The Little Drummer Girl (9 page)

In the event, he selected the course they had all voted most desirable. Instead of simply reaching back an arm and unlocking one door manually, which he could have done, he chose, perhaps in order to impress, to operate the central locking device, thereby releasing not one but all four doors together. The girl opened the rear door nearest her and, remaining outside, shoved her rucksack and guitar onto the back seat. By the time she had closed the door again, and started on her languid journey towards the front, as if to sit beside him in the passenger seat, one man had a pistol to Yanuka's temple while Litvak himself, looking his most frail, was kneeling on the back seat holding Yanuka's head from behind in a most murderous and well-informed grip, while he administered the drug that, as he had been earnestly assured, was the best suited to Yanuka's medical record: there had been worry about his asthma in adolescence.

The thing that struck everyone afterwards was the soundlessness of the operation. Even while he waited for the drug to take its effect, Litvak distinctly heard the snap of a pair of sunglasses above the rumpus of the passing traffic, and for a dreadful moment feared it was Yanuka's neck, which would have ruined everything. At first they thought he had somehow contrived to forget or shed the false number plates and papers for his onward journey, till they found them to their pleasure neatly fitted into his smart black grip, under several handmade silk shirts and flashy ties, all of which they were obliged to appropriate for their own purposes, together with his fine gold watch by Cellini and his linked gold bracelet and the gold-plated charm that Yanuka liked to wear against his heart, believed to be a gift from his beloved sister Fatmeh. Another glory of the operation--not of anyone's devising but Yanuka's--was that the target car had heavily smoked windows to prevent the common people from seeing what goes on inside. This was the first of many instances of the way in which Yanuka became the fatal victim of his own plush lifestyle. To spirit the car west and then southward after this was no headache; they could probably have driven it quite normally without a soul noticing. But for safety's sake they had hired a lorry purportedly conveying bees to a new home. There is quite a trade in bees in that region, Litvak reasoned sensibly, and even the most inquisitive policeman thinks twice before intruding upon their privacy.

The only really unforeseen element was the dog-bite; what if the brute had rabies? Somewhere they bought some serum, and injected him just in case.

With Yanuka temporarily removed from society, the vital thing was to make sure nobody, in Beirut or anywhere else, noticed the gap. They knew already that he was of an independent and carefree nature. They knew he made a cult of doing the illogical thing, that he was celebrated for altering his plans from one second to the next, partly on a whim, and partly because he believed with reason that this was the best way to confuse his trail. They knew of his recently acquired passion for things Greek, and his proven habit of chasing off in search of antiquities while in transit. On his last run, he had gone as far south as Epidaurus without so much as a by-your-leave from anyone--a great arc, right off his route, for no known reason. These random practices had in the past rendered him extremely hard to catch. Used against him, as now, he was in Litvak's cool judgement unsavable, for his own side could keep no better check on him than his enemies. The team seized him and wafted him from view. The team waited. And in all the places where it was able to listen, not one alarm bell rang, there was not a whisper of unease. If Yanuka's masters had a vision of him at all, Shimon Litvak cautiously concluded, then it was of a young man in his prime of mind and body, gone off in search of life, and--who knows?--new soldiers for the cause.

So the fiction, as Kurtz and his team now called it, could begin. Whether it could also end--whether there was time, by Kurtz's old steel watch, for it to unfold as he determined--that was another matter altogether. The pressures upon Kurtz were of two kinds: the first, crudely enough, was to show progress or have Misha Gavron close his shop. The second was Gavron's threat that if no such progress was forthcoming, he would no longer be able to hold back the mounting outcry for a military solution. Kurtz dreaded this.

"You preach at me like the English!" Gavron the Rook squawked at him in his cracked voice, during one of their frequent arguments. "And look at their crimes!"

"So maybe we should bomb the English too," Kurtz suggested, with a furious smile.

