She woke and found him sitting over her, waiting for her to come round. He had packed everything away.
‘It’s a boy,’ he said, and smiled.
‘It’s twins,’ she replied, and pulled his head down until it was against her shoulder. He started to speak, but she stopped him with a stern warning. ‘I don’t want a squeak out of you,’ she said. ‘No cover stories, no apologies, no lies. If it’s part of the service, don’t tell me. What’s the time?’
‘Midnight.’
‘Then come back to bed.’
‘Marty wants to talk to you,’ he said.
But there was something in his voice and manner that told her it was an occasion not of Marty’s making but his own.
It was Joseph’s place.
She knew as soon as she entered: a bookish, rectangular little room at street level somewhere in Bloomsbury, with lace curtains and space for one small tenant. On this wall hung maps of inner London; along that one, there was a sideboard with two telephones. A bunk bed, unslept in, made a third side; the fourth was a deal desk with an old lamp on it. A pot of coffee was bubbling beside the telephones, and a fire was burning in the grate. Marty did not get up as she entered, but turned his head towards her and gave her the warmest, best smile she had ever had from him, but perhaps that was because she saw the world so kindly herself. He held out his arms for her and she bent down and entered his long fatherly embrace: my daughter, back from her travels. She sat opposite him and Joseph crouched on the floor, Arab-style, the way he had crouched on the hilltop when he drew her down to him and lectured her about the gun.
‘You want to listen to yourself?’ Kurtz invited her, indicating a tape-recorder at his side. She shook her head. ‘Charlie, you were terrific. Not the third best, not the second best, just the best ever.’
‘He’s flattering you,’ Joseph warned her, but he wasn’t joking.
A little lady in brown came in without knocking, and there was business about who took sugar.
‘Charlie, you are free to pull out,’ said Kurtz when she had gone. ‘Joseph here insists that I remind you of this, loudly and plainly. Go now, you go with honour. Right, Joseph? A lot of money, a lot of honour. All we promised you and more.’
‘I told her already,’ Joseph said.
She saw Kurtz’s smile broaden to conceal his irritation. ‘Sure you told her, Joseph, and now I’m telling her. Isn’t that what you want me to do? Charlie, you have lifted the lid for us on a whole box of worms we’ve been looking for since a long time. You have thrown up more names and places and connections than you can know about, and there’ll be more to come. With you or without you. Near enough you’re still clean, and where there are dirty areas, give us a few months and we’ll have them cleaned up. A period of quarantine somewhere, a cooling-off period, take a friend with you – you want it that way, that’s the way you’re entitled to have it.’
‘He means it,’ Joseph said. ‘Don’t just say you’ll go on. Think about it.’
Once again, she noticed the edge of annoyance in Marty’s voice as he came back at his subordinate: ‘I surely do mean it, and if I did not mean it, this would be about the last moment on earth to flirt with meaning it,’ he said, contriving by the end to turn his retort into a joke.
‘So where are we?’ Charlie said. ‘What is this moment?’
Joseph started to speak, but Marty cut in first like a piece of bad driving. ‘Charlie, there is an above the line in this thing, and a below the line. Until now, you’ve been above the line, but you’ve managed all the same to show us what’s going on lower down. But from here on in – well, it just may get a little different. That’s how we read it. We may be wrong, but that’s how we read the signs.’
‘What he means is, until now you have been on friendly territory. We can be close to you, we can pull you out if we need to. But from now on, all that’s over. You’ll be one of them. Sharing their lives. Their mentality. Their morals. You could spend weeks, months out of touch with us.’
‘Not out of touch, perhaps, but out of reach, that is mainly true,’ Marty conceded; he was smiling, but not at Joseph. ‘But we’ll be around you, you can count on us.’
‘What’s the end?’ Charlie asked.
Marty appeared momentarily confused. ‘What kind of end, dear – the end that justifies these means? I don’t think I have you quite.’
‘What am I looking for? When will you be satisfied?’
‘Charlie, we are more than satisfied now,’ said Marty handsomely, and she knew that he was prevaricating.
