The Little Drummer Girl

nineteen

It was back to London and the waiting. For two wet autumn weeks, ever since Helga had broken the terrible news to her, the Charlie of her imagination had entered a morbid, vengeful hell, and burned in it alone. I am in shock; I am an obsessive, solitary mourner without a friend to turn to. I am a soldier robbed of my general, a revolutionary cut off from the revolution. Even Cathy had deserted her. "From now on, you manage without a nanny," Joseph told her, with a drawn smile. "We cannot have you going into phone boxes any more." Their meetings during this period were sparse and businesslike, usually elaborately planned car pickups. Sometimes he took her to out-of-the-way restaurants on the edge of London; once to Burnham Beeches for a walk; once to the zoo in Regent's Park. But wherever they were, he talked to her about her state of mind and briefed her constantly for various contingencies, without ever quite describing what they were.

What will they do next? she asked.

They are checking. They are observing you; thinking about you.

Sometimes she alarmed herself with unscripted outbreaks of hostility towards him, but, like a good doctor, he hastened to assure her that the symptoms were normal to her condition. "I am the archetypal enemy, good heavens! I killed Michel and if I had half a chance I would kill you. You should regard me with the most serious misgivings, why not?"

Thanks for the absolution, she thought in secret wonder at the seemingly endless facets of their shared schizophrenia: to understand is to forgive.

Until the day came when he announced they must temporarily abandon meetings of any kind, unless an extreme emergency occurred. He seemed to know something was about to happen, but refused to tell her what it was for fear she might respond out of character. Or not respond at all. He would be close, he said, reminding her of his promise in the Athens house: close-but not present-from day to day. And having thus, perhaps deliberately, stretched her sense of insecurity almost to breaking point, he sent her back again to the life of isolation that he had invented for her; but this time with her lover's death as its theme.

Her once-loved flat, under her diligent neglect of it, now became the unkempt shrine to Michel's memory, a place of grimy, chapel-like quiet. Books and pamphlets he had given her were spread face downward over the floor and table, opened at marked passages. At night, when she could not sleep, she would sit at her desk with an exercise book jammed among the clutter, while she copied out quotations from his letters. Her aim was to compile a secret memoir of him that would reveal him to a better world as the Arab Che Guevara. She contemplated approaching a fringe publisher she knew: "Night Letters from a Murdered Palestinian," done on bad paper with a lot of misprints. There was a certain madness to these preparations, as Charlie, when she stood back from them, well knew. But in another sense she knew that without the madness there was no sanity; there was the role, or there was nothing.

Her excursions into the outside world were few, but one night, as further evidence to herself of her determination to carry Michel's flag into battle for him, if she could only find the battlefield, she attended a comrades' get-together in the upper room of a St. Paneras pub. She sat with the Very Crazies, most of whom were stoned into oblivion by the time they got there. But she saw it through, and she scared both herself and them with a really furious peroration against Zionism in all its Fascist and genocidal manifestations, which, to the secret amusement of another part of her, brought forth nervous complaints from representatives of the radical Jewish left.

At other times she made a show of pestering Quilley about future parts-what had happened about the screen test? For Christ's sake, Ned, I need work! But the truth was that her zest for the artificial stage was waning. She was committed-for as long as it lasted, and despite its mounting hazards-to the theatre of the real.

Then the warnings began, like the advance creakings of a sea-storm in the rigging.

The first came from poor Ned Quilley, a phone call much earlier in the day than was his custom, ostensibly to return one she had made to him the day before. But she knew at once it was something Marjory had ordered him to do the moment he got into the office-before he forgot, or lost heart, or treated himself to a sharpener. No, he had nothing for her, but he wanted to cancel their lunch that day, said Quilley. No problem, she replied, trying gallantly to hide her disappointment, for lunch was the big one they had planned to celebrate her end of tour, and talk about what she might do next. She had been really looking forward to it as a treat she might decently allow herself.

"It's absolutely fine," she insisted, and waited for him to come out with his excuse. Instead of which, he lurched the other way and made a stupid stab at being rude.

"I just don't think it would be appropriate at this time," he said loftily.

"Ned, what's up? It's not Lent. What's come over you?"

Her false frivolity, intended to make things easier for him, only spurred him to greater feats of pomposity.

