The Little Drummer Girl (37 page)

His cool hand was still on hers, clasping the gun to her, and she could feel her own hand trembling inside it like a separate creature.

"Charlie, this gun is a holy thing to me. I tell you this because I love my brother and I loved my father and I love you. In a minute I shall teach you to shoot with it, but first of all I ask you, kiss the gun."

She stared at him, then at the gun. But his excited expression offered no respite. Placing his other hand round her arm, he lifted her to her feet.

"We are lovers, do you not remember? We are comrades, servants of the revolution. We live in the closest companionship of mind and body. I am a passionate Arab and I like words and gestures. Kiss the gun."

"Jose, I can't do that."

She had addressed him as Joseph, and as Joseph he replied.

"You think this is an English tea-party, Charlie? You think that because Michel is a pretty boy he must be playing games? Where should he have learnt to play games when the gun was the only thing that gave him value as a man?" he asked perfectly reasonably.

She shook her head, still staring at the gun. But her resistance did not anger him. "Listen, Charlie. Last night, as we were making love, you asked me: ‘Michel, where is the battlefield?' You know what I did? I put my hand over your heart and I told you: ‘We are fighting a jihad and the battlefield is here.' You are my disciple. Your sense of mission has never been so exalted. Do you know what that is--a jihad?"

She shook her head.

"A jihad is what you were looking for until you met me. A jihad is a holy war. You are about to fire your first shot in our jihad. Kiss the gun."

She hesitated, then pressed her lips to the blue metal of the barrel.

"So," he said, breaking briskly away from her. "From now on, this gun is part of both of us. This gun is our honour and our flag. You believe this?"

Yes, Jose, I believe it. Yes, Michel, I believe it. Don't ever make me do that again. She wiped her wrist involuntarily across her lips as if there were blood on them. She hated both herself and him, and she was feeling a little mad.

"Type Walther PPK,"Joseph was explaining when she next heard him. "Not heavy, but remember that every handgun is a compromise between concealment, portability, and efficiency. This is how Michel speaks to you about guns. Strictly, the way he has been spoken to himself by his brother."

Standing behind her, he turned her hips till she was square to the target, her feet apart. Then he placed his fist round hers, mingling his fingers with her own, keeping her arm at full stretch and the barrel pointing to the ground midway between her feet.

"The left arm free and comfortable. So." He loosened it for her. "Both eyes open, you raise the gun slowly till it is in a natural line with the target. Keeping the gun-arm straight. So. When I say fire, shoot twice, come down again, wait."

Obediently she lowered the gun till it was aiming at the ground again. He gave the order; she raised her arm, stiffly as he had instructed her; she pulled the trigger and nothing happened.

"This time," he said, and slipped the safety catch.

She repeated the action, pulled the trigger again, and the gun bucked in her hand as if it had itself been hit by a bullet. She fired a second time and her heart filled with the same perilous excitement she had felt when she had first jumped a horse or swum naked in the sea. She lowered the gun, Joseph gave a fresh order, she swung it up much faster and fired again twice in quick succession, then three times for luck. Then repeated the movement without an order, firing at will as the mounting clatter of shots filled the air on every side of her and the ricochets whined into the valley and away over the sea. She went on firing till the magazine was empty, then stood with the gun at her side, her heart thumping while she breathed the smells of thyme, and cordite.

"How did I do?" she asked, turning to him.

"Look for yourself."

Leaving him where he was, she ran forward to the oil can. Then stared at it in disbelief because it was unmarked.

"But what went wrong?" she cried indignantly.

"You missed," Joseph replied, taking the gun from her.

"They were blanks!"

"They were nothing of the kind."

"I did everything you told me!"

"For a start, you should not be shooting with one hand. For a girl weighing a hundred and ten pounds, wrists like asparagus, it's ridiculous."

"Then why the hell did you tell me that was how to shoot?"

He was heading for the car, guiding her by the arm. "If you're taught by Michel, then you must shoot like Michel's pupil. He knows nothing of two-handed grips. He has modelled himself on his brother. You want me to print ‘Made in Israel' all over you?"

