The Little Drummer Girl

by John le Carré

  Find the boy, Kurtz told his Jerusalem team, setting out on his murky travels. It’s one boy and his shadow. Find the boy, the shadow will follow, no problem. Kurtz dinned it into them till they swore they hated him; he could apply pressure as fiercely as he withstood it. He phoned in from odd places at any hour of day or night just to keep his presence among them at all times. Have you found that boy yet? Why is that boy not run to earth? But still cloaking his questions in such a way that Gavron the Rook, even if he got wind of them, would not understand their meaning, for Kurtz was holding off his assault on Gavron till the last, most favourable moment. He cancelled leave, abolished the Sabbath, and used his own meagre money rather than pass his expenses prematurely through the official accounts. He hauled reservists from the comfort of their academic sinecures and ordered them back, unpaid, to their old desks in order to hurry up the search. Find the boy. The boy will show us the way. One day, from nowhere, he produced a codename for him: Yanuka, which is a friendly Aramaic word for kid – literally a half-grown suckling. ‘Get me Yanuka and I’ll deliver those clowns with the whole apparatus on a plate.’

  But not a word to Gavron. Wait. Nothing to the Rook.

  In his beloved diaspora, if not in Jerusalem, his repertoire of supporters was unearthly. In London alone, he flitted, with barely a change in his smile, from venerable art dealers to would-be film magnates, from little East End landladies to garment merchants, questionable car dealers, grand City companies. He was also seen several times at the theatre, once out of town, but always to see the same show, and he took an Israeli diplomat with him who had cultural functions, although culture was not what they discussed. In Camden Town he ate twice in a humble transport restaurant run by a group of Goanese Indians; in Frognal, a couple of miles north-west, he inspected a secluded Victorian mansion called The Acre and pronounced it perfect for his needs. But only speculative, mind, he told his very obliging landlords; no deal unless our business brings us here. They accepted this condition. They accepted everything. They were proud to be called on, and serving Israel delighted their hearts, even if it meant moving to their house in Marlow for a few months. Did they not keep an apartment in Jerusalem, which they used for visiting friends and family every Passover after two weeks of sea and sunshine in Eilat? And were they not seriously considering living there for good – but not till their children were past military age and the rate of inflation had steadied? On the other hand, they might just stay in Hampstead. Or Marlow. Meanwhile they would send generously and do anything Kurtz asked of them, never expecting anything in return, and not breathing a word to anyone.

  At embassies, consulates, and legations along the route, Kurtz kept abreast of feuds and developments at home, and of the progress of his people in other parts of the globe. On aeroplane journeys he revised his familiarity with radical revolutionary literature of all sorts; the emaciated sidekick, whose real name was Shimon Litvak, kept a selection of the stuff in his shabby briefcase and pressed it on him at inappropriate moments. At the hard end, he had Fanon, Guevara, and Marighella; at the soft, Debray, Sartre, and Marcuse; not to mention the gentler souls who wrote mainly of the cruelties of education in consumerist societies, the horrors of religion, and the fatal cramping of the spirit in capitalist childhood. Back in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, where similar debates are not unknown, Kurtz was at his quietest, talking to his case officers, circumventing rivals, and ploughing through exhaustive character profiles assembled from old files and now cautiously but meticulously updated and expanded. One day he heard of a house that was going begging in Disraeli Street, number 11, at a low rent, and for greater secrecy ordered everyone who was working on the case quietly to decamp there.

  ‘I hear you are leaving us already,’ Misha Gavron remarked sceptically next day, when the two men met at some unrelated conference; for Gavron the Rook by now had wind of things, even if he did not know for certain their direction.

  Still Kurtz would not be drawn. Not yet. He pleaded the autonomy of operational departments, and pulled an iron grin.

  Number 11 was a fine Arab-built villa, not large but cool, with a lemon tree in the front garden, and about two hundred cats, which the women officers overfed absurdly. So the place inevitably became known as the cathouse, and gave fresh cohesion to the team, ensuring, by the proximity of desk officers one to another, that no unfortunate gaps occurred between the specialised fields, and no leaks either. It also raised the status of the operation, which to Kurtz was crucial.

