The Little Drummer Girl

by John le Carré

  ‘Why do you make your own bombs then? If you’ve only got one hand?’

  The answer was in his silence. In the twilit stillness of his face as it lay turned to her, with its straight, unsmiling fighter’s stare. The answer was in everything she had seen since the night she had signed on with the theatre of the real. For Palestine, it ran. For Israel. For God. For my sacred destiny. To do back to the bastards what the bastards did to me. To redress injustice. With injustice. Until all the just are blown to smithereens, and justice is finally free to pick herself out of the rubble and walk the unpopulated streets.

  Suddenly he was demanding her, and no longer to be resisted.

  ‘Darling,’ she whispered. ‘Khalil. Oh Christ. Oh, darling. Please.’

  And whatever else whores say.

  It was dawn, but still she would not let him sleep. With the pale daylight, a wakeful light-headedness possessed her. With kisses, with caresses, she used every wile she knew to keep him present with her, and his passion burning. You’re my best, she whispered to him, and I never award first prizes. My strongest, my bravest, my most clever lover of all time. Oh, Khalil, Khalil, Christ, oh please. Better than Salim? he asked. More patient than Salim, more cherishing, more grateful. Better than Joseph, who sent me to you on a plate.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she said as he suddenly disengaged from her. ‘Did I hurt you?’

  Instead of answering, he reached out his good hand and with a commanding gesture lightly pinched her lips together. Then lifted himself stealthily on his elbow. She listened with him. The clatter of a waterbird lifting from the lake. The shriek of geese. The crowing of a cockerel, the chiming of a bell. Foreshortened by the snowbound countryside. She felt the mattress lift beside her.

  ‘No cows,’ he said softly, from the window.

  He was standing at the side of the window, still naked, but with his gun looped by its belt over his shoulder. And for a second, in the extremity of her tension, she imagined the mirror image of Joseph standing facing him, red-lit by the electric fire, separated from him only by the thin curtain.

  ‘What do you see?’ she whispered at last, unable to bear the tension any more.

  ‘No cows. And no fishermen. And no bicycles. I see much too little.’

  His voice was tense with action. His clothes lay beside the bed where she had thrown them in their frenzy. He pulled on his dark trousers and white shirt, and buckled the gun into place beneath his armpit.

  ‘No cars, no passing lights,’ he said evenly. ‘Not one labourer on his way to work. And no cows.’

  ‘They’ve gone to milking.’

  He shook his head. ‘Not for two hours do they go for milking.’

  ‘It’s the snow. They’re keeping them indoors.’

  Something in her voice caught his ear; the quickening in him had sharpened his awareness of her. ‘Why do you apologise for them?’

  ‘I don’t. I’m just trying –’

  ‘Why do you apologise for the absence of all life around this house?’

  ‘To quell your fears. Comfort you.’

  An idea was growing in him – a terrible idea. He could read it in her face, and in her nakedness; and she in turn could feel his suspicions form. ‘Why do you wish to quell my fears? Why are you more frightened for me than for yourself ?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘You are a wanted woman. Why are you so able to love me? Why do you speak of my comfort, and not of your own safety? What guilt is in your mind?’

  ‘None. I didn’t like killing Minkel. I want to get out of this whole thing. Khalil?’

  ‘Is Tayeh right? Did my brother die for you after all? Answer me, please,’ he insisted, very, very quietly. ‘I wish for an answer.’

  Her whole body begged for his reprieve. The heat in her face was terrible. It would burn for ever.

  ‘Khalil – come back to bed,’ she whispered. ‘Love me. Come back.’

  Why was he so leisurely if they were all around the house? How could he stare at her like this while the ring tightened round him every second?

  ‘What is the time, please?’ he asked, still staring at her. ‘Charlie?’

  ‘Five. Half past. What does it matter?’

  ‘Where is your clock? Your little clock. I require to know the time, please.’

  ‘I don’t know. In the bathroom.’

  ‘Stay where you are, please. Otherwise I shall perhaps kill you. We shall see.’

  He fetched it, and handed it to her on the bed.

  ‘Kindly open it for me,’ he said, and watched her while she wrestled with the clasp.

