The Little Drummer Girl

SIX

The two girls had shown her to the lavatory and stayed with her unembarrassed while she used it. One blonde, one brunette, both scruffy, both under orders to show kindness to the new girl. They wore soft-soled shoes, their shirts hung loose of their jeans, they had twice subdued her effortlessly when she flew at them, and when she cursed them they had smiled at her with the distant sweetness of the deaf.

"I'm Rachel," the brunette confided breathlessly, during a brief truce. "This one's Rose. Rachel-Rose, got it? We're the two 'R's."

Rachel was the comely one. She had a pert North Country accent and merry eyes, and it was Rachel's backside that had stopped Yanuka on the border. Rose was tall and wiry with crinkled fair hair and the trimness of an athlete, but when she opened her hands, her palms were like axe heads on her thin wrists.

"You'll be all right, Charlie, don't you worry," Rose assured her, in a dried-out accent that could have been South African.

"I was all right before," said Charlie as she took another vain heave at them.

From the lavatory they led her to a ground-floor bedroom and gave her a comb and hair brush and a glass of slimming tea, no milk, and she sat on the bed sipping it and blaspheming in a tremulous fury while she tried to get her breathing right. " 'penniless actress held,' " she muttered. "What's the ransom, girls? My overdraft?" But they only smiled at her more fondly, hovering to either side of her with their arms loose, waiting to walk her up the big staircase. Arriving at the first landing, she lashed out at them again, this time with her clenched fist, in a swinging furious sweep of the whole arm, only to find herself laid gently on her back gazing upward at the stained-glass canopy of the stairwell, which caught the moonlight like a prism and broke it into a mosaic of pale gold and pink. "I just wanted to bust your nose for you," she explained to Rachel, but Rachel's response was a gaze of radiant understanding.

The house was ancient and smelt of cat and her bloody mother. It was crammed with bad Greek furniture in the Empire style and hung with faded velvet curtains and brass chandeliers. But if it had been clean as a Swiss hospital or sloping like a ship's deck, it would only have been a different madness, not a better or worse one. On the second landing a cracked jardiniere reminded her yet again of her mother: she saw herself as a small child seated at her mother's side wearing corduroy dungarees and shelling peas in a conservatory overhung with monkey-puzzle trees. Yet for the life of her she couldn't remember then or afterwards a house possessed of a conservatory, unless it was the first they ever had, in Branksome, near Bournemouth, when Charlie was aged three.

They approached a double door, Rachel pushed it and stood aside and a cavernous upper room was opened to her. At the centre of it sat two figures at a table, one broad and big, one stooping and very thin, both dressed in cloudy browns and greys, and from that distance phantoms. On the table she saw papers strewn, to which a downlight from the centre of the ceiling gave disproportionate prominence, and already from some way off they looked to her like press cuttings. Rose and Rachel had fallen back as if unworthy. Rachel gave her a shove on the rump and said, "On you go then," and Charlie found herself making the last twenty feet alone, feeling like an ugly clockwork mouse that has been wound up and set to run by itself. Throw a fit, she thought. Clutch my stomach, fake appendicitis. Scream. Her entrance was the cue for the two men to bound simultaneously to their feet. The thin man remained standing at the table, but the big man strode boldly up to her and his right hand curved in on her in a crab-like gesture, seizing her own and shaking it before she could prevent him.

"Charlie, we are surely glad to have you safely here among us!" Kurtz exclaimed in a swift congratulatory flow, as if she had risked fire and flood to get to them. "Charlie, my name"-her hand was still in his powerful grasp, and the intimacy of their two skins was contrary to everything she had expected-"my name for want of a better is Marty and when God finished making me there were a couple of spare pieces left around so He put together Mike here as an afterthought, so say hullo to Mike. Mr. Richthoven over there, to use his flag of convenience-Joseph, as you call him-well, I guess you practically christened him yourself anyway, didn't you?"

He must have entered the room without her noticing. Peering round, she found him on the point of arranging some papers on a small folding table set apart from everyone. On the table stood a personal reading lamp, of which the candle-like glow touched his face as he leaned across it.

"I could christen the bastard now," she said.

She thought of going for him as she had for Rachel, three quick strides and one good swipe before they stopped her, but she knew she'd never make it, so she contented herself with a volley of obscenities instead, to which Joseph listened with an air of distant recollection. He had changed into a brown lightweight pullover; the bandleader's silk shirt, the bottle-top gold cufflinks were gone as if for ever.

"My advice to you is to suspend your judgment and your bad language until you hear what these two men have to tell you," he said, without lifting his head to her, while he continued setting out his bulletins. "You are with good people here. Better than you are accustomed to, I would say. You have much to learn and, if you are lucky, much to do. Conserve your energy," he advised, in what sounded like a distracted private memo to himself. And continued to busy himself with his papers.

