The Little Drummer Girl

twenty-seven

Of the immediate and less immediate aftermath of the operation, the world knew a lot more than it realised; and certainly a lot more than Charlie. It knew, for instance-or could have done if it had studied the smaller news items of the foreign pages of the Anglo-Saxon press-that a suspected Palestinian terrorist had died in a shoot-out with members of a crack West German unit, and that his woman hostage, not named, had been removed to hospital in a state of shock, but was otherwise unhurt. The German newspapers carried more lurid versions of the story-"the wild west comes to the black forest"-but the stories were so remarkably assured, yet contradictory, that it was hard to make anything of them. A link with the abortive Freiburg bomb attack against Professor Minkel-originally reported dead, but later discovered to have made a miraculous escape-was so wittily denied by the urbane Dr. Alexis that everyone took it for granted. But it was only proper, said the wiser leader-writers, that we should not be told too much.

A succession of other minor incidents around the Western hemisphere raised occasional speculation about the doings of one or another Arab terrorist organisation, but really with so many rival groups these days, it was a toss-up where one should point the finger. The senseless gunning-down in broad daylight of Dr. Anton Mesterbein, for instance, the Swiss humanist lawyer, campaigner for minority rights, and son of the eminent financier, was laid squarely at the door of an extremist Falangist organisation that had recently "declared war" against Europeans overtly sympathetic to the Palestinian "occupation" of the Lebanon. The outrage occurred as the victim was leaving his villa for work-unprotected, as usual-and the world was deeply shocked for at least the first part of a morning. When a letter claiming responsibility and signed "Free Lebanon" was received by the editor of a Zurich newspaper, and declared authentic, a junior Lebanese diplomat was asked to leave the country, and did so philosophically.

The car-bombing of a Rejectionist Front diplomat outside the newly completed mosque in St. John's Wood rated hardly a notice anywhere; it was the fourth such killing in as many months.

On the other hand, the bloodthirsty knifing of the Italian musician and newspaper columnist Albert Rossino, and of his German lady companion, whose naked and barely recognisable bodies were discovered weeks later beside a Tyrolean lake, was declared by the Austrian authorities to have no political significance at all, despite the fact that both victims had radical connections. On the evidence available, they preferred to treat the case as a crime of passion. The lady, one Astrid Berger, was well known for her bizarre appetites, and it was held probable, if grotesque, that no third party was involved. A succession of other, less interesting deaths passed virtually unnoticed, as did the Israeli bombing of an ancient desert fortress on the Syrian border, which Jerusalem sources claimed was being used as a Palestinian training base for foreign terrorists. As to the four-hundred-pound bomb that exploded on a hilltop outside Beirut, destroying a luxurious summer villa and killing its occupants-which included both Tayeh and Fatmeh-it was about as impenetrable as any other act of terror in that tragic region.

But Charlie, in her seaside fastness, knew none of this; or, more accurately, she knew it all in general, and was either too bored or too frightened to receive the details. At first, she would only swim or take slow, aimless walks to the end of the beach and back, clutching her bathrobe to her throat while her bodyguards followed her at a respectful distance. In the sea, she was inclined to sit herself at the shallow, waveless edge, and make washing movements with the sea water, first her face and then her arms and hands. The other girls, on instruction, bathed naked; but when Charlie declined to follow this liberating example, the psychiatrist ordered them to cover themselves again, and wait.

Kurtz came to see her once a week, sometimes twice. He was extremely gentle with her; patient and faithful, even when she screamed at him. His information was practical, and all to her advantage.

A godfather had been invented for her, he said, an old friend of her father's who had struck it rich and recently died in Switzerland, leaving her a large sum of money which, since it came from foreign sources, would be free of capital transfer tax in the United Kingdom.

The British authorities had been spoken to, and had accepted-for reasons Charlie could not be party to-that no useful purpose would be served by digging further into her relationship with certain European and Palestinian extremists, he said. Kurtz was also able to reassure her of Quilley's good opinion of her: the police, he said, had actually made a point of calling on him to explain that their suspicion about Charlie had been misdirected.

