The Little Drummer Girl (7 page)

"Want to take a look, Marty?" Lenny suggested hopefully. "I can see by Joshua's smile there that he has a very nice perception of Yanuka tonight. Wait too long, he'll draw the curtain on us. What do you see, Joshua? Is Yanuka all dolled up for going out tonight? Who does he speak to on the telephone? A girl for certain."

Gently pushing Joshua aside, Kurtz ducked his big head to the binoculars. And he remained a long time that way, hunched like an old seadog in a storm, hardly seeming to breathe, while he studied Yanuka, the half-grown suckling.

"See his books there in the background?" Lenny asked. "That boy reads like my father."

"You have a fine boy there," Kurtz agreed finally, with his iron-hard smile, as he slowly straightened himself. "A good-looking kid, no question." Picking his grey raincoat from the chair, he selected a sleeve and pulled it tenderly over his arm. "Just be sure you don't marry him to your daughter." Lenny looked even more foolish than before, but Kurtz was quick to console him: "We should be thankful to you, Lenny. And so we are, no question." And as an afterthought: "Keep taking photographs of him, all angles. Don't be shy, Lenny. Film is not so expensive."

Having shaken hands with each man in turn, Kurtz added an old blue beret to his costume and, thus shielded against the bustle of the rush hour, strode vigorously into the street.

It was raining by the time they picked Kurtz up in the van again, and as the three of them drove from one glum spot to another, killing time before Kurtz's plane, the weather seemed to affect all three of them with its sombre mood. Oded was doing the driving, and his bearded young face, by the passing lights, revealed a sullen anger.

"What's he got now?" Kurtz asked, though he must have known the answer.

"His latest is a rich man's BMW," Oded replied. "Power steering, fuel injection, five thousand kilometres on the clock. Cars are his weakness."

"Cars, women, the soft life," the second boy put in from the back. "So what are his strengths, I wonder?"

"Hired again?" Kurtz asked of Oded once more.

"Hired."

"Stay close to that car," Kurtz advised them both. "The moment he hands back his car to the rental company and doesn't take another one, that's the moment we have to know about immediately." They had heard this till they were deaf from it. They had heard it before they ever left Jerusalem. Kurtz repeated it none the less: "Most important is when Yanuka turns his car in."

Suddenly Oded had had enough. Perhaps he was by youth and temperament more prone to stress than his selectors had appreciated. Perhaps, as such a young fellow, he should not have been given a job that needed so much waiting. Pulling up the van at the kerbside, he yanked on the handbrake so hard he all but wrenched it from its socket.

"Why do we let him go through with this?" he demanded. "Why play games with him? What if goes back home and doesn't come out again? Then what?"

"Then we lose him."

"So let's kill him now! Tonight. You give me the order, it's done!"

Kurtz let him rave on.

"We've got the apartment opposite, haven't we? Put a rocket across the road. We've done it before. An RPG-y--Arab kills Arab with a Russian rocket--why not?"

Kurtz still said nothing. Oded might have been storming at a sphinx.

"So why not?" Oded repeated, very loud indeed.

Kurtz did not spare him, but neither did he lose his patience: "Because he doesn't lead anywhere, Oded, that's why. You never heard what Misha Gavron himself used to say perhaps? A phrase I personally still like to echo? That if you want to catch a lion, you first must tether the goat? Whose crazy fighting talk have you been listening to? I ask myself. Are you seriously informing me you want to hit Yanuka, when for ten dollars more you can have the best operator they produced for years?"

"He did Bad Godesberg! He did Vienna, maybe Leyden too! Jews are dying, Marty! Doesn't Jerusalem care about that these days? How many do we let die while we play our games?"

Carefully taking hold of the collar of Oded's wind jacket with his big hands, Kurtz shook him twice, and the second time he did this, Oded's head banged painfully against the window. But Kurtz did not apologise and Oded did not complain.

"They,Oded. Not he: they," said Kurtz, this time with menace."They did Bad Godesberg. They did Leyden. And it's them we intend to take out; not six innocent German householders and one silly little boy."

"It's okay," said Oded blushing. "Leave me alone."

"It is not okay, Oded. Yanuka has friends, Oded. Relatives. People we have not yet been introduced to. You want to run this operation for me?"

"I said--it's okay."

