Cheyney Fox (35 page)

An awkward silence followed. Cheyney felt he was waiting for her to say something. She didn’t know what to say. Working on instinct alone, which had at least gotten her free from him and the estate for a day — no mean feat, since he was so paranoid about the comings and goings of people in his fortified desert abode — she blurted the first thing that came into her head, yet again.

“I have always been a little afraid of you.”

“How flattering. May I ask why?”

“Because I have never been able to understand the close relationship you have with Kurt, the bond that links you.”

“Then should you not have asked your husband?”

“Friendship, a deep and abiding friendship never to be broken. Kurt’s very words.”

“True enough.”

Cheyney had to muster all the control she could find within herself not to shout, Liar, what about the plan I overheard in the garden. Liar, liar. Instead she claimed, “I am here breakfasting with you because I think at last that I understand it. It is a friendship between men that doesn’t really have a place for me in it. It’s that and nothing more, isn’t it, Semanan?”

Again, silence lay heavily between them, only this time it sent a chill through Cheyney. She heard the meanness come into his voice. She stiffened herself to act a role she knew she had to play.

“I have always found you charming. Beautiful and charming, Cheyney. And intelligent. But I have never understood this elaborate pretense you make of not knowing that we are the last of the Nazi hierarchy. And that, although Kurt was never one of us, his mother and father were, and he was a Nazi sympathizer who chose to remain neutral in England and Portugal because it suited him and our purpose.”

“I didn’t know. I guessed,” answered Cheyney, trying to appear calm.

“Don’t you and your husband talk to each other, Cheyney?”

Cheyney ignored the question. She said, “Guessed, and have
now accepted my husband’s past as I accept yours. Which is why we are having breakfast together.”

“Ah, then this is a change of heart, a new beginning for our own relationship, Cheyney. Is that what you are trying to tell me?”

“Yes, in a rather awkward way it seems.”

Semanan rose from his chair and went around the table and sat down in the empty chair next to hers. He raised up her hand and kissed it, stroked her hair. Cheyney had to swallow back the inclination to be sick.

“What has brought on this extraordinary change of heart, my dear, beautiful Cheyney?”

“Time, and loving my husband and son more than anything in this world.” She gave Semanan a hard stare and pressed her advantage, “Time. Oh, just look at the time! I want to leave now, Albert.”

He threw back his head and laughed. “You are embarrassed. How charming. Never mind, Cheyney. I have waited a long time for you to appreciate us. Now I can wait a little longer for you to appreciate me.”

The meaningful looks, the squeeze on the hand. Yet again, the arm accidentally brushing against her breast as they rose from their chairs. Fortunately the sound of the seaplane taxiing up to the dock distracted enough for her to get away without having to say another word. She rushed to her room to change, his sinister laughter ringing in her ears. He was there on the dock to wave her off and tell her that a car and driver would be waiting to chauffeur her around Cairo. And she was gone, without once looking back to see him watching the plane taxi up the Nile and glide effortlessly into the air.

The plane skimmed the river up to the shore almost opposite the Hilton Hotel. Two men lashed the silver-winged beauty to its mooring, while the pilot helped Cheyney to disembark. She kept telling herself, Remember, nothing out of the ordinary. All must appear as normal. Pray you can find Irving.

Cheyney had never been naive about how powerful, wealthy, envied, and admired Kurt was, nor the irrational behavior men such as her husband might bring out in other men and women. So she had become quite used to bodyguards and cautious chauffeurs, without the kind of paranoia Semanan suffered
from. Therefore she had always, when in Egypt, used his men as casually and easily as Kurt did. She had created a rapport with them over the years. Although she had to be cautious because she knew they reported everything back to Semanan, she was certain she could give them the slip if she had to. She was confident she would find Irving.

They greeted her enthusiastically at Costi and Taki’s, the hairdressers in the Hilton. Yes, of course they could fit her in. She slipped into a gown. As soon as her hair had been washed, she called Semanan’s bodyguard in from where he hovered in the hall. She asked him to save them time by going to fetch Mahmud the antique dealer and bringing him to her. She would be at least two hours in the salon. Just enough time for him to get through the Cairo traffic to the other side of the city and back. For her, freedom from Semanan’s spies.

