The Little Drummer Girl

by John le Carré

  ‘Thanks, Jose,’ she said finally, without lifting her head. ‘Thanks a hell of a lot. If you’d lend me our nice gun a moment, I’ll just pop out and shoot myself.’

  Kurtz was already laughing, though he was alone in his mirth: ‘Now, Charlie, I don’t think that’s quite fair to our friend Joseph here at all. This was a committee thing. We had a lot of heads at work here.’

  Kurtz had a final request: the envelopes that contain your letters, dear. He had them right here with him, look, they weren’t franked or cancelled, and he hadn’t yet put the letters inside for Michel to take them out again at the ceremonial opening. Would Charlie oblige? It was mainly for the fingerprints, he said; yours first, dear, afterwards the post office sorters’, finally Michel’s. But there was also the little point about it being her saliva on the flap and underneath the stamps; her blood group, lest anybody clever should ever think of checking, because don’t ever forget they have some very clever people, as your fine, fine work has even last night confirmed to us.

  She remembered the long fatherly hug from Kurtz, because at the time it seemed as inevitable and necessary as parenthood. Of her farewell from Joseph, however, her last of the series, she afterwards had no recollection at all – not the manner of it, not the place. The briefing, yes; the covert return to Salzburg, yes: an hour and a half in the back of Dimitri’s clapped-out van, and no talking after lights out. And she remembered the landing in London, more alone than she had ever been in her life; and the smell of English sadness that had greeted her even on the runway, reminding her of what it was that had turned her towards radical solutions in the first place: the malign sloth of authority, the caged despair of the losers. There was a luggage handlers’ go-slow and a rail strike; the women’s lavatory was like a taste of prison. She went through green and, as usual, the bored Customs officer stopped and questioned her. With the difference that this time she wondered whether he had a reason beyond wanting to chat her up.

  Coming home is like going abroad, she thought as she joined the despondent queue for the bus. Let’s blow the whole lot up and start again.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The motor lodge was called Romanz and was set among pine trees on a rise beside the autobahn. It had been built twelve months ago for mediaevally minded lovers, with cement-stippled cloisters, plastic muskets, and tinted neon lighting, and Kurtz had the last chalet of the row, with a leaded jalousie window that looked over the westbound lane. It was two in the morning, an hour of day he was on cheerful terms with. He had showered and shaved, he had made himself coffee on the clever coffee machine and drunk Coca-Cola from the teak-lined refrigerator, and for the rest of the time he had done what he was doing now: he had sat in his shirt-sleeves at the little writing-table, with all the lights out and a pair of binoculars at his elbow, watching the headlamps as they switched through the tree trunks on their way to Munich. Traffic was light at that hour, on average five vehicles a minute; in the rain, they had a tendency to bunch.

  It had been a long day and a long night, too, if you counted nights, but Kurtz believed that lassitude clouded the head. Five hours’ sleep was enough for anyone, and for himself too much. It had been a long day all the same, not really starting until Charlie had left the city. There had been the Olympic Village apartments to clear, and Kurtz had supervised that operation personally, because he knew it gave the kids an extra edge when they were reminded of his determination to handle detail. There had been the letters to place in Yanuka’s apartment, and Kurtz had seen to that as well. From the surveillance post across the street, he had been able to observe the watchers let themselves in, and he had remained there to flatter them on their return, and assure them that their long, heroic vigil would soon be rewarded.

  ‘What’s happening to him?’ Lenny had asked querulously. ‘Marty, that boy has a future, now. Just you remember it.’

  Kurtz’s reply had struck a Delphic note: ‘Lenny, that boy has a future, just not with us.’

  Shimon Litvak sat behind Kurtz on the edge of the double bed. He had taken off his dripping raincoat and dumped it on the floor at his feet. He looked cheated and angry. Becker sat apart from both of them on a dainty bedroom chair, with his own small ring of light around him, much as he had sat in the Athens house. The same aloneness; yet sharing the same close atmosphere of vigilance before the battle.