"Charlie, I don't know what you've been up to," he began, from his High Altar. "I was young once myself and not as hidebound as you may think, but if one half of what is being implied is true, then I can't help feeling that you and I may do better, a lot better for both parties-" But, being her lovely Ned, he couldn't bring himself to deliver the final blow, so he said, "To put off our date until you have come to your senses." At which point, in Marjory's scenario, he was clearly supposed to ring off, and indeed, after several false curtains and a lot of help from Charlie, he managed it. She rang back immediately and got Mrs. Ellis, which was what she wanted.

"What's up, Pheeb? Why have I got bad breath suddenly?"

"Oh, Charlie, what have you been up to?" Mrs. Ellis said, speaking very low because she feared the phone might be tapped. "The police came for a whole morning about you, three of them, and none of us are allowed to say."

"Well, screw them," she said bravely.

One of their seasonal checkups, she told herself. The Discreet Enquiry brigade, barging in with hobnailed boots to top up her dossier for Christmas. They had done it periodically ever since she had started going to the forum. Except that somehow this didn't sound like routine. Not a whole morning and three of them. That was V.I.P. stuff.

Next came the hairdresser.

She had fixed her hair appointment for eleven, and she kept it, lunch or no. The proprietress was a generous Italian lady called Bibi. She frowned when she saw Charlie come in, and said she would do Charlie herself today.

"You been going with a married fellow again?" she yelled as she worked shampoo into Charlie's hair. "You don't look good, you know that? You been a bad girl, stole someone's husband? What you do, Charlie?"

Three men, said Bibi, when Charlie made her tell. Yesterday.

Said they were tax inspectors, wanted to check Bibi's appointments book and her accounts for the Value Added.

But all they really wanted to hear about was Charlie.

" 'Who's this Charlie, here?' they say me. 'Know her well then, Bibi? 'Sure,' I say to them; 'Charlie's a good girl, regular.' 'Oh, a regular, is she? Talk to you about her boyfriends, does she? Who's she got? Where she sleep these days?' All about you been on holiday-who you go with, where you go after Greece. Me, I say them nothing. Trust Bibi." But at the door, when Charlie had safely paid, Bibi turned a little bit nasty, the first time ever. "Don't come again a little while, okay? I don't like trouble. I don't like police."

Nor do I, Beeb. Believe me, nor do I. And these three beauties least of all. The quicker the authorities know about you, the quicker we force the oppositions hand, Joseph had promised her. But he hadn't said it was going to be like this.

Next came the pretty boy, not two hours later.

She had eaten a hamburger somewhere, then started walking although it was raining, because she had a silly idea that while she was moving she was safe, and safer in the rain. She headed west, thinking vaguely of Primrose Hill, then changed her mind and hopped on a bus. It was probably coincidence, but as she glanced back from the departing platform she saw a man get into a taxi fifty yards behind her. And the way she replayed it in her mind, the flag had been down before he hailed it.

Stay with the logic of the fiction, Joseph had told her, again and again. Weaken, and you ruin the operation. Stay with the fiction, and when it's over we'll repair the damage.

Halfway to panic, she had a mind to hightail it to the dressmaker's and demand Joseph immediately. But her loyalty to him held her back. She loved him without shame and without hope. In the world he had turned upside down for her, he was her one remaining constant, in both the fiction and the fact.

So she went to the cinema instead and that was where the pretty man tried to pick her up; and where she very nearly let him.

He was tall and puckish, with a long new leather coat and granny glasses, and as he edged along the row towards her during the interval, she stupidly assumed that she knew him and in her turmoil couldn't put a name or place to him. So she returned his smile.

"Hullo, how are you?" he cried, sitting down beside her. "Charmian, isn't it? Gosh, you were good in Alpha Beta last year! Weren't you absolutely wonderful? Have some popcorn."

Suddenly nothing fitted: the carefree smile didn't fit the skull-like jaw, the granny glasses didn't fit the rat's eyes, the popcorn didn't fit the polished shoes, and the dry leather coat didn't fit the weather. He had arrived here from the moon with nothing else in mind but to pull her.

"You want me to call the manager or are you going quietly?" she said.

