The Little Drummer Girl

twenty-four

She flew into Zurich in early evening. Storm flares lined the runway and blazed before her like the path of her own purpose. Her mind, as she had desperately prepared it, was an assembly of her old frustrations, matured and turned upon the rotten world. Now she knew there was not a shred of good in it; now she had seen the agony that was the price of Western affluence. She was who she had always been: an angry reject, getting her own back; with the difference that the Kalashnikov had replaced her useless tantrums. The flares sped past her window like burning wreckage. The plane touched down. But her ticket said Amsterdam, and theoretically she had still to land. Single girls returning from the Middle East are suspect, Tayeh had said, at her final briefing in Beirut. Our first task is to give you a more respectable provenance. Fatmeh, who had come to see her off, was more specific: Khalil has ordered that you acquire a fresh identity when you arrive.

Entering the deserted transit lounge, she had the feeling of being the first pioneer ever to set foot there. Canned music played but there was nobody to hear it. A smart shop sold chocolate bars and cheese, but it was empty. She went to the lavatory and considered her appearance at leisure. Her hair bobbed, and dyed a vague brown. Tayeh himself had hobbled round the Beirut flat while Fatmeh butchered it. No make-up, no sex appeal, he had ordered. She wore a heavy brown suit and a pair of vaguely astigmatic spectacles to scowl through. All I need is a boater and a crested blazer, she thought. She had come a long way from Michel's revolutionary poule de luxe.

Give my love to Khalil, Fatmeh had told her as she kissed her goodbye.

Rachel was standing beside her at the next basin, but Charlie saw straight through her. She didn't like her, didn't know her, and it was sheer coincidence that Charlie put her open handbag between them, her packet of Marlboros on top, in the way that Joseph had instructed her. And she didn't see Rachel's hand either, swapping the Marlboros with a packet of her own, or her quick, reassuring wink in the mirror.

I have no life but this one. I have no love but Michel and no loyalty except to the great Khalil.

Sit as close to the departures board as you can get, Tayeh had ordered. She did so, and from her little case took a book on Alpine plants, broad and slim like a schoolgirls' annual. Opening it, she perched it on her lap at an angle that allowed the title to be seen. She was sporting a round badge saying "Save the Whale" and that was the other sign, said Tayeh, because from now on Khalil requires that there always be two things: two plans, two signs, in everything a second system in case the first fails; a second bullet in case the world is still alive.

Khalil trusts nothing the first time, Joseph had said. But Joseph was dead and buried long ago, a discarded prophet from her adolescence. She was Michel's widow and Tayeh’s soldier and she had come to enlist in the army of her dead lover's brother.

A Swiss soldier was eyeing her, an older man carrying a Heckler amp; Koch machine pistol. Charlie turned a page. Hecklers were her favourite. At her last weapon-training session she had put eighty-four shots out of a hundred into the storm-trooper target. It was the top score, men or women. Out of the corner of her eye she saw that he was still looking at her. An angry idea struck her. I'll do to you what Bubi once did in Venezuela, she thought. Bubi had been ordered to shoot a certain Fascist policeman as he came out of his house in the morning, a very favourable hour. Bubi hid in a doorway and waited. His target carried a gun under his arm, but he was also a family man, forever romping with his kids. As he stepped into the road, Bubi took a ball from his pocket and sent it bouncing down the street towards him. A kid's rubber ball-what family man would not instinctively bend down to catch it? As soon as he did, Bubi stepped out of his doorway and shot him dead. For who can fire a weapon while he is catching a rubber ball?

Someone was trying to pick her up. Pipe smoker, pigskin shoes, grey flannels. She felt him hover, and advance.

"I say, do excuse me, but do you speak English?"

Standard issue, middle-class English rapist, fair-haired, fifty, and tubby. Falsely apologetic. No, I don't, she wanted to reply to him; / just look at the pictures. She hated his type so much she was nearly sick on the spot. She glowered at him, but he was a stayer, like all his kind.

"It's simply that this place is so awfully desolate," he explained. "I wondered if you'd care to have a drink with me? No strings. Do you good."

She said no thank you, she nearly said, "Daddy says I mustn't speak to strangers," and after a while he strode away indignantly, looking for a policeman to report her to. She returned to her study of the common edelweiss, listening to the place fill up, one pair of feet at a time. Past her to the cheese shop. Past her to the bar. Towards her. And stop.

"Imogen? You remember me. Sabine!"

Look up. Pause for recognition.

A jolly Swiss headscarf to hide the bobbed hair dyed a vague brown. No spectacles, but if Sabine were to put on a pair like mine, any bad photographer could make twins of us. A large carrier bag by Franz Carl Weber of Zurich dangled from her hand, which was the second sign.

"Gosh. Sabine. It's you."

Get up. Formal peck on cheek. How amazing. Where are you going?

Alas, Sabine's flight is just leaving. What a pity we can't have a girlish talk, but that's life, isn't it? Sabine dumps carrier bag at Charlie's feet. Keep an eye for me, darling. Sure, Sabs, no problem. Sabine vanishes into Ladies. Nosing inside bag, boldly, as if it were her own, Charlie draws out gaily covered envelope with ribbon round it, detects outline of a passport and air ticket within. Smoothly replaces it with own Irish passport, air ticket, and transit card. Sabine returns, grabs bag-must dash, exit right. Charlie counts twenty and returns to loo, roosts. Baastrup Imogen, South African, she reads. Born Johannesburg three years and one month later than me. Destination Stuttgart in one hour and twenty minutes' time. Goodbye Irish colleen, welcome to our tight-arsed little Christian racist from the outback, claiming her white-girl's heritage.

Coming out of the Ladies, she found the soldier once more looking at her. He saw it all. He's on the verge of arresting me. He thinks I've got the runs, and doesn't know how right he nearly is. She stared at him until he walked away. He just wanted something to look at, she thought as she once more dug out her book on Alpine flowers.

The flight seemed to take five minutes. An out-of-date Christmas tree stood in Stuttgart's arrivals hall and there was an air of family bustle and everybody going home. Queuing with her South African passport, Charlie studied the photographs of wanted women terrorists and had a premonition that she was about to see her own. She passed through immigration without a blink; she passed through green. Approaching the exit, she saw Rose, her fellow South African, lounging on a rucksack, half asleep, but Rose was as dead as Joseph or anyone else for her and as invisible as Rachel. The electric doors opened, a swirl of snow hit her face. Pulling up her coat collar, she hurried across the broad pavement towards the car park. Fourth floor, Tayeh had said; far left corner and look for a foxtail on the radio aerial. She had pictured an extended aerial with a bold red fox's brush waving from the top of it. But this foxtail was a scruffy nylon imitation on a ring, and it lay dead as a mouse on the little Volkswagen bonnet.

