The Little Drummer Girl

by John le Carré

  ‘He said he would call tomorrow,’ he complained as he pulled it over his head. ‘What goes on suddenly?’

  ‘Be quiet,’ Helga snapped.

  Verona continued stirring whatever she was cooking, but more slowly, as if speed were dangerous. She was one of those women whose every movement seems to come from their elbows.

  The phone rang again, two rings, and this time Helga lifted the earpiece and at once replaced it. But the next time it rang, she answered it with a curt ‘Yes’ and then listened, without a nod or a smile, for perhaps two minutes, before ringing off.

  ‘The Minkels have changed their plans,’ she announced. ‘They are spending tonight in Tübingen, where they have friends in the faculty. They have four large suitcases, many small pieces, and a briefcase.’ With a fine instinct for effect, she took a damp cloth from Verona’s handbasin and wiped the blackboard clean. ‘The briefcase is black, it has simple hinges. The location of the lecture is also changed. The police are not suspicious but they are nervous. They are taking what they call sensible precautions.’

  ‘What’s with the bulls?’ said Rossino.

  ‘The police wish to increase the guards, but Minkel is refusing this completely. He is a so-called man of principle. If he is to preach about law and justice, he insists that he cannot himself be seen surrounded by secret police. For Imogen, nothing is changed. Her orders are the same. It is her first action. She will be the complete star. No, Charlie?’

  Suddenly they were all looking at her – Verona with a mindless fixity, Rossino with an appraising grin, and Helga with a frank straight stare to which self-doubt, as ever, was a stranger.

  She lay flat, using her forearm as a pillow. Her bedroom was not a gallery in a church hall but a garret without light or curtains. Her bed was an old horsehair mattress and a yellowed blanket that smelt of camphor. Helga sat beside her, smoothing Charlie’s dyed hair with her strong hand. Moonlight came through the high window; the snow made its own deep silence. Somebody should write a fairy story here. My lover should put on the electric fire and take me by its red glow. She was in a log cabin, safe from everything except tomorrow.

  ‘What is the matter, Charlie? Open your eyes. Don’t you like me any more?’

  She opened her eyes and stared ahead of her, seeing and thinking nothing.

  ‘Are you dreaming of your little Palestinian still? Are you worried what we do here? Do you want to give up and run away while you have time?’

  ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘So why don’t you come and sleep with us? We can have sex. Then we can sleep. Mario is an excellent lover.’

  Bending over her, Helga kissed her on the neck.

  ‘You want Mario to come to you alone? You are shy? Even that I allow you.’ She kissed her again. But Charlie lay cold and rigid, her body like iron.

  ‘Tomorrow night you will be more affectionate perhaps. With Khalil there can be no rejections. He is most fascinated to meet you already. He has asked for you personally. You know what he told a friend of ours once? “Without women I would lose my human warmth and fail as a soldier. To be a good soldier, it is essential to have humanity.” Now you may imagine what a great man he is. You loved Michel, therefore he will love you. There is no question. So.’

  Bestowing a last, lingering kiss on her, Helga left the room and Charlie lay on her back, wide-eyed, watching the half-night slowly lighten in the window. She heard a woman’s wail rising to a clenched, beseeching sob; then a man’s urgent shout. Helga and Mario were advancing the revolution without her assistance.

  Follow them wherever they lead you, Joseph had said. If they tell you to kill, then kill. It will be our responsibility, not yours.

  Where will you be?

  Close.

  Close to the edge of the world.

  In her handbag she had a Mickey Mouse hand-torch with a pinlight, the kind of thing she would have played with under the blankets at her boarding school. She took it out, together with Rachel’s packet of Marlboros. There were three cigarettes left and she put them back loose. Carefully, as Joseph had taught her, she removed the wrapping paper, tore open the cardboard of the box, and spread it flat, the inside surface upward. Licking her finger, she began gently rubbing saliva onto the blank cardboard. The letters came up in brown, drawn fine as if with a mapping pen. She read the message, then poked the flattened packet through a crack in the floorboards until it dropped out of sight.

  Courage. We’re with you. The whole of the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin.