Kurtz also discussed with Charlie methods of explaining her abrupt disappearance from London, and Charlie passively agreed to a concoction involving fear of police harassment, a mild nervous breakdown, and a mystery lover whom she had picked up after her stay in Mykonos, a married man who had led her a dance and finally dumped her. It was not till he started to school her in this, and presume to test her on small points, that she became pale and started to tremble. A similar manifestation occurred when Kurtz announced to her, somewhat unwisely, that "the highest level" had ruled she could claim Israeli citizenship any time she wished for the rest of her life.

"Give it to Fatmeh," she snapped, and Kurtz, who by then had a number of new cases going, had to consult the file in order to remind himself who Fatmeh was; or had been.

As to her career, said Kurtz, there were some exciting things waiting for her as soon as she felt ready to handle them. A couple of fine Hollywood producers had developed a sincere interest in Charlie during her absence, and were anxious to have her come right out to the Coast and do some screen tests. One actually had a small part up his sleeve that he thought might be just right for her; Kurtz didn't know the details. And there were some nice things happening in the London theatre scene as well.

"I just want to go back to where I was," Charlie said.

Kurtz said that could be arranged, dear, no problem.

The psychiatrist was a bright young fellow with a twinkle in his eye and a military background, and he was not at all given to self-analysis or any other kind of gloomy introspection.

Indeed, his concern seemed to be less to make her talk than to convince her that she shouldn't; in his profession, he must have been a most divided man. He took her for drives, first along the coast roads, then into Tel Aviv. But, when he injudiciously pointed out some of the few fine old Arab houses that had survived development, Charlie became incoherent with anger. He took her to out-of-the-way restaurants, swam with her, and even lay beside her on the beach and chatted her up a little, until she told him, with a strange twist in her voice, that she would prefer to talk to him in his office. When he heard that she liked to ride, he ordered horses, and they had a grand day's riding during which she seemed to forget herself completely. But the next day she was too quiet again for his taste, and he told Kurtz to wait another week at least. And sure enough the same evening she began a prolonged and unexplained fit of vomiting, which was all the more strange considering how little she was eating.

Rachel came, having resumed her studies at university, and she was frank and sweet and relaxed, quite different from the harder version Charlie had first met in Athens. Dimitri was also back at school, she said; Raoul was thinking of reading medicine and maybe becoming an army doctor; on the other hand, he just might take up archaeology. Charlie smiled politely at these items of family news-Rachel told Kurtz it was like talking to her grandmother. But in the longer run, neither her North Country origins nor her jolly middle-class English ways made their desired impact on Charlie, and after a while, still politely, Charlie asked whether she might please be left alone again.

Meanwhile within Kurtz's service a number of valuable lessons had been added to the great sum of technical and human knowledge that formed the treasury of its many operations. Non-Jews, despite the inherent prejudice against them, were not only usable, but sometimes essential. A Jewish girl might never have held the middle ground so well. The technicians were also fascinated by the business of the batteries in the clock radio; it's never too late to learn. An expurgated case history was duly assembled for training use, to great effect. In a perfect world, it was argued, the case officer should have noticed when he made the swap that the batteries were missing from the agent's model. But at least he put two and two together when the homing signal stopped, and went in straight away, Becker's name, of course, appeared in none of this; quite apart from the question of security, Kurtz had heard no recent good of him and was not disposed to see him canonised.

