The Little Drummer Girl (49 page)

"Why did you not go with him to Munich?"

"He didn't want us crossing the border together. He said he had work to do."

"He told you this? Work to do? Nonsense! What work? No wonder you were able to betray him!"

"He said he had orders to pick up the Mercedes and deliver it somewhere for his brother."

This time Helga showed no astonishment, not even indignation, at the scale of Michel's abysmal indiscretion. Her mind was upon action, and action was what she believed in. Striding to the door, she flung it open and waved imperiously for Mesterbein to return. She swung round, hands on hips, and stared at Charlie, and her big pale eyes were a dangerous and alarming void.

"You are suddenly like Rome, Charlie," she remarked. "All roads lead to you. It is too perverse. You are his secret love, you drive his car, you spend his last night on earth with him. You knew what was in that car when you drove it?"

"Explosives."

"Nonsense. Of what sort?"

"Russian plastic, two hundred pounds of it."

"The police told you this. It is their lie. The police lie always."

"Michel told me."

Helga let out a false, angry laugh. "Oh, Charlie! Now I don't believe you one word. You are lying to me completely." With a soundless tread, Mesterbein loomed up behind her. "Anton, everything is known. Our little widow is a complete liar, I am sure of it. We shall do nothing to help her at all. We leave at once."

Mesterbein stared at her, Helga stared at her. Neither seemed half as certain as Helga 's words suggested. Not that Charlie cared either way. She sat like a slumped doll, indifferent once more to anything except her own bereavement.

Sitting beside her again, Helga put her arm round Charlie's unresponsive shoulders. "What was the brother's name?" she said. "Come." She kissed her lightly on the cheekbone. "We shall be your friends perhaps. We must be careful, we must bluff a little. This is natural. All right, tell me first Michel's name."

"Salim, but I swore never to use it."

"And the brother's name?"

"Khalil," she muttered. She began weeping again. "Michel worshipped him," she said.

"And his work name?"

She didn't understand, she didn't care. "It was a military secret," she said.                                      *

She had decided to keep driving till she dropped--a Yugoslavia all over again. I'll walk out of the show, I'll go to Nottingham and kill myself in our motel bed.

She was on the moor again, alone and touching eighty before she nearly went off the road. She stopped the car and took her hands sharply from the wheel. The muscles in the back of her neck were twisting like hot wires and she felt sick.

She was sitting on the verge, putting her head forward between her knees. A couple of wild ponies had come over to stare at her. The grass was long and full of the dawn's dew. Trailing her hands, she moistened them and pressed them to her face to cool it. A motorcycle went slowly by and she saw a boy looking at her as if uncertain whether to stop and help. Between her fingers she watched him disappear below the skyline. One of ours, one of theirs? She returned to the car and wrote down the number; just for once, she didn't trust her memory. Michel's orchids lay on the seat beside her, she had claimed them when she took her leave.

"But, Charlie, don't be too utterly ridiculous!" Helga had protested. "You are too sentimental altogether."

And screw you too, Helg. They're mine.

She was on a high, treeless plateau of pink and brown and grey. Sunrise was in her driving mirror. Her car radio gave nothing but French. It sounded like question and answer about girlish problems, but she couldn't understand the words.

She was passing a sleeping blue caravan parked in a field. An empty Landrover stood beside it, and beside the Landrover baby linen hung from a telescopic clothesline. Where had she seen a clothesline like that before? Nowhere. Nowhere ever.

She lay on her bed at the guest house, watching the day lighten on the ceiling, listening to the clatter of the doves on her window-sill. Most dangerous is when you come down from the mountain, Joseph had warned. She heard a surreptitious footfall in the corridor. It's them. But which them? Always the same question. Red? No, Officer, I have never driven a red Mercedes in my life so get out of my bedroom. A drop of cold sweat ran over her naked stomach. In her mind, she traced its course across her navel to her ribs, then onto the sheet. A creak of floorboards, a suppressed puff of exertion: he's looking through the keyhole. A corner of white paper appeared beneath her door. And wriggled. And grew. Humphrey the fat-boy was delivering her Daily Telegraph.