"I'm Saul. What's your name, honey?" said a man's voice close to her, in soft American. For a dreadful moment she thought Arthur J. Halloran alias Abdul had come back to haunt her, so that when she peered round the pillar she was relieved to find a fairly normal-looking boy propped against the wall. Long hair, Bean boots, and a fresh, lazy smile. And a "Save the Whale" badge like hers pinned to his windcheater.

"Imogen," she replied, because Saul was the name Tayeh had told her to expect.

"Lift the hood, Imogen. Put your suitcase right inside. Now look around, see who you see. Anybody bothering you?"

She gave the parking hall a leisurely inspection. In the cab of a Bedford van plastered with crazy daisies, Raoul and a girl she could not see properly were halfway to consummation.

Nobody, she said.

Saul opened the passenger door for her.

"And fix your seat belt, honey," he said as he got in beside her. "They got laws in this country, okay? Where you been, Imogen? Where'd you get your suntan?"

But little widows bent on murder do not engage strangers in small talk. With a shrug, Saul switched on the radio and listened to the news in German.

The snow made everything beautiful, and the traffic cautious. They drove down the helter-skelter and joined a ribbon-built dual carriageway. Fat flakes raced into their headlights. The news ended and a woman announced a concert.

"Care for this, Imogen? It's classical."

He let it play anyway. Mozart from Salzburg, where Charlie had been too tired to make love to Michel on the night before he died.

They skirted the high glow of the city, and the snowflakes wandered into it like black ash. They mounted a clover-leaf and below them, in an enclosed playground, children in red anoraks were playing snowballs by arc-light. She remembered her kids' group back in England, ten million miles ago. I'm doing it for them, she thought. Somehow • Michel had believed that. Somehow we all do. All of us except Halloran, who had ceased to see the point. Why was he so much on her mind? she wondered. Because he doubted, and doubt was what she had learned to fear the most. To doubt is to betray, Tayeh had warned her.

Joseph had said much the same.

They had entered another country and their road became a black river through canyons of white field and laden forest. Her sense of time slipped, then her sense of scale. She saw dream castles and train-set villages in silhouette against the pale sky. The toy churches with their onion domes made her want to pray, but she was too grown-up for them, and besides religion was for weaklings. She saw shivering ponies cropping bales of hay, and remembered the ponies of her childhood one by one.

As each beautiful thing went by, she cast her heart after it, trying to attach to it and slow it down. But nothing stayed, nothing left an imprint on her mind; they were breath on polished glass. Occasionally a car overtook them; once a motorbike raced by and she thought she recognised Dimitri's retreating back, but he was beyond the range of their headlights before she could be certain.

They mounted a hilltop and Saul began to put on speed. He swung left and crossed a road, then right, bumping down a track. Felled trees lay either side, like frozen soldiers in a Russian newsreel. Far ahead, Charlie began to make out a blackened old house with high chimney stacks, and for a second it reminded her of the house in Athens. Frenzy, is that the word? Stopping the car, Saul dipped his headlights twice. From what seemed to be the centre of the house, a hand-torch winked in return. Saul was looking at his wristwatch, softly counting the seconds aloud. "Nine-ten-got to be now" he said, and the distant light winked once more. Leaning across her, he pushed her door open.

"Far as we go, honey," he said. "It was a great conversation. Peace, okay?"

Suitcase in hand, she selected a rut in the snow and started walking towards the house with only the snow's pallor and the strips of moonlight through the trees to show her the way. As the house drew nearer, she made out an old clock tower with no clock, and a frozen pond with no statue on the plinth. A motorcycle glinted under a wooden canopy.

Suddenly she heard a familiar voice addressing her with conspiratorial restraint: "Imogen, take care from the roof. If a piece of roof hits you, it will kill you immediately. Imogen-oh, Charlie-this is too absurd!" The next moment, a soft strong body had emerged from the darkness of the porch to enfold her own, only slightly hampered by a torch and an automatic pistol.

Seized by a flood of ridiculous gratitude, Charlie returned Helga's embrace. "Helg-Christ-it's you-great!"

By the light of her torch, Helga guided her across a marble-floored hall of which half the stones had already been removed; then cautiously up a sagging wooden staircase with no banister.

The house was dying, but someone had been hastening its death. The weeping walls were smeared with slogans in red paint; door handles and light fittings had been plundered. Recovering her hostility, Charlie tried to withdraw her hand, but Helga grasped it as of right. They passed through a succession of empty rooms, each big enough to hold a banquet. In the first, a smashed porcelain stove, stuffed with newspaper. In the second, a hand printing-press, thick with dust, and the floor around it ankle-deep with the yellowed newsprint of yesterday's revolutions. They entered a third room and Helga trained her torch on a mass of files and papers flung into an alcove.

"You know what my friend and I do here, Imogen?" she demanded, suddenly raising her voice. "My friend is too fantastic. She is Verona and her father was a complete Nazi. A landlord, an industrialist, everything." Her hand relaxed, only to close again round Charlie's wrist. "He died, so we are selling him for revenge. The trees to the tree destroyers. The land to the land destroyers. The statues and furniture to the flea market. If it is worth five thousand, we sell for five. Here was her father's desk. We chopped it with our own hands and burnt it in a fire. For a symbol. It was the headquarters of his Fascist campaign-he signed his cheques from it, made all his repressive actions. We broke it up and burnt it. Now Verona is free. She is poor, she is free, she has joined the masses. Is she not fantastic? Perhaps you should have done this too."

A servants' staircase climbed crookedly to a long corridor. Helga went quietly ahead. From above them, Charlie heard folk music and smelled the fumes of burning paraffin. They reached a landing, passed a row of servants' bedrooms, and stopped before the last door. A light shone beneath it. Helga knocked and spoke something softly in German. A lock was turned and the door opened. Helga went in ahead, beckoning Charlie after her. "Imogen, this is Comrade Verona." A note of command had entered her voice. "Vero!"

A plump, distraught girl waited to receive them. She wore an apron over wide black trousers and her hair was cut like a boy's. A Smith amp; Wesson automatic in a holster dangled over her fat hip. Verona wiped her palm on her apron and they exchanged a bourgeois handshake.

"One year ago, Vero was completely Fascistic like her father," Helga remarked with proprietorial authority. "A slave and a Fascist together. Now she fights. Yes, Vero?"

