The Little Drummer Girl

by John le Carré

  After that she went every day to the post office and sometimes twice, becoming a feature of the place, if only because she always left empty-handed looking more and more distraught; a delicate, well-directed piece of acting, which she worked upon with care, and which Joseph, in his capacity of secret coach, more than once personally witnessed while he bought stamps at the next-door counter.

  In the same period, hoping to prompt life from him, she posted three letters to Michel in Paris, begging him to write, loving him, and forgiving him in advance for his silence. These were the first letters she had composed and written for herself. Mysteriously, she found relief in sending them; they gave an authenticity to their predecessors, and to her professed feelings. Each time she wrote one, she took it to a postbox chosen for her, and she supposed there were people covering it, but she had learned not to stare around and not to think about it. Once she spotted Rachel in the window of a Wimpy Bar looking very dowdy and English. Once Raoul and Dimitri rode past her on a motorbike. The last of her letters to Michel she sent express, from the same post office where she asked in vain for mail, and she scrawled ‘darling please please please oh please write’ along the back of the envelope after she had franked it, while Joseph waited patiently behind her.

  Gradually she came to think of her life over these weeks as possessing a large print and a small print. The large print was the world she lived in. The small was the world she slipped in and out of when the large world wasn’t watching. No love-affair, even with very married men, had ever been so secret for her.

  Their trip to Nottingham came on her fifth day. Joseph took exceptional precautions. He picked her up in a Rover from a remote tube station on a Saturday evening and drove her back on the Sunday afternoon. He had brought a blonde wig for her, a really good one, and a change of clothes, including a fur coat, in a suitcase. He had arranged a late dinner and it was as awful as the original; in the middle of it, Charlie confessed to an absurd panic lest the staff might recognise her despite her wig and fur coat and demand to know what had become of her one true lover.

  Then they went to their bedroom, two chaste twin beds, which in the fiction they had remade by pulling them together and laying the mattresses the other way. For a moment, she really thought it was going to happen. She came out of the bathroom and Joseph was lying full length on the bed, looking at her, and she lay beside him and put her head on his chest, then lifted her face to him and began kissing him, light selective kisses on favourite places around the temples, cheeks, and finally the lips. His hand held her back, then lifted to her face, and he kissed her in return, keeping his hand along her cheek and his eyes open. Then very gently he pushed her away from him, and sat up. And kissed her once more: goodbye.

  ‘Listen,’ he said as he picked up his coat.

  He was smiling. His beautiful, kind smile, his very best. She listened, and heard the Nottinghamshire rain clattering against their window – the same rain that had kept them in bed for two nights and one long day.

  Next morning they retraced nostalgically the little excursions that she and Michel had made together into the surrounding countryside until their desire swept them back to the motel; all for the visual memories, Joseph assured her earnestly, and for the added confidence of having seen. Between such lessons, like a light relief, he taught her other things. Silent signals, as he called them; and a method of secret writing on the inside of Marlboro cigarette packets, which somehow she could not take seriously.

  Several times, they met in a theatrical costumier’s behind the Strand, usually after rehearsals.

  ‘You’ll have come for the fitting, won’t you, dear?’ said a mountainous blonde lady of sixty in flowing robes, each time Charlie stepped through the doorway. ‘That’s the way then, dear,’ and showed her into a back bedroom where Joseph sat waiting for her like a whore’s client. Autumn becomes you, she thought, noticing the frost on his hair again, and the pink nip in his frugal cheeks; it always will.

  Her greatest worry was not knowing how to reach him: ‘Where are you staying? How can I get in touch with you?’

  Through Cathy, he would say. You have the safety signals and you have Cathy.

