The Little Drummer Girl

by John le Carré

  ‘I say, you’re not trying to buy me up or anything frightful, are you?’ he asked nervously.

  Kurtz let out a loud, comforting laugh. ‘Ned, we are surely not trying to buy you up.’ Litvak laughed too.

  ‘Well, thank God for that,’ Ned declared earnestly, handing round the glasses. ‘Do you know everybody’s being bought up these days? I get all sorts of chaps I’ve never heard of, offering me money down the telephone. All the small, old firms – decent houses – getting gobbled up like what’s-its. Shocking. Cheer-ho. Good luck. Welcome,’ he declared, still shaking his head in disapproval.

  Ned’s courting rituals continued. He asked where they were staying, and Kurtz said the Connaught, and, Ned, they really loved it, they had felt family from the minute they arrived. This part was true; they had booked in there specially, and Misha Gavron was going to fall straight off his branch when he saw the bill. Ned asked them whether they were finding opportunities for leisure, and Kurtz replied heartily that they were just loving every minute of their time. They were leaving for Munich tomorrow.

  ‘Munich? My goodness, whatever will you be doing over there?’ Ned asked, playing his age for them, playing the anachronistic, unworldly dandy. ‘You chaps don’t half hop around, I will say!’

  ‘Co-production money,’ replied Kurtz, as if that explained everything.

  ‘A lot of it,’ said Litvak, speaking in a voice as soft as his smile. ‘The German scene is big today. Way, way up there, Mr Quilley.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure it is. Oh, so I’ve heard said,’ said Ned indignantly. ‘They’re a major force, one has to face it. In everything. War’s all forgotten now, swept far under the carpet.’

  With a mysterious drive to perform ineffectually, Ned made to refill their sherry glasses pretending he had not noticed they were virtually untouched. Then he giggled and put down the decanter. It was a ship’s decanter, eighteenth century, with a broad base to keep it steady in a rolling sea. Quite often, with foreigners, Ned made a point of explaining this to put them at their ease. But something about their intent manner restrained him, and instead there was only a small silence and a creaking of chairs. Outside the window the rain had thickened into driving fog.

  ‘Ned,’ said Kurtz, timing his entrance exactly. ‘Ned, I want to tell you who we are a little and why we wrote you and why we are stealing your valuable time.’

  ‘My dear chap, please do, delighted,’ said Ned, and, feeling like someone completely different, folded his little legs and put on an attentive smile while Kurtz settled smoothly into his persuading mode.

  By his broad, raked-back forehead Ned guessed he was Hungarian, but he might have been Czech or really any of those places. He had a rich, naturally loud voice and a mid-European accent that the Atlantic had not yet swamped. He was as fast-spoken and fluent as a radio commercial, and his bright narrow eyes seemed to listen to everything he said while his right forearm beat everything to pieces in small, decisive chops. He, Gold, was the lawyer of the family, Kurtz explained; Karman here was more on the creative side, with a background of writing, agenting, and producing, mainly Canada and the Midwest. They had recently taken offices in New York, where their current interest was independent packaging for television.

  ‘Our creative rôle, Ned, is confined ninety per cent to finding a concept that is acceptable to networks and finance. The concept – we sell this to the backers. Production – we leave this to the producers. Period.’

  He had finished, and he had looked at his watch with a strangely distracted gesture, and now it was up to Ned to say something intelligent, which to his credit he managed rather well. He frowned, he held out his glass almost to arm’s length, and with his feet he traced a slow deliberate pirouette, instinctively responding to Kurtz’s mime. ‘But, old boy. If you’re packagers, old boy, what do you want with us agents?’ he protested. ‘I mean, why do I rate lunch, what? See what I mean? Why lunch if you’re packaging?’

  At this, to Ned’s surprise, Kurtz burst out in the most cheerful and infectious laughter. Ned thought he had been quite witty too, to be honest, and done a rather good thing with his feet; but it was nothing to what Kurtz thought. His narrow eyes clamped shut, his big shoulders lifted, and the next thing Ned knew, the whole room was filled with the warming peals of his Slav mirth. At the same time, his face broke into all kinds of disconcerting furrows. Till now, in Ned’s estimation, Kurtz had been forty-five at worst. Suddenly he was Ned’s age, his brow and cheeks and neck as crisp as paper, with crevices in them like the slashes of a knife. The transformation bothered Ned. He felt cheated somehow. ‘Sort of human Trojan Horse,’ he afterwards complained to his wife, Marjory. ‘You let in a high-powered showbiz salesman of forty and all of a sudden out pops a sort of sixty-year-old Mr Punch. Bloody odd.’

