The Little Drummer Girl

by John le Carré

  ‘Who the hell are you to say who’s innocent?’ she demanded rudely, again forcing herself against the tide of his persuasion.

  ‘You mean we as Israelis, Charlie?’

  ‘I mean you,’ she retorted, skirting the dangerous ground.

  ‘I would prefer to turn your question around a little, Charlie, and say that in our view somebody has to be very guilty indeed before he needs to die.’

  ‘Such as who? Who needs to die? Those poor sods you shoot up on the West Bank? Or the ones you bomb in Lebanon?’ How on earth had they come to be talking about death? she wondered, even as she put the crazy question. Had she started it, had he? It made no difference. He was already weighing his reply.

  ‘Only those who break completely the human bond, Charlie,’ Kurtz replied with steady emphasis. ‘They deserve to die.’

  Stubbornly, she went on fighting him: ‘Are there Jews like that?’

  ‘Jews, yes, Israelis surely also, but we are not among them, and mercifully they are not our problem here tonight.’

  He had the authority to talk that way. He had the answers children long for. He had the background and the whole room knew it, Charlie included: that he was a man who dealt only in things he had experienced. When he asked questions, you knew he had himself been questioned. When he gave orders, you knew he had obeyed the orders of others. When he spoke of death, it was clear that death had passed by him often and very close, and might any moment come his way again. And when he chose to issue a warning to her, as he did now, he was quite evidently on terms with the dangers he spoke of: ‘Do not confuse our play with entertainment, Charlie,’ he told her earnestly. ‘We are not speaking of some enchanted forest. When the lights go down on the stage, it will be night-time in the street. When the actors laugh they will be happy, and when they weep they will very likely be bereaved and broken-hearted. And if they get hurt – and they will, Charlie – they will surely not be in a position, when the curtain falls, to jump up and run for the last bus home. There’s no squeamish pulling back from the harsher scenes, no days off sick. It’s peak performance all the way down the line. If that’s what you like, if that’s what you can handle – and we think it is – then hear us out. Otherwise let’s skip the audition right now.’

  In his Euro-Bostonian drawl, faint as a distant signal on the transatlantic radio, Shimon Litvak made a first husky interjection: ‘Charlie never walked away from a fight in her life, Marty,’ he objected, in the tone of a disciple reassuring his master. ‘We don’t just believe that, we know it. It’s all over her record.’

  They were halfway there, Kurtz told Misha Gavron later, describing, during a rare ceasefire in their relationship, this point in the proceedings: a lady who consents to listen is a lady who consents, he said, and Gavron very nearly smiled.

  Halfway, perhaps – yet, in terms of the time ahead of them, barely at the beginning. By insisting on compression, Kurtz was not in the least insisting upon haste. He placed great weight upon a laboured manner, on adding fuel to her frustration, on having her impatience racing out ahead of them like a lead-horse. Nobody understood better than Kurtz what it was like to possess a mercurial nature in a plodding world, or how to play upon its restlessness. Within minutes of her arrival, while she was still scared, he had befriended her: a father to Joseph’s lover. Within minutes more, he had offered her the resolution to all the disordered components of a life so far. He had appealed to the actress in her, to the martyr, to the adventurer; he had flattered the daughter and excited the aspirant. He had granted her an early glimpse of the new family she might care to join, knowing that deep down, like most rebels, she was only looking for a better conformity. And most of all, by heaping such benefits upon her, he had made her rich: which, as Charlie herself had long preached to anyone who would hear her, was the beginning of subservience.

  ‘So, Charlie, what we propose,’ said Kurtz, in a slower, more genial voice, ‘we propose an open-ended audition, a string of questions which we invite you to answer very frankly, very truthfully, even though for the meanwhile remaining necessarily in the dark about the purpose of them.’

  He paused but she didn’t speak, and there was by now a tacit submission in her silence.

  ‘We ask you never to evaluate, never to try to come to our side of the net, never to seek to please or gratify us in any regard. Many things you might consider negative in your life we would surely see differently. Do not attempt to do our thinking for us.’ A short jab of the forearm entrenched this amicable warning. ‘Question. What happens – whether now or later – what happens should either one of us elect to jump off the escalator? Charlie, let me try to answer that.’