He doesn't care, she thought bitterly. He's put down his burden and the burden was me. The two men at the table were still standing, waiting for her to sit, which was a madness in itself. Madness to be polite to a girl you have just kidnapped, madness to lecture her on goodness, madness to sit down to a conference with your abductors after you have had a nice cup of tea and fixed your make-up. She sat down nevertheless, Kurtz and Litvak did the same.

"Who's got the cards?" she blurted facetiously as she punched away a stray tear with her knuckles. She noticed a scuffed brown briefcase on the floor between them, its mouth open, but not wide enough to see inside. And yes, the papers on the desk were press cuttings, and though Mike was already packing them away in a folder, she had no difficulty at all in recognising them as cuttings about herself and her career.

"You have got the right girl, you're sure of that, are you?" she said determinedly. She was addressing Litvak, mistakenly suspecting him to be the more suggestible on account of his spindly frame. But she really didn't care whom she was addressing as long as she kept afloat. "Only if you're looking for the three masked men who did the bank on Fifty-second Street, they went the other way. I was the innocent bystander who gave birth ahead of time."

"Charlie, we assuredly have the right girl!" Kurtz cried delightedly, lifting both his thick arms from the table at once. He glanced at Litvak, then across the room at Joseph, one benign but hard glance of calculation, and the next moment he was off, speaking with the animal force that had so overpowered Quilley and Alexis and countless other unlikely collaborators throughout his extraordinary career: the same rich Euro-American accents; the same hacking gestures of the forearm.

But Charlie was an actress, and her professional instincts had never been clearer. Neither Kurtz's verbal torrent nor her own mystification at the violence done to her dulled her many-stranded perceptions of what was going on in the room. We're on stage, she thought; it's us and them. As the young sentries dispersed themselves to the gloom of the perimeter, she could almost hear the tiptoe shuffle of the latecomers jockeying for their seats on the other side of the curtain. The set, now that she examined it, resembled the bedchamber of a deposed tyrant; her captors, the freedom fighters who had ousted him. Behind Kurtz's broad paternal brow as he sat facing her, she made out the dust-shadow of a vanished imperial bed-head imprinted on the crumbling plaster. Behind skinny Litvak hung a scrolled gilt mirror strategically placed for the pleasure of departed lovers. The bare floorboards provided a boxed and stagey echo; the downlight accentuated the hollows of the two men's faces and the drabness of their partisan costumes. In place of his shiny Madison Avenue suit-though Charlie lacked that standard of comparison-Kurtz now sported a shapeless army bush jacket with dark sweat patches at the armpits and a row of gunmetal pens jammed into the button-down pocket; while Litvak, the Party Intellectual, favoured a short-sleeved khaki shirt from which his white arms poked like stripped twigs. Yet she had only to glance at either man to recognise their communality with Joseph. They are drilled in the same things, she thought, they share the same ideas and practices. Kurtz's watch lay before him on the desk. It reminded her of Joseph's water-bottle.

Two shuttered French windows gave on to the front of the house. Two more overlooked the rear. The double doors to the wings were closed, and if she had ever thought of making a dash for it, she knew now that it was hopeless, for though the sentries affected a workshop languidness, she had recognised in them already-she had reason to-the readiness of professionals. Beyond the sentries again, in the farthest corners of the set, glowed four mosquito coils, like slow-burning fuses giving out a musky scent. And behind her, Joseph's little reading lamp-despite everything, or perhaps because of it, the only comfortable light.

All this she took in almost before Kurtz's rich voice had begun filling the room with its tortuously impelling phrases. If Charlie had not already guessed that she was headed for a long night, that relentless, pounding voice told her now.

"Charlie, what we seek to do, we wish to define ourselves, we wish to introduce ourselves, and though nobody here is given to apologising overmuch, we also wish to say we're sorry. Some things have to be done. We did a couple of them and that's how it is. Sorry, greetings, and again welcome. Hi."

Having paused long enough for her to unleash another volley of curses, he smiled broadly and resumed.

"Charlie, I have no doubt that you have many questions you would like to throw our way and in due course we shall surely answer them as best we can. Meanwhile let us try at least to supply a couple of basics for you. You ask, who aie we?" This time he made no pause at all, for the fact was that he was a lot less interested in studying the effect of his words than in using them to gain a friendly mastery of the proceedings and of her. "Charlie, primarily we are decent people as Joseph said, good people. In that sense, like good and decent people the world over, I guess you could reasonably call us non-sectarian, non-aligned, and deeply concerned like yourself about the many wrong directions the world is taking. If I add that we are also Israeli citizens, I trust you will not immediately foam at the mouth, vomit, or jump out of the window, unless of course it is your personal conviction that Israel should be swept into the sea, napalmed, or handed over gift-wrapped to one or another of the many fastidious Arab organisations committed to our elimination." Sensing a secret shrinking in her, Kurtz lunged for it immediately. "Is that your conviction, Charlie?" he enquired, dropping his voice. "Perhaps it is. Why don't you just tell us how you feel about that? You want to get up right now? Go home? You have your air ticket, I believe. We'll give you money. Want to run for it?"

