The Little Drummer Girl

by John le Carré

  The dismay that had descended over Ned was like the panic of the old and helpless. He felt physically unequal to the task, too weak for it, too tired. All Americans unsettled him; and most scared him, either by their knowledge or their ignorance, or both. But these two, blankly gazing at him while he floundered for an answer, inspired a spiritual alarm greater than anything he was prepared for. He was also, in a useless sort of way, very angry. He loathed gossip. All gossip. He regarded it as the blight of his profession. He had seen it ruin careers; he detested it and he could become red-faced and almost rude when it was offered to him by those who did not know his feelings. When Ned talked about people, he did so openly and with affection, exactly as he had talked about Charlie ten minutes ago. Dammit, he loved the girl. It even crossed his mind to indicate this to Kurtz, which for Ned would have been a bold step indeed, and it must have crossed his face as well, for he fancied he saw Litvak start to worry and prepare to back off a little, and Kurtz’s extraordinarily mobile face break into a come-now-Ned sort of smile. But an incurable courtesy, as ever, held him back. He was eating their salt. Besides, they were foreign and had totally different standards. Then again he had to admit, reluctantly, that they had a job to do, and backers to humour, and even in a sense a certain awful rightness on their side; and that he, Ned, must either meet their point or risk wrecking the deal, and with it all his hopes for Charlie. For there was another factor here, that Ned in his fatal reasonableness was also obliged to acknowledge – namely, that even if their project turned out to be dreadful, which he assumed would be the case; even if Charlie were to throw away every line she was given, walk on to the set drunk, and put broken glass in the director’s bath-tub, none of which in her professionalism she would contemplate for one faltering second – nevertheless her career, her status, her plain commercial value, would at last be taking that longed-for leap forward from which it need never seriously retreat.

  Kurtz, all this while, had been talking undeterred. ‘Your guidance, Ned,’ he was saying earnestly. ‘Help. We want to know this thing isn’t going to blow up in our faces on the second day of shooting. Because I’ll tell you this.’ A short strong finger was pointing at him like a pistol barrel. ‘Nobody in the state of Minnesota is about to be seen paying a quarter of a million dollars to a red-toothed enemy of democracy, if that’s what she is, and nobody in GK is going to advise them to commit hara-kiri doing it.’

  To begin with, at least, Ned rallied rather well. He apologised for nothing. He reminded them, without giving the smallest ground, of his description of Charlie’s childhood, and pointed out that by any normal standards she should have ended up a full-scale juvenile delinquent or – like her father – in prison. As to her politics or whatever one wished to call them, he said, in the nine years odd that he and Marjory had known her, Charlie had been a passionate opponent of apartheid – ‘Well, one can’t fault that, can one?’ (though they seemed to think one could) – a militant pacifist, a Sufist, a nuclear marcher, an anti-vivisectionist, and, until she went back to smoking again, a champion of campaigns to eliminate tobacco from theatres and on the public underground. And he had no doubt that before Charlie was finally gathered to the Great Reaper, a whole bunch of other, equally disparate causes would attract her romantic, if brief, patronage.

  ‘And you stood by her through all that, Ned,’ Kurtz marvelled in admiration. ‘I call that fine, Ned.’

  ‘As I would stand by any of them!’ Ned rejoined with a flash of spirit. ‘Dash it all, she’s an actress! Don’t take her so seriously. Actors don’t have opinions, my dear chap, still less do actresses. They have moods. Fads. Poses. twenty-four-hour passions. There’s a lot wrong with the world, dammit. Actors are absolute suckers for dramatic solutions. For all I know, by the time you get her out there, she’ll be Born Again!’

  ‘Not politically, she won’t,’ said Litvak nastily, under his breath.

