The Little Drummer Girl

seventeen

The company was called the Heretics and its tour had opened in Exeter before a congregation straight from the Cathedral: women in the mauve of half mourning, old priests permanently on the brink of tears. When there was no matinee, the cast drifted round the city and yawned, and in the evenings after the show they took wine and cheese with earnest disciples of the Arts, because it was part of the deal that you exchanged beds with the natives.

From Exeter, they had gone to Plymouth and played in the naval base before mystified young officers who agonised about whether stagehands should be awarded the temporary condition of gentlemen and admitted to their mess.

But both Exeter and Plymouth had been cities of devilment and wild living by comparison with the dripping, granite mining-town far down the Cornish peninsula, with cramped alleys steaming with sea-mist, and stunted trees made hunchback by the gales. The cast was spread round half a dozen guest houses, and Charlie's luck was a slate-gabled island entirely surrounded by hydrangeas, where the drumming of the London-bound trains as she lay in bed made her feel like a castaway taunted by the glimpse of distant ships. Their theatre was a rig inside a sports hall, and from its creaking stage she could smell the chlorine from the swimming pool and hear the sluggish thud of squash-balls through the wall. Their audience was the headscarf-and-lentils brigade, whose drugged, envious eyes told you they would do it better than you if they ever sank so low as to try. And their dressing-room, finally, was a women's locker-room, and that was where they brought her the orchids-while she was putting on her make-up ten minutes before curtain-up.

She saw them first in the long mirror over the handbasins, floating through the door, wrapped to the neck in damp white paper. She saw them hesitate, then advance uncertainly towards her. But she went on with her make-up as if she had never seen an orchid in her life. One spray, carried like a paper-wrapped baby across the arms of a fifty-year-old Cornish Vestal named Val, with black plaits and a vapid, disregarded smile. Russet.

"I hereby declare you to be fair Rosalind," said Val skittishly.

A hostile silence fell, in which the entire female cast savoured Val's irrelevance. It was the hour when actors are at their most nervous, and their quietest.

"I'm Rosalind," Charlie agreed unhelpfully. "Why?" And went to work with an eyeliner to show she didn't care very much what the answer was.

Making a brave ceremony of it, Val laid the orchids in the handbasin and scurried out, while Charlie picked up the envelope in full view of everyone who cared to look. For Miss Rosalind. Continental hand, blue ballpoint instead of black ink. Inside, one continental visiting card, high gloss. The name not printed but raised in spiky, colourless capitals on the slant. anton mesterbein, geneva. Below it, the one word Justice. No message added, and no "Joan, spirit of my freedom."

She transferred her attention to her other eyebrow, very carefully, as if her eyebrow were the most important thing on earth.

"Who is he, Chas?" said a Rural Shepherdess at the next-door basin. She was just out of college, mental age fifteen.

Frowning into the mirror in her concentration, Charlie critically studied her handiwork.

"Must have cost a bojnb, mustn't they, Chas?" said the Shepherdess.

"Mustn't they, Chas?" Charlie echoed.

It's him!

It's word of him!

Then why isn't he here? Why is the note not written in his hand?

Trust no one, Michel had warned her. But especially mistrust those who claim to know me.

It's a trap. It's the pigs. They've found out about my drive through Yugoslavia. They're setting me up to snare my lover.

Michel, Michel! Lover, life-tell me what to do!

She heard her name being called: "Rosalind-where the hell's Charlie? Charlie, for Christ's sake."

In the corridor, a group of swimmers with towels round their necks stared without expression at the sight of a red-headed lady in threadbare Elizabethan drag emerging from the women's locker-room.

Somehow she performed. Perhaps she even acted too. During the interval, the director, a monkish soul whom they called Brother Mycroft, asked her with a strange look whether she would mind "taking it down a bit" and she meekly promised him she would. But she barely heard him: she was too busy scanning the half-empty rows in the hope of glimpsing a red blazer.

In vain.

