The Little Drummer Girl

by John le Carré

  ‘Help yourself, Charlie,’ Kurtz advised quietly, from his chair. ‘You’ve read Frantz Fanon. Violence is a cleansing force, remember? It frees us from our inferiority complexes, it makes us fearless and restores our self-respect.’

  There was only one way out for her, so she took it. Hunching her shoulders, she dropped her face dramatically into her hands and wept inconsolably until, on a nod from Kurtz, Rachel came forward from the window and put her arm round her shoulder, which Charlie resisted and then let be.

  ‘She gets three minutes, not more,’ Kurtz called as the two of them headed for the doorway. ‘She does not change her dress or put on some new identity, she comes straight back in here. I want the engine kept running. Charlie, stop where you are a minute. Wait. I said stop.’

  Charlie stopped, but did not turn round. She stood motionless, acting with her back and wondering wretchedly whether Joseph was doing something about that cut face.

  ‘You did well, Charlie,’ Kurtz said, without condescension, down the room to her. ‘Congratulations. You took a dive but you recovered. You lied, you lost your way, but you hung in there and when the line broke you threw a tantrum and blamed your troubles on the whole world. We were proud of you. Next time we’ll think you up a better story to tell. Hurry back, okay? Time is very, very short right now.’

  In the bathroom, Charlie stood with her head against the wall, sobbing, while Rachel ran a basin of water for her and Rose stood outside in case.

  ‘I don’t know how you can put up with England for one minute,’ said Rachel while she set the soap and towel ready. ‘I had fifteen years of it before we left. I thought I’d die. Do you know Macclesfield? It’s death. It is if you’re a Jew, anyway. All that class and coldness and hypocrisy. I think it’s the unhappiest place on earth, Macclesfield is, for a Jew, I do really. I used to scrub my skin with lemon juice in the bath because they told me I was greasy. Don’t go near that door without me, will you, love, or I’ll have to stop you.’

  It was dawn and therefore bedtime and she was back with them, where she wanted more than anything to be. They had told her a little, they had brushed across the story as a headlight brushes across a dark doorway, giving a passing glimpse of whatever lies hidden in it. Imagine, they said – and told her of a perfect lover whom she’d never met.

  She hardly cared. They wanted her. They knew her through and through; they knew her fragility and her plurality. And they still wanted her. They had stolen her in order to rescue her. After all her drifting, their straight line. After all her guilt and concealment, their acceptance. After all her words, their action, their abstemiousness, their clear-eyed zeal, their authenticity, their true allegiance, to fill the emptiness that had yawned and screamed inside her like a bored demon ever since she could remember. She was a featherweight, caught in a swirling storm, but suddenly, to her amazed relief, theirs was the commanding wind.

  She lay back and let them carry her, assume her, have her. Thank God, she thought: a homeland at last. You will play yourself, but more so, they said – and when had she ever not? Yourself, with all your bluffs called, they said – put it that way. Put it any way you like, she thought.

  Yes, I’m listening. Yes, I follow.

  They had given Joseph the seat of authority at the centre of the table. Litvak and Kurtz sat still as moons to either side of him. Joseph’s face was raw where she had hit him, a chain of small bruises ran along the bone-line of his left cheek. Through the slatted shutters, ladders of early light shone on to the floorboards and across the trestle table. They stopped talking.

  ‘Have I decided yet?’ she asked him.

  Joseph shook his head. A dark stubble emphasised the hollows of his face. The downlight showed a web of fine lines round his eyes.

  ‘Tell me about the usefulness again,’ she suggested.

  She felt their interest tighten like a cord. Litvak, his white hands folded before him, dead-eyed yet strangely angry in his contemplation of her; Kurtz, ageless and prophetic, his cracked face sprinkled with a silver dust. And round the walls still, the kids, devout and motionless, as if they were queuing for their first communion.

