Do it now, Litvak pleaded. Grab the car and get out with the traffic. Make sense of what you are here for.
He was still not prepared for what they actually did. An elderly couple was standing at the cab rank and, behind them, a demure young girl like a nanny or companion. She wore a brown double-breasted suit and a strict little brown hat with the brim down. Litvak noticed her as he noticed a lot of other people in the concourse – with a trained, clear eye made clearer by the tension. A pretty girl, carrying a small travel bag. The elderly couple hailed a taxi, both together, and the girl stayed close behind them, watching it arrive. The elderly couple clambered in; the girl helped them, handing in their bits and pieces – obviously their daughter. Litvak returned his gaze to the Mercedes, then to the motorbike. If he thought anything about the girl in brown, he assumed she had got into the taxi and driven away with her parents. Naturally. It was not till he gave his attention to the tired group of trippers who were filing along the pavement towards two waiting coaches that, with a leap of sheer pleasure, he realised it was his girl, our girl, the girl from the motorbike: she had done a quick change in the lavatory and fooled him. And, having done so, tagged herself on to the coach party in order to get herself across the square. He was still rejoicing as she unlocked the car door with her own key, tossed in her travel bag, settled herself into the driving seat as chastely as if she were leaving for church, and drove away with the fishtail still glinting inside the exhaust pipe. This touch too delighted him. How obvious! How sensible! Duplicate telegrams, duplicate keys: our leader believes in doubling his chances.
He gave the one-word order and watched the followers discreetly peel away: the two girls in their Porsche; Udi in his big Opel with the Euroflag on the back, stuck there by himself; then Udi’s partner on a much less flashy motorbike than Rossino’s. He stayed at his window and watched the square slowly empty, like the end of a show. The cars departed, the charabancs departed, the pedestrians departed, the lights went down around the station concourse, and he heard a clang as someone closed an iron gate and locked it for the night. Only the two inns had stayed awake.
Finally the codeword he was waiting for crackled over his headset. ‘Ossian’: the car is heading north.
‘So where’s Luigi heading?’ he asked.
‘For Vienna.’
‘Wait,’ Litvak said, and actually took off his headset so that he could think more clearly.
He had an immediate choice to make, and immediate choices were what training was about. To follow both Rossino and the girl was impossible. He lacked the resources. In theory he should follow the explosives, and therefore the girl – yet he still hesitated, for Rossino was elusive and by far the greater catch, whereas the Mercedes was by definition conspicuous, and its destination a near certainty. For a moment longer, Litvak hesitated. The headset crackled but he ignored it while he went on running the logic of the fiction through his mind. The idea of letting Rossino out of his grasp was nearly unbearable to him. Yet Rossino was for certain an important link in the opposition’s chain: and, as Kurtz had repeatedly argued, if the chain did not hold, how could it draw Charlie into its toils? Rossino would return to Vienna satisfied that thus far nothing had been compromised: he was a crucial link, but also a crucial witness. Whereas the girl – the girl was a functionary, a driver of cars, a placer of bombs, the expendable infantry of their great movement. Moreover, Kurtz had vital plans for her future, whereas Rossino’s future could wait.
Litvak replaced the headset. ‘Stay with the car. Let Luigi go.’
His decision taken, Litvak allowed himself a contented smile. He knew the formation exactly. First, Udi riding point on his motorbike, then the blonde girl in the red Mercedes, and, after her, the Opel. And after the Opel again, lying well back from everyone, the two girls in the reserve Porsche, ready to change places with anyone as soon as they were ordered. He rehearsed to himself the static posts that would monitor the Mercedes to the German border. He imagined the kind of cock-and-bull story Alexis would have spun in order to make certain she was let through without complications.
‘Speed?’ Litvak asked, with a glance at his watch.
Udi reports her speed very moderate, came the reply. This lady wants no trouble with the law. She is nervous of her cargo.
And so she should be, thought Litvak approvingly as he removed his headset. If I were that girl, the cargo would scare me stiff.