‘The end is a man,’ said Joseph abruptly, and she saw Marty’s head swing round to him till his face was lost to her. But Joseph’s was not, and his stare, as he returned Marty’s, had a defiant straightness she had not seen in him before.
‘Charlie, the end is a man,’ Marty finally agreed, coming back to her once more. ‘If you are going ahead, these are things you will have to know.’
‘Khalil,’ she said.
‘Khalil is right,’ said Marty. ‘Khalil heads up their whole European thing. He’s the man we have to have.’
‘He’s dangerous,’ Joseph said. ‘He’s as good as Michel was bad.’
Perhaps to outmanoeuvre him, Kurtz took up the same refrain. ‘Khalil has nobody he relies on, no regular girlfriend. Never sleeps in the same bed two nights running. He’s cut himself off from people. Reduced his basic needs to the point where he is almost self-sufficient. A smart operator,’ Kurtz ended, smiling his most indulgent smile at her. But as he lit himself another cigar, she could tell by the shake of the match that he was very angry indeed.
Why did she not waver?
An extraordinary calm had descended over her, a lucidity of feeling beyond anything she had known till now. Joseph had not slept with her in order to send her away, but to hold her back. He was suffering on her behalf all the fears and hesitations that should have been her own. Yet she knew also that in this secret microcosm of existence they had made for her, to turn back now was to turn back for ever; that a love that did not advance could never renew itself; it could only slump into the pit of mediocrity to which her other loves had consigned themselves since her life with Joseph had begun. The fact that he wanted her to stop did not deter her; to the contrary, it fortified her resolve. They were partners. They were lovers. They were married to a common destiny, a common forward march.
She was asking Kurtz how she would recognise the quarry. Did he look like Michel? Marty was shaking his head and laughing. ‘Alas, dear, he never posed for our photographers!’
Then, while Joseph deliberately stared away from him towards the soot-smeared window, Kurtz quickly got up and, from an old black briefcase that stood beside the armchair where he had been sitting, fished out what resembled a fat ballpoint refill, crimped at one end, with a pair of thin red wires, like lobster whiskers, protruding from it.
‘This is what we call a detonator, dear,’ he explained as his stubby finger gingerly tapped the refill. ‘At the end here, this is the bung, and fed into the bung you see the wires here. A little of the wire, he needs. The rest, what is spare, he packages it like this.’ Producing a pair of wiresnippers, also from the briefcase, he cut each strand separately, leaving about eighteen inches still attached. Then, with a deft and practised gesture, he wound the spare wires into a neat dummy, complete with belt. Then he passed it to her to hold. ‘The little doll is what we call his signature. Sooner or later, everybody has a signature. That’s his.’
She let him take it from her hand.
Joseph had an address for her to go to. The little lady in brown showed her to the door. She stepped into the street and found a taxi ready waiting for her. It was early dawn and the sparrows were starting to sing.
CHAPTER TWENTY
She started earlier than Helga had told her, partly because in some ways she was a worrier, and partly because she had clothed herself deliberately in a coarse scepticism about the whole plan. What if it’s out of order? she had objected �
� this is England, Helg, not super-efficient Germany – what if it’s occupied when you ring? But Helga had refused to entertain these arguments: do exactly as you are ordered, leave everything else to me. So she started from Gloucester Road all right, and she sat upstairs; but instead of catching the first bus after seven-thirty, she caught the one that came at twenty past. At Tottenham Court Road tube station she was lucky; a train pulled up just as she reached the southbound platform, with the result that she had to sit like a wallflower at Embankment Cross until she made her last connection. It was Sunday morning, and apart from a few insomniacs and churchgoers she was the only person awake in the whole of London. The City, when she reached it, had been abandoned totally, and she had only to find the street to see the phone box a hundred yards ahead of her, exactly as Helga had described it, winking at her like a lighthouse. It was empty.
