The Little Drummer Girl (60 page)

Until then, Charlie had not really thought about aircraft at all. She had noticed a couple, high up, and admired their white plumes as they lazily circled the blue sky. But it had not occurred to her, in her ignorance, that the Palestinians might possess no planes, or that the Israeli Air Force might take exception to fervent claims to their territory made within walking distance of their border. She had been more interested in the uniformed girls dancing to each other on the tractor-drawn floats, tossing their machine guns back and forth to the rhythm of the crowd's hand clap; in the fighting boys with strips of red kaffiyeh bound Apache-style round their foreheads, posing on the backs of lorries with their machine guns; in the unflagging ululation of so many voices from one end of the camp to the other--did they never get hoarse?

Also, at the precise moment, her eye had been drawn to a small side-show directly in front of where she and Salma stood--a child being chastened by a guard. The guard had taken off his belt and folded it, and was slapping the child across the face with the loop, and for a second, while she was still considering whether to intervene, Charlie had the illusion, amid so much conflicting din around her, that the belt was causing the explosions.

Then came the whine of aircraft turning under strain, and a lot more fire from the ground, though surely it was too light and small to impress something so fast and high up. The first bomb, when it struck, was almost an anti-climax: if you hear it, you're still alive. She saw its flash a quarter of a mile away on the hillside, then a black onion of smoke as the noise and blast swept over her at the same time. She turned to Salma and shouted something at her, raising her voice as if a storm were blowing, though everything by then was surprisingly quiet; but Salma's face was fixed in a stare of hatred as she looked into the sky.

"When they want to hit us, they hit us," she said. "Today they are playing with us. You must have brought us luck."

The significance of this suggestion was too much for Charlie, and she rejected it outright.

The second bomb fell and it seemed farther away, or perhaps she was less impressionable: it could fall anywhere it liked except in these packed alleys, with their columns of patient children waiting like tiny, doomed sentries for the lava to roll down the mountain. The band struck up, much louder than before; the procession started, twice as brilliant. The band was playing a marching song and the crowd was clapping to it. Unfreezing her hands, Charlie set down her little girl and started to clap too. Her hands stung and her shoulders ached, but she went on clapping. The procession drew to the side; a jeep raced by, lights flashing, followed by ambulances and a fire engine. A pall of yellow dust hung behind them like battle smoke. The breeze dispersed it, the band resumed, and now it was the turn of the fishermen's union, represented by a sedate yellow van decked in pictures of Arafat, with a giant paper fish, painted red, white, and black, on its roof. After it, led by a band of pipers, came yet another river of children with wooden guns, singing the words to the march. The singing swelled, the whole crowd was taking part in it, and Charlie, words or none, was singing her heart out.

The planes disappeared. Palestine had won another victory.

"They are taking you to another place tomorrow," Salma said that evening as they walked on the hillside.

"I'm not going," said Charlie.

The planes returned two hours later, just before dark, when she was back in her hut. The siren started too late and she was still running for the shelters as the first wave came in--two of them, straight out of an air display, deafening the crowd with their engines--will they ever pull out of the dive? They did, and the blast of their first bomb threw her against the steel door, though the noise was not as bad as the earthquake that accompanied it, and the hysterical swimming-pool screams that filled the black, rank smoke on the other side of the playing field. The thud of her body alerted someone inside, the door opened, and strong women's hands pulled her into the darkness and forced her onto a wooden bench. At first she was stone deaf, but gradually she heard the whimpering of terrified children, and the steadier but fervent voices of their mothers. Someone lit an oil lamp and fixed it to a hook at the centre of the ceiling, and for a while it seemed to Charlie in her giddiness that she was living inside a Hogarth print that had been hung the wrong way up. Then she realised Salma was beside her, and she remembered she had been with her ever since the alarm had sounded. Another pair of planes followed--or was it the first pair making a second run?--the oil lamp swung, and her vision righted itself as a stick of bombs approached in careful crescendo. She felt the first two like blows on her body--no, not again, not again, oh please. The third was the loudest and killed her outright, the fourth and fifth told her she was alive after all.

"America!" a woman shouted suddenly, in hysteria and pain, straight at Charlie. "America, America, America!" She tried to get the other women to accuse her also, but Salma told her gently to be quiet.