  Their operations room in Freiburg city centre was a hastily rented ground-floor office in a busy main street, their cover the Walker & Frosch Investment Company, GmbH, one of dozens that Gavron’s secretariat kept permanently registered. Their communications equipment had more or less the appearance of commercial software; in addition they had three ordinary telephones, courtesy of Alexis, and one of them, the least official, was the Doctor’s own hot line to Kurtz. It was early morning after a busy night taken up first with the delicate business of tracking and housing Charlie; and afterwards with a tense argument about demarcation between Litvak and his West German counterpart, for Litvak was by now arguing with everyone. Kurtz and Alexis had kept aloof from such bickering between subordinates. The broad agreement held, and Kurtz had no interest yet in breaking it. Alexis and his men should have the credit; Litvak and his the satisfaction.

  As to Gadi Becker, he was finally back at war. With the imminence of action, his manner had acquired a settled and determined swiftness. The introspections that had haunted him in Jerusalem had lifted; the gnawing idleness of waiting was past. While Kurtz dozed under an army blanket and Litvak, nervous and depleted, paced the office or spoke cryptically into one or another telephone, building himself into some kind of unclear temper, Becker stood sentry at the Venetian blinds of the wide window, gazing patiently upward into the snowclad hills across the olive Dreisam River. For Freiburg, like Salzburg, is a city ringed with heights, and every street seems to lead upward to its own Jerusalem.

  ‘She’s panicked,’ Litvak announced suddenly to Becker’s back.

  Puzzled, Becker turned and glanced at him.

  ‘She’s gone over to them,’ Litvak insisted. His voice had a throaty instability.

  Becker returned to the window. ‘Part of her has gone over, part has stayed,’ he replied. ‘That is what we asked of her.’

  ‘She’s gone over!’ Litvak repeated, rising on the swell of his own provocation. ‘It’s happened with agents before. It’s happened now. I saw her at the airport, you didn’t. She looks like a ghost, I tell you!’

  ‘If she looks like a ghost, that’s how she wants to look,’ said Becker, majestically unruffled. ‘She’s an actress. She’ll see it through, don’t worry.’

  ‘So what’s her motivation? She’s not Jewish. She’s not anything. She’s theirs. Forget her!’

  Hearing Kurtz stir beneath his blanket, Litvak lifted his voice higher to include him.

  ‘If she’s ours still, why did she give Rachel a blank cigarette packet at the airport, tell me that? Weeks on end among that rabble and she doesn’t even write us a note when she comes out again? What kind of agent is that, who is so loyal to us?’

  Becker seemed to be looking for his answer in the far mountains. ‘Maybe she has nothing to say,’ he said. ‘She’s voting with her actions. Not her words.’

  From the shallows of his sparse camp bed, Kurtz offered drowsy consolation. ‘Germany makes you jumpy, Shimon. Ease off. What does it matter who she belongs to, so long as she keeps showing us the way?’

  But the effect of Kurtz’s words was the opposite of their intention. In his self-tormenting mood, Litvak sensed an unfair alliance against him, and it made him wilder still.

  ‘And if she breaks down, confesses? If she tells them the whole story, Mykonos till here? Does she still show us the way?’

  He seemed set upon collision; nothing else would satisfy him.

  Lifting himself on one elbow, K
urtz took a harsher tone. ‘So what do we do, Shimon? Give us the team solution. Suppose she has gone over. Suppose she has blown the entire operation from breakfast to dinner. You want me to call Misha Gavron, say we’re finished?’

  Becker had not abandoned the window, but he had turned himself round once more and was watching Litvak thoughtfully down the room. Staring from one to the other of them, Litvak flung out his arms, a very wild gesture to make before two such static men.

  ‘He’s somewhere out there!’ Litvak cried. ‘In a hotel. An apartment. In a doss house. He must be. Seal off the town. Roads, the railway. Buses. Have Alexis put a cordon round. Search every house till we find him!’

  Kurtz tried a little kindly humour: ‘Shimon, Freiburg is not the West Bank.’

  But Becker, interested at last, seemed anxious to pursue the argument. ‘And when we have found him?’ he said, as if he hadn’t quite got his mind around Litvak’s plan. ‘What do we do then, Shimon?’

  ‘Then we find him! Kill him! The operation’s over!’

