The Little Drummer Girl

four

Kurtz and Litvak called on Ned Quilley at his Soho offices on a misty, soaking Friday at midday-a social call with business as its aim-as soon as they heard that the Joseph-Charlie show was safely running. They were in near despair since the Leyden bomb, Gavron's croaking breath was on their necks every hour of the day; they could hear nothing in their minds but the remorseless ticking of Kurtz's battered watch. Yet on the surface, they were just two more respectful, well-contrasted mid-European Americans in dripping new Burberrys, the one stocky with a forceful rolling walk and a bit of a sea captain to him, the other gangly and young and rather insinuating, with a private academic smile. They gave their names as Gold and Karman of the firm of GK Creations, Incorporated, and their letter paper, hastily run up, sported a blue-and-gold monogram like a thirties tie-pin to prove it. They had made the appointment from the Embassy but ostensibly from New York, personally with one of Ned Quilley's ladies, and they kept it to the minute like the eager show-business citizens they weren't.

"We're Gold and Karman," said Kurtz to Quilley's senile receptionist, Mrs. Longmore, at two minutes to twelve exactly, striding straight in on her from the street. "We have a date with Mr. Quilley twelve o'clock. Thank you-no, dear, we'll stand. Was it you we spoke with by any chance, dear?"

It was not, said Mrs. Longmore, in the tone of one humouring a pair of lunatics. Appointments were the province of Mrs. Ellis, a different person entirely.

"Sure, dear," said Kurtz, undaunted.

And that was how they operated in these cases: officially somehow, with broad Kurtz beating the rhythm and slender Litvak piping softly behind him with his smouldering private smile.

The stairs to Ned Quilley's offices were steep and uncarpeted, and most American gentlemen, in Mrs. Longmore's fifty years' experience of her post, liked to comment on them wryly and pause for breath at the turn. But not Gold; not Karman either. These two, when she watched them through her window, skipped up the stairs and clean out of sight as if they had never seen an elevator. It must be the jogging, she thought, as she went back to her knitting at four pounds an hour. Wasn't that what they were all doing in New York these days? Running round Central Park, poor things, avoiding the perverts and the dogs? She had heard that a lot died of it.

"Sir, we're Gold and Karman," said Kurtz a second time as little Ned Quilley cheerily opened the door to them. "I'm Gold."

And his big right hand had landed in poor old Ned's before he even had a chance to draw. "Mr. Quilley, sir-Ned-we are surely honoured to meet you. You have a fine, fine reputation in the profession."

"And I'm Karman, sir," Litvak privately explained, just as respectfully, peering over Kurtz's shoulder. But Litvak was not in the handshaking class: Kurtz had done it for both of them.

"But, my dear fellow," Ned protested with his deprecating Edwardian charm, "my goodness, it's I who am honoured, not you!" And he led them at once to the long sash window, the legendary Quilley 's Window of his father's day, where, as tradition had it, you sat gazing down into Soho market quaffing old Quilley's sherry and contemplating the world go by while you made nice deals for old Quilley and his clients. For Ned Quilley at sixty-two was still very much a son. He asked nothing better than to see his father's agreeable way of life continue. He was a gentle little soul, white-haired and something of a dresser as stagestruck people often are, with a quaint cast in his eye, pink cheeks, and an air of being agitated and delayed both at once.

"Too wet for the tarts, I'm afraid," he declared, bravely flapping an elegant little hand at the window. Insouciance, in Ned's opinion, was what life was all about. "Get rather a decent turnout this time of year, as a rule. Big ones, black ones, yellow ones, every shape and size you can imagine. There's one old biddy been here longer than I have. My father used to give her a pound at Christmas. Wouldn't get much for a pound these days, I'm afraid. Oh no! No, indeed!"

From his cherished breakfront bookcase, while they dutifully laughed with him, Ned extracted a decanter of sherry, officiously sniffed the stopper, then half filled three crystal glasses while they watched him. Their watchfulness was something he sensed at once. He had the feeling they were pricing him, pricing the furniture, the office. An awful thought struck him-it had been at the back of his mind ever since he had received their letter.

"I say, you're not trying to buy me up or anything frightful, are you?" he asked nervously.

Kurtz let out a loud, comforting laugh. "Ned, we are surely not trying to buy you up." Litvak laughed too.

"Well, thank God for that," Ned declared earnestly, handing round the glasses. "Do you know everybody's being bought up these days? I get all sorts of chaps I've never heard of, offering me money down the telephone. All the small, old firms-decent houses-getting gobbled up like what's-its. Shocking. Cheer-ho. Good luck. Welcome," he declared, still shaking his head in disapproval.