  ‘So what is the time, please, Charlie?’ he asked again, with a terrible lightness. ‘Kindly advise me, from your clock, what hour of the day it is.’

  ‘Ten to six. Later than I thought.’

  He snatched it from her and read the dial. Digital, twenty-four-hour. He switched on the radio and it gave a wail of music before he switched it off again. He held it to his ear, then weighed it appreciatively in his hand.

  ‘Since last night when you left me, you have not had much time to yourself, I think. Is that so? None, in fact.’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Then how did you buy new batteries for this clock?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Then why is it working?’

  ‘I didn’t need to – they hadn’t run out – it goes for years, just on one set – you buy special ones – long life –’

  She had reached the end of her invention. All of it, for all time, here and for ever after, because by now she had remembered the moment on the hilltop when he had stood her outside the Coca-Cola van to search her; and the moment when he dropped the batteries into his pocket before returning the clock to her shoulder bag and tossing the bag into the van.

  He had lost interest in her. The clock had all his attention. ‘Bring me that imposing radio beside the bed, please, Charlie. We make a little experiment. An interesting technological experiment relating to high-frequency radio.’

  She whispered, ‘Can I put something on?’ She pulled on her dress and took the bedside radio to him, a modern thing in black plastic, with a speaker like a telephone dial. Placing the clock and the radio together, Khalil switched on the radio and worked through the channels until suddenly it let out a wounded wail, up and down like an air-raid warning. Then he picked up the clock, pushed back the hinged flap of the battery chamber with his thumb, and shook the batteries onto the floor, much as he must have done last night. The wailing stopped dead. Like a child who has performed a successful experiment, Khalil lifted his head to her and pretended to smile. She tried not to look at him, but could not help herself.

  ‘Who do you work for, Charlie? For the Germans?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘For the Zionists?’

  He took her silence for yes.

  ‘Are you Jewish?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you believe in Israel? What are you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  ‘Are you Christian? Do you see them as the founders of your great religion?’

  Again she shook her head.

  ‘Is it for money? Did they bribe you? Blackmail you?’

  She wanted to scream. She clenched her fists and filled her lungs, but the chaos choked her, and she sobbed instead. ‘It was to save life. It was to take part. To be something. I loved him.’

  ‘Did you betray my brother?’

  The obstructions in her throat disappeared, to be replaced by a mortal flatness of tone. ‘I never knew him. I never spoke to him in my life. They showed him to me before they killed him, the rest was invented. Our love-affair, my conversion – everything. I didn’t even write the letters, they did. They wrote his letter to you too. The one about me. I fell in love with the man who looked after me. That’s all there is.’

  Slowly, without aggression, he reached out his left hand and touched the side of her face, apparently to make sure that she was real. Then looked at the tip
s of his fingers, and back at her again, somehow comparing them in his mind.

  ‘And you are the same English who gave away my country,’ he remarked quietly, as if he could hardly believe the evidence of his eyes.

  He lifted his head and as he did so, she saw his face snatch away in disapproval and then, under the force of whatever Joseph had shot him with, catch fire. Charlie had been taught to stand still when she pulled the trigger, but Joseph didn’t do that. He didn’t trust his bullets to do their work, but ran after them, trying to beat them to the target. He rushed through the door like an ordinary intruder, but instead of pausing, hurled himself straight forward as he fired. And he fired with his arms at full stretch, to reduce the distance still more. She saw Khalil’s face burst, she saw him spin round and spread his arms to the wall, appealing for its help. So the bullets went into his back, ruining his white shirt. His hands flattened against the wall – one leather, one real – and his wrecked body slipped to a rugger player’s crouch as he tried desperately to shove a way through it. But by that time, Joseph was close enough to kick his feet away from under him, hastening him on his last journey to the ground. After Joseph came Litvak, whom she knew as Mike, and had always, as she now realised, suspected of an unhealthy nature. As Joseph stood back, Mike knelt down and put a last precise shot into the back of Khalil’s neck, which must have been unnecessary. After Mike came about half the world’s executioners, in black frogmen’s clothes, followed by Marty and the German weasel and two thousand stretcher bearers and ambulance drivers and doctors and unsmiling women, holding her, cleaning the vomit off her, guiding her down the corridor and into God’s fresh air, though the sticky warm smell of blood clogged her nose and throat.