Dismissed, Verona relocked the door, then took herself to a corner where she was cooking something on a camping stove. Charlie wondered whether she was secretly dreaming of her father's desk.

"Come. Look who is here," said Helga, and swept her away down the room. Charlie looked swiftly round her. She was in a large attic, the very one she had played in countless times on holidays in Devon. The feeble lighting came from an oil lamp dangling from a rafter. Thicknesses of velvet curtain had been nailed across the dormer windows. A jolly rocking-horse strutted along one wall; beside it stood a governess's blackboard on an easel. A street plan was drawn on it; coloured arrows pointed to a large rectangular building at its centre. On an old ping-pong table lay remnants of salami, black bread, cheese. Clothes of both sexes hung drying before an oil fire. They had reached a short wooden stair and Helga was marching her up it. On the raised floor two waterbeds were laid side by side. On one, naked to the waist and lower, reclined the dark Italian who had had Charlie at gunpoint that Sunday morning in the City. He had spread a tattered coverlet across his thighs, and she noticed the broken-down parts of a Walther automatic lay around him while he cleaned them. A transistor radio was playing Brahms at his elbow.

"And here we have the energetic Mario," Helga announced with sarcastic pride, prodding his genitals with her toe. "Mario, you are completely shameless, you know that? Cover yourself immediately and greet our guest. I order you!"

But Mario's only response was to roll himself playfully to the edge of the bed, inviting whoever wished to join him.

"How's Comrade Tayeh, Charlie?" he asked. "Tell us all the family news."

Like a scream in church, a phone rang: the more alarming because it had never crossed Charlie's mind they might possess one. Seeking to raise her spirits, Helga was proposing they drink Charlie's health, and making a palaver of it. She had balanced glasses and a bottle on a bread board and was in the act of bearing them ceremoniously across the room. Hearing the ring, she froze where she stood, then in slow motion set down the bread board on the ping-pong table, which happened to be close. Rossino switched off his radio. The phone stood alone on a small marquetry table that Verona and Helga had not yet burnt; it was of the old hanging type, with the earpiece separate. Helga stood over it but made no effort to lift the earpiece. Charlie counted eight long peals before it stopped. Helga remained where she was, staring at it. Stark naked, Rossino walked nonchalantly down the room and helped himself to a shirt from the clothesline.

"He said he would call tomorrow," he complained as he pulled it over his head. "What goes on suddenly?"

"Be quiet," Helga snapped.

Verona continued stirring whatever she was cooking, but more slowly, as if speed were dangerous. She was one of those women whose every movement seems to come from their elbows.

The phone rang again, two rings, and this time Helga lifted the earpiece and at once replaced it. But the next time it rang, she answered it with a curt "Yes" and then listened, without a nod or a smile, for perhaps two minutes, before ringing off.

"The Minkels have changed their plans," she announced. "They are spending tonight in Tubingen, where they have friends in the faculty. They have four large suitcases, many small pieces, and a briefcase." With a fine instinct for effect, she took a damp cloth from Verona's handbasin and wiped the blackboard clean. "The briefcase is black, it has simple hinges. The location of the lecture is also changed. The police are not suspicious but they are nervous. They are taking what they call sensible precautions."

"What's with the bulls?" said Rossino. "The police wish to increase the guards, but Minkel is refusing this completely. He is a so-called man of principle. If he is to preach about law and justice, he insists that he cannot himself be seen surrounded by secret police. For Imogen, nothing is changed. Her orders are the same. It is her first action. She will be the complete star. No, Charlie?"

Suddenly they were all looking at her-Verona with a mindless fixity, Rossino with an appraising grin, and Helga with a frank straight stare to which self-doubt, as ever, was a stranger.

She lay flat, using her forearm as a pillow. Her bedroom was not a gallery in a church hall but a garret without light or curtains. Her bed was an old horsehair mattress and a yellowed blanket that smelt of camphor. Helga sat beside her, smoothing Charlie's dyed hair with her strong hand. Moonlight came through the high window; the snow made its own deep silence. Somebody should write a fairy story here. My lover should put on the electric fire and take me by its red glow. She was in a log cabin, safe from everything except tomorrow.

"What is the matter, Charlie? Open your eyes. Don't you like me any more?"

She opened her eyes and stared ahead of her, seeing and thinking nothing.

"Are you dreaming of your little Palestinian still? Are you worried what we do here? Do you want to give up and run away while you have time?"

"I'm tired."

"So why don't you come and sleep with us? We can have sex. Then we can sleep. Mario is an excellent lover."

Bending over her, Helga kissed her on the neck.

"You want Mario to come to you alone? You are shy? Even that I allow you." She kissed her again. But Charlie lay cold and rigid, her body like iron.

"Tomorrow night you will be more affectionate perhaps. With Khalil there can be no rejections. He is most fascinated to meet you already. He has asked for you personally. You know what he told a friend of ours once? 'Without women I would lose my human warmth and fail as a soldier. To be a good soldier, it is essential to have humanity.' Now you may imagine what a great man he is. You loved Michel, therefore he will love you. There is no question. So."

Bestowing a last, lingering kiss on her, Helga left the room and Charlie lay on her back, wide-eyed, watching the half night slowly lighten in the window. She heard a woman's wail rising to a clenched, beseeching sob; then a man's urgent shout. Helga and Mario were advancing the revolution without her assistance.

Follow them wherever they lead you, Joseph had said. If they tell you to kill, then kill. It will be our responsibility, not yours.

Where will you be?

Close.

Close to the edge of the world.

In her handbag she had a Mickey Mouse hand-torch with a pinlight, the kind of thing she would have played with under the blankets at her boarding school. She took it out, together with Rachel's packet of Marlboros. There were three cigarettes left and she put them back loose. Carefully, as Joseph had taught her, she removed the wrapping paper, tore open the cardboard of the box, and spread it flat, the inside surface upward. Licking her finger, she began gently rubbing saliva onto the blank cardboard. The letters came up in brown, drawn fine as if with a mapping pen. She read the message, then poked the flattened packet through a crack in the floorboards until it dropped out of sight.

Courage. We're with you. The whole of the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin.