Ned's courting rituals continued. He asked where they were staying, and Kurtz said the Connaught, and, Ned, they really loved it, they had felt family from the minute they arrived. This part was true; they had booked in there specially, and Misha Gavron was going to fall straight off his branch when he saw the bill. Ned asked them whether they were finding opportunities for leisure, and Kurtz replied heartily that they were just loving every minute of their time. They were leaving for Munich tomorrow.

"Munich? My goodness, whatever will you be doing over there!" Ned asked, playing his age for them, playing the anachronistic, unworldly dandy. "You chaps don't half hop around, I will say!"

"Co-production money," replied Kurtz, as if that explained everything.

"A lot of it," said Litvak, speaking in a voice as soft as his smile. "The German scene is big today. Way, way up there, Mr. Quilley."

"Oh, I'm sure it is. Oh, so I've heard said," said Ned indignantly. "They're a major force, one has to face it. In everything. War's all forgotten now, swept far under the carpet."

With a mysterious drive to perform ineffectually, Ned made to refill their sherry glasses pretending he had not noticed they were virtually untouched. Then he giggled and put down the decanter. It was a ship's decanter, eighteenth century, with a broad base to keep it steady in a rolling sea. Quite often, with foreigners, Ned made a point of explaining this to put them at their ease. But something about their intent manner restrained him, and instead there was only a small silence and a creaking of chairs. Outside the window the rain had thickened into driving fog.

"Ned," said Kurtz, timing his entrance exactly. "Ned, I want to tell you who we are a little and why we wrote you and why we are stealing your valuable time."

"My dear chaps, please do, delighted," said Ned, and, feeling like someone completely different, folded his little legs and put on an attentive smile while Kurtz settled smoothly into his persuading mode.

By his broad, raked-back forehead Ned guessed he was Hungarian, but he might have been Czech or really any of those places. He had a rich, naturally loud voice and a mid-European accent that the Atlantic had not yet swamped. He was as fast-spoken and fluent as a radio commercial, and his bright narrow eyes seemed to listen to everything he said while his right forearm beat everything to pieces in small, decisive chops. He, Gold, was the lawyer of the family, Kurtz explained; Karman here was more on the creative side, with a background of writing, agenting, and producing, mainly Canada and the Midwest. They had recently taken offices in New York, where their current interest was independent packaging for television.

"Our creative role, Ned, is confined ninety per cent to finding a concept that is acceptable to networks and finance. The concept-we sell this to the backers. Production-we leave this to the producers. Period."

He had finished, and he had looked at his watch with a strangely distracted gesture, and now it was up to Ned to say something intelligent, which to his credit he managed rather well. He frowned, he held out his glass almost to arm's length, and with his feet he traced a slow deliberate pirouette, instinctively responding to Kurtz's mime. "But, old boy. If you're packagers, old boy, what do you want with us agents'?" he protested. "I mean, why do I rate lunch, what? See what I mean? Why lunch if you're packaging!"

At this, to Ned's surprise, Kurtz burst out in the most cheerful and infectious laughter. Ned thought he had been quite witty too, to be honest, and done a rather good thing with his feet; but it was nothing to what Kurtz thought. His narrow eyes clamped shut, his big shoulders lifted, and the next thing Ned knew, the whole room was filled with the warming peals of his Slav mirth. At the same time, his face broke into all kinds of disconcerting furrows. Till now, in Ned's estimation, Kurtz had been forty-five at worst. Suddenly he was Ned's age, his brow and cheeks and neck as crisp as paper, with crevices in them like the slashes of a knife. The transformation bothered Ned. He felt cheated somehow. "Sort of human Trojan Horse," he afterwards complained to his wife, Marjory. "You let in a high-powered showbiz salesman of forty and all of a sudden out pops a sort of sixty-year-old Mr. Punch. Bloody odd."

But it was Litvak this time who supplied the crucial, long-rehearsed answer to Ned's question, the answer on which everything else depended. Leaning his long, angular body forward over his knees, he opened his right hand, splayed the fingers, grasped one, and addressed it in an accented Boston drawl, the product of worker-bee study at the feet of American Jewish teachers.

"Mr. Quilley, sir," he began, so devoutly that he seemed to be imparting a mystical secret. "What we have in mind here is a totally original project. No precedents, no imitators. We take sixteen hours of very good television time-say, fall and winter. We form a matinee theatrical company of strolling players. A bunch of very talented repertory actors, British and American mixed, a wide range of races, personality, human interaction. This company, we move it from city to city, each actor playing a variety of roles, now starring, now supporting. Their real-life human stories and relationships to provide a nice dimension, part of the audience appeal. Live shows in every city."

