The Little Drummer Girl

by John le Carré

  You? she thought. Friend? Michel wouldn’t have a friend like you to save his bloody life. But she let her glower say it for her.

  ‘I am also charged with the responsibility to represent Michel legally, Miss Charlie. Michel is entitled to the full protection of the law. Come, please. Now.’

  The gesture took a large effort but she meant it to. The orchids were awfully heavy and it was a long way through the air to lift them from her arms to his. But she managed it; she found her courage and her strength, and his arms came up to receive them. And she found the right brassy tone for the words she had decided to say.

  ‘You’ve got the wrong show,’ she said. ‘I don’t know Michel from Nottingham, I don’t know Michel from anywhere. And we didn’t meet in Monte last season either. Nice try, but I’m tired. Of all of you.’

  Turning to the counter to pick up her key, she realised as she did so that Humphrey the porter was addressing her on a matter of great moment. His glazed face was shaking, and he held a pencil poised over a great ledger.

  ‘I said,’ he puffed indignantly, in his steep, North Country drawl, ‘what time was it you was wanting morning tea, miss?’

  ‘Nine o’clock, dear, and not a second earlier.’ She moved wearily towards the stairs.

  ‘Paper, miss?’ said Humphrey.

  She turned and glanced heavily back at him. ‘Jesus,’ she whispered.

  Humphrey was suddenly very excited. He seemed to think that only animation would wake her up. ‘Morning paper! For reading in! What’s your fancy?’

  ‘Times, dear,’ she said.

  Humphrey sank back into contented apathy. ‘Telegraph,’ he wrote, aloud. ‘Times is orders only,’ by which time she had started to haul herself up the big staircase towards the historic darkness of the landing.

  ‘Miss Charlie!’

  You call at me like that again, she thought, and I just may come down a few steps and smack you very hard on your smooth Swiss mountain pass. She took two more steps before he spoke again. She had not anticipated such force in him.

  ‘Michel will be very glad to know that Rosalind was wearing his bracelet tonight! And is actually wearing it still, I think! Or is that a gift from some other gentleman?’

  Her head, then her whole body faced him down the stairs. He had transferred the orchids to his left arm. His right hung at his side like an empty sleeve.

  ‘I said go away. Get out. Please – okay?’

  But she was arguing against her own conviction, as her faltering voice betrayed.

  ‘Michel orders me to buy you fresh lobster, and a bottle of Boutaris wine. White and cold, he says. I have other messages from him also. He will be very angry when I tell him you refused his hospitality, also insulted.’

  It was too much. He was her own dark angel, claiming the soul she had carelessly pledged. Whether he was lying, whether he was the police or a common blackmailer, she would follow him to the centre of the underworld if he could lead her to Michel. Jolting on her heels, she bumped slowly down the stairs to the reception counter.

  ‘Humphrey.’ Tossing her key to the counter, she took the pencil from his unresisting hand and wrote the name CATHY on a block of paper before him. ‘American lady. Got it? Mate of mine. If she rings, tell her I’ve gone out with six lovers. Tell her maybe I’ll drive over for lunch tomorrow. Got it?’ she repeated.

  Tearing the sheet of paper from the block, she tucked it into his handkerchief pocket, then gave him a distracted kiss while Mesterbein looked on with the masked resentment of a lover waiting to claim her for the night. At the porch, he produced a neat Swiss torch. By its light she saw the yellow Hertz sticker on the windscreen of his car. He opened the passenger door for her and said, ‘Please,’ but she walked straight past it to her Fiat, got in, started the engine, and waited. To drive, she noticed as he went ahead of her, he wore a black beret, the brim quite level like a bathing hat, except that it made his ears stick out.

