The Little Drummer Girl

by John le Carré

  ‘Commander, this picture was taken by a lucky chance just two weeks before the bomb incident outside Munich, in which, as you rightly say, a certain pair of terrorists had the misfortune to destroy themselves with their own explosives. The red-headed girl in the foreground is a British subject. Her escort addressed her as “Joan”. She called him in return “Michel”, which was not, however, the name on his passport.’

  The change in atmosphere was like a sudden drop in temperature. The Chief Inspector smirked at Malcolm, Malcolm seemed to smile in return; but then Malcolm’s smile, it was becoming slowly clear, had little to do with what commonly passes for humour. But it was Picton’s massive immobility that held the centre stage – his refusal, as it seemed, to take his information from anywhere but the photograph before him. For Kurtz, by his reference to a British subject, had ventured as if unawares upon Picton’s holy territory, and men did that at their peril.

  ‘A lucky chance,’ Picton echoed through tight lips while he went on staring at the photograph. ‘A good friend who just happened to have his camera ready, I suppose – that sort of lucky bloody chance.’

  Kurtz grinned shyly but said nothing.

  ‘Banged off a couple of frames – sent ’em to Jerusalem on the offchance. Terrorist he happened to spot on holiday – thought he’d be helpful.’ Kurtz’s grin broadened; and to his surprise, he saw Picton grinning in return, if not very nicely.

  ‘Yes, well, I think I do remember friends like that. You people have friends everywhere, now I come to think of it. High places, low places, rich places –’ For an unfortunate moment, it appeared that certain old frustrations of Picton’s days in Palestine had unexpectedly revived themselves and were threatening to spill out of him in a gush of temper. But he contained himself. He tamed his features, he brought his voice down. He relaxed his smile until it could have passed for friendly. But Kurtz’s smile was an all-weather thing, and Litvak’s face was so twisted by his hand that for all anybody knew he could as well have been laughing his head off or nursing a raging toothache.

  Clearing his throat, the grey Chief Inspector, with Welsh bonhomie, ventured another timely intervention. ‘Well now, even given she was English, sir, which seems to me on the face of it something of a hypothetical longshot, there’s still no law, is there, not in this country, against sleeping with Palestinians? We can’t mount a nationwide hunt for a lady, just on account of that! My goodness, if we –’

  ‘He’s got more,’ said Picton, returning his gaze to Kurtz. ‘Much more.’

  But his tone went further. They always do have, he was saying.

  His courteous good humour undimmed, Kurtz invited his audience to study the Mercedes to the right of the photograph. Forgive him for not knowing too much about cars, but his people assured him this was a saloon model, wine red, with the radio aerial forward on the offside wing, two wing mirrors, central locking, and seat belts in the front only. In all of these details, and many others not visible, he said, the Mercedes in the picture corresponded to the Mercedes that had been accidentally blown up outside Munich, and of which most of the front had miraculously survived.

  Malcolm had a sudden solution. ‘But surely, sir – all this about her being English – isn’t she the Dutch girl? Red hair, blonde hair – that doesn’t mean a thing. English in this case just means their common language.’

  ‘Quiet,’ Picton ordered, and lit himself a cigarette without offering them to anyone. ‘Let him go on,’ he said. And drank in a huge amount of smoke without expelling it.

  Kurtz’s voice meanwhile had thickened, and so, for a moment at least, had his shoulders. He had placed both fists on the table either side of the dossier.

  ‘It is also our information by a different source, Commander,’ Kurtz announced, with greater force, ‘that on its northward journey from Greece through Yugoslavia, the same Mercedes was driven by a young woman with a British passport. Her lover did not accompany her, but flew ahead to Salzburg with Austrian Airlines. The same airline was privileged to reserve prestige accommodation for him in Salzburg, at the hotel Österreichischer Hof, where our enquiries show that the couple called themselves Monsieur and Madame Laserre, though the lady in question spoke no French, only English. This lady is remembered for her striking looks, her red hair, the absence of a wedding ring, for her guitar, which caused a certain merriment, also for the fact that though she left the hotel early in the morning with her husband, she returned later in the day to make use of its facilities. The head porter recalls summoning a taxi for Madame Laserre to take her to Salzburg Airport and he remembers the time of day he ordered it – 2 p.m., just before he went off duty. He offered to confirm her flight reservation and establish that her plane’s departure was not delayed, but Madame Laserre would not permit him to do this, presumably because she was not travelling under that name. Three flights out of Salzburg fit the timing, one of them Austrian to London. The lady at the Austrian Airlines sales desk distinctly recalls a red-headed English girl who had an unused charter ticket Thessalonika to London, and wished to have it rewritten, which was not possible. In the event, she was obliged to buy a full-fare one-way ticket, which she paid for in US dollars, mostly twenty bills.’