Kurtz released him, Oded started up the engine again. Kurtz suggested they continue their interesting tour of Yanuka's lifestyle. So they bumped down a cobbled street where his favourite nightclub was, the shop where he bought his shirts and ties, the place where he had his hair cut, and the left-wing bookshops where he liked to browse and buy. And all the while Kurtz, in the best of spirits, beamed and nodded at everything he saw as if he were watching an old movie he couldn't get enough of--until, in a square not far from the city air terminal, they prepared to part. Standing on the pavement, Kurtz clapped Oded on the shoulder with unabashed affection, then ran his hand through his hair.

"Listen, both of you, don't pull so hard at the bridle. Buy yourselves a nice meal somewhere, charge it to me personally, okay?"

His tone was that of a commander moved to love before the battle. Which, for as long as Misha Gavron permitted it, was what he was.

The night flight from Munich to Berlin, for the few who use it, is one of the last great nostalgic journeys to be made in Europe. The Orient Express, the Golden Arrow, and the Train Bleu may be dead, dying, or artificially revived, but for those who have their memories, sixty minutes of night-flying through the East German corridor in a rattly Pan American plane three-quarters empty is like the safari of an old habitué indulging his addiction. Lufthansa is forbidden to fly the route. It belongs only to the victors, to the occupiers of the former German capital; to the historians and island-seekers; and to one war-scarred elderly American impregnated with the docile quiet of a professional, who makes the journey almost daily, knows his favourite seat and the first name of the air hostess, which he pronounces in the frightful German of the Occupation. For two pins, you think, he will slip her a packet of Lucky Strikes and make an assignation with her behind the commissary. The fuselage grunts and lifts, the lights falter, you cannot believe the plane has no propellers. You look into the unlit enemy landscape--to bomb, to jump?--you think your memories and confuse your wars: down there, at least, in some uneasy sense, the world is as it was.

Kurtz was no exception.

He sat at his window, he gazed past his own reflection at the night; he became, as always when he made this journey, a spectator looking upon his own life. Somewhere in that blackness was the railway line which had brought the goods train on its slow journey from the East; somewhere the very siding where it had parked for five nights and six days in dead of winter to make way for the military transports that mattered so much more, while Kurtz and his mother, and the hundred and eighteen other Jews who were crammed into their truck, ate the snow and froze, most of them to death. "The next camp will be better," his mother kept assuring him, to keep his spirits up. Somewhere in that blackness his mother had later filed passively to her death; somewhere in its fields the Sudeten boy who was himself had starved and stolen and killed, waiting without illusion for another hostile world to find him. He saw the Allied reception camp, the unfamiliar uniforms, the children's faces as old and hollow as his own. A new coat, new boots and new barbed wire--and a new escape, this time from his rescuers. He saw himself in the fields again, slipping southward from farm to village for weeks on end as the escape line handed him on, until gradually the nights grew warm and smelled of flowers, and he heard for the first time in his life the rustle of palm trees in a sea wind. "Listen to us, you frozen little boy," they whispered to him, "that's how we sound in Israel. That's how blue the sea is, just like here." He saw the rotting steamer slumped beside the jetty, the biggest and noblest boat he had set eyes on, so black with Jewish heads that when he boarded it, he stole a stocking cap and wore it till they had cleared harbour. But they needed him, fair hair or none at all. On the deck in small groups, the leaders were giving lessons in how to shoot with stolen Lee-Enfield rifles. Haifa was still two days away, and Kurtz's war had just begun.

The plane was circling to land. He felt it bank, and watched as it crossed the Wall. He had only hand luggage, but security was tight on account of the terrorists, so formalities took quite a time.

Shimon Litvak was waiting in the car park in an inferior Ford. He had flown from Holland after two days spent looking at the mess in Leyden. Like Kurtz, he did not feel he had a right to sleep.

"The book bomb was delivered by a girl," he said as soon as Kurtz had clambered in. "Shapely brunette. Jeans. The hotel porter assumed she was from the university, convinced himself she arrived and left by bicycle. Speculative, but I believe him partly. Somebody else again says she was brought to the hotel on a motorbike. A party ribbon round the parcel and ‘Happy birthday, Mordecai' on the label. A plan, a transport, a bomb, and a girl, what's new?"

"Explosive?"

"Russian plastic, shreds of wrapping, nothing traceable."

"Any trademark?"

"One neat twist of surplus red circuit wire, made into a dummy."

Kurtz glanced at him sharply.

