdain of them both. By the time of the floorshow, the evening which had begun so well, with so many questions from the lovely Kia, was wearing long for Servatius and he was tempted to join the girls at the bar. But she seemed to be enjoying every minute of it, from the strip-tease to the magician, who asked her to inspect his sleeves, plucking doves from her hair. In this she was like a sophisticated child, still without guile, yet with an intuitive understanding for the magician’s lip make-up in the yellow glare of the spotlight. Occasionally she would laugh with her arm on Servatius’ shoulder, and he saw in this, the fool, a spark of hope. Theo smiled with his rotten teeth slightly protruding, giving him an innocent, perhaps mildly moronic aspect. He knew it well and used it wisely. Servatius drank heavily, preparing himself for a night of intimacy and tenderness. He would not later care with whom.

The nightclub was dark and plush with bamboo and coconuts on the walls and infant girls at the bar chattering among themselves. They were no more real for the Dutchman than the stuffed parrots and the rubber palm leaves but he was at ease with Kia smiling at his elbow and the big German growing impatient, the child about to take a child to bed. Tel Aviv could wait. He followed Servatius into the washroom where there were murals of black women with Western anatomies, and they urinated side by side with masculine solidarity and intimacy, Servatius reeling slightly, speaking of a girl he knew in Naples and the bars of Piraeus. Theo was used to such friendships, sealed on the white tile of quiet lavatories. He noted the salesman was not circumcised—yet another link in a chain of evidence already complete. Tel Aviv was so fanatic about identifications. We take her home now, eh? the salesman said. He was quite comfortable at last with the diamond courier— a fellow man of the streets.

Kia was dancing when they returned with an elderly American in evening clothes who must have thought she belonged to the bar. He was quite evidently happy with himself, with his conquest: her beauty had that faint quality of childishness, so touching and arousing to Theo, so like a big schoolgirl, protected from all experience, even the bed, by her innocence, her stupidity. No doubt she had been insulted when the two men left her alone at the table.

Later, Theo bargained with the taxi driver as a favor to Servatius. It was friendship. The German was paying now, and his night had just begun. Theo walked the girl into the lobby of her hotel, too good, too lavish for a multi-lingual secretary. Theo opened his cigarette case as they climbed the white marble. She looked at him directly, almost sadly, then smiled. Why does he stay outside, in the night? It was as if she knew more than he had thought and he wanted to talk with her then, take her arm and sit her down, but she shook his hand at the desk, whispering in German, You’ll come and see me in the morning? The handshake belonged to the continental. Go to him, she said, touching his elbow. Then she asked him for a cigarette and left him at the desk, a golden key dangling from her white hand. Her voice and gestures had suggested to the desk clerk an imaginary intrigue. Love, an illusion, ought always to be made in a foreign tongue. The clerk stared in wonder, in open admiration at the small Dutch Jew.

Servatius waited in the taxi, free now of his dreams, unburdened by the lovely Kia, but as they pulled away from the hotel her scent was still with Theo, on his hands and where she had touched him, as warm as the Greek night, as German as Veilchen, Frühling. Theo was happy in contemplation of all the things Tel Aviv would never know. The fools, the bearded fools. He recalled a blind carpenter in Haifa building from memory a scale model of the Dachau ovens. His own dedication was of another kind. Watching Servatius in silence as they sped through the streets of Athens, Theo felt the same affection for the German as a policeman feels for his prisoner.

A warship swung on her chain, anchored in the bay of Phaleron. They took the high road to Piraeus, where merchant sailors lay in wait for marines to bash, where saxophones wailed in the bars and sleek young Greeks sold non-existing women with imaginary addresses to French sailors with red balls on their pancake caps. Theo was grateful for the silence of the night ride, for the time which went swiftly and easily with no need to talk, to be clever. The names of the waterfront bars were tributes to America, the new land, racy and free: Miami, Flamingo, Twenty-One and Chicago. Theo chose one where he was not known, and they sat at a table to watch the dancing. I know a place around the corner, Servatius whispered, but Theo knew it was not time for that.

Which one do you want? he asked, looking at the bar girls, holding the German’s elbow. Servatius moved away from the advance, and for a moment Theo thought he had lost him.

She’s a pretty girl, Kia, isn’t she, he said, clinging to the arm. The pronouncement seemed to wound Servatius, who put his tinted glasses away and smiled at a big sloppy blond. Without the glasses he was handsome and strong, looking like some Bauinginieur or Bürgermeister, torn from the deep green hills. Theo left the table and whispered in Greek to the girl, who followed him to the German’s side.

