The Little Drummer Girl (43 page)

They were in two brown wrapped packages, one much larger than the other. Selecting the smaller first, Kurtz clumsily opened it with his gloved fingertips and -spread the papers flat. She recognised the black, schoolboy writing of Michel. He unwrapped the second and, like a dream come true, she recognised the handwriting as her own. Michel's to you are in photostat, dear, Kurtz was saying: we have the originals waiting for you in England. Your own letters, now, they're the originals, so they belong to Michel, don't they, dear?

"Naturally," she said, this time aloud, and on an instinct glanced in Joseph's direction, but this time quite specifically at his locked-up hands so intent upon disowning authorship.

She read Michel's letters first because she felt she owed him the attention. There were a dozen, and they varied from the frankly sensual and passionate to the brief and authoritarian. "Kindly in your letters be sure to number. If you do not number, do not write. I cannot enjoy your letters if I do not know I receive them all. This for my personal safety." Between passages of ecstatic praise for her acting came arid exhortations to perform only" rôles of social significance which can awaken awareness." At the same time she was to "avoid public acts that reveal your true politics." She was to go to no more radical forums, attend no more demonstrations or rallies. She was to conduct herself "in the bourgeois manner," appearing to accept capitalist standards. She should let it be thought she had "renounced to the revolution" while secretly "continuing, by all means, with your radical reading." There were many confusions of logic, many lapses of syntax, many misspellings. There was talk of "our soon reunion," meaning presumably in Athens, and there were a couple of coy references to white grapes, vodka, and taking "plenty of sleep before we are together again."

As she read on, she began to form a new and humbler picture of Michel, one that came suddenly much closer to their prisoner upstairs. "He's a baby," she muttered. She glanced accusingly at Joseph. "You built him up so much. He's a kid."

Receiving no answer, she turned to her own letters to Michel, picking them up gingerly, as if they solved a great mystery. "Schoolbooks," she said aloud, with a stupid smile, as she took a first nervous look at them, and this was because, thanks to poor Ned Quilley's archives, the old Georgian had been able to reproduce not merely Charlie's exotic taste in stationery--the backs of menus, bills, the headed notepaper of hotels and theatres and boarding houses along her route--but had caught, to her mounting awe, the spontaneous variations in her writing, from the infantile scrawls of early sadness to the passionate woman in love; to the goodnight scribble of the bone-weary actress holed out in the sticks and longing for a little light relief to the would-be erudite copperplate of the revolutionary who troubled to write out a lengthy passage of Trotsky, but missed the second "r" in "occurred."

Thanks to Leon, her prose was given no less exactly; Charlie actually blushed to see how perfectly they had imitated her lurid hyperbole, her lapses into awkward, incomplete philosophising, her rampant, violent fury against the ruling Tory government. Unlike Michel's, her references to their lovemaking were graphic and explicit; to her parents abusive; to her childhood wrathful and unavenged. She met Charlie the romancer, Charlie the penitent, and Charlie the hard-nosed bitch. She met what Joseph called the Arab in her--the Charlie who was in love with her own rhetoric, whose notions of truth were inspired less by what had happened than by what should have happened. And when she had read them all through, she put the two piles together and, head in hands, read them again as a complete correspondence--her five letters to his every one, her answers in reply to his questions, his evasions in reply to hers.

"Thanks, Jose," she said finally, without lifting her head. "Thanks a hell of a lot. If you'd lend me our nice gun a moment, I'll just pop out and shoot myself."

Kurtz was already laughing, though he was alone in his mirth: "Now, Charlie, I don't think that's quite fair to our friend Joseph here at all. This was a committee thing. We had a lot of heads at work here."

Kurtz had a final request: the envelopes that contain your letters, dear. He had them right here with him, look, they weren't franked or cancelled, and he hadn't yet put the letters inside for Michel to take them out again at the ceremonial opening. Would Charlie oblige? It was mainly for the fingerprints, he said; yours first, dear, afterwards the post office sorters', finally Michel's. But there was also the little point about it being her saliva on the flap and underneath the stamps; her blood group, lest anybody clever should ever think of checking, because don't ever forget they have some very clever people, as your fine, fine work has even last night confirmed to us.