He walked downstairs, briefcase in hand. He had already paid his bill, but if they had asked him he would have paid it again; he was in love with the whole world. His command car was waiting for him in the hotel car park. With a self-control bred of long experience, Litvak set off in calm pursuit of the convoy. How much would she know? How much time would they have to find out? Take it easy, he thought; first tether the goat. His mind went back to Kurtz and with an ache of pleasure he imagined his ramming, inexhaustible voice heaping praise on him in awful Hebrew. It pleased Litvak very much to think he was bringing Kurtz so plump a sacrifice.
Salzburg had still to hear of summer. A fresh spring air was blowing off the mountains and the Salzach River smelt of the sea. How they arrived there was still half a mystery to her, because she slept so often along the journey. From Graz they had flown to Vienna, but the trip had taken about five seconds, so she must have slept on the plane. In Vienna he had a hire car waiting, a smart BMW. She slept again, and as they entered the city she thought for a moment the car must be on fire, but it was only the evening sun catching the crimson paintwork as she opened her eyes.
‘Anyway, why Salzburg?’ she had asked him.
Because it is one of Michel’s cities, he had replied. Because it is on the way.
‘On the way where to?’ she asked, but once more struck his reserve.
Their hotel had a roofed interior courtyard, with old gilded banisters and potted plants in marble urns. Their suite looked straight down on to the fast brown river, and across it at more domes than are in Heaven. Behind the domes rose a castle with a cable car that switched up and down the hillside.
‘I need to walk,’ she said.
She took a bath and fell asleep in it, and he had to bang on the door to wake her. She dressed and once more he knew the places to show her and the things that would please her most.
‘It’s our last night, isn’t it?’ she said, and this time he didn’t hide behind Michel.
‘Yes, it’s our last night, Charlie; tomorrow we have a visit to make and then you return to London.’
Clutching his arm in both her hands, she wandered with him through narrow streets, and squares that ran into each other like drawing-rooms. They stood outside the house where Mozart was born, and the trippers were like a matinée audience to her, cheerful and unaware.
‘I did well, didn’t I, Jose? I did really well. Say it.’
‘You did excellently,’ he said – but somehow his reservations meant more to her than his praise.
The doll’s-house churches were more beautiful than anything she had imagined, with scrolled golden altars and voluptuous angels and tombs where the dead seemed still to be dreaming of pleasure. A Jew pretending to be a Muslim shows me my Christian heritage, she thought. But when she demanded information of him, the most he would do was buy a glossy guidebook and put the receipt in his wallet.
‘I fear that Michel has not yet had the time to launch himself upon the Baroque period,’ he explained, in his dry way; and yet again she sensed in him the shadows of some unexplained obstruction.
‘Shall we go back now?’ he asked.
She shook her head. Make it last. The evening darkened, the crowds disappeared, choirboy singing issued from unexpected doorways. They sat by the river and listened to the deaf old bells chiming at each other in stubborn competition. They started to walk again and suddenly she was so floppy she needed his arm round her waist just to keep her upright.
‘Food,’ she ordered as he guided her into the lift. ‘Champagne. Music.’
But by the time
he had rung room service she was fast asleep on the bed, and nothing on God’s earth, not even Joseph, was going to wake her.
She lay as she had lain in the sand on Mykonos, her left arm crooked and her face pressed into it; and Becker sat in the armchair watching her. The first weak glow of dawn was appearing through the curtains. He could smell fresh leaves and timber. There had been a rainstorm in the night, so loud and sudden it was like an express train crashing up the valley. From the window he had watched the city rock under the long slow onslaughts of its lightning, and the rain dancing on the glistening domes. But Charlie had lain so still he had actually stooped over her and put his ear to her mouth to make sure she was breathing.