Charlie waited an hour, but it was probably two minutes, and when still nothing happened she looked at Salma to say "Let's go," because she had decided that the shelter was worse than anywhere. Salma shook her head.

"They are waiting for us to come out," she explained quietly, perhaps thinking of her mother. "We cannot come out before dark."

The dark came and Charlie returned alone to her hut. She lit a candle because the electricity was off, and the last thing she saw in the whole room was the sprig of white heather in the tooth mug above her handbasin. She studied the kitschy little painting of the Palestinian child; she stepped into the courtyard where her clothes still hung on the line--hooray, they're dry. She had no means of ironing, so she opened a drawer of her tiny clapboard chest and folded the clothes into it with a camp dweller's concentration upon neatness. One of my kids put it there, she told herself gaily when the white heather once more forced itself upon her vision. The jolly one with gold teeth I call Aladdin. It's a present from Salma on my last night. How sweet of her. Of him.

"We are a love-affair,"Salma had said as they parted."You'll go, and when you've gone, we'll be a dream."

You bastards, she thought. You rotten, killing Zionist bastards. If I hadn't been here, you'd have bombed them to Kingdom Come.

"The only loyalty is to be here"Salma had said.

twenty-two

Charlie was not alone in watching the time pass and her life unfold before her eyes. From the moment she had crossed the line, Litvak, Kurtz, and Becker--her whole former family, in fact--had been forced, in one way and another, to harness their impatience to the alien and desultory tempo of their adversaries. "There is nothing so hard in war," Kurtz liked to quote to his subordinates--and assuredly to himself as well--"as the heroic feat of holding back."

Kurtz was holding back as never before in his career. The very act of withdrawing his ragged army from its English shadows appeared--to its foot soldiers, at least--more like a defeat than the victories they had so far scored but scarcely celebrated. Within hours of Charlie's departure, the Hampstead house was given back to the diaspora, the radio van stripped, its electronic equipment shipped as diplomatic baggage to Tel Aviv, somehow in disgrace. The van itself, its false plates removed, its engine numbers sheared from their casings, became yet another burnt-out roadside wreck somewhere between Bodmin moor and civilisation. But Kurtz did not linger for these obsequies. He returned hot-foot to Disraeli Street, chained himself reluctantly to the desk he hated, and became that same coordinator whose functions he had derided to Alexis. Jerusalem was enjoying a balmy spell of winter sunshine, and as he hastened from one secret office building to another, fighting off attacks, begging resources, the gold stone of the Walled City mirrored itself in the shimmering blue sky. For once, Kurtz drew little solace from the sight. His war machine, he said later, had become a horse-drawn carriage with the horses pulling different ways. In the field, despite all Gavron's effort to prevent him, he was his own man; at home, where every second-class politician and third-class soldier saw himself as some kind of genius at intelligence, he had more critics than Elijah and more enemies than the Samaritans. His first battle was for Charlie's continued existence and perhaps for his own too, a kind of obligatory scene that started the moment Kurtz set foot in Gavron's office.

Gavron the Rook was already standing, his arms lifted, shaping for the brawl. His shaggy black hair was more disorderly than ever.

"Had a nice time?" he squawked. "Eaten some good meals? You have put on some weight out there, I see."

Then bang and they were off, their raised voices echoing everywhere while they screamed and shouted at each other and hammered the table with clenched fists like a married couple having a cathartic quarrel. What had become of Kurtz's promises of progress? the Rook demanded. Where was this great reckoning he had spoken of? What was this he heard about Alexis, when he had specifically instructed Marty not to proceed with this man?

"Do you wonder that I lose faith in you--so much invention and money, so many orders disobeyed, so few results?"

As a punishment, Gavron obliged him to attend a meeting of his guidance committee, which by now could talk of nothing but the ultimate recourse. Kurtz had to lobby his heart away, even to obtain a modification of their plans.

"But what have you got going, Marty?" his friends begged him in low urgent voices in the corridors. "Give us a hint at least, so that we know why we are helping you."

His silence offended them, and they left him feeling more like a shabby appeaser.