And in the late spring at last, as soon as the Litani basin was dry enough for tanks, Kurtz's worst fears and Gavron's worst threats were fulfilled: the long-awaited Israeli push into Lebanon occurred, ending the present phase of hostilities or, according to where you stood, heralding the next one. The refugee camps that had played host to Charlie were sanitised, which meant roughly that bulldozers were brought in to bury the bodies and complete what the tanks and artillery bombing raids had started; a pitiful trail of refugees set off northward, leaving their hundreds, then their thousands, of dead behind. Special groups eradicated the secret places in Beirut where Charlie had stayed; of the house in Sidon only the chickens and the tangerine orchard remained. The house was destroyed by a team of Sayaret, who also put an end to the two boys Kareem and Yasir. They came in at night, from the sea, exactly as Yasir, the great intelligence officer, had always predicted, and they used a special kind of American explosive bullet, still on the secret list, that has only to touch the body to kill. Of all this-of the effective destruction of her brief love-affair with Palestine-Charlie was wisely spared all knowledge. It could unhinge her, the psychiatrist said; with her imagination and self-absorption, she could perfectly easily hold herself responsible for the entire invasion. Better to keep it from her, therefore; let her find out in her own good time. As to Kurtz, for a month or more he was hardly seen, or, if seen, hardly recognised. His body seemed to shrink to half its size, his Slav eyes lost all their sparkle, he looked his age, whatever that was, at last. Then one day, like a man who had shaken off a long and wasting illness, he returned, and within hours, it seemed, had vigorously resumed his strange running feud with Misha Gavron.

In Berlin, Gadi Becker at first floated in a vacuum comparable to Charlie's; but he had floated there before, and was in certain ways less sensitive to its causes and effects. He returned to his flat, and to his failing business prospects; insolvency was once more round the corner. Though he spent days arguing on the telephone with wholesalers, or else hauling boxes from one side of the storeroom to the other, the world slump seemed to have hit the Berlin garment industry harder and further than any other. There was a girl he sometimes slept with, a rather stately creature straight out of the thirties, warm-hearted to a fault and even, to appease his inherited standards, vaguely Jewish. After several days' futile reflection, he phoned her and said he was temporarily in town. Just for a few days, he said; maybe only one. He listened to her joy at his being back, and to her light-hearted remonstrations at his disappearance; but he listened also to the unclear voices of his own inner mind.

"So come round," she said when she had finished scolding him.

But he didn't. He could not approve of the pleasure she might give him.

Scared of himself, he hastened to a fashionable Greek nightclub he knew of, run by a woman of cosmopolitan wisdom and, having at last succeeded in getting drunk, watched the guests smash the plates too eagerly, in the best German-Greek tradition. Next day, without too much planning, he began a novel about a Berlin-Jewish family that had fled to Israel and then uprooted itself again, unable to come to terms with what was being done in the name of Zion. But when he looked at what he had written, he consigned his notes first to the waste-paper basket and then, for security reasons, to the grate. A new man from the Bonn Embassy flew up to visit him, and said he was the replacement for the last man: if you need to communicate with Jerusalem or anything, ask for me. Without seeming to be able to prevent himself, Becker embarked on a provocative discussion with him about the State of Israel. And he ended with a most offensive question, something he claimed to have culled from the writings of Arthur Koestler, and evidently adapted to his own preoccupation. "What are we to become, I wonder?" he said. "A Jewish homeland or an ugly little Spartan state?"

The new man was hard-eyed and unimaginative and the question clearly annoyed him without his understanding the meaning of it. He left some money and his card: Second Secretary, Commercial. But more significantly he left a cloud of doubt behind him, which Kurtz's telephone call next morning was certainly intended to disperse.

"What the hell are you trying to tell me?" he demanded roughly, in English, as soon as Becker had picked up the phone. "You're going to start muddying the nest, then come on home where nobody pays you any attention."

"How is she?" Becker said.

Kurtz's response was perhaps deliberately cruel, for the conversation took place just when he was at his lowest. "Frankie's just fine. Fine in her mind, fine in her appearance, and for some reason beyond me she persists in loving you. Elli spoke to her only the other day and formed the distinct impression that she did not regard the divorce as binding."

"Divorces aren't intended to be binding."

But Kurtz as usual had an answer. "Divorces aren't intended, period."