He glanced at his watch. Plan, he thought. Move. Let action kill the doubt. The dinner-table with its uneaten food stood in the window bay, the ice bucket with its unopened bottle of champagne. Taking each fork in turn, he began scooping the lobster meat from its shell, dirtying plates, mixing up the salad, spoiling the strawberries, adding one last fiction to the many they had already lived: their gala banquet in Salzburg; Charlie and Michel celebrate the successful completion of her first mission for the revolution. He took the champagne bottle to the bathroom, and closed the door in case the pop of the cork should wake her. He poured the champagne down the basin and ran water after it; he flushed the lobster meat and strawberries and salad down the lavatory and had to wait and flush again because they wouldn’t disappear the first time. He left enough champagne to pour a little into his own glass, and for Charlie’s glass he took lipstick from her bag and drew traces round the brim before adding the dregs from the bottle. Then he went to the window again, where he had spent much of the night, and gazed at the rain-soaked blue hills. I am a climber weary of the mountains, he thought.
He shaved, he put on his red blazer. He went to the bed, stretched out his hand to wake her, and drew it back. A reluctance, like a heavy tiredness, descended over him. He sat down in the armchair again, his eyes closed, he forced them open; he woke with a jolt, feeling the weight of the desert dew clinging to his battledress, smelling the scent of damp sand before the sun had burned it dry.
‘Charlie?’ He again reached out, this time to touch her cheek, then touched her arm instead. Charlie, it’s a triumph; Marty says you are a star, and that you have presented him with a whole new cast of characters. He called his Gadi in the night but you didn’t wake. Better than Garbo, he says. There is nothing we can’t achieve together, he says. Charlie, wake up. We have work to do. Charlie.
But aloud he merely said her name again, then went downstairs, paid the bill, and obtained the last receipt. He walked out the back of the hotel to collect the hired BMW, and the dawn was the way the dusk had been, fresh and not yet summer.
‘You’re to wave me off, then appear to take a walk,’ he told her. ‘Dimitri will bring you separately to Munich.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
She entered the lift without speaking. It smelt of disinfectant and the graffiti were scratched deep into the grey vinyl. She had shoved the toughness in her to the front, the way she did at demos and talk-ins and all the other junkets. She was excited and she felt a sense of impending completion. Dimitri pressed the bell, Kurtz himself opened the door. Behind him stood Joseph, and behind Joseph hung a brass shield with a beaten image of Saint Christopher dandling a child.
‘Charlie, this is truly great, and you are great,’ said Kurtz, with a soft, heartfelt urgency, and clutched her intensely to his chest. ‘Charlie, incredible.’
‘Where is he?’ she said, looking past Joseph at the closed door. Dimitri had not come in. Having delivered her, he had taken the lift down again.
Still speaking as if they were in church together, Kurtz chose to treat her question as a general one. ‘Charlie, he is just fine,’ he assured her as he released her. ‘A little tired from his travels, which is natural, but fine. Dark glasses, Joseph,’ he added. ‘Give her dark glasses. Do you have dark glasses, dear? Here’s a headscarf to hide that lovely hair. Keep it.’ It was of green silk, a rather nice one. Kurtz had it ready for her in his pocket. Crammed close together, the two men looked on while she made a nurse’s head-dress for herself in the mirror.
‘Just a precaution,’ Kurtz explained. ‘In this business, we can never be too careful. That correct, Joseph?’
From her handbag, Charlie had taken out her new powder compact and was straightening her make-up.
‘Charlie, this could be a little emotional,’ Kurtz warned.
She put away the compact and took out her lipstick.
‘If you get seasick, just remember he killed a lot of innocent human beings,’ Kurtz advised her. ‘Everybody has a human face and this boy is no exception. A lot of good looks, lot of talent, a lot of unused capacity – all wasted. That’s never very nice at all to see. Once we get in there, I don’t want you speaking. Remember that. Leave all the speaking to me.’ He opened the door for them. ‘You’ll find him docile. We had to have him docile while we shipped him and we have to keep him that way while he’s here with us. Otherwise he’s in good shape. No problems. Just don’t speak to him.’
