The Little Drummer Girl (54 page)

Helg, I hear you perfectly.

She stepped into the street and saw one man staring into an unlit shop window and a second sauntering away from him towards a parked car with an aerial. Now the terror had her, and it was so bad she wanted to lie down whimpering on the pavement and confess to everything and beg the world to take her back. The people ahead of her were as frightening as the people behind her, the ghostly lines of the kerb led to some dreadful vanishing point which was her own extinction. Helga,she prayed; oh, Helg, get me out of this. She caught a bus in the wrong direction, waited, caught another and walked again, but funked the tube because the thought of being below ground scared her. So she weakened and caught another cab and watched out of the back window. Nothing was following her. The street was empty. To hell with walking, to hell with tubes and buses.

"Peckham," she said to the driver, and went right to the gates in style.

The hall they used for rehearsals was at the back of the church, a barn-like place next to an adventure playground, which the kids had smashed to pieces long ago. To reach it she had to walk down a line of yew trees. No lights burned, but she pressed the bell because of Lofty, a retired boxer. Lofty was the night watchman, but since the cuts he came three nights a week at most, and the bell, to her relief, produced no answering tread. She unlocked the door and stepped inside, and the cold institutional air reminded her of the Cornish church she had gone into after laying her wreath to the unknown revolutionary. She closed the door behind her and lit a match. Its flame flickered on the glossy green tiles and the high vault of the Victorian pine roof. She called out "Loftee" humorously to keep her spirits up. The match went out, but she found the door-chain and slipped it into its housing before lighting another. Her voice, her footsteps, the rattle of the chain in the pitch darkness echoed crazily for hours.

She thought of bats and other aversions; of seaweed dragged across her face. A staircase with an iron handrail led upward to a pine gallery, known euphemistically as "the common room," and, ever since her clandestine visit to the Munich duplex, reminiscent of Michel. Grabbing the rail, she followed it upstairs, then stood motionless on the gallery staring into the gloom of the hall and listening while her eyes grew accustomed to the dark. She made out the stage, then the billowing, psychedelic clouds of her backdrop, then the trusses and the roof. She picked out the silver glow of their one spotlight, a headlamp converted by a Bahamian kid called Gums, who'd nicked it from a car dump. There was an old sofa on the gallery and beside it a pale plastic-topped table that caught the city's glow from the window. On the table stood the black telephone, for staff only, and the exercise book where you were supposed to enter private calls, which sparked off about six major rows a month.

Sitting on the sofa, Charlie waited till her stomach had untied itself and her pulse rate dropped below the three hundred mark. Then she lifted phone and cradle together and laid them on the floor beneath the table. There used to be a couple of household candles in the table drawer for when the wiring failed, which it often did, but somebody had nicked them too. So she twisted a page of an old parish magazine into a spill and, having propped it in a dirty teacup, lit one end to make a tallow. With the table above and the balcony to one side, the flame was as contained as it could be, but as soon as she had dialled she blew it out all the same. She had fifteen numerals to dial altogether and the first time the phone just howled at her. The second time she mis-dialled and got some mad Italian yelling at her, and the third her fingertip slipped. But on the fourth she got a pensive silence followed by the peep of a continental ringing tone.

Followed a lot later by the strident voice of Helga speaking German.

"It's Joan," said Charlie. "Remember me?" and got another pensive silence.

"Where are you, Joan?"

"Mind your own bloody business."

"You have a problem, Joan?"

"Not really. I just wanted to thank you for bringing the pigs to my fucking doorstep."

Then, to her glory, the old luxurious fury took command of her, and she let rip with an abandon she had not managed since the time she was not allowed to remember, when Joseph had taken her to see her little lover-boy before cutting him up for bait.

Helga heard her out in silence. "Where are you?" she said when Charlie seemed to have finished. She spoke reluctantly, as if she were breaking her own rules.

"Forget it," Charlie said.

"Can you be reached anywhere? Tell me where you will be for the next forty-eight hours."

