The Little Drummer Girl (15 page)

"Is there anybody else she might have confided in? Such as this anarchist friend she has?"

"Oh, he'd be the last to know."

"Ned, is there anybody apart from you--think carefully, please, girlfriend, boyfriend, maybe an older person, family friend--in whom Charlie would confide such a shift in position?Away from radicalism? Ned?"

"Not that I know of, no. No, I can't think of a soul. She's close in some ways. Closer than you'd think."

Then a most extraordinary thing happened. Ned later provided Marjory with an exact account of it. To escape the uncomfortable and, to Ned's ear, histrionic crossfire of their separate gazes on him, Ned had been playing with his glass, peering into it, rolling the Marc around. Sensing that Kurtz had somehow rested his case, he now glanced up, and intercepted an expression of quite evident relief in Kurtz's features that he was in the act of communicating to Litvak: his actual pleasure that Charlie was not after all softening in her conviction. Or, if she was, had not admitted it to anybody of note. He looked again and it had gone. But not even Marjory could afterwards persuade him it had not been there.

Litvak, the great barrister's junior, had taken over the questioning: a quicker tone to wrap the case up.

"Mr. Quilley, sir, do you hold in your agency individual office papers on all your clients? Files?"

"Well, Mrs. Ellis does, I'm sure," said Ned. "Somewhere."

"Mrs. Ellis been doing that work for long, sir?"

"My goodness, yes. She was there in my father's time."

"And what type of information does she store there? Fees--expenses--commission taken, kind of thing? Are they merely arid business papers, these files?"

"Good Lord, no, she puts everything in. Birthdays, the kind of flowers they like, restaurants. We even found an old dancing-shoe in one. Names of their kids. Dogs. Press cuttings. Any amount of stuff."

"Personal letters?"

"Yes, of course."

"In her own hand? Her own letters, going back over the years?"

Kurtz was embarrassed. His Slav eyebrows said so; they were massing in a pained line round the bridge of his nose.

"Karman, I think Mr. Quilley has given us enough of his time and experience already," he told Litvak severely. "If we need more information, Mr. Quilley will surely supply it later. Better still, if Charlie herself is prepared to talk this out with us, we can get it from her. Ned, this has been a great and memorable occasion. Thank you, sir."

But Litvak was not so easily put off. He had a young man's obstinacy: "Mr. Quilley doesn't have any secrets from us," he exclaimed. "Hell, Mr. Gold. I'm only asking him what the world already knows, and what our visa people will find out in point zero five seconds on their computer. We're in a hurry with this. You know that. If there's papers, her own letters, using her own words, mitigating circumstances, evidence of a change of heart maybe, why don't we have Mr. Quilley show them to us? If he's willing. If he's not--well, that's another matter," he added, with unpleasant innuendo.

"Karman, I am quite sure Ned is willing," said Kurtz sternly, as if that were not the point at all. And shook his head as if to say he would never quite get used to young men's pushy manners these days.

The rain had stopped. They walked little Quilley between them, carefully trimming their agile pace to his own faltering tread. He was fuddled, he was aggrieved, he was afflicted with a sense of alcoholic foreboding that damp traffic fumes did nothing to dispel. What the devil do they want? he kept wondering. One minute offering Charlie the moon, the next objecting to her silly politics? And now, for reasons he had ceased to remember, they were proposing to consult the record, which wasn't a record at all, but a desultory collection of keepsakes, the province of an employee too elderly to be retired. Mrs. Longmore, the receptionist, watched their arrival and Ned knew at once from her disapproving face that he had done himself too well at lunch. To hell with her. Kurtz insisted that Ned go ahead of them up the stairs. From his office, while they practically held a gun to his head, he telephoned Mrs. Ellis asking her to bring Charlie's papers to the waiting-room and leave them there.

"Shall we knock on your door when we're through, Mr. Quilley?" Litvak asked, like someone about to deliver a child.

The last he saw of them both, they were seated at the rosewood drum table in the waiting-room, surrounded by about six of Mrs. Ellis' foul brown boxes that looked as though they had been rescued from the blitz. Like a pair of tax collectors they were, poring over the same set of suspect figures, pencil and paper at their elbows, and Gold, the broad one, with his jacket off and that scruffy watch of his set on the table beside him as if he were timing himself while he made his beastly calculations. After that, Quilley must have dozed off for a bit. He woke with a jolt at five to find the waiting-room empty. And when he buzzed Mrs. Longmore, she replied pointedly that his guests had not wished to disturb him.

Ned did not tell Marjory at once. "Oh,them," he said when she asked him that same evening. "Just a pair of dreary package artists, I'm afraid, on their way to Munich. Nothing to worry about there"

"Jew-boys?"

"Yes--well, yes, Jewish, I suppose. Very, in fact." Marjory nodded as if she'd known as much all along. "But I mean jolly nice ones," said Ned a bit hopelessly.

