The Little Drummer Girl

by John le Carré

  ‘Miss Larsen also drove cars and ran errands for her Palestinian boyfriend. The same boyfriend, as a matter of fact. Miss Larsen even placed bombs for him. Two. Maybe three. On paper, Miss Larsen was a very implicated lady.’ Kurtz shook his head. ‘But in terms of usable intelligence, Commander, she was an empty vessel.’ Unaffected by Picton’s menacing proximity, Kurtz lifted his hands and opened them to show how empty the vessel was. ‘Just a little groupie kid who liked the scene, who liked the danger and the boys, and liked to please. And they told her nothing. No addresses, no names, no plans.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ said Picton accusingly.

  ‘We had a little talk with her.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘A while ago. Quite some while. A little sell-and-tell deal, before we threw her back into the pool. You know the way it goes.’

  ‘Like five minutes before you blew her up, I suppose,’ Picton suggested, as his yellowed eyes continued to hold Kurtz in their stare.

  But Kurtz’s smile was wonderfully unruffled. ‘If it were only so easy, Commander,’ he said, with a sigh.

  ‘I asked what you wanted, Mr Raphael.’

  ‘We’d like her set in motion, Commander.’

  ‘I thought you might.’

  ‘We’d like her smoked out a little, but not arrested. We’d like her running scared – so scared maybe that she is obliged to make further contact with her people, or they with her. We’d like to take her all the way through. What we call an unconscious agent. Naturally, we would share the product with you, and when the operation is over, you are welcome to both the lady and the credit.’

  ‘She’s made contact already,’ Picton objected. ‘They came and saw her in Cornwall, brought her a bunch of bloody flowers, didn’t they?’

  ‘Commander, our reading of that meeting suggests to us that it was a somewhat exploratory exercise. Left to itself, we fear that the meeting is unlikely to bear further fruit.’

  ‘How the hell do you know that?’ Picton’s voice filled with a marvelling wrath. ‘I’ll tell you how you know. You had your ear pressed up to the bloody keyhole! What do you think I am, Mr Raphael? Some kind of jungle nignog? That girl belongs to you, Mr Raphael, I know she does! I know you Izzies, I know that poison dwarf Misha, and I’m beginning to know you!’ His voice had risen alarmingly. Striding out ahead of Kurtz, he waited until he had brought it under control. Then waited again till Kurtz fell in beside him. ‘I have a very nice scenario in my mind at this moment, Mr Raphael, and I’d like to share it with you. May I do that?’

  ‘It will be a privilege, Commander,’ said Kurtz pleasantly.

  ‘Thank you. The trick is normally done with dead meat. You find a nice corpse, you dress him up and leave him somewhere where the enemy will stumble on him. “Hullo,” says the enemy, “what’s this? A dead body carrying a briefcase? Let’s look inside.” They look, and they find a little message. “Hullo,” they say, “he must have been a courier! Let’s read the message and fall into the trap.” So they do. And we all get medals. “Disinformation,” we used to call it, designed to misguide the enemy’s eye, and very nice too.’ Picton’s sarcasm was as awesome as his wrath. ‘But that’s too simple for you and Misha. Being a bunch of overeducated fanatics, you’ve gone one further. “No dead meat for us, oh no! We’ll use live meat. Arab meat. Dutch meat.” So you did. And you blew it up in a nice Mercedes motorcar. Theirs. What I don’t know, of course – and I never will, because you and Misha will deny the whole thing on your deathbeds, won’t you? – is where you’ve planted that disinformation. But planted it you have, and now they’ve bitten. Or they’d never have brought her those nice flowers, would they?’

  Ruefully shaking his head in admiration of Picton’s amusing fantasy, Kurtz started to move away from him, but Picton with a policeman’s unerring touch lightly held him where he was.

  ‘You tell this to Master bloody Gavron. If I’m right and you lot have recruited one of our nationals without our consent, I’ll personally come over to his nasty little country and take his balls off. Got it?’ But suddenly, as if against his wish, Picton’s face relaxed into an almost tender smile of recollection. ‘What was it the old devil used to say?’ he asked. ‘Tigers, was it? You’d know.’

