The Little Drummer Girl

twelve

The hilltop smelt of thyme and was a special place for Joseph. He had looked for it on the map and led Charlie to it with an air of moment, first by car and now on foot, climbing purposefully past rows of wattle beehives, through glades of cypress trees and stony fields of yellow flowers. The sun was still not at its height. Inland lay range after range of brown mountains. Eastward she glimpsed the silver plains of the Aegean until the haze turned them into sky. The air smelt of resin and honey and rang to the din of goat bells. A fresh breeze burned one side of her face and clamped her light dress against her body. She held his arm, but Joseph, deep in concentration, seemed not to notice. Once she thought she saw Dimitri sitting on a gate, but when she exclaimed, he warned her sharply not to greet him. Once she could have sworn she saw the silhouette of Rose, up above them on the skyline, but when she looked again she saw nothing.

Their day till then had had its own choreography and she had let him steer her through it with his customary restlessness. She had woken early to find Rachel standing over her, telling her that she was please to wear the other blue, dear, the one with the long sleeves. She showered quickly and marched back into the bedroom stark naked, but Rachel was gone and it was Joseph who sat perched before a breakfast tray for two, listening to a Greek news bulletin on his little radio, for all the world her companion of the night. She shot back into the bathroom, he handed the dress round the door to her; they ate hurriedly and in near silence. In the foyer he paid cash and pocketed the receipt. At the Mercedes, when they took their luggage to it, she found Raoul the hippy boy lying not six feet from the rear bumper, fiddling with the engine of an overladen motorbike, and Rose reclining on the grass with her hip cocked while she munched a bread roll. Charlie wondered how long they'd been there and why they had to guard the car. Joseph drove the mile down the road to the ancient sites, parked once more, and long before other mortals had started to queue and swelter, he had spirited her through a side gate and treated her to another privately conducted tour of the centre of the universe. He showed her the Temple of Apollo and the Doric wall inscribed with hymns of praise, and the stone that had marked the world's navel. He showed her the Treasuries and the running track and treated her to a commentary on the many wars that had been fought to obtain possession of the Oracle. But there was no lightness to his manner, as there had been on the Acropolis. She had a picture of him with a checklist in his mind, ticking each heading as he hurried her through.

Returning to the car, he handed her the key.

"Me?" she said.

"Why not? I thought fine cars were your weakness."

They headed north over winding empty roads and at first he did little but assess her driving technique, much as if she were taking her Advanced Test again, but he could not make her nervous, nor she him apparently, for quite soon he spread the map over his knees and ignored her. The car handled like a dream, the road changed from tarmac to gravel. With each sharp turn a cloud of dust shot up and, lit by the fresh sunlight, drifted away into the stupendous landscape. Abruptly he folded up the map and returned it to the pocket at his side.

"So, Charlie? You are ready?" he enquired, as brusquely as if she had been keeping him waiting. And resumed his narrative.

At first, they were still in Nottingham, their frenzy at its height. They had spent two nights and one day in the motel, he said, and the register bore this out.

"The staff, if pressed, will recall a loving couple answering our description. Our bedroom was at the western end of the complex, looking on to its own piece of garden. In due course, you will be taken there and see for yourself what it looked like."

Most of their time they had spent in bed, he said, talking politics, exchanging lives, making love. The only interruptions, it seemed, were a couple of flips into the Nottingham countryside, but the lovers' desire soon got the better of them and they hurried back to the motel.

"Why didn't we just have it off in the car?" she enquired, in an effort to draw him from his dark mood. "I like those unscheduled ones."

"I respect your taste, but unfortunately Michel is shy in these matters and prefers the privacy of the bedroom."

She tried again: "So how does he rate in the charts?"

He had the answer to that too. "According to the best-informed reports, he is a little unimaginative, but his enthusiasm is boundless and his virility impressive."

"Thank you," she said gravely.

Early on the Monday morning, he resumed, Michel returned to London, but Charlie, who had no rehearsal till afternoon, remained behind, heartbroken, in the motel. He briskly described her grief.