  ‘Don’t be so damn coy,’ Picton growled. ‘What’s her name?’ And he stubbed out his cigarette very violently, holding it down long after it had ceased to struggle.

  In answer to his question, Litvak was already passing round photocopies of a passenger list. He looked pale and might have been in pain. When he had gone all the way round the table, he helped himself to a little water from the carafe, though he had barely breathed a word all morning.

  ‘To our initial consternation, Commander, there was no Joan,’ Kurtz confessed as they all settled to the passenger list. ‘The best we could come up with was a Charmian. Her surname you have before you. The Austrian Airlines lady confirms our identification – number thirty-eight on the list. The lady even remembers her guitar. By a happy chance, she is herself a devotee of the great Manitas de Plata; the guitar therefore left a deep impression on her memory.’

  ‘Another bloody friend,’ said Picton coarsely, and Litvak coughed.

  Kurtz’s last exhibit also came from Litvak’s briefcase. Kurtz held out both hands for it, Litvak placed it into them: a wad of photographs still tacky from the printing pan. He dealt them out summarily. They showed Mesterbein and Helga in an airport departure lounge, Mesterbein staring despondently into the middle air. Helga, behind him, was buying a half-litre bottle of duty-free whisky. Mesterbein was carrying a bunch of orchids wrapped in tissue paper.

  ‘Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris, thirty-six hours ago,’ Kurtz said cryptically. ‘Berger and Mesterbein, about to fly Paris–Exeter via Gatwick. Mesterbein ordered a self-drive Hertz car to be available to him on arrival at Exeter Airport. They returned to Paris yesterday, minus the orchids, by the same route. Berger was travelling under the name of Maria Brinkhausen, Swiss, a new alias we may add to her many others. Her passport, one of a bunch prepared by the East Germans for Palestinian use.’

  Malcolm had not waited for the order. He was already through the door.

  ‘Pity you haven’t got a shot of them arriving in Exeter too,’ said Picton with innuendo, while they waited.

  ‘Commander, as you well know, we could not do that,’ said Kurtz piously.

  ‘Do I?’ said Picton. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Our masters have a reciprocal trading deal, sir. No fishing in one another’s waters without prior consent in writing.’

  ‘Oh that,’ said Picton.

  The Welsh policeman once more applied his diplomatic unction. ‘Exeter her home town, is it, sir?’ he asked Kurtz. ‘Devon girl? You wouldn’t think a country girl would take to terror, not in the normal way of things, I suppose?’

  But Kurtz’s information seemed to have stopped dead at the English coast. They heard footsteps mounting the big staircase, and the squeak of Malcolm’s suède boots. The Welshman, never daunted, tried again.<
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  ‘I never think of red-heads as Devon, somehow, I will say,’ he lamented. ‘Nor Charmian, truthfully, to be honest. Bess, Rose, I suppose – I can see a Rose. But not Charmian, not Devon. Up country, I’d say Charmian was. London, more likely.’

  Malcolm came in warily, one soft tread following cautiously upon the other. He was carrying a heap of files: the fruit of Charlie’s forays into the militant left. Those at the bottom were tattered with age and use. Press cuttings and cyclostyled pamphlets poked from the edges.

  ‘Well, I must say, sir,’ said Malcolm, with a grunt of relief as he set his burden on the table, ‘if she’s not our girl, she jolly well ought to be!’

  ‘Lunch,’ Picton snapped, and, having muttered a quite furious stream of orders to his two subordinates, marched his guests to a vast dining-room smelling of cabbage and furniture polish.

