The Little Drummer Girl

by John le Carré

  The boys eyed him respectfully. He felt them counting his medal ribbons in their hungry minds, and probably they knew his feats of heroism better than he did himself.

  ‘She’s looking good, Gadi,’ said the bolder of the two.

  Becker ignored him. Sometimes he sidelined a paragraph, sometimes he underlined a date. When he had finished, he handed the papers to the boys, and made them test him until he was satisfied that he knew his lines.

  Outside the minibus again, he paused at the window despite himself and heard their cheerful voices discussing him.

  ‘The Rook got him a whole directorship to himself, running some great new textile factory near Haifa,’ said the bold one.

  ‘Great,’ said the other. ‘So let’s retire and let Gavron make us millionaires.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  For his forbidden but vital reunion with the good Dr Alexis that same night, Kurtz had donned an attitude of collegial affinity between professionals, coloured by ancient friendship. They met, at Kurtz’s suggestion, not in Wiesbaden but down the road in Frankfurt, where the crowds are thicker and more itinerant, at a large and dowdy conference hotel which was that week playing host to disciples of the soft-toy industry. Alexis had proposed his house, but Kurtz had declined with an innuendo Alexis was not slow to sense. It was ten at night when they met and most of the delegates were already out on the town in search of other varieties of soft toy. The bar was three-quarters empty and, to look at, they were just two more traders solving the world’s problems over a bowl of plastic flowers. Which, in a manner of speaking, they were. Canned music played, but the barman was listening to a Bach recital on his transistor.

  In the time since they had first met, the imp in Alexis seemed finally to have gone to sleep. The first faint shadows of failure lay on him like the advance notice of an illness, and his television smile had a new and unbecoming modesty. Kurtz, who was preparing himself for the kill, confirmed this gratefully at a glance – Alexis, less gratefully, each morning, when in the privacy of his bathroom he pushed back the skin around his eyes and briefly restored the last of his ebbing youthfulness. Kurtz brought greetings from Jerusalem and, as a token, a small bottle of clouded water certified by the label to have been taken from the true Jordan. He had heard that the new Mrs Alexis was expecting a baby, and suggested the water might eventually come in handy. This gesture touched Alexis, and amused him somewhat more than the occasion of it.

  ‘But you knew about it before I did,’ he protested when he had gazed at the bottle in polite marvel. ‘I haven’t even told my office yet.’ Which was true: his silence had been a kind of last-ditch effort at preventing the conception.

  ‘Tell them when it’s over and apologise,’ Kurtz suggested, not without meaning. Quietly, as became people who make no ceremony, they drank to life, and to a better future for the Doctor’s unborn child.

  ‘They tell me you are a coordinator these days,’ said Kurtz, with a twinkle in his eye.

  ‘To all coordinators,’ Alexis replied gravely, and once again each took a token sip. They agreed to call each other by their first names, but Kurtz nevertheless retained the formal style of Sie, rather than du. He did not want his ascendancy over Alexis undermined.

  ‘May I ask what you coordinate, Paul?’ asked Kurtz.

  ‘Herr Schulmann, I must advise you that liaison with friendly services is no longer included among my official duties,’ Alexis intoned in deliberate parody of the Bonn syntax; and waited for Kurtz to press him further.

  But instead Kurtz ventured a guess, which was not a guess at all. ‘A coordinator has administrative responsibility for such vital matters as transport, training, recruitment, and the financial accountability of operational sections. Also for the exchange of intelligence between federal and state agencies.’

  ‘You have left out official leave,’ Alexis objected, as much amused as he was horrified, once more, by the quality of Kurtz’s information. ‘You want more leave, come to Wiesbaden, I give you some. We’ve got a very high-powered committee just for official leave.’

  Kurtz promised that he would do this – it really was high time he gave himself a break, he confessed. The hint of overwork reminded Alexis of his own days in the field, and he digressed in order to relate a case in which he had not slept – but literally, Marty, not even lain down – for three successive nights. Kurtz heard him out with respectful sympathy. Kurtz was an excellent listener, a breed Alexis met with all too rarely in Wiesbaden.