"No."

"Will you phone me again in one hour, please."

"I can't."

A long silence. "Where are the letters?"

"Safe."

Another silence. "Get paper and a pencil."

"I don't need one."

"Get one all the same. You are not in a condition for accurate remembering. You are ready?"

Not an address, not a telephone number either. But street directions, a time, and the route by which she should approach. "Do exactly as I am telling you. If you cannot make it, if you have more problems, telephone to the number on Anton's card and say you wish to contact Petra. Bring the letters. Do you hear me?Petra, and bring the letters. If you don't bring the letters, we shall be extremely angry with you."

Ringing off, Charlie heard the sound of one pair of hands softly clapping from the auditorium downstairs. She went to the edge of the balcony and looked over, and to her immeasurable joy saw Joseph sitting all alone in the centre of the front row. She turned and ran down the stairs to him. She reached the bottom step to find him waiting with his arms out for her. He was afraid she might lose her footing in the darkness. He kissed her, and went on kissing her; then he led her back to the gallery keeping his arm round her even on the narrowest bit of the staircase, and carrying a basket in the other hand.

He had brought smoked salmon and a bottle of wine. He had put them on the table without unwrapping them. He knew where the plates lived under the sink, and how you plugged the electric fire into the spare socket on the cooker. He had brought a Thermos of coffee and a couple of rather ripe blankets from Lofty's lair downstairs. He put the Thermos down with the plates, then went round checking the big Victorian doors, putting them on the bolt from the inside. And she knew, even in the gloomy light--she could tell by the line of his back and the private deliberation of his gestures--that he was doing something outside the script, he was closing the doors on every world but their own. He sat beside her on the sofa and put a blanket over her because the cold in the hall was something that really had to be dealt with; and so was her shivering, she couldn't stop. The phone call to Helga had frightened her stiff, so had the executioner's eyes of the policeman in her flat, so had the accumulated days of waiting and half knowing, which was far, far worse than knowing nothing.

The only light came from the electric fire and it shone upwards on his face like pale footlights from the days when theatres used them. She remembered him in Greece, telling her that the floodlighting of ancient sites was an act of modern vandalism, because the temples were built to be seen with the sun above them, not below. He had his arm round her shoulder under the blanket and it occurred to her how thin she was against him. "I've lost weight," she said, as a kind of warning to him. He didn't answer, but held her tighter to keep her trembling in check, to absorb it and make it his. It occurred to her that she had always known, despite his evasions and disguises, that he was in essence a kind man, of instinctive sympathy for everyone; in battle and in peace, a troubled man who hated causing pain. She put her hand to his face and she was pleased to find he hadn't shaved, because tonight she didn't want to think he had calculated anything, though it was not their first night, nor yet their fiftieth--they were old frenzied lovers with half the motels in England behind them, with Greece and Salzburg and God knew how many other lives as well, because suddenly it was clear to her that their whole shared fiction was nothing but foreplay for this night of fact.

He took her hand away and drew her into him and kissed her mouth and she responded chastely, waiting for him to light the passions they had so often spoken of. She loved his wrists, his hands. No hands had been so wise. He was touching her face, her neck, her breasts, and she held back from kissing him because she wanted her flavours separate: now he is kissing me, now he is touching me, undressing me, he is lying in my arms, we are naked, we are on the beach again, on the scratchy sand of Mykonos, we are vandalised buildings with the sun burning us from below. He laughed and, rolling away from her, moved back the electric fire. And in all her loving she had never seen anything as beautiful as his body stooped over the red glow, the fire brightest where his own body burned. He returned to her and, kneeling beside her, started again from the beginning in case she had forgotten the story this far, kissing and touching everything with  a light  possessiveness that  slowly  lost its diffidence, but always returning to her face because they needed to see and taste each other repeatedly and reassure themselves that they were who they said they were. He was the best, long before he entered her, the one incomparable lover she had never had, the distant star she had been following through all that rotten country. If she had been blind, she would have known it by his touch; if she had been dying, by his sad victorious smile that conquered terror and unbelief by being there ahead of her; by his instinctive power to know her, and to make her own knowledge more.