  Kurtz said it too. Often. Grinning his pirate’s grin, he said it now. ‘You want to catch the lion, first you tether the goat.’

  The moment of adversarial kinship past, Picton’s features once more set to stone. ‘And at the formal level, Mr Raphael, compliments of my Chief, your service has got itself a deal,’ he snapped. Swinging on his heel, he marched briskly back towards the house, leaving Kurtz and Mrs O’Flaherty to plod after him. ‘And tell him this too,’ Picton added, pointing his stick at Kurtz in a final assertion of his colonial authority. ‘He will please to stop using our bloody passports. If other people can manage without them, so can the Rook, damn him.’

  For the return journey to London, Kurtz sat Litvak in the front seat of the car to teach him English manners. Meadows, who had grown a voice, wanted to discuss the problem of the West Bank: how could one solve the thing, actually, sir, while giving the Arabs a fair deal, of course, do you think? Cutting himself off from their futile conversation, Kurtz abandoned himself to memories he had held at bay till now.

  There is a working gallows in Jerusalem where nobody is hanged any more. Kurtz knew it well: close to the old Russian compound, on the left-hand side as you drive down a half-made road and stop before a pair of aged gates that lead to what was once Jerusalem’s central prison. The signs say ‘TO THE MUSEUM’ but also ‘HALL OF HEROISM’ and there is a rather cracked old man who loiters outside and bows you in, sweeping his shallow black hat in the dust. The entrance fee is fifteen shekels but rising. It is where the British hanged the Jews during the Mandate time, from a noose with a leather lining to it. Only a handful, actually, and they hanged Arabs galore; but this was where they hanged two of Kurtz’s friends, in the years when he was in the Haganah with Misha Gavron. Kurtz might well have joined them. They had imprisoned him twice and interrogated him four times, and the occasional troubles he had with his teeth were still ascribed by his dentist to the beatings he had received at the hand of an amiable young field security officer, now dead, whose manner, though not his looks, reminded him a little of Picton’s.

  But a nice man, that Picton, all the same, thought Kurtz, with an inward smile, as he contemplated yet another successful step along the road. A little rough maybe; a little heavy with the mouth and hand; and sad about his taste for alcohol – a waste as always. But in the end as fair as most men. A fine practitioner too. A fine mind inside the violence. Misha Gavron always said he’d learned a lot from him.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  It was back to London and the waiting. For two wet autumn weeks, ever since Helga had broken the terrible news to her, the Charlie of her imagination had entered a morbid, vengeful hell, and burned in it alone. I am in shock; I am an obsessive, solitary mourner without a friend to turn to. I am a soldier robbed of my general, a revolutionary cut off from the revolution. Even Cathy had deserted her. ‘From now on, you manage without a nanny,’ Joseph told her, with a drawn smile. ‘We cannot have you going into phone boxes any more.’ Their meetings during this period were sparse and businesslike, usually elaborately planned car pickups. Sometimes he took her to out-of-the-way restaurants on the edge of London; once to Burnham Beeches for a walk; once to the zoo in Regent’s Park. But wherever they were, he talked to her about her state of mind and briefed her constantly for various contingencies, without ever quite describing what they were.

  What will they do next? she asked.

  They are checking. They are observing you; thinking about you.

  Sometimes she alarmed herself with unscripted outbreaks of hostility towards him, but, like a good doctor, he hastened to assure her that the symptoms were normal to her condition. ‘I am the archetypal enemy, good heavens! I killed Michel and if I had half a chance I would kill you
. You should regard me with the most serious misgivings, why not?’

  Thanks for the absolution, she thought in secret wonder at the seemingly endless facets of their shared schizophrenia: to understand is to forgive.

  Until the day came when he announced they must temporarily abandon meetings of any kind, unless an extreme emergency occurred. He seemed to know something was about to happen, but refused to tell her what it was for fear she might respond out of character. Or not respond at all. He would be close, he said, reminding her of his promise in the Athens house: close – but not present – from day to day. And having thus, perhaps deliberately, stretched her sense of insecurity almost to breaking point, he sent her back again to the life of isolation that he had invented for her; but this time with her lover’s death as its theme.