He glanced up suspiciously as if he thought Quilley had spoken, but Quilley emphatically had not.

"Mr. Quilley, we travel with that company," Litvak resumed, slowing almost to a halt as his fervour deepened. "We ride in that company's buses. We help shift the scenery with that company. We the audience share their problems, their lousy hotels, look in on their fights and love-affairs. We the audience rehearse with them. We share their opening-night nerves, read their reviews next day, rejoice at their successes, grieve at their failures, write letters to their folks. We give theatre back its adventure. Its pioneering spirit. Its actor-audience relationship."

For a moment Quilley thought Litvak had finished. But he was only selecting a different finger to hold on to.

"We use classic theatre plays, Mr. Quilley, out of copyright, low cost all the way. We barnstorm. We use new, relatively unknown actors and actresses, now and then a guest star for mileage, but basically we are promoting new talent and inviting that talent to demonstrate the whole range of its versatility over a minimum four-month period, which hopefully is extended. And re-extended. For the actors, great exposure, great publicity, nice clean shows, no dirt, see if it goes. That's our concept, Mr. Quilley, and our backers seem to like it a lot."

Then, before Quilley even had time to offer his congratulations, a thing he always liked to do when someone told him an idea, Kurtz had stormed back into the act.

"Ned, we want to sign your Charlie," he announced; and with the enthusiasm of a Shakespearian herald bearing news of victory, he swept his whole right arm up into the air and held it there.

Very excited, Ned made to speak, only to find Kurtz was once more talking clean through him.

"Ned, we believe that your Charlie has great wit, great versatility, fine range. If you can reassure us on a couple of slightly urgent points we have-why, I think we can offer her the opportunity of a place in the theatrical firmament which you and she will surely not regret."

Yet again Ned tried to speak, but this time it was Litvak who got in ahead of him: "We're all set to go for her, Mr. Quilley. Give us a couple of answers to a couple of questions and Charlie's up there with the big ones."

Suddenly there was silence, and all Ned could hear was the song in his own heart. He blew out his cheeks and, trying to appear businesslike, tugged at each of his elegant cuffs in turn. He adjusted the rose which Marjory had that very morning put into his button-hole with her usual instruction not to drink too much at lunch. But Marjory would have thought quite differently if she had known that, far from wanting to buy Ned out, they were actually proposing to give their beloved Charlie her long-awaited break. If she had known that, old Marge would have lifted all restrictions, of course she would.

Kurtz and Litvak drank tea, but at The Ivy they take such eccentricities in their stride, and as for Ned he required little persuasion to choose himself a very decent-half bottle from the list and, since they seemed to insist upon it, a big, misted glass of the house Chablis to go with his smoked salmon first. In the taxi, which they took to escape the rain, Ned had begun to relate to them the amusing story of how he had acquired Charlie as a client. In The Ivy he resumed the thread.

"Fell for her hook, line, and sinker. Never done such a thing before. Old fool, that's what I was-not as old as I am now, but still a fool. Nothing much to the show. Little old-fashioned revue, really, dolled up to look modern. But Charlie was marvellous. The defended softness, that's what I look for in the gals." The expression was in fact a legacy of his father's. "Soon as the curtain came down, I popped straight round to her dressing-room-if you could call it a dressing-room-did my Pygmalion act, and signed her on the spot. She wouldn't believe me at first. Thought I was a dirty old man. Had to go back and fetch Marjory to persuade her. Ha!"

"What happened after that?" said Kurtz very pleasantly, handing him some more brown bread and butter. "Roses all the way, huh?"

"Oh, not a bit of it!" Ned protested guilelessly. "She was just like so many of 'em at that age. Come bouncing out of drama college all starry-eyed and full of promise, get a couple of parts, start buying a flat or some stupid thing, then suddenly it all stops for 'em. The twilight time we call it. Some pull through it, some don't. Cheers."

"But Charlie did," Litvak softly prompted, sipping his tea.

"She held on. Sweated it out. It wasn't easy, but it never is. Years of it, in her case. Too many." He was surprised to discover himself so moved. From their expressions, so were they. "Well, now it's come right for her, hasn't it? Oh, I am pleased for her! I really am. Yes, indeed."

And that was another odd thing, Ned told Marjory afterwards. Or maybe it was the same thing over again. He was referring to the way the two men changed character as the day wore on. Back in the office, for instance, he'd hardly got a word in edgeways. But at The Ivy they gave him centre stage and nodded him through his lines with hardly a word between them. And afterwards-well, afterwards was another damned thing completely.