  But it was Litvak this time who supplied the crucial, long-rehearsed answer to Ned’s question, the answer on which everything else depended. Leaning his long, angular body forward over his knees, he opened his right hand, splayed the fingers, grasped one, and addressed it in an accented Boston drawl, the product of worker-bee study at the feet of American Jewish teachers.

  ‘Mr Quilley, sir,’ he began, so devoutly that he seemed to be imparting a mystical secret. ‘What we have in mind here is a totally original project. No precedents, no imitators. We take sixteen hours of very good television time – say, fall and winter. We form a matinée theatrical company of strolling players. A bunch of very talented repertory actors, British and American mixed, a wide range of races, personality, human interaction. This company, we move it from city to city, each actor playing a variety of rôles, now starring, now supporting. Their real-life human stories and relationships to provide a nice dimension, part of the audience appeal. Live shows in every city.’

  He glanced up suspiciously as if he thought Quilley had spoken, but Quilley emphatically had not.

  ‘Mr Quilley, we travel with that company,’ Litvak resumed, slowing almost to a halt as his fervour deepened. ‘We ride in that company’s buses. We help shift the scenery with that company. We the audience share their problems, their lousy hotels, look in on their fights and love-affairs. We the audience rehearse with them. We share their opening night nerves, read their reviews next day, rejoice at their successes, grieve at their failures, write letters to their folks. We give theatre back its adventure. Its pioneering spirit. Its actor–audience relationship.’

  For a moment Quilley thought Litvak had finished. But he was only selecting a different finger to hold on to.

  ‘We use classic theatre plays, Mr Quilley, out of copyright, low cost all the way. We barnstorm. We use new, relatively unknown actors and actresses, now and then a guest star for mileage, but basically we are promoting new talent and inviting that talent to demonstrate the whole range of its versatility over a minimum four-month period, which hopefully is extended. And re-extended. For the actors, great exposure, great publicity, nice clean shows, no dirt, see if it goes. That’s our concept, Mr Quilley, and our backers seem to like it a lot.’

  Then, before Quilley even had time to offer his congratulations, a thing he always liked to do when someone told him an idea, Kurtz had stormed back into the act.

  ‘Ned, we want to sign your Charlie,’ he announced; and with the enthusiasm of a Shakespearean herald bearing news of victory, he swept his whole right arm up into the air and held it there.

  Very excited, Ned made to speak, only to find that Kurtz was once more talking clean through him.

  ‘Ned, we believe that your Charlie has great wit, great versatility, fine range. If you can reassure us on a couple of slightly urgent points we have – why, I think we can offer her the opportunity of a place in the theatrical firmament which you and she will surely not regret.’

  Yet again Ned tried to speak, but this time it was Litvak who got in ahead of him: ‘We’re all set to go for her, Mr Quilley. Give us a couple of answers to a couple of questions and Charlie’s up there with the big ones.’

 
Suddenly there was silence, and all Ned could hear was the song in his own heart. He blew out his cheeks and, trying to appear businesslike, tugged at each of his elegant cuffs in turn. He adjusted the rose which Marjory had that very morning put into his button-hole with her usual instruction not to drink too much at lunch. But Marjory would have thought quite differently if she had known that, far from wanting to buy Ned out, they were actually proposing to give their beloved Charlie her long-awaited break. If she had known that, old Marge would have lifted all restrictions, of course she would.

  Kurtz and Litvak drank tea, but at The Ivy they take such eccentricities in their stride, and as for Ned he required little persuasion to choose himself a very decent half-bottle from the list and, since they seemed to insist upon it, a big, misted glass of the house Chablis to go with his smoked salmon first. In the taxi, which they took to escape the rain, Ned had begun to relate to them the amusing story of how he had acquired Charlie as a client. In The Ivy he resumed the thread.