Irving was not in Paris. But his office promised they could reach him and he would call her within the hour. He did, from Rome. The moment Cheyney heard Irving’s voice she knew everything was going to be all right. Her relief was so great she broke down, blurting out all she had heard, between dry sobs of anxiety. She was too incoherent. Irving spent minutes trying to calm her. What finally did it was his saying:

“Cheyney, we take care of our own.”

“Yes, and that’s what I’m trying to do, Irving,” she answered in a more controlled voice.

“Good, then let’s proceed. First, hang up this telephone now. I’ll call you back in ten minutes and tell you where to go to meet two colleagues. They will help us work out what to do.”

The three-way conversation that took place between Cheyney on one telephone, Efram Sagar, a Mossad agent sitting next to her, on another, and Irving on his in Rome, was hardly necessary. Based on information they had received that Semanan was chancing a journey, they had been plotting to lift him in a swoop on his motor launch sometime during the trip up the Nile to Abu Simbel. They calculated it to be during the night of the boat’s second day on the river. Efram was none too happy to receive Irving’s call. He knew Irving would want the paintings and to get into the palace. That was too complicated. Efram said all they wanted was Semanan, and there was no
chance of getting into that fortress without a mini-war and a squad of men and arms to fight it. Israel, because of diplomatic relations with Egypt, couldn’t do it. The CIA would turn a blind eye to the operation. But not to a war raid that involved hundreds of people. Irving was furious and on his way to join them. Cheyney no longer knew what to do. She pleaded:

“What about me, my family?”

“Listen to Efram. Do what he tells you. I’m leaving for the airport now. And Cheyney, Efram and John Collins will see to it you all walk away as if nothing happened. I have your word on that, Efram, don’t I?”

Efram hesitated before he answered. Then looking at John Collins, he said, “John, it was your tip, it’s our ball game, if you can keep your informer safe, how about a friend who’s a countrywoman who can help us?”

“Has helped us,” shouted Irving down the telephone.

John Collins, who had taken it all in along with inhalations from a cigar, took the telephone from Efram. “Irving, this’ll cost you. You owe me one. Quit screaming and get in the air and jet your ass down here, or you’ll miss the whole fucking show. Yes, Irving, yes.” He hung up.

“This is a nightmare,” said Cheyney.

“No, it’s not. You think that way, lady, and it will be.”

John pulled a chair up next to her and poured two fingers of whiskey into a tumbler. He handed it to her. “Belt this back, lady, and tell us everything you know. From the start. And how you are involved with Irving. We’ll work it all out.”

Many things surfaced during their conversation. Not least the answers to many of the questions Kurt had forbidden her even to raise. Relieved as she was to have confirmed the truth about her husband, she still resented the look in Efram’s, the Mossad man’s, eyes that told her guilt by association was guilty enough. And the raised eyebrow, “those-are-the-facts-lady” look in John’s, the CIA man’s, eye. His shrug of indifference. The “it was a long time ago, now let’s get on with catching the guy we know
is
a criminal and still dangerous” attitude gave her no comfort.

They were all waiting on the dock for Cheyney on her return. Kurt, Taggart, Semanan, Helmut. Smiling faces, waving arms. Never before had Cheyney felt guilt about helping Irving. Not
once had she seen it as a betrayal of Kurt. But she had a twinge of that feeling now. For the first time she had agreed to participate actively in something she knew Kurt would never forgive her for.

When he placed his arms around her and kissed her, she wanted to blurt it all out. What she had overheard: the Israeli plan to catch Semanan, the most senior top Nazi war criminal still free and unpunished for his crimes against humanity. They had given her the proof of that, and more. Kurt Walbrook and his father had never joined the Nazi party. Their guilt lay in their attachment to his mother, who had, and by association with the top people in the party. And in coming out of the war wealthy, their fortune intact, like so many others of the aristocratic, wealthy Germans. They couldn’t even prove that Kurt Walbrook was an anti-Semite, let alone a collaborator.

It was impossible for her to reveal anything there and then. But there was still time to talk to Kurt, give him a chance to explain his attachment to such a monster. He could make a clean breast of the past. She could tell him what she had overheard and let him find a way out. They need never associate again with the likes of Albert Semanan.