  They drove in slow convoy because of the fog patches. Or perhaps Mesterbein drove that way always, for he had the aggressive poker-back of the habitually cautious driver. They climbed a hill and made north over empty moorland. The fog broke, the telegraph poles stuck up like threaded needles against the night sky. A torn Greek moon peered briefly from the clouds before they dragged it back inside. At a crossroads Mesterbein stopped to consult a map. Finally he indicated left, first with his light, then with a white hand, which he rotated. Yes, Anton, I get the message. She followed him down a hill and through a village; she lowered her window and filled the car with the salt smell of the sea. The rushing air opened her mouth for her in a scream. She followed him under a tattered banner that read ‘East West Timesharer Chalets Ltd.’, then up a narrow new road through dunes towards a ruined tin-mine perched on the skyline, an advertisement for ‘Come to Cornwall’. Left and right of her, clapboard bungalows, unlit. Mesterbein parked, she parked behind him, leaving her car in gear because of the gradient. New groan in the handbrake, she thought; take it back to Eustace. He climbed out; she did the same and locked her car. The wind had dropped; they were on the lee side of the peninsula. Gulls were wheeling low and squalling, as if they had lost something valuable on the ground. Torch in hand, Mesterbein reached for her elbow to guide her forward.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ she said. He pushed a gate and it creaked. A light went on ahead of them. Short concrete path, blue door called Sea-Wrack. Mesterbein had a key ready. The door opened; he stepped ahead of her and stood back to let her by, an estate agent showing the place to a potential client. There was no porch and somehow no warning. She followed him in, he closed the door behind her, she was in a drawing-room. She smelt damp laundry and saw black fungus spots spattered on the ceiling. A tall blonde woman in a blue corduroy suit was jamming a coin into the electric meter. Seeing them enter, she peered quickly round with a bright smile, then leapt to her feet, punching away a strand of long gold hair as she did so.

  ‘Anton! Oh this is too nice! You have brought me Charlie! Charlie, welcome. And you will be twice welcome if you will please show me how to work this impossible machine.’ Grabbing Charlie’s shoulders, she embraced her excitedly on each cheek. ‘I mean, Charlie, listen, you were completely fantastic tonight in that Shakespeare, yes? Wasn’t she, Anton? I mean superb. I am Helga, okay?’ Names are a game to me, she meant. ‘Helga. Yes? As you are Charlie, I am Helga.’

  Her eyes were grey and lucid and, like Mesterbein’s, dangerously innocent. A militant simplicity gazed out from them upon a complicated world. To be true is to be untamed, thought Charlie, quoting to herself from one of Michel’s letters. I feel, therefore I do.

  From a corner of the room, Mesterbein offered a belated answer to Helga’s question. He was threading a coat-hanger into his gabardine trench coat. ‘Oh, she was very impressive, naturally.’

  Helga’s hands still rested on Charlie’s shoulders, her strong thumbs lightly grazing her neck. ‘Is it difficult to learn so many words, Charlie?’ she asked, staring brightly into Charlie’s face.

  ‘I don’t have that problem,’ she said, and broke away from her.

  ‘You learn easily then?’ Grasping Charlie’s hand, she pressed a fifty-pence piece into her palm. ‘Come. Show me. Show me how to work this fantastic English invention called fire.’

  Charlie crouched to the meter, turned the lever one way, slipped in the coin, turned it the other, and let the coin fall with a clunk. There was a protesting whine as the fire came on.

  ‘Incredible! Oh, Charlie! But you see that is typical of me. I am completely untechnical,’ Helga explained immediately, as if this were an important thing about her that a new friend should know. ‘I am completely anti-possessions, so if I don’t own anything, how can I know how to work it? Anton will please translate for me. I believe in Sein, nicht Haben.’ It was an order, issued by a nursery autocrat. Her English was quite good enough without his help. ‘You have read Erich Fromm, Charlie?’

  ‘She means being, not possession,’ said M
esterbein gloomily while he regarded the two women. ‘It is the essence of Fräulein Helga’s moral. She believes in fundamental goodness, also Nature over Science. We both do,’ he added, as if wishing to interpose himself between them.

  ‘You have read Erich Fromm?’ Helga repeated, sweeping back her blonde hair again and already thinking of something quite different. ‘I am completely in love with him.’ She crouched before the fire, hands outstretched. ‘When I admire a philosopher, I love him. That also is typical of me.’ There was a surface grace to her movements, and a teenager’s lumpiness. She wore flat shoes to help her with her height.

  ‘Where’s Michel?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘Fräulein Helga does not know where Michel is,’ Mesterbein objected sharply from his corner. ‘She is not a lawyer, she came only for the journey and for justice. Fräulein Helga has no knowledge of Michel’s activities or whereabouts. Sit down, please.’