  ‘Fell for her hook, line, and sinker. Never done such a thing before. Old fool, that’s what I was – not as old as I am now, but still a fool. Nothing much to the show. Little old-fashioned revue, really, dolled up to look modern. But Charlie was marvellous. The defended softness, that’s what I look for in the gals.’ The expression was in fact a legacy of his father’s. ‘Soon as the curtain came down, I popped straight round to her dressing-room – if you could call it a dressing-room – did my Pygmalion act, and signed her on the spot. She wouldn’t believe me at first. Thought I was a dirty old man. Had to go back and fetch Marjory to persuade her. Ha!’

  ‘What happened after that?’ said Kurtz very pleasantly, handing him some more brown bread and butter. ‘Roses all the way, huh?’

  ‘Oh, not a bit of it!’ Ned protested guilelessly. ‘She was just like so many of ’em at that age. Come bouncing out of drama college all starry-eyed and full of promise, get a couple of parts, start buying a flat or some stupid thing, then suddenly it all stops for ’em. The twilight time we call it. Some pull through it, some don’t. Cheers.’

  ‘But Charlie did,’ Litvak softly prompted, sipping his tea.

  ‘She held on. Sweated it out. It wasn’t easy, but it never is. Years of it, in her case. Too many.’ He was surprised to discover himself so moved. From their expressions, so were they. ‘Well, now it’s come right for her, hasn’t it? Oh, I am pleased for her! I really am. Yes, indeed.’

  And that was another odd thing, Ned told Marjory afterwards. Or maybe it was the same thing over again. He was referring to the way the two men changed character as the day wore on. Back in the office, for instance, he’d hardly got a word in edgeways. But at The Ivy they gave him centre stage and nodded him through his lines with hardly a word between them. And afterwards – well, afterwards was another damned thing completely.

  ‘Terrible childhood, of course,’ said Ned proudly. ‘A lot of the gals have that, I notice. It’s what sends ’em towards fantasy in the first place. Dissembling. Hiding your emotions. Copying people who look happier than you are. Or unhappier. Stealing a bit of ’em – what acting’s half about. Misery. Theft. I’m talking too much. Cheers again.’

  ‘Terrible in what way, Mr Quilley?’ Litvak asked respectfully, like someone who was researching the whole question of terribleness. ‘Charlie’s childhood. Terrible how, sir?’

  Ignoring what he only afterwards saw to be a deepening gravity in Litvak’s manner and in Kurtz’s gaze as well, Ned entrusted to them whatever knowledge he had incidentally acquired during the little, confessive lunches he occasionally gave her upstairs at Bianchi’s, where he took them all. The mother a ninny, he said. The father some sort of rather awful swindler chap, a stockbroker who’d gone to the devil and was now mercifully dead, one of those plausible liars who think God put the fifth ace up their sleeves. Ended up in jug. Died there. Shocking.

  Once again, Litvak made the mildest intervention: ‘Died in prison, did you say, sir?’

  ‘Buried there too. Mother so bitter she wouldn’t waste the money moving him.’

  ‘This something Charlie told you herself, sir?’

  Quilley was mystified. ‘Well, who else would?’

  ‘No collateral?’ said Litvak.

  ‘No what?’ said Ned as his fears of a takeover suddenly revived.

  ‘Corroboration, sir. Confirmation from unconnected parties. Sometimes with actresses –’

  But Kurtz intervened with a fatherly smile: ‘Ned, you just ignore this boy,’ he advised. ‘Mike here has a very suspicious streak in him. Don’t you, Mike?’

  ‘Maybe I do, at that,’ Litvak conceded, in a voice no louder than a sigh.

  Only then did Ned think to ask them what they had seen of her work, and to his pleasurable surprise it turned out that they had taken their researches very seriously indeed. Not only had they obtained clips of every minor television appearance she had ever made, they had actually traipsed up to beastly Nottingham on their previous visit to catch her Saint Joan.

  ‘Well, my goodness, what a sly pair you are!’ cried Ned as the waiters cleared their plates and set the scene for roast duck. ‘If you’d given me a call, I’d have driven you up there myself, or Marjory would. Did you go backstage, take her out for a meal? You didn’t? Well, I’m damned!’

  Kurtz allowed himself a moment’s hesitation and his voice grew grave. He cast a questioning glance at his partner, Litvak, who gave him a faint nod of encouragement. ‘Ned,’ he said, ‘to tell you the truth, we just didn’t quite feel it was appropriate in the circumstances.’