Marjory was a prison visitor in her off-hours and Ned's deceptions held no mystery for her. But she bided her time. Bill Lochheim was Ned's correspondent in New York, his only American buddy. Next afternoon Ned rang him. Old Loch hadn't heard of them but he duly reported back what Ned already knew: GK were new in the field, had some backing, but independents were a drug on the market these days. Quilley didn't like the tone of old Loch's voice. He sounded as if he'd been put upon somehow--not by Quilley, who had never put upon anyone in his life, but by someone else, some third party he'd consulted. Quilley even had the queer feeling that he and old Loch might, in some strange way, be in the same boat. With amazing bravura, Ned rang GK's New York number on a pretext. The place turned out to be a holding address for out-of-town companies: no information available on clients. Now Ned could think of nothing except his two visitors and the luncheon. He wished to God he had shown them the door. He rang the Munich hotel they had mentioned and got a stuffy manager. Herr Gold and Herr Karman had stayed one night but left early the next morning unexpectedly on business, he said sourly--so why did he say it at all? Always too much information, thought Ned. Or too little. And the same hint of chaps doing things against their better judgement A German producer whom Kurtz had mentioned said that they were "good people, very respectable, oh very good." But when Ned asked whether they had been in Munich recently and what projects they were associated with, the producer grew hostile and practically hung up on him.

There remained Ned's professional colleagues in the agency business. Ned consulted them reluctantly and with tremendous casualness, spreading his enquiries wide, and drawing blanks everywhere.

"Met two awfully nice Americans the other day," he confided finally to Herb Nolan, of Lomax Stars, pausing at Herb's table at the Garrick. "Over here bargain-hunting for some high-flyin' TV series they're putting together. Gold and something. Come your way at all?"

Nolan laughed. "It was me who sent ‘em to you, old boy. Asked after a couple of my horrors, then wanted to know all about your Charlie. Whether I thought she could go the distance. I told ‘em, Ned. I told ‘em!"

"What did you tell them?"

" ‘More likely she'll blow us all sky high,' I said! What?"

Depressed by the poor level of Herb Nolan's humour, Ned enquired no further. But the same night, after Marjory had extracted his inevitable confession, he went on to share his anxieties with her.

"They were in such a damned hurry," he said. "They had too much energy, even for Americans. Went at me like a pair of bloody policemen. First one chap, then the other. Pair of bloody terriers," he added, changing his simile. "I keep thinking I should go to the authorities," he said.

"But, darling," Marjory replied at last. "By the sound of it, I'm afraid they were the authorities."

"I'm going to write to her," Ned declared, with great decisiveness. "I've a jolly good mind to write and warn her, just in case. She could be in trouble."

But even if he had done so, he would have been too late. It was not forty-eight hours later that Charlie set sail for Athens to keep her tryst with Joseph.

So once again it was done; on the face of it, a mere sideshow compared with the main thrust of the operation; and a dreadfully risky one at that, as Kurtz was the first to agree when, the same night, he modestly reported his triumph to Misha Gavron. Yet what else could we have done, Misha--tell me that? Where else was such a precious store of correspondence, ranging over so long a period, to be obtained? They had hunted for other recipients of Charlie's letters--boyfriends, girlfriends, her bloody mother, a former schoolmistress; they had posed, in a couple of places, as a commercial company interested in acquiring the manuscripts and autographs of tomorrow's great. Till Kurtz, with Gavron's grudging consent, had had the whole thing stopped. Better one big strike, he had decreed, than so many dangerous small ones.

Besides, Kurtz needed the intangibles. He needed to feel the warmth and texture of his quarry. Who better than Quilley, therefore, with his long and innocent experience of her, to supply them? Thus Kurtz punched it through with his will. Having done so, he flew next morning to Munich, as he had told Quilley he would, even if the production he was concerned with was not of the type he had led him to suppose. He visited his two safe flats; he breathed fresh encouragement into his men. In addition to this, he contrived a congenial meeting with the good Dr. Alexis: another long luncheon at which they discussed almost nothing of importance--but then what do old friends need but one another?

And from Munich, Kurtz flew on to Athens, continuing his southward march.

five

The boat was two hours late arriving in Piraeus, and if Joseph had not already pocketed her air ticket Charlie might well have stood him up then and there. Though again she mightn't, for under her scatty exterior she was cursed with a dependability of character that was often wasted on the company she kept. For one thing, she'd had too much time to think, and though she had by now convinced herself that the spectral observer of Nottingham, York, and East London was either a different man or no man at all, there was still an unsettling voice inside her that would not be talked down. For another thing, declaring her plans to the family had not been half as easy as Joseph had made out it was going to be. Lucy had wept and pressed money on her--"My last five hundred drachs, Chas, all for you." Willy and Pauly, drunk, had gone down on their knees on the dockside before an estimated audience of thousands--"Chas, Chas,how can you do this to us?"--and to escape, she'd had to fight her way though a grinning throng, then run the length of the road with the strap of her shoulder bag broken, her guitar flapping under her other arm, and foolish tears of remorse flooding her face. She was saved by, of all people, the flaxen hippy boy from Mykonos, who must have crossed on the boat with them, though she hadn't seen him. Passing by in a taxi, he scooped her up and dumped her fifty yards from her destination. He was Swedish and his name was Raoul, he said. His father was in Athens on a business trip; Raoul hoped to hit him for some bread. She was a little surprised to find him quite so lucid, and he never mentioned Jesus once.