The Little Drummer Girl (18 page)

"Who's us?' she said sharply.

Till then he had been a loner. She didn't like the change at all. They were heading for a main road, but he was not slowing down. She saw the lights of two cars descending on them, then held her breath as he pressed the kickdown and foot brake together and tucked the Mercedes neatly in front of them, fast enough to allow the car behind to do the same.

"It's not guns, is it?" she enquired, thinking suddenly of his scars. "Not running a small war on the side somewhere, are we? Only I can't stand bangs, you see. I've got these delicate eardrums." Her voice, with its forced jauntiness, was becoming unfamiliar to her.

"No, Charlie, it is not gunrunning."

" ‘No, Charlie, it is not gunrunning.' White-slave traffic?"

"No, it's not white-slave traffic either."

She echoed that line too.

"That leaves drugs then, doesn't it? Because you are trading in something, aren't you? Only drugs aren't my scene either, to be frank. Long Al makes me carry his hash for him when we go through Customs and I'm a mess for days afterwards just from the nerves." No answer. "It's higher, is it? Nobler? A different plane entirely?" She reached out and switched off the radio. "How about your just stopping the car, actually? You needn't take me anywhere. You can go back to Mykonos tomorrow if you like and collect my understudy."

"And leave you in the middle of nowhere? Don't be utterly absurd."

"Do it now!' she screamed."Stop the bloody car!"

They had jumped a set of traffic lights and swung left, so violently that her seat belt locked and punched the breath out of her. She made a lunge for the wheel but his forearm was there long before she was. He swung left a second time, through a white gateway into a private drive lined with azaleas and hibiscus. The drive made a curve and they flew round it, ploughing to a halt in a gravel sweep ringed with white-painted stones. The second car was pulling up behind them, blocking the way out. She heard footsteps on the gravel. The house was an old villa covered in red flowers. In the beam of the headlamps the flowers looked like patches of fresh blood. One pale light burned in the porch. Joseph switched off the engine and pocketed the ignition key. Leaning across Charlie, he shoved open her door for her, admitting her to the rancid smell of hydrangeas and the familiar chatter of cicadas. He got out but Charlie stayed in her seat. There was no breeze, no other sensation of fresh air, no sound but the delicate shuffle of young light-footed people gathering round the car. Dimitri, the ten-year-old driver with the buckwheat smile. Raoul,the flaxen Jesus-freak who rode in taxis and had a rich Swedish daddy. Two girls in jeans and jackets, the same pair who had followed them up the Acropolis and--now that she saw them more clearly--the same pair she had seen slouching around Mykonos a couple of times when she had gone window-shopping. Hearing the thud of someone unloading luggage from the boot, she leapt furiously from the car. "My guitar!" she shouted. "You leave that alone, you--

But Raoul already held it under his arm, and her shoulder bag was in the charge of Dimitri. She was about to spring for it when the two girls each took hold of a wrist and elbow, and without effort led her towards the front porch.

"Where's that bastard Joseph?" she yelled.

But the bastard Joseph, his mission accomplished, was already halfway up the steps and not looking back, like someone escaping from an accident. Passing the car, Charlie saw by the porch light the markings on the rear licence plate. It was not a Greek registration at all. It was Arab, with Hollywood-style writing round the number, and a plastic "CD" for "Corps Diplomatique" stuck on the lid of the boot just to the left of the Mercedes emblem.

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 jardinière 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 band leader's silk shirt, the bottle-top gold cuff links were gone as if for ever.

"My advice to you is to suspend your judgement 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 are 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?"