The Little Drummer Girl (25 page)

The three men were back in the resting room, where the chattering of the code machine had summoned them like a bugle. While Becker and Litvak looked on, Kurtz crouched at the desk deciphering with an air of utter disbelief the newest, unexpected, urgent, and strictly private telegram from Jerusalem. From behind him they could watch the dark sweat patch spread across his shirt like a leaking wound. The radio operator was gone, packed off by Kurtz as soon as Jerusalem's coded text began to print itself. The silence in the house was otherwise very deep. If birds sang or traffic passed, they did not hear it. They heard only the stop and start of the printer.

"I never saw you better, Gadi," declared Kurtz, for whom no one activity was ever quite enough. He was speaking English, the language of Gavron's text. "Masterful, high-minded, incisive." He tore off a sheet and waited for the next to print itself. "All that a girl adrift could wish for in her saviour. That right, Shimon?" The machine resumed.

"Some of our colleagues in Jerusalem--Mr. Gavron, to name but one--they questioned my selection of you, Mr. Litvak here for another. Not me. I had the confidence." Muttering a mild curse, he tore off the second sheet. "That Gadi, he's the best I ever had, I told them," he resumed. "A lion's heart, a poet's head: my very words. A life of violence has not coarsened him, I said. How does she handle, Gadi?"

And he actually turned his head and tilted it, watching for Becker's answer.

"Didn't you notice?" Becker said.

If Kurtz had noticed, he was not at present saying so. The message completed, he swung right round on his swivel chair, holding the sheets strictly upright before him to catch the desk light that came over his shoulder. But it was Litvak, oddly, who spoke first--Litvak who gave vent to a clenched and strident outburst of impatience that took his two colleagues by surprise. "They've planted another bomb!" he blurted. "Tell us! Where was it? How many of us have they killed this time?"

Kurtz slowly shook his head, and smiled for the first time since the message had come in.

"A bomb, maybe, Shimon. But nobody died from it. Not yet."

"Just let him read it," Becker said. "Don't let him play you."

But Kurtz preferred to extrapolate. "Misha Gavron greets us and sends us three further messages," he said. "Message one, certain installations in the Lebanon will be hit tomorrow, but those concerned will be sure to avoid our target houses. Message two"--he tossed aside his pieces of paper--"message two is an order, akin in quality and perception to the order we received earlier tonight. We are to drop the gallant Dr. Alexis by yesterday. No further contact. Misha Gavron has turned over his case file to certain wise psychologists who have ruled him as crazy as a bedbug."

Litvak again began to protest. Perhaps extreme tiredness affected him that way. Perhaps the heat did, for the night had turned very hot. Kurtz, still with his smile, talked him gently down to earth.

"Calm yourself, Shimon. Our gallant leader is being a little bit political, that is all. If Alexis jumps the wall and there is a scandal affecting our country's relationship with a sorely needed ally, Marty Kurtz here takes the rap. If Alexis stays our side, keeps his mouth shut, and does what we tell him, Misha Gavron takes the glory. You know how Misha treats me. I'm his Jew."

"And the third message?" Becker said.

"Our leader advises us that there is very little time. The hounds are baying at his heels, he says. He means our heels, naturally."

At Kurtz's suggestion, Litvak went off to pack his toothbrush. Left alone with Becker, Kurtz gave a grateful sigh of relief, and, much easier in his manner, wandered over to the truckle bed and picked up a French passport, opened it, and studied the personal particulars, committing them to memory. "You are the deliverer of our success, Gadi," he observed as he read. "Any gaps, special needs, you let me know. Hear me?"

Becker heard him.

"The kids say you made a fine couple up there on the Acropolis. Like a pair of movie stars, they tell me."

"Thank them for me."

Armed with an old, clogged hairbrush, Kurtz stood himself before the mirror and set to work to give himself a parting.

"A case like this, a girl involved, a concept, I leave it to the case officer's discretion," he remarked reflectively as he laboured. "Sometimes it pays to keep a distance, sometimes--He tossed the hairbrush into an open case.

"This one's distance," Becker said.

The door opened. Litvak, dressed for the city and carrying a briefcase, was impatient for his master's company.

"We're late," he said, with an unfriendly glance at Becker.

