"Paul-Loup Sulitzer - The Green King" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sulitzer Paul Loup)

The gray eyes, very light in the night, looked down.
"I don't know anybody by that name."
Eliahou began to laugh. "O.K." He started to walk away, stopped, turned around.
"Try not to get killed right away."
"I'll try," said Reb. "You have my word."
He and Yoыl left together. A truck from a kibbutz came for them, as planned, at four o'clock in the morning, to take them, as planned, to the north of Ashod. They were in Tel Aviv before sunrise, having crossed many checkpoints without trouble, eating fruit they had picked during the night.
In October and November of the same year, 1945, they took part in a dozen missions, one of which took them into the desert and lasted six days. The objective was to blow up, in as many places as possible, one of the British-Iranian pipelines.
Apart from these missions, they lived in Tel Aviv, where the Irgun had found them housing and official work to serve as a cover. Yoыl Bainish became a shopkeeper, selling knickknacks in a booth on Allenby Road. Reb Klimrod was a waiter in a coffeehouse on Ben Yehouda Street. The place was frequented mostly by lawyers. His progress in English was spectacular, and fascinated Yoel, who was himself quite talented when it came to learning languages. Besides Yiddish and Hebrew, Yoыl spoke fluent Polish, German, and Russian, and he too would soon be speaking English. At that time, whenever he had a free moment, Reb went to the movies, where American films in the original language were usually being shown. Bainish remembers that the tall Viennese would sit through twelve or fifteen consecutive screenings of Citizen Kane, Bataan Patrol, Objective Burma, the Marx Brothers' Go West, and My Darling Cleinentine, and he could do a perfect imitation of Bogart in The Maltese Falcon and suave Cary Grant in Philadelphia Story. Even the indescribable nasal sound of Groucho Marx. He still read voraciously, but now it was mostly in English.
And there was an undeniable relationship between this bulimia for reading-through the lawyers he served each day at the coffeehouse he had obtained access to special libraries-and the change that took place at the end of November. The partnership of Klimrod and Bainish was dissolved. Each of them had become an excellent explosives specialist, and to let them work together was redundant. Begin's Assault Force was beginning to intensify its activity as the Irgun was becoming better organized, following the example of the French Resistance. Leaflets from that period refer to the British as the "occupying force," and members of the Irgun were, it was said, no more terrorists than were members of the French Resistance: "The situation is the same as that which existed between the French maquis and the German invaders."
At the end of November, Reb K.limrod was given a new assignment. First, he completely changed both his identity and his work. He was given papers that identified him as Pierre
Hubrecht, born in Paris in l926-an assumed name he was to use at least two more times. The curriculum vitae given him specified that his mother was Jewish and had disappeared in Paris in 1942, and that his father, a career officer who had chosen to fight on the side of the Free French, had been killed in Syria, where he had been joined by his son, after a detour in Spain. Although all of these biographical details were perfectly authentic, they had nothing to do with Reb Klimrod; but they did explain his knowledge of French and rudimentary Arabic.
As for his new work, these papers gave him access to a bank in the business center of Tel Aviv, the Hakim & Senechal Bank, whose central office was in Beirut. He started as a runner. One of the Hakim brothers was a silent partner funding the Irgun, but that was not the only reason Reb was soon promoted; he was simply a little too bright to be a runner. Around mid-December, he was working as a money broker. He was only seventeen, although his passport said he was twenty.

Another change marked his separation from Bainish. The latter had left Tel Aviv for Jerusalem and now specialized in attempts against the railroads and pipelines of the Iraqi Petroleum Company.
Reb, on the other hand, because of his physical appearance
-light-brown hair, light eyes, fair skin-and because of his employment at Hakim & Senechal, which justified his traveling and his absences, was more and more used by the Irgun for infiltration of British circles, and, on a military level, for urban terrorism.
From this point on, too, he was almost always teamed with Dov Lazarus.