"No surplus wire," Litvak confessed. "Carbonised fragments, yes. But no identifiable wire."

"No clothespeg either?" said Kurtz.

"This time he preferred a mousetrap. A sweet little kitchen mousetrap." He started the engine.

"He used mousetraps too," said Kurtz.

"He used mousetraps, clothespegs, old Bedouin blankets, untraceable explosives, cheap one-handed watches, and cheap girls. And he's the absolute lousiest bomb maker bar none, even for an Arab," said Litvak, who hated inefficiency almost as much as he hated the enemy who was guilty of it. "How long did he give you?"

Kurtz affected not to understand."Give me? Who gave me?"

"What's your licence? A month? Two months? What's the deal?"

But Kurtz was not always inclined to precision in his replies. "The deal is that a lot of people in Jerusalem would prefer to charge the windmills of Lebanon rather than fight the enemy with their heads."

"Can the Rook hold them off? Can you?"

Kurtz lapsed into an unaccustomed quiet from which Litvak was disinclined to rouse him. In the middle of West Berlin there is no darkness, at the edges no light. They were heading for the light.

"You paid Gadi a big compliment," Litvak observed suddenly, with a sideways look at his master. "Coming to his town like this. A journey from you to him is like a homage."

"It's not his town," said Kurtz equably. "He borrowed it. He has a grant, a trade to learn, a second life to make. That is the only reason Gadi is in Berlin."

"And he can bear to live in such a trash heap? Even for a new career? After Jerusalem, he can come here!"

Kurtz did not answer the question directly, nor did Litvak expect him to. "Gadi has made his contribution, Shimon. No man made a better, according to his ability. He fought hard in hard places, most of them behind the lines. Why should he not remake himself? He is entitled to his peace."

But Litvak was not trained to abandon his battles inconclusively. "So why disturb it? Why resurrect what is finished with? If he is making a new beginning, so leave him to make it."

"Because he is the middle ground, Shimon." Litvak turned swiftly to him for enlightenment, but Kurtz's face was in shadow. "Because he has the reluctance that can make the bridge. Because he ponders."

They passed the memorial church and proceeded between the icy fires of the Kurfürstendamm, then returned to the menacing stillness of the city's dark outlands.

"So what name is he using these days?" Kurtz enquired, with an indulgent smile to his voice. "Tell me how he calls himself."

"Becker," said Litvak tersely.

Kurtz expressed jovial disappointment. "Becker? What the hell name is that? Gadi Becker--and him a sabra?"

"It's the German version of the Hebrew version of the German version of his name," Litvak replied, without humour. "At the request of his employers, he's reverted. He's not an Israeli any more, he's a Jew."

Kurtz kept his smile flying. "Does he have any ladies with him, Shimon? What's with women for him these days?"

"A night here, a night there. Nothing he could call his own."

Kurtz settled more comfortably in his seat. "So maybe an involvement is what he needs. Then afterwards he goes back to his nice wife, Frankie, in Jerusalem, whom, in my judgement, he had no business relinquishing in the first place."

Entering a squalid side street, they pulled up before a clumsy three-storey apartment house of dappled stone. A pilastered doorway had somehow survived the war. To one side of it, at street level, a neon-lit textiles shop displayed a lacklustre range of women's dresses. A sign above it said"wholesale only."

"Press the upper bell," Litvak advised. "Two rings, a pause, a third ring, he will come. They gave him a room above the business." Kurtz clambered out. "Good luck, okay? Really good luck."

Litvak watched Kurtz storm across the street. He watched him thrusting along the pavement at his rolling pace, too fast, then halt too hastily at the shabby doorway. He saw his thick arm lift to the bell and the door open a moment afterwards, as if someone had been waiting just behind it, and he supposed someone had. He saw Kurtz square his feet and lower his shoulders to embrace a slimmer man; he saw the arms of his host fold round him in a brisk, soldierly greeting. The door closed, Kurtz was inside.

Driving slowly back through the city, Litvak glowered at everything he saw on his way, externalising his jealousy: Berlin as a place of hatred for him, an inherited enemy for all time; Berlin where terror had its spawning ground, then and now. His destination was a cheap pension where no one seemed to sleep, himself included. By five to seven, he was back in the side street where he had left Kurtz. He pressed the bell, waited, and heard slow footsteps, one pair. The door opened and Kurtz stepped gratefully into the morning air, then stretched himself. He was unshaven and had removed his tie.