  An ambulance was being backed to the front door. There were bottles of blood inside and the blankets were red too, so at first she refused to get in. In fact, she resisted quite hard and must have lashed out, because one of the women holding her suddenly let her go and swung away with her hand to her face. She had gone deaf, so she could only vaguely hear her own screaming, but her main concern was to get her dress off, partly because she was a whore, partly because there was so much of Khalil’s blood on it. But the dress was still more unfamiliar to her than it had been last night, and she couldn’t fathom whether it had buttons or a zip, so she decided not to bother with it after all. Then Rachel and Rose appeared either side of her, and each grabbed an arm exactly as they had done in the Athens house when she first arrived there for her audition for the theatre of the real; the experience told her that further resistance was futile. They led her up the steps to the ambulance and sat either side of her on one of the beds. She looked down and saw all the silly faces staring at her – the tough little boys with their heroes’ scowls, Marty and Mike, Dimitri and Raoul, and other friends as well, some of them not yet introduced. Then the crowd parted, and Joseph emerged, considerately having got rid of the gun with which he had shot Khalil, but still unfortunately with quite a lot of blood over his jeans and running shoes, she noticed. He came to the foot of the steps and looked up at her, and at first it was like staring into her own face, because she could see exactly the same things in him that she hated in herself. So a sort of exchange of character occurred, where she assumed his rôle of killer and pimp, and he, presumably, hers of decoy, whore, and traitor.

  Till suddenly, as she continued to stare at him, a surviving spark of outrage kindled in her, and gave her back the identity that he had stolen from her. She stood up, and neither Rose nor Rachel was in time to hold her down; she drew an enormous breath, and she shouted, ‘Go,’ at him – or so at least it sounded to herself. Perhaps it was ‘No.’ It hardly mattered.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Of the immediate and less immediate aftermath of the operation, the world knew a lot more than it realised; and certainly a lot more than Charlie. It knew, for instance – or could have done if it had studied the smaller news items of the foreign pages of the Anglo-Saxon press – that a suspected Palestinian terrorist had died in a shoot-out with members of a crack West German unit, and that his woman hostage, not named, had been removed to hospital in a state of shock, but was otherwise unhurt. The German newspapers carried more lurid versions of the story – ‘THE WILD WEST COMES TO THE BLACK FOREST’ – but the stories were so remarkably assured, yet contradictory, that it was hard to make anything of them. A link with the abortive Freiburg bomb attack against Professor Minkel – originally reported dead, but later discovered to have made a miraculous escape – was so wittily denied by the urbane Dr Alexis that everyone took it for granted. But it was only proper, said the wiser leader-writers, that we should not be told too much.

  A succession of other minor incidents around the Western hemisphere raised occasional speculation about the doings of one or another Arab terrorist organisation, but really with so many rival groups these days, it was a toss-up where one should point the finger. The senseless gunning-down in broad daylight of Dr Anton Mesterbein, for instance, the Swiss humanist lawyer, campaigner for minority rights, and son of the eminent financier, was laid squarely at the door of an extremist Falangist organisation that had recently ‘declared war’ against Europeans overtly sympathetic to the Palestinian ‘occupation’ of the Lebanon. The outrage occurred as the victim was leaving his villa for work – unprotected, as usual – and the world was deeply shocked for at least the first part of a morning. When a letter claiming responsibility and signed ‘Free Lebanon’ was received by the editor of a Zürich newspaper, and declared authentic, a junior Lebanese diplomat was asked to leave the country, and did so philosophically.

  The car-bombing of a Rejectionist Front diplomat outside the newly completed mosque in St John’s Wood rated hardly a notice anywhere; it was the fourth such killing in as many months.