2

The Jeep was driven by a man named Harmond. He had changed the original e of his name to an a in order to anglicize it. He had fought in the British Army in Africa and in Italy. He had, in fact, been part of the four-hundred-man detachment that had for ten straight days held off the Italian Anete Division near Koenig's Free French at Bir-Hakeim, at the cost of seventy-five percent of their number. The uniform he wore was truly his: that of the Sixth Airborne Division. Officially, for his British superiors, he was on leave.
Dov Lazarus was at his side, wearing the insignia of a major. Behind them was Reb Klimrod, also in uniform, with corporal's stripes, his feet resting on canvas bags containing explosives. A truck followed the Jeep; on board were fifteen men plus the driver and an officer who had a beautiful red mustache. Among the men, ten had handcuffs on their wrists and were dressed as Arabs; the other five, in combat uniforms and helmets, served as guards.
Two hundred yards before reaching the police station, at a signal given by Lazarus, Harmond slowed down and stopped the Jeep. But the truck kept going.
The place was called Yagur and was halfway between Haifa and Nazareth. The police station was a two-story square building, surrounded by a double fence of barbed wire. Four sentries were posted at the entrance and four others were on the roof, protected by a rampart of sandbags. Inside, there were probably twenty more soldiers, plus policemen, out of uniform perhaps, but certainly armed. It was three o'clock in the morning, March 1, 1946.
"One minute," announced Lazarus.
From the Jeep, parked in the shadows, they had a direct view
of the entrance. They saw the truck approach, stop. The officer with the mustache got out, had a discussion with the sergeant in command. He must have been convincing, since the sergeant seemed agreeable. The truck entered the defensive perimeter of the station. The false guard made the false Arab prisoners get down, prisoners who were concealing Sten and Bren machine guns beneath their robes.
The whole group went into the building.
"Two minutes," said Lazarus.
Harmond had a general idea of what was taking place inside the police station. The commando was neutralizing the British, those on the ground floor and then those on the floors above, one by one. All very quietly, so as not to alert anyone, especially the sentries posted on the roof, with their ready machine guns. Then they would empty the arms store, free the prisoners, the false officer with the mustache would appear at the door, give the signal by removing his hat, and he, Harmond, would drive the Jeep up to the entrance quite naturally, to drop off the two men with him. He learned their names only later, but he did know that they carried with them enough explosives to blow up half a town.
"Three minutes. We're running late
Lazarus sounded amused. Harmond, his hand on the gear-shift, ready to pull away at a second's notice, glanced at him quickly. Then, in the rear-view mirror, he looked at the thin, blank face of the other man. He remembers how amazed he was by their absolute calm, and by the disparity, on all counts, of this team: one, short and stocky, already old; the other one, very young and very tall, with pale eyes lost in a dream.
"Watch out . .
The warning, uttered in a surprisingly quiet tone by Lazarus, came one second before two events that were to upset all the plans. One was the appearance of two half-tracks, one hundred yards to their right, on the road to Nazareth; right after, from inside the station, a scream, the sounding of an alarm, gunshots. After that, everything happened quickly, as always. Harmond's orders had been very clear: in the event of a serious incident, he was to retreat immediately, and leave. He shifted into reverse, preparing to turn around.
"Wait."
Lazarus's hairy paw came down on his wrist.
"Listen, ducky," he said, smiling. "The half-tracks are going to block their way. They won't even be able to leave."
And right then the two armored vehicles suddenly accelerated and took up positions at the entrance to the station, where shooting had reached a peak. Harmond saw one of the false Arabs run out of the building, but he was stopped short by a burst of gunfire.
"Completely blocked," said Lazarus, smiling even more now. "Reb? Are you coming with me, kid?"
"I didn't have the slightest idea what they were going to do," Harmond said later. "Even if I had, I'm not sure that I would have had the courage to go with them. But they were both extraordinarily calm. It was only later that I understood that they were, in a way, trying to outdo each other. And that they were crazy."
Harmond stopped the Jeep exactly between the two half-tracks. "That's fine," said Lazarus, getting out and nodding appreciatively to the men in the armored trucks, who were looking at him, not without surprise, wondering where the hell he had come from. "Good work," he said, with a slight Irish accent. "You fucking well stopped them, those bastards. Keep that door in your line of fire and don't let any of them get out. I'm going in to see if I can get them alive. It's alive that I want them." He seemed to discover then, almost at his feet, one of the outside sentries, who had fallen to the ground upon hearing the first shots and was waiting, with his machine pistol aimed.
"Is this any time to take a nap, my boy? Why don't you get up and take your position at that angle. As far as I remember, there is another door there, through which those bastards might try to escape. Cover it. Who is the officer on duty tonight?"
"Lieutenant Parnell," answered the young soldier, crushed by this outburst of sarcastic authority.
"Another Irishman!" commented Lazarus. "What would the Empire do without us." He half turned, and as he gestured amiably to the sentries posted on the roof, their machine guns searching for a target, he said to Reb: "And you, Barnes, what are you waiting for? Why don't you get your ass out of that Jeep and come with me
Very slowly, he walked through the first wire entanglement and advanced toward the building, where automatic firearms were still cracking. As sometimes happens, there was a sudden pause in the shooting, and Lazarus took advantage of it.
He screamed: "Parnell! We've got them blocked off here, but I want them alive! Do you hear me, Parnell?"
In answer, a spray of bullets hit the ground less than a yard from his feet, but without touching him. And Harmond understood two things: first, that the burst of gunfire had come from his Irgun comrades, who were stuck on the ground floor, and, second, that they had recognized his voice.
A head appeared on the second floor, that of a young officer in shirt sleeves, disheveled, holding a regulation pistol. Lazarus smiled at him broadly.
"Lieutenant Parnell? I am Major Connors. God bless Ireland. We've got the bastards. The trick is to get them to talk. I'm going to speak to them in their gibberish. Would you ask your men to stop shooting, please."
He went on, in Hebrew, in a loud and resonant voice, marked now more than ever by a heavy Irish accent. He wasn't taking any risks, just in case there should be someone in the British contingent who might understand him. Addressing the men from the Irgun, he suggested they give up, on the spot, and put down their arms. He told them he was coming in, that they didn't stand a chance of getting out alive, except as prisoners, in which case he would personally guarantee them status as political prisoners.