  ‘Whatever circumstances are they?’ asked Ned, supposing he was referring to some point of agents’ ethics. ‘Good Lord, we’re not like that over here, you know! You want to make her an offer, make one. Don’t have to get a chit from me. I’ll collect my commission one day, don’t you worry!’

  Then Ned went quiet because they both looked so bloody solemn, he told Marjory. As if they’d swallowed bad oysters. Shells and all.

  Litvak was carefully dabbing his thin lips. ‘Mind if I ask you something, sir?’

  ‘My dear chap,’ said Ned, very puzzled.

  ‘Would you tell us, please – your own assessment – how does Charlie interview?’

  Ned put down his claret glass. ‘Interview? Ah well, if that’s your worry you can take it from me that she’s an absolute natural. First rate. Knows instinctively what the press boys want and, given the chance, how to provide it. Chameleon, that’s what she is. Bit out of practice recently, I’ll grant you, but she’ll pick it up again like a shot, you’ll see. Don’t have any anxiety on that score.’ He took a long pull of wine to reassure them. ‘Oh no.’

  But Litvak was not as uplifted by this news as Ned had hoped. Pressing his lips into a kiss of worried disapproval, he began assembling crumbs on the tablecloth with his long, thin fingers. So that Ned actually lowered his own head and tilted his face up in an effort to draw him from his doldrums: ‘But, my dear fellow!’ he protested uncertainly. ‘Don’t look like that! What can possibly be wrong with her interviewing well? There are plenty of gals around who make a perfect hash of it. If that’s what you want, I’ve got any number of ’em!’

  But Litvak’s favour was not to be won. His only response was to lift his gaze briefly to Kurtz as if to say, ‘Your witness,’ then lower it again to the tablecloth. ‘A real two-hander,’ Ned told Marjory ruefully afterwards. ‘You felt they could have switched parts at the drop of a hat.’

  ‘Ned,’ said Kurtz, ‘if we sign your Charlie for this project, she is going to get one hell of a lot of exposure, and I mean a lot. Once she is into this thing, your kid is going to have her whole life spread right out in front of her face. Not only her love life, her family, her taste in popstars and poetry. Not only the story of her father. But also her religion, her attitudes, her opinions.’

  ‘And her politics,’ Litvak whispered, raking in the last of the crumbs. At which Ned suffered a mild but unmistakable loss of appetite, and laid
down his knife and fork, while Kurtz kept rolling on: ‘Ned, our backers in this project are nice Midwestern American people. They have all the virtues. Too much money, ungrateful children, second homes in Florida, wholesome values. But especially the wholesome values. And they want those values reflected in this production, all the way down the line. We can laugh at it a little, weep at it a little, but it’s the reality, it’s television, and it’s where the money is –’

  ‘And it’s America,’ Litvak breathed patriotically, to his crumbs.

  ‘Ned, we will be frank with you. We will be truthful. When we finally decided to write you, we were all ready, subject to obtaining other consents along the way, to buy your Charlie out of her commitments and start her on the big road. But I will not conceal from you that in the last couple of days, Karman here and myself have heard things around the bazaars that made us sit up and start to wonder. Her talent, no problem – Charlie is a fine, fine talent, under-exercised, diligent, all set to go. But whether she is bankable within the context of this project. Whether she is exposable. Ned, we want some reassurance from you that this thing isn’t serious.’

  It was Litvak who again put in the decisive thrust. Relinquishing his crumbs at last, he had crooked his right forefinger under his lower lip and was gazing mournfully at Ned through his black-framed spectacles.

  ‘We hear she’s currently radical,’ he said. ‘We hear she’s far, far out in her political causes. Militant. We hear she’s currently allied with a very flakey anarchist guy, some kind of crazy. We don’t want to condemn anybody on the strength of idle rumour, but the stuff that’s reaching us, Mr Quilley, it’s like she’s Fidel Castro’s mother and Arafat’s sister rolled into a single hooker.’

  Ned stared from one to the other of them, and for a moment he had the delusion that their four eyes were controlled by one optic muscle. He wanted to say something but he felt unreal. He wondered whether he might have drunk the Chablis faster than was prudent. All that he could think of was a favourite aphorism of Marjory’s: there is no such thing in life as a bargain.