The Little Drummer Girl

by John le Carré

  Next time, the two Swiss returned without the guards but looking very grave indeed, and bringing with them Yanuka’s diary as if, small though it might be, it somehow changed things completely. They also had with them his two spare passports, one French, one Cypriot, which had been found hidden under the floorboards in his flat, and the Lebanese passport on which he had been travelling at the time of his kidnapping.

  Then they explained their problem. Laboriously. But with an ominous manner that was new to them – not threatening but warning. At the request of the Israelis, the West German authorities had made a search of his apartment in central Munich, they said. They had found this diary and these passports and a quantity of other clues to his movements over the last few months, which they were now determined to investigate ‘with full vigour’. In their representations to the governor, the Swiss had insisted that such a proposal was neither legal nor necessary. Let the Red Cross place the documents before the prisoner, they suggested, and obtain his explanation for the entries. Let the Red Cross, in decency, invite him, rather than force him, as a first step, to prepare a statement – if the governor wished, a written one, in the prisoner’s own hand – of his whereabouts during the last six months, with dates, places, whom he had met, where he had stayed, and on what papers he had travelled. If military honour dictated reticence, they said, then let the prisoner honestly indicate this at the appropriate points. Where it did not – well, at least it would buy time while their representations continued.

  Here they ventured to offer Yanuka – or Salim as they now called him – some private advice of their own. Above all, be accurate, they implored him as they set up a folding table for him, gave him a blanket, and unchained his hands. Tell them nothing you wish to keep secret, but make absolutely certain that what you do tell them is the truth. Remember that we have our reputation to maintain. Think of those like yourself who may come after you. For their sakes, if not for ours, do your best. The way they said this suggested somehow that Yanuka was already halfway to martyrdom. Quite why seemed not to matter; the only truth he knew by then was the terror in his own soul.

  It was thin, as they had always known it would be. And there was a moment, a rather long one, in which they feared they had lost him. It took the form of a straight, unclouded stare at each of them as Yanuka seemed to shake aside the curtains of delusion and look out clearly at his oppressors. But clarity had never been the basis of their relationship and it wasn’t now. As Yanuka accepted the proffered pen, they read in his eyes the unmistakable supplication that they should continue to deceive him.

  It was on the day following these dramas – around lunchtime in the normal scheme of things – that Kurtz arrived directly from Athens, in order to inspect Schwili’s handiwork, and to give his own personal approval for the diary, passports, and receipts, with certain ingenious embellishments, to be put back where they legally belonged.

  To Kurtz himself went also the task of going back to the beginning. But first, seated comfortably in the downstairs apartment, he called in everyone except the guards and let them brief him, in their own style and at their own pace, on the progress so far. Wearing white cotton gloves, and looking none the worse for his all-night interrogation of Charlie, he examined their exhibits, listened appreciatively to tape-recordings of crucial moments, and watched with admiration as Miss Bach’s desk computer printed out one day after another of Yanuka’s recent life in green type on its television screen: dates, flight numbers, arrival times, hotels. Then he watched again while the screen cleared and Miss Bach superimposed the fiction: ‘Writes Charlie from City Hotel, Zürich, letter posted on arrival de Gaulle Airport eighteen-twenty hours . . . meets Charlie Excelsior Hotel, Heathrow . . . phones Charlie from Munich railway station . . .’ And with each insertion, the collateral: which receipts and diary entries referred to which encounter; where deliberate gaps and obscurities had been introduced, because in the reconstruction nothing should ever be too easy or too clear.

  When Kurtz had done all this – it was by then evening – he took off the gloves, changed into plain Israeli Army uniform with a colonel’s badges and a few grimy campaign ribbons above the left pocket, and generally reduced his external self until he was the epitome of any military remittance man turned prison officer. Then he went upstairs and tiptoed spryly to the observation window, where for some time he watched Yanuka very closely. Then he sent Oded and his companion downstairs with orders that he and Yanuka should be left with their privacy. Speaking Arabic in a grey, bureaucratic voice, Kurtz began asking Yanuka a few simple, dull questions, tiny things: where a certain fuse came from, or explosive, or a car; or the exact spot, say, where Yanuka and the girl had met up before she planted the Godesberg bomb. Kurtz’s detailed knowledge, so casually displayed, was terrifying to Yanuka, whose reaction was to shout at him and order him to keep quiet for reasons of security. Kurtz was puzzled by this.