An icy stillness descended over Charlie's manner, disguising the chaos and momentary terror inside her. That Joseph was Jewish she had not doubted since her abortive interrogation of him on the beach. But Israel was a confused abstraction to her, engaging both her protectiveness and her hostility. She had never supposed for one second that it would ever get up and come to face her in the flesh.

"So what is this, actually?" she demanded, ignoring Kurtz's offer to discontinue dealings before they had begun. "A war party? A punitive raid? You going to put the electrodes on me? What the hell's the big idea?"

"Ever met an Israeli before?" Kurtz enquired.

"Not that I know of."

"You have some racial objection to Jews overall? Jews as Jews, period? We don't smell bad to you, have improper table manners? Tell us. We understand these things."

"Don't be bloody silly." Her voice had gone wrong, or was it her hearing?

"You feel you are among enemies here?"

"Oh, Christ, what gave you that idea? I mean anybody who kidnaps me is a friend for life," she retorted, and to her surprise won a burst of spontaneous laughter in which everyone seemed free to join. Except for Joseph, that is, who was too busy at his reading, as she could hear by the faint rustle as he turned the pages over.

Kurtz bore in on her a little harder. "So put our minds at rest for us," he urged, still beaming heartily. "Let us forget that you are in some sense captive here. May Israel survive or must all of us here pack up our belongings and go back to our former countries and start over again? Maybe you would prefer us to take a piece of Central Africa? Or Uruguay? Not Egypt, thank you, we tried it once and it wasn't a success. Or shall we re-disperse ourselves over the ghettos of Europe and Asia while we wait for the next pogrom? What do you say, Charlie?"

"I just want you to leave the poor bloody Arabs alone," she said, parrying again.

"Great. And how do we do that specifically?"

"Stop bombing their camps. Driving them off their land. Bulldozing their villages. Torturing them."

"Ever looked at a map of the Middle East?"

"Of course I have."

"And when you looked at the map, did you once wish the Arabs would leave us alone?" said Kurtz, as dangerously cheerful as before.

To her confusion and fear was added plain embarrassment, as Kurtz had probably intended. Faced with such bald reality, her flip phrases had a schoolroom cheapness. She felt like a fool, preaching to the wise.

"I just want peace," she said stupidly; though, as a matter of fact, it was true. She had a decent vision, when it was allowed her, of a Palestine magically restored to those who had been hounded from it in order to make way for more powerful, European custodians.

"In that case, why don't you take a look at the map again and ask yourself what Israel wants," Kurtz advised her contentedly, and stopped for a break that was like a commemorative silence for the loved ones unable to be with us here tonight.

And this silence became more extraordinary the longer it lasted, since it was Charlie herself who helped preserve it. Charlie, who minutes before had been screaming blue murder at God and the world, now suddenly had nothing to add. And it was Kurtz, not Charlie, who finally broke the spell with what sounded like a prepared statement for the press.

"Charlie, we are not here to attack your politics. You will not believe me at this early stage-why should you?-but we like your politics. Every aspect of them. Every paradox and good intention. We respect them and we need them; we do not laugh at them at all, and in due course I surely hope we may return to them and discuss them openly and creatively. We are aiming to address the natural humanity in you, that is all. We are aiming at your good, caring, human heart. Your feelings. Your sense of right. We mean to ask nothing of you which conflicts in any wise with your strong and decent ethical concerns. Your polemical politics-the names you give to your beliefs-well, we would like to put them on a back burner. Your beliefs themselves-the more confused they are, the more irrational, the more frustrated-Charlie, we respect them totally. On this premise, you will surely sit with us a little longer and hear us out."

Once again, Charlie hid her response under a fresh attack: "If Joseph's Israeli," she demanded, "what the hell's he doing driving round in a dirty great Arab car?"

Kurtz's face broke into that ploughed and wrinkled smile which had so dramatically betrayed his age to Quilley. "We stole it, Charlie," he replied cheerfully, and his admission was followed at once by another round of laughter from the kids, in which Charlie was half tempted to take part. "And the next thing you want to know, Charlie," he said-thus incidentally announcing that the Palestinian issue was, at least for the time being, safely stored away on that back burner he had spoken of-"is what are you doing here among us and why have you been dragged here in such a roundabout and unceremonious fashion. I will tell you. The reason, Charlie, is that we want to offer you a job. An acting job."

He had hit calm water and his bountiful smile showed he knew it. His voice had become slow and deliberate, as if he were announcing the number of the lucky winners: "The biggest part you ever had in your life, the most demanding, the most difficult, surely the most dangerous, and surely the most important. And I don't mean money. You can have money galore, no problem, name your figure." His big forearm swept away financial considerations. "The part we have in view for you combines all your talents, Charlie, human and professional. Your wit. Your excellent memory. Your intelligence. Your courage. But also that extra human quality to which I already referred. Your warmth. We chose you, Charlie. We cast you. We looked at a big field, many candidates from many countries. We came up with you and that's why you're here. Among fans. Everybody in this room has seen your work, everybody admires you. So let's get the atmosphere right. On our side there is no hostility. There is affection, there is admiration, there is hope. Hear us out. It's like your friend Joseph said, we are good people, the same as you. We want you. We need you. And there are people out there who are going to need you even more than we do."

