The Little Drummer Girl (28 page)

"Well, why don't I sit tight and see! Just for a bit."

"Charlie, what is your intention? You are saying to him what, in your mind, please?"

"I'm saying: ‘Take this back--I can't accept it,' " she replied virtuously.

"Very well. Then will you seriously risk the chance he will slip away into the night--never to appear again--leaving you with this valuable gift which you so sincerely do not want to accept?"

With an ill grace she agreed to go and seek him out.

"But how--where will you find him? Where do you look first?" said Joseph.

The road was empty, but he was driving slowly in order that the present should intrude as little as possible upon the reconstructed past.

"I'd run round the back," she said before she had seriously thought. "Out of the back entrance, into the street, round the corner to the theatre foyer. Catch him on the pavement coming out."

"Why not through the theatre?"

"I'd have to fight my way through the milling throng, that's why. He'd be gone long before I ever got to him."

He thought about this. "Then you will need your mackintosh," he said.

Once again, he was right. She had forgotten the Nottingham rain that night, one cloudburst after another, all through the show. She began again. Having changed at lightning speed, she put on her new mackintosh--her long French one from the Liberty's sale--knotted the belt, and charged out into the teeming rain, down the street, round the corner to the front of the theatre--

"Only to find half the audience crammed under the canopy waiting for it to clear," Joseph interrupted. "Why are you smiling?"

"I need my yellow foulard round my head. You remember--the Jaeger one I got from my television commercial."

"We note also, then, that even in your haste to be rid of him, you do not forget your yellow headscarf. So. Wearing her mackintosh and yellow headscarf, Charlie dashes through the rain in search of her over-ardent lover. She arrives at the crowded foyer--calling ‘Michel! Michel!' perhaps? Yes? Beautiful. Her cries are in vain, however. Michel is not there. So what do you do?"

"Did you write this, Jose?"

"Never mind."

"Go back to my dressing-room?"

"Does it not occur to you to look in the auditorium?"

"All right, damn it--yes, it does."

"You take which entrance?"

"The stalls. That's where you were sitting."

"Where Michel was. You take the stalls entrance, you push the bar to the door. Hooray, it yields. Mr. Lemon has not yet locked up. You enter the empty auditorium, you walk slowly down the aisle."

"And there he is," she said softly. "Jesus, that's corny."

"But it plays."

"Oh, it plays"

"Because there he is, still in his same seat, in the middle of the front row. Staring at the curtain as if by staring at it he could make it rise again upon the apparition of his Joan, the spirit of his freedom, whom he loves infinitely."

"I mean this is awful" Charlie murmured. But he ignored her.

"The same seat he has been sitting in for the last seven hours."

I want to go home, she thought. A long sleep all on my own at the Astral Commercial and Private. How many destinies can a girl meet in one day? For she could no longer miss the extra note of assurance in him, the drawing near, as he described her new admirer.

"You hesitate, then you call his name. ‘Michel!' The only name you know. He turns to look at you but does not move. He does not smile, or greet you, or in any way demonstrate his considerable charm."

"So what does he do, the creep?"

"Nothing. He stares at you with his deep and passionate eyes, challenging you to speak. You may think him arrogant, you may think him romantic, but he is not ordinary and he is certainly not apologetic or bashful. He has come to claim you. He is young, cosmopolitan, well dressed. A man of movement and money, and lacking any sign of self-consciousness. So." He switched to the first person: "You walk towards me down the aisle, realising already that the scene is not unfolding in the way you expected. It is you, not I, apparently, who must provide the explanations. You take the bracelet from your pocket. You offer it to me. I make no move. The rain is dripping from you becomingly."

The road was leading them up a winding hill. His commanding voice, coupled to the mesmeric rhythm of successive bends, forced her mind further and further into the labyrinth of his story.

"You say something. What do you say?" Obtaining no answer from her, he supplied his own. " ‘I do not know you. Thank you, Michel, I am flattered. But I do not know you and I cannot accept this gift.' Would you say that? Yes, you would. But better, perhaps."

She barely heard him. She was standing before him in the auditorium, holding out the box to him, gazing into his dark eyes. And my new boots, she thought; the long brown ones I bought myself for Christmas. Ruined by the rain, but who cares?