  ‘But why should I keep quiet?’ he protested, with the glazed stupidity which comes over people who have spent too long in prison, whether as guards or inmates. ‘If your great brother won’t keep quiet, what secrets are there left for me to preserve?’

  He asked this question not as a revelation at all, but as the logical outcome to a piece of common knowledge. While Yanuka was still staring wildly at him, Kurtz told him a few more things about himself that only his big brother could have known. There was nothing magical about this. After weeks of sifting through the boy’s daily life, monitoring his phone calls and his correspondence – not to mention his dossier in Jerusalem from two years back – it was no wonder if Kurtz and his team were as familiar as Yanuka himself was with such minutiae as the safe addresses where his letters went to earth; the ingenious one-way system by which his orders were handed to him; and the point at which Yanuka, like themselves, was cut off from his own command structure. What distinguished Kurtz from his predecessors was the evident indifference with which he referred to these items, and his indifference also to Yanuka’s reaction.

  ‘Where is he?’ Yanuka began screaming. ‘What have you done with him? My brother does not talk! He would never talk! How did you capture him?’

  The deal was done in moments. Downstairs, as they crowded round the loudspeaker, a kind of awe settled over the whole room as they heard Kurtz, within three hours of his arrival, sweep away Yanuka’s last defences. As governor, my job is limited to matters of administration, he explained. Your brother is in a hospital cell downstairs, he is a little tired; naturally one hopes he will live but it will be some months before he can walk. When you have answered the following questions, I shall sign an order permitting you to share his accommodation and nurse him to recovery. If you refuse, you stay where you are. Then, to avoid any mistaken notions of chicanery, Kurtz produced for Yanuka the Polaroid colour photograph they had rigged, showing the barely recognisable face of Yanuka’s brother peering out of a bloodstained prison blanket as the two guards carried him away from his interrogation.

  But there again the genius of Kurtz was never static. When Yanuka really started talking, Kurtz immediately grew a heart to match the poor boy’s passion; suddenly the old jailer needed to hear everything that the great fighter had ever said to his apprentice. By the time Kurtz returned downstairs, therefore, the team had really obtained pretty well everything from Yanuka that was obtainable – which amounted to nothing at all, as Kurtz was quick to point out, when it came to establishing his big brother’s whereabouts. In the margin, it was further noted that the old interrogator’s adage was borne out once again: namely, that physical violence is contrary to the ethics and spirit of the profession. Kurtz stressed this vehemently to Oded in particular. He made really heavy weather of it. If you have to use violence, and sometimes you couldn’t do much else, always be sure to use it against the mind, not the body, he said. Kurtz believed there were lessons everywhere if the young would only have the eyes to see them.

  He made the same point to Gavron also, but to less effect.

 
Yet even then Kurtz would not, perhaps could not, rest. By early next morning, with the matter of Yanuka now dispatched in all but its final resolution, Kurtz was back in the city centre, consoling the surveillance team, whose spirits had recently plummeted with Yanuka’s disappearance. What had become of him? cried old Lenny – such a future the boy had, such promise in so many fields! From there again, his mission of mercy accomplished, Kurtz set off northward for yet another tryst with Alexis, quite undaunted by the fact that the good Doctor’s allegedly erratic nature had caused Misha Gavron to place him out of bounds.

  ‘I’ll tell him I’m American,’ he promised Litvak, with a broad smile, recalling Gavron’s fatuous telegram to the Athens house.

