The Little Drummer Girl

thirteen

The monastery lay two kilometres from the border, in a hollow of boulders and yellow sedge. It was a sad, desecrated place of caved-in roofs and a courtyard of broken cells with psychedelic hula girls painted on the stone walls. Some post-Christian had started a discotheque here, but, like the monks, had fled. On the concrete pad intended as a dance floor stood the red Mercedes, like a warhorse being tended for the battle; beside it, the champion who would ride it, with Joseph the administrator supervising at her elbow. This is where Michel brought you to change the number plates and see you off, Charlie; this is where he handed you the false papers and the keys. Rose, wipe down that door panel again, please. Rachel, what's that scrap of paper on the floor? He was Joseph the perfectionist once more, ordering every tiny detail. The communications van stood against the outer wall, its aerial gently nodding in the hot breeze.

The Munich number plates were already bolted in position. A dusty German "D" had replaced the diplomatic sticker. Unwanted rubbish had been removed. With meticulous care, Becker now began introducing eloquent souvenirs to replace it: a thumbed guidebook to the Acropolis shoved into a door pocket and forgotten; grape pips for the ashtray, fragments of orange-peel for the floor; Greek ice-cream sticks, scraps of chocolate paper. Next, two cancelled tickets to the ancient sites of Delphi, followed by an Esso road map of Greece with the route between Delphi and Thessalonika marked in fibre-tip pen, with a couple of Michel's scribbled marginal annotations in Arabic close to the point in the hills where Charlie had fired the gun one-handed, and missed. A comb with a few black hairs in it, the teeth smeared with Michel's pungent German hair lotion. A pair of leather driving gloves, lightly sprayed with Michel's body-mist. A spectacles case by Frey of Munich, the one that went with the sunglasses which had been inadvertently smashed when their owner tried to pick up Rachel at the border.

And lastly he submitted Charlie herself to an equally searching scrutiny, covering the whole surface of her clothed body, from her shoes to her head and down again by way of her bracelet before he turned-reluctantly, as it seemed to her-to a small trestle table on which were laid out the revised contents of her handbag.

"So now put them in, please," he said finally, when he had made another check; and watched her pack everything in her own way-handkerchief, lipsticks, driver's licence, coins, wallet, keepsakes, keys, and all the meticulously calculated junk that, on examination, would testify to the complex fictions of her several lives.

"What about his letters?" she said. A Joseph pause. "If he wrote me all those hot-breath letters, I'd cart them round with me everywhere, wouldn't I?"

"Michel does not permit that. You have strict instructions to keep his letters in a safe place in your flat and above all never to cross a frontier with them in your possession. However- From the side pocket of his jacket, he had drawn a small diary wrapped in protective cellophane. It was clothbound, with a little pencil in the spine. "Since you do not keep a diary, we decided to keep one for you," he explained. Gingerly, she accepted it and pulled away the cellophane. She took out the pencil. It was lightly dented with teethmarks, which was what she still did with pencils: chewed them. She leafed through half a dozen pages. Schwili's entries were sparse but, with Leon's flair and Miss Bach's electronic memory, all her own. Over the Nottingham period, nothing: Michel had descended on her without warning. For York, a big "M," with a question mark and a ring round it. In the corner of the same day, a long, contemplative doodle, the sort she did when she was daydreaming. Her car was featured: Fiat to Eustace, 9 a.m. Her mother also: 1 week to Mum's birthday. Buy present now. So also was Alastair: A to Isle of Wight-Kellogg's commercial? He hadn't gone, she remembered; Kellogg's found a better and more sober star. For her monthly periods, wavy lines, and once or twice the facetious entry off games. Turning forward to the Greek holiday, she found the name Mykonos, printed in large pensive capitals, and beside it the departure and arrival times of the charter. But when she came to the day of her arrival in Athens, the whole double page was illuminated with a flock of soaring birds, in blue and red ball-point like a sailor's tattoo. She dropped the diary into the handbag and closed the catch with a snap. It was too much. She felt dirty and invaded. She wanted new people she could still surprise-people who could not fake her feelings and her handwriting so that she could no longer distinguish them from the originals. Perhaps Joseph knew that. Perhaps he read it in her brusque manner. She hoped so. With his gloved hand he was holding open the car door for her. She got in quickly.