"So how is she?" Becker repeated, with emphasis.

Kurtz had to harness his temper before replying. "If we are speaking of a mutual friend, she is in good health, she is being healed, and she never wants to see you again-and may you remain young for ever!" Kurtz ended with an unbridled shout, and rang off.

The same evening, Frankie rang-Kurtz must have given her the number out of spite. The telephone was Frankie's instrument. Others might play the violin, the harp, or the shofar, but for Frankie it was the telephone every time.

Becker listened to her for quite a time. To her weeping, at which she was unequalled; to her cajolements, and her promises. "I'll be whatever you want me to be," she said. "Just tell me and I'll be it."

But the last thing Becker wanted was to invent anybody.

It was not long after this that Kurtz and the psychiatrist decided the time had come to throw Charlie back into the water.

The tour was called A Bouquet of Comedy, and the theatre, like others she had known, served as a Women's Institute and a play school, and no doubt as a polling booth at election times as well. It was a lousy play and a lousy theatre, and it came at the lower end of her decline. The theatre had a tin roof and a wooden floor, and when she stamped, bullet puffs of dust came up between the blocks. She had begun by taking only tragic parts, because after one nervous look at her Ned Quilley had assumed that tragedy was what she wanted, and so, for her own reasons, had Charlie. But she discovered quickly that serious parts, if they meant anything to her at all, were too much for her. She would cry or weep at the most incongruous places, and several times she had to fake an exit in order to get hold of herself.

But more frequently it was their irrelevance that got to her; she had no stomach any more-and, worse, no understanding- for what passed for pain in Western middle-class society. Thus comedy became, after all, the better mask for her, and through it she had watched her weeks rotate between Sheridan and Priestley and the latest modern genius, whose offering was described in the programme as a souffle flashing with barbed wit. They had played it in York but, thank God, bypassed Nottingham; they had played it in Leeds and Bradford and Huddersfield and Derby; and Charlie for one had yet to see the souffle rise, or the wit flash, but probably the fault was in herself, for in her imagination she went through her lines like a punchdrunk boxer who must either slug away or go down for good.

All day long, when she was not rehearsing, she lounged about like a patient in a doctor's waiting-room, smoking and reading magazines. But tonight, as the curtain rose once more, a dangerous sloth replaced her nervousness and she kept wanting to fall asleep. She heard her voice run up and down the scale, felt her arm reach this way, her foot step that way; she paused for what was normally a safe laugh, but struck instead an uncomprehending quiet. At the same time, pictures from the forbidden album began to fill her mind: of the prison in Sidon and the line of waiting mothers along the wall; of Fatmeh; of the schoolroom in the camp at night, ironing on the slogans for the march; of the air-raid shelter, and the stoic faces staring at her, wondering whether she was to blame. And of Khalil's gloved hand drawing its crude claw marks in his own blood.

The dressing-room was communal, but when the interval came, Charlie did not go to it. Instead she stood outside the stage door, in the open air, smoking and shivering and staring down the foggy Midland street, and wondering whether she should simply walk, and keep walking until she fell down or got hit by a car. They were calling her name and she could hear slamming doors and running feet, but the problem seemed to be theirs, not hers, and she left them to it. Only a last-a very last-sense of responsibility made her open the door and wander back in.