  Next day came the blow he had been waiting for and was still powerless to prevent. It was dreadful but it served its purpose. A young Israeli poet on a visit to Leyden University, in Holland, where he was to receive an award, was blown to pieces over breakfast by a parcel bomb delivered to his hotel on the morning of his twenty-fifth birthday. Kurtz was at his desk when the news came, and he took it like an old prize-fighter riding out a punch: he flinched, his eyes closed for a second, but within hours he was standing in Gavron’s room with a stack of files under his arm and two versions of his operational plan in his free hand, one for Gavron himself and the other, much vaguer, for Gavron’s steering committee of nervous politicians and war-hungry generals.

  What passed precisely between the two men could not at first be known, for neither Kurtz nor Gavron was of a confiding nature. But by next morning, Kurtz was out in the open, evidently with some kind of licence, mustering fresh troops. For this he used the zealous Litvak as his intermediary, a sabra, an apparatchik trained to his fingertips, and able to move among Gavron’s highly motivated young, whom Kurtz secretly found stiff and embarrassing to handle. The baby of this hastily assembled family was Oded, a twenty-three-year-old from Litvak’s own kibbutz and, like himself, a graduate of the prestigious Sayaret. The grandfather was a seventy-year-old Georgian named Bougaschwili, but ‘Schwili’ for short. Schwili had a polished bald head and stooped shoulders and trousers cut for a clown – very low in the crotch and short in the leg. A black Homburg hat, worn indoors as much as out, topped the quaint confection. Schwili had begun life as a smuggler and confidence trickster, trades not uncommon in his home region, but in middle life he had turned his trade to forger of all kinds. His greatest feat had been performed in the Lubyanka, where he had faked documents for fellow inmates from back numbers of Pravda, repulping them to press his own paper. Released at last, he had applied the same genius to the world of fine art, both as a forger and as an expert under contract to distinguished galleries. Several times, he claimed, he had had the pleasure of authenticating his own fakes. Kurtz loved Schwili and, when he had a spare ten minutes, would march him off to an ice-cream parlour at the bottom of the hill and buy him a double caramel, Schwili’s best flavour.

  Kurtz also supplied Schwili with the two most unlikely helpers anyone could have imagined. The first – a Litvak discovery – was a graduate of London University named Leon, an Israeli who by no choice of his own had had an English childhood, for his father was a kibbutz macher who had been dispatched to Europe as the representative of a marketing cooperative: macher being the Yiddish word for a busybody or a fellow on the move. In London, Leon had developed a literary interest, edited a magazine, and published a completely unregarded novel. His obligatory three years in the Israeli Army left him miserable, and on release he went to earth in Tel Aviv, where he attached himself to one of the intellectual weeklies that come and go like pretty girls. By the time it collapsed, Leon was writing the whole thing single-handed. Yet somehow, among the peace-obsessed, claustrophobic young of Tel Aviv, he experienced the deep reawakening of his identity as a Jew and, with it, a burning urge to rid Israel of her enemies, past and future.

  ‘From now on,’ Kurtz told him, ‘you write for me. A big readership you won’t have. But appreciative – that they will be.’

  Schwili’s second helper after Leon was a Miss Bach, a quiet-mannered business lady from South Bend, Indiana. Impressed equally by her intelligence and her non-Jewish appearance, Kurtz had recruited Miss Bach, tr
ained her in a variety of skills, and eventually dispatched her to Damascus as an instructor in computer programming. Thereafter, for several years, the sedate Miss Bach reported on the capacity and disposition of Syrian air radar systems. Recalled at last, Miss Bach had been talking wistfully of taking up the wagon-trail life of a West Bank settler when the new summons from Kurtz saved her from this discomfort.

  Schwili, Leon, Miss Bach, therefore: Kurtz called the incongruous trio his Literacy Committee, and gave it special standing within his fast-expanding private army.