Their operations room in Freiburg city centre was a hastily rented ground-floor office in a busy main street, their cover the Walker amp; Frosch Investment Company, GmbH, one of dozens that Gavron's secretariat kept permanently registered. Their communications equipment had more or less the appearance of commercial software; in addition they had three ordinary telephones, courtesy of Alexis, and one of them, the least official, was the Doctor's own hot line to Kurtz. It was early morning after a busy night taken up first with the delicate business of tracking and housing Charlie; and afterwards with a tense argument about demarcation between Litvak and his West German counterpart, for Litvak was by now arguing with everyone. Kurtz and Alexis had kept aloof from such bickering between subordinates. The broad agreement held, and Kurtz had no interest yet in breaking it. Alexis and his men should have the credit; Litvak and his the satisfaction,

As to Gadi Becker, he was finally back at war. With the imminence of action, his manner had acquired a settled and determined swiftness. The introspections that had haunted him in Jerusalem had lifted; the gnawing idleness of waiting was past. While Kurtz dozed under an army blanket and Litvak, nervous and depleted, paced the office or spoke cryptically into one or another telephone, building himself into some kind of unclear temper, Becker stood sentry at the Venetian blinds of the wide window, gazing patiently upward into the snowclad hills across the olive Dreisam River. For Freiburg, like Salzburg, is a city ringed with heights, and every street seems to lead upward to its own Jerusalem.

"She's panicked," Litvak announced suddenly to Becker's back.

Puzzled, Becker turned and glanced at him.

"She's gone over to them," Litvak insisted. His voice had a throaty instability.

Becker returned to the window. "Part of her has gone over, part has stayed," he replied. "That is what we asked of her."

"She's gone over!" Litvak repeated, rising on the swell of his own provocation. "It's happened with agents before. It's happened now. I saw her at the airport, you didn't. She looks like a ghost, I tell you!"

"If she looks like a ghost, that's how she wants to look," said Becker, majestically unruffled. "She's an actress. She'll see it through, don't worry."

"So what's her motivation? She's not Jewish. She's not anything. She's theirs. Forget her!"

Hearing Kurtz stir beneath his blanket, Litvak lifted his voice higher to include him.

"If she's ours still, why did she give Rachel a blank cigarette packet at the airport, tell me that? Weeks on end among that rabble and she doesn't even write us a note when she comes out again? What kind of agent is that, who is so loyal to us?"

Becker seemed to be looking for his answer in the far mountains. "Maybe she has nothing to say," he said. "She's voting with her actions. Not her words."

From the shallows of his sparse camp bed, Kurtz offered drowsy consolation. "Germany makes you jumpy, Shimon. Ease off. What does it matter who she belongs to, so long as she keeps showing us the way?"

But the effect of Kurtz's words was the opposite of their

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intention. In his self-tormenting mood, Litvak sensed an unfair alliance against him, and it made him wilder still.

"And if she breaks down, confesses? If she tells them the whole story, Mykonos till here? Does she still show us the way?"

He seemed set upon collision; nothing else would satisfy him.

Lifting himself on one elbow, Kurtz took a harsher tone. "So what do we do, Shimon? Give us the team solution. Suppose she has gone over. Suppose she has blown the entire operation from breakfast to dinner. You want me to call Misha Gavron, say we're finished?"

Becker had not abandoned the window, but he had turned himself round once more and was watching Litvak thoughtfully down the room. Staring from one to the other of them, Litvak flung out his arms, a very wild gesture to make before two such static men.

"He's somewhere out there!" Litvak cried. "In a hotel. An apartment. In a doss house. He must be. Seal off the town. Roads, the railway. Buses. Have Alexis put a cordon round. Search every house till we find him!"

Kurtz tried a little kindly humour: "Shimon, Freiburg is not the West Bank."

But Becker, interested at last, seemed anxious to pursue the argument. "And when we have found him?" he said, as if he hadn't quite got his mind around Litvak's plan. "What do we do then, Shimon?"

"Then we find him! Kill him! The operation's over!"

"And who kills Charlie?" Becker asked, in the same perfectly reasonable way. "Us or them?"

Suddenly there was more going on in Litvak than he could handle on his own. Under the tensions of the past night and of the day to come, the whole knotted mass of his frustrations, male and female, swam suddenly to the surface of his being. His face coloured, his eyes blazed, as one thin arm struck out towards Becker in accusation. "She's a whore and she's a Communist and she's an Arab-lover!" he shouted, loud enough to be heard through the partition wall. "Dump her. Who cares?"

If Litvak was expecting Becker to make a fight of it, then he was disappointed, for the most Becker offered was one quiet nod of confirmation, as if everything that he had been thinking about Litvak for some time had now been demonstrated. Kurtz had pushed away his blanket. He was sitting on the bed in his underpants, head forward while he rubbed the tips of his fingers in his short grey hair.

"Go take a bath, Shimon," he ordered quietly. "A bath, a nice rest, some coffee. Come back around midday. Not before." A phone was ringing. "Don't answer that," he added, and lifted the receiver himself while Litvak, in mute self-horror, watched him from the doorway. "He's busy," Kurtz said, in German. "Yes, this is Helmuth, who's speaking?"

He said yes; then yes again; and well done. He rang off. Then he smiled his ageless, mirthless smile. First to Litvak, to console him, then to Becker also, because at that moment their differences were unimportant. "Charlie arrived at the Minkels' hotel five minutes ago," he said. "Rossino's with her. They're having a nice breakfast together, well ahead of time, just the way our friend likes it."

"And the bracelet?" said Becker.

Kurtz liked this part best. "On her right wrist," he said proudly. "She has a message for us. She's a fine girl, Gadi, and I congratulate you."

The hotel had been built in the sixties when the catering industry still believed in large, milling lobbies with soothing illuminated fountains and gold watches under glass. A wide double staircase rose to a mezzanine, and from the balcony table where they sat, Charlie and Rossino had a view of both the main door and the reception. Rossino was wearing a middle-management blue suit, Charlie her South African girl guide's uniform and her wooden Christ-child from the training camp. The lenses of her spectacles, which Tayeh had insisted should be real, made her eyes ache when it was her turn to watch. They had eaten eggs and bacon because she was ravenous, and now they were drinking fresh coffee while Rossino read the Stuttgarter Zeitung and periodically regaled her with facetious news items. They had driven into town early and she had almost frozen to death riding pillion. They had parked at the railway station, where Rossino had made enquiries, and they had come on to the hotel by taxi. In the hour they had been here, Charlie had watched police outriders deliver a Catholic bishop, and return with a delegation of West Africans in tribal costume. She had watched a busload of Americans arrive and a busload of Japanese depart; she knew the check-in procedure by heart, right down to the name of the chasseur who grabbed the suitcases from the new arrivals as they came through the sliding doors, loaded them on their little trolleys, and hovered at a yard's distance while the guests filled in their registration forms.