"Look at the papers once more," he ordered.

"I don't need to," she said, looking straight ahead of her.

"Number of the car?"

She gave it.

"Date of registration?"

She gave it all: story within the story within the story. The car was the private property of a fashionable Munich doctor, name supplied, her current lover. Insured and registered in his name, see the false papers.

"Why is he not with you, this active doctor? It is Michel asking you this, you understand?"

She understood. "He had to fly back from Thessalonika this morning for an urgent case. I agreed to drive the car for him. He was in Athens to deliver a lecture. We've been touring together."

"How did you meet him in the first place?"

"In England. He's a buddy of my parents-he cures their hangovers. My parents are mountainously rich, hint, hint."

"For the extreme case, you have Michel's one thousand dollars in your handbag, which he has lent to you for the trip. Conceivably, for their overtime, for the inconvenience you have caused these people, they may graciously consider a small subsidy. What is the name of his wife?"

"Renate, and I hate the bitch."

"The children?"

"Christoph and Dorothea. I'd make a marvellous mother to them if only Renate would stand aside. I want to go now. Anything else?"

"Yes."

Like you love me, she suggested to him in her mind. Like you're a bit apologetic about launching me halfway across Europe with a earful of high-quality Russian plastic explosive.

"Don't be overconfident," he advised her, with no more feeling than if he were examining her driver's licence. "Not every frontier guard is a fool or a sex maniac."

She had promised herself no farewells and perhaps Joseph had done the same.

"So, Charlie," she said. And started the engine.

He neither waved nor smiled. Perhaps he said "So, Charlie" back, but if he did she didn't hear. She reached the main road; the monastery and its temporary inhabitants vanished from her mirror. She drove a couple of kilometres fast and came to an old painted arrow saying "jugoslawien." She drove on slowly, following the traffic. The road spread and became a car park. She saw a line of charabancs and a line of cars and the flags of all nations cooked to pale pastel by the sun. I'm English, German, Israeli, and Arab. She took her place behind an open sports car. Two boys sat in the front, two girls in the back. She wondered whether they were Joseph's. Or Michel's. Or police of some kind. She was learning to see the world that way: everyone belongs to someone. A grey-uniformed official waved her impatiently forward. She had everything ready. False papers, false explanations. Nobody wanted them. She was over.

Standing on the hilltop high above the monastery, Joseph lowered his binoculars and returned to the waiting van.

"Package posted," he said curtly to the boy David, who typed the words obediently into his machine. For Becker he would have typed anything-risked anything, shot anybody. Becker was a living legend for him, complete in all his abilities, somebody he should aspire ceaselessly to copy.

"Marty replies congratulations," the boy said reverently.

But the great Becker seemed not to hear.

She drove for ever. She drove with her arms aching from grasping the wheel too tight, and her neck aching from keeping her legs too rigid. She drove with her belly feeling sick from too much slackness. Then sick again from too much fear. Then sicker still when the engine stalled and she thought: Oh hooray, we're having a breakdown. If you do, then dump it, Joseph had said; run it into a side turning, hitch a lift, lose the papers, catch a train. Above all, get as far away from it as you can. But now that she had started, she didn't think she could do that: it would be like running out on a performance. She went deaf from too much music; she turned off the radio and went deaf again from the din of the lorries. She was in a sauna, she was freezing to death, she was singing. There was no progress, only movement. She chatted brightly with her dead father and her bloody mother: "Well, I met this simply charming Arab, Mother, marvellously well educated and frightfully rich and cultural, and it was just one long screw from dawn till dusk and back again…"

She drove with her mind whited out and her thoughts deliberately foreshortened. She forced herself to remain on the outer surface of experience: Oh look, a village; oh look, a lake, she would think, never allowing herself to break through to the chaos below. I'm free and relaxed and having a simply marvellous time. For lunch she ate fruit and bread, which she bought from a garage kiosk. And ice-cream-she had a sudden passion for it, like an appetite in pregnancy. Yellow, watery Yugoslav ice-cream, with a girl with big tits on the wrapper. Once she saw a boy hitchhiker and had an overwhelming urge to ignore Joseph's orders and give him a lift. Her loneliness was suddenly so awful she would have done anything to keep him with her: married him in one of the little chapels scattered on the treeless hilltops, raped him in the yellow grass beside the road. But she never once admitted to herself, in all the years and miles of driving, that she was ferrying two hundred pounds of prime-quality Russian plastic explosive divided into half-pound sticks, concealed in the valance, cross members, roof-lining, and seats. Or that an older make of car had the advantage of box sections and girders. Or that it was good new stuff, well cared for, capable of withstanding heat and cold, and reasonably plastic in all temperatures.