  For a few moments longer, under the helpful influence of his claret, Ned continued on this bold course. A sort of giddiness overtook him. He heard the words in his head; he repeated them and felt young again and completely divorced from his own actions. He spoke of actors generally and how they were pursued by ‘an absolute horror of unreality’. How on stage they acted out all the agonies of man, and off stage were hollow vessels waiting to be filled. He talked about their shyness, their smallness, their vulnerability, and their habit of disguising these weaknesses with tough-sounding and extreme causes borrowed from the adult world. He spoke of their self-obsession, and how they saw themselves on stage twenty-four hours a day – in childbirth, under the knife, in love. Then he dried, a thing that happened to him a mite too often these days. He lost his thread, he lost his bounce. The wine waiter brought the liqueur trolley. Under the cold-sober eyes of his hosts, Quilley desperately selected a Marc de Champagne and let the waiter pour a large one before he made a show of stopping him. Meanwhile Litvak had recovered sufficiently to bounce back with a good idea. Poking his long fingers inside his jacket, he drew out one of those notebooks made like a blank picture, with imitation crocodile backing and brass corners for the little sheets of paper.

  ‘I say we start with first principles,’ he proposed softly, more to Kurtz than to Ned. ‘The when, the where, the who with, the how long.’ He drew a margin, presumably for dates. ‘Rallies she’s been in. Demonstrations. Petitions, marches. Anything that has maybe caught the public eye. When we have it all out on the table, we can make an informed assessment. Either buy the risk or get the hell out the back door. Ned, when to your knowledge was she first involved?’

  ‘I like it,’ said Kurtz. ‘I like the method. I think it’s right for Charlie too.’ And he managed to say this exactly as if Litvak’s plan had come to him out of a clear sky, instead of being the product of hours of preparatory discussion.

  So Ned told them that too. Where he could, he glossed things over; once or twice he told a small lie, but in the main he told them what he knew. He had misgivings certainly, but those came afterwards. As he put it to Marjory, at the time they just swept him along. Not that he knew very much. The anti-apartheid and anti-nuclear stuff, of course – well, that was common knowledge anyway. Then there was that Theatre of Radical Reform crowd she rode with occasionally, who had made such a damn nuisance of themselves outside the National, stopping the performances. And some people called Alternative Action in Islington, who were some kind of loony Trot splinter group, all fifteen of them. And some awful women’s panel she had appeared on at St Pancras Town Hall, dragging Marjory along in order to show her the light. And there was the time two or three years ago she had rung up in the middle of the night from Durham police station, asking for Ned to come and bail her out, after being arrested at some anti-Nazi jamboree she’d got up to.

  ‘This the thing that made all the publicity, got her picture in the papers, Mr Quilley?’

  ‘No, that was Reading,’ said Ned. ‘That was later.’

  ‘So what was Durham?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know exactly. I rather forbid it as a topic, to be frank. It’s just what one hears by mistake. Wasn’t there some nuclear power station project up there? One forgets. One simply does forget. She’s become much more moderate latterly, you know. Not half the fireball she used to pretend she was, I can assure you. Far more mature. Oh yes!’

  ‘Pretend, Ned?’ Kurtz echoed doubtfully.

  ‘Tell us about Reading, Mr Quilley,’ said Litvak. ‘What happened there?’

  ‘Oh, the same sort of thing. Somebody set fire to a bus, so they all got charged for it. They were protesting against reducing services for old people, I believe. Or was it something about not taking on the darkies as conductors? The bus was empty, of course,’ he added hastily. ‘Nobody got hurt.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Litvak, and glanced at Kurtz, whose questioning now acquired the resonance of a courtroom soap opera:

  ‘Ned, you indicated just now that Charlie was maybe softening somewhat in her convictions. Is that what you are
saying?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. If her convictions were ever very hard, that is. It’s only an impression, but old Marjory thinks so too. Sure of it –’

  ‘Has Charlie confided such a change of heart to you, Ned?’ Kurtz interrupted, rather sharp.

  ‘I just think that once she gets a real chance like this –’

  Kurtz overrode him: ‘To Mrs Quilley perhaps?’

  ‘Well, no, not really.’

  ‘Is there anybody else she might have confided in? Such as this anarchist friend she has?’

  ‘Oh, he’d be the last to know.’

  ‘Ned, is there anybody apart from you – think carefully, please, girlfriend, boyfriend, maybe an older person, family friend – in whom Charlie would confide such a shift in position? Away from radicalism? Ned?’

  ‘Not that I know of, no. No, I can’t think of a soul. She’s close in some ways. Closer than you’d think.’