"And His Holiness the Pope plans a tour of all Fascist South American states," Rossino announced from behind his newspaper as she stood up. "Maybe this time they finish him off. Where are you going, Imogen?"

"To piss."

"What's the matter? Nervous?"

The women's room had fluttering pink lights over the hand-basins and soft music to drown the whirr of the ventilators. Rachel was putting on her eye shadow. Two other women were washing. One door was closed. Brushing past her, Charlie pressed the scribbled message into Rachel's waiting hand. She cleaned up and returned to the table.

"Let's get out of here," she said, as if the relief had changed her mind. "It's ridiculous."

Rossino lit a thick Dutch cigar and deliberately blew the smoke into her face.

An official-looking Mercedes drew up and disgorged a bunch of dark-suited men with name badges on their lapels. Rossino had started to make an obscene joke about them when he was interrupted by a bellboy calling him to the telephone: Signo: Verdi, who had left his name and five marks with the concierge, was required in cabin 3. She sipped her coffee, feeling the heat of it all the way down her chest. Rachel was sitting with a boyfriend under an aluminium palm tree, reading Cosmopolitan. The boyfriend was new to her and looked German. He was clutching a document in a plastic folder. There were twenty-odd people sitting around, but Rachel was the only one she recognised. Rossino had returned.

"The Minkels arrived at the station two minutes ago. Grabbed themselves a blue Peugeot cab. Should be here any moment."

He called for the bill and paid it, then took up his newspaper once more.

I shall do everything once, she had promised herself as she lay waiting for the morning; everything will be a last time. She repeated it to herself. If I sit here now, I shall never have to sit here again. When I go downstairs, I shall never have to come up again. When I leave the hotel, I shall never return.

"Why don't we just shoot the bastard and be done with it?" Charlie whispered, with a sudden welling up of fear and hatred as she once more fixed her gaze upon the entrance.

"Because we want to stay alive to shoot other bastards," Rossino explained patiently, and turned a page. "Manchester United lost again," he added complacently. "Poor old Empire."

"Action," said Charlie.

A blue Peugeot taxi had pulled up on the other side of the glass doors. A grey-haired woman was scrambling out. She was followed by a tall, distinguished-looking man with a slow and ceremonious walk.

"Watch the small pieces, I'll watch the big ones," Rossino told her as he relit his cigar.

The driver was unlocking the boot; Franz, the chasseur, was standing behind him with his trolley. First came two matching suitcases in brown nylon, neither new nor old. Belts round the centre for extra support. Red tie-on labels. Now an old leather suitcase, much bigger, with a pair of wheels at one corner. Followed by yet another suitcase.

Rossino let out a soft Italian oath. "So how long are they staying?" he complained.

The small pieces were stacked on the front passenger seat. Having locked the boot, the driver began unloading them, but Franz's trolley wasn't going to take all of them at once. One shabby carrier bag in patchwork leather, and two umbrellas, his and hers. A paper carrier bag with a black cat on it. Two large boxes in festive wrapping, presumably belated Christmas presents. Then she saw it: a black briefcase. Hard sides, steel frame, leather name-tag. Good old Helg, thought Charlie; spot on. Minkel was paying off the cab. Like someone else Charlie had once known, he kept his coins in a purse, and spilt them into his palm before parting with the unfamiliar currency. Mrs. Minkel picked up the briefcase.

"Shit," said Charlie.

"Wait," said Rossino.

Laden with parcels, Minkel followed his wife through the sliding doors.

"Around now you tell me you think you recognise him," Rossino said quietly. "I tell you, why don't you go down and take a closer look? You hesitate, you're a shy little virgin." He was holding her by the sleeve of her dress. "Don't force it. If it doesn't work, there's lots of other ways. Frown. Adjust your spectacles. Go."

Minkel was approaching the reception desk with small, slightly silly steps, as if he had never done this before. His wife, holding the briefcase, was at his side. There was only one receptionist on duty and she was occupied with two other guests. Waiting, Minkel gazed round in confusion. His wife, unimpressed, sized the place up. Across the lobby from them, behind a smoked-glass partition, a group of well-dressed Germans was assembling for some kind of function. She studied the guests disapprovingly, muttered something to her husband. The reception desk became vacant and Minkel took the briefcase from her hand: a tacit, instinctive transaction between partners. The receptionist was a blonde in a black dress. She checked the card index with her red fingernails before passing Minkel a form to fill in. The stairs were hitting Charlie's heels, her damp hand was sticking on the wide banister, Minkel was a misted abstraction through her astigmatic spectacles. The floor lifted to her and she started her hesitant journey towards the reception desk. Minkel was stooped over the counter, filling in his form. He had put his Israeli passport at his elbow and was copying out its number. The briefcase stood on the floor beside his left foot; Mrs. Minkel was out of shot. Placing herself on Minkel's right, Charlie peered crookedly over his shoulder as he wrote. Mrs. Minkel entered left, and was looking at Charlie in puzzlement. She nudged her husband. Aware finally that he was being studied at close quarters, Minkel slowly raised his venerable head and turned to her. Charlie cleared her throat, acting shy, which was no hardship. Now.

"Professor Minkel?" she said.

He had grey troubled eyes and looked even more embarrassed than Charlie was. It was suddenly like supporting a bad actor.

"I am Professor Minkel," he conceded, as if he were not quite sure. "Yes. I am he. Why?"

The sheer badness of his performance gave her strength. She took a deep breath.

"Professor, my name is Imogen Baastrup from Johannesburg and I'm a graduate in social studies from Witwatersrand University," she said, all of a rush. Her accent was less South African than vaguely Antipodean; her manner mawkish but determined. "I had the great good fortune to hear your centenary lecture last year on minority rights in racially determined societies. That was a fine lecture. It changed my life, in fact. I meant to write to you but never got around to it. Do you mind, please, if I shake your hand?"

She practically had to take it from him. He stared foolishly at his wife, but she had the better talent and was at least giving Charlie a smile. Taking his cue from her, Minkel smiled too, if wanly. If Charlie was sweating, she was nothing to Minkel: it was like dipping her hand in an oil pot.

"Are you staying here long, Professor? What are you doing here? Don't say you're lecturing again?"

In the background, out of focus, Rossino was asking the receptionist in English whether a Mr. Boccaccio had checked in from Milan yet.

Again Mrs. Minkel came to the rescue: "My husband is making a European tour," she explained. "We are having a holiday, lecturing a little, visiting friends. We are really looking forward."

