‘Because there he is, still in his same seat, in the middle of the front row. Staring at the curtain as if by staring at it he could make it rise again upon the apparition of his Joan, the spirit of his freedom, whom he loves infinitely.’
‘I mean this is awful,’ Charlie murmured. But he ignored her.
‘The same seat he has been sitting in for the last seven hours.’
I want to go home, she thought. A long sleep all on my own at the Astral Commercial and Private. How many destinies can a girl meet in one day? For she could no longer miss the extra note of assurance in him, the drawing near, as he described her new admirer.
‘You hesitate, then you call his name. “Michel!” The only name you know. He turns to look at you but does not move. He does not smile, or greet you, or in any way demonstrate his considerable charm.’
‘So what does he do, the creep?’
‘Nothing. He stares at you with his deep and passionate eyes, challenging you to speak. You may think him arrogant, you may think him romantic, but he is not ordinary and he is certainly not apologetic or bashful. He has come to claim you. He is young, cosmopolitan, well dressed. A man of movement and money, and lacking any sign of self-consciousness. So.’ He switched to the first person: ‘You walk towards me down the aisle, realising already that the scene is not unfolding in the way you expected. It is you, not I, apparently, who must provide the explanations. You take the bracelet from your pocket. You offer it to me. I make no move. The rain is dripping from you becomingly.’
The road was leading them up a winding hill. His commanding voice, coupled to the mesmeric rhythm of successive bends, forced her mind farther and farther into the labyrinth of his story.
‘You say something. What do you say?’ Obtaining no answer from her, he supplied his own. ‘“I do not know you. Thank you, Michel, I am flattered. But I do not know you and I cannot accept this gift.” Would you say that? Yes, you would. But better, perhaps.’
She barely heard him. She was standing before him in the auditorium, holding the box to him, gazing into his dark eyes. And my new boots, she thought; the long brown ones I bought myself for Christmas. Ruined by the rain, but who cares?
Joseph was continuing his fairy tale. ‘Still I speak not one word. You will know from your theatrical experience that there is nothing like silence to establish communication. If the wretched fellow won’t speak, what can you do? You are obliged to speak again yourself. Tell me what you say to me this time.’
An unwonted shyness struggled with her burgeoning imagination. ‘I ask him who he is.’
‘My name is Michel.’
‘I know that part. Michel who?’
‘No answer.’
‘I ask you what you are doing in Nottingham.’
‘Falling in love with you. Go on.’
‘Christ – Jose –’
‘Go on!’
‘He can’t say that to me!’
‘Then tell him!’
‘I reason with him. Appeal to him.’
‘Then let’s hear you do it – he’s waiting for you, Charlie! Speak to him!’
‘I’d say . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘“Look, Michel . . . it’s nice of you . . . I’m very flattered. But sorry – it’s too much.”’
He was disappointed. ‘Charlie, you must do better than that,’ he reproved her austerely. ‘He’s an Arab – even if you don’t know that yet, you may suspect it – you are refusing his gift. You must try harder.’
‘“It’s not fair to you, Michel. People often get fixations about actresses . . . and actors . . . happens every day. That’s no reason to go ruining yourself . . . just for a kind of . . . illusion.”’
‘Good. Continue.’
It was coming more easily to her. She hated his browbeating of her, as she hated any producer’s, but she could not deny its effect. ‘“That’s what acting’s all about, Michel. Illusion. The audience sits down here hoping to be enchanted. The actors stand up there hoping to enchant you. We succeeded. But I can’t accept this. It’s beautiful.”’ She meant the bracelet. ‘“Too beautiful. I can’t accept anything. We’ve fooled you. That’s all that’s happened. Theatre’s a con trick, Michel. Do you know what that means? Con trick? You’ve been deceived.”’
‘I still don’t speak.’
‘Well, make him!’
‘Why? Are you running out of conviction already? Don’t you feel responsible for me? A young boy like this – so handsome – throwing away my money on orchids and expensive jewels?’
‘Of course I do! I’ve told you!’
‘Then protect me,’ he insisted, in an impatient tone. ‘Save me from my infatuation.’