  Her once-loved flat, under her diligent neglect of it, now became the unkempt shrine to Michel’s memory, a place of grimy, chapel-like quiet. Books and pamphlets he had given her were spread face downward over the floor and table, opened at marked passages. At night, when she could not sleep, she would sit at her desk with an exercise book jammed among the clutter, while she copied out quotations from his letters. Her aim was to compile a secret memoir of him that would reveal him to a better world as the Arab Che Guevara. She contemplated approaching a fringe publisher she knew: ‘Night Letters from a Murdered Palestinian’, done on bad paper with a lot of misprints. There was a certain madness to these preparations, as Charlie, when she stood back from them, well knew. But in another sense she knew that without the madness there was no sanity; there was the rôle, or there was nothing.

  Her excursions into the outside world were few, but one night, as further evidence to herself of her determination to carry Michel’s flag into battle for him, if she could only find the battlefield, she attended a comrades’ get-together in the upper room of a St Pancras pub. She sat with the Very Crazies, most of whom were stoned into oblivion by the time they got there. But she saw it through, and she scared both herself and them with a really furious peroration against Zionism in all its Fascist and genocidal manifestations, which, to the secret amusement of another part of her, brought forth nervous complaints from representatives of the radical Jewish left.

  At other times she made a show of pestering Quilley about future parts – what had happened about the screen test? For Christ’s sake, Ned, I need work! But the truth was that her zest for the artificial stage was waning. She was committed – for as long as it lasted, and despite its mounting hazards – to the theatre of the real.

  Then the warnings began, like the advance creakings of a sea-storm in the rigging.

  The first came from poor Ned Quilley, a phone call much earlier in the day than was his custom, ostensibly to return one she had made to him the day before. But she knew at once it was something Marjory had ordered him to do the moment he got into the office – before he forgot, or lost heart, or treated himself to a sharpener. No, he had nothing for her, but he wanted to cancel their lunch that day, said Quilley. No problem, she replied, trying gallantly to hide her disappointment, for lunch was the big one they had planned to celebrate her end of tour, and talk about what she might do next. She had been really looking forward to it as a treat she might decently allow herself.

  ‘It’s absolutely fine,’ she insisted, and waited for him to come out with his excuse. Instead of which, he lurched the other way and made a stupid stab at being rude.

  ‘I just don’t think it would be appropriate at this time,’ he said loftily.

  ‘Ned, what’s up? It’s not Lent. What’s come over you?’

  Her false frivolity, intended to make things easier for him, only spurred him to greater feats of pomposity.

  ‘Charlie, I don’t know what you’ve been up to,’ he began, from his High Altar. ‘I was young once myself and not as hidebound as you may think, but if one half of what is being implied is true, then I can’t help feeling that you and I may do better, a lot better for both parties –’ But, being her lovely Ned, he couldn’t bring himself to deliver the final blow, so he said, ‘To put off our date until you have come to your senses.’ At which point, in Marjory’s scenario, he was clearly supposed to ring off, and indeed, after several false curtains and a lot of help from Charlie, he managed it. She rang back immediately and got Mrs Ellis, which was what she wanted.

  ‘What’s up, Pheeb? Why have I got bad breath suddenly?’

  ‘Oh, Charlie, what have you been up to?’ Mrs Ellis said, speaking very low because she feared the phone might be tapped. ‘The police came for a whole morning about you, three of them, and none of us are allowed to say.’

  ‘Well, screw them,’ she said bravely.

  One of their seasonal checkups, she told herself. The Discreet Enquiry brigade, barging in with hobnailed boots to top up her dossier for Christmas. They had done it periodically ever since she had started going to the forum. Except that somehow this didn’t sound like routine. Not a whole morning and three of them. That was VIP stuff.

  Next came the hairdresser.

  She had fixed her hair appointment for eleven, and she kept it, lunch or no. The proprietress was a generous Italian lady called Bibi. She frowned when she saw Charlie come in, and said she would do Charlie herself today.

  ‘You been going with a married fellow again?’ she yelled as she worked shampoo into Charlie’s hair. ‘You don’t look good, you know that? You been a bad girl, stole someone’s husband? What you do, Charlie?’

  Three men, said Bibi, when Charlie made her tell. Yesterday.