Thus encouraged, Minkel himself managed finally to speak: "And what brings you to Freiburg-Miss Baastrup?" he asked, in the thickest German accent she had ever heard off stage.

"Oh, I just thought I'd better see a little of the world before I decided what to do with my life," said Charlie.

Get me out. Christ get me out. The receptionist was regretting that no reservation could be found for Mr. Boccaccio, and alas the hotel was full; with the other half of herself, she was handing Mrs. Minkel a room key. Somehow Charlie was thanking the Professor again for a really stimulating and instructive lecture, Minkel was thanking her for her kind words; Rossino, having thanked the receptionist, was heading briskly for the main entrance, Minkel's briefcase mostly hidden by the smart black raincoat over his arm. With a last bashful effusion of thanks and apologies, Charlie went out after him, careful to show no sign of haste. As she reached the glass doors, she was in time to see the reflected image of the Minkels peering helplessly round them, trying to remember who had it last and where.

Stepping between the parked taxis, Charlie reached the hotel car park, where Helga, wearing a loden cape with horn buttons, sat waiting in a green Citroen. Charlie got in beside her; Helga drove sedately to the car park exit, put in her ticket and money. As the boom lifted, Charlie began laughing, as if the boom had triggered off her laughter. She gulped, she put her knuckles in her mouth and her head on Helga's shoulder, and broke into helpless, glorious mirth.

"I was incredible, Helg! You should have seen me-Jesus!" At the junction, a young traffic policeman stared in puzzlement at the sight of two grown women weeping and laughing their heads off. Lowering her window, Helga blew him a kiss.

In the operations room, Litvak sat over the radio, Becker and Kurtz stood behind him. Litvak seemed frightened of himself, muted and pale. He wore a headset with one earpiece, and a throat-pad microphone.

"Rossino has taken a cab to the station," Litvak said. "He has the briefcase with him. He's going to collect his bike."

"I don't want him followed," Becker said across Litvak's back to Kurtz.

Litvak pulled off his throat pad and acted as though he couldn't believe his ears. "Not followed? We're got six men round that bike. Alexis has like fifty. We've put a homer on it and we've got cars standing by all over town. Follow the bike, we follow the briefcase. The briefcase takes us to our man!" He swung to Kurtz, appealing for his support.

"Gadi?" said Kurtz.

"He'll use cut-outs," Becker said. "He always has done. Rossino will take it so far, hand it over, somebody else will take it on the next stage. By this afternoon, they'll have dragged us through small streets, open country, and empty restaurants. There's not a surveillance team in the world that could survive that without being recognised."

"And your special interest, Gadi?" Kurtz enquired.

"Berger will stay on Charlie all day long. Khalil will phone her at agreed intervals and places. If Khalil smells a rat, he'll order Berger to kill her. If he doesn't call for two hours, three hours, whatever their arrangement is, Berger will kill her anyway."

Seemingly undecided, Kurtz turned his back to both of them and wandered down the room. Then up again. Then down again, while Litvak watched him like a madman. Finally Kurtz picked up the hot line to Alexis and they heard him say "Paul" in a consultative, do-me-a-favour sort of tone. He spoke quietly for a while, listened, spoke again, and rang off.

"We have about nine seconds before he reaches the station," Litvak said wildly, listening to his headset. "Six."

Kurtz ignored him. "I am advised that Berger and Charlie have just entered a fashionable hairdresser's," he said, coming back down the room again. "Looks like they're going to have themselves prettied up for the great event." He drew to a halt before them.

"Rossino's cab just reached the station concourse," Litvak reported in despair. "He's paying him off now."

Kurtz was looking at Becker. His regard was respectful, even tender. He was an old coach whose favourite athlete had finally found his form.

"Gadi has won the day, Shimon," he said, his gaze still upon Becker. "Call off your kids. Tell them to rest up till evening."

A phone rang and again Kurtz took the call. It was Professor Minkel, having his fourth nervous breakdown of the operation. Kurtz heard him out, then spoke long and soothingly to his wife.

"It's a really nice day," he said, in suppressed exasperation as he rang off. "Everyone's having a great time." Putting on his blue beret, he went off to meet Alexis for their joint inspection of the lecture hall.

It was her most fraught wait ever, and her longest; a first night to end first nights. Worse still, she could do nothing alone, for Helga had appointed Charlie her ward and favoured niece, and would not let her out of her sight. From the hairdresser, where Helga, under the hairdryer, had received her first phone call, they went to a clothes store where Helga bought Charlie a pair of fur-lined boots, and silk gloves against what she called "finger marks." From there to the Cathedral, where Helga imperiously treated Charlie to a history lesson, and from there again, with much giggling and insinuation, to a small square where she was determined to introduce her to one Berthold Schwarz, "the most sexy person ever-Charlie, you are certain to fall completely in love with him!" Berthold Schwarz turned out to be a statue.

"Is he not fantastic, Charlie? Do you not wish we could lift his skirts once? You know what he did, our Berthold? He was a Franciscan, a famous alchemist, and he invented gunpowder. He loved God so much he taught all His creatures to blow each other up. So the good citizens build him a statue. Naturally." Grasping Charlie's arm, she cuddled her excitedly against her. "You know what we do after tonight?" she whispered. "We come back, we bring some flowers for Berthold, we put them at his feet. Yes? Yes, Charlie?"

The Cathedral spire was beginning to get on Charlie's nerves: a fretted, jagged beacon, always black, stalking out ahead of her every time she turned a corner or entered a new street.

For lunch they went to a smart restaurant where Helga treated Charlie to Baden wine, which had been grown, she said, in the volcanic soil of the Kaiserstuhl -a volcano, Charlie, think! -and now everything they ate or drank or saw had to be the subject of wearying and facetious innuendo. Over the Black Forest pie-"We must have everything bourgeois today"- Helga was again summoned to the telephone, and returned saying they must leave for the university or they would never get everything done. So they entered a pedestrian underpass lined with prosperous little shops, and emerged before a portentous building of strawberry sandstone, with pillars and a curved front with gold lettering above it, which Helga was quick to translate.

"So here is a fine message to you, Charlie. Listen. 'The truth will make you free.' They are quoting Karl Marx for you, is that not beautiful and thoughtful?"

"I thought it was Noel Coward," Charlie said and saw a flash of anger pass across Helga's over-excited face.