  ‘They say you will save lives, Charlie,’ Joseph explained, in a detached tone from which all hint of theatre had been rigorously expunged. Did she hear reluctance in his voice? If so, it only emphasised the gravity of his words. ‘That you will give mothers back their children and help to bring peace to peaceful people. They say that innocent men and women will live. Because of you.’

  ‘What do you say?’

  His answer sounded deliberately dull. ‘Why else would I be here? For one of us, we would call the work a sacrifice, an atonement for life. For you – well, maybe it’s not so different after all.’

  ‘Where will you be?’

  ‘We shall stay as close to you as we can.’

  ‘I said you. You singular. Joseph.’

  ‘I shall be close, naturally. That will be my job.’

  And only my job, he was saying; not even Charlie could have mistaken the message.

  ‘Joseph will be right with you all along the line, Charlie,’ Kurtz put in softly. ‘Joseph is a fine, fine professional. Joseph, tell her about the time factor, please.’

  ‘We have very little,’ Joseph said. ‘Every hour counts.’

  Kurtz was still smiling, seeming to wait for him to go on. But Joseph had finished.

  She had said yes. She must have done. Or yes to the next phase at least, because she felt a slight movement of relief around her, and then, to her disappointment, nothing more. In her hyperbolic state of mind she had imagined her whole audience bursting into applause: exhausted Mike sinking his head into his spidery white hands and weeping unashamedly; Marty, like the old man he had turned out to be, grasping her shoulders in his thick hands – my child, my daughter – pressing his prickly face against her cheek; the kids, her soft-footed fans, breaking ranks to gather round and touch her. And Joseph folding her to his breast. But in the theatre of deeds, it seemed, people didn’t do that. Kurtz and Litvak were busy tidying papers, closing briefcases. Joseph was conferring with Dimitri and the South African Rose. Raoul was clearing away the débris of tea and sugary biscuits. Rachel alone seemed concerned with what became of their recruit. Touching Charlie’s arm, she led her towards the landing for what she called a nice lie down. They had not reached the door before Joseph softly spoke her name. He was staring at her with pensive curiosity.

  ‘So good night then,’ he repeated, as if the words were a puzzle to him.

  ‘So good night to you, too,’ Charlie retorted, with a battered grin that should have signified the final curtain. But it didn’t. As Charlie followed Rachel down the corridor, she was surprised to discover herself in her father’s London club, on her way towards the ladies’ annexe for lunch. Stopping, she gazed round her trying to identify the source of this hallucination. Then she heard it: the restless ticking of an unseen teleprinter, pushing out the latest market prices. She guessed it came from behind a half-closed door. But Rachel hurried her past before she had a chance to find out.

  The three men were back in the resting room, where the chattering of the code machine had summoned them like a bugle. While Becker and Litvak looked on, Kurtz crouched at the desk deciphering with an air of utter disbelief the newest, unexpected, urgent, and strictly private telegram from Jerusalem. From behind him they could watch the dark sweat patch spread across his shirt like a leaking wound. The radio operator was gone, packed off by Kurtz as soon as Jerusalem’s coded text began to print itself. The silence in the house was otherwise very deep. If birds sang or traffic passed, they did not hear it. They heard only the stop and start of the printer.

  ‘I never saw you better, Gadi,’ declared Kurtz, for whom no one activity was ever quite enough. He was speaking English, the language of Gavron’s text. ‘Masterful, high-minded, incisive.’ He tore off a sheet and waited for the next to print itself. ‘All that a girl adrift could wish for in her saviour. That right,
Shimon?’ The machine resumed.

  ‘Some of our colleagues in Jerusalem – Mr Gavron, to name but one – they questioned my selection of you. Mr Litvak here for another. Not me. I had the confidence.’ Muttering a mild curse, he tore off the second sheet. ‘That Gadi, he’s the best I ever had, I told them,’ he resumed. ‘A lion’s heart, a poet’s head: my very words. A life of violence has not coarsened him, I said. How does she handle, Gadi?’

  And he actually turned his head and tilted it, watching for Becker’s answer.