Keep going, girl, she repeated to herself determinedly, sometimes aloud. It's a sunny day and you're a rich whore driving your lover's Mercedes. She recited her lines from As You Like It, and lines from her first part ever. She recited lines from Saint Joan. But of Joseph she thought not at all; she had never met an Israeli in her life, never longed for him, never changed her spots and her religion for him, or become his creature while pretending to be the creature of his enemy; never marvelled and fretted at the secret wars that were going on inside him.

At six in the evening, though she would have preferred to keep driving all night, she saw the painted sign that nobody had told her to watch out for, and she said, "Oh well, that looks a nice place, I'll try it." Just like that. She said it aloud, bright as brass, probably to her bloody mother. She drove a mile into the hills and there it was, exactly as he-who-did-not-exist had described it, a hotel built inside a ruin, with a pool and miniature golf course. And as she entered the foyer, whom should she walk straight into but her old pals Dimitri and Rose, whom she'd met on Mykonos. Gosh, look, darling, it's Charlie, what a coincidence, why don't we all have dinner together? They ate a barbecue by the pool and swam, and when the pool shut and Charlie couldn't sleep they played Scrabble with her in the bedroom, like warders on the eve of her execution. She dozed for a few hours, but at six in the morning she was back on the road, and by mid-afternoon she had hit the queue for the Austrian border, at which point her appearance suddenly became desperately important to her.

She was wearing a sleeveless blouse from Michel's trousseau; she had brushed out her hair and looked great in each of her three mirrors. Most cars were being waved straight through, but she wasn't counting on that, not again. The rest were showing papers and a few were being fished out for a thorough search. She wondered whether it was random, or whether they had advance warning, or whether they went by certain illegible indications. Two men in uniform were coming slowly down the line, pausing at each car window. One wore green, the other blue, and the blue one had bent his peaked cap to make himself look like an air ace. They glanced at her, then walked slowly round the car. She heard-one of them kick her rear tyre and she had a good mind to yell "Ouch, that hurt," but restrained herself because Joseph, whom she dared not think of, had said, don't go to them, keep your distance, decide what you think is necessary and halve it. The man in green asked her something in German and she said "Sorry?" in English. She was holding up her British passport to him, profession actress. He took it, compared her with her photograph, handed it to his colleague. They were good-looking boys; she hadn't realised they were so young. Blond, full of sap, straight-eyed, with the permanent tan of mountaineers. It's prime quality, she wanted to tell them, in a dreadful lurch towards self-extinction: I'm Charlie, weigh me.

Their four eyes stayed on her while they asked their questions-your turn, my turn. No, she said-well, just a hundred Greek cigarettes and a bottle of ouzo. No, she said, no gifts, honest. She looked away from them, resisting the temptation to flirt. Well, a piece of junk for her mother, but no value. Say, ten dollars. Copybook stuff: give them something to think about. They opened her door and asked to see the bottle of ouzo, but she had a shrewd suspicion that, having had a good look down the front of her blouse, they were keen to see her legs and match everything up. The ouzo was in a basket on the floor beside her. Leaning across the passenger seat, she drew it out and as she did so her skirt opened, which was ninety per cent accidental but for a moment her left thigh was exposed all the way north to the hip. She lifted the bottle to show it to them and in the same moment felt something damp and cold strike her bare flesh. Jesus, they've stabbed me! She let out an exclamation, clapped her hand over the spot, and was astonished to see, printed on her thigh, an inky blue entry stamp recording her arrival in the Republic of Austria. She was so angry she nearly flew at them; she was so grateful she nearly burst into uncontrollable laughter. Without Joseph's words of caution to stop her, she would have embraced them both then and there for their incredible, lovable, innocent generosity. She was through, she was bloody marvellous. She looked in the mirror and saw the darlings shyly waving goodbye to her for about thirty-five minutes on end, oblivious to all other comers.