Joseph was continuing his fairy tale. "Still I speak not one word. You will know from your theatrical experience that there is nothing like silence to establish communication. If the wretched fellow won't speak, what can you do? You are obliged to speak again yourself. Tell me what you say to me this time."

An unwanted shyness struggled with her burgeoning imagination. "I ask him who he is."

"My name is Michel."

"I know that part. Michel who?"

"No answer."

"I ask you what you are doing in Nottingham."

"Falling in love with you. Go on."

"Christ--Jose--"

"Go on!"

"He can't say that to me!"

"Then tell him!"

"I reason with him. Appeal to him."

"Then let's hear you do it--he's waiting for you, Charlie! Speak to him!"

"I'd say..."

"Yes?"

" ‘Look, Michel... it's nice of you... I'm very flattered. But sorry--it's too much.' ‘

He was disappointed. "Charlie, you must do better than that," he reproved her austerely. "He's an Arab--even if you don't know that yet, you may suspect it--you are refusing his gift. You must try harder."

"It's not fair to you, Michel. People often get fixations about actresses... and actors... happens every day. That's no reason to go ruining yourself... just for a kind of... illusion.' "

"Good. Continue."

It was coming more easily to her. She hated his browbeating of her, as she hated any producer's, but she could not deny its effect. " That's what acting's all about, Michel. Illusion. The audience sits down here hoping to be enchanted. The actors stand up there hoping to enchant you. We succeeded. But I can't accept this. It's beautiful.' " She meant the bracelet. " ‘Too beautiful. I can't accept anything. We've fooled you. That's all that's happened. Theatre's a con trick, Michel. Do you know what that means? Con trick? You've been deceived.' ‘

"I still don't speak."

"Well, make him!"

"Why? Are you running out of conviction already? Don't you feel responsible for me? A young boy like this--so handsome--throwing away my money on orchids and expensive jewels?"

"Of course I do! I've told you!"

"Then protect me," he insisted, in an impatient tone. "Save me from my infatuation."

"I'm trying!"

"That bracelet cost me hundreds of pounds--even you can guess that. For all you know, thousands. I might have stolen it for you. Killed. Pawned my inheritance. All for you. I am besotted, Charlie! Be charitable! Exercise your power!"

In her imagination's eye, Charlie had sat herself beside Michel in the next seat. Her hands clasped on her lap, she was leaning forward earnestly to reason with him. She was a nurse to him, a mother. A friend.

"I tell him he would be disappointed if he knew me in reality."

"The exact words, please."

She took a deep breath and plunged: " ‘Listen, Michel, I'm just an ordinary girl. I've got torn tights, and an overdraft, and I'm certainly no Joan of Arc, believe me. I'm no virgin, and no soldier, and God and I haven't exchanged a word since I was chucked out of school for'--I'm not going to say that bit--‘I'm Charlie, a feckless Western slut.' ‘

"Excellent. Go on."

" ‘Michel, you've got to snap out of this. I mean I'm doing what I can to help, okay? So here, take this back, keep your money and your illusions--and thanks. Thanks, truly. Really thanks. Over and out.' ‘

"But you don't want him to keep his illusions," Joseph objected aridly. "Or do you?"

"All right, give up his bloody illusions!"

"So how does it end?"

"It just did. I put the bracelet on the seat beside him and walked out. Thanks, world, and bye-bye. If I hurry to the bus-stop, I'll be just in time for rubber chicken at the Astral."

Joseph was appalled. His face said so, and his hand left the wheel in a rare, if limited, gesture of supplication.

"But Charlie, how can you do this? Do you not know you are leaving me to commit suicide perhaps? To roam the rain swept streets of Nottingham all night? Alone? While you lie beside my orchids and my note in the warmth of your elegant hotel."

"Elegant! Christ, the bloody fleas are damp!"

"Do you have no sense of responsibility? You of all people, champion of the underdog--for a boy you have ensnared with your beauty and your talents and your revolutionary passion?"

She tried to bridle but he gave her no opportunity.

"You have a warm heart, Charlie. Others might think of Michel at that moment as some kind of refined seducer. Not you. You believe in people. And that is how you are tonight, with Michel. Without thought for yourself, you are sincerely affected by him."