"The day is dark as a funeral. The rain is still falling. Remember the weather. At first you are crying so much you cannot even stand. You lie in the bed that is still warm from his body, weeping your heart out. He has told you he will try to come to York next week, but you are convinced you will never see him again in your life. So what do you do?" He gave her no chance to answer. "You sit yourself at the cramped dressing-table in front of the mirror, you stare at the marks of his hands on your body, at your own tears as they continue falling. You open a drawer. Take out the motel folder. And, from the folder, motel stationery and a courtesy ballpoint pen. And you write to him as you sit there. Describing yourself. Your inmost thoughts. Five pages. The first of many, many letters which you send to him. You would do this? In your despair? You are an impulsive letter-writer, after all."

"If I had his address, I would."

"He has given you an address in Paris." He gave it to her himself, now. Care of a tobacconist's in Montparnasse. To Michel, please forward, no surname needed or supplied.

"The same night, from the misery of the Astral Commercial and Private Hotel, you write to him again. In the morning as soon as you wake, you once more write to him. On all sorts and scraps of stationery. At rehearsals, in the intervals, at all odd times, henceforth, you write to him passionately, unthinkingly, with total frankness." He glanced at her. "You would do that?" he insisted again. "You would really write such letters?"

How much reassurance does a man need? she wondered. But he was already away again. For, joy of joys-despite her pessimistic forecasts-Michel came not only to York, he came to Bristol and, better still, to London, where he spent a whole miraculous night in Charlie's flat in Camden, frenzy all the way. And it was there, said Joseph-as gratefully as if rounding off a complicated mathematical premise-"in your own bed, in your own flat, between protestations of eternal love, that we planned this very Greek holiday which we are here and now enjoying."

A long silence while she drove and thought. We are here at last. From Nottingham to Greece in one hour's driving.

"To join up with Michel after Mykonos," she said sceptically.

"Why not?"

"Mykonos with Al and the family, jump ship, meet Michel in the Athens restaurant, away we go?"

"Correct."

"No Al," she pronounced finally. "If I'd had you, I wouldn't have taken Al to Mykonos. I'd have chucked him. He wasn't invited by the sponsors. He tagged on. One at a time, that's me."

He dismissed her objection out of hand. "Michel does not ask for that type of loyalty; he does not give it and he does not receive it. He is a soldier and an enemy of your society, liable to be arrested at any time. It may be a week before you see him or six months. You think he wants you to live like a nun suddenly? Sit around pining, having tantrums, confiding your secret to your girlfriends? Nonsense. You would sleep with a whole army if he told you to." They passed a wayside chapel. "Slow down," he ordered, and again studied the map.

Slow down. Park here. March.

He had quickened his step. Their path led to a cluster of derelict sheds and past it to a disused stone quarry hacked like a volcanic crater into the summit of the hill. At the foot of the hewn face stood an old oil can. Without a word, Joseph weighted it with small pebbles while Charlie looked on mystified. Removing the red blazer, he folded it and laid it carefully on the ground. The gun was at his waist, dropped into a leather loop fastened to his belt, the butt tipped slightly forward on a line below his right armpit. He wore a second holster over his left shoulder but it was empty. Grasping her wrist, he drew her to the ground to squat, Arab-style, beside him.

"So then, Nottingham is in the past, so is York, so is Bristol, so is London. Today is today, the third of our great Greek honeymoon; we are where we are, we made love all night in our hotel in Delphi, rose early, and Michel supplied you with another memorable insight into the cradle of your civilisation. You drove the car and I confirmed what I had heard from you already, that you like to drive and for a woman you drive well. And now I have brought you here, to this hilltop, you do not know why. My mood, as you have noticed, is withdrawn. I am brooding-perhaps wrestling with a great decision. Your efforts to break in upon my thoughts only annoy me. What is happening? you wonder. Is our love advancing? Or have you done something which displeases me? And if advancing, how? I sit you here-beside me-so-and I draw the gun."

She watched in fascination how he slipped it nimbly from its holster and made it the natural extension of his hand.

"As a great and unique privilege, I am going to initiate you into the history of this gun, and for the first time"-his voice slowed down to make the emphasis-"I am going to mention to you my great brother, whose very existence is a military secret which only the most loyal few may share. I do this because I love you, and because-" He hesitated.