He kept up his pitch, protesting, smirking, asking whether she was a dyke, but when she stormed to the foyer to find someone, the staff had disappeared like summer snow, all but one little black girl in the ticket box, who pretended she was too busy counting change.

Going home took more courage than she possessed, more than Joseph had any right to expect of her, and all the way there she prayed that she would break her ankle or be run over by a bus or have another of her fainting fits. It was seven in the evening and the cafe was having a lull. The chef grinned at her brilliantly and his cheeky boyfriend, as usual, waved as if she were daft. Inside her flat, instead of putting on the light, she sat on the bed and left the curtains open, and watched in the mirror how the two men on the opposite pavement loitered and never talked to each other and never looked in her direction. Michel's letters were still under their floorboard: so was her passport and what was left of her fighting fund. Your passport is now a dangerous document, Joseph had warned her, in his sermon on her new status since Michel's death; he should not have let you use it for the drive. Your passport must be guarded with your other secrets.

Cindy, Charlie thought.

Cindy was a Geordie waif who worked at evening shift downstairs. Her West Indian lover was in prison for grievous bodily harm, and Charlie occasionally gave her free guitar lessons to help her pass the time.

"Cind," she wrote. "Here's a birthday present for you, for whenever your birthday is. Take it home and practise till you're half dead. You've got the touch so don't give up. Take the music case too, but like an idiot I've left the key at Mum's. I'll bring it when I next call. Anyway the music's not right for you yet. Love you, Chas."

Her music case was her father's, a sturdy Edwardian job with serious locks and stitching. She put Michel's letters into it, together with her money and passport and plenty of music. She took it downstairs with the guitar.

"This lot's for Cindy," she told the chef, and the chef burst into a fit of giggles and put them in the Ladies with the Hoover and the empties.

She returned upstairs, switched on the light, pulled the curtains, and dressed herself in her full warpaint because it was Peckham night and not all the coppers on earth, and not all her dead lovers, were going to stop her rehearsing her kids for their pantomime. She got home soon after eleven; the pavement was clear; Cindy had taken her music case and guitar. She rang Al because suddenly she wanted a man desperately. No answer. Bastard's out screwing again. She tried a couple of other old stand-bys without success. Her phone sounded funny to her, but the way she was feeling, it could have been her ears. About to go to bed, she took a last look out of the window and there were her two guardians back in position on the pavement.

The next day nothing happened, except that when she called on Lucy, half expecting to find Al there, Lucy said Al had vanished from the earth, she'd phoned the police and the hospitals and everyone.

"Try Battersea Dogs' Home," Charlie advised her. But when she got back to her own flat, there was her old awful Al on the phone in a state of alcoholic hysteria.

"Come round now, woman. Don't talk, just bloody well come now."

She went, knowing it was more of the same. Knowing there was no corner of her life any more that was not occupied by danger.

Al had parked himself on Willy and Pauly, who weren't breaking up after all. She arrived there to find that he had convened a whole supporters' club. Robert had brought a new girlfriend, an idiot in white lipstick and mauve hair called Samantha. But it was Al, as usual, who held the stage.

"And you can tell me what you like, you can!" he was yelling as she entered. "This is if! This is war! Oh yes, it is, and total war at than"

He raged on till Charlie screamed at him: just shut up and tell her what had happened.

"Happened, girl? Happened! What has happened is that the counter-revolution has fired its first salvo is what's happened, and the target was Joe Soap here!"

"Let's have it in bleeding English!" Charlie screamed back, but she still went nearly mad before she dragged the plain facts out of him.

Al was coming out of this pub when these three gorillas just fell on him, he said. One, even two, he could have managed, but they were three and hard as bloody Brighton Rock, and they worked him over as a team. But it wasn't till they'd got him in the police car, half castrated, that he realised they were pigs pulling him in on a trumped-up indecency charge.

"And you know what they wanted to talk about really, don't you?" He struck out an arm at her. "You, girl! You and me and our bloody politics, oh yes! And did we count any friendly Palestinian activists among our acquaintance, by any chance? Meanwhile they're telling me I flashed my dick at some fetching copper-boy in the Gents at the Rising Sun and made movements of the right hand of a masturbatory nature. And when they're not telling me that, they're telling me they'll pull out my fingernails one by one and get me ten years in Sing Sing for hatching anarchist plots with my faggy little radical friends on Greek islands, such as Willy and Pauly here. I mean this is it, girl! This is day one and we, in this room, are the front line."