  Charlie remained standing. But Mesterbein sat himself on a dining-chair and folded his clean white hands on his lap. The trench coat discarded, he displayed a new brown suit. It could have been a birthday present from his mother.

  ‘You said you had news of him,’ Charlie said. A tremor had entered her voice and her lips felt stiff.

  Still crouching, Helga had turned to face her. She had pressed her thumbnail thoughtfully against her strong front teeth.

  ‘When did you see him last, please?’ Mesterbein asked.

  She no longer knew which of them to look at. ‘In Salzburg,’ she said.

  ‘Salzburg, that’s not a date, I think,’ Helga objected from the floor.

  ‘Five weeks ago. Six. Where is he?’

  ‘And you heard from him last when?’ asked Mesterbein.

  ‘Just tell me where he is! What’s happened to him?’ She swung back to Helga. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Nobody came to you?’ Mesterbein asked. ‘No friends of his? Police?’

  ‘Maybe you are not so good at memory as you say, Charlie,’ Helga suggested.

  ‘Tell us who you have been in touch with, please, Miss Charlie,’ Mesterbein said. ‘Immediately. It is most necessary. We are here for urgent matters.’

  ‘Actually she could lie easily, such an actress,’ Helga said, while her wide eyes gazed up at Charlie in a questing, unshadowed stare. ‘A woman so trained to pretend, how can one believe anything, actually?’

  ‘We must be very careful,’ Mesterbein agreed, as a private note to himself for the future.

  Their double-act had a ring of sadism; they were playing upon a pain she had yet to feel. She stared at Helga, then at Mesterbein. Her words slipped from her. She could no longer keep them in.

  ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ she whispered.

  Helga seemed not to hear. She was entirely taken up with watching.

  ‘Oh yes. Michel is dead,’ said Mesterbein glumly. ‘I’m sorry, naturally. Fräulein Helga is also sorry. We are both very sorry. From the letters you wrote to him, we assume you will be sorry also.’

  ‘But maybe the letters are also pretending, Anton,’ Helga reminded him.

  It had happened to her once before in her life, at school. Three hundred girls lining the gymnasium wall, the headmistress in the middle, everybody waiting for the culprit to confess. Charlie had been peering around with the best of them, looking for the guilty one – is it her? I’ll bet it’s her – she wasn’t blushing, she was looking grave and innocent, and she hadn’t – it was really true and later positively proved – she hadn’t stolen anything at all. Yet suddenly her knees sagged and she fell straight over her feet, feeling perfectly all right from the waist up, but paralysed below. She did it now, not a studied thing at all; she did it before she was herself aware of it, before she had even halfway considered the enormity of the information, and before Helga could put out a hand to catch her. She keeled over and hit the floor with a thud that made the ceiling light hop on its flex. Helga knelt quickly beside her, muttered something in German, and laid a comforting woman’s hand on her shoulder – a gentle, unaffected act. Mesterbein stooped to gaze at her but didn’t touch her. His interest was directed more towards examining the way she wept.

  She had her head sideways and she was resting her cheek on her clenched fist, so that the stream of her tears ran across her face instead of down it. Gradually, as he went on watching, her tears seemed to cheer him up. He gave a mousy nod that might have been approval; he stayed close while Helga manhandled her to the sofa, where she lay again, her face buried in the prickly cushions and her hands locked over her face, weeping as only the bereaved and children can. Turmoil, anger, guilt, remorse, terror: she perceived each one of them like the phases of a controlled, yet deeply felt performance. I knew; I didn’t know; I didn’t dare allow myself to think. You cheats, you murdering Fascist cheats, you bastards who killed my darling lover in the theatre of the real.

  She must have said some of this aloud. Indeed she knew she had. She had monitored and selected her strangled phrases even while the grief tore at her: You Fascist bastards, swine, oh Jesus, Michel.

  A pause, then she heard Mesterbein’s unaltered voice inviting her to enlarge on this, but she ignored him and continued to roll her head from side to side behind her hands. She choked and retched and her words clogged in her throat and stumbled on her lips. The tears, the agony, the repeated sobs were no problem to her – she was on excellent terms with the sources of her grief and outrage. She did not need to think of her late father, hastened to his grave by the disgrace of her expulsion from school, nor paint herself as a tragic child in the wilderness of adult life, which was what she usually did. She had only to remember the half-tamed Arab boy who had restored her capacity for love, who had given her life the direction it had always craved, and who now was dead for the tears to come running on command.