She saw other faces-Rachel's, Dimitri's, for example-but did not recognise them. He's not there, she thought in despair. It's a trick. It's the police.

In the locker-room, she changed quickly, put on her white headscarf, and dawdled there till the janitor threw her out. In the foyer, standing like a white-headed ghost among the departing athletes, she waited again, the orchids clutched to her breast. An old lady asked whether she had grown them. A schoolboy wanted her autograph. The Shepherdess plucked at her sleeve: "Chas -the party, for God's sake- Val is looking for you everywhere!."

The front doors of the sports hall slammed behind her, she stepped into the night air and nearly fell flat before the bluff gale whipping over the tarmac. Staggering to her car, she unlocked it, laid the orchids on the passenger seat, and heaved the door shut after her. The ignition wouldn't catch at first, and when it did the engine raced like a horse straining to get home. As she roared down the drive into the main road, she saw in her mirror the headlamps of another car pull out after her, then follow her at an even distance to her guest house.

She parked and heard the same wind tearing into the hydrangeas. She wrapped her coat round her and, with the orchids inside it, made a dash for the front door. There were four steps and she counted them twice: once as she bounded up them, and the second time while she was standing panting at the reception desk, as someone tripped after her with a light and purposeful tattoo. There were no residents about, not in the lounge, not in the hall. The sole survivor was Humphrey, a Dickensian fat-boy who played night porter.

"Not six, Humph," she said gaily as he groped for her key. "Sixteen. Come on, sweetheart. Up to the top row. There's a love-letter in there too, before you give it to someone else."

She took the folded piece of paper from him, hoping it might be from Michel, then let her features register suppressed disappointment when she discovered it was only from her sister, saying "Good luck for the show tonight," which was Joseph's way of whispering "We're with you," but so low she barely heard.

The hall door opened and closed behind her. A man's feet were approaching across the hall carpet. She allowed herself one swift glance at him in case he was Michel. But he wasn't, as her expression of disappointment showed. He was someone from the rest of the world and of no use to her at all. A slender, dangerously peaceful boy, with dark, mother-loving eyes. Wearing a long brown gabardine trench coat with a military yoke to give breadth to the civilian shoulders. And a brown tie to match the eyes which matched the coat. And brown helpless shoes with stubby toecaps, double stitched. Not a man of justice at all, she decided-but of justice denied. A forty-year-old gabardine boy, robbed of his justice at an early age.

"Miss Charlie?"

And a small overfed mouth in a pale field of chin.

"I bring you greetings from our mutual acquaintance Michel, Miss Charlie."

Charlie had hardened her face like someone preparing to take punishment. "Michel who?" she said-and saw how nothing in him stirred, which in turn made her very still herself, in the way we stand still for paintings, and statues, and motionless policemen.

"Michel from Nottingham, Miss Charlie." The Swiss accent aggrieved and faintly accusing. The voice furry, as if justice were a secret matter. "Michel asked me to bring you gold orchids and take you to dinner for him. He was insistent that you come. Please. I am the good friend of Michel. Come."

You? she thought. Friend? Michel wouldn't have a friend like you to save his bloody life. But she let her glower say it for her.

"I am also charged with the responsibility to represent Michel legally, Miss Charlie. Michel is entitled to the full protection of the law. Come, please. Now."

The gesture took a large effort but she meant it to. The orchids were awfully heavy and it was a long way through the air to lift them from her arms to his. But she managed it; she found her courage and her strength and his arms came up to receive them. And she found the right brassy tone for the words she had decided to say.

"You've got the wrong show," she said. "I don't know Michel from Nottingham, I don't know Michel from anywhere. And we didn't meet in Monte last season either. Nice try, but I'm tired. Of all of you."

Turning to the counter to pick up her key, she realised as she did so that Humphrey the porter was addressing her on a matter of great moment. His glazed face was shaking, and he held a pencil poised over a great ledger.

"I said," he puffed indignantly, in his steep, North Country drawl, "what time was it you was wanting morning tea, miss?"