‘You walk first to the end of the road, you turn round, and you come back again,’ Helga had said, so she dutifully made a first pass and established that the phone did not look too smashed up; though by then she had decided that it was an absurdly obvious place to hang around waiting for phone calls from international terrorists. She made the turn and started back again; and, to her great annoyance, as she did so, a man got into the box ahead of her and closed the door. She glanced at her watch and there were twelve minutes still to go, so, not unduly worried, she parked herself a few feet away and waited. He was wearing a bobble hat like a fisherman’s and a leather flying-coat with a fur collar, too much for such a sticky day. He had his back to her and was talking Italian non-stop. That’s why he needs the fur-lined, she thought; his Latin blood doesn’t fancy our climate. Charlie herself was wearing the clothes she had worn since she picked up the boy Matthew at Al’s party: old jeans and her Tibetan jacket. She had combed her hair but not brushed it; she felt fraught and haunted, and hoped she looked it.
Seven minutes to go, and the man in the box had launched himself upon one of those passionate Italian monologues that could as well have been about unrequited love as the state of the Milan stock market. Nervous now, she licked her lips and looked up and down the street, but not a soul stirred – no sinister black sedans or men in doorways; no red Mercedes either. The only car in sight was a grotty little van, with corrugated sides and the driver’s door still open, standing directly in front of her. All the same, she was beginning to feel very naked. Eight o’clock arrived, announced by an amazing variety of secular and religious chimes. Helga had said five past. The man had stopped speaking, but she heard the chink of coin in his pockets as he fumbled for more; then she heard a tapping as he tried to attract her attention. She turned round and saw him holding a fifty-pence piece at her and looking appealing.
‘Can’t you let me go first?’ she said. ‘I’m in a hurry.’
But English was not his language.
To hell with it, she thought; Helga will just have to keep dialling. It’s exactly what I warned her of. Slipping the shoulder strap of her handbag, she unpopped it and delved in the sump for tens and fives till she made up fifty. Christ, look at the sweat on my fingers. She stuck her closed fist towards him, damp fingers downward, ready to drop the stuff into his grateful Latin palm, and saw that he was pointing a small pistol at her from within the folds of his flying-jacket, straight at the point where her stomach met her rib cage, as neat a piece of conjuring as she was likely to find. Not a big gun, though guns do look a lot bigger when they’re pointed at you, she noticed. About the size of Michel’s. But as Michel himself had told her, every handgun is a compromise between concealment, portability, and efficiency. He was still holding the telephone in his other hand and she supposed that someone was still listening at the other end, because although he was addressing Charlie now, he kept his face close to the mouthpiece.
‘What you do, you walk beside me to the car, Charlie,’ he explained, in good English. ‘You keep to my right side, you walk on my right side a little ahead of me, hands behind your back where I can see them. Joined behind your back, you follow me? If you try to get away or make a signal to someone, if you call out, then I shall shoot you through the left side – here – and kill you. If the police show up, if anyone shoots, if I’m suspicious, it’s the same. I shoot you.’
He indicated to her the same point on his own body, so that she understood. He added something Italian into the telephone and rang off. Then he stepped out onto the pavement and cracked a big confiding smile at her just at the moment when his face was closest to hers. It was a real Italian face, not a single lazy line to it. A real Italian voice too, rich and musical. She could imagine it echoing round ancient marketplaces and chatting up the women at their balconies.
‘Let’s go,’ he said. One hand had stayed in the pocket of his flying-jacket. ‘Not too fast, okay? Nice and easy.’
A moment earlier she had desperately needed a pee, but with walking the urge left her and she developed instead a cramp in the nape of the neck and a wailing in her right ear like a mosquito in the dark.
‘As you get into the passenger seat, transfer your hands to the dashboard in front of you,’ he advised as he walked behind her. ‘The girl in the back has a gun too and she is very quick to shoot people. Much quicker than me.’
Charlie opened the passenger door, sat down, and placed her fingertips on the dashboard like a good girl at table.
‘Relax, Charlie,’ said Helga cheerfully from behind her. ‘Lower your shoulders, my dear, you are looking like an old woman already!’ Charlie kept her shoulders where they were. ‘Now smile. Hoorah. Keep smiling. Everybody’s happy today. Whoever is not happy must be shot.’
‘Start with me,’ said Charlie.
The Italian got into the driving seat and switched the radio to the God slot.