"Terrible childhood, of course," said Ned proudly. "A lot of the gals have that, I notice. It's what sends 'em towards fantasy in the first place. Dissembling. Hiding your emotions. Copying people who look happier than you are. Or unhappier. Stealing a bit of 'em-what acting's half about. Misery. Theft. I'm talking too much. Cheers again."

"Terrible in what way, Mr. Quilley?" Litvak asked respectfully, like someone who was researching the whole question of terribleness. "Charlie's childhood. Terrible how, sir?"

Ignoring what he only afterwards saw to be deepening gravity in Litvak's manner and in Kurtz's gaze as well, Ned entrusted to them whatever knowledge he had incidentally acquired during the little, confessive lunches he occasionally gave her upstairs at Bianchi's, where he took them all. The mother a ninny, he said. The father some sort of rather awful swindler chap, a stockbroker who'd gone to the devil and was now mercifully dead, one of those plausible liars who think God put the fifth ace up their sleeve. Ended up in jug. Died there. Shocking.

Once again, Litvak made the mildest intervention: "Died in prison, did you say, sir?"

"Buried there too. Mother so bitter she wouldn't waste the money moving him."

"This something Charlie told you herself, sir?"

Quilley was mystified. "Well, who else would?"

"No collateral?" said Litvak.

"No what?" said Ned as his fears of a takeover suddenly revived.

"Corroboration, sir. Confirmation from unconnected parties. Sometimes with actresses-

But Kurtz intervened with a fatherly smile: "Ned, you just ignore this boy," he advised. "Mike here has a very suspicious streak in him. Don't you, Mike?"

"Maybe I do, at that," Litvak conceded, in a voice no louder than a sigh.

Only then did Ned think to ask them what they had seen of her work, and to his pleasurable surprise it turned out that they had taken their researches very seriously indeed. Not only had they obtained clips of every minor television appearance she had ever made, they had actually traipsed up to beastly Nottingham on their previous visit to catch her Saint Joan.

"Well, my goodness what a sly pair you are!" cried Ned as the waiters cleared their plates and set the scene for roast duck. "If you'd given me a call, I'd have driven you up there myself, or Marjory would. Did you go backstage, take her out for a meal? You didn't? Well, I'm damned!"

Kurtz allowed himself a moment's hesitation and his voice grew grave. He cast a questioning glance at his partner, Litvak, who gave him a faint nod of encouragement. "Ned," he said, "to tell you the truth, we just didn't quite feel it was appropriate in the circumstances."

"Whatever circumstances are they?" asked Ned, supposing he was referring to some point of agents' ethics. "Good Lord, we're not like that over here, you know! You want to make her an offer, make one. Don't have to get a chit from me. I'll collect my commission one day, don't you worry!"

Then Ned went quiet because they both looked so bloody solemn, he told Marjory. As if they'd swallowed bad oysters. Shells and all.

Litvak was carefully dabbing his thin lips. "Mind if I ask you something, sir?"

"My dear chap," said Ned, very puzzled.

"Would you tell us, please-your own assessment-how does Charlie interview?"

Ned put down his claret glass. "Interview? Ah well, if that's your worry you can take it from me that she's an absolute natural. First rate. Knows instinctively what the press boys want and, given the chance, how to provide it. Chameleon, that's what she is. Bit out of practice recently, I'll grant you, but she'll pick it up again like a shot, you'll see. Don't have any anxiety on that score." He took a long pull of wine to reassure them. "Oh no."

But Litvak was not as uplifted by this news as Ned had hoped. Pressing his lips into a kiss of worried disapproval, he began assembling crumbs on the tablecloth with his long, thin fingers. So that Ned actually lowered his own head and tilted his face up in an effort to draw him from his doldrums: "But, my dear fellow!" he protested uncertainly. "Don't look like that! What can possibly be wrong with her interviewing well? There are plenty of gals around who make a perfect hash of it. If that's what you want, I've got any number of 'em!"

But Litvak's favour was not to be won. His only response was to lift his gaze briefly to Kurtz as if to say "Your witness," then lower it again to the tablecloth. "A real two-hander" Ned told Marjory ruefully afterwards. "You felt they could have switched parts at the drop of a hat."

"Ned," said Kurtz, "if we sign your Charlie for this project, she is going to get one hell of a lot of exposure, and I mean a lot. Once she is into this thing, your kid is going to have her whole life spread right out in front of her face. Not only her love life, her family, her taste in pop-stars and poetry. Not only the story of her father. But also her religion, her attitudes, her opinions."