"Nine o'clock, dear, and not a second earlier." She moved wearily towards the stairs.

"Paper, miss?" said Humphrey.

She turned and glanced heavily back at him. "Jesus," she whispered.

Humphrey was suddenly very excited. He seemed to think that only animation would wake her up. "Morning paper! For reading in! What's your fancy?"

"Times, dear," she said.

Humphrey sank back into contented apathy. "Telegraph," he wrote, aloud. "Times is orders only," by which time she had started to haul herself up the big staircase towards the historic darkness of the landing.

"Miss Charlie!"

You call at me like that again, she thought, and I just may come down a few steps and smack you very hard on your smooth Swiss mountain pass. She took two more steps before he spoke again. She had not anticipated such force in him.

"Michel will be very glad to know that Rosalind was wearing his bracelet tonight! And is actually wearing it still, I think! Or is that a gift from some other gentleman?"

Her head, then her whole body faced him down the stairs. He had transferred the orchids to his left arm. His right hung at his side like an empty sleeve.

"I said go away. Get out. Please-okay?"

But she was arguing against her own conviction, as her faltering voice betrayed.

"Michel orders me to buy you fresh lobster, and a bottle of Boutaris wine. White and cold, he says. I have other messages from him also. He will be very angry when I tell him you refused his hospitality, also insulted."

It was too much. He was her own dark angel, claiming the soul she had carelessly pledged. Whether he was lying, whether he was the police or a common blackmailer, she would follow him to the centre of the underworld if he could lead her to Michel. Jolting on her heels, she bumped slowly down the stairs to the reception counter.

"Humphrey." Tossing her key to the counter, she took the pencil from his unresisting hand and wrote the name cathy on a block of paper before him. "American lady. Got it? Mate of mine. If she rings, tell her I've gone out with six lovers. Tell her maybe I'll drive over for lunch tomorrow. Got it? " she repeated.

Tearing the sheet of paper from the block, she tucked it into his handkerchief pocket, then gave him a distracted kiss while Mesterbein looked on with the masked resentment of a lover waiting to claim her for the night. At the porch, he produced a neat Swiss torch. By its light she saw the yellow Hertz sticker on the windscreen of his car. He opened the passenger door for her and said "Please," but she walked straight past it to her Fiat, got in, started the engine, and waited. To drive, she noticed as he went ahead of her, he wore a black beret, the brim quite level like a bathing hat, except that it made his ears stick out.

They drove in slow convoy because of the fog patches. Or perhaps Mesterbein drove that way always, for he had the aggressive poker-back of the habitually cautious driver. They climbed a hill and made north over empty moorland. The fog broke, the telegraph poles stuck up like threaded needles against the night sky. A torn Greek moon peered briefly from the clouds before they dragged it back inside. At a crossroads Mesterbein stopped to consult a map. Finally he indicated left, first with his light, then with a white hand, which he rotated. Yes, Anton, I get the message. She followed him down a hill and through a village; she lowered her window and filled the car with the salt smell of the sea. The rushing air opened her mouth for her in a scream. She followed him under a tattered banner that read "East West Timesharer Chalets Ltd.," then up a narrow new road through dunes towards a ruined tin-mine perched on the skyline, an advertisement for "Come to Cornwall." Left and right of her, clapboard bungalows, unlit. Mesterbein parked, she parked behind him, leaving her car in gear because of the gradient. New groan in the handbrake, she thought; take it back to Eustace. He climbed out; she did the same and locked her car. The wind had dropped; they were on the lee side of the peninsula. Gulls were wheeling low and squalling, as if they had lost something valuable on the ground. Torch in hand, Mesterbein reached for her elbow to guide her forward.