  ‘You know something, Paul,’ Kurtz said when they had batted back and forth a while in this agreeable way. ‘I was a coordinator once myself. My supervisor decided I had been a naughty boy’ – Kurtz pulled an accomplice’s rueful grin – ‘so he made me a coordinator. I got so bored that after one month I wrote to General Gavron and I told him officially he was a bum. “General, this is official. Marty Schulmann says you are a bum.” He sent for me. You have met this Gavron? No? He’s small and shrivelled with a big mop of black hair. No peace in him. No rest. “Schulmann,” he yells at me. “What the hell is this, one month and calling me a bum? How did you find out my dark secret?” A cracked voice, like someone dropped him when he was a kid. “General,” I say. “If you had one ounce of self-respect, you would reduce me to the ranks and throw me back into my old unit where I cannot insult you to your face.” You know what Misha did? He threw me out, then he promoted me. That’s how I got my unit back.’

  This story was the more amusing since it reminded Alexis of his own vanished days as a well-publicised maverick among the stuffed shirts of the Bonn hierarchy. So that it was the most natural thing on earth that the conversation should pass to the matter of the Bad Godesberg outrage, which after all had been the occasion of their getting to know each other.

  ‘I heard they’re making a little progress at last,’ Kurtz remarked. ‘Tracing the girl back to Paris Orly, that’s quite a breakthrough, even if they still don’t know who she is.’

  Alexis was not a little irritated to hear this careless praise from the lips of someone he so admired and respected. ‘You call that a breakthrough? Yesterday I got their most up-todate analysis. Some girl flies Orly–Cologne on the day of the bombing. They think. She’s wearing jeans. They think. Headscarf, good figure, maybe she’s a blonde, so what? The French can’t even trace her embarkation. Or say they can’t.’

  ‘Maybe that’s because she didn’t embark for Cologne, Paul,’ Kurtz suggested.

  ‘How does she fly to Cologne when she doesn’t embark for Cologne?’ Alexis objected, slightly missing the point. ‘Those cretins couldn’t trace an elephant through a heap of cocoa.’

  The neighbouring tables were still empty, and what with Bach on the transistor and Oklahoma over the loudspeakers, there was enough music to drown several heresies at once.

  ‘Suppose she takes a ticket for somewhere else,’ said Kurtz patiently. ‘Say, Madrid. She embarks at Orly but takes a ticket to Madrid.’

  Alexis accepted the hypothesis.

  ‘She takes a ticket Orly–Madrid, and when she gets to Orly she checks in for Madrid. She goes to the departure lounge with her Madrid boarding-card, picks a certain place to wait; waits. Like close to a certain departure gate, why not? Say, departure gate eighteen, which is where she waited. Somebody comes up to her, a girl, speaks the agreed words, they go to the ladies’ room, switch tickets. Nicely organised. A really nice arrangement. They switch passports too. With girls, that’s no problem. Make-up – wigs – Paul, when you dig down, all pretty girls are the same.’

  The truth of this aphorism pleased Alexis very much, for he had recently come to the same gloomy conclusion regarding his second marriage. But he did not dwell on it, for he sensed already the imminence of serious information, and the policeman in him was alive again. ‘And when she gets to Bonn?’ he asked, lighting himself a cigarette.

  ‘She arrives on a Belgian passport. A nice fake, one of a batch made in East Germany. She’s met at the airport by a bearded boy on a stolen
motorbike with false plates. Tall, young, bearded: that’s all the girl knows, it’s all anyone knows, because these are good people in the matter of security. A beard? What’s a beard? Also he never removed his helmet. In security, these people are way above the average.

  Outstanding, even. I would say outstanding.’

  Alexis said he had noticed this already.

  ‘The boy’s job in this operation is to play cut-out,’ Kurtz continued. ‘That’s all he does. He breaks the circuit. He meets the girl, he makes sure she isn’t being followed, he drives her around a little, takes her to the safe house for briefing.’ He paused. ‘There’s a stockbroker farm near Mehlem, calls itself the Haus Sommer. A converted barn sits at the end of the south drive. This drive feeds straight on to a slip-road to the autobahn. Under the sleeping accommodation is a garage and in the garage waits an Opel, Siegburg registration, driver already aboard.’

  This time, to his bemused delight, Alexis was able to join in. ‘Achmann,’ he said, below his breath. ‘The publicist Achmann from Düsseldorf! Are we mad? Why did nobody think of this man?’