And because Michel likes telling secrets, she thought; but nothing on earth would have prompted her to spoil his act.

"Because today I intend to take the first step towards initiating you as a fighting comrade in our secret army. How often-in your many letters, in our lovemaking-have you begged for a chance to prove your loyalty in action? Today we are taking the first step along that path."

Once again, she was aware of his seemingly effortless ability to put on Arab clothes. As last night in the taverna, when at times she barely knew which of his conflicting spirits was speaking out of him, so now she listened entranced to his adoption of the ornate Arab style of narrative.

"All through my nomadic life as a victim of the Zionist usurpers, my great elder brother shone before me like a star. In the Jordan, in our first camp, when school was a tin hut filled with fleas. In Syria, where we fled after the Jordanian troops had driven us out with tanks. In the Lebanon, where the Zionists shelled us from the sea and bombed us from the air, and the Shiites helped them to do it. Still, in the midst of these deprivations, I unfailingly remind myself of the great absent hero, my brother, whose feats, reported to me in whispers by my beloved sister Fatmeh, I long more than anything to rival."

He no longer asked her whether she was listening.

"I see him seldom, and only in great secrecy. Now in Damascus. Now in Amman. A summons-come! Then, for a night, I am at his side, drinking in his words, his nobility of heart, his clear commander's mind, his courage. One night he orders me to Beirut. He has just returned from a mission of great daring of which I may know nothing except that it was a total victory over the Fascists. I am to go with him to hear a great political speaker, a Libyan, a man of wonderful rhetoric and persuasiveness. The most beautiful speech I ever heard in my life. To this day I can quote it to you. The oppressed peoples of the entire earth should have heard this great Libyan." The gun lay flat in his palm. He was holding it out for her, willing her to covet it. "With our hearts beating with excitement, we depart from the secret lecture place and walk back through the Beirut dawn. Arm in arm, after the Arab fashion. There are tears in my eyes. On an impulse, my brother stops and embraces me as we stand there on the pavement. I can feel now his wise face pressed against my own. He takes this gun from his pocket and presses it into my hand. So." Grasping Charlie's hand, he transferred the gun to it, but kept his own hand over hers while he pointed the barrel towards the quarry wall. " 'A gift,' he says. To avenge. To set our people free. A gift from one fighter to another. With this gun I declared my oath upon the grave of my father.' I am speechless."

His cool hand was still on hers, clasping the gun to her, and she could feel her own hand trembling inside it like a separate creature.

"Charlie, this gun is a holy thing to me. I tell you this because I love my brother and I loved my father and I love you. In a minute I shall teach you to shoot with it, but first of all I ask you, kiss the gun."

She stared at him, then at the gun. But his excited expression offered no respite. Placing his other hand round her arm, he lifted her to her feet.

"We are lovers, do you not remember? We are comrades, servants of the revolution. We live in the closest companionship of mind and body. I am a passionate Arab and I like words and gestures. Kiss the gun."

"Jose, I can't do that."

She had addressed him as Joseph, and as Joseph he replied.

"You think this is an English tea-party, Charlie? You think that because Michel is a pretty boy he must be playing games? Where should he have learnt to play games when the gun was the only thing that gave him value as a man?" he asked perfectly reasonably.

She shook her head, still staring at the gun. But her resistance did not anger him. "Listen, Charlie. Last night, as we were making love, you asked me: 'Michel, where is the battlefield?' You know what I did? I put my hand over your heart and I told you: 'We are fighting a jehad and the battlefield is here.' You are my disciple. Your sense of mission has never been so exalted. Do you know what that is-a jehad?"

She shook her head.

"A jehad is what you were looking for until you met me. A jehad is a holy war. You are about to fire your first shot in our jehad. Kiss the gun."

She hesitated, then pressed her lips to the blue metal of the barrel.

"So," he said, breaking briskly away from her. "From now on, this gun is part of both of us. This gun is our honour and our flag. You believe this?"

Yes, Jose, I believe it. Yes, Michel, I believe it. Don't ever make me do that again. She wiped her wrist involuntarily across her lips as if there were blood on them. She hated both herself and him, and she was feeling a little mad.

