‘Suppose,’ Alexis said, half deafened in his mind by the volume of Kurtz’s words.
‘And this Arab, Paul, he was moved to approach you,’ Kurtz resumed. ‘Would speak to no one else. Trusted you on impulse, declined to have dealings with any other German representative. Bypassed the ministries, the police, the intelligence people. Looked you up in the telephone directory, say – called you at your home. Or at your office. How you like – the story’s yours. And met you here in this hotel. Tonight. And drank a couple of whiskies with you. Let you pay. And over those whiskies he presented you with certain facts. The great Alexis – no one else will do for him. Do you see a line of advantage here, for a man unjustly deprived of the proper flowering of his career?’
Reliving this scene later, a thing that Alexis did repeatedly in the light of many conflicting moods of amazement, pride, and total, anarchic horror, he came to regard the speech that followed as Kurtz’s oblique justification in advance for what he had in mind.
‘Terror people get better and better these days,’ he complained gloomily. ‘“Put in an agent, Schulmann,” Misha Gavron shrieks at me from halfway inside his desk. “Sure, General,” I tell him. “I’ll find you an agent. I’ll train him, help him trail his coat, gain attention in the right places, feed him to the opposition. I’ll do whatever you ask. And you know the first thing they’ll do?” I say to him. “They’ll invite him to authenticate himself. To go shoot a bank guard or an American soldier. Or bomb a restaurant. Or deliver a nice suitcase to someone. Blow him up. Is that what you want? Is that what you are inviting me to do, General – put in an agent, then sit back and watch him kill our people for the enemy?”’ Once again, he cast Alexis the unhappy smile of someone who was also at the mercy of unreasonable superiors. ‘Terrorist organisations don’t carry passengers, Paul. I told Misha this. They don’t have secretaries, typists, coding clerks, or any of the people who would normally make natural agents without being in the front line. They require a special kind of penetration. “You want to crack the terror target these days,” I told him, “you practically have to build yourself your own terrorist first.” Does he listen to me?’
Alexis could no longer withhold his fascination. He leaned right forward, his eyes bright with the dangerous glamour of his question. ‘And have you done that, Marty?’ he whispered. ‘Here in Germany?’
Kurtz, as so often, did not answer directly, and his Slav eyes seemed already to look beyond Alexis to the next goal along his devious and lonely road.
‘Suppose I were to report an accident to you, Paul,’ he suggested, in the tone of one selecting a remote option from the many that had presented themselves to his resourceful mind. ‘One that was going to happen, say, in around four days’ time.’
The barman’s concert had ended and he was noisily shutting down the bar as a prelude to going off to bed. At Kurtz’s suggestion, they took themselves to the hotel lounge and huddled there head to head like passengers on a windswept deck. Twice during their discussions, Kurtz glanced at his old steel watch and hurriedly excused himself to make a telephone call; and later, when Alexis out of idle curiosity investigated them, he established that he had spoken to a hotel in Delphi, Greece, for twelve minutes, and paid cash, and to a number in Jerusalem, untraceable. At three o’clock or more, several Oriental-looking guestworkers appeared in frayed overalls, wheeling a great green vacuum cleaner that resembled a Krupp cannon. But Kurtz and Alexis kept talking over the din. Indeed, it was well after dawn before the two men walked out and shook hands on their bargain. But Kurtz was careful not to thank his latest recruit too lavishly, for Alexis, as Kurtz well knew, was of a type to be alienated by too much gratitude.
The reborn Alexis hurried home, and, having shaved and changed and tarried long enough to impress his bride with the high secrecy of his mission, arrived at his glass-and-concrete office wearing an expression of mysterious contentment such as had not been seen on his face for a long while. Among his staff it was remarked that he joked a lot, and ventured some risqué comment about his colleagues. Quite the old Alexis, they said; he’s even showing signs of humour, though humour was never his strong point. He called for blank writing paper and, excluding even his private secretary, set to work penning a long and deliberately obscure report to his masters on an approach he had received from a ‘highly placed Oriental source known to me in my previous capacity’, and including a mass of brand-new information on the Godesberg outrage – though none of it sufficient, as yet, to do more than authenticate the bona fides of the informant and, by extension, of the good Doctor as his controller. He requested certain powers and facilities, and also a non-accountable operational fund to be opened in Switzerland and dispensed at his sole discretion. He was not a grasping man, though it was true his remarriage had been expensive and his divorce ruinous. But he did recognise that, in these materialistic days, people valued most highly what cost them most.