  ‘The girl knows nothing,’ Litvak reported indignantly to Kurtz’s still back. ‘She’s a half-wit.’ His voice had risen slightly and had a quaver. ‘She’s Dutch, her name is Larsen, she thinks Yanuka picked her up while she was squatting with a commune in Frankfurt, but she can’t be sure because she’s had so many men and she forgets. Yanuka took her on a few trips, taught her to shoot his gun all wrong, and lent her to big brother for his rest and recreation. That part she remembers. Even for Khalil’s sex-life they used cut-outs, never the same place twice. She found that groovy. Between times she drove cars for them, placed a couple of bombs for them, stole a few passports for them. For friendly. Because she’s an anarchist. Because she’s a half-wit.’

  ‘A comfort girl,’ said Kurtz thoughtfully, speaking less to Litvak than to his own reflection in the window.

  ‘She admits Godesberg, she half admits Zürich. If we had the time, she’d admit Zürich totally. Antwerp no.’

  ‘Leyden?’ asked Kurtz. And now there was a knot in Kurtz’s voice as well, so that from where Becker sat, it might have sounded as if the two men were suffering from the same minor throat affliction, a clenching of the cords.

  ‘Leyden a solid no,’ Litvak replied. ‘No, no, no again. Then still no. She was on holiday with her parents at the time. On Sylt. Where’s Sylt?’

  ‘Off the coast of northern Germany,’ said Becker, but Litvak glared at him as if suspecting an insult.

  ‘She’s so damn slow,’ Litvak complained, talking to Kurtz once more. ‘She started talking around midday, but by mid-afternoon she was backing away from everything she’d said. “No, I never said that. You’re lying.” We find the place on the tape, play it to her, still she says it’s a forgery, and starts spitting at us. She’s stubborn Dutch and she’s nuts.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Kurtz.

  But Litvak wanted more than understanding: ‘Hurt her, we raise her anger so she gets more stubborn. Stop hurting her, we give her the strength back, she gets even more stubborn, starts to call us names.’

  Kurtz turned half the distance, till, if he had been looking at anyone, he would have been looking straight at Becker.

  ‘She bargains,’ Litvak continued, in the same note of strident complaint. ‘We’re Jews so she bargains. “I tell you this much, you keep me alive. Yes? I tell you that much, you let me go. Yes?”’ He swung suddenly on Becker. ‘So what’s the hero’s way?’ he demanded. ‘I should enchant her maybe? Have her fall in love with me?’

  Kurtz was looking at his watch, and beyond it. ‘Whatever she knows, it’s already history,’ he remarked. ‘Important is only what we do with her. And when.’ But he spoke as the man who must give the final answer himself. ‘How does the fiction play, Gadi?’ he asked of Becker.

  ‘It fits,’ said Becker. He let them wait a moment. ‘Rossino had the use of her in Vienna for a couple of days, drove her south, delivered her to the car. All true. She drove the car to Munich, met Yanuka. Untrue, but they’re the only two people who know it.’

  Litvak greedily took up the story: ‘They met in Ottobrunn. That’s a village south-east of town. From there they went somewhere and made love. Who cares where? Not everything has to fit a reconstruction. Maybe in the car. She likes it all the time, she says so. But best she likes it with the fighters, as she calls them. Maybe they rented a room somewhere and the proprietor is too scared even to come forward. Gaps like that are normal. The opposition will expect them.’

  ‘And tonight?’ said Kurtz, with a glance towards the window. ‘Now?’

  Litvak did not like to be so closely questioned. ‘So now they’re in the car and on their
way into town. To make love. To pull a job and hide the rest of the explosive. Who will ever know? Why should we explain so much?’

  ‘So where is she at this moment?’ Kurtz asked, gathering in the details while he continued to deliberate. ‘In reality?’

  ‘In the van,’ said Litvak.

  ‘And where’s the van?’

  ‘Beside the Mercedes. In the layby. You give the word, we transfer her.’

  ‘And Yanuka?’

  ‘Also in the van. Their last night together. We sedated both of them, just like we agreed.’

  Taking up his binoculars again, Kurtz held them halfway to his eyes, then returned them to the table. Then he put his hands together and frowned into them.