She remembered the long fatherly hug from Kurtz, because at the time it seemed as inevitable and necessary as parenthood. Of her farewell from Joseph, however, her last of the series, she afterwards had no recollection at all--not the manner of it, not the place. The briefing, yes; the covert return to Salzburg, yes: an hour and a half in the back of Dimitri's clapped-out van, and no talking after lights out. And she remembered the landing in London, more alone than she had ever been in her life; and the smell of English sadness that had greeted her even on the runway, reminding her of what it was that had turned her towards radical solutions in the first place: the malign sloth of authority, the caged despair of the losers. There was a luggage handlers' go-slow and a rail-strike; the women's lavatory was like a taste of prison. She went through green and, as usual, the bored Customs officer stopped and questioned her. With the difference that this time she wondered whether he had a reason beyond wanting to chat her up.

Coming home is like going abroad, she thought as she joined the despondent queue for the bus. Let's blow the whole lot up and start again.

fifteen

The motor lodge was called Romanz and was set among pine trees on a rise beside the autobahn. It had been built twelve months ago for mediaevally minded lovers, with cement-stippled cloisters, plastic muskets, and tinted neon lighting, and Kurtz had the last chalet of the row, with a leaded jalousie window that looked over the westbound lane. It was two in the morning, an hour of day he was on cheerful terms with. He had showered and shaved, he had made himself coffee on the clever coffee machine and drunk Coca-Cola from the teak-lined refrigerator, and for the rest of the time he had done what he was doing now: he had sat in his shirt-sleeves at the little writing-table, with all the lights out and a pair of binoculars at his elbow, watching the headlamps as they switched through the tree trunks on their way to Munich. Traffic was light at that hour, on average five vehicles a minute; in the rain, they had a tendency to bunch.

It had been a long day and a long night, too, if you counted nights, but Kurtz believed that lassitude clouded the head. Five hours' sleep was enough for anyone, and for himself too much. It had been a long day all the same, not really starting until Charlie had left the city. There had been the Olympic Village apartments to clear, and Kurtz had supervised that operation personally, because he knew it gave the kids an extra edge when they were reminded of his determination to handle detail. There had been the letters to place in Yanuka's apartment, and Kurtz had seen to that as well. From the surveillance post across the street, he had been able to observe the watchers let themselves in, and he had remained there to flatter them on their return, and assure them that their long, heroic vigil would soon be rewarded.

"What's happening to him?" Lenny had asked querulously. "Marty, that boy has a future, now. Just you remember it."

Kurtz's reply had struck a Delphic note: "Lenny, that boy has a future, just not with us."

Shimon Litvak sat behind Kurtz on the edge of the double bed. He had taken off his dripping raincoat and dumped it on the floor at his feet. He looked cheated and angry. Becker sat apart from both of them on a dainty bedroom chair, with his own small ring of light around him, much as he had sat in the Athens house. The same aloneness, yet sharing the same close atmosphere of vigilance before the battle.

"The girl knows nothing," Litvak reported indignantly to Kurtz's still back. "She's a half-wit." His voice had risen slightly and had a quaver. "She's Dutch, her name is Larsen, she thinks Yanuka picked her up while she was squatting with a commune in Frankfurt, but she can't be sure because she's had so many men and she forgets. Yanuka took her on a few trips, taught her to shoot his gun all wrong, and lent her to big brother for his rest and recreation. That part she remembers. Even for Khalil's sex-life they used cut-outs, never the same place twice. She found that groovy. Between times she drove cars for them, placed a couple of bombs for them, stole a few passports for them. For friendly. Because she's an anarchist. Because she's a half-wit."

"A comfort girl," said Kurtz thoughtfully, speaking less to Litvak than to his own reflection in the window.

"She admits Godesberg, she half admits Zürich. If we had the time, she'd admit Zürich totally. Antwerp no."

"Leyden?" asked Kurtz. And now there was a knot in Kurtz's voice as well, so that from where Becker sat, it might have sounded as if the two men were suffering from the same minor throat affliction, a clenching of the cords.