  On the other hand, the bloodthirsty knifing of the Italian musician and newspaper columnist Albert Rossino, and of his German lady companion, whose naked and barely recognisable bodies were discovered weeks later beside a Tyrolean lake, was declared by the Austrian authorities to have no political significance at all, despite the fact that both victims had radical connections. On the evidence available, they preferred to treat the case as a crime of passion. The lady, one Astrid Berger, was well known for her bizarre appetites, and it was held probable, if grotesque, that no third party was involved. A succession of other, less interesting deaths passed virtually unnoticed, as did the Israeli bombing of an ancient desert fortress on the Syrian border, which Jerusalem sources claimed was being used as a Palestinian training base for foreign terrorists. As to the four-hundred-pound bomb that exploded on a hilltop outside Beirut, destroying a luxurious summer villa and killing its occupants – which included both Tayeh and Fatmeh – it was about as impenetrable as any other act of terror in that tragic region.

  But Charlie, in her seaside fastness, knew none of this; or, more accurately, she knew it all in general, and was either too bored or too frightened to receive the details. At first, she would only swim or take slow, aimless walks to the end of the beach and back, clutching her bathrobe to her throat while her bodyguards followed her at a respectful distance. In the sea, she was inclined to sit herself at the shallow, waveless edge, and make washing movements with the sea water, first her face and then her arms and hands. The other girls, on instruction, bathed naked; but when Charlie declined to follow this liberating example, the psychiatrist ordered them to cover themselves again, and wait.

  Kurtz came to see her once a week, sometimes twice. He was extremely gentle with her; patient and faithful, even when she screamed at him. His information was practical, and all to her advantage.

  A godfather had been invented for her, he said, an old friend of her father’s who had struck it rich and recently died in Switzerland, leaving her a large sum of money which, since it came from foreign sources, would be free of capital transfer tax in the United Kingdom.

  The British authorities had been spoken to, and had accepted – for reasons Charlie could n
ot be party to – that no useful purpose would be served by digging further into her relationship with certain European and Palestinian extremists, he said. Kurtz was also able to reassure her of Quilley’s good opinion of her: the police, he said, had actually made a point of calling on him to explain that their suspicions about Charlie had been misdirected.

  Kurtz also discussed with Charlie methods of explaining her abrupt disappearance from London, and Charlie passively agreed to a concoction involving fear of police harassment, a mild nervous breakdown, and a mystery lover whom she had picked up after her stay in Mykonos, a married man who had led her a dance and finally dumped her. It was not till he started to school her in this, and presume to test her on small points, that she became pale and started to tremble. A similar manifestation occurred when Kurtz announced to her, somewhat unwisely, that ‘the highest level’ had ruled she could claim Israeli citizenship any time she wished for the rest of her life.

  ‘Give it to Fatmeh,’ she snapped, and Kurtz, who by then had a number of new cases going, had to consult the file in order to remind himself who Fatmeh was; or had been.

  As to her career, said Kurtz, there were some exciting things waiting for her as soon as she felt ready to handle them. A couple of fine Hollywood producers had developed a sincere interest in Charlie during her absence, and were anxious to have her come right out to the Coast and do some screen tests. One actually had a small part up his sleeve that he thought might be just right for her; Kurtz didn’t know the details. And there were some nice things happening in the London theatre scene as well.

  ‘I just want to go back to where I was,’ Charlie said.

  Kurtz said that could be arranged, dear, no problem.

  The psychiatrist was a bright young fellow with a twinkle in his eye and a military background, and he was not at all given to self-analysis or any other kind of gloomy introspection. Indeed, his concern seemed to be less to make her talk than to convince her that she shouldn’t; in his profession, he must have been a most divided man. He took her for drives, first along the coast roads, then into Tel Aviv. But when he injudiciously pointed out some of the few fine old Arab houses that had survived development, Charlie became incoherent with anger. He took her to out-of-the-way restaurants, swam with her, and even lay beside her on the beach and chatted her up a little, until she told him, with a strange twist in her voice, that she would prefer to talk to him in his office. When he heard that she liked to ride, he ordered horses, and they had a grand day’s riding during which she seemed to forget herself completely. But the next day she was too quiet again for his taste, and he told Kurtz to wait another week at least. And sure enough the same evening she began a prolonged and unexplained fit of vomiting, which was all the more strange considering how little she was eating.