"Why doesn't he?" she insisted angrily, and seized his arm."Why doesn't he know how to shoot properly? Why hasn't he been taught?"

"I told you. He was taught by his brother."

"Then why didn't his brother teach him right?"

She really wanted an answer. She was humiliated and prepared to make a scene, and he seemed to recognise this, for he smiled and, in his own way, capitulated.

" ‘It is God's will that Khalil shoots with one hand,' he says."

"Why?"

With a shake of his head, he dismissed her question. They returned to the car.

"Is Khalil his brother's name?"

"Yes."

"You said it was the Arab name for Hebron."

He was pleased, if strangely distracted. "It is both." He started the engine. "Khalil for our town. Khalil for my brother. Khalil for the friend of God and of the Hebrew prophet Abraham, whom Islam respects, and who rests in our ancient mosque."

"Khalil then," she said.

"Khalil," he agreed shortly. "Remember it. Also the circumstances in which he told it to you. Because he loves you. Because he loves his brother. Because you have kissed his brother's gun and become of his blood."

They set off down the hillside, Joseph driving. She no longer knew herself, if she ever had. The sound of her own shooting was still ringing in her ears. The taste of the gun barrel was on her lips, and when he pointed out Olympus to her, all she saw was black and white rainstacks like atomic cloud. Joseph's preoccupation was as great as her own, but his aim lay once more ahead of them, and while he drove he pressed forward ceaselessly with his narrative, heaping detail upon detail. Khalil again. The times they had together before he went off to fight.

Nottingham, the great meeting of their souls. His sister Fatmeh and his great love for her. About his other brothers, dead. They hit the coast road. The traffic was thunderous and much too fast; the sullied beaches were strewn with broken huts, the factory towers like prisons looking in on her.

She tried to keep herself awake for him, but eventually the effort was too much. She put her head on his shoulder and for a while escaped.

The hotel in Thessalonika was an antique Edwardian pile with floodlit domes and an air of circumstance. Their suite was on the top floor, with a children's alcove, a twenty-foot bathroom, and scratched twenties furniture like home. She had put on the light but he ordered her to switch it off. He had had food sent up, but neither of them had touched it. There was a bay window and he stood in it with his back to her, gazing down into the green square and the moonlit waterfront beyond it. Charlie sat on the bed. The room was filled with stray Greek music from the street.

"So, Charlie."

"So, Charlie," she echoed quietly, waiting for the explanation that was owed to her.

"You have pledged yourself to my battle. But what battle? How is it fought? Where? I have talked of the cause, I have talked of action: we believe, therefore we do. I have told you that terror is theatre, and that sometimes the world has to be lifted up by its ears before it will listen to justice."

She shifted restlessly.

"Repeatedly, in my letters, in our long discussions, I have promised to bring you to the point of action. But I have prevaricated. I have delayed. Until tonight. Perhaps I do not trust you. Or perhaps I have learned to love you too much and do not wish to put you in the front line. You do not know which of these is true, but sometimes you have felt hurt by my secrecy. As your letters reveal."

The letters, she thought again; always the letters.

"So how, in practical terms, do you become my little soldier? That is what we are discussing tonight. Here. In that bed you are sitting on. On the last night of our Greek honeymoon.

Maybe our last night ever, for you can never be sure that you will see me again."

He turned to face her, nothing rushed. It was as if he had bound his body in the same careful bonds that held his voice. "You weep a lot," he remarked. "I think you are weeping tonight. As you hold me. Pledging yourself to me for all eternity. Yes? You weep, and while you weep, I tell you: ‘It is time.' Tomorrow you shall have your chance. Tomorrow, in the morning, you shall fulfil the vow you swore to me by the great Khalil's gun. I am ordering you--asking you"--carefully, almost majestically, he went back to the window--"to drive that Mercedes car across the Yugoslav border, northward and into Austria. Where it will be collected from you. Alone. Will you do that? What do you say?"

On the surface, she felt nothing beyond a concern to match his apparent barrenness of feeling. No fear, no sense of danger, no surprise: she shut them all out with a bang. It's now, she thought. Charlie, you're on. A driving job. Away you go. She was staring straight at him, hard-jawed, the way she stared at people when she lied.