She speaks three languages, Theo said, and Servatius was interested and polite. Höflich. Theo thought they made a nice couple, ein hübschs Paar, destined for each other until death do them part. She crossed her legs as she sat and her skirt lay spread also over Servatius knees, an intricate evolution.

Theo had told her Servatius was a relative of Alfred Krupp. Krupp? she had whispered, looking over her shoulder. He sells warships to sheiks and prime ministers. The picture of a sleek grey battleship had cemented the bargain. Servatius spoke slowly and it was soon clear to him that her German was confined to the essentials. He liked it better that way.

May I suggest a philter? Theo asked. He drew a little glass vial from the lining of his jacket. But the German would have nothing of the nonsense. No, he smiled, calling a waiter over for another brandy, champagne for the girl. She was happy. She laid her arm about Servatius’ neck and stared at the dirty little vial with the green cork. It makes love? she asked. A sailor came up behind her and began to stroke her bare shoulders. While Servatius smiled, she affected a pout of annoyance and plucked the vial from Theo’s fingers, as if she had better things to do. The sailor left her prying the cork off with her fingernails. It tastes like gin, Theo offered. She lifted the vial to her nose, then drank it down, smiling. Somehow she maneuvered herself into the German’s lap and suddenly the idea of a love phiIter was irresistibly appealing to him. Theo produced another, deep from his side pocket where the telegrams were, wiping it clean with her skirt. The German was drunk now and it was all in sport, in good sport. He lifted the vial to his lips—it was absurdly small, and a drop of the thick fluid ran down his chin. He sipped it slowly, like an aperitif. We will go now, no?" He slapped the girl on her rump and she went stiff and proper in his lap, as if this were not the treatment to which she was accustomed, then pressed his big head into her breasts. She was happy, truly happy. It occurred to Theo that love was the simple pressure of compatible biologic parts. The pair of lovers left him alone at the table as if he had never existed.

For a time that night, Theo thought of the two of them lying naked in each other’s arms, suddenly stricken as the aroused blood carried the Mossad’s compound deep into the centers of the brain. They would be stiff when the police found them, locked in some phase of the primordial struggle, with an air of unbelief in their eyes and about their mouths. The German Embassy would be concerned: the Greek police amused. Tel Aviv would be good for another couple thousand in sterling. Or perhaps the philter really worked? Marriages, also, appealed to the Dutchman. But what did it matter? Servatius was a clerk, a dispatcher. His was not even the hand that opened the valve. And what would the German have felt at that moment of immobility when vision failed and the darkness closed in with only the twisted and cheated face of the prostitute above the sheets in the twilight. Terror, absurd terror. Theo thought of those stands of black German pine which bring a darkness to the earth—and of a land to which a man might want to return after the ravages of war, solitary and silent, old, tired, and beaten. It was absurd, sad and comic both. He summed up the evening for himself: it was an amusing, truly moving way to die. His thin lips parted and the yellow teeth gleamed.

The next morning Kia called him at the hotel, as bright as the night before. A girl had died. Servatius was in the hospital. Terrible scandal. Would he help?

Ja, Ja, he muttered into the speaker and let it fall back on the cradle. But he was mildly elated. Naked, he watched himself in the mirror as he dressed thinking how crudely constructed was man, with the wiry hair and the rotten little thumb. The alcohol must have saved the German. He thought of Servatius’ brain bathed in Greek brandy. The blond who died must have been drinking carbonated water.

In the lobby he cabled Tel Aviv: Civilization begins with the invention of the mirror and the donning of the breechcloth. The rooster’s wings are plucked. He flies no more. It was vague enough—he knew the sterling would come through. But Kia? What of Kia? It was clear, despite her bright voice so early in the morning that she had been weeping. He smiled as the clerk read the cable.

Those for whom the visible world is but a burden, a reminder of ruined and corrupted dreams, see evil in all places and at all times, in the soft hinds of jackasses, in the white of an egg, in the posture of innocent children: Hausner, Kia’s father or brother, no one was sure, retreated into a deep green hole, an Alpine hell, but Hake, conceived too soon before the great movement of the twisted cross, flirted still with a memory, with the tales of the crippled over wine and Kuchen: dreams hard to kill, dreamt in the waking sleep of winter retreats when bootless bodies lay under the evergreen, when yellow smoke hung in frozen bottoms and death began slowly with the freezing of a toe.