And yet, Charlie, for all their manipulation of her, was not coerced--not by Kurtz's standards, anyway. It was a point on which he placed stress from the outset. A durable basis of morality, he ruled, was essential to their plan. In the early stages, yes, there had been fancy talk of pressure, domination, even sexual enslavement to some less scrupulous Apollo than Becker; of confining Charlie in fragmenting circumstances for a few nights before offering her the hand of friendship. Gavron's wise psychologists, having read her dossier, put forward all sorts of fatuous suggestions, including some that were on the brutal side. But it was the tested operational mind of Kurtz that won the day against Jerusalem's swelling army of experts. Volunteers fight harder and longer, he had argued. Volunteers find their own ways to persuade themselves. And besides, if you are proposing marriage to a lady, it is wiser not to rape her first.

Others, of whom Litvak had been one, had voted loudly for an Israeli girl who could be fitted out with Charlie's kind of background. Litvak was viscerally opposed, as others were, to the idea of counting on the loyalty of a Gentile, least of all an English one, for anything. Kurtz had disagreed with equal vehemence. He loved the naturalness in Charlie and coveted the original, not the imitation. Her ideological drift did not dismay him in the least; the nearer she was to drowning, he said, the greater would be her pleasure at coming aboard.

Yet another school of thought--for the team was nothing if not democratic, if you ignored Kurtz's natural tyranny--had advocated a longer and more gradual courtship in advance of Yanuka's kidnapping, ending with a straight, sober offer along the classically defined lines of intelligence recruitment. Once again, Kurtz strangled the suggestion at birth. A girl of Charlie's temperament did not make up her mind by idle hours of reflection, he shouted--and neither, as a matter of fact, did Kurtz. Better to compress! Better to research and prepare down to the last detail, and take her by storm in one tremendous push! Becker, when he had taken a look at her himself, agreed: impulse recruitment was best.

But what if she says no, for God's sake? they cried, Gavron the Rook among them. To have prepared so much, only to be jilted at the altar!

In that case, Misha my friend, said Kurtz, we will have wasted a little time, and a little money, and a few prayers. He held that view through thick and thin; even if, in his most private circle--which comprised his wife and occasionally Becker--he confessed that he was taking one devil of a gamble. But there again, perhaps he was playing the cocotte. Kurtz had had his eye on Charlie ever since she had first surfaced at the weekend sessions of the forum. He had marked her down, enquired about her, twisted her around in his mind. You assemble tools, you look for the tasks, you improvise, he would say. You match the operation to the resources.

But why drag her to Greece, Marty? And all the others with her? Are we a charity, suddenly, lavishing our precious secret funds on rootless left-wing English actors?

But Kurtz was unbudgeable. He demanded scale from the start, knowing he would only be whittled down thereafter. Since Charlie's odyssey must begin in Greece, he insisted, let her be brought to Greece ahead of time, where the foreignness and magic of her situation would detach her more easily from domestic ties. Let the sun soften her. And since Alastair would never let her go alone, let him come also--and be removed at the psychological moment, thus further depriving her of support. And since all actors collect families--and do not feel secure unless they have the protection of the flock--and since no other natural method presented itself by which to lure the couple abroad--So it went on, one argument predicating another, until the only logic was the fiction, and the fiction was a web that enmeshed everyone who tried to sweep it away.

As to the removal of Alastair, it provided on that very day in London an amusing postscript to all their planning up till now. The scene occurred, of all places, in the domain of poor Ned Quilley, while Charlie was still deeply sleeping, and Ned was treating himself to a small refreshment in the privacy of his room in order to fortify himself for the rigours of lunch. He was in the act of unstopping his decanter when he was startled by a stream of obscenities, delivered in a male Celtic brogue, from the direction of Mrs. Longmore's cubby-hole downstairs, and ending with the demand that she "call the old goat out of his shed before I personally go up and drag him out." Wondering who of his more erratic clients had elected to have his nervous breakdown in Scottish, and before lunch, Quilley tiptoed gingerly to the door and put his ear to the panel. But he failed to recognise the voice. A moment later there was a thunder of footsteps, the door was flung open, and there before him stood the swaying figure of Long Al, known to him from occasional sorties to Charlie's dressing-room, where Alastair was in the habit of sitting out her performances with the aid of a bottle during his own protracted spells of idleness. He was filthy, he had three days' growth, he was blind drunk. Quilley attempted, in his best Pickwickian style, to demand the meaning of this outrage, but he might as well have spared his breath. Besides, he had been through a number of such scenes in his day, and experience had taught him that one does one's best to say as little as possible.