But the subject of the English was by then not coincidental; for ironically it was to England that Kurtz was now looking for his salvation.

three

Joseph and Charlie were formally introduced to each other on the island of Mykonos, on a beach with two tavernas, at a late luncheon in the second half of August, just around the time when the Greek sun hits its fiercest heat. Or, in terms of the larger history, four weeks after Israeli jets bombed the crowded Palestinian quarter of Beirut, in what was afterwards declared to be an effort to destroy the leadership, though there were no leaders among the several hundred dead--unless of course they were the leaders of tomorrow, for many were children.

"Charlie, say hullo to Joseph," said somebody excitedly, and it was done.

Yet both behaved as if the meeting had scarcely taken place: she by pulling her revolutionist's frown and holding out her hand for an English schoolgirl's handshake of quite vicious respectability; and he by casting her a glance of calm and tolerant appraisal, strangely without ambition.

"Well, Charlie, yes, hullo," he agreed, and smiled no more than was necessary to be polite. So it was actually he, not Charlie, who said hullo.

She noticed that he had the military mannerism of pursing his lips just before he spoke. His voice, which was foreign and held under close arrest, had a daunting mildness--she was more aware of what was held back than what was given. His behaviour towards her was thus the obverse of aggression.

Her name was actually Charmian but she was known to everyone as "Charlie," and often as "Charlie the Red" in deference to the colour of her hair and to her somewhat crazy radical stances, which were her way of caring for the world and coming to grips with its injustices. She was the outsider of a rackety troupe of young British acting people who slept in a tumbledown farmhouse half a mile inland and descended to the shore in a shaggy, close-knit family that never broke up. How they had come by the farmhouse in the first place--how they had come to be on the island at all--was a miracle to all of them, though as actors they derived no surprise from miracles. Their benefactor was a wealthy City company that had recently taken to playing angel to the itinerant stage. Their tour of the provinces over, the troupe's half-dozen cadre members were astonished to find themselves treated to rest and recreation at the company's expense. A charter whisked them there, the farmhouse stood welcoming, and spending-money was assured by a modest extension of their terms of salary. It was too kind, too generous, too sudden, too long ago. Only a bunch of Fascist swine, they had joyously agreed when they received their invitations, could have behaved with such disarming philanthropy. After which they had forgotten how they came to be there, until one or another would sleepily raise his glass and mutter the company's name in a querulous, half-hearted toast.

Charlie was not the prettiest of the girls, by any means, though her sexuality shone through, as did her incurable goodwill, which was never quite concealed by her posturing. Lucy, though stupid, was gorgeous, whereas by accepted standards Charlie was rather plain: moche, with a long strong nose and prematurely shadowed face that was one minute childish and the next so old and mournful you feared for her experience of life this far, and wondered what more was to become of her. Sometimes she was their foundling, sometimes their mother, the one who counted the money and knew where the anti-sting was, and the sticking-plaster for cut feet. In that rôle, as in all her others, she was their largest-hearted and their most capable. And now and then she was their conscience, bawling them out for some real or imagined crime of chauvinism, sexism, or Western apathy. Her right to do this was vested in her by her class, for Charlie was their bit of quality, as they liked to say: privately educated and the daughter of a stockbroker, even if--as she never tired of telling them--the poor man had ended his days behind bars for defrauding clients. But class will out, whatever.

And finally, she was their undisputed leading lady. When evening came, and the family took to acting little dramas to each other in their straw hats and flowing beach gowns, it was Charlie, when she cared to take part, who was the best at it. If they decided to sing to each other, it was Charlie who played her guitar a little too well for their voices; Charlie who knew the protest folk songs, and sang them in an angry, mannish style. At other times they would lounge together in sullen council, smoking marijuana and drinking retsina at thirty drachmas a half-litre. All but Charlie, who would lie apart from them like someone who had smoked and drunk all she needed long ago. "You wait till my revolution dawns," she'd warn them, in a drowsy voice. "I'll have the whole bunch of you babies out there tilling turnips before breakfast." At this, they would pretend to take fright: where will it start,Chas?Where will the first head roll? "In bloody Rickmansworth," she'd reply, harking on her storm-tossed suburban childhood. "We're going to drive all their bloody Jaguars into their bloody swimming pools." And they would let out wails of fear, even though they knew that Charlie herself had a weakness for fast cars.