A stone concourse surrounded the building. An elderly policeman patrolled it, eyeing the girls incuriously as they gawped and pointed, tourists to their fingertips. Four steps led to the front entrance. Inside it, the lights of a large hall glinted through darkened glass doors. The side entrance was guarded by statues of Homer and Aristotle, and it was here that Helga and Charlie lingered longest, admiring the sculptures and the pompous architecture while they secretly measured distances and approaches. A yellow poster announced Minkel's lecture for that evening.

"You are scared, Charlie," Helga whispered, without waiting for an answer. "Listen, after this morning you will triumph totally, you are perfect. You will show what is truth and what is lies, you will show them also what freedom is. For great lies, we need a great action, it is logical. A great action, a great audience, a great cause. Come."

A modern pedestrian bridge led across the dual carriageway. Macabre stone totem-poles presided at either end. From the bridge they passed through the university library to a student cafe slung like a concrete cradle over the carriageway. Through its glass walls, while they drank their coffee, they could watch staff and students leave and enter the lecture hall. Helga was once again waiting for a phone call. It came, and as she returned from it, she saw something in Charlie's expression that angered her.

"What is the matter with you?" she hissed. "You are filled with compassion for Minkel's charming Zionist opinions suddenly? So noble, so fine? Listen, he is worse than Hitler, a complete tyrant in disguise. I buy you a schnapps to give you courage."

The heat of the schnapps was still burning her as they reached the empty park. The pond was frozen over; early darkness was gathering; the evening air prickled with specks of freezing water. Very loudly, an old bell chimed the hour. A second bell, smaller and higher-pitched, tinkled after it. Her green cape pulled tight around her, Helga at once let out a cry of pleasure.

"Oh, Charlie, listen! You hear that little bell? It is silver. You know why? I tell you. A traveller on his horse lost his way one night. There were robbers, it was bad weather, he was so glad to see Freiburg that he gave a silver bell to the Cathedral. Every evening now, it rings. Is that not beautiful?"

Charlie nodded, trying to smile, but without success. Throwing a strong arm round her, Helga gathered her into the folds of her cape. "Charlie-listen-you want I give you another sermon?"

She shook her head.

Still holding Charlie to her breast, Helga glanced at her watch, then down the path into the half darkness.

"You know something else about this park, Charlie?"

I know that it is the second most awful place in the world. And I never award first prizes.

"Then I tell you another story about it. Yes? In the war there was a he-goose here. You say he-goose?"

"Gander."

"This gander was an air-raid siren. When the bombers came, he was the first who heard them, and when he screamed the citizens went at once to their cellars, not waiting for the official warning. The gander died, but after the war the citizens were so grateful they built him a monument. So there is Freiburg for you. One statue to their bomber monk, another to their air raid warning. Are they not crazy, these little Freibourgeois?" Stiffening, Helga glanced at her watch again and then into the misty darkness. "He is here," she said very quietly, and turned to say goodbye.

No, thought Charlie. Helg, I love you, you can have me for breakfast every day, just don't make me go to Khalil.

Laying her hands flat on Charlie's cheeks, Helga kissed her softly on the lips.

"For Michel, yes?" She kissed her again, more fiercely. "For the revolution and peace and for Michel. Walk straight down the path, you come to a gate. A green Ford is waiting there. You sit in the back, directly behind the driver." One more kiss. "Oh, Charlie, listen, you are too fantastic. We shall be friends always."

Charlie started down the path, paused, looked back. Stiff and oddly dutiful in the twilight, Helga stood watching her, her green loden cape hanging round her like a policeman's.

Helga waved, a royal side-to-side flap of her big hand. Charlie waved back, watched by the Cathedral spire.

The driver wore a fur hat that hid half his face, and he had pulled up the fur collar of his coat. He did not turn to greet her, and from where she sat she had no picture of him, except that by the line of his cheekbone he was young, and she had a suspicion he was Arab. He drove slowly, first through the evening traffic, then into countryside, down straight, narrow lanes where the snow still lay. They passed a small railway station, approached a level crossing, and stopped. Charlie heard a warning bell ring and saw the high painted boom waver and start its descent. Her driver slammed the car into second gear and raced over the crossing, which closed neatly behind them just as they reached safety.

"Thanks," she said, and heard him laugh-one guttural peal; he was Arab, for sure. He drove up a hill and once more stopped the car, this time at a bus-stop. He handed her a coin.

"Take a two-mark ticket, the next bus that way," he said.

It's our annual school treasure hunt on Foundation Day, she thought; the next clue takes you to the next clue; the last clue takes you to the prize.

It was pitch dark and the first stars were appearing. A biting country wind was blowing off the hills. Away down the road she saw the lights of a petrol station, but no houses anywhere. She waited five minutes, a bus pulled up with a sigh. It was three-quarters empty. She bought her ticket and sat down near the door, knees together, eyes nowhere. For the next two stops no one boarded; at the third, a boy in a leather jacket leapt in and sat himself cheerfully beside her. He was her American chauffeur of last night.

"Two stops from now is a new church," he said conversationally. "You get out, you walk past the church, down the road, keeping on the right sidewalk. You come to a parked red vehicle with a little devil hanging from the driver's mirror. Open the passenger door, sit down, wait. That's all you do."

The bus drew up, she got out and started walking. The boy remained on the bus. The road was straight and the night extremely dark. Ahead of her, perhaps five hundred yards, she saw a crooked splash of red under a street lamp. No sidelights. The snow squeaked under her new boots, and the noise added to her feeling of being detached from her body. Hullo, feet, what are you doing down there? March, girl, march. The van came nearer and she saw it was a little Coca-Cola van driven high on the kerb. Fifty yards beyond it under the next lamp was a tiny cafe, and beyond the cafe again nothing but the bare snow plateau and the straight, pointless road to nowhere. What had possessed anybody to put a cafe in such a godless spot was a riddle for another life.

She opened the van door and got in. The interior was strangely bright from the street lamp overhead. She smelt onions and saw a cardboard box full of them among the crates of empty bottles that filled the back. A plastic devil with a trident dangled from the driver's mirror. She remembered a similar mascot in the van in London, when Mario had hijacked her. A heap of grimy cassettes lay at her feet. It was the quietest place in the world. A single light approached her slowly down the road. It came level and she saw a young priest on a bicycle. His face turned to her as he ticked past, and he looked offended, as if she had challenged his chastity. She waited again. A tall man in a peaked cap stepped out of the cafe, sniffed the air, then peered up and down the street, uncertain what time of day it was. He returned to the cafe, came out again, walked slowly towards her until he came alongside. He tapped on Charlie's window with the fingertips of one gloved hand. A leather glove, hard and shiny. A bright torch shone on her, blacking him off from her completely. Its beam held her, travelled slowly round the van, returned to her, dazzling her in one eye. She lifted a hand to shield herself, and as she lowered it, the beam followed it to her lap. The torch went out, her door opened, one hand closed on her wrist and hauled her out of the car. She was standing face to face with him, and he was taller than she was by a foot, broad and square to her. But his face was in black shadow under the peak of his cap, and he had turned his collar up against the cold.