She had never loved authority so well.

The long watch of Shimon Litvak began in early morning, eight hours before Charlie had been reported safely across the border, and two nights and one day since Joseph, acting on behalf of Michel, had sent the duplicated telegrams to the lawyer in Geneva, for onward transmission to his client. It was now mid-afternoon and Litvak had changed the guard three times, but nobody was bored, nobody was less than very vigilant; his problem was not to keep the team alert but to persuade them to rest properly in their off-hours.

From his commanding position at the window of the bridal suite of an old hotel, Litvak looked down upon a pretty Carinthian market square of which the main features were a couple of traditional inns with outdoor tables, a small car park, and an agreeably antique railway station with an onion dome on the stationmaster's office. The inn nearer to him was called the Black Swan, and boasted an accordion player, a pale, introspective boy who played too well for his comfort and glowered when cars went by, which was quite often. The second inn was called the Carpenter's Arms, and possessed a fine golden sign made up of hand tools. The Carpenter's had class: white tablecloths and trout, which you could choose from an outside tank. There were few pedestrians at this time of day; a heavy, dusty heat cast a pleasant somnolence over the scene. Outside the Swan, two girls drank tea and giggled over a letter they were jointly writing, and their job was to keep a list of vehicle numbers of whoever entered or left the square. Outside the Carpenter's Arms, an earnest young priest sipped wine and read his breviary, and in southern Austria nobody asks a priest to go away. The priest's real name was Udi, short for Ehud, the left-handed killer of the King of Moab. Like his namesake, he was armed to the teeth and left-handed and he was there in case there was fighting to be done. He was backed by a middle-aged English couple seated in the car park in their Rover, to all the world sleeping off the effects of a good luncheon. All the same, they had firearms wedged between their feet and a variety of other hardware within handy reach. Their radio was tuned to the communications van parked two hundred metres up the road towards Salzburg.

Litvak had, in all, nine men and four girls. He could have done with sixteen but he was not complaining. He liked a good stake-out, and the tension always filled him with a sense of well-being. This is what I was born for, he thought: in the run-up to action he thought it always. He was becalmed, his body and his intellect were in a deep sleep, his crew was lying on the deck daydreaming about boyfriends, girlfriends, summer rambles in the Galilee. Yet the lightest whisper of a breeze and every one of them would be at his post before the sails had caught the first strain of it.

Litvak muttered a routine checkword over his headset and had one in reply. They were speaking German in order to attract less attention. Their cover was now a radio-taxi firm in Graz, now a helicopter rescue service based on Innsbruck. They changed wavebands frequently, and used a variety of confusing call signs.

At four o'clock, Charlie pottered into the square with the Mercedes, and one of the watchers in the car park cheekily trumpeted three notes of a fanfare over his headset. She had problems finding a space, but Litvak had ruled she should not be helped in this. Let her play it as it plays, no featherbedding. A space became vacant; she took it, got out, stretched, rubbed her backside, fished her shoulder bag and guitar from the boot. She's good, thought Litvak, watching her through his glasses. A natural. Now lock the car. She did, leaving the boot till last. Now slip the key into the exhaust pipe. She did that too, a really deft movement as she stooped to her luggage; then set course wearily for the railway station, looking neither left nor right. Litvak settled down to wait again. The goat is tethered, he thought, recalling a favourite phrase of Kurtz's. Now all we need is a lion. He spoke a word into his headset and heard his order confirmed. He imagined Kurtz in the Munich flat, crouching over the little teleprinter as the communications van tapped the signal through. He imagined the fraught, unconscious wiping gesture of his stubby fingers pulling nervously at his constant smile; the lifting of his thick forearm as he sightlessly consulted his watch. We're stepping into the dark at last, Litvak thought as he watched the early dusk gather. The dark is what we have been looking forward to all these months.