  His mood nevertheless was one of guarded optimism. We are moving, he told Litvak; and Misha only hits me when I’m sitting still.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The taverna was rougher than those on Mykonos, with a black-and-white television fluttering like a flag nobody saluted, and old hillsmen too proud to take an interest in tourists, even pretty red-headed English girls in blue kaftans and gold bracelets. But in the story Joseph now related, it was Charlie and Michel who were dining alone in the grillroom of a roadhouse outside Nottingham that Michel had bribed to stay open. Charlie’s own pathetic car, as usual, was off the road at her latest pet garage in Camden. But Michel had a Mercedes saloon, he liked no other make so well; he had it waiting at the back entrance of the theatre and whisked her off in it immediately, ten minutes through the eternal Nottingham rain. And no passing tantrum of Charlie’s, whether here or there, no momentary doubts, could arrest the pull of Joseph’s narrative.

  ‘He wears driving gloves,’ Joseph said. ‘They are a fad with him. You notice it but do not remark on it.’

  With holes in the back, she thought. ‘How does he drive?’

  ‘He is not a natural driver but you do not hold this against him. You ask him where he lives and he replies that he has driven up from London in order to see you. You ask him what his occupation is and he says, “Student.” You ask him where he studies; he replies, “Europe,” implying somehow that Europe is a bad word. When you press him, not too hard, he says he takes semesters in different cities, depending on his mood and who is lecturing. The English, he says, do not understand the system. When he speaks the word “English”, it sounds hostile to you, you don’t know why, but hostile. Your next question?’

  ‘Where’s he living now?’

  ‘He is evasive. Like me. Sometimes Rome, he says vaguely, sometimes Munich, Paris a little, wherever he decides. Vienna. He does not say he lives in a box, but he makes it clear that he is unmarried, which does not totally dismay you.’ He smiled and took back his hand. ‘You ask which city he likes best, he dismisses the question as irrelevant; you ask what subject he is studying, he replies, “Freedom”; you ask him where home is, and he replies that his home is presently under enemy occupation. Your response to this?’

  ‘Confusion.’

  ‘However, with your customary persistence you again press him and he speaks the name Palestine. With passion. You hear it at once in his voice – Palestine, like a challenge. Like a war-cry – Palestine.’ His eyes were so fixedly upon her that she had to give a nervous smile and look away. ‘I may remind you, Charlie, that though you are heavily involved with Alastair at this period, he is presently safely in Argyll making a commercial for some totally valueless consumer product, and you happen to know he is keeping company with his leading lady. Correct?’

  ‘Correct,’ she said, and to her astonishment found that she was blushing.

  ‘So now you must tell me, please, what Palestine, spoken in this way by this eager boy, means to you in a roadhouse in Nottingham on a rainy night. Let us say he asks you this himself. Yes. He asks you. Why not?’

  Oh glory, she thought, how many sides to a threepenny bit? ‘I admire them,’ she said.

  ‘Call me Michel, please.’

  ‘I admire them, Michel.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Their suffering.’ She felt a bit of a fool. ‘For hanging on.’

  ‘Nonsense. We Palestinians are a bunch of uneducated terrorists, who should have reconciled ourselves long ago to the loss of our homeland. We are nothing but former shoe-shine boys and street vendors, delinquent children with machine guns in our hands, and old men who refuse to forget. So who are we then, please? Tell me your opinion. I shall value it. I am still calling you Joan, remember.’

  She took a deep breath. Not for nothing, after all, my weekend sessions at the forum. ‘All right. Here it is. The Palestinians – you – are gentle, decent farming people of great tradition, unfairly driven from your land, from 1948 onwards, in order to appease Zionism – and make way for a Western foothold in Arabia.’

  ‘Your words do not displease me. Kindly continue.’

  It was wonderful to discover how much came back to her under his perverse prompting. Snatches of forgotten pamphlets, lovers’ lectures, the harangues of freedom fighters, bits of half-read books – all rallied to her like faithful allies in her need. ‘You’re the invention of a European guilt complex about the Jews . . . you’ve been forced to pay the penalty for a Holocaust you had no part in . . . you’re the victims of a racist, anti-Arab imperialist policy of dispossession and banishment –’

  ‘And murder,’ Joseph suggested quietly.

  ‘And murder.’ Faltering again, she caught the stranger’s gaze fixed steadily upon her and, as at Mykonos, she had suddenly no idea what she read there. ‘Anyway, that’s who Palestinians are,’ she said lightly. ‘Since you enquire. Since you do,’ she added when he still said nothing.