  ‘And who kills Charlie?’ Becker asked, in the same perfectly reasonable way. ‘Us or them?’

  Suddenly there was more going on in Litvak than he could handle on his own. Under the tensions of the past night and of the day to come, the whole knotted mass of his frustrations, male and female, swam suddenly to the surface of his being. His face coloured, his eyes blazed, as one thin arm struck out towards Becker in accusation. ‘She’s a whore and she’s a Communist and she’s an Arab-lover!’ he shouted, loud enough to be heard through the partition wall. ‘Dump her. Who cares?’

  If Litvak was expecting Becker to make a fight of it, then he was disappointed, for the most Becker offered was one quiet nod of confirmation, as if everything that he had been thinking about Litvak for some time had now been demonstrated. Kurtz had pushed away his blanket. He was sitting on the bed in his underpants, head forward while he rubbed the tips of his fingers in his short grey hair.

  ‘Go take a bath, Shimon,’ he ordered quietly. ‘A bath, a nice rest, some coffee. Come back around midday. Not before.’ A phone was ringing. ‘Don’t answer that,’ he added, and lifted the receiver himself while Litvak, in mute self-horror, watched him from the doorway. ‘He’s busy,’ Kurtz said, in German. ‘Yes, this is Helmuth, who’s speaking?’

  He said yes; then yes again; and well done. He rang off. Then he smiled his ageless, mirthless smile. First to Litvak, to console him, then to Becker also, because at that moment their differences were unimportant. ‘Charlie arrived at the Minkels’ hotel five minutes ago,’ he said. ‘Rossino’s with her. They’re having a nice breakfast together, well ahead of time, just the way our friend likes it.’

  ‘And the bracelet?’ said Becker.

  Kurtz liked this part best. ‘On her right wrist,’ he said proudly. ‘She has a message for us. She’s a fine girl, Gadi, and I congratulate you.’

  The hotel had been built in the sixties when the catering industry still believed in large, milling lobbies with soothing illuminated fountains and gold watches under glass. A wide double staircase rose to a mezzanine, and from the balcony table where they sat, Charlie and Rossino had a view of both the main door and the reception. Rossino was wearing a middle-management blue suit, Charlie her South African girl guide’s uniform and her wooden Christ-child from the training camp. The lenses of her spectacles, which Tayeh had insisted should be real, made her eyes ache when it was her turn to watch. They had eaten eggs and bacon because she was ravenous, and now they were drinking fresh coffee while Rossino read the Stuttgarter Zeitung and periodically regaled her with facetious news items. They had driven into town early and she had almost frozen to death riding pillion. They had parked at the railway station, where Rossino had made enquiries, and they had come on to the hotel by taxi. In the hour they had been here, Charlie had watched police outriders deliver a Catholic bishop, and return with a delegation of West Africans in tribal costume. She had watched a busload of Americans arrive and a busload of Japanese depart; she knew the check-in procedure by heart, right down to the name of the chasseur who grabbed the suitcases from the new arrivals as they came through the sliding doors, loaded them on their little trolleys, and hovered at a yard’s distance while the guests filled in their registration forms.

  ‘And His Holiness the Pope plans a tour of all Fascist South American States,’ Rossino announced from behind his newspaper as she stood up. ‘Maybe this time they finish him off. Where are you going, Imogen?’

  ‘To piss.’

  ‘What’s the matter? Nervous?’

  The women’s room had fluttering pink lights over the handbasins and soft music to drown the whirr of the ventilators. Rachel was putting on her eye shadow. Two other women were washing. One door was closed. Brushing past her, Charlie pressed the scribbled message into Rachel’s waiting hand. She cleaned up and returned to the table.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said, as if the relief had changed her mind. ‘It’s ridiculous.’

  Rossino lit a thick Dutch cigar and deliberately blew the smoke into her face.

  An official-looking Mercedes drew up and disgorged a bunch of dark-suited men with name badges on their lapels. Rossino had started to make an obscene joke about them when he was interrupted by a bellboy calling him to the telephone: Signor Verdi, who had left his name and five marks with the concierge, was required in cabin 3. She sipped her coffee, feeling the heat of it all the way down her chest. Rachel was sitting with a boyfriend under an aluminium palm tree, reading Cosmopolitan. The boyfriend was new to her and looked German. He was clutching a document in a plastic folder. There were twenty-odd people sitting around, but Rachel was the only one she recognised. Rossino had returned.