An hour passed, the good priest Udi paid his modest bill and disappeared at a pious pace down a side street for a rest and a change of profile in the safe flat. The two girls had finished their letter at last and wanted a stamp. When they had one, they departed for the same reason. Litvak watched with satisfaction as their replacements took up their positions: a battered laundry van; two male hikers needing a late lunch; an Italian guest-worker for a coffee and the Milan newspapers. A police car entered the square and made three slow laps of honour, but neither the driver nor his colleague showed any interest in a parked red Mercedes with its ignition key hidden in the exhaust pipe. At seven-forty, amid a resurgence of excitement among the watchers, a fat woman marched straight up to the driving door, forced a key into the lock, then did a comedy double-take and drove off in a red Audi instead. She had got her make wrong. At eight, a powerful motorbike made one swift pass before anyone could get the number and roared out again. Pillion passenger, long hair, could be female, looked like two kids on a spree.

"Contact?" Litvak asked over his headset.

Opinions were divided. Too careless, said one voice. Too fast, said another-why run the risk of being stopped by the police? Litvak's own view differed. It was a first reconnaissance, he was sure of it, but he didn't say so for fear of influencing their judgment. He settled down to wait again. The lion has taken a sniff, he thought. Will he come back?

It was ten o'clock. The restaurants were beginning to empty. A deep country quiet was descending over the town. But the red Mercedes sat untouched, and the motorcycle had not returned.

If you have ever watched one, you know that an empty car is a truly stupid thing to stare at, and Litvak had watched a lot of them. With time, just by holding its focus, you find yourself remembering what a fatuous thing a car really is without man to give it meaning. And what a fatuous thing man is to have invented cars in the first place. After a couple of hours it is the worst piece of junk you have ever seen in your life. You start to dream of horses or a world of pedestrians. Of getting away from the scrap metal of life, and returning to the flesh. Of your kibbutz and its orange groves. Of the day when the whole world finally learns the risks of spilling Jewish blood.

You want to blow all the enemy cars in the world to pieces and set Israel free for ever.

Or you remember it is the Sabbath; and that the Law says it is better to save a soul by working than to observe the Sabbath and not save the soul.

Or that you are expected to marry a plain and very pious girl you do not particularly care for, and settle down in Herzlia with a mortgage and enter the baby-trap without a word of protest.

Or you reflect on the Jewish God, and on certain Biblical parallels to your present situation.

But whatever you think or don't think, and whatever you do, if you are as well trained as Litvak was, and if you are in command, and if you are one of those to whom the prospect of action against the tormentors of Jewry is a drug that will never let you go, you do not for one second take your eyes off that car.

The motorbike had returned.

It had been in the station square for five and a half eternal minutes by Shimon Litvak's luminous wristwatch. From his place at the window of the darkened hotel room, not twenty yards away as the bullet flies, he had been watching it all that time. It was a motorbike from the upper end of the range-Japanese, Vienna registration, and the high handlebars were custom built. It had coasted into the square on no engine, like a runaway, bearing one leather-clad, helmeted driver, gender still to be determined, and one male, broad-shouldered pillion passenger, instantaneous alias Longhair, in jeans and sneakers and a heroic neckscarf knotted at the nape. It had parked close to the Mercedes, but not so close as to suggest they had designs on it. Litvak would have done that too.

"Party collected," he said softly over the headset, and received four acknowledgments immediately. Litvak was so sure of his ground that if the couple had caught fright and run for it at that moment, he would have given the order without a second thought, though it would have meant the end of the operation. Aaron, from the cab of the laundry van, would have stood up and shot them to pieces in the square; then Litvak would have gone down and rolled a charge into the mess to make sure. But they didn't run for it, which was much, much better. They stayed on their bike, they fidgeted with their chinstraps and buckles and sat tight seemingly for hours, in the way motorcyclists can, though it was actually about two minutes. They continued to take the scent of the place, checking side turnings and parked cars, and upper windows such as Litvak's, though the team had made sure long ago that absolutely nothing showed.

Their period of meditation over, Longhair languidly dismounted from his pillion, then ambled past the Mercedes, his head innocently tilted while he presumably marked down the fishtail of the ignition key protruding from the exhaust. But he didn't make a lunge for it, which Litvak as a fellow performer appreciated. He strolled past the car and headed for the station concourse to the public lavatory, from which he emerged again immediately, hoping to wrong-foot anybody unwise enough to be following him. Nobody was. The girls couldn't anyway, and the boys were far too canny. Longhair passed the car a second time, and Litvak besought him very hard to stoop and help himself to the key, because he wanted a conclusive gesture. But Longhair declined to oblige. He returned instead to the motorbike and his companion, who had stayed in the saddle, doubtless in order to be able to make a smooth getaway if one were needed. Longhair said something to his companion, then pulled off his helmet, and, with a flick of the head, turned his face carelessly into the light.

