In the gardens of Sultan Ahmed Square he sat on a bench among the orange and mauve flower beds, gazing benignly at the surrounding domes and minarets that made the perimeter, and also at the clusters of giggling American tourists, particularly a group of teenage girls in shorts. But something held him back from approaching them, which would have been his normal practice – to chat and laugh his way among them until they accepted him. He bought slides and postcards from the child hawkers without caring about their outrageous prices; he wandered round the Saint Sophia, contemplating with equal pleasure the glories of Justinian’s Byzantium and of the Ottoman conquest; and he was heard to let out a cry of frank amazement at the sight of columns dragged all the way from Baalbek in the country he had so recently relinquished.
But his most devout concentration was reserved for the mosaic of Augustine and Constantine presenting their church and city to the Virgin Mary, for that was where he made his clandestine connection: with a tall, unhurried man in a windjacket who at once became his guide. Until then Yanuka had resolutely refused such offers, but something this man now said to him – added no doubt to the place and time of his approach – persuaded him immediately. Side by side, they made a second, cursory tour of the interior, dutifully admired the early unsupported dome, then drove together along the Bosphorus in an old American Plymouth, till they came to a car park close to the Ankara highway. The Plymouth drove off; Yanuka was once more alone in the world – but this time as owner of a fine red Mercedes car, which he calmly took back to the Hilton and registered with the concierge as his own.
Yanuka did not go out on the town that night – not even to watch the belly dancers who had so enchanted him the night before – and the next sighting of him was very early the following day as he set off westward on the dead straight road that leads over the plains towards Edirne and Ipsala. At first the day was misty and cool and the horizons close. He stopped in a small town for coffee, and photographed a stork nesting on the dome of a mosque. He climbed a mound and relieved himself, watching the sea. The day grew hotter, the dull hills turned red and yellow, the sea ran between them to his left. On such a road, the followers had no choice but to ride him astride, as it is called, with one car far out ahead, and another far behind, hoping to God he would not plunge into some unmarked side turning, which he was quite capable of. But the deserted nature of the place gave them no option, for the only signs of life for miles at a time were tented gypsies and young shepherds and an occasional surly man in black whose life seemed taken up with studying the phenomenon of motion. Reaching Ipsala, he fooled everybody by preferring the right fork into town instead of continuing to the border. Was he going to hand over the car? God forbid! Then what the hell did he want in a stinking little Turkish border town?
The answer was God. In an undistinguished mosque in the main square, at the very edge of Christendom, Yanuka once more commended himself to Allah, which, as Litvak said grimly afterwards, was wise of him. Emerging, he was bitten by a small brown dog, which escaped before he could retaliate. That too was seen to be an omen.
Finally, to everyone’s relief, he returned to the main road. The frontier crossing there is a hostile little place. Turk and Greek do not meet easily. The area is mined indiscriminately on both sides; terrorists and contrebandiers of all kinds have their illegal routes and purposes; shootings are common and seldom spoken of; the Bulgarian border runs just a few miles north. A sign on the Turkish side says ‘HAVE A GOOD TRIP’ in English, but there is no kind word for departing Greeks. First come the Turkish insignia, mounted on a military board, next a bridge over slack green water, next a nervous little queue for the Turkish emigration formalities, which Yanuka tried to bypass on the strength of his diplomatic passport; and indeed succeeded, thus hastening his own destruction. Next, sandwiched between the Turkish police station and the Greek sentries, comes a no-man’s-land of twenty yards or so, where Yanuka bought himself a bottle of duty-free vodka and ate an ice-cream in the café, watched by a dreamy-looking, long-haired lad called Reuven, who had been eating buns there for the last three hours. The final Turkish flourish is a great bronze bust of Atatürk, the visionary and decadent, glowering into the hostile Greek plains. As soon as Yanuka had passed this, Reuven hopped onto his motorcycle and transmitted a five-dot signal to Litvak, who was waiting thirty kilometres inside the Greek border – but outside the military area – at a point where traffic had to slow to a walking pace because of construction work. He then hurried to join the fun.