"You contemptible old faggot," Alastair began pleasantly, holding a shaking index finger directly beneath Quilley's nose. "You mean, scheming old queen. I'm going to break your stupid neck."

"My dear chap," said Quilley. "Whatever for?"

"I'm phoning for the police, Mr. Ned!" cried Mrs. Longmore from downstairs. "I'm dialling nine-nine-nine now!"

"Either    sit    down  and  explain  your  business    at    once,"

Quilley said sternly, "or Mrs. Longmore will phone for the police."

"I'm dialling!" called Mrs. Longmore, who had done this occasionally before.

Alastair sat down.

"Now then," said Quilley, with all the fierceness at his command. "What about a little black coffee while you tell me what I have done to offend you?"

The list was long: played him a fool's trick, Quilley had. For Charlie's sake. Pretended to be a non-existent film company. Persuaded his agent to send telegrams to Mykonos. Made a conspiracy with clever friends in Hollywood. Prepaid air tickets, all to make a ninny out of him in front of the gang. And to get him out of Charlie's hair.

Gradually, Quilley unravelled the story. A Hollywood film production company calling itself Pan Talent Celestial had telephoned his agent from California saying that their leading man had fallen sick and they required Alastair for immediate screen tests in London. They would pay whatever was necessary to obtain his attendance, and when they heard he was in Greece they arranged for a certified cheque for a thousand dollars to be delivered to the agent's office. Alastair returned from holiday hot-foot, then sat on his thumbs for a week while no screen test materialised."stand by," said the telegrams. Everything by telegram, note well."arrangements pending." On the ninth day, Alastair, in a state of near dementia, was instructed to present himself at Shepperton Studios. Ask for one Pete Vyschinsky, Studio D.

No Vyschinsky, not anywhere. No Pete.

Alastair's agent rang the number in Hollywood. The telephone operator advised him that Pan Talent Celestial had closed its account. Alastair's agent rang other agents; nobody had heard of Pan Talent Celestial. Doom. Alastair's judgement was as good as anyone's, and in the course of a two-day drunk, on the balance of his thousand dollars' expenses, Alastair had concluded that the only person with the motive and ability to play such a trick was Ned Quilley, known in the trade as "Desperate Quilley," who had never concealed his dislike for Alastair, or his conviction that Alastair was the evil influence behind Charlie's zany politics. He had therefore come round in person to wring Quilley's neck. After a few cups of coffee, however, he began protesting his undying admiration for his host, and Quilley told Mrs. Longmore to get him a cab.

The same evening, while the Quilleys sat in the garden enjoying a sundowner before dinner--they had recently invested in some rather decent outdoor furniture, cast-iron but done in the original Victorian moulds--Marjory listened gravely to his story, then to his great annoyance burst out laughing.

"What a very naughty girl," she said. "She must have found some rich lover to buy the boy off!"

Then she saw Quilley's face. Rootless American production companies. Telephone numbers that no longer answer. Filmmakers who cannot be found. And all of it happening around Charlie. And her Ned.

"It's even worse," said Quilley miserably.

"What is, darling?"

"They've stolen all her letters."

"They've what?"

All her handwritten letters, Quilley said. Going back over the last five years or more. All her chatty, intimate billets-doux scribbled when she was on tour or lonely. Marvellous things. Pen-portraits of producers and members of the cast. The dear little drawings she liked to do when she was feeling happy. Gone. Whipped from the file. By those awful Americans who wouldn't drink--Karman and his frightful chum. Mrs. Longmore was having a fit about it. Mrs. Ellis had gone sick.

Write them a filthy letter, Marjory advised.

But to what effect? Quilley wondered miserably. And to what address?

Talk to Brian, she suggested.

All right, Brian was his solicitor, so what the hell was Brian supposed to do?