"Luigi" said Litvak into his headset, giving the agreed covername.

As he did so, he experienced the rare and timeless blessing of pure satisfaction. It's you, he thought calmly. Rossino, the apostle of the peaceful solution. Litvak knew him really well. He knew the names and addresses of his girlfriends and boyfriends, of his right-wing parents in Rome and of his left-wing mentor at the musical academy in Milan. He knew the upmarket Neapolitan journal that still published his preachy articles insisting that non-violence was the only acceptable path. He knew Jerusalem's long-nurtured suspicions about him, and the whole history of their repeated fruitless efforts to obtain the proof. He knew the smell of him and his shoe size; he was beginning to guess the part he had played in Bad Godesberg and in several other places, and he had very clear ideas, as they all had, about what could best be done with him. But not yet. Not for a long time. Not till the whole tortuous journey was behind them could that score be settled.

She's paid her way, he thought joyously. With this one identification, she has paid her whole long trip till here. She was a righteous Gentile, and in Litvak's estimation one of a rare breed.

Now at last the driver himself was dismounting. He was dismounting, and stretching, and unbuttoning his chinstrap, and Rossino was replacing him at the custom-built handlebars.

Except that the driver was a girl.

A slim blonde girl, according to Litvak's light-intensifying glasses, with delicate bony features and an altogether ethereal air to her, despite her mastery of the motorbike. And Litvak at this critical stage refused point-blank to bother himself about whether her travels might ever have taken her from Paris Orly apparently to Madrid, and whether she made a practice of delivering suitcases of gramophone records to Swedish girlfriends. Because if he had gone that route, the cumulative hatred among the team might have overridden their sense of discipline; most of them had shot people in their time, and in cases like this were quite without compunction. So he said nothing at all over his headset; he let them make their own tentative identifications, and that was all.

It was the girl's turn to visit the lavatory. Fishing a small bag from the luggage grid and handing Rossino her helmet to look after, she walked bareheaded across the square and straight into the concourse, where, unlike her companion, she remained. Once more, Litvak waited for her to make a dive for the ignition key but she didn't. Her walk, like Rossino's, was lithe and effortless, and it didn't falter. She was undeniably a most attractive girl-no wonder that wretched Labour Attache had fallen for her. His glasses went back to Rossino. Rising slightly in the front saddle, he had cocked his head as if listening for something. Of course, thought Litvak, as he strained his own ears to catch the same faint rumble: the ten-twenty-four from Klagenfurt, due any minute. With a long slow shudder, the train pulled up at the platform. The first bleary-eyed arrivals emerged in the concourse. A couple of taxis shuffled forward and stopped again. A couple of private cars drove away. A tired excursion group appeared, a carriage-load of them, everyone with the same luggage labels.

Do it now, Litvak pleaded. Grab the car and get out with the traffic. Make sense of what you are here for.

He was still not prepared for what they actually did. An elderly couple was standing at the cab rank and, behind them, a demure young girl like a nanny or companion. She wore a brown double-breasted suit and a strict little brown hat with the brim down. Litvak noticed her as he noticed a lot of other people in the concourse-with a trained, clear eye made clearer by the tension. A pretty girl, carrying a small travel bag. The elderly couple hailed a taxi, both together, and the girl stayed close behind them, watching it arrive. The elderly couple clambered in; the girl helped them, handing in their bits and pieces-obviously their daughter. Litvak returned his gaze to the Mercedes, then to the motorbike. If he thought anything about the girl in brown, he assumed she had got into the taxi and driven away with her parents. Naturally. It was not till he gave his attention to the tired group of trippers who were filing along the pavement towards two waiting coaches that, with a leap of sheer pleasure, he realised it was his girl, our girl, the girl from the motorbike; she had done a quick change in the lavatory and fooled him. And, having done so, tagged herself on to the coach party in order to get herself across the square. He was still rejoicing as she unlocked the car door with her own key, tossed in her travel bag, settled herself into the driving seat as chastely as if she were leaving for church, and drove away with the fishtail still glinting inside the exhaust pipe. This touch too delighted him. How obvious! How sensible! Duplicate telegrams, duplicate keys: our leader believes in doubling his chances.