"Type Walther PPK," Joseph was explaining when she next heard him. "Not heavy, but remember that every handgun is a compromise between concealment, portability, and efficiency. This is how Michel speaks to you about guns. Strictly, the way he has been spoken to himself by his brother."

Standing behind her, he turned her hips till she was square to the target, her feet apart. Then he placed his fist round hers, mingling his fingers with her own, keeping her arm at full stretch and the barrel pointing to the ground midway between her feet.

"The left arm free and comfortable. So." He loosened it for her. "Both eyes open, you raise the gun slowly till it is in a natural line with the target. Keeping the gun-arm straight. So. When I say fire, shoot twice, come down again, wait."

Obediently she lowered the gun till it was aiming at the ground again. He gave the order; she raised her arm, stiffly as he had instructed her; she pulled the trigger and nothing happened.

"This time," he said, and slipped the safety catch.

She repeated the action, pulled the trigger again, and the gun bucked in her hand as if it had itself been hit by a bullet. She fired a second time and her heart filled with the same perilous excitement she had felt when she had first jumped a horse or swum naked in the sea. She lowered the gun, Joseph gave a fresh order, she swung it up much faster and fired again twice in quick succession, then three times for luck. Then repeated the movement without an order, firing at will as the mounting clatter of shots filled the air on every side of her and the ricochets whined into the valley and away over the sea. She went on firing till the magazine was empty, then stood with the gun at her side, her heart thumping while she breathed the smells of thyme, and cordite.

"How did I do?" she asked, turning to him.

"Look for yourself."

Leaving him where he was, she ran forward to the oil can. Then stared at it in disbelief because it was unmarked.

"But what went wrong?" she cried indignantly.

"You missed," Joseph replied, taking the gun from her.

"They were blanks!"

"They were nothing of the kind."

"I did everything you told me!"

"For a start, you should not be shooting with one hand. For a girl weighing a hundred and ten pounds, wrists like asparagus, it's ridiculous."

"Then why the hell did you tell me that was how to shoot?"

He was heading for the car, guiding her by the arm. "If you're taught by Michel, then you must shoot like Michel's pupil. He knows nothing of two-handed grips. He has modelled himself on his brother. You want me to print 'Made in Israel' all over you?"

"Why doesn't he?" she insisted angrily, and seized his arm. "Why doesn't he know how to shoot properly? Why hasn't he been taught?"

"I told you. He was taught by his brother."

"Then why didn't his brother teach him right?"

She really wanted an answer. She was humiliated and prepared to make a scene, and he seemed to recognise this, for he smiled and, in his own way, capitulated.

" 'It is God's will that Khalil shoots with one hand,' he says."

"Why?"

With a shake of his head, he dismissed her question. They returned to the car.

"Is Khalil his brother's name?"

"Yes."

"You said it was the Arab name for Hebron."

He was pleased, if strangely distracted. "It is both." He started the engine. "Khalil for our town. Khalil for my brother. Khalil for the friend of God and of the Hebrew prophet Abraham, whom Islam respects, and who rests in our ancient mosque."

"Khalil then," she said.

"Khalil," he agreed shortly. "Remember it. Also the circumstances in which he told it to you. Because he loves you. Because he loves his brother. Because you have kissed his brother's gun and become of his blood."

They set off down the hillside, Joseph driving. She no longer knew herself, if she ever had. The sound of her own shooting was still ringing in her ears. The taste of the gun barrel was on her lips, and when he pointed out Olympus to her, all she saw was black and white rainstacks like atomic cloud. Joseph's preoccupation was as great as her own, but his aim lay once more ahead of them, and while he drove he pressed forward ceaselessly with his narrative, heaping detail upon detail. Khalil again. The times they had together before he went off to fight.

Nottingham, the great meeting of their souls. His sister Fatmeh and his great love for her. About his other brothers, dead. They hit the coast road. The traffic was thunderous and much too fast; the sullied beaches were strewn with broken huts, the factory towers like prisons looking in on her.