  A pineapple chandelier hung over the thirty-foot table, two candles burned, two stewards in shining white coats attended their every need. Picton ate woodenly; Litvak, deathly pale, picked at his food like an invalid. But Kurtz was oblivious to everybody’s tantrums. He chatted, though nothing in the way of business, naturally: he doubted whether the Commander would recognise Jerusalem, if ever he had the fortune to go back there; he really appreciated his first meal in an English officers’ mess. Even then, Picton did not stay the meal through. Twice, Captain Malcolm summoned him to the door for a murmured conversation; once he was required on the telephone by his superior. And when the pudding came, he suddenly stood up as if he had been stung, handed his damask napkin to the servant, and strode off, ostensibly to make some phone calls of his own, but perhaps also to consult the locked cupboard in his office where he kept a private store.

  The park, apart from the ever-present sentries, was as empty as a school playing field on the first day of holidays, and Picton strolled in it with the faddish restlessness of a landowner, grumpily eyeing the fences, stabbing with his walking stick at anything he didn’t like the look of. Nine inches below him, Kurtz bobbed cheerfully at his side. From a distance, they might have resembled a prisoner and his captor, though it would not have been quite certain which was which. Behind them trailed Shimon Litvak holding both briefcases, and, behind Litvak, Mrs O’Flaherty, Picton’s fabled Alsatian bitch.

  ‘Mr Levene likes to listen, does he?’ Picton burst out, quite loud enough for Litvak to hear. ‘Good listener, good memory? I like that.’

  ‘Mike is close, Commander,’ Kurtz replied with a dutiful smile. ‘Mike comes everywhere.’

  ‘Sulky chap, he strikes me as. My Chief said a one-to-one, if it’s all the same to you.’

  Kurtz turned and said something to Litvak in Hebrew. Litvak dropped back until he was out of earshot. And it was a strange thing, which neither Kurtz nor Picton could quite have explained, even if they had admitted to it, that an indefinable sense of comradeship settled over them as soon as they were left alone.

  The afternoon was grey and blustery. Picton had lent Kurtz a duffle coat, which gave him a sea-dog look. Picton himself wore a British Warm, and his face had darkened instantly with the fresh air.

  ‘Decent of you to come all this way really, just to tell us about her,’ said Picton, like a challenge. ‘My Chief’s going to drop old Misha a line, the devil.’

  ‘Misha will surely appreciate that,’ said Kurtz without enquiring which devil Picton was referring to.

  ‘Funny, really, all the same. You chaps tipping us off about our own terrorists. In my day the traffic tended to go the other way.’

  Kurtz said something soothing about the wheel of history, but Picton was no poet.

  ‘Your operation, of course,’ said Picton. ‘Your sources, your shout. My Chief is adamant about it. Our job is to sit tight and do what we’re bloody told,’ he added, with a sideways glance.

  Kurtz said cooperation was what it was all about these days, and for a second Picton looked as though he might blow up. His yellowed eyes widened, and his chin shot into his neck and stuck there. But instead, perhaps to calm himself, he lit a cigarette, turning his back on the wind and cupping his huge catcher’s hands to shield the flame.

  ‘Meanwhile, you’ll be amazed to hear your information is confirmed,’ Picton said, with the heaviest sarcasm, as he flicked away the match. ‘Berger and Mesterbein flew Paris–Exeter return, took a Hertz car on arrival at Exeter Airport, notched up four hundred and twenty miles. Mesterbein paid by American Express credit card in his own name. Don’t know where they spent the night, but no doubt you’ll advise us in due course.’

  Kurtz preserved a virtuous silence.

  ‘As to the lady in the case,’ Picton went on, with the same forced levity, ‘you will be equally astonished to hear that she is currently doing a spot of acting in deepest Cornwall. She’s with a classical drama group, name of the Heretics, which I like, but you wouldn’t know that either, would you? Her hotel says a man answering Mesterbein’s description picked her up after the show and she didn’t get home till morning. Proper little bedhopper by the sound of her, your lady.’ He allowed a monumental pause, which Kurtz affected to ignore. ‘Meanwhile, I am to advise you that my Chief is an officer and a gentleman and will provide you with every assistance. He’s grateful, my Chief is. Grateful and touched. He’s soft on Jews and he thinks it’s very handsome of you to take the trouble to come over here and put us on to her.’ He shot Kurtz a malevolent glance. ‘My Chief is young, you see. He’s a great fan of your fine new country, barring accidents, and not disposed to listen to any nasty suspicions I might have.’