And lastly he made a tantalising prediction, which Kurtz had dictated to him word by word, and had him read back while he listened to it. It was imprecise enough to be virtually useless, precise enough to impress greatly once it was fulfilled. Unconfirmed reports claimed that a large consignment of explosive had recently been supplied by Islamic Turkish extremists in Istanbul for the purpose of anti-Zionist actions in Western Europe. A fresh outrage should be expected in the next few days. Rumours suggested a target in southern Germany. All frontier posts and local police forces to be alerted. No further details available. The same afternoon, Alexis was summoned by his superiors, and the same night he conducted a very long clandestine telephone call with his great friend Schulmann, in order to receive his congratulations and encouragement, as well as fresh instructions.
‘They are biting, Marty!’ he cried excitedly, in English. ‘They are sheep. They are completely in our hands!’
Alexis has bitten, Kurtz told Litvak back in Munich, but he’s going to need one hell of a lot of shepherding. ‘Why can’t Gadi hurry that girl up?’ he muttered, staring moodily at his watch.
‘Because he doesn’t like the killing any more!’ Litvak cried with a jubilation he could not hold back. ‘You think I can’t feel it? You think you can’t?’
Kurtz told him to be quiet.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The hilltop smelt of thyme and was a special place for Joseph. He had looked for it on the map and led Charlie to it with an air of moment, first by car and now on foot, climbing purposefully past rows of wattle beehives, through glades of cypress trees and stony fields of yellow flowers. The sun was still not at its height. Inland lay range after range of brown mountains. Eastward she glimpsed the silver plains of the Aegean until the haze turned them into sky. The air smelt of resin and honey and rang to the din of goat bells. A fresh breeze burned one side of her face and clamped her light dress against her body. She held his arm, but Joseph, deep in concentration, seemed not to notice. Once she thought she saw Dimitri sitting on a gate, but when she exclaimed, he warned her sharply not to greet him. Once she could have sworn she saw the silhouette of Rose, up above them on the skyline, but when she looked again she saw nothing.
Their day till then had had its own choreography and she had let him steer her through it with his customary restlessness. She had woken early to find Rachel standing over her, telling her that she was please to wear the other blue, dear, the one with the long sleeves. She showered quickly and marched back into the bedroom stark naked, but Rachel was gone and it was Joseph who sat perched before a breakfast tray for two, listening to a Greek news bulletin on his little radio, for all the world her companion of the night. She shot back into the bathroom, he handed the dress round the door to her; they ate hurriedly and in near silence. In the foyer he paid cash and pocketed the receipt. At the Mercedes, when they took their luggage to it, she found Raoul the hippy boy lying not six feet from the rear bumper, fiddling with the engine of an overladen motorbike, and Rose reclining on the grass with her hip cocked while she munched a bread roll. Ch
arlie wondered how long they’d been there and why they had to guard the car. Joseph drove the mile down the road to the ancient sites, parked once more, and long before other mortals had started to queue and swelter, he had spirited her through a side gate and treated her to another privately conducted tour of the centre of the universe. He showed her the Temple of Apollo and the Doric wall inscribed with hymns of praise, and the stone that had marked the world’s navel. He showed her the Treasuries and the running track and treated her to a commentary on the many wars that had been fought to obtain possession of the Oracle. But there was no lightness to his manner, as there had been on the Acropolis. She had a picture of him with a checklist in his mind, ticking each heading as he hurried her through.
Returning to the car, he handed her the key.
‘Me?’ she said.
‘Why not? I thought fine cars were your weakness.’