His voice had left a void. She had known actors, just a few, whose voices did that. It was a presence, by its remorseless benevolence it became an addiction, and when it ceased, as it did now, it left you stranded. First Al gets his big part, she thought, in an instinctive rush of elation, and now I do. The madness of her situation was still quite clear to her, yet it was all she could manage to bite back a grin of excitement that was tickling at her cheeks and trying 'to get out.

"So that's how you do your casting, is it?" she said, mustering a sceptical tone once more. "Knock 'em over the head and drag 'em in handcuffed? That's your usual way, I suppose."

"Charlie, we are surely not claiming that this is usual drama," Kurtz replied equably, and once more left the initiative with her.

"A part what in, anyway?" she said, still fighting the grin.

"Call it theatre."

She remembered Joseph and the fun fading from his face, and his clipped reference to the theatre of the real. "So it's a play then," she said. "Why don't you say so?"

"In a sense it is a play," Kurtz agreed.

"Who writes it?"

"We handle the plot, Joseph does the dialogue. With a lot of help from you."

"Who's the audience?" She made a gesture towards the shadows. "These little charmers?"

Kurtz's solemnity was as sudden and awesome as his goodwill. His worker's hands found each other on the table, his head came forward over them, and not even the most determined sceptic could have denied the conviction in his manner. "Charlie, there are people out there who will never get to watch the play, never even know it's running, yet who will owe you for as long as they live. Innocent people. The ones you've always cared about, tried to speak for, march for, help. In everything that follows from here on, you have to keep that notion before you in your head, or you will lose up and you will lose yourself, no question."

She tried to look away from him. His rhetoric was too high, too much. She wished he would train it on someone else.

"Who the hell are you to say who's innocent?" she demanded rudely, again forcing herself against the tide of his persuasion.

"You mean we as Israelis, Charlie?"

"I mean you," she retorted, skirting the dangerous ground.

"I would prefer to turn your question around a little, Charlie, and say that in our view somebody has to be very guilty indeed before he needs to die."

"Such as who? Who needs to die? Those poor sods you shoot up on the West Bank? Or the ones you bomb in Lebanon?" How on earth had they come to be talking about death? she wondered, even as she put the crazy question. Had she started it, had he? It made no difference. He was already weighing his reply.

"Only those who break completely the human bond, Charlie," Kurtz replied with steady emphasis. "They deserve to die."

Stubbornly, she went on fighting him: "Are there Jews like that?"

"Jews, yes, Israelis surely also, but we are not among them, and mercifully, they are not our problem here tonight."

He had the authority to talk that way. He had the answers children long for. He had the background and the whole room knew it, Charlie included: that he was a man who dealt only in things he had experienced. When he asked questions, you knew he had himself been questioned. When he gave orders, you knew he had obeyed the orders of others. When he spoke of death, it was clear that death had passed by him often and very close, and might any moment come his way again. And when he chose to issue a warning to her, as he did now, he was quite evidently on terms with the dangers he spoke of: "Do not confuse our play with entertainment, Charlie," he told her earnestly. "We are not speaking of some enchanted forest. When the lights go down on the stage, it will be night-time in the street. When the actors laugh they will be happy, and when they weep they will very likely be bereaved and broken-hearted. And if they get hurt-and they will, Charlie-they will surely not be in a position, when the curtain falls, to jump up and run for the last bus home. There's no squeamish pulling back from the harsher scenes, no days off sick. It's peak performance all the way down the line. If that's what you like, if that's what you can handle-and we think it is-then hear us out. Otherwise let's skip the audition right now."

In his Euro-Bostonian drawl, faint as a distant signal on the transatlantic radio, Shimon Litvak made a first husky interjection: "Charlie never walked away from a fight in her life, Marty," he objected, in the tone of a disciple reassuring his master. "We don't just believe that, we know it. It's all over her record."

They were halfway there, Kurtz told Misha Gavron later, describing, during a rare ceasefire in their relationship, this point in the proceedings: a lady who consents to listen is a lady who consents, he said, and Gavron very nearly smiled.