  Said they were tax inspectors, wanted to check Bibi’s appointments book and her accounts for the Value Added.

  But all they really wanted to hear about was Charlie.

  ‘“Who’s this Charlie, here?” they say me. “Know her well then, Bibi?” “Sure,” I say to them; “Charlie’s a good girl, regular.” “Oh, a regular, is she? Talk to you about her boyfriends, does she? Who’s she got? Where she sleep these days?” All about you been on holiday – who you go with, where you go after Greece. Me, I say them nothing. Trust Bibi.’ But at the door, when Charlie had safely paid, Bibi turned a little bit nasty, the first time ever. ‘Don’t come again a little while, okay? I don’t like trouble. I don’t like police.’

  Nor do I, Beeb. Believe me, nor do I. And these three beauties least of all. The quicker the authorities know about you, the quicker we force the opposition’s hand, Joseph had promised her. But he hadn’t said it was going to be like this.

  Next came the pretty boy, not two hours later.

  She had eaten a hamburger somewhere, then started walking although it was raining, because she had a silly idea that while she was moving she was safe, and safer in the rain. She headed west, thinking vaguely of Primrose Hill, then changed her mind and hopped on a bus. It was probably coincidence, but as she glanced back from the departing platform she saw a man get into a taxi fifty yards behind her. And the way she replayed it in her mind, the flag had been down before he hailed it.

  Stay with the logic of the fiction, Joseph had told her, again and again. Weaken, and you ruin the operation. Stay with the fiction, and when it’s over we’ll repair the damage.

  Halfway to panic, she had a mind to hightail it to the dressmaker’s and demand Joseph immediately. But her loyalty to him held her back. She loved him without shame and without hope. In the world he had turned upside down for her, he was her one remaining constant, in both the fiction and the fact.

  So she went to the cinema instead and that was where the pretty man tried to pick her up; and where she very nearly let him.

  He was tall and puckish, with a long new leather coat and granny glasses, and as he edged along the row towards her during the interval, she stupidly assumed that she knew him and in her turmoil couldn’t put a name or place to him. So she returned his smile.

  ‘Hullo, how are you?’ he cried, sitting down beside her. ‘Charmian, isn’t it? Gosh, you were good in Alpha Beta last year! Weren’t you absolutely w
onderful? Have some popcorn.’

  Suddenly nothing fitted: the carefree smile didn’t fit the skull-like jaw, the granny glasses didn’t fit the rat’s eyes, the popcorn didn’t fit the polished shoes, and the dry leather coat didn’t fit the weather. He had arrived here from the moon with nothing else in mind but to pull her.

  ‘You want me to call the manager or are you going quietly?’ she said.

  He kept up his pitch, protesting, smirking, asking whether she was a dyke, but when she stormed to the foyer to find someone, the staff had disappeared like summer snow, all but one little black girl in the ticket box, who pretended she was too busy counting change.

  Going home took more courage than she possessed, more than Joseph had any right to expect of her, and all the way there she prayed that she would break her ankle or be run over by a bus or have another of her fainting fits. It was seven in the evening and the café was having a lull. The chef grinned at her brilliantly and his cheeky boyfriend, as usual, waved as if she were daft. Inside her flat, instead of putting on the light, she sat on the bed and left the curtains open, and watched in the mirror how the two men on the opposite pavement loitered and never talked to each other and never looked in her direction. Michel’s letters were still under their floorboard; so was her passport and what was left of her fighting fund. Your passport is now a dangerous document, Joseph had warned her, in his sermon on her new status since Michel’s death; he should not have let you use it for the drive. Your passport must be guarded with your other secrets.

  Cindy, Charlie thought.

  Cindy was a Geordie waif who worked an evening shift downstairs. Her West Indian lover was in prison for grievous bodily harm, and Charlie occasionally gave her free guitar lessons to help her pass the time.

  ‘Cind,’ she wrote. ‘Here’s a birthday present for you, for whenever your birthday is. Take it home and practise till you’re half dead. You’ve got the touch so don’t give up. Take the music case too, but like an idiot I’ve left the key at Mum’s. I’ll bring it when I next call. Anyway the music’s not right for you yet. Love you, Chas.’