"And her politics," Litvak whispered, raking in the last of the crumbs. At which Ned suffered a mild but unmistakable loss of appetite, and laid down his knife and fork, while Kurtz kept rolling on: "Ned, our backers in this project are nice Midwestern American people. They have all the virtues. Too much money, ungrateful children, second homes in Florida, wholesome values. But especially the wholesome values. And they want those values reflected in this production, all the way down the line. We can laugh at it a little, weep at it a little, but it's the reality, it's television, and it's where the money is-

"And it's America," Litvak breathed patriotically, to his crumbs.

"Ned, we will be frank with you. We will be truthful. When we finally decided to write you, we were all ready, subject to obtaining other consents along the way, to buy your Charlie out of her commitments and start her on the big road. But I will not conceal from you that in the last couple of days, Karman here and myself have heard things around the bazaars that made us sit up and start to wonder. Her talent, no problem-Charlie is a fine, fine talent, under-exercised, diligent, all set to go. But whether she is bankable within the context of this project. Whether she is exposable. Ned, we want some reassurance from you that this thing isn't serious."

It was Litvak who again put in the decisive thrust. Relinquishing his crumbs at last, he had crooked his right forefinger under his lower lip and was gazing mournfully at Ned through his black-framed spectacles.

"We hear she's currently radical," he said. "We hear she's far, far out in her political causes. Militant. We hear she's currently allied with a very flaky anarchist guy, some kind of crazy. We don't want to condemn anybody on the strength of idle rumour, but the stuff that's reaching us, Mr. Quilley, it's like she's Fidel Castro's mother and Arafat's sister rolled into a single hooker."

Ned stared from one to the other of them, and for a moment he had the delusion that their four eyes were controlled by one optic muscle. He wanted to say something but he felt unreal. He wondered whether he might have drunk the Chablis faster than was prudent. All that he could think of was a favourite aphorism of Marjory's: there is no such thing in life as a bargain.

The dismay that had descended over Ned was like the panic of the old and helpless. He felt physically unequal to the task, too weak for it, too tired. All Americans unsettled him; and most scared him, either by their knowledge or their ignorance, or both. But these two, blankly gazing at him while he floundered for an answer, inspired a spiritual alarm, greater than anything he was prepared for. He was also, in a useless sort of way, very angry. He loathed gossip. All gossip. He regarded it as the blight of his profession. He had seen it ruin careers; he detested it and he could become red-faced and almost rude when it was offered to him by those who did not know his feelings. When Ned talked about people, he did so openly and with affection, exactly as he had talked about Charlie ten minutes ago. Dammit, he loved the girl. It even crossed his mind to indicate this to Kurtz, which for Ned would have been a bold step indeed, and it must have crossed his face as well, for he fancied he saw Litvak start to worry and prepare to back off a little, and Kurtz's extraordinarily mobile face break into a come-now-Ned sort of smile. But an incurable courtesy, as ever, held him back. He was eating their salt. Besides, they were foreign and had totally different standards. Then again, he had to admit, reluctantly, that they had a job to do, and backers to humour, and even in a sense a certain awful rightness on their side, and that he, Ned, must either meet their point or risk wrecking the deal, and with it all his hopes for Charlie. For there was another factor here, that Ned in his fatal reasonableness was also obliged to acknowledge-namely, that even if their project turned out to be dreadful, which he assumed would be the case; even if Charlie were to throw away every line she was given, walk on to the set drunk, and put broken glass in the director's bath-tub, none of which in her professionalism she would contemplate for one faltering second-nevertheless her career, her status, her plain commercial value, would at last be taking that longed-for leap forward from which it need never seriously retreat.

Kurtz, all this while, had been talking undeterred. "Your guidance, Ned," he was saying earnestly. "Help. We want to know this thing isn't going to blow up in our faces on the second day of shooting. Because I'll tell you this." A short strong finger was pointing at him like a pistol barrel. "Nobody in the state of Minnesota is about to be seen paying a quarter of a million dollars to a red-toothed enemy of democracy, if that's what she is, and nobody in GK is going to advise them to commit harakiri doing it."

To begin with, at least, Ned rallied rather well. He apologised for nothing. He reminded them, without giving the smallest ground, of his description of Charlie's childhood, and pointed out that by any normal standards she should have ended up a full-scale juvenile delinquent or-like her father-in prison. As to her politics or whatever one wished to call them, he said, in the nine years odd that he and Marjory had known her, Charlie had been a passionate opponent of apartheid-"Well, one can't fault that, can one?" (though they seemed to think one could)-a militant pacifist, a Sufist, a nuclear marcher, an anti-vivisectionist, and until she went back to smoking again, a champion of campaigns to eliminate tobacco from theatres and on the public underground. And he had no doubt that before Charlie was finally gathered to the Great Reaper, a whole bunch of other, equally disparate causes would attract her romantic, if brief, patronage.