Yet Hake had survived. He was proud of his French and his well-formed legs. He liked Greeks and Italians and had fought with the Foreign Legion in Indo-China, enjoyed the opium and rice wine, then driven a black Citroen on the Riviera and posed as a Marquis. Now he had a liberal girlfriend in Aix and a mistress in Saigon to whom he wrote the best of love letters. He liked Jews and stewed turnips and in Munich, wearing his rimless bifocals, he was the pride of the Morgensblatt—progressive, but somehow of the older school. Der Vater war ein Pfarrer, he would say, to an old Austrian lady in Tivoli. But the old Greek distrusted him. His account years later of the Nuremburg Trials was considered a monument of impartial research for the New Germany, the crippled bloom, as he called it. They seek Grottoes as other men seek brothels, he said, confidentially, to the patriarch of Salonika. Hake had a good word for any occasion, a poet in his own way.

At the Cafe he bought a handful of salted cashews from an itinerant vendor and popped them happily into his mouth. He missed the flashing Phillips sign, the leftwing student bar, his faithful Collot. A small boy stole his cigarettes from the table and ran down the quay, disappearing somewhere in the shadow of rotten rigging and net-laden fishing craft, but it took more than this to perturb the foreign correspondent. In Salonika it was strolling time, the Mediterranean promenade, girls with their mothers, soon to be alone, girls alone soon to be fully engaged. He thought the city deserved a travelogue feature, but he could not stoop to this; his bent was politics. So he smoked the Old Greek’s cigarettes and smiled as they tested one another out. The Greek wore sharkskin: he was an exporter of furs and found it easy to stare at women in mink stoles. Already the conversation drifted back to the days of the occupation, and Hake was enjoying himself. In a moment the defenses would be down and they would talk of discarded dreams over a brace of brandies.

For Hake it was easy—life was so easy. He simply had looked up the name of the wartime governor of Salonika and traced him to a waterfront cafe where lamb roasted on a spit and old men played at backgammon. The interview was a ruse— it played on the old man’s vanity. You know, he said, They still look for us … He paused to see if the collective pronoun, a lie, took its effect. The old man frowned, but with pride. He was no longer used to brandy.

They were here, he said, at last. They come every now and then.

Hake sat back and could not help inwardly to revel, as when a friend confides the details of an enormous personal evil. He felt the touch of the dream with a detached pleasure, a reverie of lost innocence. It all rushed back to him, the great tidal flood of barely a year’s war—east into Russia, south to the African continent, west to the sea. It was a dream of action, of movement, of conquest, of troop trains and aircraft and truck convoys, echelons of tanks in the Sahara, boots on the cobble of Prague. It made him smile. He could not say why, but it made him smile.

He drew a notebook from his jacket. He would need names and descriptions.

Kia waited for Theo in the lobby of her hotel, standing on the white marble, bright and cheerful with her smile for room clerks, chambermaids, and the romantic manager with a wife in the country. They embraced and Theo kissed her mouth, her eye lashes fluttering against his cheek like the wings of a moth. Theo thought that there were no criminals, only the certainty of crime. But it was a lovely exhibition. Now the staff hated him—he had enemies—and his power was more complete. Love to an onlooker is either bitter or absurd. Only the admiring desk clerk could smile at the conquest of a fellow Jew.

I don’t want to see him, not yet, not now, Kia said, as she walked on his arm through the national gardens in the morning, with sun through the trees and light in her stray hair. It would have bored Theo had he not known they were followed, but it was a sorry exhibition all over again, a bit of life for an amateur, the play of a man who had yet a few ricks to learn of pacing and deception, of holding a newspaper, of cradling a tiny mirrors in the palm of his hand. Theo waited for a lull, a moment of boredom in their talk, before he told her of the man behind them with the German newspaper under his arm.

Theo held her the more tightly for this and bought her a lemon drink when they sat in the dusty chairs. She stared at her soiled shoes, a German girl with a good position, a girl with friends, a fine figure, proof of innocence in her long white neck. For Theo, his love for her was strange only because it was not inspired by rejection. He recalled with pleasure the Vienna of the thirties: the black haired Jew lying in wait for the unsuspicious girl, seduction in the shadows, adulteration of the race. He watched the eyes of the man over the headlines of the German newspaper, soft and grey, unembarrassed in their crude stare, and for a moment Theo thought it was time to flee again, seek cover like a low running animal, hide from a yellow sun beneath the rotting leaves. And then the two men smiled at one another, with the sun already too high, with nothing of the amateur in the lowered newsprint and the steady gleam of perfect teeth. The man was admiring Kia as one admires a pretty child. Theo paid the waiter and Kia followed him through the tables. With great deliberation the man shook tobacco into a creased slip of paper while the waiter stood aside for his order. For the first time in years Theo forgot the pistol under his arm. They waited for a tram and as Kia took his arm Theo said, You have lied to me.