On the skyline ahead of them a crumbling village marked a small peak in their ascent. She saw the lights of a taverna strung along the roadside.

"Anyway, your response at this moment is irrelevant because Michel finally decides to speak to you," Joseph resumed, with a swift, measuring glance at her. "In a soft and appealing foreign accent, part French, part something else, he addresses you without shyness or inhibition. He is not interested in arguments, he says, you are everything he has ever dreamed of, he wishes to become your lover, preferably tonight, and he calls you Joan although you tell him you are Charlie. If you will go out with him to dinner, and after dinner you still do not want him any more, he will consider taking back the bracelet. No, you say, he must take it back now; you already have a lover, and besides, don't be ridiculous, where is dinner in Nottingham at half past ten on a pouring wet Saturday night?... You would say this? Is it true?"

"It's a dump," she admitted, refusing to look at him.

"And dinner--you would say specifically that dinner is an impossible dream?"

"It's Chinese or fish and chips."

"Nevertheless, you have made a dangerous concession to him."

"How?" she demanded, stung.

"You have made a practical objection. ‘We cannot dine together because there is no restaurant.' You might as well say you cannot sleep together because you have no bed. Michel senses this. He brushes your hesitations aside. He knows a place, he has made arrangements. So. We can eat. Why not?"

Swinging off the road, he had brought the car to a halt in the gravel laybye in front of the taverna. Dazed by his wilful leap from past fiction to present time, perversely elated by his harassment of her, and relieved that, after all, Michel had not let her go, Charlie remained in her seat. So did Joseph. She turned to him and her eyes made out, by the coloured fairy lights outside, the direction of his own. He was gazing at her hands, still linked on her lap, the right hand uppermost. His face, as far as she could read it by the fairy lights, was rigid and expressionless. Reaching out, he clasped her right wrist with a swift, surgical confidence and, lifting it, revealed the wrist below, and round it the gold bracelet, twinkling in the dark.

"Well, well, I must congratulate you," he remarked impassively. "You English girls don't waste much time!"

Angrily she snatched back her hand. "What's the matter?" she snapped. "Jealous, are we?"

But she could not hurt him. He had the face that did not mark. Who are you? she wondered hopelessly as she followed him in. Him? Or you? Or nobody?

nine

Yet, much as Charlie might have supposed the contrary, she was not the only centre of Joseph's universe that night; not of Kurtz's; and certainly not of Michel's.

Well before Charlie and her putative lover had said a last goodbye to the Athens villa--while they still, in the fiction, lay in each other's arms, sleeping off their frenzy--Kurtz and Litvak were chastely seated in different rows of a Lufthansa plane bound for Munich, and travelling under the protection of different countries: for Kurtz, France, and for Litvak, Canada. On landing, Kurtz repaired immediately to the Olympic Village, where the so-called Argentinian photographers eagerly awaited him, and Litvak to the Hotel Bayerischer Hof,where he was greeted by a munitions expert known to him only as Jacob, a sighing, other-worldish fellow in a stained suède jacket, who carried with him a wad of large-scale maps in a pop-down plastic folder. Posing as a surveyor, Jacob had spent the last three days taking laborious measurements along the Munich-to-Salzburg autobahn. His brief was to calculate the likely effect, in a variety of weathers and traffic conditions, of a very big explosive charge detonated at the roadside in the early hours of a weekday morning. Over several pots of excellent coffee in the lounge, the two men discussed Jacob's tentative suggestions, then, in a hired car, slowly toured the entire hundred-and-forty-kilometre stretch together, annoying the faster traffic and stopping at almost every point where they were allowed, and some where they were not.

From Salzburg, Litvak continued alone to Vienna, where a new team of outriders was awaiting him with fresh transport and fresh faces. Litvak briefed them in a soundproofed conference room at the Israeli Embassy and, having attended to other small matters there, including reading the latest bulletins from Munich, led them southward in a ragged trippers' convoy to the area of the Yugoslav border, where with the frankness of summer sightseers they made a reconnaissance of urban car parks, railway stations, and picturesque market squares, before distributing themselves over several humble pensions in the region of Villach. His net thus spread, he hurried back to Munich in order to contemplate the crucial preparation of the bait.