"Leave me alone," she said. He pushed a gate and it creaked. A light went on ahead of them. Short concrete path, blue door called Sea-Wrack. Mesterbein had a key ready. The door opened; he stepped ahead of her and stood back to let her by, an estate agent showing the place to a potential client. There was no porch and somehow no warning. She followed him in, he closed the door behind her, she was in a drawing-room. She smelt damp laundry and saw black fungus spots spattered on the ceiling. A tall blonde woman in a blue corduroy suit was jamming a coin into the electric meter. Seeing them enter, she peered quickly round with a bright smile, then leapt to her feet, punching away a strand of long gold hair as she did so.

"Anton! Oh this is too nice! You have brought me Charlie! Charlie, welcome. And you will be twice welcome if you please show me how to work this impossible machine." Grabbing Charlie's shoulders, she embraced her excitedly on each cheek. "I mean, Charlie, listen, you were completely fantastic tonight in that Shakespeare, yes? Wasn't she, Anton? I mean superb. I am Helga, okay?" Names are a game to me, she meant. "Helga. yes? As you are Charlie, I am Helga."

Her eyes were grey and lucid and, like Mesterbein's, dangerously innocent. A militant simplicity gazed out from them upon a complicated world. To be true is to be untamed, thought Charlie, quoting to herself from one of Michel's letters. I feel, therefore I do.

From a corner of the room, Mesterbein offered a belated answer to Helga's question. He was threading a coat-hanger into his gabardine trench coat. "Oh, she was very impressive, naturally."

Helga's hands still rested on Charlie's shoulders, her strong thumbs lightly grazing her neck. "Is it difficult to learn so many words, Charlie?" she asked, staring brightly into Charlie's face.

"I don't have that problem," she said, and broke away from her.

"You learn easily then?" Grasping Charlie's hand, she pressed a fifty-pence piece into her palm. "Come. Show me. Show me how to work this fantastic English invention called fire."

Charlie crouched to the meter, turned the lever one way, slipped in the coin, turned it the other, and let the coin fall with a clunk. There was a protesting whine as the fire came on.

"Incredible! Oh, Charlie! But you see that is typical of me. I am completely untechnical," Helga explained immediately, as if this were an important thing about her that a new friend should know. "I am completely anti-possessions, so if I don't own anything, how can I know how to work it? Anton will please translate for me. I believe in Sein, nicht Haben." It was an order, issued by a nursery autocrat. Her English was quite good enough without his help. "You have read Erich Fromm, Charlie?"

"She means being, not possession," said Mesterbein gloomily while he regarded the two women. "It is the essence of Fraulein Helga's moral. She believes in fundamental goodness, also Nature over Science. We both do," he added, as if wishing to interpose himself between them.

"You have read Erich Fromm?" Helga repeated, sweeping back her blonde hair again and already thinking of something quite different. "I am completely in love with him." She crouched before the fire, hands outstretched. "When I admire a philosopher, I love him. That also is typical of me." There was a surface grace to her movements, and a teenager's happiness. She wore flat shoes to help her with her height.

"Where's Michel?" Charlie asked.

"Fraulein Helga does not know where Michel is," Mesterbein objected sharply from his corner. "She is not a lawyer, she came only for the journey and for justice. Fraulein Helga has no knowledge of Michel's activities or whereabouts. Sit down, please."

Charlie remained standing. But Mesterbein sat himself on a dining-chair and folded his clean white hands on his lap. The trench coat discarded, he displayed a new brown suit. It could have been a birthday present from his mother.

"You said you had news of him," Charlie said. A tremor had entered her voice and her lips felt stiff.

Still crouching, Helga had turned to face her. She had pressed her thumbnail thoughtfully against her strong front teeth.

"When did you see him last, please?" Mesterbein asked.

She no longer knew which of them to look at. "In Salzburg," she said.

"Salzburg, that's not a date, I think," Helga objected from the floor.

"Five weeks ago. Six. Where is he?'

"And you heard from him last when?" said Mesterbein.

"Just tell me where he is! What's happened to him?" She swung back to Helga. "Where is he?"

"Nobody came to you?" Mesterbein asked. "No friends of his? Police?"

"Maybe you are not so good at memory as you say, Charlie," Helga suggested.