She tried to keep herself awake for him, but eventually the effort was too much. She put her head on his shoulder and for a while escaped.

The hotel in Thessalonika was an antique Edwardian pile with floodlit domes and an air of circumstance. Their suite was on the top floor, with a children's alcove, a twenty-foot bathroom, and scratched twenties furniture like home. She had put on the light but he ordered her to switch it off. He had had food sent up, but neither of them had touched it. There was a bay window and he stood in it with his back to her, gazing down into the green square and the moonlit waterfront beyond it. Charlie sat on the bed. The room was filled with stray Greek music from the street.

"So, Charlie."

"So, Charlie," she echoed quietly, waiting for the explanation that was owed to her.

"You have pledged yourself to my battle. But what battle? How is it fought? Where? I have talked of the cause, I have talked of action: we believe, therefore we do. I have told you that terror is theatre, and that sometimes the world has to be lifted up by its ears before it will listen to justice."

She shifted restlessly.

"Repeatedly, in my letters, in our long discussions, I have promised to bring you to the point of action. But I have prevaricated. I have delayed. Until tonight. Perhaps I do not trust you. Or perhaps I have learned to love you too much and do not wish to put you in the front line. You do not know which of these is true, but sometimes you have felt hurt by my secrecy. As your letters reveal."

The letters, she thought again; always the letters.

"So how, in practical terms, do you become my little soldier? That is what we are discussing tonight. Here. In that bed you are sitting on. On the last night of our Greek honeymoon.

Maybe our last night ever, for you can never be sure that you will see me again."

He turned to face her, nothing rushed. It was as if he had bound his body in the same careful bonds that held his voice. "You weep a lot," he remarked. "I think you are weeping tonight. As you hold me. Pledging yourself to me for all eternity. Yes? You weep, and while you weep, I tell you: 'It is time.' Tomorrow you shall have your chance. Tomorrow, in the morning, you shall fulfill the vow you swore to me by the great Khalil's gun. I am ordering you-asking you"-carefully, almost majestically, he went back to the window-"to drive that Mercedes car across the Yugoslav border, northward and into Austria. Where it will be collected from you. Alone. Will you do that? What do you say?"

On the surface, she felt nothing beyond a concern to match his apparent barrenness of feeling. No fear, no sense of danger, no surprise: she shut them all out with a bang. It's now, she thought. Charlie, you're on. A driving job. Away you go. She was staring straight at him, hard-jawed, the way she stared at people when she lied.

"Well-how do you respond to him?" he enquired, jollying her slightly. "Alone," he reminded her. "It's some distance, you know. Eight hundred miles through Yugolsavia-that's quite something, for a first mission. What do you say?"

"What's in it?" she asked.

Whether deliberately or not she could not tell, but he chose to misunderstand her: "Money. Your debut in the theatre of the real. Everything Marty promised you." His mind seemed as closed to her as it was perhaps to himself. His tone was clipped and deprecating.

"I meant what's in the car?"

The three minute warning before his voice became hectoring. "What does it matter what's in the car? A military message perhaps. Papers. Do you think you can know every secret of our great movement on your first day?" A break, but she did not answer. "Will you drive the car or not? That is all that matters."

She did not want Michel's reply. She wanted his.

"Why doesn't he drive it himself?"

"Charlie, it is not your task, as a new recruit, to question orders. Naturally, if you are shocked-" Who was he? She felt his mask slipping, but did not know which mask it was. "If suddenly you suspect-within the fiction-that you have been manipulated by this man-that all his adoration of you, his glamour, his protestations of eternal love-' Yet again he seemed to lose his footing. Was it her own wishful thinking, or dared she suppose that, in the half darkness, some sentiment had crept up on him unnoticed, which he would have preferred to hold at bay?

"I mean only that if, at this stage"-his voice recovered its strength-"if the scales should somehow fall from your eyes, or your courage fail you, then naturally you must say no."

"I was asking you a question. Why don't you drive it yourself-you, Michel?"