  Cathy was her lifeline, and Joseph’s front office, the preserver of his exclusiveness. Each evening between six and eight Charlie would enter a phone box, always a different one, and ring a West End number so that Cathy could take her through her day: how the rehearsals had gone, what news of Al and the gang, how was Quilley and had they discussed future parts, had she auditioned for the movie yet, and was there anything she needed? – often for half an hour or more. At first Charlie resented Cathy as a diminution of her relationship with Joseph, but gradually she came to look forward to their chats because Cathy turned out to possess a nice line in senior wit and a great deal of earthy wisdom. Charlie had a picture of somebody warm-hearted and detached and possibly Canadian: one of those unshockable lady-shrinks she used to visit at the Tavistock Clinic after she was expelled from school and thought she might be going bananas. And this was clever of Charlie, for though Miss Bach was American and not Canadian, her family had been doctors for generations.

  The house in Hampstead that Kurtz had rented for the watchers was very large, set in a quiet backwater favoured by the Finchley driving schools. Its owners, at the suggestion of their good friend Marty from Jerusalem, had tiptoed off to Marlow, but their house remained a garrison of hushed and intellectual elegance. There were pictures by Nolde in the drawing-room and a signed photograph of Thomas Mann in the conservatory, and a cage-bird that sang when you wound it up, and a library with cracking leather chairs, and a music room with a Bechstein grand. There was ping-pong in the basement and at the back a tangled garden with a crumbling grey tennis court too far gone, so the kids invented a new game for it, a kind of tennis-golf to accommodate its bunkers. At the front was a tiny gatehouse, and that was where they put their notices saying ‘Hebraic and Humanist Study Group, Students and Staff Only’, which in Hampstead did not raise an eyebrow.

  There were fourteen of them in all, including Litvak, but they spread themselves over the four floors with such a discreet and catlike orderliness you could hardly have told there was anyone there at all. Their morale had never been a problem, and the Hampstead house raised it even higher. They loved the dark furniture and the feeling that every object around them seemed to know more than they did. They loved working all day and often half the night, and coming back to this temple of gracious Jewish living; and living out that heritage as well. When Litvak played Brahms, which he did very well, even Rachel, who was pop-mad, put aside her prejudices and came downstairs to hear him, though – as they were not slow to remind her – she had at first kicked against the very idea of coming back to England at all, and had made an ostentatious point of not travelling on a British passport.

  With such a fine team spirit, they settled to the wait like clockwork. They avoided, without even being told, the local pubs and restaurants and unnecessary contact with local people. On the other hand, they took care to send themselves mail and buy milk and newspapers and do the things that the inquisitive otherwise notice by omission. They bicycled a lot and were hugely tickled to discover what distinguished and sometimes questionable Jews had been here ahead of them, and there was not one who did not pay his wry respects to the house of Friedrich Engels, or to the tomb of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery. Their transport stable was a smart little pink-painted garage off Haverstock Hill, with an old silver Rolls-Royce in the window marked ‘Not for Sale’ and a proprietor called Bernie. Bernie was a big, growling man, with a dark face and a blue suit and a half-smoked cigarette and a blue Homburg hat like Schwili’s that he wore while he did his own typing. He had vans and cars and motorbikes and number plates galore, and on the day they arrived he put up a big sign saying ‘CONTRACT BUSINESS ONLY. NO CALLERS.’ ‘A bunch of bleeding poofters,’ he told his business friends coarsely. ‘Called themselves a film company. Hired everything in my bleeding shop, paid me i
n bleeding used-oncers – well, how can you bleeding resist?’

  All of which, to a point, was true, for that was the fiction they had agreed with him. But Bernie knew a whole lot better. Bernie too, in his day, had done a thing or two.

  Meanwhile, almost daily, tidbits of news came in by way of the London Embassy, like the word of a distant battle. Rossino had called again at Yanuka’s flat in Munich, this time accompanied by a blonde woman who satisfied their theories about the girl known as Edda. So-and-so had visited so-and-so in Paris, or Beirut, or Damascus, or Marseilles. With the identification of Rossino, new avenues had opened in a dozen different directions. As often as three times a week, Litvak held a briefing and a free discussion. Where photographs had been taken, he held a magic-lantern show as well, with short lectures on known aliases, behaviour patterns, personal appetites, and habits of tradecraft. Periodically he mounted quiz competitions with amusing prizes for the winners.

