The Assassin (2 page)

Beirut was cold in February. The rich had gone in their quest for sunshine and amusement as soon as the first cold winds came in from the Mediterranean and the famous blue seas reflected the changing grey of the skies. The sumptuous hotels, of which the St George was the most famous, more because of the spy Philby's patronage than for its established excellence, were empty, and in hibernation before the spring season. The beach umbrellas and bright canvas lounging chairs were under cover. At the St George the wicker pergola, under which it was so pleasant to drink gin or Turkish coffee in the boiling summer heat, was stripped of its creeper and shivered in the cold like a naked old man.

The man walking down the steep road towards the hotel entrance looked at the deserted terrace, and the wicker skeleton and turned up his coat collar. The wind blew in from the sea and it was very cold. His clothes were light-weight; he began to walk more quickly, and while he walked he paused in front of the hotel entrance and lit a cigarette.

Those were his instructions. They seemed meaningless, but he carried them out exactly. He didn't even look up to see if anyone was behind the glass doors in the hotel lobby, watching him, because he was sure that they were. He threw the match away and went on walking, sheltered from the cold by the hotel building, and then by the shops selling jewellery and Roman antiquities to the rich tourists. There was a bus shelter two hundred yards down and by the time he reached it he was shivering.

There was a woman waiting; she wore the jellaba, like all the poor-class Muslim women, but she had let it fall back from her face as he approached. Her cheeks were bright red, her eyelids and brows blackened like a clown's; she showed a pathetic prostitute's smile of invitation and revealed a tattered European mini dress. Her bare legs were blotched with cold. He didn't bother to look up when she spoke to him.

‘I've no money. Go away,' he said in Arabic. He didn't curse her or spit on her, as her own people did when they refused her. He was a European, heavily built with blue eyes and a face that was common to many races and particular to none. He could have been Polish or German or French from Alsace. His name was Keller, because that was the name his mother gave him when she left him at the orphanage. The nuns believed his father was a German but they didn't know, and he had never tried to find out. He didn't care. He came from nowhere and belonged to no one. His only background was a place for the rejects of society, dependent for survival on the Christian charity of the nuns. When he went out into the world he did so alone, and found no difference from the loneliness of bastardy and institutional life. The only change was for the worse. He had no rights, there was no one to shelter a waif in his teens from the brutal realities of a country ravaged by the German Army and occupied by Allied troops, where the only way to survive was by living outside the law. And that was where Keller had found himself from the start. Outside the law and outside the society the law represented. At twenty-five he joined the Foreign Legion; the war had been over for some years and he was only just ahead of the police. The Legion was not a romantic place of refuge or a leap into adventure. It was the last resort of the desperate.

The wretched little whore had moved away, and he was glad. She came from the filthy, overcrowded refugee camps on the outskirts of the city. She would be half-starved and venereally infected. She might be fourteen or even less. There weren't many of them because the Lebanese police discouraged amateur prostitution; it was bad for the flourishing tourist trade, for the elegant hotels and the opulent beauty of the Lebanon's great capital.

If Keller had money, he would have settled here. It was full of wealth; they were a trading people, and some of the richest men in the Middle East, excepting the oil-bloated sheiks, lived in the stucco palaces above Beirut. His journey took ten minutes. At the end of it he walked to a car parked on the opposite side of the road and got into the back seat.

There was a man sitting there, a thin, sharp-faced Lebanese in a warm overcoat with a velvet collar, bright black eyes and a smile that glittered with gold teeth.

‘Very good,' he said to Keller. ‘Right on time. Did you do it?'

‘Yes,' Keller said. ‘I hope whoever it was liked the look of me.'

‘Why should you say that? What makes you say such a thing?' Fuad Hamedin was an arranger by profession. He could and did arrange anything for anyone who paid enough, and for this the money was very big. It wouldn't do for this piece of rubbish to get clever.

‘I say it because I'm not a fool,' Keller answered him. ‘They want to look at me, all right. They've looked. When do I know about the job?'

‘Tomorrow.'

‘Tomorrow. Always tomorrow! I can't go on waiting.'