  ‘Didn’t you notice?’ Becker said.

  If Kurtz had noticed, he was not at present saying so. The message completed, he swung right round on his swivel chair, holding the sheets strictly upright before him to catch the desk light that came over his shoulder. But it was Litvak, oddly, who spoke first – Litvak who gave vent to a clenched and strident outburst of impatience that took his two colleagues by surprise. ‘They’ve planted another bomb!’ he blurted. ‘Tell us! Where was it? How many of us have they killed this time?’

  Kurtz slowly shook his head, and smiled for the first time since the message had come in.

  ‘A bomb, maybe, Shimon. But nobody died from it. Not yet.’

  ‘Just let him read it,’ Becker said. ‘Don’t let him play you.’

  But Kurtz preferred to extrapolate. ‘Misha Gavron greets us and sends us three further messages,’ he said. ‘Message one, certain installations in the Lebanon will be hit tomorrow, but those concerned will be sure to avoid our target houses. Message two’ – he tossed aside his pieces of paper – ‘message two is an order, akin in quality and perception to the order we received earlier tonight. We are to drop the gallant Dr Alexis by yesterday. No further contact. Misha Gavron has turned over his case file to certain wise psychologists who have ruled him as crazy as a bedbug.’

  Litvak again began to protest. Perhaps extreme tiredness affected him that way. Perhaps the heat did, for the night had turned very hot. Kurtz, still with his smile, talked him gently down to earth.

  ‘Calm yourself, Shimon. Our gallant leader is being a little bit political, that is all. If Alexis jumps the wall and there is a scandal affecting our country’s relationship with a sorely needed ally, Marty Kurtz here takes the rap. If Alexis stays our side, keeps his mouth shut, and does what we tell him, Misha Gavron takes the glory. You know how Misha treats me. I’m his Jew.’

  ‘And the third message?’ Becker said.

  ‘Our leader advises us that there is very little time. The hounds are baying at his heels, he says. He means our heels, naturally.’

  At Kurtz’s suggestion, Litvak went off to pack his toothbrush. Left alone with Becker, Kurtz gave a grateful sigh of relief, and, much easier in his manner, wandered over to the truckle bed and picked up a French passport, opened it, and studied the personal particulars, committing them to memory. ‘You are the deliverer of our success, Gadi,’ he observed as he read. ‘Any gaps, special needs, you let me know. Hear me?’

  Becker heard him.

  ‘The kids say you made a fine couple up there on the Acropolis. Like a pair of movie stars, they tell me.’

  ‘Thank them for me.’

  Armed with an old, clogged hairbrush, Kurtz stood himself before the mirror and set to work to give himself a parting.

  ‘A case like this, a girl involved, a concept, I leave it to the case officer’s discretion,’ he remarked reflectively as he laboured. ‘Sometimes it pays to keep a distance, sometimes –’ He tossed the hairbrush into an open case.

  ‘This one’s distance,’ Becker said.

  The door opened. Litvak, dressed for the city and carrying a briefcase, was impatient for his master’s company.

  ‘We’re late,’ he said, with an unfriendly glance at Becker.

  And yet Charlie, for all their manipulation of her, was not coerced – not by Kurtz’s standards, anyway. It was a point on which he placed stress from the outset. A durable basis of morality, he ruled, was essential to their plan. In the early stages, yes, there had been fancy talk of pressure, domination, even sexual enslavement to some less scrupulous Apollo than Becker; of confining Charlie in fragmenting circumstances for a few nights before offering her the hand of friendship. Gavron’s wise psychologists, having read her dossier, put forward all sorts of fatuous suggestions, including some that were on the brutal side. But it was the tested operational mind of Kurtz that won the day against Jerusalem’s swelling army of experts. Volunteers fight harder and longer, he had argued. Volunteers find their own ways to persuade themselves. And besides, if you are proposing marriage to a lady, it is wiser not to rape her first.