"Tell us who you have been in touch with, please, Miss Charlie," Mesterbein said. "Immediately. It is most necessary. We are here for urgent matters."

"Actually she could lie easily, such an actress," Helga said, while her wide eyes gazed up at Charlie in a questing, unshadowed stare. "A woman so trained to pretend, how can one believe anything, actually?"

"We must be very careful," Mesterbein agreed, as a private note to himself for the future.

Their double-act had a ring of sadism; they were playing upon a pain she had yet to feel. She stared at Helga, then at Mesterbein. Her words slipped from her. She could no longer keep them in.

"He's dead, isn't he?" she whispered.

Helga seemed not to hear. She was entirely taken up with watching.

"Oh yes, Michel is dead," said Mesterbein glumly. "I'm sorry, naturally. Fraulein Helga is also sorry. We are both very sorry. From the letters you wrote to him, we assume you will be sorry also."

"But maybe the letters are also pretending, Anton," Helga reminded him.

It had happened to her once before in her life, at school. Three hundred girls lining the gymnasium wall, the headmistress in the middle, everybody waiting for the culprit to confess. Charlie had been peering around with the best of them, looking for the guilty one-is it her? I'll bet it's her-she wasn't blushing, she was looking grave and innocent, and she hadn't-it was really true and later positively proved-she hadn't stolen anything at all. Yet suddenly her knees sagged and she fell straight over her feet, feeling perfectly all right from the waist up, but paralysed below. She did it now, not a studied thing at all; she did it before she was herself aware of it, before she had even halfway considered the enormity of the information, and before Helga could put out a hand to catch her. She keeled over and hit the floor with a thud that made the ceiling light hop on its flex. Helga knelt quickly beside her, muttered something in German, and laid a comforting woman's hand on her shoulder-a gentle, unaffected act. Mesterbein stooped to gaze at her but didn't touch her. His interest was directed more towards examining the way she wept.

She had her head sideways and she was resting her cheek on her clenched fist, so that the stream of her tears ran across her face instead of down it. Gradually, as he went on watching, her tears seemed to cheer him up. He gave a mousy nod that might have been approval; he stayed close while Helga manhandled her to the sofa, where she lay again, her face buried on the prickly cushions and her hands locked over her face, weeping as only the bereaved and children can. Turmoil, anger, guilt, remorse, terror: she perceived each one of them like the phases of a controlled, yet deeply felt performance. I knew; I didn't know; I didn't dare allow myself to think. You cheats, you murdering Fascist cheats, you bastards who killed my darling lover in the theatre of the real.

She must have said some of this aloud. Indeed she knew she had. She had monitored and selected her strangled phrases even while the grief tore at her: You Fascist bastards, swine, oh Jesus, Michel.

A pause, then she heard Mesterbein's unaltered voice inviting her to enlarge on this, but she ignored him and continued to roll her head from side to side behind her hands. She choked and retched and her words clogged in her throat and stumbled on her lips. The tears, the agony, the repeated sobs were no problem to her-she was on excellent terms with the sources of her grief and outrage. She did not need to think of her late father, hastened to his grave by the disgrace of her expulsion from school, nor paint herself as a tragic child in the wilderness of adult life, which was what she usually did. She had only to remember the half-tamed Arab boy who had restored her capacity for love, who had given her life the direction it had always craved, and who now was dead for the tears to come running on command.

"She says it was the Zionists," Mesterbein objected to Helga, in English. "Why does she say it was the Zionists when it was an accident? The police have assured us it was an accident. Why does she contradict the police? It is very dangerous to contradict police."

But Helga had either heard it already for herself or didn't care. She had put a coffee pot on the electric stove. Kneeling at Charlie's head, she pensively smoothed her red hair away from her face with her strong hand, waiting for her weeping to stop and her explanations to begin.