He swung swiftly back to the window and it seemed to Charlie that he had much to quell in himself before replying. "Michel tells you this and no more," he began, with strained forbearance. "Whatever is in that car"-he could look down on it from where he stood, parked in the square and guarded by a Volkswagen bus-"it is vital to our great struggle, but it is also very dangerous. Whoever was caught driving that car at any point in those eight hundred miles-whether the car contains subversive literature or some other kind of material, messages perhaps-to be caught with it would be extremely incriminating. Not all the influence-the diplomatic pressures, good lawyers-could prevent that person from having a very bad time indeed. If you are considering your own skin, that is what you have to consider." And he added, in a voice quite unlike Michel's: "You have your own life, after all. You are not one of us."

But his faltering, however slight, had given her an assurance she had not felt in his company before. "I asked why he wasn't driving it himself. I'm still waiting for his answer."

Once more, he rallied, too strongly. "Charlie! I am a Palestinian activist. I am known as a fighter for the cause. I am travelling on a false passport which may at any time be compromised. But you-an attractive English girl of good appearance-no record, quick-witted, charming-naturally for you there is no danger. Now surely that is enough!"

"You just said there was a danger."

"Nonsense. Michel assures you there is none. For himself, maybe. But for you-none. 'Do it for me,' I say. 'Do it and be proud. Do it for our love and for the revolution. Do it for all we have sworn to each other. Do it for my great brother. Are your vows meaningless? Were you merely mouthing Western hypocrisies when you professed yourself a revolutionary?' " He paused once more. "Do it because if you don't, your life will be even emptier than it was before I picked you up at the beach."

"You mean at the theatre," she corrected him.

He barely bothered with her. He remained standing with his back to her, his gaze still upon the Mercedes. He was Joseph again, Joseph of the pressed-out vowels and careful sentences and the mission that would save innocent lives.

"So there you are. This is your Rubicon. You know what that is? The Rubicon? Cut off now-go home-you can take some money, forget the revolution, Palestine, Michel, everything."

"Or?"

"Drive the car. Your first blow for the cause. Alone. Eight hundred miles. Which is it to be?"

"Where will you be?"

His calm was once more unassailable, and once more he took refuge in Michel: "In spirit, close to you, but I cannot help you. Nobody can help you. You will be on your own, performing a criminal act in the interests of what the world will call a gang of terrorists." He started again, but this time he was Joseph. "Some of the kids will make an escort for you, but there is nothing they can do if things go wrong, except report the fact to Marty and myself. Yugoslavia is no great friend of Israel."

Charlie hung on. All her instincts of survival told her to. She saw that he had once more turned round to look at her, and she met his black stare knowing that her own face was visible where his was not. Who are you fighting? she thought; yourself or me? Why are you the enemy in both camps?

"We haven't finished the scene," she reminded him. "I'm asking you-both of you-what's in the car? You want me to drive the car-whoever does-however many of you there are in there-I need to know what's in it. Now."

She thought she would have to wait. She had expected another three minute warning while his mind whirred through the options before it printed out its deliberately desiccated answers. She was wrong.

"Explosives," he retorted, in his most detached voice. "Two hundred pounds of Russian plastic explosive divided into half-pound sticks. Good new stuff, well cared for, capable of standing extremes of heat and cold, and reasonably plastic at all temperatures."

"Oh well, I'm glad it's well cared for," Charlie said cheerfully, fighting off the tidal wave. "Where's it hidden?"

"In the valance, cross members, roof-lining, and seats. As an older make of car, it has the advantage of box sections and girders."

"What's it going to be used for?"

"Our struggle."

"But why does he have to schlep all the way down to Greece for the stuff-why not get it in Europe?"

"My brother has certain rules of secrecy and he obliges me to obey them scrupulously. The circle he trusts is extremely small, and he will not enlarge it. In essence he trusts neither Arab nor European. What we do alone, we alone can betray."

"And what form exactly-in this case-does our struggle take, would you say?" Charlie enquired, in the same blithe, over-relaxed voice.

Again he did not hesitate. "Killing the Jews of the diaspora. As they have dispersed the people of Palestine, so we punish them in their diaspora and declare our agony to the ears and eyes of the world. By this means we also arouse the sleeping consciousness of the proletariat," he added, as a less assured afterthought.

"Well, that seems reasonable enough."