Theo had always known that it was moral scruples which make a man careless, which make a man a fool. It was to the honor of evil that it kept a man together, a final solution, more permanent than drugs, more dignified than perversion. And in the isolation of crime he found a kind of perfect love. In his worse moments he cleaned and oiled his Beretta and slipped fresh cartridges into the clip. In the tram he thought Kia’s knees were hateful, and it was in moments such as these when he felt again the terrible tenderness toward woman which would have destroyed a man less criminally inclined. Women were to be deferred to, agreed with, humored; they were pure; they were stupid; they were lovely, kind and childish: Theo had never shot a girl. It was the golden heart of his crime and without it his manhood would have died. Pregnant women were the most dangerous of them all.

"Servatius ist gestorben, nicht wahr? He had spoken to her without looking into her face, and she slapped him across the cheek, once, twice, crying Du, du," and he looked about in the tram to see if they were alone. He was surprised to see that she did not weep, but looked straight ahead of her, rubbing her finger nails.

Theo, please talk to me? she asked. The tram stopped at Hadrian’s Gate but he saw it was the wrong time for architecture. He thought he was not up to courting a woman so early in the day, not in a yellow tram, not when the sun shone, with children in the streets. The tram was filling up—they were among Greeks now and he had the pleasant sense of going nowhere, with the German’s corpse somewhere at the end of the line. A day such as this could only be compromised by love. Somehow even the thought of being followed, through gardens and ruins, to the races, to the sea, was pleasing and absurd. It would be an education for the tall grey man with a newspaper under his arm, best of Athens, following the path of the wandering Jew. Theo said, We are the ferment, the decomposition of a race, and he suddenly wondered what had put him so at ease. I don’t want to listen to your talk of Jews, Kia said. With her words the sun transited the meridian and they began the long afternoon together, joined so many years ago by a chance meeting, an embarrassed kindness, a common sin. Both the victim and the criminal share equally in the crime. It was true enough to turn Theo’s head, and now there were children in the streets. We fear the people most, he said, because we can share nothing with them, and then he felt the shame of imprudent confession. Must we talk in a tram? Kia said. Strassenbahn. They were joined by nothing but a common language, watching the tram pull away, with time to kill, and only truth to be evaded.

The Roman Agora, the Tower of Winds, Theo said, and it was the old tour guide in him, the international man, the journeyman. The east wind brings flowers, the south wind rain; and from the southwest, good news and wealth from Africa, the Caesars triumphant, Carthage sacked—the joy of conquest—am I making sense? Theo asked. The Germans loved their Greece. What better place to court das Mädchen, to destroy his perfect love? They were both comforted by the presence of ruins, pure and lifeless, white and hot in the sun. But purity and perfection are their own undoing: they produce the most grotesque of relics. For Theo, the spirit of the afternoon—grey men, lovely children, shadow of the Acropolis with a femme fatale—was already dwindling. His history was imperfectly recalled. It was as if he had had too much brandy— as if he had passed through the stage of truth to the stage of despair. Was Carthage before Athens? Agora before Caesars? He supposed it mattered to someone. They walked in white light, in the reflection of columned ruins, across the Agora to the Tower of Winds, where later Turkish Dervishes danced, where ostrich eggs hung in the flame of burning oil. A child ran across their path, a child with dirty legs in a short green skirt, dark as a Jew, germ of Cleopatra. It was her legs which moved him. You might as well be walking alone, Kia said, but Theo Fassaert, hired gunman, was too old and wise to feel pain. He knew of girls who had read too much of Freud. Why must fools know so much?

Tell me, Kia, is he dead? She was looking directly into his dull green eyes.

In a coma, without speech. Does that relieve you? The spite was beneath her dignity—or was it her appalling beauty? They walked on the Avenue Adrianou; and if walking was a metaphor of love’s journey, what journey was not?

I am a hired gunman employed in a task of justice and revenge, Theo said. I think we should see Servatius now. He was at last free of her. Kia said, We must go to my hotel. It seemed to Theo that words, ideas, fragments of speech were like low islands, awash in a sea of reality, the substance of illusions, at best navigation hazards. It was a pretty enough lie to believe in—like Kia herself.

Theo read the letter in the coolness of her hotel room. He was tired of ancient rubble—he was tired of children. Silence is seldom dramatic—more often stagnation. In the taxi they had spoken of Greece and Rome and the possibilities of the afternoon meal. She trusted him. She trusted to him the contents of a letter, the intimate chatter of the beloved father/brother. You’ll help me, won’t you she said, and though her body was cold her arms smelled like an afternoon at the beach. He was happy he had not to undress her; he disliked doing stupid things. She pressed him to her breasts (wasn’t that what men liked?) but he thought he could do nothing but suffocate there. The cool length of her body, the touch of agreeable flesh: this was all he asked. You know, Theo said, I’ll have now to go away."