‘You need money,' Fuad said. He spoke with tact when dealing with Keller. He knew the type; they were like dangerous animals, always ready to do with their fists what they couldn't achieve with their brains. He thought of Keller as rubbish because he was broke and obviously on the run. He had come through from Damascus, half-starved and ready to do anything, when Fuad heard about him. So Fuad had staked him to enough money to eat and sleep, and got him a job in the summer season as a bouncer in a sleazy night-club which robbed its customers. The club had closed in December. In the meantime he had taken a girl in to live with him, and offered to beat Fuad's face in when he suggested that she might be put out to a house to work.

Fuad feared Keller and therefore thought of him with contempt; it made him feel easier when Keller wasn't there.

‘You need money,' he repeated. ‘For both of you. And this is big money.'

‘All I've heard is big talk.' The other man turned away from him. He felt in his pocket for a cigarette. The packet was flat.

‘Give me a cigarette. You talk about a job and big money. But you can't say what kind of a job or how much money. You tell whoever it is, I want to know, or I'll find something else. I can still get to Israel.'

That was what had kept Fuad interested. Keller's original plan was to get some money together and make his way to Israel to fight for the Israelis. He had tried in Syria but the Syrians didn't want mercenaries. Fuad prompted him again, just to reassure himself.

‘You're very sure the Jews would take you on,' he said. ‘Myself, I don't see why. They've plenty of soldiers.'

‘Maybe. But I've got something special to offer.' Keller took out a cigarette from Fuad's case and lit it. ‘In their kind of war they need snipers. I can shoot a man's eye out at three hundred yards.'

‘I hope you can prove that,' Fuad said, ‘because that's what you've got to do. Tomorrow you must show just how well you can shoot. Walk past the St George at the same time tomorrow morning. And here's something to buy your girl a present.'

He put the money into Keller's pocket. ‘Now you can take a taxi,' he said. The gold-capped teeth glittered in the cavern of his mouth. ‘Enjoy yourself!'

Keller got out and slammed the door. He watched the car move off and called Fuad a short filthy name in Legionese, where the obscenities of half a dozen languages were blended. Then he began to walk back the way he had come.

‘Did you get a good look at him?' Eddi King asked the question quietly, leaning towards Elizabeth. The manager of the hotel had recognised her face; the name of Cameron sent him rushing to check up. They hadn't been in the hotel for an hour before people knew she was Huntley Cameron's niece. The other patrons in the foyer were watching them with interest.

‘Yes, I'd certainly know him again. I wish those two over there would stop staring at me. It's just because of that damned article.' Elizabeth turned in her chair, irritated by the unblinking scrutiny of an elderly foreign couple who were watching her and referring to the new issue of
Look
magazine. There was a picture of her uncle on the cover. Many articles were written about Huntley Cameron by people who got no closer to him than the gates outside his home, Freemont. He was a gift to the specialist in acid portraits. His marriages, his money, his personal tyranny as an employer, most of all his vicious right-wing politics, had made him a popular hate figure to millions all over the world. But what made him hated most was his arrogant avowal that his enemies weren't worth what the cat could lick of its ass. Some years back he had marshalled his newspaper, radio and television empire in a frontal assault on the Democratic Party under its then President Hughsden. All his life Huntley Cameron had been a right-wing reactionary, prepared to use his power and money to advance his views. In the coming Presidential election he could have been counted with certainty among the supporters of the ex-Klansman John Jackson, with his bully-boy screaming about communists and niggers taking over the States. All Cameron's friends, and indeed many of his enemies, were behind Jackson, the ugly political phenomenon which had come up in the field of American public life like a poisonous fungus. He had spread like a fungus until the impossible had happened. The Ku-Klax-Klan was in the running for the White House. And that was where Huntley Cameron had shown himself of different stature to the rest. He had seen what a President like John Jackson could do to the United States. He saw beyond the, present bitter Far East issues and social unrest to a future so bloodied by disruption and internal strife that it could cripple America for a generation. He had astonished everyone by swinging round completely and announcing that he was backing the Democrat Patrick Casey for the White House. He intended putting all his immense resources at the disposal of the most ardent liberal in American political life. Cameron had not begun poor; he was the son of a rich industrialist, but he turned his million-dollar inheritance away from chemical production and bought a steady circulation newspaper in up-state New York. By the time he was sixty he had a fortune which couldn't be counted with exactitude, and enough power to make or break anyone he chose.