"Thank you."

"And you and Marty-you just thought it would be nice if I ran it up to Austria for them as a favour." With a small intake of breath, she rose and very deliberately went to the window. "Will you put your arms round me, please, Jose? I'm not being fast. It's just, for a minute there, I felt a trifle lonely."

One arm went round her shoulder and she shivered violently against it. Leaning her body along his, she turned in to him and reached her arms round him, and hugged him to her, and to her joy she felt him soften, and return her clasp. Her mind was working everywhere at once, like an eye turned upon a vast and unexpected panorama. But clearest of all, beyond the immediate danger of the drive, she began to see at last the larger journey that was stretching ahead of her and, along the route, the faceless comrades of the other army she was about to join. Is he sending me or holding me back? she wondered. He doesn't know. He's waking up and putting himself to sleep at the same time. His arms, still locked around her, gave her a new courage. Till now, under the spell of his determined chastity, she had believed in some dark way that her promiscuous body was unfit for him. Now, for reasons she had yet to understand, that self-distaste had left her.

"Keep convincing me," she said, still holding him. "Do your job."

"Is it not enough that Michel sends you, yet does not want you to go?"

She didn't answer.

"Should I quote Shelley to you-'the tempestuous loveliness of terror'? Must I remind you of our many promises to each other-that we are ready to kill because we are ready to die?"

"I don't think words do it any more. I think I've had all the words I can eat." She had buried her face in his chest. "You promised to stay close to me," she reminded him, and felt his grasp slacken as his voice hardened.

"I shall be waiting for you in Austria," he said, in a tone calculated more to repel than persuade her. "That is Michel's promise to you. It is also mine."

She stood back from him and held his head between her hands the way she had held it on the Acropolis, studying it critically by the lights from the square. And she had the feeling that it had locked against her like a door that would let her neither in nor out. Cold and aroused at the same time, she walked back to the bed and sat down again. Her voice too had a new confidence that impressed her. Her eyes were on her bracelet, which she was turning thoughtfully in the half dark.

"So which way do you want it to be?" she asked. "You, Joseph? Does Charlie stay and do the job, or does Charlie take the money and bolt? What's your personal scenario?"

"You know the dangers. Decide."

"So do you. Better than I do. You knew them from the start."

"You have heard all the arguments, from Marty and from me."

Unclasping the bracelet, she let it slip into her hand. "We save innocent life. Assuming I deliver the explosive, that is. There are those, of course-simpletons-who might suppose one would save more lives by not delivering the explosive. But they would be wrong, I take it?"

"In the long run, if all goes well, they will be wrong."

He had his back to her once more, and to all appearances had resumed his examination of the view from the window.

"If you're Michel talking to me, it's easy," she continued reasonably, fastening the bracelet on her other wrist. "You've bowled me off my feet; I've kissed the gun, and I can't wait to get to the barricades. If we don't believe that, your best endeavours over the last few days have failed. Which they haven't. That's how you cast me, and that's how you've got me. End of argument. I'll go."

She saw his head nod slightly in acceptance. "And if you're Joseph talking, what's the difference? If I said no, I'd never see you again. It would be back to Nowheresville with my golden handshake."

She noticed to her surprise that he had lost interest in her. His shoulders lifted, he let out a long breath; his head remained turned to the window, his gaze fixed on the horizon. He resumed speaking, and she thought at first that he was again evading the thrust of what she had been saying. But as she continued to listen, she realised he was explaining why, so far as he was concerned, there had never been any real choice for either of them.

"Michel would be pleased with this town, I think. Until the Germans began their occupation here, sixty thousand Jews lived fairly happily up on that hillside. Postworkers, merchants, bankers, Sephardim. They came here from Spain, through the Balkans. By the time the Germans left, there were none. Those who were not exterminated found their way to Israel."

She lay in bed. Joseph was still at the window, watching the street fires die. She wondered whether he would come to her, knowing he would not. She heard a creak as he stretched himself on the divan, his body parallel to hers and only the length of Yugoslavia between them. She wanted him more than she had ever wanted anyone. Her fear of tomorrow intensified her desire.