  Stopping before a big green shed, Picton thumped his stick on the iron door. A boy in running shoes and a blue tracksuit admitted them to an empty gymnasium. ‘Saturday,’ Picton said, presumably to explain the atmosphere of desertion, and launched himself upon an angry tour of the premises, now eyeing the state of the changing-rooms, now running an enormous finger along the parallel bars to check for dust.

  ‘I hear you’ve been bombing those camps again,’ Picton said accusingly. ‘That Misha’s idea, is it? Misha never did like a rapier when a blunderbuss would do.’

  Kurtz began to confess quite truthfully that the processes of decision-taking in the upper levels of Israeli society had always been something of a mystery to him; but Picton had no time for that type of answer.

  ‘Well, he won’t get away with it. You tell him that from me. Those Pallies will come back to haunt you lot for the rest of time.’

  This time Kurtz only smiled and shook his head in wonder at the world’s ways.

  ‘Misha Gavron was Irgun, wasn’t he?’ Picton said, in merest curiosity.

  ‘Haganah,’ Kurtz corrected him.

  ‘Which was your lot then?’ said Picton.

  Kurtz affected the loser’s shy regret. ‘Fortunately or not, Commander, we Raphaels arrived in Israel too late to be of any inconvenience to the British,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t bullshit me,’ said Picton. ‘I know where Misha gets his friends from. I gave him his bloody job.’

  ‘So he told me, Commander,’ Kurtz said, with his waterproof smile.

  The athletic boy was holding open a door. They passed through. In a long glass case lay a display of homemade weapons for silent killing: a knobkerrie with nails driven into the head, a hat-pin, very rusty, with a wooden handle added, homemade syringes, an improvised garrotte.

  ‘Labels fading,’ Picton snapped at the boy when he had regarded these instruments nostalgically for a moment. ‘New labels by ten hundred hours Monday, hear me, or I’ll have you.’

  He stepped back into the fresh air, Kurtz plodding agreeably at his side. Mrs O’Flaherty, who had waited for them, fell in at her master’s heels.

  ‘All right, what do you want?’ said Picton, like a man driven against his will to settle. ‘Don’t tell me you came here to bring me a love-letter from my old mate Misha the Rook, because I won’t believe you. I doubt whether I’ll believe you anyway, as a matter of fact. I’m hard to convince, where your lot’s
concerned.’

  Kurtz smiled and shook his head in appreciation of Picton’s English wit.

  ‘Well, sir, Misha the Rook feels that a simple arrest in this case is just out of the question. Owing to the delicacy of our sources, naturally,’ he explained, in the tone of a mere messenger.

  ‘I thought your sources were all just good friends,’ Picton put in nastily.

  ‘And even if Misha were to consent to a formal arrest,’ Kurtz continued, still smiling, ‘he asks himself what charges could be filed against the lady and in what court. Who is to prove the explosive was aboard that car when she drove it? The explosive was put aboard afterwards, she will say. Which leaves us, I believe, with the somewhat minor infringement of driving a car through Yugoslavia on false papers. And where are those papers? Who is to prove they ever existed? It’s very flimsy.’

  ‘Very,’ Picton agreed. ‘Misha become a lawyer, has he, in his old age?’ he enquired, with a sideways look. ‘Christ, that would be a case of poacher turned gamekeeper if ever I heard one.’

  ‘There is also – Misha argues – the matter of her value. Her value to us, and to yourselves, as she stands at present. In what we might call her state of near innocence. What does she know finally? What can she reveal? Take the case of Miss Larsen.’

  ‘Larsen?’

  ‘The Dutch lady who was involved in the unfortunate accident outside of Munich.’

  ‘What of her?’ Stopping in his tracks, Picton turned to Kurtz and glowered down on him with growing suspicion.