‘I’m trying!’
‘That bracelet cost me hundreds of pounds – even you can guess that. For all you know, thousands. I might have stolen it for you. Killed. Pawned my inheritance. All for you. I am besotted, Charlie! Be charitable! Exercise your power!’
In her imagination’s eye, Charlie had sat herself beside Michel in the next seat. Her hands clasped on her lap, she was leaning forward earnestly to reason with him. She was a nurse to him, a mother. A friend.
‘I tell him he would be disappointed if he knew me in reality.’
‘The exact words, please.’
She took a deep breath and plunged: ‘“Listen, Michel, I’m just an ordinary girl. I’ve got torn tights, and an overdraft, and I’m certainly no Joan of Arc, believe me. I’m no virgin, and no soldier, and God and I haven’t exchanged a word since I was chucked out of school for” – I’m not going to say that bit – “I’m Charlie, a feckless Western slut.”’
‘Excellent. Go on.’
‘“Michel, you’ve got to snap out of this. I mean I’m doing what I can to help, okay? So here, take this back, keep your money and your illusions – and thanks. Thanks, truly. Really thanks. Over and out.”’
‘But you don’t want him to keep his illusions,’ Joseph objected aridly. ‘Or do you?’
‘All right, give up his bloody illusions!’
‘So how does it end?’
‘It just did. I put the bracelet on the seat beside him and walked out. Thanks, world, and bye-bye. If I hurry to the bus-stop, I’ll be just in time for rubber chicken at the Astral.’
Joseph was appalled. His face said so, and his hand left the wheel in a rare, if limited, gesture of supplication.
‘But, Charlie, how can you do this? Do you not know you are leaving me to commit suicide perhaps? To roam the rain-swept streets of Nottingham all night? Alone? While you lie beside my orchids and my note in the warmth of your elegant hotel.’
‘Elegant! Christ, the bloody fleas are damp!’
‘Do you have no sense of responsibility? You of all people, champion of the underdog – for a boy you have ensnared with your beauty and your talents and your revolutionary passion?’
She tried to bridle but he gave her no opportunity.
‘You have a warm heart, Charlie. Others might think of Michel at that moment as some kind of refined seducer. Not you. You believe in people. And that is how you are tonight, with Michel. Without thought for yourself, you are sincerely affected by him.’
On the skyline ahead of them a crumbling village marked a small peak in their ascent. She saw the lights of a taverna strung along the roadside.
‘Anyway, your response at this moment is irrelevant because Michel finally decides to speak to you,’ Joseph resumed, with a swift, measuring glance at her. ‘In a soft and appealing foreign accent, part French, part something else, he addresses you without shyness or inhibition. He is not interested in arguments, he says, you are everything he has ever dreamed of, he wishes to become your lover, preferably tonight, and he calls you Joan although you tell him you are Charlie. If you will go out with him to dinner, and after dinner you still do not want him any more, he will consider taking back the bracelet. No, you say, he must take it back now; you already have a lover, and besides, don’t be ridiculous, wh
ere is dinner in Nottingham at half past ten on a pouring wet Saturday night? . . . You would say this? Is it true?’
‘It’s a dump,’ she admitted, refusing to look at him.
‘And dinner – you would say specifically that dinner is an impossible dream?’
‘It’s Chinese or fish and chips.’
‘Nevertheless, you have made a dangerous concession to him.’
‘How?’ she demanded, stung.
‘You have made a practical objection. “We cannot dine together because there is no restaurant.” You might as well say you cannot sleep together because you have no bed. Michel senses this. He brushes your hesitations aside. He knows a place, he has made arrangements. So. We can eat. Why not?’
Swinging off the road, he had brought the car to a halt in the gravel layby in front of the taverna. Dazed by his wilful leap from past fiction to present time, perversely elated by his harassment of her, and relieved that, after all, Michel had not let her go, Charlie remained in her seat. So did Joseph. She turned to him and her eyes made out, by the coloured fairy lights outside, the direction of his own. He was gazing at her hands, still linked on her lap, the right hand uppermost. His face, as far as she could read it by the fairy lights, was rigid and expressionless. Reaching out, he clasped her right wrist with a swift, surgical confidence and, lifting it, revealed the wrist below, and round it the gold bracelet, twinkling in the dark.