  Others, of whom Litvak had been one, had voted loudly for an Israeli girl who could be fitted out with Charlie’s kind of background. Litvak was viscerally opposed, as others were, to the idea of counting on the loyalty of a Gentile, least of all an English one, for anything. Kurtz had disagreed with equal vehemence. He loved the naturalness in Charlie and coveted the original, not the imitation. Her ideological drift did not dismay him in the least; the nearer she was to drowning, he said, the greater would be her pleasure at coming aboard.

  Yet another school of thought – for the team was nothing if not democratic, if you ignored Kurtz’s natural tyranny – had advocated a longer and more gradual courtship in advance of Yanuka’s kidnapping, ending with a straight, sober offer along the classically defined lines of intelligence recruitment. Once again, Kurtz strangled the suggestion at birth. A girl of Charlie’s temperament did not make up her mind by idle hours of reflection, he shouted – and neither, as a matter of fact, did Kurtz. Better to compress! Better to research and prepare down to the last detail, and take her by storm in one tremendous push! Becker, when he had taken a look at her himself, agreed: impulse recruitment was best.

  But what if she says no, for God’s sake? they had cried, Gavron the Rook among them. To have prepared so much, only to be jilted at the altar!

  In that case, Misha my friend, said Kurtz, we will have wasted a little time, and a little money, and a few prayers. He held that view through thick and thin; even if, in his most private circle – which comprised his wife and occasionally Becker – he confessed that he was taking one devil of a gamble. But there again, perhaps he was playing the cocotte. Kurtz had had his eye on Charlie ever since she had first surfaced at the weekend sessions of the forum. He had marked her down, enquired about her, twisted her around in his mind. You assemble tools, you look for the tasks, you improvise, he would say. You match the operation to the resources.

  But why drag her to Greece, Marty? And all the others with her? Are we a charity, suddenly, lavishing our precious secret funds on rootless left-wing English actors?

  But Kurtz was unbudgeable. He demanded scale from the start, knowing he would only be whittled down thereafter. Since Charlie’s odyssey must begin in Greece, he insisted, let her be brought to Greece ahead of time, where the foreignness and magic of her situation would detach her more easily from domestic ties. Let the sun soften her. And since Alastair would never let her go alone, let him come also – and be removed at the psychological moment, thus further depriving her of support. And since all actors collect families – and do not feel secure unless they have the protection of the flock – and since no other natural method presented itself by which to lure the couple abroad – So it went on, one argument predicating another, until the only logic was the fiction, and the fiction was a web that enmeshed everyone who tried to sweep it away.

  As to the removal of Alastair, it provided on that very day in London an amusing postscript to all their planning up till now. The scene occurred, of all places, in the domain of poor Ned Quilley, while Charlie was still deeply sleeping, and Ned was treating himself to a small refreshment in the privacy of his room in order to fortify himself for the rigours of lunch. He was in the act of unstopping his decanter when he was startled by a stream of obscenities, delivered in a male Celtic brogue, from the direction of Mrs Longmore’s cubby-hole downstairs, and en
ding with the demand that she ‘call the old goat out of his shed before I personally go up and drag him out’. Wondering who of his more erratic clients had elected to have his nervous breakdown in Scottish, and before lunch, Quilley tiptoed gingerly to the door and put his ear to the panel. But he failed to recognise the voice. A moment later there was a thunder of footsteps, the door was flung open, and there before him stood the swaying figure of Long Al, known to him from occasional sorties to Charlie’s dressing-room, where Alastair was in the habit of sitting out her performances with the aid of a bottle during his own protracted spells of idleness. He was filthy, he had three days’ growth, he was blind drunk. Quilley attempted, in his best Pickwickian style, to demand the meaning of this outrage, but he might as well have spared his breath. Besides, he had been through a number of such scenes in his day, and experience had taught him that one does one’s best to say as little as possible.

  ‘You contemptible old faggot,’ Alastair began pleasantly, holding a shaking index finger directly beneath Quilley’s nose. ‘You mean, scheming old queen. I’m going to break your stupid neck.’