She had bathed and dressed. She drove slowly, taking lesser roads, stopping at a couple of shops along the way, as he had taught her. She had dressed herself dowdily, her hair was anyhow. Nobody observing her numb manner and neglected appearance could have doubted her distress. The road darkened; diseased elm trees closed over her, an old Cornish church crouched among them. Stopping the car again, she pushed open the iron gate. The graves were very old. Few were marked. She found one that lay apart from the others. A suicide? A murderer? Wrong: a revolutionary. Kneeling, she reverently laid the orchids at the end where she had decided his head was. Impulse mourning, she thought, stepping into the bottled, ice-cold air of the church. Something Charlie would have done in the circumstances, in the theatre of the real.

For another hour she continued aimlessly in this way, pulling up for no reason at all, except perhaps to lean on a gate and stare at a field. Or to lean on a gate and stare at nothing. It wasn't till after twelve that she was certain the motorcyclist had finally stopped tailing her. Even then, she made several vague detours and sat in two more churches before joining the main road to Falmouth.

The hotel was a pantiled ranch on the Helford Estuary, with an indoor pool and a sauna and a nine-hole golf course and guests who looked like hoteliers themselves. She had been to the other hotels, but not, till now, to this one. He had signed in as a German publisher, bringing a stack of unreadable books with him to prove it. He had tipped the switchboard ladies lavishly, explaining that he had international correspondents who were no respecters of his sleep. The waiters and porters knew him as a good touch who sat up all hours of the night. He had lived that way under different names and pretexts for the last two weeks, as he stalked Charlie's progress down the peninsula on his solitary safari. He had lain on beds and stared at ceilings as Charlie had. He had talked to Kurtz on the telephone, and kept himself abreast of Litvak's field operations hour by hour. He had talked to Charlie sparingly, fed her little meals, and taught her more tricks of secret writing and communications. He had been as much a prisoner to her as she to him.

He opened the door to her and she walked past him with a distracted frown, not knowing what to feel. Murderer. Bully. Cheat. But she had no appetite for the obligatory scenes; she had played them all, she was a burnt-out mourner. He was already standing as she entered, and she expected him to come forward and embrace her, but he stood his ground. She had never seen him so grave, so held back. Deep shadows of worry ringed his eyes. He was wearing a white shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows--cotton, not silk. She stared at it, aware after all of what she felt. No cuff-links. No medallion at the neck. No Gucci shoes.

"You're on your own then," she said.

He did not follow her meaning.

"You can forget the red blazer, can't you? You're you and no one else. You've killed your own bodyguard. No one left to hide behind."

Opening her handbag, she handed him her little clock radio. From the table, he picked up her original model and dropped it into the handbag for her. "Oh indeed," he said with a laugh, closing her bag. "Our relationship is henceforth unmediated, I would say."

"How did I sound?" said Charlie. She sat down. "I thought I was the best thing since Bernhardt."

"Better, In Marty's view, the best thing since Moses came down the mountain. Maybe before he went up. If you wished, you could stop now with honour. They owe you enough. More than enough."

They,she thought. Never we "And in Joseph's view?"

"Those are big people, Charlie. Big little people from the centre. The real thing."

"Did I fool them?"

He came and sat beside her. To be near but not to touch.

"Since you are still alive, we must assume that so far you fooled them," he said.

"Let's go," she said. A smart little tape recorder lay ready on the table. Reaching past him, she switched it on. With no more preamble, they passed to the debriefing, like the old married couple they had become. For though Litvak's audio van had listened to every word of last night's conversation as it was transmitted by the cunningly adapted little radio in Charlie's handbag, the pure gold of her own perceptions had still to be mined and sifted.

eighteen

The swift young man who called at the Israeli Embassy in London wore a long leather coat and granny glasses, and said his name was Meadows. The car was a spotless green Rover with extra pace. Kurtz sat in the front in order to keep Meadows company. Litvak smouldered in the back. Kurtz's manner was diffident and a little shabby, as became him in the presence of colonial superiors.

"Just flown in, have we, sir?" Meadows asked airily.

"Yesterday as ever is," said Kurtz, who had been in London a week.

"Pity you didn't let us know, sir. The Commander could have smoothed things over for you at the airport."