  ‘Tell me a different method,’ he suggested, addressing himself by the pose of his head to Becker. ‘We fly her home, stick her in the Negev Desert, lock her up. Then what? What has become of her? they will ask. From the moment she disappears, they will think the worst. They will think she has defected. That Alexis has got her. That the Zionists have. In any case, that their operation is at risk. That is what they will say, no question: “Disband the team, send everybody home.”’ He summarised: ‘They have to have the evidence that nobody has got her except God and Yanuka. They have to know she’s as dead as Yanuka is. You disagree with me, Gadi? Or do I perceive from your expression that you know better?’

  Kurtz merely waited, but Litvak’s gaze, trained upon Becker, remained hostile and accusing. Perhaps he suspected him of innocence at a moment when he needed him to share the guilt.

  ‘No,’ said Becker, after an age. But his face, as Kurtz had noticed, had the hardness of a willed allegiance.

  Then suddenly Litvak was on him – so tense and jerky in his voice that his words were like a leap from where he sat. ‘No?’ he repeated. ‘No what? No operation? What is no?’

  ‘No is: we have no alternative,’ Becker replied again, taking his time. ‘Spare the Dutch girl, they’ll never accept Charlie. Alive, Miss Larsen is as dangerous as Yanuka. If we are going on, this is where we do it.’

  ‘If,’ Litvak echoed with contempt.

  Kurtz restored order with another question.

  ‘Does she have no useful names at all?’ he asked Litvak, seeming to want the answer yes. ‘Nothing that we should maybe pursue with her? A reason to hold her back?’

  Litvak pulled a high shrug. ‘She knows of a big north German called Edda. She only met her once. Beyond Edda there’s another girl, who’s a voice from Paris on the telephone. Beyond the voice is Khalil, but Khalil doesn’t hand out visiting cards. She’s a half-wit,’ he repeated. ‘She drugs so hard you get stoned just standing over her.’

  ‘So she’s a dead end,’ said Kurtz.

  Litvak was already buttoning his dark raincoat. ‘A dead end is what she is,’ he agreed, with a mirthless grin. But he didn’t move towards the door. He was still awaiting the specific order.

  Kurtz had a last question. ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Twenty-one next week. Is that a reason?’

  Slowly, self-consciously, Kurtz too stood up, and faced Litvak formally across the cramped little room, with its carved, hunting-lodge furniture and wrought-iron fittings.

  ‘Ask each kid individually, Shimon,’ he ordered. ‘Does he or she wish to stand down? No explanations needed, no mark against anyone’s name who does. A free vote, right across the board.’

  ‘I asked them already,’ Litvak said.

  ‘Ask them again.’ Kurtz raised his left wrist and looked at his watch. ‘One hour from now exactly, telephone me. Not earlier. Do nothing until you have spoken to me.’

  When the traffic is at its thinnest, Kurtz meant. When I have made my dispositions.

  Litvak departed. Becker stayed.

  Kurtz’s first call was to his wife, Elli, and he reversed the charges because he was punctilious about expenses.

  ‘Stay right where you are, please, Gadi,’ he said quietly as Becker rose to leave, for Kurtz prided himself on living a very open life. So for ten minutes Becker listened to such urgent trivia as how Elli was getting along with her Bible study group, or coping with her shopping problems while the car was off the road. He did not need to ask why Kurtz had chosen such a moment to discuss these matters. In his day, he had done the same thing exactly. Kurtz wanted to touch base before the killing. He wanted to hear Israel talking to him live.

  ‘Elli’s just fine,’ Kurtz assured Becker enthusiastically as he rang off. ‘She sends love, she says, “Gadi, hurry on back home.” She bumped into Frankie a couple of days back. Frankie was fine too. A little lonely for you, but fine.’

  Kurtz’s second phone call was to Alexis, and at first Becker might have supposed, if he hadn’t known Kurtz better, that it was all part of the same affable round-up of good friends. Kurtz listened to his agent’s family news; he asked about the coming baby – yes, mother and child in excellent health. But once these preliminaries were over, Kurtz braced himself and went straight and hard to the nub, for in his last few conversations with Alexis he had sensed a distinct easing in the Doctor’s devotion.

  ‘Paul, it appears that a certain accident we recently spoke of is about to occur at any moment and there is nothing you or I can do to prevent it, so get yourself a pen and paper,’ he announced jovially. Then, changing tone, he poured out his instructions in a brisk Germanic stream: ‘For the first twenty-four hours after you receive the official word, you will confine your enquiries to the student quarters of Frankfurt and Munich. You will let it be known that the principal suspects are a left-wing group of activists known to have connections with a cell in Paris. You have that?’ He paused, allowing Alexis time to write things down.