"Well--how do you respond to him?" he enquired, jollying her slightly. "Alone," he reminded her. "It's some distance, you know. Eight hundred miles through Yugoslavia--that's quite something, for a first mission. What do you say?"

"What's in it?" she asked.

Whether deliberately or not she could not tell, but he chose to misunderstand her: "Money. Your début in the theatre of the real. Everything Marty promised you." His mind seemed as closed to her as it was perhaps to himself. His tone was clipped and deprecating.

"I meant what's in the car?"

The three minute warning before his voice became hectoring. "What does it matter what's in the car? A military message perhaps. Papers. Do you think you can know every secret of our great movement on your first day?" A break, but she did not answer. "Will you drive the car or not? That is all that matters."

She did not want Michel's reply. She wanted his.

"Why doesn't he drive it himself?"

"Charlie, it is not your task, as a new recruit, to question orders. Naturally, if you are shocked--" Who was he? She felt his mask slipping, but did not know which mask it was. "If suddenly you suspect--within the fiction--that you have been manipulated by this man--that all his adoration of you, his glamour, his protestations of eternal love--‘ Yet again he seemed to lose his footing. Was it her own wishful thinking, or dared she suppose that, in the half darkness, some sentiment had crept up on him unnoticed, which he would have preferred to hold at bay?

"I mean only that if, at this stage"--his voice recovered its strength--"if the scales should somehow fall from your eyes, or your courage fail you, then naturally you must say no."

"I was asking you a question. Why don't you drive it yourself--you, Michel?"

He swung swiftly back to the window and it seemed to Charlie that he had much to quell in himself before replying. "Michel tells you this and no more," he began, with strained forbearance. "Whatever is in that car"--he could look down on it from where he stood, parked in the square and guarded by a Volkswagen bus--"it is vital to our great struggle, but it is also very dangerous. Whoever was caught driving that car at any point in those eight hundred miles--whether the car contains subversive literature or some other kind of material, messages perhaps--to be caught with it would be extremely incriminating. Not all the influence--the diplomatic pressures, good lawyers--could prevent that person from having a very bad time indeed. If you are considering your own skin, that is what you have to consider." And he added, in a voice quite unlike Michel's: "You have your own life, after all. You are not one of us."

But his faltering, however slight, had given her an assurance she had not felt in his company before. "I asked why he wasn't driving it himself. I'm still waiting for his answer."

Once more, he rallied, too strongly. "Charlie! I am a Palestinian activist. I am known as a fighter for the cause. I am travelling on a false passport which may at any time be compromised. But you--an attractive English girl of good appearance--no record, quick-witted, charming--naturally for you there is no danger. Now surely that is enough!"

"You just said there was a danger."

"Nonsense. Michel assures you there is none. For himself, maybe. But for you--none. ‘Do it for me,' I say. ‘Do it and be proud. Do it for our love and for the revolution. Do it for all we have sworn to each other. Do it for my great brother. Are your vows meaningless? Were you merely mouthing Western hypocrisies when you professed yourself a revolutionary?' " He paused once more. "Do it because if you don't, your life will be even emptier than it was before I picked you up at the beach."

"You mean at the theatre," she corrected him.

He barely bothered with her. He remained standing with his back to her, his gaze still upon the Mercedes. He was Joseph again, Joseph of the pressed-out vowels and careful sentences and the mission that would save innocent lives.

"So there you are. This is your Rubicon. You know what that is? The Rubicon? Cut off now--go home--you can take some money, forget the revolution, Palestine, Michel, everything."

"Or?"

"Drive the car. Your first blow for the cause. Alone. Eight hundred miles. Which is it to be?"

"Where will you be?"

His calm was once more unassailable, and once more he took refuge in Michel: "In spirit, close to you, but I cannot help you. Nobody can help you. You will be on your own, performing a criminal act in the interests of what the world will call a gang of terrorists." He started again, but this time he was Joseph. "Some of the kids will make an escort for you, but there is nothing they can do if things go wrong, except report the fact to Marty and myself. Yugoslavia is no great friend of Israel."