  Occasionally, though not often, the great Gadi Becker slipped in to hear the latest word, seating himself at the back of the room apart from everyone and leaving as soon as the meeting ended. Of his life away from them they knew nothing at all, nor did they expect to: he was the agent runner, a breed apart; he was Becker, unsung hero of more secret missions than most of them had had birthdays. They called him affectionately ‘the Steppenwolf’, and told each other impressive half-true stories about his feats.

  The call came on day eighteen. A telex from Geneva put them on standby, a cable from Paris gave the confirmation. Within an hour, two-thirds of the team was on the road, headed westward through black rain.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The company was called the Heretics and its tour had opened in Exeter before a congregation straight from the Cathedral: women in the mauve of half-mourning, old priests permanently on the brink of tears. When there was no matinée, the cast drifted round the city and yawned, and in the evenings after the show they took wine and cheese with earnest disciples of the Arts, because it was part of the deal that you exchanged beads with the natives.

  From Exeter, they had gone to Plymouth and played in the naval base before mystified young officers who agonised about whether stage-hands should be awarded the temporary condition of gentlemen and admitted to their mess.

  But both Exeter and Plymouth had been cities of devilment and wild living by comparison with the dripping, granite mining-town far down the Cornish peninsula, with cramped alleys steaming with sea-mist, and stunted trees made hunchback by the gales. The cast was spread round half a dozen guest houses, and Charlie’s luck was a slate-gabled island entirely surrounded by hydrangeas, where the drumming of the London-bound trains as she lay in bed made her feel like a castaway taunted by the glimpse of distant ships. Their theatre was a rig inside a sports hall, and from its creaking stage she could smell the chlorine from the swimming pool and hear the sluggish thud of squash-balls through the wall. Their audience was the headscarf-and-lentils brigade, whose drugged, envious eyes told you they would do it better than you if they ever sank so low as to try. And their dressing-room, finally, was a women’s locker-room, and that was where they brought her the orchids – while she was putting on her make-up ten minutes before curtain-up.

  She saw them first in the long mirror over the handbasins, floating through the door, wrapped to the neck in damp white paper. She saw them hesitate, then advance uncertainly towards her. But she went on with her make-up as if she had never seen an orchid in her life. One spray, carried like a paper-wrapped baby across the arms of a fifty-year-old Cornish Vestal named Val, with black plaits and a vapid, disregarded smile. Russet.

  ‘I hereby declare you to be fair Rosalind,’ said Val skittishly.

  A hostile silence fell, in which the entire female cast savoured Val’s irrelevance. It was the hour when actors are at their most nervous, and their quietest.

  ‘I’m Rosalind,’ Charlie agreed unhelpfully. ‘Why?’ And went to work with an eyeliner to show she didn’t care very much what the answer was.

  Making a brave ceremony of it, Val laid the orchids in the handbasin and scurried out, while Charlie picked up the envelope in full view of everyone who cared to look. For Miss Rosalind. Continental hand, blue ballpoint instead of black ink. Inside, one continental visiting card, high gloss. The name not printed but raised in spiky, colourless capitals on the slant. ANTON MESTERBEIN, GENEVA. Below it, the one word Justice. No message added, and no ‘Joan, spirit of my freedom’.

  She transferred her attention to her other eyebrow, very carefully, as if her eyebrow were the most important thing on earth.

  ‘Who is he, Chas?’ said a Rural Shepherdess at the next-door basin. She was just out of college, mental age fifteen.

  Frowning into the mirror in her concentration, Charlie critically studied her handiwork.

  ‘Must have cost a bomb, mustn’t they, Chas?’ said the Shepherdess.

  ‘Mustn’t they, Chas?’ Charlie echoed.

  It’s him!

  It’s word of him!

  Then why isn’t he here? Why is the note not written in his hand?

  Trust no one, Michel had warned her. But especially mistrust those who claim to know me.