The coffee pot suddenly bubbled; Helga rose and tended it. Charlie sat on the sofa cradling her mug in both hands, bowed over it as if inhaling its vapour, while the tears ran steadily down her cheeks. Helga had her arm round Charlie's shoulder and Mesterbein sat opposite, peering out at the two women from the shades of his own dark world.

"It was an explosion accident," he said. "On the autobahn Salzburg-Munich. According to police, his car was full of explosive. Hundreds of pounds. Why? Why should explosive detonate suddenly, on a flat autobahn?"

"Your letters are safe," Helga whispered, drawing back another hank of Charlie's hair and tucking it lovingly behind her ear.

"The car was a Mercedes," Mesterbein said. "It had Munich licences, but the police say they are false. Also the papers. Forgeries. Why should my client drive a car with false papers and full of explosive? He was a student. He was not a bomber. It is a conspiracy, actually. I think so."

"Do you know this car, Charlie?" Helga murmured into her ear, and pressed her more fondly against her in an effort to coax an answer out of her. But all Charlie could see in her mind was her lover blown to pieces by two hundred pounds of Russian plastic explosive hidden in the valance, cross members, roof-lining, and seats: an inferno, tearing apart the body she adored. And all she could hear was the voice of her other nameless mentor saying: Distrust them, lie to them, deny everything; reject, refuse.

"She spoke something," said Mesterbein accusingly.

"She said 'Michel,' " said Helga, wiping away a fresh onslaught of tears with a sensible handkerchief from her handbag.

"A girl died also," Mesterbein said. "She was with him in the car, they say."

"A Dutch," Helga said softly, so close that Charlie could feel her breath upon her ear. "A real beauty. Blonde."

"They died together, apparently," Mesterbein continued, raising his voice.

"You were not the only one, Charlie," Helga explained confidingly. "You did not have the exclusive use of our little Palestinian, you know."

For the first time since they had broken the news to her, Charlie spoke a coherent sentence.

"I never asked for it," she whispered.

"The police say the Dutch was a terrorist," Mesterbein complained.

"They say also that Michel was a terrorist," said Helga.

"They say that the Dutch planted bombs for Michel several times already," said Mesterbein. "They say Michel and the girl were planning another action, and that in the car they found a city map of Munich with the Israeli Trade Centre marked in Michel's handwriting. On the River Isar," he added. "An upper floor-really a difficult target, actually. Did he speak to you of this action, Miss Charlie?"

Shivering, Charlie sipped a little coffee, which seemed to please Helga quite as well as a reply. "There! She is waking up at last. You want more coffee, Charlie? Shall I heat some? Food? We have cheese up here, eggs, sausage, we have everything."

Shaking her head, Charlie let Helga lead her to the lavatory, where she stayed a long time, throwing water in her face, retching, and between whiles wishing to Heaven that she knew enough German to follow the uneasy, staccato conversation that was reaching her through the paper-thin doors.

She returned to find Mesterbein standing at the front door dressed in his gabardine trench coat.

"Miss Charlie, I remind you that Fraulein Helga is entitled to the full protection of the law," he said, and stalked out of the front door.

Alone at last. Girls together.

"Anton is a genius," Helga announced, with a laugh. "He is our guardian angel, he hates the law, but naturally he falls in love with what he hates. Do you agree?… Charlie, you must always agree with me. I am otherwise too disappointed." She drew nearer. "Violence is not the issue," she said, resuming a conversation they had not yet had. "Never. We make a violent action, we make a peaceful one, it is indifferent. The issue with us is to be logical, not to stand aside while the world runs itself, but to turn opinion into conviction and conviction into action." She paused, examining the effect of her statements upon her pupil. Their heads were very close. "Action is self-realisation, it is also objective. Yes?" Another pause, but still no answer. "You know something else that will surprise you completely? I have an excellent relationship with my parents. You, you are different. One sees it in your letters. Anton also. Naturally, my mother is the more intelligent, but my father-" She broke off again, but this time she was angered by Charlie's silence, and her renewed weeping.