Halfway, perhaps-yet, in terms of the time ahead of them, barely at the beginning. By insisting on compression, Kurtz was not in the least insisting upon haste. He placed great weight upon a laboured manner, on adding fuel to her frustration, on having her impatience racing out ahead of them like a lead-horse. Nobody understood better than Kurtz what it was like to possess a mercurial nature in a plodding world, or how to play upon its restlessness. Within minutes of her arrival, while she was still scared, he had befriended her: a father of Joseph's lover. Within minutes more, he had offered her the resolution to all the disordered components of a life so far. He had appealed to the actress in her, to the martyr, to the adventurer; he had flattered the daughter and excited the aspirant. He had granted her an early glimpse of the new family she might care to join, knowing that deep down, like most rebels, she was only looking for a better conformity. And most of all, by heaping such benefits upon her, he had made her rich, which, as Charlie herself had long preached to anyone who would hear her, was the beginning of subservience.

"So, Charlie, what we propose," said Kurtz, in a slower, more genial voice, "we propose an open-ended audition, a string of questions which we invite you to answer very frankly, very truthfully, even though for the meanwhile remaining necessarily in the dark about the purpose of them."

He paused but she didn't speak, and there was by now a tacit submission in her silence.

"We ask you never to evaluate, never to try to come to our side of the net, never to seek to please or gratify us in any regard. Many things you might consider negative in your life we would surely see differently. Do not attempt to do our thinking for us." A short jab of the forearm entrenched this amicable warning. "Question. What happens-whether now or later-what happens should either one of us elect to jump off the escalator? Charlie, let me try to answer that."

"You do that, Mart," she advised, and putting her elbows on the table, rested her chin in her hands and smiled at him with a look intended to convey dazed unbelief.

"Thank you, Charlie, so listen carefully, please. Depending on the precise moment you want out or we do, depending on the degree of your knowledge at that time and our assessment of you, we follow one of two courses. Course one, we extract a solemn promise from you, we give you money, we send you back to England. A handshake, mutual trust, good friends, and a certain vigilance on our side to make sure you keep the bargain. You follow me?"

She lowered her gaze to the table, partly to escape his scrutiny, partly to conceal her growing excitement. For that was another thing Kurtz counted on, which most intelligence professionals forget too soon: to the uninitiated, the secret world is of itself attractive. Simply by turning on its axis, it can draw the weakly anchored to its centre.

"Course two, a little rougher, still not terrible. We place you in quarantine. We like you, but we fear we have reached a point where you might compromise our project, where the part we are proposing, say, cannot safely be offered anyplace else while you are at large to talk about it."

She knew without looking that he was smiling his good-hearted smile, suggesting that such frailty on Charlie's part would be only human.

"So what we can do in that case, Charlie," he resumed, "we take a nice house somewhere-say, on a beach, somewhere pleasant, no problem. We give you company, some people similar to the kids here. Nice people but able. We fake some reason for your absence, most likely a voguish one that fits your volatile reputation, such as a mystical sojourn to the East."

His thick fingers had found his old wristwatch on the table before him. Without looking at it, Kurtz lifted it and set it down six inches nearer to him. Needing an activity herself, Charlie took up a pen and began to doodle on the pad before her.

"Once you are out of quarantine, we do not desert you-far from it. We straighten you out, we give you a sack of money, we keep in touch with you, make sure you are not incautious in any way, and as soon as it's safe we help you to resume your career and friendships. That's the worst that can happen, Charlie, and I'm only telling it to you because you may be harbouring some crazy notion that by saying 'no' to us, now or later, you're going to wake up dead in a river wearing a pair of concrete boots. We don't deal that way. Least of all with friends."

She was still doodling. Closing a circle with her pencil, she drew a neat diagonal arrow above it to make it male. She had flicked through some work of popular psychology that used that symbol. Suddenly, like a man annoyed at being interrupted, Joseph spoke; yet his voice, for all its severity, had a thrilling and warm effect on her.

"Charlie, it will not be enough for you to play the sullen witness. It is your own dangerous future they are discussing. Do you mean to sit there and allow them to dispose of it practically without consulting you? A commitment, do you understand? Charlie, come!"

She drew another circle. Another boy. She had heard everything Kurtz had said, every innuendo. She could have played back every word for him, just as she had done for Joseph on the Acropolis. She was as keen-witted and alert as she had been in her life, but every cunning instinct in her told her to dissemble and withhold.

"So how long does the show run, Mart?" she asked, in a lacklustre voice as if Joseph had never spoken at all.

Kurtz rephrased her question: "Well now, I guess what you really mean is what happens to you when the job runs out. Is that right?"

She was wonderful. A shrew. Flinging down her pencil, she slapped the table with her palm: "No, it bloody well isn't! I mean how long does it run, and what about my tour with As You Like It in the autumn?"

Kurtz betrayed no triumph at the practicality of her objection. "Charlie," he said earnestly, "your projected tour with As You Like It will in no wise be affected. We would surely expect you to fulfill that engagement, assuming the grant for it is forthcoming. As to duration, your commitment to our project could take six weeks, it could take two years, though we would surely hope not. What we have to hear from you now is whether you wish to audition with us at all or whether you prefer to tell good night to everybody here and go home to a safer, duller life. What's your verdict?"