  ‘You do that, Mart,’ she advised, and, putting her elbows on the table, rested her chin in her hands and smiled at him with a look intended to convey dazed unbelief.

  ‘Thank you, Charlie, so listen carefully, please. Depending on the precise moment you want out or we do, depending on the degree of your knowledge at that time and our assessment of you, we follow one of two courses. Course one, we extract a solemn promise from you, we give you money, we send you back to England. A handshake, mutual trust, good friends, and a certain vigilance on our side to make sure you keep the bargain. You follow me?’

  She lowered her gaze to the table, partly to escape his scrutiny, partly to conceal her growing excitement. For that was another thing Kurtz counted on, which most intelligence professionals forget too soon: to the uninitiated, the secret world is of itself attractive. Simply by turning on its axis, it can draw the weakly anchored to its centre.

  ‘Course two, a little rougher, still not terrible. We place you in quarantine. We like you, but we fear we have reached a point where you might compromise our project, where the part we are proposing, say, cannot safely be offered anyplace else while you are at large to talk about it.’

  She knew without looking that he was smiling his good-hearted smile, suggesting that such frailty on Charlie’s part would be only human.

  ‘So what we can do in that case, Charlie,’ he resumed, ‘we take a nice house somewhere – say, on a beach, somewhere pleasant, no problem. We give you company, some people similar to the kids here. Nice people but able. We fake some reason for your absence, most likely a voguish one that fits your volatile reputation, such as a mystical sojourn to the East.’

  His thick fingers had found his old wristwatch on the table before him. Without looking at it, Kurtz lifted it and set it down six inches nearer to him. Needing an activity herself, Charlie took up a pen and began to doodle on the pad before her.

  ‘Once you are out of quarantine, we do not desert you – far from it. We straighten you out, we give you a sack of money, we keep in touch with you, make sure you are not incautious in any way, and as soon as it’s safe we help you to resume your career and friendships. That’s the worst that can happen, Charlie, and I’m only telling it to you because you may be harbouring some crazy notion that by saying “no” to us, now or later, you’re going to wake up dead in a river wearing a pair of concrete boots. We don’t deal that way. Least of all with friends.’

  She was still doodling. Closing a circle with her pencil, she drew a neat diagonal arrow above it to make it male. She had flicked through some work of popular psychology that used that symbol. Suddenly, like a man annoyed at being interrupted, Joseph spoke; yet his voice, for all its severity, had a thrilling and warm effect on her.

  ‘Charlie, it will not be enough for you to play the sullen witness. It is your own dangerous future they are discussing. Do you mean to sit there and allow them to dispose of it practically without consulting you? A commitment, do you understand? Charlie, come!’

  She drew another circle. Another boy. She had heard everything Kurtz had said, every innuendo. She could have played back every word for him, just as she had done for Joseph on the Acropolis. She was as keen-witted and alert as she had been in her life, but every cunning instinct in her told her to dissemble and withhold.

  ‘S
o how long does the show run, Mart?’ she asked, in a lacklustre voice as if Joseph had never spoken at all.

  Kurtz rephrased her question: ‘Well now, I guess what you really mean is what happens to you when the job runs out. Is that right?’

  She was wonderful. A shrew. Flinging down her pencil, she slapped the table with her palm: ‘No, it bloody well isn’t! I mean how long does it run, and what about my tour with As You Like It in the autumn?’

  Kurtz betrayed no triumph at the practicality of her objection. ‘Charlie,’ he said earnestly, ‘your projected tour with As You Like It will in no wise be affected. We would surely expect you to fulfil that engagement, assuming the grant for it is forthcoming. As to duration, your commitment to our project could take six weeks, it could take two years, though we would surely hope not. What we have to hear from you now is whether you wish to audition with us at all or whether you prefer to tell good night to everybody here and go home to a safer, duller life. What’s your verdict?’