"Charlie, stop now. Stop, okay? We are not old women finally. You loved him, we accept that as logical, but he is dead." Her voice had hardened surprisingly. "He is dead, but we are not individualists for private experience, we are fighters and workers. Stop weeping."

Grasping Charlie's elbow, Helga lifted her bodily to her feet and marched her slowly down the length of the room.

"Listen to me. Immediately. Once I had a very rich boyfriend. Kurt. Very fascistic, completely primitive. I used him for sex, like I use Anton, but also I tried to educate him. One day the German Ambassador in Bolivia, a Graf somebody, was executed by the freedom fighters. You remember this action? Kurt, who did not even know him, was immediately enraged: The swine! These terrorists! It's disgraceful!' I said to him, 'Kurt'-this was his name-'who do you mourn for? People starve to death every day in Bolivia. Why should we bother about one dead Graf?' You agree with this evaluation, Charlie? Yes?"

Charlie gave a faint shrug. Turning her round, Helga started the return journey.

"Now I take a harder argument. Michel is a martyr, but the dead cannot fight and there are many other martyrs also. One soldier is dead. The revolution continues. Yes?"

"Yes," Charlie whispered.

They had reached the sofa. Taking up her sensible handbag, Helga pulled out a flat half-bottle of whisky on which Charlie noticed a duty-free label. She unscrewed the cap and handed her the bottle.

"To Michel!" she declared. "We drink to him. To Michel. Say it."

Charlie took a small sip, pulled a face. Helga took back the bottle.

"Sit down, please, Charlie, I wish you to sit down. Immediately."

She sat listlessly on the sofa. Helga once more stood over her.

"You listen to me and you answer, okay? I do not come here for fun, you understand? Nor for discussions. I like to discuss but not now. Say 'Yes.' '

"Yes," said Charlie wearily.

"He was attracted to you. This is a scientific fact. Even infatuated, actually. There was an unfinished letter to you on the desk in his apartment, full of fantastic statements concerning love and sex. All for you. Also politics."

Slowly, as if the sense of this had only gradually got through to her, Charlie's blotched and twisted face became eager. "Where is it?" she said. "Give it to me!"

"It is being processed. In operations, everything must be evaluated, everything must be processed objectively."

Charlie started to her feet. "It's mine! Give it to me!"

"It is the property of the revolution. Possibly you shall have it later. One shall see." Not very gently, Helga pushed her back to the sofa. "This car. The Mercedes which is now an ash box. You drove it over the border into Germany? For Michel? A mission? Answer me.'

"Austria," she muttered.

"Where from?"

"Through Yugoslavia."

"Charlie, I think you are seriously quite bad at accuracy: where from?"

"Thessalonika."

"And Michel accompanied you on the journey, of course he did. This was normal with him, I think."

"No."

"What no? You drove alone? So far? Ridiculous! He would never entrust you such a responsibility. I do not believe you one word. The whole story is lies."

"Who cares? said Charlie, with a return to apathy.

Helga did. She was already furious. "Of course you don't care! If you are a spy, why should you care? It is already clear to me what happened. I need ask no more questions, they are pure formality. Michel recruited you, he made you his secret love, and as soon as you were able, you took your story to the police in order to protect yourself and make a fortune of money. You are a police spy. I shall report this to certain quite effective people we are in touch with and you will be taken care of, even if it is twenty years from now. Executed."

"Great," said Charlie. "Terrific." She stubbed out her cigarette. "You do that, Helg. That's just exactly what I need. Send them round, will you? Room sixteen, up the hotel."

Helga had gone to the window and torn back the curtain, apparently intending to summon Mesterbein. Looking past her, Charlie saw his little hire car with the interior light on, and Mesterbein's hatted outline seated impassively in the driving seat.

Helga tapped on the window. "Anton? Anton, come here at once, we have a complete spy among us!" But her voice was too low for him, as she intended. "Why did Michel not tell us about you?" she demanded, closing the curtain again and turning round to face her. "Why did he not share you with us? You-his dark horse for so many months. It's too ridiculous!"