Meanwhile they loved her. Indisputably. And Charlie, for all that she denied it, loved them in return.

Whereas Joseph, as they called him, was not part of their family at all. Not even, like Charlie, a splinter group of one. He had a self-sufficiency that to weaker souls was a kind of courage by itself. He was friendless but uncomplaining, the stranger who needed nobody, not even them. Just a towel, a book, a water-bottle, and his own small foxhole in the sand. Charlie alone knew he was a ghost.

Her first local sighting of him occurred the morning after her big fight with Alastair, which she lost on a straight knock-out There was a central meekness in Charlie somewhere that seemed to attract her fatally to bullies, and her bully of the day was a six-foot drunken Scot known to the family as "Long Al," who menaced a lot, and quoted inaccurately from the anarchist Bakunin. Like Charlie, he was red-headed and fair-skinned, with hard blue eyes. When they rose shining out of the water together, they were like people of a separate race from anyone else around, and their sultry expressions advised you they knew it. When they set off abruptly for the farmhouse hand in hand, speaking to no one, you felt the urgency of their desire like a pain you had endured but seldom shared. But when they fought--which had happened that previous evening--their rancour cast such a blight over tender souls like Willy and Pauly that they slipped away until the storm was over. And on this occasion so had Charlie: she had crept off to a corner of the loft to nurse her wounds. Waking sharply at six, however, she decided to take herself for a solitary bathe, then walk into town and treat herself to an English language newspaper and breakfast. It was while she was buying her Herald Tribune that the apparition occurred: a clear case of psychic phenomenon.

He was the man in the red blazer. He was standing right behind her at that moment, choosing himself a paperback, ignoring her. No red blazer this time, but a tee-shirt, shorts and sandals. Yet the same man without a doubt. The same cropped black hair frosted at the tips and running to a devil's point at the centre of the forehead; the same brown and courteous stare, respectful of other people's passions, that had fixed on her like a dark lantern from the front row of the stalls of the Barrie Theatre in Nottingham for half a day: first the matinée, then the evening performance, eyes only for Charlie as they followed every gesture she made. A face that was neither softened nor hardened by time, but was finite as a print. A face that to Charlie's eye spelt one strong and constant reality, in contrast to an actor's many masks.

She had been playing Saint Joan, and going nearly mad about the Dauphin, who was miles over the top and upstaging every speech she made. So it was not till the final tableau that she first became aware of him sitting among the schoolchildren at the front of the half-empty auditorium. If the lighting hadn't been so dim, she probably wouldn't have spotted him even then, but their lighting rig was stuck in Derby waiting to be sent on, so there was none of the usual glare to swamp her vision. She had taken him at first for a schoolteacher, but when the kids left, he stayed in his seat reading what she took to be the text of the play, or perhaps the Introduction. And when the curtain rose again for the evening show, there he was still, in that same central spot, his placid unresponsive gaze locked on her exactly as before; and when the final curtain fell, she resented it for taking him away from her.

A few days later, in York, when she had forgotten him, she could have sworn she saw him again, but she wasn't sure; the stage lighting was too good, she couldn't penetrate the haze. Nor did the stranger stay in his place between shows. All the same, she could have sworn it was the same face, front row centre, raptly upturned to her, and the same red blazer too. Was he a critic? A producer? An agent? A film director? Was he from the City company, perhaps, that had taken over the sponsorship of their troupe from the Arts Council? He was too lean, too watchful in his immobility, for a mere professional money-man who was checking out his firm's investment. As to critics, agents, and the rest, it was a miracle if they stayed for one act, let alone two consecutive performances. And when she saw him on a third occasion--or thought she did--just before leaving for her holiday, on the very last night of their tour, in fact, posted at the stage door of the little East End theatre, she had half a mind to bowl straight up to him and ask him outright what his business was--whether he was an embryonic Ripper, an autograph hunter, or just a normal sex maniac like the rest of us. But his air of studious righteousness had held her back.