  Then a most extraordinary thing happened. Ned later provided Marjory with an exact account of it. To escape the uncomfortable and, to Ned’s ear, histrionic crossfire of their separate gazes on him, Ned had been playing with his glass, peering into it, rolling the Marc around. Sensing that Kurtz had somehow rested his case, he now glanced up, and intercepted an expression of quite evident relief in Kurtz’s features that he was in the act of communicating to Litvak: his actual pleasure that Charlie was not after all softening in her conviction. Or, if she was, had not admitted it to anybody of note. He looked again and it had gone. But not even Marjory could afterwards persuade him it had not been there.

  Litvak, the great barrister’s junior, had taken over the questioning: a quicker tone to wrap the case up.

  ‘Mr Quilley, sir, do you hold in your agency individual office papers on all your clients? Files?’

  ‘Well, Mrs Ellis does, I’m sure,’ said Ned. ‘Somewhere.’

  ‘Mrs Ellis been doing that work for long, sir?’

  ‘My goodness, yes. She was there in my father’s time.’

  ‘And what type of information does she store there? Fees – expenses – commission taken, kind of thing? Are they merely arid business papers, these files?’

  ‘Good Lord, no, she puts everything in. Birthdays, the kind of flowers they like, restaurants. We even found an old dancing-shoe in one. Names of their kids. Dogs. Press cuttings. Any amount of stuff.’

  ‘Personal letters?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘In her own hand? Her own letters, going back over the years?’

  Kurtz was embarrassed. His Slav eyebrows said so; they were massing in a pained line round the bridge of his nose.

  ‘Karman, I think Mr Quilley has given us enough of his time and experience already,’ he told Litvak severely. ‘If we need more information, Mr Quilley will surely supply it later. Better still, if Charlie herself is prepared to talk this out with us, we can get it from her. Ned, this has been a great and memorable occasion. Thank you, sir.’

  But Litvak was not so easily put off. He had a young man’s obstinacy: ‘Mr Quilley doesn’t have any secrets from us,’ he exclaimed. ‘Hell, Mr Gold, I’m only asking him for what the world already knows, and what our visa people will find out in point zero five seconds on their computer. We’re in a hurry with this. You know that. If there’s papers, her own letters, using her own words, mitigating circumstances, evidence of a change of heart maybe, why don’t we have Mr Quilley show them to us? If he’s willing. If he’s not – well, that’s another matter,’ he added, with unpleasing innuendo.

  ‘Karman, I am quite sure Ned is willing,’ said Kurtz sternly, as if that were not the point at all. And shook his head as if to say he would never quite get used to young men’s pushy manners these days.

  The rain had stopped. They walked little Quilley between them, carefully trimming their agile pace to his own faltering tread. He was fuddled, he was aggrieved, he was afflicted with a sense of alcoholic foreboding that damp traffic fumes did nothing to dispel. What the devil do they want? he kept wondering. One minute offering Charlie the moon, the next objecting to her silly politics? And now, for reasons he had ceased to remember, they were proposing to consult the record, which wasn’t a record at all, but a desultory collection of keepsakes, the province of an employee too elderly to be retired. Mrs Longmore, the receptionist, watched their arrival and Ned knew at once from her disapproving face that he had done himself too well at lunch. To hell with her. Kurtz insisted that Ned go ahead of them up the stairs. From his office, while they practically held a gun to his head, he telephoned Mrs Ellis asking her to bring Charlie’s papers to the waiting-room and leave them there.

  ‘Shall we knock on your door when we’re through, Mr Quilley?’ Litvak asked, like someone about to deliver a child.

  The last he saw of them both, they were seated at the rosewood drum table in the waiting-room, surrounded by about six of Mrs Ellis’s foul brown boxes that looked as though they had been rescued from the blitz. Like a pair of tax collectors they were, poring over the same set of suspect figures, pencil and paper at their elbows, and Gold, the broad one, with his jacket off and that scruffy watch of his set on the table beside him as if he were timing himself while he made his beastly calculations. After that, Quilley must have dozed off for a bit. He woke with a jolt at five to find the waiting-room empty. And when he buzzed Mrs Longmore, she replied pointedly that his guests had not wished to disturb him.