"He loved me."

"Quatsch! He was using you. You have his letters still-to you?"

"He ordered me to destroy them."

"But you didn't. Of course you didn't. How could you? You are a sentimental idiot, which may be seen immediately from your own letters to him. You exploited him, he spent money on you, clothes, jewels, hotels, and you sell him to the police. Of course you do!"

Finding herself close to Charlie's handbag, Helga picked it up and on an impulse, tipped its contents over the dining-table. But the clues that were planted in it-the diary, the ballpoint pen from Nottingham, the matches from the Diogenes in Athens-were in her present mood too fine for her, she was looking for evidence of Charlie's treachery, not her devotion.

"This radio."

Her little Japanese job with an alarm clock on it for rehearsals.

"What is it? It is a spy device. Where does it come from? Why does a woman like you carry a radio in her handbag?"

Leaving her to her own preoccupations, Charlie turned away from her and stared sightlessly at the fire. Helga fiddled with the dials of the radio and picked up some music. She switched it off and put it irritably aside.

"In Michel's last letter that he did not post to you, he says you have kissed the gun. What does this mean?"

"It means I kissed the gun." She corrected herself. "His brother's gun."

Helga's voice rose abruptly. "His brother? What brother?"

"He had an elder brother. His hero. A great fighter. The brother gave him the gun, Michel made me kiss it as a pledge."

Helga was staring at her in disbelief. "Michel told you this?"

"I read it in the papers, didn't I?"

"When did he tell it to you?"

"On a hilltop in Greece."

"What else of this brother-quickly!" She almost screamed.

"Michel worshipped him. I told you."

"Give facts. Only facts. What else did he tell you about his brother?"

But Charlie's secret voice was telling her she had already gone far enough. "He's a military secret," she said, and helped herself to a fresh cigarette.

"Did he tell you where he is? What he is doing? Charlie, I order you to tell me!" She drew nearer. "Police, intelligence, maybe even the Zionists-everybody is looking for you. We have excellent relations with certain elements of the German police. They know already it was not the Dutch girl who drove the car through Yugoslavia. They have descriptions. They have many informations to incriminate you. If we wish, we can help you. But not until you have told everything that Michel has revealed to you about his brother." She leaned forward until her big pale eyes were not a hand's width from Charlie's own. "He had no right to talk to you about him. You have no right to this information. Give it to me."

Charlie considered Helga's application but after due reflection rejected it.

"No," she said.

She was intending to go on: I promised and that's it-I don't trust you-get off my back-but when she had listened to plain "no" for a time, she decided she liked it best alone.

Your job is to make them need you, Joseph had said. Think of it as courtship. They will treasure most what they cannot have.

Helga had developed an unearthly composure. The histrionics were over. She had entered a period of ice-cold disconnection, which Charlie understood instinctively because it was something she could do herself.

"So. You drove the car to Austria. And then?"

"I dumped it where he told me, we met up and went to Salzburg."

"How?"

"Plane and car."

"And? In Salzburg?"

"We went to a hotel."

"The name of the hotel, please?"

"I don't remember. I didn't notice."

"Then describe it."

"It was old and big and near a river. And beautiful," she added.

"And you had sex. He was very virile, he had many orgasms, as usual."

"We went for a walk."

"And after the walk you had sex. Don't be silly, please."

Once more, Charlie let her wait. "We meant to, but I fell asleep as soon as we'd had dinner. I was exhausted from the drive. He tried to wake me a couple of times, then gave up. In the morning he was dressed by the time I woke."

"And then you went with him to Munich-yes?"

"No."

"So what did you do?"

"Caught an afternoon plane to London."

"What car did he have?"

"A hire car."

"What make?"

She pretended not to remember.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Explosives."

"Nonsense. Of what sort?"

"Russian plastic, two hundred pounds of it."

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

"Michel told me."

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

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

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

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

"And the brother's name?"

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

"And his workname?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He did not follow her meaning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Did I fool them?"

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

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

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