  ‘On day two, after midday, you present yourself at the Munich main post office and you collect a poste restante letter addressed to you in your own name,’ Kurtz continued when he had apparently obtained the required reassurance. ‘This will provide you with the identity of your first culprit, a Dutch girl, together with certain background data regarding her involvement in previous incidents.’

  Kurtz’s orders now proceeded at dictation speed, and with great force: no searches to be made in Munich city centre until day fourteen; the results of all forensic tests to be sent to Alexis alone in the first instance, and not put into distribution until cleared by Kurtz; public comparison with other incidents made only with Kurtz’s approval. Hearing his agent bridle, Kurtz held the receiver a distance from his ear so that Becker could hear it too. ‘But, Marty, listen – my friend – I must ask something, actually –’

  ‘Ask it.’

  ‘What are we looking at here? An accident is not a picnic, after all, Marty. We are a civilised democracy, you know what I mean?’

  If Kurtz did, he refrained from saying so.

  ‘Listen. I must demand something. Marty, I demand it, I insist on it. No damage, no loss of life. This is a condition. We are friends. You follow?’

  Kurtz followed, as his terse answers testified. ‘Paul, there will surely be no damage to German property. A little bruising maybe. No damage.’

  ‘And life? For God’s sake, Marty, we are not primitive here!’ cried Alexis, with a resurgence of alarm.

  A massive calm entered Kurtz’s voice. ‘No innocent blood will be shed, Paul. You have my word. No German citizen will suffer so much as a scratch.’

  ‘I can rely on this?’

  ‘You’ll have to,’ said Kurtz, and rang off without leaving his number.

  In normal circumstances, Kurtz would not have used the telephones so freely, but since Alexis now had the responsibility for the tapping of them, he felt entitled to take the risk.

  Litvak rang ten minutes later. Go, said Kurtz; the green light; do it.

  They waited, Kurtz at the window, Becker in his chair again, looking past him at the uneasy night sky. Grabbing the central catch, Kurtz unfastened it and shoved the two casements as wide as they would go, admitting the boom of the traffic from the autobahn.

 
‘Why take needless risks?’ he muttered, as if he had caught himself in an act of negligence.

  Becker began counting at the soldier’s speed. So long to arrange the two of them in position. So long for the last check-up. So long to get clear. So long before a break in the traffic was signalled from both directions. So long to wonder how much human life is worth, even to those who dishonour the human bond completely. And to those who do not.

  It was as usual the loudest bang anyone had ever heard. Louder than Godesberg, louder than Hiroshima, louder than all the battles he had fought. Still sitting in his chair, looking past Kurtz’s silhouette, Becker saw one orange ball of flame burst out of the ground, then vanish, taking the late stars and early daylight with it. It was followed at once by a wave of oily black smoke that rushed to fill the space left behind by the expanding gases. He saw débris fly into the air and a spray of black fragments spin away from the rear – a wheel, a chunk of tarmac, something human, who would ever tell? He saw the curtain brush itself affectionately against Kurtz’s bare arm, and felt the warm puff of a hair-dryer. He heard the insect-like buzz of hard objects trembling against each other and, well before that had stopped, the first cries of indignation, the yapping of dogs, and the slopping of scared feet as people in bedroom slippers collected in the covered gangway that linked the chalets, and said the nonsense sentences to each other that people say in films of sinking ships: ‘Mother! Where’s Mother! I’ve lost my jewels.’ He heard a woman in hysterics insist that the Russians were coming, and an equally frightened voice assure her that it was only a petrol tanker going up. Someone said it was military – the things they move at night are a disgrace! There was a radio by the bed. While Kurtz stayed at the window, Becker switched it to a local chat programme for insomniacs and kept it running in case they cut into it with a bulletin. To the wail of a siren, a police car hurtled down the autobahn, blue light flashing. Then nothing, then a fire engine, followed by an ambulance. The music stopped and gave way to the first announcement. Unexplained explosion west of Munich, cause unknown, no further details. Closure of autobahn in both directions, traffic advised to take alternative route.