"Leyden a solid no," Litvak replied. "No, no, no again. Then still no. She was on holiday with her parents at the time. On Sylt. Where's Sylt?"

"Off the coast of northern Germany," said Becker, but Litvak glared at him as if suspecting an insult.

"She's so damn slow," Litvak complained, talking to Kurtz once more. "She started talking around midday, but by mid-afternoon she was backing away from everything she'd said. ‘No, I never said that. You're lying!' We find the place on the tape, play it to her, still she says it's a forgery, and starts spitting at us. She's stubborn Dutch and she's nuts."

"I understand," said Kurtz.

But Litvak wanted more than understanding. "Hurt her, we raise her anger so she gets more stubborn. Stop hurting her, we give her the strength back, she gets even more stubborn, starts to call us names."

Kurtz turned half the distance, till, if he had been looking at anyone, he would have been looking straight at Becker.

"She bargains," Litvak continued, in the same note of strident complaint. "We're Jews so she bargains. ‘I tell you this much, you keep me alive. Yes? I tell you that much, you let me go. Yes?' " He swung suddenly on Becker. "So what's the hero's way?" he demanded. "I should enchant her maybe? Have her fall in love with me?"

Kurtz was looking at his watch and beyond it. "Whatever she knows, it's already history," he remarked. "Important is only what we do with her. And when." But he spoke as the man who must give the final.answer himself. "How does the fiction play, Gadi?" he asked of Becker.

"It fits," said Becker. He let them wait a moment. "Rossino had the use of her in Vienna for a couple of days, drove her south, delivered her to the car. All true. She drove the car to Munich, met Yanuka. Untrue, but they're the only two people who know it."

Litvak greedily took up the story: "They met in Ottobrunn. That's a village south-east of town. From there they went somewhere and made love. Who cares where? Not everything has to fit a reconstruction. Maybe in the car. She likes it all the time, she says so. But best she likes it with the fighters, as she calls them. Maybe they rented a room somewhere and the proprietor is too scared even to come forward. Gaps like that are normal. The opposition will expect them."

"And tonight?" said Kurtz, with a glance towards the window. "Now?"

Litvak did not like to be so closely questioned. "So now they're in the car and on their way into town. To make love. To pull a job and hide the rest of the explosive. Who will ever know? Why should we explain so much?"

"So where is she at this moment?" Kurtz asked, gathering in the details while he continued to deliberate. "In reality?"

"In the van," said Litvak.

"And where's the van?"

"Beside the Mercedes. In the laybye. You give the word, we transfer her."

"And Yanuka?"

"Also in the van. Their last night together. We sedated both of them, just like we agreed."

Taking up his binoculars again, Kurtz held them halfway to his eyes, then returned them to the table. Then he put his hands together and frowned into them.

"Tell me a different method," he suggested, addressing himself by the pose of his head to Becker. "We fly her home, stick her in the Negev Desert, lock her up. Then what? What has become of her? they will ask. From the moment she disappears, they will think the worst. They will think she has defected. That Alexis has got her. That the Zionists have. In any case, that their operation is at risk. That is what they will say, no question: ‘Disband the team, send everybody home.' " He summarised: "They have to have the evidence that nobody has got her except God and Yanuka. They have to know she's as dead as Yanuka is. You disagree with me, Gadi? Or do I perceive from your expression that you know better?"

Kurtz merely waited, but Litvak's gaze, trained upon Becker, remained hostile and accusing. Perhaps he suspected him of innocence at a moment when he needed him to share the guilt.

"No," said Becker, after an age. But his face, as Kurtz had noticed, had the hardness of a willed allegiance.

Then suddenly Litvak was on him--so tense and jerky in his voice that his words were like a leap from where he sat. ‘No?" he repeated. "No what? No operation? What is no?"

‘No is: we have no alternative," Becker replied again, taking his time. "Spare the Dutch girl, they'll never accept Charlie. Alive, Miss Larsen is as dangerous as Yanuka. If we are going on, this is where we do it."

"If," Litvak echoed with contempt.

Kurtz restored order with another question.

"Does she have no useful names at all?" he asked Litvak, seeming to want the answer yes. "Nothing that we should maybe pursue with her? A reason to hold her back?"