It was a false peak he had made for her. He wished to give her a sense of conquest as well as of submission. Of having chosen her own captors. She was wearing a denim jacket and one of the tin buttons hung loose; this morning when she put it on, she had made a mental note to stitch it during the boat trip, then had promptly forgotten it again in her excitement at meeting Joseph. Taking hold of it now, she began testing the strength of the thread. She was centre stage. She could feel their collective gaze fixed on her, from the table, from the shadows, from behind her. She could feel their bodies craning in tension, Joseph's also, and hear the taut, creaking sound that audiences make when they are hooked. She could feel the strength of their purpose and of her own power: will she, won't she?

"Jose?" she said, without turning her head.

"Yes, Charlie."

She still did not turn to him, yet she had the clear knowledge that from his candlelit island he was waiting on her answer more keenly than all the rest of them together.

"This is it, is it? Our big romantic tour of Greece? Delphi, all the second-best places?"

"Our drive north will in no wise be affected," Joseph replied, lightly parodying Kurtz's phraseology.

"Not even postponed?"

"I would say it was imminent, actually."

The thread broke, the button lay on her palm. She tossed it on the table, watched it spin and settle. Heads or tails, she thought, playing them. Let them sweat a little. She puffed out some breath as if blowing away her forelock.

"So I'll stick around for the audition then, won't I?" she told Kurtz carelessly, looking nowhere but at the button. "I've got nowt to lose," she added, and immediately wished she hadn't. Sometimes, to her own annoyance, she overdid things for the sake of a good exit line: "Nowt I haven't lost already, anyhow," she said.

Curtain, she thought; applause, please, Joseph, and we'll wait for tomorrow's reviews. But none came, so she picked up a pencil and drew a girl for a change, while Kurtz, perhaps without even knowing he was doing so, transferred his watch to another, better spot.

The interrogation, with Charlie's gracious consent, could now begin in earnest.

Slowness is one thing, concentration another. Kurtz did not relax for a second; he did not permit himself or Charlie even half a breathing space as he willed her, coaxed her, lulled and woke her up, and by every effort of his dynamic spirit bound himself to her in their burgeoning theatrical partnership. Only God and a few people in Jerusalem, it was said within his service, knew where Kurtz's repertoire was learnt-the mesmeric intensity, the horse-drawn Americanised prose, the flair, the barrister's tricks. His slashed face, now applauding, now ruefully incredulous, now beaming out the reassurance that she wanted, became by degrees an entire audience in itself, so that all her performance was directed towards winning his desperately coveted approval and no one else's. Even Joseph was forgotten: put aside until another life.

Kurtz's first questions, by design, were scattered and harmless. It was as if, thought Charlie, he had a blank passport application pinned up in his mind and Charlie, without being able to see it, was filling in the boxes. Full name of your mother, Charlie. Your father's date and place of birth if known, Charlie. Grandfather's occupation; no, Charlie, on your father's side. Followed, with no conceivable reason, by the last known address of a maternal aunt, which was followed yet again by some arcane detail of her father's education. Not a single one of these early questions bore directly upon herself, nor did Kurtz intend it to. Charlie was like the forbidden subject he was scrupulous to avoid. The entire purpose behind this cheerful quickfire opening salvo was not to elicit information at all, but to instill in her the instinctive obedience, the yes-sir-no-sir of the classroom, on which the later passages between them would depend while Charlie, for her part, as the sap of her trade increasingly worked in her, performed, obeyed, and reacted with ever-increasing compliancy. Had she not done as much for directors and producers a hundred times-used the stuff of harmless conversation to give them a sample of her range? All the more reason, under Kurtz's hypnotic encouragement, to do it now.

"Heidi?" Kurtz echoed. "Heidi? That's a damned odd name for an English elder sister, isn't it?"

"Not for Heidi, it isn't," she replied buoyantly, and scored an immediate laugh from the kids beyond the lighting. Heidi because her parents went to Switzerland for their honeymoon, she explained; and Switzerland was where Heidi was conceived. "Among the edelweiss," she added, with a sigh. "In the missionary position."

"So why Charmian?' Marty asked when the laughter had finally subsided.

Charlie lifted her voice to capture the curdled tones of her bloody mother: "The name Charmian was arrived upon with a view to flettering our rich and distant cousin of that na-eme."

"Did it pay off?" Kurtz asked as he inclined his head to catch something Litvak was trying to say to him.

"Not yet," Charlie replied skittishly, still with her mother's precious intonation. "Father, you know, has passed on, but Cousin Charmian, alas, has yet to join him."

Only by these and many similar harmless detours did they gradually advance upon the subject of Charlie herself.

"Libra," Kurtz murmured with satisfaction as he jotted down her date of birth.