Trendy split-level duplex gone to seed, she recorded automatically, noting the tasteful open-tread staircase, the rustic minstrel gallery and the handcrafted iron balustrade. One English-style fireplace with mock coals in painted canvas. Photographic lamps in evidence, supported by impressive cameras on tripods. One family-size tape-recorder on its own legs, one gracious Marbella-style curved sofa, foam rubber and harder than iron. She sat on it and Joseph sat beside her. We should hold hands, she thought. Kurtz had picked up a grey telephone and was pressing the extension button. He said something in Hebrew, looking up at the gallery as he spoke. He put the phone down, smiled at her reassuringly. She smelt male bodies, dust, coffee, and liver sausage. And about a million dead cigarettes. She recognised another smell but couldn’t identify it because there were too many possibilities in her mind, from the harness of her first pony to the sweat of her first lover.
Her mind changed pace and she nearly fell asleep. I’m ill, she thought. I’m waiting for the results of the tests. Doctor, doctor, give it to me straight. She noticed a stack of waiting-room magazines and wished she could have one on her lap as a prop. Now Joseph was looking up at the gallery too. Charlie followed his gaze, but not till a little afterwards, because she wanted to give herself the impression that she had done this so often she barely needed to look at all, she was a buyer at a fashion show. The door on the balcony opened on a bearded boy, backing into the room with a stage-hand’s lopsided waddle, and contriving to convey anger, even from behind.
For a moment came nothing, then a kind of low scarlet bundle appeared, and after it a clean-shaven boy followed, looking not so much angry as resolutely pious.
Finally she got it straight. It was three boys, not two, but the middle one was sagging between them in his red blazer: the slender Arab boy, her lover, her collapsed puppet from the theatre of the real.
Yes, she thought, from deep inside her sunglasses, perfectly reasonably. Yes – well, not a bad likeness at all given the few years’ age difference, and Joseph’s indefinable maturity. Sometimes, in her fantasies, she had used Joseph’s features, letting him understudy for the lover of her dreams. At other times a different figure had evolved, built upon her imperfect memory of the masked Palestinian at the forum, and she was impressed by how close he now came to the reality. You don’t think the mouth a touch too long at the corners? she asked herself. Not overdoing the sensuality a mite? The nostrils too flared? Too much nip at the waist? She thought of getting up and rushing to protect him, but on stage one doesn’t, not unless it’s in the script. And besides, she’d never have broken free of Joseph.
For a second, all the same, she nearly lost her hold on herself. For that second, she was everything that Joseph said she was – she was Michel’s saviour and liberator, his Saint Joan, his body-slave, his star. She had acted her heart out for him, she had dined with him in
a lousy candlelit motel, she had shared his bed and joined his revolution and worn his bracelet and drunk his vodka and torn his body to pieces and had him tear her own to pieces in return. She had driven his Merc for him and kissed his gun and carried his best-quality Russian TNT to the beleaguered armies of freedom. She had celebrated the victory with him in a riverside hotel in Salzburg. She had danced with him on the Acropolis by night and had the whole world revived for her; and she was filled with an insane guilt that she had ever contemplated any other love.
He was so beautiful – as beautiful as Joseph had promised. He was more beautiful. He had the absolute attraction that Charlie and her kind acknowledge with rueful inevitability: he was of that monarchy and knew it. He was slight but perfect, with well-formed shoulders and very slender hips. He had a pugilist’s brow and a Pan-child’s face, crowned with a cap of flat black hair. Nothing they had done to tame him could conceal from her the rich passion of his nature, or extinguish the light of rebellion in his coal-dark eyes.
He was so trivial – a little peasant boy fallen out of an olive tree, with a repertoire of learned phrases and a magpie eye for pretty toys, pretty ladies, and pretty cars. And a peasant’s indignation against those who drove him from his farm. Come into my bed, you little baby, and let Mummy teach you some of life’s long words.
The Little Drummer Girl Page 33