‘Well, well, I must congratulate you,’ he remarked impassively. ‘You English girls don’t waste much time!’
Angrily she snatched back her hand. ‘What’s the matter?’ she snapped. ‘Jealous, are we?’
But she could not hurt him. He had the face that did not mark. Who are you? she wondered hopelessly as she followed him in. Him? Or you? Or nobody?
CHAPTER NINE
Yet, much as Charlie might have supposed the contrary, she was not the only centre of Joseph’s universe that night; not of Kurtz’s; and certainly not of Michel’s.
Well before Charlie and her putative lover had said a last goodbye to the Athens villa – while they still, in the fiction, lay in each other’s arms, sleeping off their frenzy – Kurtz and Litvak were chastely seated in different rows of a Lufthansa plane bound for Munich, and travelling under the protection of different countries: for Kurtz, France, and for Litvak, Canada. On landing, Kurtz repaired immediately to the Olympic Village, where the so-called Argentinian photographers eagerly awaited him, and Litvak to the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, where he was greeted by a munitions expert known to him only as Jacob, a sighing, other-worldish fellow in a stained suède jacket, who carried with him a wad of large-scale maps in a pop-down plastic folder. Posing as a surveyor, Jacob had spent the last three days taking laborious measurements along the Munich-to-Salzburg autobahn. His brief was to calculate the likely effect, in a variety of weathers and traffic conditions, of a very big explosive charge detonated at the roadside in the early hours of a weekday morning. Over several pots of excellent coffee in the lounge, the two men discussed Jacob’s tentative suggestions, then, in a hired car, slowly toured the entire hundred-and-forty-kilometre stretch together, annoying the faster traffic and stopping at almost every point where they were allowed, and some where they were not.
From Salzburg, Litvak continued alone to Vienna, where a new team of outriders was awaiting him with fresh transport and fresh faces. Litvak briefed them in a soundproofed conference room at the Israeli Embassy and, having attended to other small matters there, including reading the latest bulletins from Munich, led them southward in a ragged trippers’ convoy to the area of the Yugoslav border, where with the frankness of summer sightseers they made a reconnaissance of urban car parks, railway stations, and picturesque market squares, before distributing themselves over several humble pensions in the region of Villach. His net thus spread, he hurried back to Munich in order to contemplate the crucial preparation of the bait.
The interrogation of Yanuka was entering its fourth day when Kurtz arrived to take up the reins, and had proceeded till then with unnerving smoothness.
‘You have six days with him maximum,’ Kurtz had warned his two interrogators in Jerusalem. ‘After six days your errors will be permanent, and so will his.’
It was a job after Kurtz’s heart. If he could have been in three places at once rather than merely two, he would have kept it to himself, but he couldn’t, so he chose as his proxies these two heavy-bodied specialists in the soft approach, famous for their muted histrionic talents and a joint air of lugubrious good nature. They were not related, nor, so far as anybody knew, were they lovers, but they had worked in unison for so long that their befriending features gave a sense of duplication, and when Kurtz first summoned them to the house in Disraeli Street, their four hands rested on the table-edge like the paws of two big dogs. At first he had treated them harshly, because he envied them, and was of a mood to regard delegation as defeat. He had given them only an inkling of the operation, then ordered them to study Yanuka’s file and not report to him again until they knew it inside out. When they had returned too quickly for his liking, he had grilled them like an interrogator himself, snapping questions at them about Yanuka’s childhood, his life-style, behaviour patterns, anything to ruffle them. They were word perfect. So grudgingly he had called in his Literacy Committee, consisting of Miss Bach, the writer Leon, and old Schwili, who in the intervening weeks had pooled their eccentricities and turned themselves into a neatly interlocking team. Kurtz’s briefing on that occasion was a classic of the art of unclarity.