  She went on looking at him, waiting for the lead that would tell her what to be. Under the compulsion of his presence, she had consigned her convictions to the dross of an earlier existence. She wanted none of them, unless he did.

  ‘Notice he has no small talk,’ Joseph ordered, as if they had never smiled at each other in their lives. ‘How quickly he has appealed to the serious side of you. He is also in certain ways meticulous. For example, tonight he has prepared everything – the food, the wine, the candles, even his conversation. We may say that with Israeli-style efficiency, he has mounted a complete campaign to capture his Joan single-handed.’

  ‘Disgraceful,’ she said gravely, studying her bracelet.

  ‘Meanwhile he tells you that you are the most brilliant actress on earth, which once again, I take it, does not incurably dismay you. He persists in confusing you with Saint Joan, but by now you are no longer quite so upset that life and theatre are inseparable for him. Saint Joan, he tells you, has been his heroine ever since he first read about her. She was a woman, yet she successfully aroused the class awareness of the French peasantry and led them in battle against the British imperialist oppressors. She was a true revolutionary, who lit the flame of freedom for the exploited peoples of the world. She turned slaves into heroes. That is the sum of his critical analysis. The voice of God addressing her is no more than her own revolutionary conscience urging her to resist the colonialist. It cannot be the actual voice of God, because Michel has decided God is dead. Perhaps you were not aware of all these implications when you played the part?’

  She was still fiddling with the bracelet. ‘Well, I might have missed out on some of them,’ she admitted carelessly – only to look up and meet head on with his granite disapproval. ‘Oh Christ,’ she said.

  ‘Charlie, I warn you most sincerely never to tease Michel with your Western wit. His sense of humour is capricious, and stops well short of jokes against himself, particularly when made by women.’ A pause for the admonition to sink in. ‘Very well. The food is dreadful, but you are totally indifferent to it. He has ordered steak and does not know that you are going through one of your vegetarian phases. You chew some in order not to offend him. In a later letter you tell him it was the worst steak you ever ate, but also the best. All you can think of while he is talking is his animated, passionate voice and his bea
utiful Arab face across the candle. Yes?’

  She hesitated, then smiled. ‘Yes.’

  ‘He loves you, he loves your talent, he loves Saint Joan. “For the British colonialists she was a criminal,” he tells you. “So were all freedom fighters. So was George Washington, so was Mahatma Gandhi, so was Robin Hood. So are the secret soldiers of the Irish freedom struggle.” These are not exactly new ideas he is expressing, as you appreciate, but in his fervent Oriental voice, so full of – what shall we say, animal naturalness? – they have a hypnotic effect upon you; they give new life to the old clichés, they are like a rediscovery of love. “For the British,” he tells you, “whoever fights the terror of the colonialist is himself a terrorist. The British are my enemies, all but you. The British gave away my country to the Zionists, they shipped the Jews of Europe to us with orders to turn the East into the West. Go and tame the Orient for us, they said. The Palestinians are trash, but they will make good coolies for you! The old British colonisers were tired and defeated, so they handed us over to the new colonisers who had the zeal and the ruthlessness to cut the knot. Don’t worry about the Arabs, the British said to them. We promise to look the other way while you deal with them.” Listen. Are you listening?’

  Jose, when was I not?

  ‘Michel is a prophet to you tonight. Nobody has ever before concentrated the full force of his fanaticism on you alone. His conviction, his commitment, his devotion – they all shine out of him as he speaks. In theory, of course, he is already preaching to the converted, but in reality he is planting the human heart into the ragbag of your vague left-wing principles. That too you tell him in a later letter, whether or not it is logical that a ragbag should acquire a human heart. You want him to lecture you: he does. You want him to play upon your British guilt: he does that too. Your protective cynicism is swept aside completely. You are renewed. How apart he is from your middle-class prejudices, still not eradicated! From your lazily formed Western sympathies! Yes?’ he enquired softly, as if she had asked a question. She shook her head and he was away again, filled with the borrowed fervour of his Arab surrogate.