  It’s a trap. It’s the pigs. They’ve found out about my drive through Yugoslavia. They’re setting me up to snare my lover.

  Michel, Michel! Lover, life – tell me what to do!

  She heard her name being called: ‘Rosalind – where the hell’s Charlie? Charlie, for Christ’s sake.’

  In the corridor, a group of swimmers with towels round their necks stared without expression at the sight of a redheaded lady in threadbare Elizabethan drag emerging from the women’s locker-room.

  Somehow she performed. Perhaps she even acted too. During the interval, the director, a monkish soul whom they called Brother Mycroft, asked her with a strange look whether she would mind ‘taking it down a bit’ and she meekly promised him she would. But she barely heard him: she was too busy scanning the half-empty rows in the hope of glimpsing a red blazer.

  In vain.

  She saw other faces – Rachel’s, Dimitri’s, for example – but did not recognise them. He’s not there, she thought in despair. It’s a trick. It’s the police.

  In the locker-room, she changed quickly, put on her white headscarf, and dawdled there till the janitor threw her out. In the foyer, standing like a white-headed ghost among the departing athletes, she waited again, the orchids clutched to her breast. An old lady asked whether she had grown them. A schoolboy wanted her autograph. The Shepherdess plucked at her sleeve: ‘Chas – the party, for God’s sake – Val is looking for you everywhere!’

  The front doors of the sports hall slammed behind her, she stepped into the night air and nearly fell flat before the bluff gale whipping over the tarmac. Staggering to her car, she unlocked it, laid the orchids on the passenger seat, and heaved the door shut after her. The ignition wouldn’t catch at first, and when it did the engine raced like a horse straining to get home. As she roared down the drive into the main road, she saw in her mirror the headlamps of another car pull out after her, then follow her at an even distance to her guest house.

  She parked and heard the same wind tearing into the hydrangeas. She wrapped her coat round her and, with the orchids inside it, made a dash for the front door. There were four steps and she counted them twice: once as she bounded up them, and the second time while she was standing panting at the reception desk, as someone tripped after her with a light and purposeful tattoo. There were no residents about, not in the lounge, not in the hall. The sole survivor was Humphrey, a Dickensian fat-boy who played night porter.

  ‘Not six, Humph,’ she said gaily as he groped for her key. ‘Sixteen. Come on, sweetheart. Up on the top row. There’s a love-letter in there too, before you give it to someone else.’

  She took the folded piece of paper from him, hoping it might be from Michel, then let her features register suppressed disappointment when she discovered it was only from her siste
r, saying, ‘Good luck for the show tonight,’ which was Joseph’s way of whispering, ‘We’re with you,’ but so low she barely heard.

  The hall door opened and closed behind her. A man’s feet were approaching across the hall carpet. She allowed herself one swift glance at him in case he was Michel. But he wasn’t, as her expression of disappointment showed. He was someone from the rest of the world, and of no use to her at all. A slender, dangerously peaceful boy, with dark, mother-loving eyes. Wearing a long brown gabardine trench coat with a military yoke to give breadth to the civilian shoulders. And a brown tie to match the eyes which matched the coat. And brown helpless shoes with stubby toecaps, double stitched. Not a man of justice at all, she decided – but of justice denied. A forty-year-old gabardine boy, robbed of his justice at an early age.

  ‘Miss Charlie?’

  And a small overfed mouth in a pale field of chin.

  ‘I bring you greetings from our mutual acquaintance Michel, Miss Charlie.’

  Charlie had hardened her face like someone preparing to take punishment. ‘Michel who?’ she said – and saw how nothing in him stirred, which in turn made her very still herself, in the way we stand still for paintings, and statues, and motionless policemen.

  ‘Michel from Nottingham, Miss Charlie.’ The Swiss accent aggrieved and faintly accusing. The voice furry, as if justice were a secret matter. ‘Michel asked me to bring you gold orchids and take you to dinner for him. He was insistent that you come. Please. I am the good friend of Michel. Come.’