They had smacked his ear so hard he couldn't hear himself speak, he said; his balls were like ostrich eggs, and look at the bloody bruise on his arm. They'd kept him twenty-four hours in the can, questioned him for six. They'd offered him the phone but no small change, and when he wanted a phone book they'd lost it so he couldn't even ring his agent. Then unaccountably they had dropped the indecency charge and let him go with a caution.

There was a boy called Matthew among the party, a tubby-chinned articled accountant looking for life's alternatives; and he had a flat. To his surprise, Charlie went back there and slept with him. Next day there was no rehearsal and she had been meaning to visit her mother, but at lunchtime when she woke in Matthew's bed she hadn't the stomach, so she rang and cancelled, which was probably what threw the police, because when she arrived outside the Goanese cafe that evening she found a squad car parked on the kerb, and a uniformed Sergeant standing in the open doorway, and the chef beside him, grinning at her with Asian embarrassment.

It's happened, she thought calmly. High time too. They've come out of the woodwork at last.

The Sergeant was the angry-eyed, close-cropped type who hates the whole world, but Indians and pretty women most. Perhaps it was this hatred which blinded him to who Charlie might be at that crucial moment in the drama.

"Cafe's temporarily closed," he snapped at her. "Find somewhere else."

Bereavement engenders its own responses. "Has someone died?" she asked fearfully.

"If they have, they haven't told me. There's a suspected burglar been seen on the premises. Our officers are investigating. Now hop it."

Perhaps he had been on duty too long and was sleepy. Perhaps he did not know how fast an impulsive girl can think and duck. In any case she was under his guard and into the cafe in a second, slamming the doors behind her as she ran. The cafe was empty and the machines switched off. Her own front door was closed but she could hear men's voices murmuring through it. Downstairs the Sergeant was yelling and hammering on the door. She heard: "You. Stop that. Come out." But only faintly. She thought, Key, and opened her handbag. She saw the white headscarf and put it on instead, a lightning change between scenes. Then she pressed the bell, two quick, confident rings. Then pushed the flap of her letter box.

"Chas? Are you in? It's me. Sandy."

The voices stopped dead, she heard a footstep and a whispered "Harry, quick!" The door lurched open and she found herself staring straight into the eyes of a grey-haired, savage little man in a grey suit. Behind him, she could see her treasured relics of Michel scattered everywhere, her bed upended, her posters down, her carpet rolled back, and the floorboards open. She saw a downward-faced camera on a stand and a second man peering through the eyepiece, and several of her mother's letters spread beneath it. She saw chisels, pliers, and her would-be lover-boy from the cinema in his granny glasses kneeling among a heap of her expensive new clothes and she knew with one glance that she was not interrupting the investigation, but the break-in itself.

"I'm looking for my sister Charmian," she said. "Who the hell are you?"

"She's not here," the grey-haired man replied, and she caught a whiff of the Welsh on his voice, and noticed claw marks on his jaw.

Still looking at her, he raised his voice to a bellow. "Sergeant Mallis! Sergeant Mallis, get this lady out of here and take her particulars!"

The door slammed in her face. From below she could hear the luckless Sergeant still yelling. She went softly down the stairs but only as far as the half-landing, where she squeezed between heaps of cardboard boxes to the courtyard door. It was bolted but not locked. The courtyard gave on to a mews and the mews on to the street where Miss Dubber lived. Passing her window, Charlie tapped on it and gave her a cheery wave hullo. How she did that, where she got the wit from, she would never know. She kept going, but no footsteps or furious voices came after her, no car screeched alongside. She reached the main road, and somewhere along the way she pulled on one leather glove, which was what Joseph had told her to do if and when they flushed her. She saw a free cab and hailed it. Well then, she thought cheerfully, here we all are. It was only much, much later in her many lives that it crossed her mind they had let her go deliberately.