"Got any brothers and sisters, Jose?" she asked.

"One brother."

"What's he do?"

"He died in the war of '67."

"The war that drove Michel across the Jordan," she said. She had never expected him to give a truthful answer, but she knew that he had. "Did you fight in that war too?"

"I expect so."

"And in the war before? The one I can't remember the date of?"

" '56."

"Yes?"

"Yes."

"And in the war after? '73?"

"Probably."

"What did you fight for?"

Wait again.

"In '56 because I wanted to be a hero, in '67 for peace. And in '73"-he seemed to find it harder to remember-"for Israel," he said.

"And now? What are you fighting for this time?"

Because it is there, she thought. To save lives. Because they asked me to. So that my villagers can dance the dabke, and listen to the tales of travellers at the well.

"Jose?"

"Yes, Charlie."

"How did you pick up those dishy scars?"

In the darkness, his long pauses had acquired a campfire excitement.

"The burn marks, I would say, I got them sitting in a tank. The bullet-holes from getting out of it."

"How old were you?"

"Twenty. Twenty-one."

At the age of eight I joined the Ashbal, she thought. At the age of fifteen-

"So who's Daddy?" she asked, determined to keep up the momentum.

"He was a pioneer. An early settler."

"Where from?"

"Poland."

"When?"

"In the twenties. In the third aliyah, if you know what that means."

She didn't, but for the moment it didn't matter.

"What was his trade?"

"A construction worker. Worked with his hands. Turned a sand dune into a city. Called it Tel Aviv. A Socialist-the practical kind. Didn't think much of God. Never drank. Never owned anything worth more than a few dollars."

"Is that what you would have liked to be too?" she asked.

He'll never answer, she thought. He's asleep. Don't be impertinent.

"I chose the higher calling," he replied drily.

Or it chose you, she thought, which is what choice is called when you are born into captivity. And somehow, quite quickly, she fell asleep.

But Gadi Becker, the seasoned warrior, lay patiently awake, staring at the darkness and listening to the uneven breathing of his young recruit. Why had he spoken to her like that? Why had he declared himself to her at the very moment when he was dispatching her on her first mission? Sometimes he no longer trusted himself. He would flex his muscles only to find that the cords of discipline did not tighten against him as they used to. He would set a straight course, only to look back and marvel at his degree of error. What am I dreaming of, he wondered, the fighting or the peace? He was too old for both. Too old to go on, too old to stop. Too old to give himself, yet unable to withhold. Too old not to know the smell of death before he killed. He listened again as her breathing settled to the calmer rhythm of sleep. Holding his wrist Kurtz-style before him in the darkness, he looked at the luminous dial of his watch. Then, so quietly that even wide awake she would have been hard-pressed to hear him, he put on his red blazer and stole from the room.

The night concierge was an alert man, and had only to see the well-dressed gentleman approach him to sense at once the proximity of a large tip.

"You have telegram forms?" Becker demanded, in a peremptory tone.

The night concierge dived below his counter.

Becker began writing. Large, careful letters in a black ink. He had the address in his head-care of a lawyer in Geneva; Kurtz had signalled it to him from Munich after confirming with Yanuka, for safety's sake, that it was still in use. He had the text in his head too. It began "Kindly advise your client" and referred to the maturing of bonds in accordance with our standard contract. It ran to forty-five words, and when he had checked them over he added the stiff self-conscious signature in which Schwili had patiently instructed him. Then he handed the form across the counter, and gave the concierge five hundred drachmas for himself.

"I wish you to send it twice, you understand? The same message, twice. Once now by telephone, again in the morning from the post office. Don't give the job to a boy, do it yourself. Afterwards, you send me a confirmatory copy to my room."

The concierge would do everything exactly as the gentleman ordered. He had heard of Arab tips, he had dreamed of them. Tonight, out of the blue, he had finally landed one. There were many other services he would have wished to perform for the gentleman, but the gentleman, alas, was unreceptive to his suggestions. Forlornly, the concierge watched his prey stride into the street, then cut away towards the waterfront. The communications van stood in a car park. It was time for the great Gadi Becker to file his report and make sure all was clear for the big launch.