  In Munich, his business was administrative, but he went about it with a hushed delicacy, contriving to force his driving nature into the most modest mould of all. No fewer than six members of his newly formed team had now been installed there, and they occupied two quite separate establishments, in quite different areas of town. The first team consisted of two outdoor men. They should have been a full five, but Misha Gavron was still determined to keep him on a short rein, so they were two. Collecting Kurtz not from the airport but from a glum café in Schwabing, and using a rickety builder’s van to hide him in – the van also was an economy – they drove him to the Olympic Village, to one of the dark underground car parks there, a favourite haunt for muggers and prostitutes of both sexes. The Village is not a village at all, of course, but a marooned and disintegrating citadel of grey concrete, more reminiscent of an Israeli settlement than anything that can be found in Bavaria. From one of its vast subterranean car parks, they ushered him up a filthy staircase smeared with multi-lingual graffiti, across small roof gardens to a duplex apartment, which they had taken part-furnished on a short let. Outdoors, they spoke English and called him ‘sir’, but indoors, they addressed their chief as ‘Marty’ and spoke respectfully to him in Hebrew.

  The apartment was at the top of a corner building, and filled with odd bits of photographic lighting and portentous cameras on stands, as well as tape decks and projection screens. It boasted an open-tread teak staircase and a rustic minstrel gallery, which jangled when they trod on it too hard. From it led a spare bedroom four metres by three and a half, with a skylight let into the rake of the roof, which as they carefully explained to him they had covered first with blanket, then hardboard, then several inches of kapok wadding held in place with diamonds of black tape. Walls, floor, and ceiling were similarly padded, and the result resembled a mix between a modern priesthole and a madman’s cell. The door to it they had reinforced with painted steel sheeting, and had built into it a small area of armoured glass at head height, several thicknesses, over which they had hung a cardboard notice saying ‘DARK ROOM KEEP OUT’ and underneath, ‘Dunkelkammer kein Eintritt!’ Kurtz made one of them enter this little room, close the door, and yell as loud as he could yell. Hearing only a hoarse, scratching sound, he gave his approval.

  The rest of the apartment was airy but, like the Olympic Village, awfully down-at-heel. Northward the windows gave a grimy view of the road to Dachau, where a great many Jews had died in the concentration camp, and the irony escaped none of those present; the more particularly since the Bavarian police, with stultifying insensitivity, had housed its flying squad in the former barracks there. Nearer at hand, they could point out to Kurtz the very spot where, in more recent history, Palestinian commandos had burst into the living quarters of the Israeli athletes, killing some immediately, and taking the rest to the military airport, where they killed them too. Right next door to their own apartment, they told Kurtz, was a student commune; underneath them was for the moment nobody, because the last tenant had killed herself. Having stomped all around the place alone, and considered the entrances and escape routes, Kurtz decided he must rent the lower flat also, and the same day telephoned a certain lawyer in Nuremberg instructing him to handle the contract. The kids themselves had developed a floppy, ineffectual look, and one – the young Oded – had grown a beard. Their passports revealed them to be Argentinians, professional photographers, of what sort no one knew or cared. Sometimes, they told Kurtz, to give their household an air of naturalness and irregularity, they announced to their neighbours that they would be holding a late party, of which the only evidence was loud music till all hours and empty bottles in the dustbins. But in reality they had admitted nobody to the apartment, except the courier from the other team: no guests, no visitors of any kind. As to women, forget it. They had put women right out of their minds till they got back to Jerusalem.

  When they had reported all this and more to Kurtz, and discussed such office matters as extra transport and operational expenses, and whether it might not be a good plan to set iron rings into the padded walls of the darkroom – Kurtz was in favour of the idea – they took him, at his own request, for a walk and what he called some nice fresh air. They wandered through the rich student slums, lingered over a pottery school, a carpentry school, and what was proudly offered as the first swimming-school in the world to have been built for very small babies, and they read the daubed anarchist slogans on the painted cottage doors. Till inevitably, by gravitation, they found themselves standing before the same ill-fated house where, almost ten years ago, the attack on the Israeli boys had shocked the world. A stone tablet, engraved in Hebrew and in German, commemorated the eleven dead. Eleven, or eleven thousand, their feeling of shared outrage was the same.