The Police are stupid.

They persevere.

Theo was at peace. The acrobats would come to the plaza, dependable as the seasons, inevitable as the rain. Tel Aviv would have its ecstasy, like the mongrel and the bitch. Acrobats were to be distrusted but accepted, but there was a time for a gunman all his own, pure and perfect. Kia was white and lovely in the sun. A foolish letter lay under the bed. It occurred to Theo that they both must be hungry; surely food was the best part of life.

They ate at the hotel. The waiter had gold teeth, the coffee was cold, the check irregular. All these things he would remember; for all them he would have later to do penance, as if he had lost a sum of money. It was the innocence of the Land, of Volk, which cut him down. What weight had an immense catalog of degradation against the force of one or two remembered details? The S. A. Gruppenführer shot in bed with one of Roehm’s young men in the Hanselbauer Hotel, massacre in the forests of Poland, a music critic, returned to his wife, Frau Schmidt, with instructions never to open the coffin—it had been a case of mistaken identity, the good solid Schmidt abducted playing the cello while his wife prepared supper and three children played on the floor. The catalog was endless but Theo (a decomposed Jew, a sentimental victim) recalled the Rhineland of his youth. There is a point beyond which hate, like mawkish sentimentality, will not be limited by easy notions of good and bad: it extends to all man, to flesh, to life itself. It is the kind of truth, the kind of sentimentality which unmans a man. Sitting with her then Theo longed for the road again, for rail stations after midnight, for doorways, taxis, the bulge under his arm. He would flee anywhere now but Tel Aviv.

His first name is Eric, Kia said. Eric must have been a brother.

I’ll learn what I can.

There were still some Greeks who remembered a few German phrases and the waiter, attracted to Kia, looked upon the Dutchman as if he were American. Theo corrected the check and paid in Sterling. He was thinking of the meeting in Capri. Kia would be fine so long as she did not know too much. There were always things one couldn’t tell a woman.

I suppose this means we are in love, he said, but Kia was smiling. He knew it was a stupid thing to say before the words left his lips. The only comfort was that he was safe, still alone and unknown, still in the pay of Tel Aviv. Crime at least was the final solution.

The girl hung by a grasped rope from the high arch of a stone bridge with her toes dangling against the keystone, her lean figure shrouded in her trenchcoat. Luckily she had thought to knot the rope. The flat wall of the bridge against her face smelled of mildew and moss and made her hear her own breathing. It was a simple plan, but not her own, read somewhere in a book or seen at the cinema. The train would slow as it entered the turn and began to climb, flashing the head lamp on her only for an instant before the engine pushed under the footbridge. She would judge the speed by the frequency of clicks as the wheels jumped the junction between sections of rail, a frequency which at first would be swift, then die as the express slowed, and she would jump just as it hastened again, as near as possible to the slowest point. The girl had once studied her physics. It comforted her that she had been better at it than most of the boys had been. In the darkness of the shroud, with her legs wrapped about the rope, she counted sheep to her herself and thought of her gentleman, seeing herself for an instant falling through the space between two cars, crushed beneath a set of wheels with her rat colored hair spread in a fan above her on the sharp cinders among the brown ties. She prayed to God bring me luck, but she thought also of probability. It had worked in a movie, or somewhere, and she recalled the thousand francs she had won in Cassis, among the elderly women of a local casino—her only venture at the wheel. With men she only watched.

A diesel whistle sounded in the distance and she wondered if her legs dangled too far below the bridge. Wind whipped the tails of her coat into the air and exposed her dark legs to the moonlight, and it was exposure she feared the most. In a Hamburg nightclub she had been billed as Vicki die Barcelona Sex Bombe and performed a number called Ein Sexy Cha-cha-cha, after emerging from a wine glass reputedly filled with Liebfraumilch. But the French were kinder and she instinctively knew she was prettier in tights. Her dark skin made her look naked and seemed to invite attention to the scars on her knee. It was her kind of logic, and as she fell through the air still counting clicks she saw herself again on the tracks below, naked this time with the hair across her face, with Russian cigarettes and a French translation of the life of Trotsky in the pockets of her raincoat as her gentleman friend stooped to smell her hair, covering her over with the waterproof coat.

In times of crisis she always comforted herself with dreams of imminent disaster: an unexplained pregnancy, police raids at Roman parties, the parting of a garter strap. She landed on the roof of a first class coach and thought it had been a mistake