They headed north over winding empty roads and at first he did little but assess her driving technique, much as if she were taking her Advanced Test again, but he could not make her nervous, nor she him apparently, for quite soon he spread the map over his knees and ignored her. The car handled like a dream, the road changed from tarmac to gravel. With each sharp turn a cloud of dust shot up and, lit by the fresh sunlight, drifted away into the stupendous landscape. Abruptly he folded up the map and returned it to the pocket at his side.
‘So, Charlie? You are ready?’ he enquired, as brusquely as if she had been keeping him waiting. And resumed his narrative.
At first, they were still in Nottingham, their frenzy at its height. They had spent two nights and one day in the motel, he said, and the register bore this out.
‘The staff, if pressed, will recall a loving couple answering our description. Our bedroom was at the western end of the complex, looking on to its own piece of garden. In due course, you will be taken there and see for yourself what it looked like.’
Most of their time they had spent in bed, he said, talking politics, exchanging lives, making love. The only interruptions, it seemed, were a couple of flips into the Nottingham countryside, but the lovers’ desire soon got the better of them and they hurried back to the motel.
‘Why didn’t we just have it off in the car?’ she enquired, in an effort to draw him from his dark mood. ‘I like those unscheduled ones.’
‘I respect your taste, but unfortunately Michel is shy in these matters and prefers the privacy of the bedroom.’
She tried again: ‘So how does he rate in the charts?’
He had the answer to that too. ‘According to the best-informed reports, he is a little unimaginative, but his enthusiasm is boundless and his virility impressive.’
‘Thank you,’ she said gravely.
Early on the Monday morning, he resumed, Michel returned to London, but Charlie, who had no rehearsal till afternoon, remained behind, heartbroken, in the motel. He briskly described her grief.
‘The day is dark as a funeral. The rain is still falling. Remember the weather. At first you are crying so much you cannot even stand. You lie in the bed that is still warm from his body, weeping your heart out. He has told you he will try to come to York next week, but you are convinced you will never see him again in your life. So what do you do?’ He gave her no chance to answer. ‘You sit yourself at the cramped dressing-table in front of the mirror, you stare at the marks of his hands on your body, at your own tears as they continue falling. You open a drawer. Take out the motel folder. And, from the folder, motel stationery and a courtesy ballpoint pen. And you write to him as you sit there. Describing yourself. Your inmost thoughts. Five pages. The first of many, many letters which you send to him. You would do this? In your despair? You are an impulsive letter-writer, after all.’
‘If I had his address, I would.’
‘He has given you an address in Paris.’ He gave it to her himself, now. Care of a tobacconist’s in Montparnasse. To Michel, please forward, no surname needed or supplied.
‘The same night, from the misery of the Astral Commercial and Private Hotel, you write to him again. In the morning as soon as you wake, you once more write to him. On all sorts and scraps of stationery. At rehearsals, in the intervals, at all odd times, henceforth, you write to him passionately, unthinkingly, with total frankness.’ He glanced at her. ‘You would do that?’ he insisted again. ‘You would really write such letters?’
How much reassurance does a man need? she wondered. But he was already away again. For, joy of joys – despite her pessimistic forecasts – Michel came not only to York, he came to Bristol and, better still, to London, where he spent a whole miraculous night in Charlie’s flat in Camden, frenzy all the way. And it was there, said Joseph – as gratefully as if rounding off a complicated mathematical premise – ‘in your own bed, in your own flat, between protestations of eternal love, that we planned this very Greek holiday which we are here and now enjoying.’
A long silence while she drove and thought. We are here at last. From Nottingham to Greece in one hour’s driving.
‘To join up with Michel after Mykonos,’ she said sceptically.
‘Why not?’
‘Mykonos with Al and the family, jump ship, meet Michel in the Athens restaurant, away we go?’
‘Correct.’
‘No Al,’ she pronounced finally. ‘If I’d had you, I wouldn’t have taken Al to Mykonos. I’d have chucked him. He wasn’t invited by the sponsors. He tagged on. One at a time, that’s me.’
He dismissed her objection out of hand. ‘Michel does not ask for that type of loyalty; he does not give it and he does not receive it. He is a soldier and an enemy of your society, liable to be arrested at any time. It may be a week before you see him or six months. You think he wants you to live like a nun suddenly? Sit around pining, having tantrums, confiding your secret to your girlfriends? Nonsense. You would sleep with a whole army if he told you to.’ They passed a wayside chapel. ‘Slow down,’ he ordered, and again studied the map.