  ‘So remember that,’ Kurtz ordered needlessly as they returned to the van.

  From the Village, they brought Kurtz to the middle of the town, where he deliberately lost himself for a while, walking wherever his fancy took him, till the kids, who were watching his back, gave him the signal that it was safe to go on to his next rendezvous. The contrast between the last place and the new one could not have been greater. Kurtz’s destination was the top floor of a high-gabled gingerbread house right at the heart of fashionable Munich. The street was narrow, cobbled, and expensive. It boasted a Swiss restaurant and an exclusive couturier who seemed to sell nothing, yet prosper. Kurtz climbed to the flat by way of a dark stairway and the door opened to him as he reached the top step, because they had been watching him come down the street on their little closed-circuit television screen. He walked in without a word. These men were older than the two who had received him first, fathers more than sons. They had the pallor of long-termers, and a resigned way of moving, particularly when they trod round each other in their stockinged feet. For these were professional static watchers – even in Jerusalem, a secret society to themselves. Lace curtains hung across the window; it was dusk in the street and dusk in the flat also, and the whole place was pervaded with an air of sad neglect. An array of electronic and optical devices was crowded among the fake Biedermeier furniture, including indoor aerials of varying designs. But in the failing light their spectral shapes only added to the mood of bereavement.

  Kurtz embraced each man gravely. Then, over crackers, cheese, and tea, the eldest of the men, whose name was Lenny, gave Kurtz the full tour of Yanuka’s life-style, quite disregarding the fact that for weeks now Kurtz had been sharing every small sensation as it arose: Yanuka’s phone calls in and out, his latest visitors, his latest girls. Lenny was big-hearted and kind, but a little shy of people he was not observing. He had wide ears and an ugly, over-featured face, and perhaps that was why he kept it from the hard gaze of the world. He wore a big grey knitted waistcoat like chain mail. In other circumstances Kurtz could tire of detail very quickly, but he respected Lenny and paid the closest attention to everything he said, nodding, congratulating, making all the right expressions for him.

  ‘He’s a normal young man, this Yanuka,’ Lenny pleaded earnestly. ‘Tradesmen admire him. Friends admire him. That’s a likeable, popular person, Marty. Studies, likes to enjoy himself, talks a lot, he’s a serious fellow with healthy appetites.’ Catching Kurtz’s eye, he became a little foolish: ‘Now and then it’s hard to believe in this other side to him, Marty, trust me.’

  Kurtz assured Lenny that he fully understood. He was still doing this when a light came on in the mansard window of the
flat directly across the street. The rectangular yellow glow, with nothing else lit near it, had the look of a lover’s signal. Without a word, one of Lenny’s men tiptoed swiftly to a pair of binoculars anchored to a stand, while another squatted to a radio receiver and clutched a headphone to his ear.

  ‘Want to take a look, Marty?’ Lenny suggested hopefully. ‘I can see by Joshua’s smile there that he has a very nice perception of Yanuka tonight. Wait too long, he’ll draw the curtain on us. What do you see, Joshua? Is Yanuka all dolled up for going out tonight? Who does he speak to on the telephone? A girl for certain.’

  Gently pushing Joshua aside, Kurtz ducked his big head to the binoculars. And he remained a long time that way, hunched like an old sea-dog in a storm, hardly seeming to breathe, while he studied Yanuka, the half-grown suckling.

  ‘See his books there in the background?’ Lenny asked. ‘That boy reads like my father.’

  ‘You have a fine boy there,’ Kurtz agreed finally, with his iron-hard smile, as he slowly straightened himself. ‘A good-looking kid, no question.’ Picking his grey raincoat from the chair, he selected a sleeve and pulled it tenderly over his arm. ‘Just be sure you don’t marry him to your daughter.’ Lenny looked even more foolish than before, but Kurtz was quick to console him: ‘We should be thankful to you, Lenny. And so we are, no question.’ And as an afterthought: ‘Keep taking photographs of him, all angles. Don’t be shy, Lenny. Film is not so expensive.’