Meticulously but swiftly, he bustled her through her early childhood-boarding schools, houses, names of early friends and ponies-and Charlie answered him in kind, spaciously, sometimes humorously, always willingly, her excellent memory illuminated by the fixed glow of his attention and by her growing need to be on terms with him. From schools and childhood it was a natural step-though Kurtz took it only with the greatest diffidence-to the painful history of her father's ruin, and Charlie rendered this in quiet but moving detail, from the first brutal breaking of the news to the trauma of the trial and sentence and imprisonment. Now and then, it was true, her voice caught slightly; sometimes her gaze sank to study her own hands that played so prettily and expressively in the downlight; then a gallant, lightly self-mocking phrase would come to her, to blow it all away.

"We'd have been all right if we'd been working class," she said once, with a wise and hopeless smile. "You get sacked, you go redundant, the forces of capital run against you-it's life, it's reality, you know where you are. But we weren't working class. We were us. The winning side. And all of a sudden, we'd joined the losers."

"Tough," said Kurtz gravely, with a shake of his broad head.

Backtracking, he probed for the solid facts: date and place of trial, Charlie; the exact length of sentence, Charlie; names of lawyers if she remembered them. She didn't, but wherever she could she helped him, and Litvak duly noted down her answers, leaving Kurtz free to give her his entire benevolent attention. Now all laughter had ceased completely. It was as if the soundtrack had stopped dead, all but hers and Marty's. There was not a creak, not a cough, not an alien shuffle from anywhere. In her whole life, it seemed to Charlie, no group of people had been so attentive, so appreciative of her performance. They understand, she thought. They know what it is to live the nomad's life; to be thrown upon your own resources when the cards are stacked against you. Once, on a quiet order from Joseph, the lights went out and they waited together without a sound in the tense darkness of an air raid, Charlie as apprehensive as the rest, till Joseph announced the all-clear and Kurtz resumed his patient questioning. Had Joseph really heard anything, or was this their way of reminding her that she belonged? The effect on Charlie was in either case the same: for those tense few seconds she was their fellow conspirator with no thought of rescue.

At other times, wresting her gaze briefly from Kurtz, she would see the kids dozing at their posts: Swedish Raoul, with his flaxen head sunk upon his chest and the sole of one thick track-shoe flattened against the wall; South African Rose propped against the double doors, her runner's legs stretched in front of her and her long arms folded across her chest; North Country Rachel, the wings of her black hair folded round her face, eyes half closed, but still with her soft smile of sensual reminiscence. Yet the smallest extraneous whisper found every one of them instantly alert.

"So what's the bottom line here, Charlie?" Kurtz enquired kindly. "Regarding that whole early period of your life until what we may call the Fall-

"The age of innocence, Mart?" she suggested helpfully.

"Precisely. Your age of innocence. Define it for me."

"It was hell."

"Want to name some reasons?"

"It was suburbia. Isn't that enough?"

"No, it is not."

"Oh, Mart-you're so-" Her slack-mouthed voice. Her tone of fond despair. Limp gestures with the hands. How could she ever explain? "It's all right for you, you're a Jew, don't you see? You've got these fantastic traditions, the security. Even when you're persecuted, you know who you are, and why."

Kurtz ruefully acknowledged the point.

"But for us-rich English suburban kids from Nowheresville-forget it. We had no traditions, no faith, no self-awareness, no nothing."

"But you told me your mother was Catholic."

"Christmas and Easter. Pure hypocrisy. We're the post-Christian era, Mart. Didn't anybody tell you? Faith leaves a vacuum behind it when it goes away. We're in it."

As she said this, she caught Litvak's smouldering eyes upon her and received the first hint of his rabbinical anger.

"No going to confession?" Kurtz asked.

"Come off it. Mum didn't have anything to confess! That's her whole trouble. No fun, no sin, no nothing. Just apathy and fear. Fear of life, fear of death, fear of the neighbours-fear. Somewhere out there, real people were living real lives. Just not us. Not in Rickmansworth. No way. I mean, Christ-for children-I mean talk about castration!"

"And you-no fear?"

"Only of being like Mum."

"And this notion we all have-ancient England steeped in her traditional ways?"

"Forget it."

Kurtz smiled and shook his wise head as if to say you could always learn.

"So as soon as you could, you left home and you took revenge in the stage and radical politics," he suggested contentedly. "You became a political exile to the stage. I read that somewhere, some interview you gave. I liked it. Go on from there."

She was back to doodling again, more symbols of the psyche. "Oh, there were other ways of breaking out before that," she said.

"Such as?"

"Well, sex, you know," said Charlie carelessly. "I mean we haven't even touched on sex as the essential basis of revolt, have we? Or drugs."

"We haven't touched on revolt," said Kurtz.