He gave the one-word order and watched the followers discreetly peel away: the two girls in their Porsche; Udi in his big Opel with the Euroflag on the back, stuck there by himself; then Udi's partner on a much less flashy motorbike than Rossino's. He stayed at his window and watched the square slowly empty, like the end of a show. The cars departed, the charabancs departed, the pedestrians departed, the lights went down around the station concourse, and he heard a clang as someone closed an iron gate and locked it for the night. Only the two inns had stayed awake.

Finally the codeword he was waiting for crackled over his headset. "Ossian": the car is heading north.

"So where's Luigi heading?" he asked.

"For Vienna."

"Wait," Litvak said, and actually took off his headset so that he could think more clearly.

He had an immediate choice to make, and immediate choices were what training was about. To follow both Rossino and the girl was impossible. He lacked the resources. In theory he should follow the explosives, and therefore the girl-yet he still hesitated, for Rossino was elusive and by far the greater catch, whereas the Mercedes was by definition conspicuous, and its destination a near certainty. For a moment longer, Litvak hesitated. The headset crackled but he ignored it while he went on running the logic of the fiction through his mind. The idea of letting Rossino out of his grasp was nearly unbearable to him. Yet Rossino was for certain an important link in the opposition's chain: and, as Kurtz had repeatedly argued, if the chain did not hold, how could it draw Charlie into its toils? Rossino would return to Vienna satisfied that thus far nothing had been compromised: he was a crucial link, but also a crucial witness. Whereas the girl-the girl was a functionary, a driver of cars, a placer of bombs, the expendable infantry of their great movement. Moreover, Kurtz had vital plans for her future, whereas Rossino's future could wait.

Litvak replaced the headset. "Stay with the car. Let Luigi go."

His decision taken, Litvak allowed himself a contented smile. He knew the formation exactly. First, Udi riding point on his motorbike, then the blonde girl in the red Mercedes, and, after her, the Opel. And after the Opel again, lying well back from everyone, the two girls in the reserve Porsche, ready to change places with anyone as soon as they were ordered. He rehearsed to himself the static posts that would monitor the Mercedes to the German border. He imagined the kind of cock-and-bull story Alexis would have spun in order to make certain she was let through without complications.

"Speed?" Litvak asked, with a glance at his watch.

Udi reports her speed very moderate, came the reply. This lady wants no trouble with the law. She is nervous of her cargo.

And so she should be, thought Litvak approvingly as he removed his headset. If I were that girl, the cargo would scare me stiff.

He walked downstairs, briefcase in hand. He had already paid his bill, but if they had asked him he would have paid it again; he was in love with the whole world. His command car was waiting for him in the hotel car park. With a self-control bred of long experience, Litvak set off in calm pursuit of the convoy. How much would she know? How much time would they have to find out? Take it easy, he thought; first tether the goat. His mind went back to Kurtz and with an ache of pleasure he imagined his ramming, inexhaustible voice heaping praise on him in awful Hebrew. It pleased Litvak very much to think he was bringing Kurtz so plump a sacrifice.

Salzburg had still to hear of summer. A fresh spring air was blowing off the mountains and the Salzach River smelt of the sea. How they arrived there was still half a mystery to her, because she slept so often along the journey. From Graz they had flown to Vienna, but the trip had taken about five seconds, so she must have slept on the plane. In Vienna he had a hire car waiting, a smart BMW. She slept again, and as they entered the city she thought for a moment the car must be on fire, but it was only the evening sun catching the crimson paintwork as she opened her eyes.

"Anyway, why Salzburg?" she had asked him.

Because it is one of Michel's cities, he had replied. Because it is on the way.

"On the way where to?" she asked, but once more struck his reserve.

Their hotel had a roofed interior courtyard, with old gilded banisters and potted plants in marble urns. Their suite looked straight down on to the fast brown river, and across it at more domes than are in Heaven. Behind the domes rose a castle with a cable car that switched up and down the hillside.