There were the other fronts to fight on too. To monitor Charlie's progress through enemy territory, he was obliged to go cap in hand to the department that specialised in the maintenance of grass-roots courier lines and listening posts along the north-east seaboard. Its director, a Sephardi from Aleppo, hated everyone but hated Kurtz particularly. A trail like that could take him anywhere! he objected. What about his own operations? As to providing field support for three of Litvak's watchers merely to give the girl a sense of hominess in her new surroundings, such feather-bedding was unknown to him, it could not be done. It cost Kurtz blood, and all sorts of underhand concessions, to obtain the scale of collaboration he required. From these and similar deals, Misha Gavron remained callously aloof, preferring to allow the market forces to find their natural solution. If Kurtz believed enough, he would get his way, he told his people secretly; a little curbing, added to a little of the whip, did such a man no harm, said Gavron.

Reluctant to leave Jerusalem even for a night while these intrigues continued, Kurtz consigned Litvak to the European shuttle as his emissary charged with strengthening and recasting the surveillance team, and to prepare by all possible means for what they all prayed would be the final phase. The carefree days of Munich, when a couple of boys on double shift could meet their needs, were over for good. To maintain a full-time watch on the heavenly trio of Mesterbein, Helga,and Rossino, whole platoons of fieldmen had to be levied--all German-speakers and many of them rusty from disuse. Litvak's suspicion of non-Israeli Jews only added to the headache, but he would not yield: they were too soft in action, he said; too divided in their loyalties. On Kurtz's orders, Litvak also flew to Frankfurt for a clandestine meeting with Alexis at the airport, partly in order to obtain his help in the surveillance operation, and partly--as Kurtz had it--"to test his spine, a notably uncertain article." In the event, the renewal of their acquaintance was a disaster, for the two men loathed each other on sight. Worse still, Litvak's opinion confirmed the earlier prediction of Gavron's psychiatrists: that Alexis should not be trusted with a used bus-ticket.

"The decision is taken," Alexis announced to Litvak, even before they had sat down, in a furious, half-whispered, half-coherent monologue that kept slipping into falsetto. "I never go back on a decision; it is known of me. I shall present myself to my Minister as soon as this meeting is over, and make a clean breast of everything. For a man of honour there is no alternative." Alexis, it quickly developed, had suffered not merely a change of heart but a full-blown political realignment.

"Nothing against Jews, naturally--as a German, one has one's conscience--but from recent experiences--a certain bomb incident--certain measures one has been forced-blackmailed--into undertaking--one begins also to see reasons why historically the Jews have attracted persecution. Forgive me."

Litvak, with his locked-in glower, forgave him nothing.

"Your friend Schulmann--an able man, impressive-persuasive also--your friend is without all moderation. He has performed unlicensed acts of violence on German soil; he is showing a degree of excess which has too long been attributed to us Germans."

Litvak had had enough. His expression white and sickly, he had turned his eyes away, perhaps to conceal their fire. "Why don't you call him up and tell him all that yourself?" he suggested. So Alexis did. From the airport telephone office, using the special number Kurtz had given him, while Litvak stood at his side, holding the spare earpiece to his head.

"Well now, you do that, Paul," Kurtz advised heartily when Alexis had finished. Then his voice changed: "And while you're talking to the Minister, Paul, just you make sure you tell him all about that Swiss bank account of yours as well. Because if you don't, I may be so impressed by your fine example of candour that I'll have to go down there and tell him about it myself."

After which Kurtz ordered his switchboard to receive no more calls from Alexis for the next forty-eight hours. But Kurtz bore no grudges. Not with agents. The cooling-off period over, he squeezed himself a free day and made his own pilgrimage to Frankfurt, where he found the good Doctor much recovered. The reference to the Swiss bank account, though Alexis ruefully called it "unsporting," had sobered him, but the factor most conducive to his recovery was the joyous sight of his own features in the middle pages of a mass-circulation German tabloid--resolute, dedicated, but always that underlying Alexis wit--which convinced him he was who they said he was. Kurtz left him with this happy fiction and, as a prize, brought back one tantalising clue for his overworked analysts that Alexis in his dudgeon had been holding back: the photocopy of a picture postcard addressed to Astrid Berger under one of her many other aliases.