"Well, take it from me, Mart-

Then a strange thing happened: proof, perhaps, of how a perfect audience can extract the best from a performer and improve her in spontaneous, unexpected ways. She had been on the brink of giving them her set piece for the unliberated. How the discovery of self was an essential prelude to identifying with the radical movement. How when the history of the new revolution came to be written, its true roots would be found in the drawing-rooms of the middle classes, where repressive tolerance had its natural home. Instead of which, to her surprise, she heard herself enumerating aloud for Kurtz-or was it for Joseph?-her rows and rows of early lovers and all the stupid reasons she had invented for going to bed with them. "It's completely beyond me, Mart," she insisted, once more opening her hands disarmingly. Was she using them too much? She feared she might be, and put them in her lap. "Even today. I didn't want them, I didn't like them, I just let them." The men she had taken out of boredom, anything to move the stale air of Rickmansworth, Mart. Out of curiosity. Men to prove her power, men to avenge herself against other men, or against other women, against her sister or her bloody mother. Men out of politeness, Mart, out of sheer bone-weariness at their persistence. The casting couches-Christ, Mart, you can't imagine! Men to break the tension, men to create it. Men to inform her-her political enlighteners, appointed to explain to her in bed the things she could never get her mind round from the books. The five-minute lusts that smashed like pottery in her hands and left her lonelier than ever. Failures, failures- every one of them, Mart-or so she wanted him to believe. "But they freed me, don't you see? I was using my own body in my own way\ Even if it was the wrong way. It was my show!"

While Kurtz nodded sagely, Litvak wrote swiftly at his side. But in her secret mind she was picturing Joseph seated behind her. She imagined him looking up from his reading, his strong index finger laid along his smooth cheek, while he received the private gift of her amazing openness. Scoop me up, she was saying to him; give me what the others never could.

Then she fell quiet and her own silence chilled her. Why had she done that? In her entire life she had never played that part before, not even to herself. The timeless hour of the night had affected her. The lighting, the upstairs room, the sense of travel, of talking to strangers on a train. She wanted to sleep. She'd done enough. They must give her the part or send her home, or both.

But Kurtz did neither. Not yet. Instead, he called a short interval, picked up his watch, and buckled it to his wrist by its khaki webbing strap. Then he bustled from the room, taking Litvak with him. She waited for a footfall from behind her as Joseph also left, but none came. And still none. She wanted to turn her head but didn't quite dare. Rose brought her a glass of sweet tea, no milk. Rachel had some sugar-coated biscuits, like English shortbread. Charlie took one.

"You're doing great," Rachel confided breathlessly. "You really laid it on the line about England. I just sat there drinking it in, didn't I, Rose?"

"She really did," said Rose.

"It's just how I feel," Charlie explained.

"Do you want the loo, love?" said Rachel.

"No thanks, I never do between acts."

"Right then," said Rachel, with a wink.

Sipping, Charlie propped an elbow on the back of her chair in order to be able to glance naturally over her shoulder. Joseph had vanished, taking his papers with him.

The resting room they had retired to was as large as the room they had left and quite as bare. A couple of army beds and a teleprinter made up the only furniture, double doors gave on to a bathroom. Becker and Litvak sat facing each other on the beds, studying their respective files; the teleprinter was tended by a straight-backed boy named David, and periodically it heaved itself and disgorged another sheet of paper, which he devoutly added to the pile at his elbow. The only other sound was the sloshing of water in the bathroom, where Kurtz, with his back to them and stripped to the waist, was dousing himself at the handbasin, like an athlete between events.

"She's a neat lady," Kurtz called as Litvak turned a page and sidelined something with a felt-tipped pen. "She's everything we expected. Bright, creative, and under-used."

"She's lying in her teeth," said Litvak, still reading. But it was clear from the slant of his body, as well as the provocative insolence of his tone, that his remark was not intended for Kurtz.

"So who's complaining?" Kurtz demanded, flinging more water in his face. "Tonight she lies for herself, tomorrow she lies for us. Do we want an angel suddenly?"

The teleprinter burst abruptly into a different song. Both Becker and Litvak glanced sharply towards it, but Kurtz appeared not to have heard. Perhaps he had water in his ears.

"For a woman, lying is a protection. She protects the truth, so she protects her chastity. For a woman, lying is a proof of virtue," Kurtz announced, still washing.

Seated before the telephone, David held up his hand for attention. "It's the Embassy in Athens, Marty," he said. "They want to break in with a relay from Jerusalem."

Kurtz hesitated. "Tell them to go ahead," he said grudgingly.

"It's for your eyes only," David said and, getting up, walked across the room.

The teleprinter gave a shudder. Flinging his towel round his neck, Kurtz sat himself in David's chair, inserted a disc, and watched the message turn to clear text. The printing ceased; Kurtz read it, then ripped the tearsheet from the roller and read it again. Then he let out an angry laugh. "A message from the very highest twig," he announced bitterly. "The great Rook says we are to pose as Americans. Isn't that nice? 'On no account will you admit to her you are Israeli subjects acting in official or near-official capacity.' I love it. It's constructive, it's helpful, it's timely and it's Misha Gavron at his unmatchable best. I never in my life worked for anyone so totally dependable. Cable back 'Yes repeat no,' " he snapped at the astonished boy, handing him the tearsheet, and the three men trooped back on stage.