"And you stood by her through all that, Ned," Kurtz marvelled in admiration. "I call that fine, Ned."

"As I would stand by any of them!" Ned rejoined with a flash of spirit. "Dash it all, she's an actress! Don't take her so seriously. Actors don't have opinions, my dear chap, still less do actresses. They have moods. Fads. Poses. Twenty-four-hour passions. There's a lot wrong with the world, dammit. Actors are absolute suckers for dramatic solutions. For all I know, by the time you get her out there, she'll be Born Again!"

"Not politically, she won't," said Litvak nastily, under his breath.

For a few moments longer, under the helpful influence of his claret, Ned continued on this bold course. A sort of giddiness overtook him. He heard the words in his head; he repeated them and felt young again and completely divorced from his own actions. He spoke of actors generally and how they were pursued by "an absolute horror of unreality." How on stage they acted out all the agonies of man, and off stage were hollow vessels waiting to be filled. He talked about their shyness, their smallness, their vulnerability, and their habit of disguising these weaknesses with tough-sounding and extreme causes borrowed from the adult world. He spoke of their self-obsession, and how they saw themselves on stage twenty-four hours a day-in childbirth, under the knife, in love. Then he dried, a thing that happened to him a mite too often these days. He lost his thread, he lost his bounce. The wine waiter brought the liqueur trolley. Under the cold-sober eyes of his hosts, Quilley desperately selected a Marc de Champagne and let the waiter pour a large one before he made a show of stopping him. Meanwhile Litvak had recovered sufficiently to bounce back with a good idea. Poking his long fingers inside his jacket, he drew out one of those notebooks made like a blank picture, with imitation crocodile backing and brass corners for the little sheets of paper.

"I say we start with first principles," he proposed softly, more to Kurtz than to Ned. "The when, the where, the who with, the how long." He drew a margin, presumably for dates. "Rallies she's been in. Demonstrations. Petitions, marches. Anything that has maybe caught the public eye. When we have it all out on the table, we can make an informed assessment. Either buy the risk or get the hell out the back door. Ned, when to your knowledge was she first involved?"

"I like it," said Kurtz. "I like the method, I think it's right for Charlie too." And he managed to say this exactly as if Litvak's plan had come to him out of a clear sky, instead of being the product of hours of preparatory discussion.

So Ned told them that too. When he could, he glossed things over, once or twice he told a small lie, but in the main he told them what he knew. He had misgivings certainly, but those came afterwards. As he put it to Marjory, at the time they just swept him along. Not that he knew very much. The anti-apartheid and anti-nuclear stuff, of course-well, that was common knowledge anyway. Then there was that Theatre of Radical Reform crowd she rode with occasionally, who had made such a damn nuisance of themselves outside the National, stopping the performances. And some people called Alternative Action in Islington, who were some kind of loony Trot splinter group, all fifteen of them. And some awful women's panel she had appeared on at St. Paneras Town Hall, dragging Marjory along in order to show her the light. And there was the time two or three years ago she had rung up in the middle of the night from Durham police station, asking for Ned to come and bail her out, after being arrested at some anti-Nazi jamboree she'd got up to.

"This the thing that made all the publicity, got her picture in the papers, Mr. Quilley?"

"No, that was Reading," said Ned. "That was later."

"So what was Durham?"

"Well, I don't know exactly. I rather forbid it as a topic, to be frank. It's just what one hears by mistake. Wasn't there some nuclear power station project up there? One forgets. One simply does forget. She's become much more moderate latterly, you know. Not half the fireball she used to pretend she was, I can assure you. Far more mature. Oh yes!"

"Pretend, Ned?" Kurtz echoed doubtfully.

"Tell us about Reading, Mr. Quilley," said Litvak. "What happened there?"

"Oh, the same sort of thing. Somebody set fire to a bus, so they all got charged for it. They were protesting against reducing services for old people, I believe. Or was it something about not taking on the darkies as conductors? The bus was empty, of course," he added hastily. "Nobody got hurt."

"Jesus," said Litvak, and glanced at Kurtz, whose questioning now acquired the resonance of a courtroom soap opera:

"Ned, you indicated just now that Charlie was maybe softening somewhat in her convictions. Is that what you are saying?"

"Yes, I think so. If her convictions were ever very hard, that is. It's only an impression, but old Marjory thinks so too. Sure of it-"

"Has Charlie confided such a change of heart to you, Ned?" Kurtz interrupted, rather sharp.