By comparison Eddi King was a nonentity. He owned a small but select publishing house and an intellectual magazine which was widely circulated among conservatives in the States, and with some influence in similar circles in Europe. He was fifty-two years old, but he looked younger. His hair was slightly grey, but his skin was tanned and healthy, his figure kept in shape by rigorous exercising. Although he dressed immaculately, dapper was not the right word for him because he was too tall and thickset. The broad face, with its after-shave smell and even, American teeth, was still European, with a prominent frontal bone over pale green eyes. He said he had Latvian blood and women thought it was rather a smart thing to claim. He was a clever raconteur, a stimulating companion and an intellectual of consequence in a country where a sophisticated man of letters was more prized than a multimillionaire. He was not Huntley Cameron's friend; he was an intimate, but friendship was too close to describe Huntley's relationship to anyone. It presupposed equality in some degree, and no one was equal with Huntley but Huntley.

King sat back, crossing one leg over the other, and smiled at Elizabeth. Cultivating her had been a pleasure; he liked pretty girls and Elizabeth Cameron was exceptionally attractive, without the strident selfishness which de-sexed so many rich American women in his circle.

‘You really got a good look at him?' he asked again.

‘Good enough,' she answered. ‘I certainly wouldn't pick up a Lebanese by mistake!'

‘And it wasn't so terrible after all, was it?' He lit a cigarette for her and laughed in his easy way. ‘I told you when we had lunch it wouldn't be illegal, or even dangerous. And you're quite happy about it now?'

‘I'm sorry I made a fuss,' Elizabeth said. ‘I suppose I'm not good at using my imagination; I'd begun to think all sorts of crazy things.' She had not made a fuss, or even a mild scene. She was too controlled, too self-disciplined, to do what she felt like doing, which was to walk right out and take the next plane home. Elizabeth kept restrained and cool, preserving her dignity. She hadn't demanded to know, she had merely asked, but in a way that showed Eddi King the time had come for him to give an answer. And he had ordered champagne for them both, made her sit down, and told her that all she had to do was travel back to the States with a man her uncle wanted to keep under cover.

It was perfectly simple; she had nothing to do but pick the man up, go to the airport with him and board the plane, see him through Customs and hand him over to somebody else at Kennedy.

‘But why,' Elizabeth had asked him, ‘why all the secrecy? Why couldn't you have told me before?'

‘Because you just might have let it slip,' King's reply came back. ‘Without meaning to; you're in the news, Elizabeth, people listen to what you say at parties. A columnist might have got hold of it, printed something and the whole plan would have fallen flat. Wham, like that!'

He had a way of making the flimsiest thing seem a substantial fact; a hint at a party, an eavesdropping columnist—it hadn't sounded ridiculous when he explained it. But now, with time to think about it, and having just watched the man lighting his cigarette beyond the plate glass door, Elizabeth protested again.

‘I still think you could have trusted me,' she said. ‘If you'd said it was secret I wouldn't have told anyone.'

‘Of course you wouldn't,' he agreed, ‘but for Huntley's sake I wanted to be sure.'

‘And I suppose that's why you won't tell me why he can't go to the States alone,' she said. On this question he was adamant. Again he demanded her trust, appealed to her family loyalty and made her feel in the wrong for trying to probe any further.

‘He has an American passport,' King said. ‘But he's not an American; that much I can tell you. Nobody must know he's making a special visit. Complete secrecy is the key. And because of Huntley being who he is, nobody else could be trusted not to talk, or be bribed, or try to make use of it in some way. Only you, my dear. And you're sure you're not worried about it? You've no reason to be, but even so …' He shrugged prepared to understand and forgive if at the last moment she proved herself unworthy.