"Stand very still," he said.

Unslinging her shoulder bag, he first felt the weight of it, then opened it and looked inside. For the third time in its recent life, her little clock radio received careful attention. He switched it on. It played. He switched it off, fiddled with it, and slipped something into his pocket. For a second, she thought he had decided to keep the radio for himself. But he hadn't after all, for she saw him drop it back into the bag, and the bag into the van. Then, like a deportment instructor correcting her posture, he put the tips of a gloved hand on each of her shoulders, straightening her up. His dark gaze was on her face all the time. Letting his right arm dangle, he began lightly touching her body with the flat of his left hand, first her neck and shoulders, now her collarbone and shoulder blades, testing the spots where the straps of her bra would have been if she had worn one. Now her armpits and down her sides to her hips; her breasts and belly.

"This morning in the hotel you wear your bracelet on your right wrist. Tonight you wear it on your left wrist. Why?"

His English was foreign and educated and courteous; his accent, so far as she could judge, Arab. A soft voice but powerful; a speaker's voice.

"I like to change it around," she said.

"Why?" he repeated.

"To make it feel new."

Dropping into a crouch, he explored her hips and legs and the inside of her thighs with the same minute attention as the rest of her; then, still only with his left hand, carefully prodded her new fur boots.

"You know how much it is worth, that bracelet?" he asked as he stood up again.

"No."

"Stay still."

He was standing behind her, tracing her back, her buttocks, her legs again, down to the boots.

"You didn't insure it?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Michel gave it to me for love. Not money."

"Get in the car."

She did so; he walked round the front and climbed in beside her.

"Okay, I take you to Khalil." He started the engine. "Door-to-door delivery. Okay?"

The van had an automatic gearbox, but she noticed he steered mainly with his left hand while the right rested on his lap. The jangle of the empties took her by surprise. He reached a crossroads and turned left into a road as straight as the first, but without lamps. His face, as much as she could see of it, reminded her of Joseph's, not in its features but in its intentness, in the drawn-back corners of his fighter's eyes, which kept a constant watch on the van's three mirrors, as well as on herself.

"You like onions?" he called above the clatter of the bottles.

"Quite."

"You like to cook? What you cook? Spaghetti? Wienerschnitzel?"

"Things like that."

"What did you cook for Michel?"

"Steak."

"When?"

"In London. The night he stayed in my flat."

"No onions?" he shouted.

"In the salad," she said.

They were heading back towards the city. Its glow made a pink wall under the heavy evening cloud. They descended a hill and arrived in a flat, sprawling valley suddenly without form. She saw half-built factories and huge lorry parks, unoccupied. She saw a rubbish tip that was being shaped into a mountain. She saw no shops, no pub, no lights in any window. They entered a concrete forecourt. He stopped the van but did not switch off the engine. "hotel garni eden," she read, in red neon letters, and above the garish doorway: "Willkommen! Bienvenu! Well-come!"

As he handed her the shoulder bag, an idea struck him. "Here-give him these. He likes them too," he said, fishing for the box of onions from among the crates. As he dumped it in her lap, she noticed again the stillness of his gloved right hand. "Room five, fourth floor. The stairs. Not the elevator. Go well."

With the van's engine still running, he watched her across the forecourt to the lighted entrance. The box was heavier than she had expected and claimed both her arms. The lobby was empty, the lift stood waiting, but she didn't take it. The staircase was narrow and twisting, the carpet worn to the thread. The canned music had a panting insinuation, the fuggy air reeked of cheap scent and stale tobacco smoke. At the first landing, an old woman called "Gruss Gott" to her from inside her glass cubicle but did not raise her head. It seemed to be a place where unexplained ladies came and went a good deal.

At the second landing, she heard music and female laughter; at the third she was overtaken by the lift and wondered why he had made her take the stairs, but she had no will any more, no resistance; her words and actions had all been written for her. The box was making her arms ache, and by the time she entered the fourth-floor corridor the ache was her greatest concern. The first door was a fire exit and the second, right beside it, was marked 5. The lift, the fire exit, the stairs, she thought automatically; he always has at least two things.

She knocked on the door, it opened, and her first thought was: Oh Christ, typical, I've mucked it up; because the man who stood before her was the man who had just driven her here in the Coca-Cola van, minus his hat and left glove. He took the box from her and laid it on the luggage stand. He took off her spectacles, folded them, and handed them back to her. When he had done that, he again unslung her shoulder bag and emptied its contents onto the cheap pink eiderdown, much as they had done to her in London when they put the black glasses on her. About the only other thing in the room apart from the bed was the briefcase. It was lying on the washstand, empty, its black mouth turned towards her like an open jaw. It was the one she had helped to steal from Professor Minkel, back in that big hotel with the mezzanine, when she was too young to know any better.

An utter calm had descended over the three men in their operations room. No phone calls, even from Minkel and Alexis; no desperate recantations over the cipher link with the Embassy in Bonn. In their collective imagination the whole tortuous conspiracy seemed to be holding its breath. Litvak sat slumped despondently in an office chair; Kurtz was in some kind of sunny dream, his eyes half closed, smiling like an old alligator. And Gadi Becker, as before, was the stillest of them, staring self-cri tically into the gathering dark, like a man examining all the promises of his past life-which had he kept? Which broken?

"We should have given her the homer this time round," Litvak said. "They trust her by now. Why didn't we give her the homer? -wire her up?"

"Because he'll search her," Becker said. "He'll search her for weapons and wires and he'll search her for a homer."

Litvak roused himself enough to argue. "So why do they use her? You're crazy. Why use a girl you don't trust-for a job like this?"

"Because she hasn't killed," said Becker. "Because she's clean. That's why they use her, and that's why they don't trust her. For the same reason."

Kurtz's smile became almost human. "When she's made her first kill, Shimon. When she's no longer a novice. When she's the wrong side of the law forever, an illegal unto death-then they'll trust her. Then everybody will trust her," he assured Litvak contentedly. "By nine o'clock tonight, she'll be one of them-no problem, Shimon, no problem."

Litvak remained unconsoled.