When they were alone dressing for dinner, she tried. He seemed never to take his eyes off Cheyney, he wanted her, it was in every glance he gave her. She kept avoiding the erotic tension building between them. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, and finally, as she passed in front of him naked except for a diaphanous dressing gown, he reached out and yanked her off her feet and into his arms. He opened the dressing gown and roughly shoved it off her shoulders. The moment his hands touched her skin, his lips hungrily sucked on her nipple, he felt her stiffen with anxiety. He released her at once.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she answered, attempting to pull her dressing gown closed.

“For the first time since I’ve known you, you are lying to me. Now, I’ll ask you only one more time, what’s wrong?”

She scrambled off the bed and walked to the wardrobe. She dropped her dressing gown to the floor and slipped into a no less seductive one of powder-blue silk moiré, with cuffs and lapels of a darker blue. A St. Laurent robe he had bought her.
It did at least cover her nakedness. She swung around to face him, visibly trembling as she tied the sash around her waist.

“I hate Albert. He is an evil man, and I don’t know why you remain loyal to him. Why are you loyal to him?”

“I told you, Cheyney. He’s like family. Now leave it at that. I’d have thought you would have come to terms with that as fact by now. It has nothing to do with us. Subject closed. And I don’t want to hear about it again.”

“Well, I am afraid the subject is not closed.”

The look of anger in Kurt’s face frightened her. She had never seen him like that. He started toward her. She was terrified, but she stood her ground. He grabbed her by the shoulders. His fingers dug into her flesh. Then the honeyed, sensuously husky voice, “Sheyney,” He closed his eyes, that seductive emotional habit of his. Again, “Sheyney,” he whispered, and the long lashes trembled. Slowly he opened his eyes. She felt herself slipping, slipping, under his spell. He possessed her entirely. She began to whimper as he pulled her tight into his arms and kissed her. Sucked hungrily on her lips until they parted and he kissed her deeply, passionately. Slowly he released her and stroked her hair and grazed her cheek with the back of his hand. And she broke down and began to weep. In between sobs she blurted it out, what she had heard in the garden in the dawn of that day.

Taking her by the hand, he led her to the bed where they sat down together. He calmed her down and then made her repeat everything she had heard. She could tell nothing from his voice, the look on his face. He cradled her in his arms.

“It’s unfortunate that you overheard that conversation.”

“Unfortunate? You call it unfortunate?”

“Put it out of your mind. Semanan can do nothing to harm us. I can assure you of that. Leave it with me. He has a dream which can never be, and that is all that this amounts to. I can always talk him around, and I will this time as well.”

She couldn’t believe it. He was sympathizing with Semanan. She was going to tell him about the plot to kidnap Semanan. That she now knew the truth about him and the Walbrook family. But he kissed her once more on the lips and sealed them forever from telling him about anything she had done for Irving in the past, or what she was about to do for Irving and
for her family, her marriage. Because when Kurt released her he said:

“You must forget you ever heard that conversation, Cheyney. Don’t think about Albert. Just take him as a remarkable man who has amassed one of the finest collections of art and artifacts the world has ever seen. And that one day it might belong to me, or to Taggart. And, if that happens, then ultimately the collection is not just for private eyes, but for the world to see. I have spent a lifetime on this, Cheyney, and it would be best if you kept that in mind. And nothing else, except that I love you just as much today as the first time we met. Only now, my Sheyney, I adore you as well.”

Was it the greed within his magnificent obsession that blinded Kurt? Cheyney was once again swayed by his almost mesmerizing charm. Her husband was still the consummate spellbinder. What surfaced this time for Cheyney was the realization that he was a far more tough and ruthless spellbinder than she had ever allowed herself to realize. He did what he had to do. She would do the same.

The person involved in the “snatch” (John Collins’ term for the Israeli operation “Killer One”) who suffered the most anxiety over the affair was Irving Kirshner. Not allowed to participate, unable to see and help Cheyney with her small but crucial part in the affair, and finding no way in to do a bit of his own snatching the art treasures. There was nothing for him to do but to await the outcome.