  ‘The Minkels arrived at the station two minutes ago. Grabbed themselves a blue Peugeot cab. Should be here any moment.’

  He called for the bill and paid it, then took up his newspaper once more.

  I shall do everything once, she had promised herself as she lay waiting for the morning; everything will be a last time. She repeated it to herself. If I sit here now, I shall never have to sit here again. When I go downstairs, I shall never have to come up again. When I leave the hotel, I shall never return.

  ‘Why don’t we just shoot the bastard and be done with it?’ Charlie whispered, with a sudden welling up of fear and hatred as she once more fixed her gaze upon the entrance.

  ‘Because we want to stay alive to shoot other bastards,’ Rossino explained patiently, and turned a page. ‘Manchester United lost again,’ he added complacently. ‘Poor old Empire.’

  ‘Action,’ said Charlie.

  A blue Peugeot taxi had pulled up on the other side of the glass doors. A grey-haired woman was scrambling out. She was followed by a tall, distinguished-looking man with a slow and ceremonious walk.

  ‘Watch the small pieces, I’ll watch the big ones,’ Rossino told her as he relit his cigar.

  The driver was unlocking the boot; Franz, the chasseur, was standing behind him with his trolley. First came two matching suitcases in brown nylon, neither new nor old. Belts round the centre for extra support. Red tie-on labels. Now an old leather suitcase, much bigger, with a pair of wheels at one corner. Followed by yet another suitcase.

  Rossino let out a soft Italian oath. ‘So how long are they staying?’ he complained.

  The small pieces were stacked on the front passenger seat. Having locked the boot, the driver began unloading them, but Franz’s trolley wasn’t going to take all of them at once. One shabby carrier bag in patchwork leather, and two umbrellas, his and hers. A paper carrier bag with a black cat on it. Two large boxes in festive wrapping, presumably belated Christmas presents. Then she saw it: a black briefcase. Hard sides, steel frame, leather name-tag. Good old Helg, thought Charlie; spot on. Minkel was paying off the cab. Like someone else Charlie had once known, he kept his coins in a purse, and spilt them into his palm before parting with the unfamiliar currency. Mrs Minkel picked up the briefcase.


  ‘Shit,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Wait,’ said Rossino.

  Laden with parcels, Minkel followed his wife through the sliding doors.

  ‘Around now you tell me you think you recognise him,’ Rossino said quietly. ‘I tell you, why don’t you go down and take a closer look? You hesitate, you’re a shy little virgin.’ He was holding her by the sleeve of her dress. ‘Don’t force it. If it doesn’t work, there’s lots of other ways. Frown. Adjust your spectacles. Go.’

  Minkel was approaching the reception desk with small, slightly silly steps, as if he had never done this before. His wife, holding the briefcase, was at his side. There was only one receptionist on duty and she was occupied with two other guests. Waiting, Minkel gazed round in confusion. His wife, unimpressed, sized the place up. Across the lobby from them, behind a smoked-glass partition, a group of well-dressed Germans was assembling for some kind of function. She studied the guests disapprovingly, muttered something to her husband. The reception desk became vacant and Minkel took the briefcase from her hand: a tacit, instinctive transaction between partners. The receptionist was a blonde in a black dress. She checked the card index with her red fingernails before passing Minkel a form to fill in. The stairs were hitting Charlie’s heels, her damp hand was sticking on the wide banister, Minkel was a misted abstraction through her astigmatic spectacles. The floor lifted to her and she started her hesitant journey towards the reception desk. Minkel was stooped over the counter, filling in his form. He had put his Israeli passport at his elbow and was copying out its number. The briefcase stood on the floor beside his left foot; Mrs Minkel was out of shot. Placing herself on Minkel’s right, Charlie peered crookedly over his shoulder as he wrote. Mrs Minkel entered left, and was looking at Charlie in puzzlement. She nudged her husband. Aware finally that he was being studied at close quarters, Minkel slowly raised his venerable head and turned to her. Charlie cleared her throat, acting shy, which was no hardship. Now.