  ‘She says it was the Zionists,’ Mesterbein objected to Helga, in English. ‘Why does she say it was the Zionists when it was an accident? The police have assured us it was an accident. Why does she contradict the police? It is very dangerous to contradict police.’

  But Helga had either heard it already for herself or didn’t care. She had put a coffee pot on the electric stove. Kneeling at Charlie’s head, she pensively smoothed her red hair away from her face with her strong hand, waiting for her weeping to stop and her explanations to begin.

  The coffee pot suddenly bubbled; Helga rose and tended it. Charlie sat on the sofa cradling her mug in both hands, bowed over it as if inhaling its vapour, while the tears ran steadily down her cheeks. Helga had her arm round Charlie’s shoulder and Mesterbein sat opposite, peering out at the two women from the shades of his own dark world.

  ‘It was an explosion accident,’ he said. ‘On the autobahn Salzburg–Munich. According to police, his car was full of explosive. Hundreds of pounds. Why? Why should explosive detonate suddenly, on a flat autobahn?’

  ‘Your letters are safe,’ Helga whispered, drawing back another hank of Charlie’s hair and tucking it lovingly behind her ear.

  ‘The car was a Mercedes,’ Mesterbein said. ‘It had Munich licences, but the police say they are false. Also the papers. Forgeries. Why should my client drive a car with false papers and full of explosive? He was a student. He was not a bomber. It is a conspiracy, actually. I think so.’

  ‘Do you know this car, Charlie?’ Helga murmured into her ear, and pressed her more fondly against her in an effort to coax an answer out of her. But all Charlie could see in her mind was her lover blown to pieces by two hundred pounds of Russian plastic explosive hidden in the valance, cross-members, roof-lining, and seats: an inferno, tearing apart the body she adored. And all she could hear was the voice of her other nameless mentor saying: Distrust them, lie to them, deny everything; reject, refuse.

  ‘She spoke something,’ said Mesterbein accusingly.

  ‘She said, “Michel,”’ said Helga, wiping away a fresh onslaught of tears with a sensible handkerchief from her handbag.

  ‘A girl died also,’ Mesterb
ein said. ‘She was with him in the car, they say.’

  ‘A Dutch,’ Helga said softly, so close that Charlie could feel her breath upon her ear. ‘A real beauty. Blonde.’

  ‘They died together, apparently,’ Mesterbein continued, raising his voice.

  ‘You were not the only one, Charlie,’ Helga explained confidingly. ‘You did not have the exclusive use of our little Palestinian, you know.’

  For the first time since they had broken the news to her, Charlie spoke a coherent sentence.

  ‘I never asked for it,’ she whispered.

  ‘The police say the Dutch was a terrorist,’ Mesterbein complained.

  ‘They say also that Michel was a terrorist,’ said Helga.

  ‘They say that the Dutch planted bombs for Michel several times already,’ said Mesterbein. ‘They say Michel and the girl were planning another action, and that in the car they found a city map of Munich with the Israeli Trade Centre marked in Michel’s handwriting. On the River Isar,’ he added. ‘An upper floor – really a difficult target, actually. Did he speak to you of this action, Miss Charlie?’

  Shivering, Charlie sipped a little coffee, which seemed to please Helga quite as well as a reply. ‘There! She is waking up at last. You want more coffee, Charlie? Shall I heat some? Food? We have cheese up here, eggs, sausage, we have everything.’

  Shaking her head, Charlie let Helga lead her to the lavatory, where she stayed a long time, throwing water in her face, retching, and between whiles wishing to Heaven that she knew enough German to follow the uneasy, staccato conversation that was reaching her through the paper-thin door.

  She returned to find Mesterbein standing at the front door dressed in his gabardine trench coat.

  ‘Miss Charlie, I remind you that Fräulein Helga is entitled to the full protection of the law,’ he said, and stalked out of the front door.

  Alone at last. Girls together.