"I just think that once she gets a real chance like this-

Kurtz overrode him: "To Mrs. Quilley perhaps?"

"Well, no, not really."

"Is there anybody else she might have confided in? Such as this anarchist friend she has?"

"Oh, he'd be the last to know."

"Ned, is there anybody apart from you-think carefully, please, girlfriend, boyfriend, maybe an older person, family friend-in whom Charlie would confide such a shift in position? Away from radicalism? Ned?"

"Not that I know of, no. No, I can't think of a soul. She's close in some ways. Closer than you'd think."

Then a most extraordinary thing happened. Ned later provided Marjory with an exact account of it. To escape the uncomfortable and, to Ned's ear, histrionic crossfire of their separate gazes on him, Ned had been playing with his glass, peering into it, rolling the Marc around. Sensing that Kurtz had somehow rested his case, he now glanced up, and intercepted an expression of quite evident relief in Kurtz's features that he was in the act of communicating to Litvak: his actual pleasure that Charlie was not after all softening in her conviction. Or, if she was, had not admitted it to anybody of note. He looked again and it had gone. But not even Marjory could afterwards persuade him it had not been there.

Litvak, the great barrister's junior, had taken over the questioning: a quicker tone to wrap the case up.

"Mr. Quilley, sir, do you hold in your agency individual office papers on all your clients? Files?"

"Well, Mrs. Ellis does, I'm sure," said Ned. "Somewhere."

"Mrs. Ellis been doing that work for long, sir?"

"My goodness, yes. She was there in my father's time."

"And what type of information does she store there? Fees-expenses-commission taken, kind of thing? Are they merely arid business papers, these files?"

"Good Lord, no, she puts everything in. Birthdays, the kind of flowers they like, restaurants. We even found an old dancing-shoe in one. Names of their kids. Dogs. Press cuttings. Any amount of stuff."

"Personal letters?"

"Yes, of course."

"In her own hand? Her own letters, going back over the years?"

Kurtz was embarrassed. His Slav eyebrows said so; they were massing in a pained line round the bridge of his nose.

"Karman, I think Mr. Quilley has given us enough of his time and experience already," he told Litvak severely. "If we need more information, Mr. Quilley will surely supply it later. Better still, if Charlie herself is prepared to talk this out with us, we can get it from her. Ned, this has been a great and memorable occasion. Thank you, sir."

But Litvak was not so easily put off. He had a young man's obstinacy: "Mr. Quilley doesn't have any secrets from us," he exclaimed. "Hell, Mr. Gold. I'm only asking him what the world already knows, and what our visa people will find out in point zero five seconds on their computer. We're in a hurry with this. You know that. If there's papers, her own letters, using her own words, mitigating circumstances, evidence of a change of heart maybe, why don't we have Mr. Quilley show them to us? If he's willing. If he's not-well, that's another matter," he added, with unpleasing innuendo.

"Karman, I am quite sure Ned is willing," said Kurtz sternly, as if that were not the point at all. And shook his head as if to say he would never quite get used to young men's pushy manners these days.

The rain had stopped. They walked little Quilley between them, carefully trimming their agile pace to his own faltering tread. He was fuddled, he was aggrieved, he was afflicted with a sense of alcoholic foreboding that damp traffic fumes did nothing to dispel. What the devil do they want? he kept wondering. One minute offering Charlie the moon, the next objecting to her silly politics? And now, for reasons he had ceased to remember, they were proposing to consult the record, which wasn't a record at all, but a desultory collection of keepsakes, the province of an employee too elderly to be retired. Mrs. Longmore, the receptionist, watched their arrival and Ned knew at once from her disapproving face that he had done himself too well at lunch. To hell with her. Kurtz insisted that Ned go ahead of them up the stairs. From his office, while they practically held a gun to his head, he telephoned Mrs. Ellis asking her to bring Charlie's papers to the waiting-room and leave them there.

"Shall we knock on your door when we're through, Mr. Quilley?" Litvak asked, like someone about to deliver a child.

The last he saw of them both, they were seated at the rosewood drum table in the waiting-room, surrounded by about six of Mrs. Ellis's foul brown boxes that looked as though they had been rescued from the blitz. Like a pair of tax collectors they were, poring over the same set of suspect figures, pencil and paper at their elbows, and Gold, the broad one, with his jacket off and that scruffy watch of his set on the table beside him as if he were timing himself while he made his beastly calculations. After that, Quilley must have dozed off for a bit. He woke with a jolt at five to find the waiting-room empty. And when he buzzed Mrs. Longmore, she replied pointedly that his guests had not wished to disturb him.