  ‘Achmann is correct,’ said Kurtz approvingly to his pupil. ‘Haus Sommer is the property of Dr Achmann of Düsseldorf, whose distinguished family owns a flourishing timber business, some magazines, and a fine string of pornography shops. As a sideline, he also publishes romantic calendars of the German landscape. The converted barn belongs to Dr Achmann’s daughter Inge, and has been the scene of many fringe conferences attended mostly by wealthy and disenchanted explorers of the human soul. At the time in question, Inge had lent the house to a friend in need, a boyfriend who had a girlfriend . . .’

  ‘Ad infinitum,’ Alexis completed for him admiringly.

  ‘Clear away the smoke, you find more smoke. The fire is always down the road a little. That is the way these people work. That is how they always worked.’

  From caves in the Jordan Valley, thought Alexis excitedly. With a skein of surplus wire wound into a dummy. With bikini bombs you can make in your own back yard.

  As Kurtz spoke, the face and figure of Alexis underwent a mysterious easing, which had not escaped his notice. The lines of worry and human weakness that so distressed him had been brushed away. He sat well back; he had folded his small arms comfortably across his chest, a rejuvenating smile had settled on his face, and his sandy head had tilted forward in harmonious submission to the great performance of his mentor.

  ‘May I ask what basis you have for these interesting theories?’ Alexis enquired, with an unconvincing stab at scepticism.

  Kurtz made a show of pondering, though Yanuka’s information was as fresh in his mind as if he were still sitting with him back in Munich in his padded cell, holding his head while he coughed and wept. ‘Well now, Paul, we have both licence numbers of the Opel, and we have a photocopy of the car-hire contract, and we have a signed deposition from one of the participants,’ he confessed, and – in the modest hope that these meagre clues might decently pass as a basis for the time being – proceeded with his tale.

  ‘The bearded boy, he leaves her at the barn, departs, never to be seen again. The girl, she changes into her neat blue dress, puts on her wig, gets herself up really nicely, in a manner calculated to please the somewhat gullible and over-affectionate Labour Attaché. She gets into the Opel and is driven to the target house by a second young man. On the way, they pause to prime the bomb. Please?’

  ‘This boy,’ Alexis asked eagerly. ‘Does she know him, or is he a mystery to her?’

  Declining absolutely to elaborate further upon Yanuka’s rôle, Kurtz left the question unanswered and merely smiled, yet his evasion was not offensive; for Alexis was by now straining for every detail, and could not expect to have his plate filled every time. Nor was it desirable that he should.

  ‘The mission accomplished, the same driver changes over the number plates and papers and takes the girl to the handsome little Rhineland spa of Bad Neuenahr, where he drops her,’ Kurtz resumed.

  ‘And then?’

  Kurtz became very slow spoken, as if each word were now a danger to his complex plan; as indeed it was. ‘And there – at a guess – I would say that the girl is introduced to a certain secret admirer of hers – someone who maybe coached her a little in her part that day. Say, in how to arm the bomb. How to set the timer. Rig the booby trap. At a guess, I would say that this same admirer had already rented a hotel room somewhere, and that under the stimulus of their shared achievement, the couple engaged in much passionate lovemaking. Next morning, while they’re sleeping off their pleasures, the bomb goes off – later than intended, but who cares?’

  Alexis leaned swiftly forward, almost accusing in his excitement. ‘And the brother, Marty? The great fighter who has killed so many Israelis already? Where was he all this while? In Bad Neuenahr, I think, having a bit of fun with his little bomber girl. Yes?’

  But Kurtz’s features had set into a rigid impassivity, which the good Doctor’s enthusiasm seemed only to intensify.

  ‘Wherever he is, he runs an efficient operation, nicely compartmented, nicely delegated, everything well researched,’ Kurtz replied, with seeming contentment. ‘The bearded boy, he had the girl’s description, nothing more. Not even the target. The girl knew the number of his motorbike. The driver, he knew the target but not the bearded boy. There’s a brain at work.’