  Ned did not tell Marjory at once. ‘Oh, them,’ he said when she asked him that same evening. ‘Just a pair of dreary package artists, I’m afraid, on their way to Munich. Nothing to worry about there.’

  ‘Jew-boys?’

  ‘Yes – well, yes, Jewish, I suppose. Very, in fact.’ Marjory nodded as if she’d known as much all along. ‘But I mean jolly nice ones,’ said Ned a bit hopelessly.

  Marjory was a prison visitor in her off-hours and Ned’s deceptions held no mystery for her. But she bided her time. Bill Lochheim was Ned’s correspondent in New York, his only American buddy. Next afternoon Ned rang him. Old Loch hadn’t heard of them but he duly reported back what Ned already knew: GK were new in the field, had some backing, but independents were a drug on the market these days. Quilley didn’t like the tone of old Loch’s voice. He sounded as if he’d been put upon somehow – not by Quilley, who had never put upon anyone in his life, but by someone else, some third party he’d consulted. Quilley even had the queer feeling that he and old Loch might, in some strange way, be in the same boat. With amazing bravura, Ned rang GK’s New York number on a pretext. The place turned out to be a holding address for out-of-town companies: no information available on clients. Now Ned could think of nothing except his two visitors and the luncheon. He wished to God he had shown them the door. He rang the Munich hotel they had mentioned and got a stuffy manager. Herr Gold and Herr Karman had stayed one night but left early the next morning unexpectedly on business, he said sourly – so why did he say it at all? Always too much information, thought Ned. Or too little. And the same hint of chaps doing things against their better judgment. A German producer whom Kurtz had mentioned said that they were ‘good people, very respectable, oh very good’. But when Ned asked whether they had been in Munich recently and what projects they were associated with, the producer grew hostile and practically hung up on him.

  There remained Ned’s professional colleagues in the agency business. Ned consulted them reluctantly and with tremendous casualness, spreading his enquiries wide, and drawing blanks everywhere.

  ‘Met two awfully nice Americans the other day,’ he confided finally to Herb Nolan, of Lomax Stars, pausing at Herb’s table at the Garrick. ‘Over here bargain-hunting for some high-flyin’ TV series they’re putting together. Gold and something. Come your way at all?’

  Nolan laughed. ‘It was me who sent ’em on to you, old boy. Asked after a couple of my horrors, then wanted to know all about your Charlie. Whether I thought she could go the distance. I told ’em, Ned. I told ’em!’

 
‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘“More likely she’ll blow us all sky high,” I said! What?’

  Depressed by the poor level of Herb Nolan’s humour, Ned enquired no further. But the same night, after Marjory had extracted his inevitable confession, he went on to share his anxieties with her.

  ‘They were in such a damned hurry,’ he said. ‘They had too much energy, even for Americans. Went at me like a pair of bloody policemen. First one chap, then the other. Pair of bloody terriers,’ he added, changing his simile. ‘I keep thinking I should go to the authorities,’ he said.

  ‘But, darling,’ Marjory replied at last. ‘By the sound of it, I’m afraid they were the authorities.’

  ‘I’m going to write to her,’ Ned declared, with great decisiveness. ‘I’ve a jolly good mind to write and warn her, just in case. She could be in trouble.’

  But even if he had done so, he would have been too late. It was not forty-eight hours later that Charlie set sail for Athens to keep her tryst with Joseph.

  So once again it was done; on the face of it, a mere sideshow compared with the main thrust of the operation; and a dreadfully risky one at that, as Kurtz was the first to agree when, the same night, he modestly reported his triumph to Misha Gavron. Yet what else could we have done, Misha – tell me that? Where else was such a precious store of correspondence, ranging over so long a period, to be obtained? They had hunted for other recipients of Charlie’s letters – boyfriends, girlfriends, her bloody mother, a former schoolmistress; they had posed, in a couple of places, as a commercial company interested in acquiring the manuscripts and autographs of tomorrow’s great. Till Kurtz, with Gavron’s grudging consent, had had the whole thing stopped. Better one big strike, he had decreed, than so many dangerous small ones.