  It was a false peak he had made for her. He wished to give her a sense of conquest as well as of submission. Of having chosen her own captors. She was wearing a denim jacket and one of the tin buttons hung loose; this morning when she put it on, she had made a mental note to stitch it during the boat trip, then had promptly forgotten it again in her excitement at meeting Joseph. Taking hold of it now, she began testing the strength of the thread. She was centre stage. She could feel their collective gaze fixed on her, from the table, from the shadows, from behind her. She could feel their bodies craning in tension, Joseph’s also, and hear the taut, creaking sound that audiences make when they are hooked. She could feel the strength of their purpose and of her own power: will she, won’t she?

  ‘Jose?’ she said, without turning her head.

  ‘Yes, Charlie.’

  She still did not turn to him, yet she had the clear knowledge that from his candlelit island he was waiting on her answer more keenly than all the rest of them together.

  ‘This is it, is it? Our big romantic tour of Greece? Delphi, all the second-best places?’

  ‘Our drive north will in no wise be affected,’ Joseph replied, lightly parodying Kurtz’s phraseology.

  ‘Not even postponed?’

  ‘I would say it was imminent, actually.’

  The thread broke, the button lay on her palm. She tossed it on the table, watched it spin and settle. Heads or tails, she thought, playing them. Let them sweat a little. She puffed out some breath as if blowing away her forelock.

  ‘So I’ll stick around for the audition then, won’t I?’ she told Kurtz carelessly, looking nowhere but at the button. ‘I’ve got nowt to lose,’ she added, and immediately wished she hadn’t. Sometimes, to her own annoyance, she overdid things for the sake of a good exit line: ‘Nowt I haven’t lost already, anyhow,’ she said.

  Curtain, she thought; applause, please, Joseph, and we’ll wait for tomorrow’s reviews. But none came, so she picked up a pencil and drew a girl for a change, while Kurtz, perhaps without even knowing he was doing so, transferred his watch to another, better spot.

  The interrogation, with Charlie’s gracious consent, could now begin in earnest.

  Slowness is one thing, concentration another. Kurtz did not relax for a second; he did not permit himself or Charlie even half a breathing space as he willed her, coaxed her, lulled and woke her up, and by every effort of his dynamic spirit bound himself to her in their burgeoning theatrical partnership. Only God and a few people in Jerusalem, it was said within his service, knew where Kurtz’s repertoire was learned – the mesmeric intensity, the horse-drawn Americanised prose, the flair, the barrister’s tricks. His slashed face, now applauding, now ruefully incredulous, now beaming out the reassurance that she wanted, became by degrees an entire audience in itself, so that all her performance was directed towards winning his desperately coveted approval and no one else’s. Even Joseph was forgotten: put aside until another life.

  Kurtz’s first questions, by design, were scattered and harmless. It was as if, thought Charlie, he had a blank passport application pinned up in his mind and Charlie, without being able to see it, was filling in the boxes. Full name of your mother, Charlie. Your father’s date and place of birth if known, Charlie. Grandfather’s occupation; no, Charlie, on your father’s side. Followed, with no conceivable reason, by the last known address of a maternal aunt, which was followed yet again by some arcane detail of her father’s education. Not a single one of these early questions bore directly upon herself, nor did Kurtz intend it to. Charlie was like the forbidden subject he was scrupulous to avoid. The entire purpose behind this cheerful quickfire opening salvo was not to elicit information at all, but to instil in her the instinctive obedience, the yes-sir-no-sir of the classroom, on which the later passages between them would depend; while Charlie, for her part, as the sap of her trade increasingly worked in her, performed, obeyed, and reacted with ever-increasing compliancy. Had she not done as much for directors and producers a hundred times – used the stuff of harmless conversation to give them a sample of her range? All the more reason, under Kurtz’s hypnotic encouragement, to do it now.

  ‘Heidi?’ Kurtz echoed. ‘Heidi? That’s a damned odd name for an English elder sister, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not for Heidi, it isn’t,’ she replied buoyantly, and scored an immediate laugh from the kids beyond the lighting. Heidi because her parents went to Switzerland for their honeymoon, she explained; and Switzerland was where Heidi was conceived. ‘Among the edelweiss,’ she added, with a sigh. ‘In the missionary position.’