  After which Kurtz appeared to be afflicted by a seraphic deafness; so that Alexis, after further fruitless questioning, felt the need to order up fresh whiskies. The truth was the good Doctor was experiencing a shortage of oxygen. It was as if his life till now had been spent at a lower level of existence, and latterly at a very low level indeed. Now suddenly the great Schulmann was wafting him to heights he had not dreamed of.

  ‘And you are here in Germany to pass this information to your official German colleagues, I suppose,’ Alexis remarked provocatively.

  But Kurtz replied only with a long and speculative silence, during which he seemed to be testing Alexis with his eyes and thoughts. Then he made that gesture which Alexis so admired, of pushing back his sleeve and raising his wrist to contemplate his watch. And it reminded Alexis yet again that while his own time was ebbing wearily away before his eyes, for Kurtz there was never enough of it.

  ‘Cologne will be very grateful to you, you may be sure,’ Alexis pressed. ‘My excellent successor – you remember him, Marty? – he will score an immense personal triumph. With the assistance of the media, he will become the most brilliant and popular policeman in West Germany. Quite rightly, yes? And all thanks to you.’

  Kurtz’s broad smile conceded that this was so. He took a tiny sip of his whisky, and wiped his lips with an old khaki handkerchief. Then he put his chin into the cup of his hand and sighed, implying that he hadn’t really meant to say this, but since Alexis had brought it up, he would.

  ‘Well now, Jerusalem gave quite a lot of thought to this question, Paul,’ he confessed, ‘and we’re not quite as sure as you seem to be that your successor is the type of gentleman whose progress in life we are over-enthusiastic to advance.’ So what could one do about that? his frown seemed to ask. ‘It occurred to us, however, that there was an alternative available to us, and maybe we should explore that a little with you and test your response to it. Maybe, we said to ourselves, there are ways in which the good Dr Alexis could pass our information to Cologne on our behalf ? Privately. Unofficially yet officially, if you take my meaning. On a basis of his own personal enterprise and wise stewardship. This is a question we have been putting to ourselves. Maybe we could go to Paul, and we could say to him: “Paul, you are a friend of Israel. Take this. Use it. Profit from it. Have it as our gift and keep us out of it.” Why always promote a wrong man in these cases? we asked ourselves. Why not the right one, for once? Why not deal with friends, which is our principle? Advance them? Reward them for their loyalty to us?’

  Alexis affected not to understand. He had gone rather red, and there was a slightly hysterical note
to his denials. ‘But, Marty, listen to me, I have no sources! I am not operational, I am a bureaucrat! Shall I pick up the telephone – “Cologne, here is Alexis, I advise you, go immediately to Haus Sommer, arrest the Achmann daughter, pull in all her friends for questioning”? Am I a conjurer – an alchemist – that I make such wonderful pieces of information out of stones? What are they thinking about in Jerusalem – that a coordinator is suddenly a magic man?’ His self-ridicule became cumbersome, and increasingly unreal. ‘Shall I demand the arrest of all bearded motorcyclists who are possibly Italian? They will laugh at me!’

  He had dried up, so Kurtz helped him out, which was what Alexis wanted, for he was in the mood of a child who is criticising authority only in order to be reassured of its embrace.

  ‘Nobody is looking for arrests, Paul. Not yet. Not on our side of the house. Nobody is looking for anything overt at all, least of all in Jerusalem.’

  ‘Then what are you looking for?’ Alexis demanded, with sudden snappishness.

  ‘Justice,’ said Kurtz kindly. But his straight, unflinching smile was transmitting another kind of message. ‘Justice, a little patience, a little nerve, a lot of creativity, a lot of inventiveness from whoever plays our game for us. Let me ask you something, Paul.’ His big head drew suddenly much closer. His powerful hand settled on the Doctor’s forearm. ‘Suppose, now. Suppose a very anonymous and exceptionally secret informant – I see a high Arab here, Paul, an Arab of the moderate centre, who likes Germany, admires her, and possesses information regarding certain terror operations which he disapproves of – suppose such a man had seen the great Alexis on television a while back. Suppose, for instance, that he was sitting in his hotel room one night in Bonn, say –Düsseldorf, wherever he was sitting – and he happened to turn the switch of his television set for a distraction, and there was the fine Dr Alexis, a lawyer, a policeman, sure; but a man of humour also, flexible, pragmatic, a humanist to his fingertips – in short, a lot of man – yes?’