They used a girl, which was common sense considering Yanuka’s proven appetites, and they gave her a guitar, which was a nice touch because these days a guitar legitimises a girl even if she can’t play it. A guitar is the uniform of a certain soulful peaceability, as their recent observations in another quarter had reminded them. They havered about whether to use a blonde girl or a brunette, knowing his preference for blondes, but aware also that he was always ready to make an exception. In the end they came down in favour of the dark girl, on the grounds that she had the better backside and the saucier walk, and they posted her where the road works ended. The road works were a godsend. They believed that. Some of them even believed that God – the Jewish one – rather than Kurtz or Litvak, was master-minding their entire luck.
First there was tarmac; then without warning there were the coarse blue chippings the size of golf balls but a lot more jagged. Then came the wooden ramp with yellow scarecrow lights blipping along it, speed limit ten kilometres and only a madman would have done more. Then came the girl the other side of the ramp, plodding along the pedestrian walkway. Keep moving just as you are, they said: don’t tart around, but trail your left thumb. Their only real worry was that because the girl was so pretty she might hole up with the wrong man before Yanuka appeared to claim her. A particularly helpful feature of the spot was the way the sparse traffic was separated by a temporary divide. There was about a fifty-yard wasteland between the eastbound and westbound lanes, with builders’ huts and tractors and every kind of junk spread over it. They could have hidden a whole regiment in there without a soul being the wiser. Not that they were a regiment. The team was seven strong, including Shimon Litvak and the decoy girl. Gavron the Rook would not allow a penny more. The other five were lightly dressed kids in summer rig and track-shoes, the sort who can stand about all day staring at their fingernails with no one ever asking why they don’t speak. Then flash into action like pike, before returning to their lethargic contemplations.
The time was by now mid-morning; the sun was high, the air dusty. The rest of the traffic consisted of grey lorries laden with some kind of lime or clay. The polished wine-red Mercedes – not new, but handsome enough – stood out in such company like a wedding car sandwiched between rubbish trucks. It hit the blue chip at thirty kilometres an hour, which was too fast, then braked as the rocks started popping against the underbody. It mounted the ramp at twenty, slowing to fifteen, then ten, and as it passed the girl everybody saw Yanuka’s head turn to check whether the front of her was as good as the back. It was. He drove for another fifty yards till he reached the tarmac, and for a bad moment Litvak was convinced he would have to invoke the fallback plan, a more elaborate affair that involved a second team and a faked road accident a hundred kilometres on. But lust, or nature, or whatever it is that makes fools of us, had its way. Yanuka pulled up and lowered his electric window, poked out his handsome young head, and, full of life’s fun, watched the girl walk luxuriously towards him through the sunlight. As she drew alongside, he enquired of her whether she intended to walk all the way to California. She replied, also in English, that she was heading ‘kind of vaguely’ for Thessalonika – was he? According to the girl, he replied, ‘As vaguely as you like,’ but no one else heard him and it was one of those things that are always disputed after an operation. Yanuka himself flatly denied that he had said anything at all, so perhaps the girl romanced a little in her triumph. Her eyes, her features altogether, were really most alluring, and her slow
enticing motion claimed his complete attention. What more could a good Arab boy ask, after two weeks of austere political retraining in the southern hills of Lebanon, than this beguiling jeans-clad vision from the harem?
It must be added that Yanuka was slim and extremely dashing in appearance, with fine Semitic looks that matched her own, and that there was an infectious gaiety about him. Consequently a mutual scenting resulted, of the kind that can take place instantly between two physically attractive people, where they actually seem to share a mirror image of themselves making love. The girl set down her guitar and, true to orders, wriggled her way out of her rucksack and dumped it gratefully on the ground. The effect of this gesture of undressing, Litvak had argued, would be to force him to do one of two things: either to open the back door from inside, or else get out of the car and unlock the boot from outside. In either case he would lay himself open to attack. In some Mercedes models, of course, the boot lock can be operated from inside. Not in this one. Litvak knew that. Just as he knew for certain that the boot was locked; and that there was no point in offering him the girl on the Turkish side of the border because – however good his papers might be, and by Arab standards they were held to be quite good – Yanuka would not be stupid enough to compound the risk of a frontier crossing by taking aboard unattested lumber.
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 life-style. 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 judgment unsaveable, 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.
CHAPTER 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 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 recrea
tion 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 marihuana 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.
The Little Drummer Girl Page 7