‘Turn it off,’ Helga ordered. She was wedged against the rear doors with her knees up, and holding her gun with both hands, and she didn’t look like somebody who would miss an oil can at fifteen paces. With a shrug, the Italian turned off the radio and, in the restored quiet, once more addressed her.
‘Okay, so put on your seat belt, then link your hands together and put them on your lap,’ he said. ‘Hang on, I do it for you.’ Picking up her handbag, he tossed it to Helga, then grabbed the seat belt and buckled it, carelessly brushing her breasts. Thirtyish. Handsome as a movie star. A spoilt Garibaldi in a red neckscarf going for the hero kick. Very calmly, with all the time in the world to kill, he fished a pair of large sunglasses from his pocket and fitted them over her eyes. At first she thought she had gone blind with funk, because she could see nothing through them at all. Then she thought, they’re the self-adjusting kind; I’m supposed to sit tight and wait for them to clear. Then she realised that seeing nothing was what was intended.
‘If you take them off, she’ll shoot you through the back of the head for sure,’ the Italian boy warned her as he started the car.
‘Oh, she will,’ said jolly old Helga.
They set off, first bumping over a bit of cobble, then settling into calmer water. She listened for the sound of another car but heard only their own engine ticking and rattling through the streets. She tried to work out which way they were heading but she was already lost. Without warning, they stopped. She had no sensation of slowing down, nor of the driver shaping up to park. She had counted three hundred of her own pulsebeats, and two previous stops, which she assumed were traffic lights. She had memorised such trivia as the new rubber mat under her feet and the red devil with a trident in his hand dangling from the car keyring. The Italian was helping her out of the car; a stick was put into her hand, she supposed a white one. With plenty of help from her friends, she was negotiating the six paces and four rising steps to somebody’s front door. The lift mechanism had a warble in it that was an exact reproduction of the water-whistle she had blown in her prep-school orchestra to make the bird noises in the Toy Symphony. They are good performers, Joseph had warned her. There is no apprenticeship. You will go from drama school straight to the West End. Sh
e was sitting on some kind of leather saddle with no back. They had made her link her hands and keep them on her lap again. They had kept her handbag and she heard them tip its contents onto a glass table, which chimed when her keys and small change landed. And thudded to the weight of Michel’s letters, which she had collected that morning on Helga’s orders. There was a smell of body lotion in the air, sweeter than Michel’s, and sleepier. The carpet at her feet was of thick nylon and russet-coloured, like Michel’s orchids; she guessed the curtains must be heavy and drawn tight, because the light at the edges of her spectacles was electric yellow, not a hint of day. They had been in the room some minutes with no word spoken.
‘I need Comrade Mesterbein,’ Charlie pronounced suddenly. ‘I need the full protection of the law.’
Helga laughed rapturously. ‘Oh, Charlie! This is too completely crazy. She is wonderful. Don’t you think so?’ This to the Italian, presumably, for she was aware of no one else in the room. Yet the question received no answer, and Helga seemed to expect none. Charlie sent out another probe.
‘A gun suits you, Helg, I’ll give you that. From now on, I’ll never think of you dressed in anything else.’
And this time Charlie distinctly heard the note of nervous pride in Helga’s laughter; she was showing Charlie off to someone – someone she respected a great deal more than she respected the Italian boy. She heard a footstep and saw, at the very bottom of her vision, laid out on the russet carpet for her inspection, the black and highly polished toecap of one very expensive male shoe. She heard breathing, and the suck of a tongue placed against the upper teeth. The foot disappeared and she felt a disturbance of air as the warm-scented body passed very close to her. Instinctively, she leaned away from it but Helga ordered her to be still. She heard a match struck and smelt one of her father’s Christmas cigars. Yet again Helga was warning her to keep still – ‘exactly still, otherwise you will be punished, there will be no hesitation.’ But Helga’s threats were a mere intrusion into Charlie’s thoughts as she tried by every means known to her to define the unseen visitor. She imagined herself as a kind of bat, sending out signals and listening to how they bounced back to her. She remembered the blindfold games she used to play at children’s parties at Hallowe’en. Smell this, feel that, guess who is kissing you on your thirteen-year-old lips.
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