She woke and found him sitting over her, waiting for her to come round. He had packed everything away. "It's a boy," he said and smiled.

"It's twins," she replied, and pulled his head down until it was against her shoulder. He started to speak, but she stopped him with a stern warning. "I don't want a squeak out of you," she said. "No cover stories, no apologies, no lies. If it's part of the service, don't tell me. What's the time?"

"Midnight."

"Then come back to bed."

"Marty wants to talk to you," he said.

But there was something in his voice and manner that told her it was an occasion not of Marty's making but his own.

It was Joseph's place.

She knew as soon as she entered: a bookish, rectangular little room at street level somewhere in Bloomsbury, with lace curtains and space for one small tenant. On this wall hung maps of inner London; along that one, there was a sideboard with two telephones. A bunk bed, unslept in, made a third side; the fourth was a deal desk with an old lamp on it. A pot of coffee was bubbling beside the telephones, and a fire was burning in the grate. Marty did not get up as she entered, but turned his head towards her and gave her the warmest, best smile she had ever had from him, but perhaps that was because she saw the world so kindly herself. He held out his arms for her and she bent down and entered his long fatherly embrace: my daughter, back from her travels. She sat opposite him and Joseph crouched on the floor, Arab-style, the way he had crouched on the hilltop when he drew her down to him and lectured her about the gun.

"You want to listen to yourself?" Kurtz invited her, indicating a tape-recorder at his side. She shook her head. "Charlie, you were terrific. Not the third best, not the second best, just the best ever."

"He's flattering you," Joseph warned her, but he wasn't joking.

A little lady in brown came in without knocking, and there was business about who took sugar.

"Charlie, you are free to pull out," said Kurtz when she had gone. "Joseph here insists that I remind you of this, loudly and plainly. Go now, you go with honour. Right, Joseph? A lot of money, a lot of honour. All we promised you and more."

"I told her already," Joseph said.

She saw Kurtz's smile broaden to conceal his irritation. "Sure you told her, Joseph, and now I'm telling her. Isn't that what you want me to do? Charlie, you have lifted the lid for us on a whole box of worms we've been looking for since a long time. You have thrown up more names and places and connections than you can know about, and there'll be more to come. With you or without you. Near enough you're still clean, and where there are dirty areas, give us a few months and we'll have them cleaned up. A period of quarantine somewhere, a cooling-off period, take a friend with you--you want it that way, that's the way you're entitled to have it."

"He means it," Joseph said. "Don't just say you'll go on. Think about it."

Once again, she noticed the edge of annoyance in Marty's voice as he came back at his subordinate: "I surely do mean it, and if I did not mean it, this would be about the last moment on earth to flirt with meaning it," he said, contriving by the end to turn his retort into a joke.

"So where are we?" Charlie said. "What is this moment?"

Joseph started to speak, but Marty cut in first like a piece of bad driving. "Charlie, there is an above the line in this thing, and a below the line. Until now, you've been above the line, but you've managed all the same to show us what's going on lower down. But from here on in--well, it just may get a little different. That's how we read it. We may be wrong, but that's how we read the signs."

"What he means is, until now you have been on friendly territory. We can be close to you, we can pull you out if we need to. But from now on, all that's over. You'll be one of them. Sharing their lives. Their mentality. Their morals. You could spend weeks, months out of touch with us."

"Not out of touch, perhaps, but out of reach, that is mainly true," Marty conceded; he was smiling, but not at Joseph. "But we'll be around you, you can count on us."

"What's the end?" Charlie asked.

Marty appeared momentarily confused. "What kind of end, dear--the end that justifies these means? I don't think I have you quite."

"What am I looking for? When will you be satisfied?"

"Charlie, we are more than satisfied now," said Marty handsomely, and she knew that he was prevaricating.