Joseph had ruled her Fiat out of bounds, and reluctantly she knew he was right. So she moved by stages, nothing hasty. She was talking herself down. After the taxi, we take a bus ride, she told herself, walk a bit, then a stretch by tube. Her mind was sharp as a flint, but she had to get her thoughts straight; her gaiety had not subsided; she knew she had to grab a firm hold on her responses before she made her next move, because if she fluffed this, she fluffed the whole show. Joseph had told her so and she believed him.

I'm on the run. They're after me. Christ, Helg, what do I do?

You may call this number only in extreme emergency, Charlie, if you call unnecessarily, we shall be most angry, do you hear me?

Yes, Helg, I hear you.

She sat in a pub and drank one of Michel's vodkas, remembering the rest of the gratuitous advice Helga had given her while Mesterbein was skulking in the car. Make sure you are not followed. Don't use the telephones of friends or family. Don't use the box on the corner or the box across the road or down the street or up the street from your flat.

Never, do you hear? They are all extremely dangerous. The pigs can tap a phone in one second, you may be certain. And never use the same telephone twice. Do you hear me, Charlie!

Helg, I hear you perfectly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Where are you, Joan?"

"Mind your own bloody business."

"You have a problem, Joan?"

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

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

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

"Forget it," Charlie said.

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

"No."

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

"I can't."

A long silence. "Where are the letters?"

"Safe."

Another silence. "Get paper and a pencil."

"I don't need one."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Midnight."

"Then come back to bed."

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

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

It was Joseph's place.

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

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

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

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

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

"I told her already," Joseph said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What's the end?" Charlie asked.

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

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

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

"The end is a man," said Joseph abruptly, and she saw Marty's head swing round to him till his face was lost to her. But Joseph's was not, and his stare, as he returned Marty's, had a defiant straightness she had not seen in him before.

"Charlie, the end is a man," Marty finally agreed, coming back to her once more. "If you are going ahead, these are things you will have to know."

"Khalil," she said.

"Khalil is right," said Marty. "Khalil heads up their whole European thing. He's the man we have to have."

"He's dangerous," Joseph said. "He's as good as Michel was bad."

Perhaps to outmanoeuvre him, Kurtz took up the same refrain. "Khalil has nobody he relies on, no regular girlfriend. Never sleeps in the same bed two nights running. He's cut himself off from people. Reduced his basic needs to the point where he is almost self-sufficient. A smart operator," Kurtz ended, smiling his most indulgent smile at her. But as he lit himself another cigar, she could tell by the shake of the match that he was very angry indeed.

Why did she not waver?

An extraordinary calm had descended over her, a lucidity of feeling beyond anything she had known till now. Joseph had not slept with her in order to send her away, but to hold her back. He was suffering on her behalf all the fears and hesitations that should have been her own. Yet she knew also that in this secret microcosm of existence they had made for her, to turn back now was to turn back for ever; that a love that did not advance could never renew itself; it could only slump into the pit of mediocrity to which her other loves had consigned themselves since her life with Joseph had begun. The fact that he wanted her to stop did not deter her; on the contrary, it fortified her resolve. They were partners. They were lovers. They were married to a common destiny, a common forward march.

She was asking Kurtz how she would recognise the quarry.

Did he look like Michel? Marty was shaking his head and laughing. "Alas, dear, he never posed for our photographers!"

Then, while Joseph deliberately stared away from him towards the soot-smeared window, Kurtz quickly got up and, from an old black briefcase that stood beside the armchair where he had been sitting, fished out what resembled a fat ballpoint refill, crimped at one end, with a pair of thin red wires, like lobster whiskers, protruding from it.

"This is what we call a detonator, dear," he explained as his stubby finger gingerly tapped the refill. "At the end here, this is the bung, and fed into the bung you see the wires here. A little of the wire, he needs. The rest, what is spare, he packages it like this." Producing a pair of wiresnippers, also from the briefcase, he cut each strand separately, leaving about eighteen inches still attached. Then, with a deft and practised gesture, he wound the spare wires into a neat dummy, complete with belt. Then he passed it to her to hold. "The little doll is what we call his signature. Sooner or later, everybody has a signature. That's his."

She let him take it from her hand.

Joseph had an address for her to go to. The little lady in brown showed her to the door. She stepped into the street and found a taxi ready waiting for her. It was early dawn and the sparrows were starting to sing.