Ned did not tell Marjory at once. "Oh, them," he said when she asked him that same evening. "Just a pair of dreary package artists, I'm afraid, on their way to Munich. Nothing to worry about there."

"Jew-boys?"

"Yes-well, yes, Jewish, I suppose. Very, in fact." Marjory nodded as if she'd known as much all along. "But I mean jolly nice ones," said Ned a bit hopelessly.

Marjory was a prison visitor in her off-hours and Ned's deceptions held no mystery for her. But she bided her time. Bill Lochheim was Ned's correspondent in New York, his only American buddy. Next afternoon Ned rang him. Old Loch hadn't heard of them but he duly reported back what Ned already knew: GK were new in the field, had some backing, but independents were a drug on the market these days. Quilley didn't like the tone of old Loch's voice. He sounded as if he'd been put upon somehow-not by Quilley, who had never put upon anyone in his life, but by someone else, some third party he'd consulted. Quilley even had the queer feeling that he and old Loch might, in some strange way, be in the same boat. With amazing bravura, Ned rang GK's New York number on a pretext. The place turned out to be a holding address for out-of-town companies: no information available on clients. Now Ned could think of nothing except his two visitors and the luncheon. He wished to God he had shown them the door. He rang the Munich hotel they had mentioned and got a stuffy manager. Herr Gold and Herr Karman had stayed one night but left early the next morning unexpectedly on business, he said sourly-so why did he say it at all? Always too much information, thought Ned. Or too little. And the same hint of chaps doing things against their better judgment. A German producer whom Kurtz had mentioned said that they were "good people, very respectable, oh very good." But when Ned asked whether they had been in Munich recently and what projects they were associated with, the producer grew hostile and practically hung up on him.

There remained Ned's professional colleagues in the agency business. Ned consulted them reluctantly and with tremendous casualness, spreading his enquiries wide, and drawing blanks everywhere.

"Met two awfully nice Americans the other day," he confided finally to Herb Nolan, of Lomax Stars, pausing at Herb's table at the Garrick. "Over here bargain-hunting for some high-flyin' TV series they're putting together. Gold and something. Come your way at all?"

Nolan laughed. "It was me who sent 'em to you, old boy. Asked after a couple of my horrors, then wanted to know all about your Charlie. Whether I thought she could go the distance. I told 'em, Ned. I told 'em!"

"What did you tell them?"

" 'More likely she'll blow us all sky high,' I said! What?"

Depressed by the poor level of Herb Nolan's humour, Ned enquired no further. But the same night, after Marjory had extracted his inevitable confession, he went on to share his anxieties with her.

"They were in such a damned hurry," he said. "They had too much energy, even for Americans. Went at me like a pair of bloody policemen. First one chap, then the other. Pair of bloody terriers," he added, changing his simile. "I keep thinking I should go to the authorities," he said.

"But, darling," Marjory replied at last. "By the sound of it, I'm afraid they were the authorities."

"I'm going to write to her," Ned declared, with great decisiveness. "I've a jolly good mind to write and warn her, just in case. She could be in trouble."

But even if he had done so, he would have been too late. It was not forty-eight hours later that Charlie set sail for Athens to keep her tryst with Joseph.

So once again it was done; on the face of it, a mere sideshow compared with the main thrust of the operation; and a dreadfully risky one at that, as Kurtz was the first to agree when, the same night, he modestly reported his triumph to Misha Gavron. Yet what else could we have done, Misha-tell me that? Where else was such a precious store of correspondence, ranging over so long a period, to be obtained? They had hunted for other recipients of Charlie's letters-boyfriends, girlfriends, her bloody mother, a former schoolmistress; they had posed, in a couple of places, as a commercial company interested in acquiring the manuscripts and autographs of tomorrow's great. Till Kurtz, with Gavron's grudging consent, had had the whole thing stopped. Better one big strike, he had decreed, than so many dangerous small ones.

Besides, Kurtz needed the intangibles. He needed to feel the warmth and texture of his quarry. Who better than Quilley, therefore, with his long and innocent experience of her, to supply them? Thus Kurtz punched it through with his will. Having done so, he flew next morning to Munich, as he had told Quilley he would, even if the production he was concerned with was not of the type he had led him to suppose. He visited his two safe flats; he breathed fresh encouragement into his men. In addition to this, he contrived a congenial meeting with the good Dr. Alexis: another long luncheon at which they discussed almost nothing of importance-but then what do old friends need but one another?

And from Munich, Kurtz flew on to Athens, continuing his southward march.