"Oh now, we didn't have that much to declare, Mr. Meadows!" Kurtz protested, and they both laughed because liaison was so good. From the back, Litvak laughed too, but without conviction.

They drove fast to Aylesbury, then fast through pretty lanes. They reached a sandstone gateway mastered by stone cockerels. A blue-and-red sign proclaimed "No. 3 TLSU," a white boom blocked their path. Meadows left Kurtz and Litvak to themselves while he went into the gatehouse. Dark eyes surveyed them from its windows. No cars passed, no distant tractor chattered. There seemed little around that was alive.

"Looks like a fine place," said Kurtz, in Hebrew, while they waited.

"Beautiful," Litvak agreed for the microphone, if there was one. "Nice people, too."

"First rate," said Kurtz. "Top of the profession, no question."

Meadows returned, the boom lifted, and for a surprisingly long time they wove through the uneasy parkland of paramilitary England. In place of sweetly gazing thoroughbreds, blue-uniformed sentries in Wellington boots. Low-backed brick buildings with no windows lay half buried in the earth. They passed an assault course and a private landing strip laid out with orange cones. Rope bridges were strung across a trout stream

"A dream," said Kurtz politely. "Just beautiful, Mr. Meadows. We should have all this at home, but how can we?"

"Well, thanks," said Meadows.

The house had once been old but its façade was vandalised with ministerial paint of battleship blue, and the red flowers in the window-boxes were dressed strictly by the left. A second young man was waiting at the entrance and led them quickly up a glistening staircase of polished pine.

"I'm Lawson," he explained breathlessly, as if they were already late; and rapped bravely with his knuckles on a double door. A voice inside barked "Come!"

"Mr. Raphael, sir," Lawson announced. "From Jerusalem. Bit of bother with the traffic, I'm afraid, sir."

For as long as it takes to be rude, Deputy Commander Picton stayed seated at his desk. He took up a pen and, with a frown, signed his name on a letter. He looked up, and fixed Kurtz with a yellow-eyed stare. Then he leaned his head right forward as though he were about to butt someone, and lifted himself slowly to his feet, all the way, until he was standing to attention.

"And good day to you, Mr. Raphael," he said. And he smiled sparsely, as if smiles were out of season.

He was big and Aryan, with waved fair hair parted like a razor slash. He was broad and thick-faced and violent, with pressed-together lips and a bully's straight gaze. He had the senior policeman's fastidious bad grammar and the borrowed good manners of a gentleman, and both were returnable without notice any time he damn well felt like it. He had a spotted handkerchief stuffed in his left sleeve and a tie with flat gold crowns to tell you he played his games in better company than you. He was a self-made counter-terrorist, "part soldier, part copper, part villain," as he liked to say, and he belonged to the fabled generation of his trade. He had hunted Communists in Malaya and Mau Mauin Kenya, Jews in Palestine, Arabs in Aden, and the Irish everywhere. He had blown people up with the Trucial Oman Scouts; in Cyprus he had missed Grivas by a whisker and when he was drunk he talked of it with regret--but let anybody dare to pity him! He had been second man in several places, first man rarely, for there were other shadows too.

"Misha Gavron in good shape?" he enquired, selecting a button on his telephone and pushing it so hard it might never come up again.

"Commander, Misha is just fine!" said Kurtz enthusiastically, and started to ask after Picton's superior in return, but Picton was not interested in what Kurtz might have to say, least of all about his Chief.

A highly polished silver cigarette box lay prominently on his desk with the signatures of brother officers engraved on the lid. Picton opened it and held it out, if only for Kurtz to admire its shine. Kurtz said he did not smoke. Picton returned the box to its correct position, an exhibit disposed of. There was a knock at the door and two men were admitted, one grey, one tweed. The grey was a forty-year-old Welsh bantamweight with claw marks on the lower jaw. Picton described him as "my Chief Inspector."

"Never ever been to Jerusalem, I'm afraid, sir," the Chief Inspector announced, rising on his toes and pulling down the skirts of his jacket at the same time, as if he were trying to stretch himself an inch or two. "The wife's all for spending Christmas in Bethlehem, but Cardiff was always good enough for me, oh yes!"