"Charlie, for Christ'ssake! Charlie, what the bloody hell!" The curtain rose and she found herself once more on stage. Alone. Long monologue, while Hilda sits at husband's desk and pens a letter to her lover: to Michel, to Joseph. A candle burned at her elbow and in a minute she would pull open the drawer of the desk in search of another sheet of paper, and find-"Oh no!"-her husband's unposted letter to his mistress. She began writing and she was in the motel in Nottingham; she stared into the candle flame and saw Joseph's face glinting at her across the table in the taverna outside Delphi. She looked again and it was Khalil, dining with her at the log table in the house in the Black Forest. She was saying her lines and miraculously they were not Joseph's, not Tayeh's, not Khalil's, but Hilda's. She opened the desk drawer and put in a hand, missed a beat, drew out a sheet of handwriting in puzzlement, lifted it, and turned to give the audience their look. She rose to her feet, and with an expression of growing disbelief, advanced to the front of the stage and began to read aloud-such a witty letter, so full of neat cross-references. In a minute her husband, John, would enter left in his dressing-gown, advance upon the desk, and read her own unfinished letter to her lover. In a minute there would be an even wittier cross-cut of their two letters, and the audience would roll about in delirium, which would turn to ecstasy when the two deceived lovers, each roused by the other's infidelities, fell together in a lecherous embrace. She heard her husband enter, and it was the cue for her to raise her voice: indignation replaces curiosity as Hilda reads on. She grasped the letter in both hands, turned, and took two paces left front in order not to mask John. As she did so, she saw him-not John but Joseph, quite distinctly, seated where Michel had sat in the centre of the stalls, staring up at her with the same dreadfully serious concern.

At first, she was really not surprised at all; the divide between her inner and outer world had been a flimsy affair at the best of times, but these days it had virtually ceased to exist.

So he's come, she thought. And about time too. Any orchids, Jose? No orchids at all? No red blazer? Gold medallion? Gucci’s? Maybe I should have gone to the dressing-room after all. Read your note. I'd have known you were coming, wouldn't I? Baked a cake.

She had stopped reading aloud because there was really no point in acting any more, even though the prompter was unashamedly belting out the lines to her and the director was standing behind him waving his arms like someone fighting off a swarm of bees; they were both in her line of vision, somehow, though she was staring at Joseph exclusively. Or perhaps she was imagining them, because Joseph had become so real at last. Behind her, husband John, with no conviction at all, had started inventing lines to cover for her. You need a Joseph, she wanted to tell him proudly; our Jose here will do you lines for all occasions.

There was a screen of light between them-not a screen so much as an optical partition. Added to her tears, it had started to upset her vision of him, and she was beginning to suspect he was after all a mirage. From the wings, they were shouting at her to come off; husband John had marched downstage-clonk, clonk-and taken her kindly but firmly by the elbow as a preliminary to consigning her to the bin. She supposed that in a minute they would pull the curtain on her and give that little tart-what's-her-name, her understudy-the chance of her lifetime. But her concern was to reach Joseph and touch him and make sure. The curtain closed, but she was already walking down the steps to him. The lights went up, and yes it was Joseph, but when she saw him so clearly he bored her; he was just another member of her audience. She started up the aisle and felt a hand on her arm and thought: Husband John again, go away. The foyer was empty except for two geriatric duchesses who presumably were the management.

"See a doctor, dear, I should," said one of them.

"Or sleep it off," said the other.

"Oh leave it out," Charlie advised them happily, using an expression she had never used before.

No Nottingham rain was falling, no red Mercedes waiting to receive her, so she went and stood at a bus-stop, half expecting the American boy to be aboard, telling her to look out for a red van.

Joseph came towards her down the empty street, walking very tall, and she imagined him breaking into a run in order to beat his own bullets to her, but he didn't. He drew up before her, slightly out of breath, and it was clear that someone had sent him with a message, most likely Marty, but perhaps Tayeh. He opened his mouth to deliver it, but she prevented him.

"I'm dead, Jose. You shot me, don't you remember?"

She wanted to add something about the theatre of the real, how the bodies didn't get up and walk away. But she lost it somehow.

A cab passed and Joseph hailed it with his free hand. It didn't stop, but what can you expect? The cabs these days-a law to themselves. She was leaning on him and she would have fallen if he hadn't been holding her so firmly. Her tears were half blinding her, and she was hearing him from under water. I'm dead, she kept saying, I'm dead, I'm dead. But it seemed that he wanted her dead or alive. Locked together, they set off awkwardly along the pavement, though the town was strange to them.