‘Miss Bach here has the supervision, holds all the strings,’ he had begun, by way of introducing the new boys. After thirty-five years of it, his Hebrew was still famously awful. ‘Miss Bach monitors the raw material as it comes down to her. She makes up the bulletins for transmission to the field. She supplies Leon here with his guidelines. She checks out his compositions, makes sure they fit the overall game-plan for the correspondence.’ If the interrogators had known a little before, they knew less now. But they had kept their mouths shut. ‘Once Miss Bach has approved a composition, she calls a conference with Leon here and Mr Schwili jointly.’ It had been a hundred years since anyone had called Schwili ‘Mister’. ‘At this conference are agreed the stationery, are agreed the inks, pens, the emotional and physical condition of the writer inside the terms of the fiction. Is he or she high or low? Is he or she angry? With each projected item, the team considers the entire fiction in all its aspects.’ Gradually, despite their new chief’s determination to imply his information rather than impart it, the interrogators had begun to discern the outlines of the plan they were now part of. ‘Maybe Miss Bach will also have on record an original sample of handwriting – letter, postcard, diary – that can serve as a model. Maybe she won’t.’ Kurtz’s right forearm had batted either possibility across the desk at them. ‘When all these procedures have been observed, and only then, Mr Schwili forges. Beautifully. Mr Schwili is not merely a forger, he is an artist,’ he had warned – and they had better remember it. ‘His work complete, Mr Schwili hands it straight back to Miss Bach. For further checking, for fingerprinting, for docketing, for storage. Questions?’
Smiling their meek smile, the interrogators had assured him they had none.
‘Start at the end,’ Kurtz barked after them as they trooped out. ‘You can go back to the beginning later if there’s time.’
Other meetings had been taken up with the more tricky issue of how best to persuade Yanuka to fall in with their plans at such short notice. Once again, Misha Gavron’s beloved psychologists were called in, peremptorily listened to, and shown the door. A lecture on hallucinatory and disintegrating drugs fared better, and there was a hasty hunt around for other interrogators who had used them with success. Thus to the long-term planning was added, as ever, an atmosphere of last-minute improvisation that Kurtz and all of them loved. Their orders agreed, Kurtz dispatched the interrogators to Munich ahead of time to set up their lighting and sound effects and rehe
arse the guards in their rôle. They arrived looking like a two-piece band, with heavy luggage clad in dimpled metal, and suits like Satchmo’s. Schwili’s committee followed a couple of days later and settled themselves discreetly into the lower apartment, giving themselves out as professional stamp dealers here for the big auction in the city. The neighbours found no fault with this story. Jews, they told each other, but who cares these days? Jews had been normalised long ago. And of course they would be dealers, what else did one expect? For company, apart from Miss Bach’s portable memory-storage system, they had tape-recorders, earphones, crates of tinned food, and a thin boy called ‘Samuel the pianist’ to man the little teleprinter that was linked to Kurtz’s own command set. Samuel wore a very large Colt revolver in a special pocket of his quilted kapok waistcoat, and when he transmitted they heard it knocking against the desk, but he never took it off. He was of the same quiet cast as David of the Athens house; in manner, he could have been his twin.
The allocation of rooms was Miss Bach’s responsibility. To Leon, on account of its quietness, she assigned the child’s room. On its walls, dew-eyed deer peacefully cropped giant daisies. To Samuel went the kitchen with its natural access to the rear courtyard, where he rigged up his aerial and hung babies’ socks from it. But when Schwili caught sight of the bedroom set aside for his own use – office and sleep space combined – he let out a spontaneous wail of woe.
‘My light! Dear God, look at my light! A man could not forge a letter to his own grandmother in such a light!’
With Leon, full of nervous creativity, reeling before this unexpected storm, the practical Miss Bach spotted the problem immediately: Schwili needed more daylight for his work – but also, after his long incarceration, for his soul. In a trice she had phoned upstairs, the Argentinian boys appeared, furniture was whisked around like playblocks under her direction, and Schwili’s desk was repositioned in the living-room window bay, with a view of green leaves and sky. Miss Bach herself tacked up an extra thickness of net curtain for his privacy and ordered Leon to make an extension for his posh Italian lamp. Then, on Miss Bach’s nod, they quietly left him, though Leon watched him covertly from his door.
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