meet.”
“Why should we do that?”
“Because I am a former officer of the American intelligence service who has excellent contacts in the Mossad, and if you do not talk to me, you will be talking to them.”
This broke all the rules including the law of self-preservation, but it worked.
“How odd,” said Hawk in an altered tone of voice. “I shouldn’t have thought that a man with those connections would be a friend of Arabs.”
“It’s an odd world, Mr. Hawk. May I come to you or not?”
“Dinner tonight,” he said. It was not a question; clearly I was all too available.
“That’svery kind. How will I find you?”
“I’ll send a car for you at the Novotel. Eight-thirty.”
“I can easily take a taxi.”
“The driver would never find me and you would be a fool to trust him,” Hawk said. “I assure you that you will be quite safe.”
Well, now,
that
put my mind at ease. If you couldn’t trust an old Schutzstaffel man living in the jungle under an alias who happened to have a connection to Ibn Awad, whom could you trust? I decided to skip the Novotel and went instead to a hotel recommended by my taxi driver. The ride through Manaus was what one might expect in the tropics, a tour of a slum that appeared to have been built as a slum, punctuated by an occasional bank or office building made of the same scabby concrete and painted in the same garish colors as the rest of the city. In the central market sweaty butchers worked in the open air in hot sunlight, cutting up steers and hogs and selling the warm meat while blood spilled sluggishly over the edge of the table in a lacy crimson film.
Despite my driver’s assurances that the manager was his brother-in-law, the hotel, a most humble one, was fully booked until I slid a twenty-dollar bill across the reception desk. The banknote vanished and an encouraging smile appeared on the face of the clerk, who almost immediately noticed a cancellation. I was soon under a lukewarm shower. After that I ate a dry roomservice sandwich, wedged the door, and fell into yet another profound sleep. Evidently my brain wanted no part of the waking world into which the rest of my body had carried it.
After my nap, I put on fresh clothes and walked to the Novotel. I waited outside for my ride. The car that Simon Hawk sent for me at precisely eight o’clock was not the gleaming Mercedes that his telephone manner evoked, but a well-worn Subaru in need of a wash. The driver, a stringy Brazilian dressed in a clean but threadbare white suit, spotted me at once.
“You are the North American for Mister Doctor Hawk?”
Evidently Hawk had been willing to part with the name he was born with but not with the
Herr Doktor
that went with his originalidentity. His house was some distance from the city. The road ran through a sort of trench lined with brightly lit, open-fronted shops and cafés. Music blared, people went about their business in the trickled light of the shops. A fat drunk pissed into the roadway and the driver steered around the arcing yellow stream as if avoiding a pothole.
A mile or so further on, the driver turned the car into a narrow driveway cut into a grove of enormous smooth trees. The house itself was modest, overgrown with vines, in need of paint. According to Kalash, Hawk had been in hiding from Nazi-hunters since 1945, and by the look of things he was coming to the end of his nest egg.
He greeted me on the doorstep with a Leica in hand and took three rapid flash pictures before handing the camera for safekeeping to the driver, who disappeared.
“Hawk,” he said, with a firm handshake.
“Dyer.”
“No doubt.”
I might have said the same, and did so with a lift of the eyebrows. Hawk showed me a small, just perceptible sneer.
“Do come in.”
We stepped into a Sydney Greenstreet movie set: low ceilings, concrete walls, small high windows, ceiling fans turning lazily. Rattan furniture. Nothing on the walls except for a primitive textile or
“Why should we do that?”
“Because I am a former officer of the American intelligence service who has excellent contacts in the Mossad, and if you do not talk to me, you will be talking to them.”
This broke all the rules including the law of self-preservation, but it worked.
“How odd,” said Hawk in an altered tone of voice. “I shouldn’t have thought that a man with those connections would be a friend of Arabs.”
“It’s an odd world, Mr. Hawk. May I come to you or not?”
“Dinner tonight,” he said. It was not a question; clearly I was all too available.
“That’svery kind. How will I find you?”
“I’ll send a car for you at the Novotel. Eight-thirty.”
“I can easily take a taxi.”
“The driver would never find me and you would be a fool to trust him,” Hawk said. “I assure you that you will be quite safe.”
Well, now,
that
put my mind at ease. If you couldn’t trust an old Schutzstaffel man living in the jungle under an alias who happened to have a connection to Ibn Awad, whom could you trust? I decided to skip the Novotel and went instead to a hotel recommended by my taxi driver. The ride through Manaus was what one might expect in the tropics, a tour of a slum that appeared to have been built as a slum, punctuated by an occasional bank or office building made of the same scabby concrete and painted in the same garish colors as the rest of the city. In the central market sweaty butchers worked in the open air in hot sunlight, cutting up steers and hogs and selling the warm meat while blood spilled sluggishly over the edge of the table in a lacy crimson film.
Despite my driver’s assurances that the manager was his brother-in-law, the hotel, a most humble one, was fully booked until I slid a twenty-dollar bill across the reception desk. The banknote vanished and an encouraging smile appeared on the face of the clerk, who almost immediately noticed a cancellation. I was soon under a lukewarm shower. After that I ate a dry roomservice sandwich, wedged the door, and fell into yet another profound sleep. Evidently my brain wanted no part of the waking world into which the rest of my body had carried it.
After my nap, I put on fresh clothes and walked to the Novotel. I waited outside for my ride. The car that Simon Hawk sent for me at precisely eight o’clock was not the gleaming Mercedes that his telephone manner evoked, but a well-worn Subaru in need of a wash. The driver, a stringy Brazilian dressed in a clean but threadbare white suit, spotted me at once.
“You are the North American for Mister Doctor Hawk?”
Evidently Hawk had been willing to part with the name he was born with but not with the
Herr Doktor
that went with his originalidentity. His house was some distance from the city. The road ran through a sort of trench lined with brightly lit, open-fronted shops and cafés. Music blared, people went about their business in the trickled light of the shops. A fat drunk pissed into the roadway and the driver steered around the arcing yellow stream as if avoiding a pothole.
A mile or so further on, the driver turned the car into a narrow driveway cut into a grove of enormous smooth trees. The house itself was modest, overgrown with vines, in need of paint. According to Kalash, Hawk had been in hiding from Nazi-hunters since 1945, and by the look of things he was coming to the end of his nest egg.
He greeted me on the doorstep with a Leica in hand and took three rapid flash pictures before handing the camera for safekeeping to the driver, who disappeared.
“Hawk,” he said, with a firm handshake.
“Dyer.”
“No doubt.”
I might have said the same, and did so with a lift of the eyebrows. Hawk showed me a small, just perceptible sneer.
“Do come in.”
We stepped into a Sydney Greenstreet movie set: low ceilings, concrete walls, small high windows, ceiling fans turning lazily. Rattan furniture. Nothing on the walls except for a primitive textile or
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