Slow down. Park here. March.
He had quickened his step. Their path led to a cluster of derelict sheds and past it to a disused stone quarry hacked like a volcanic crater into the summit of the hill. At the foot of the hewn face stood an old oil can. Without a word, Joseph weighted it with small pebbles while Charlie looked on mystified. Removing the red blazer, he folded it and laid it carefully on the ground. The gun was at his waist, dropped into a leather loop fastened to his belt, the butt tipped slightly forward on a line below his right armpit. He wore a second holster over his left shoulder but it was empty. Grasping her wrist, he drew her to the ground to squat, Arab-style, beside him.
‘So then. Nottingham is in the past, so is York, so is Bristol, so is London. Today is today, the third of our great Greek honeymoon; we are where we are, we made love all night in our hotel in Delphi, rose early, and Michel supplied you with another memorable insight into the cradle of your civilisation. You drove the car and I confirmed what I had heard from you already, that you like to drive and for a woman you drive well. And now I have brought you here, to this hilltop, you do not know why. My mood, as you have noticed, is withdrawn. I am brooding – perhaps wrestling with a great decision. Your efforts to break in upon my thoughts only annoy me. What is happening? you wonder. Is our love advancing? Or have you done something which displeases me? And if advancing, how? I sit you here – beside me – so – and I draw the gun.’
She watched in fascination how he slipped it nimbly from its holster and made it the natural extension of his hand.
‘As a great and unique privilege, I am going to initiate you into the history of this gun, and for the first time’ – his voice slowed down to make the emphasis – ‘I am going to mention to you my great brother, whose very existence is a military secret which only the most loyal few may share. I do this because I love you, and because –’ He hesitated.
And because Michel likes telling secrets, she thought; but nothing on earth would have prompted her to spoil his act.
Once again, she was aware of his seemingly effortless ability to put on Arab clothes. As last night in the taverna, when at times she barely knew which of his conflicting spirits was speaking out of him, so now she listened entranced to his adoption of the ornate Arab style of narrative.
‘All through my nomadic life as a victim of the Zionist usurpers, my great elder brother shone before me like a star. In the Jordan, in our first camp, when school was a tin hut filled with fleas. In Syria, where we fled after the Jordanian troops had driven us out with tanks. In the Lebanon, where the Zionists shelled us from the sea and bombed us from the air, and the Shiites helped them to do it. Still, in the midst of these deprivations, I unfailingly remind myself of the great absent hero, my brother, whose feats, reported to me in whispers by my beloved sister Fatmeh, I long more than anything to rival.’
He no longer asked her whether she was listening.
‘I see him seldom, and only in great secrecy. Now in Damascus. Now in Amman. A summons – come! Then, for a night, I am at his side, drinking in his words, his nobility of heart, his clear commander’s mind, his courage. One night he orders me to Beirut. He has just returned from a mission of great daring of which I may know nothing except that it was a total victory over the Fascists. I am to go with him to hear a great political speaker, a Libyan, a man of wonderful rhetoric and persuasiveness. The most beautiful speech I ever heard in my life. To this day I can quote it to you. The oppressed peoples of the entire earth should have heard this great Libyan.’ The gun lay flat in his palm. He was holding it out for her, willing her to covet it. ‘With our hearts beating with excitement, we depart from the secret lecture place and walk back through the Beirut dawn. Arm in arm, after the Arab fashion. There are tears in my eyes. On an impulse, my brother stops and embraces me as we stand there on the pavement. I can feel now his wise face pressed against my own. He takes this gun from his pocket and presses it into my hand. So.’ Grasping Charlie’s hand, he transferred the gun to it, but kept his own hand over hers while he pointed the barrel towards the quarry wall. ‘“A gift,” he says. “To avenge. To set our people free. A gift from one fighter to another. With this gun I declared my oath upon the grave of my father.” I am speechless.’
The Little Drummer Girl Page 29