"I need to walk," she said.

She took a bath and fell asleep in it, and he had to bang on the door to wake her. She dressed and once more he knew the places to show her and the things that would please her most.

"It's our last night, isn't it?" she said, and this time he didn't hide behind Michel.

"Yes, it's our last night, Charlie; tomorrow we have a visit to make and then you return to London."

Clutching his arm in both her hands, she wandered with him through narrow streets, and squares that ran into each other like drawing-rooms. They stood outside the house where Mozart was born, and the trippers were like a matinee audience to her, cheerful and unaware.

"I did well, didn't I, Jose? I did really well. Say it."

"You did excellently," he said-but somehow his reservations meant more to her than his praise.

The doll's-house churches were more beautiful than anything she had imagined, with scrolled golden altars and voluptuous angels and tombs where the dead seemed still to be dreaming of pleasure. A Jew pretending to be a Muslim shows me my Christian heritage, she thought. But when she demanded information of him, the most he would do was buy a glossy guidebook and put the receipt in his wallet.

"I fear that Michel has not yet had the time to launch himself upon the Baroque period," he explained, in his dry way; and yet again she sensed in him the shadows of some unexplained obstruction.

"Shall we go back now?" he asked.

She shook her head. Make it last. The evening darkened, the crowds disappeared, choirboy singing issued from unexpected doorways. They sat by the river and listened to the deaf old bells chiming at each other in stubborn competition. They started to walk again and suddenly she was so floppy she needed his arm round her waist just to keep her upright.

"Food," she ordered as he guided her into the lift. "Champagne. Music."

But by the time he had rung room service she was fast asleep on the bed, and nothing on God's earth, not even Joseph, was going to wake her.

She lay as she had lain in the sand on Mykonos, her left arm crooked and her face pressed into it; and Becker sat in the armchair watching her. The first weak glow of dawn was appearing through the curtains. He could smell fresh leaves and timber. There had been a rainstorm in the night, so loud and sudden it was like an express train crashing up the valley. From the window he had watched the city rock under the long slow onslaughts of its lightning, and the rain dancing on the glistening domes. But Charlie had lain so still he had actually stooped over her and put his ear to her mouth to make sure she was breathing.

He glanced at his watch. Plan, he thought. Move. Let action kill the doubt. The dinner-table with its uneaten food stood in the window bay, the ice bucket with its unopened bottle of champagne. Taking each fork in turn, he began scooping the lobster meat from its shell, dirtying plates, mixing up the salad, spoiling the strawberries, adding one last fiction to the many they had already lived: their gala banquet in Salzburg; Charlie and Michel celebrate the successful completion of her first mission for the revolution. He took the champagne bottle to the bathroom, and closed the door in case the pop of the cork should wake her. He poured the champagne down the basin and ran water after it; he flushed the lobster meat and strawberries and salad down the lavatory and had to wait and flush again because they wouldn't disappear the first time. He left enough champagne to pour a little into his own glass, and for Charlie's glass he took lipstick from her bag and drew traces round the brim before adding the dregs from the bottle. Then he went to the window again, where he had spent much of the night, and gazed at the rain-soaked blue hills. I am a climber weary of the mountains, he thought.

He shaved, he put on his red blazer. He went to the bed. stretched out his hand to wake her, and drew it back. A reluctance, like a heavy tiredness, descended over him. He sat down in the armchair again, his eyes closed, he forced them open; he woke with a jolt, feeling the weight of the desert dew clinging to his battledress, smelling the scent of damp sand before the sun had burned it dry.

"Charlie?" He again reached out, this time to touch her cheek, then touched her arm instead. Charlie, it's a triumph; Marty says you are a star, and that you have presented him with a whole new cast of characters. He called his Gadi in the night but you didn't wake. Better than Garbo, he says. There is nothing we can't achieve together, he says. Charlie, wake up. We have work to do. Charlie.

But aloud he merely said her name again, then went downstairs, paid the bill, and obtained the last receipt. He walked out the back of the hotel to collect the hired BMW, and the dawn was the way the dusk had been, fresh and not yet summer.

"You're to wave me off, then appear to take a walk," he told her. "Dimitri will bring you separately to Munich."