  ‘So why Charmian?’ Marty asked when the laughter had finally subsided.

  Charlie lifted her voice to capture the curdled tones of her bloody mother: ‘The name Charmian was arrived upon with a view to flettering our rich and distant cousin of that na-eme.’

  ‘Did it pay off?’ Kurtz asked as he inclined his head to catch something Litvak was trying to say to him.

  ‘Not yet,’ Charlie replied skittishly, still with her mother’s precious intonation. ‘Father, you know, has passed on, but Cousin Charmian, alas, has yet to join him.’

  Only by these and many similar harmless detours did they gradually advance upon the subject of Charlie herself.

  ‘Libra,’ Kurtz murmured with satisfaction as he jotted down her date of birth.

  Meticulously but swiftly, he bustled her through her early childhood – boarding schools, houses, names of early friends and ponies – and Charlie answered him in kind, spaciously, sometimes humorously, always willingly, her excellent memory illuminated by the fixed glow of his attention and by her growing need to be on terms with him. From schools and childhood it was a natural step – though Kurtz took it only with the greatest diffidence – to the painful history of her father’s ruin, and Charlie rendered this in quiet but moving detail, from the first brutal breaking of the news to the trauma of the trial and sentence and imprisonment. Now and then, it was true, her voice caught slightly; sometimes her gaze sank to study her own hands that played so prettily and expressively in the downlight; then a gallant, lightly self-mocking phrase would come to her, to blow it all away.

  ‘We’d have been all right if we’d been working class,’ she said once, with a wise and hopeless smile. ‘You get sacked, you go redundant, the forces of capital run against you – it’s life, it’s reality, you know where you are. But we weren’t working class. We were us. The winning side. And all of a sudden, we’d joined the losers.’

  ‘Tough,’ said Kurtz gravely, with a shake of his broad head.

  Backtracking, he probed for the solid facts: date and place of trial, Charlie; the exact length of sentence, Charlie; names of lawyers if she remembered them. She didn’t, but wherever she could she helped him, and Litvak duly noted down her answers, leaving Kurtz free to give her his entire benevolent attention. Now all laughter had ceased completely. It was as if the soundtrack had stopped dead, all but hers and Marty’s. There was not a creak, not a cough, not an al
ien shuffle from anywhere. In her whole life, it seemed to Charlie, no group of people had been so attentive, so appreciative of her performance. They understand, she thought. They know what it is to live the nomad’s life; to be thrown upon your own resources when the cards are stacked against you. Once, on a quiet order from Joseph, the lights went out and they waited together without a sound in the tense darkness of an air raid, Charlie as apprehensive as the rest, till Joseph announced the all-clear and Kurtz resumed his patient questioning. Had Joseph really heard anything, or was this their way of reminding her that she belonged? The effect on Charlie was in either case the same: for those tense few seconds she was their fellow conspirator with no thought of rescue.

  At other times, wresting her gaze briefly from Kurtz, she would see the kids dozing at their posts: Swedish Raoul, with his flaxen head sunk upon his chest and the sole of one thick track-shoe flattened against the wall; South African Rose propped against the double doors, her runner’s legs stretched in front of her and her long arms folded across her chest; North Country Rachel, the wings of her black hair folded round her face, eyes half closed, but still with her soft smile of sensual reminiscence. Yet the smallest extraneous whisper found every one of them instantly alert.

  ‘So what’s the bottom line here, Charlie?’ Kurtz enquired kindly. ‘Regarding that whole early period of your life until what we may call the Fall –’

  ‘The age of innocence, Mart?’ she suggested helpfully.

  ‘Precisely. Your age of innocence. Define it for me.’

  ‘It was hell.’

  ‘Want to name some reasons?’

  ‘It was suburbia. Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘No, it is not.’

  ‘Oh, Mart – you’re so –’ Her slack-mouthed voice. Her tone of fond despair. Limp gestures with the hands. How could she ever explain? ‘It’s all right for you, you’re a Jew, don’t you see? You’ve got these fantastic traditions, the security. Even when you’re persecuted, you know who you are, and why.’