The Little Drummer Girl

by John le Carré

‘No.’

  ‘“Tayeh, my friend, we Palestinians are very lazy people in our exile. Why do we have no Palestinians in the Pentagon? In the State Department? Why are we not yet running the New York Times, Wall Street, the CIA? Why are we not making Hollywood movies about our great struggle, getting ourselves elected Mayor of New York, head of the Supreme Court? What is wrong with us, Tayeh? Why are we without enterprise? It is not enough that our people become doctors, scientists, schoolmasters. Why do we not run America as well? Is it because of this that we have to use bombs and machine guns?”’

  He was standing strictly before her, holding the briefcase by its handle like a good commuter.

  ‘You know what we should do?’

  She didn’t.

  ‘March. All of us. Before they destroy us for ever.’ Offering her his forearm, he lifted her to her feet. ‘From the United States, from Australia, Paris, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon – from everywhere in the world where there are Palestinians. We take ships to the borders. Planes. Millions of us. Like a great tide which nobody can turn back.’ He handed her the briefcase, then began swiftly gathering up his tools and packing them in the box. ‘Then all together, we march into our homeland, we claim our houses and our farms and our villages, even if we have to knock down their towns and settlements and kibbutzim in order to find them. It wouldn’t work. You know why not? They would never come.’ He dropped to a crouch, examining the threadbare carpet for tell-tale traces. ‘Our rich would not be able to sustain their social-economic drop in life-style,’ he explained, ironically emphasising the jargon. ‘Our merchants would not leave their banks and shops and offices. Our doctors would not give up their smart clinics, the lawyers their corrupt practices, our academics their comfortable universities.’ He was standing before her, and his smile was a triumph over all his pain. ‘So the rich make the money and the poor do the fighting. When was it any different?’

  She walked ahead of him down the stairs. Exit one tart, carrying her little box of tricks. The Coca-Cola van stood in the forecourt still, but he strode past it as if he had never seen it in his life and climbed into a farmer’s Ford, a diesel with bales of straw strapped to the roof. She got in beside him. Hills again. Pine trees laden on one side with fresh wet snow. Instructions, Joseph-style: Charlie, do you understand? Yes, Khalil, I understand. Then repeat it to me. She did. It is for peace, remember that. I will, Khalil, I will: for peace, for Michel, for Palestine; for Joseph and Khalil; for Marty and the revolution and for Israel, and for the theatre of the real.

  He had stopped beside a barn and put out the headlights. He was looking at his watch. From down the road a torch flashed twice. He reached across her and pushed open her door.

  ‘His name is Franz and you will tell him you are Margaret. Good luck.’

  The evening was moist and quiet, the street lamps of the old city centre hung over her like caged white moons in their iron brackets. She had made Franz drop her at the corner because she wanted the short walk across the bridge before she made her entrance. She wanted the puffed look of someone stepping in from outdoors, and the nip of cold on her face, and the hatred back in her mind. She was in an alley among low scaffolding, which closed round her like a spindly tunnel. She passed an art gallery full of self-portraits of a blond, unpleasing boy in spectacles, and another next to it with idealised landscapes that the boy would never enter. Graffiti screamed at her but she could not understand a word until she suddenly read ‘Fuck America’. Thanks for the translation, she thought. She was in the open air again, climbing concrete steps strewn with sand to beat the snow, but they were still slippery underfoot. She reached the top and saw the glass doors of the university library to her left. The lights were still burning in the students’ café. Rachel and a boy were sitting tensely at the window. She passed the first marble totem-pole, she was on the treewalk high above the carriageway, crossing to the farther side. Already the lecture hall rose ahead of her, its strawberry stone turned to blazing crimson by the floodlighting. Cars were pulling up; the first members of the audience were arriving, climbing the four steps to the front entrance, pausing to shake hands and congratulate one another on their immense prominence. A couple of security men perfunctorily checked ladies’ handbags. She kept walking. The truth will make you free. She passed the second totem-pole, heading for the down staircase.

  The briefcase was dangling in her right hand and she felt it brushing her thigh. A whining police siren made her shoulder muscles convulse in terror, but she kept going. Two police motorcycles with whirling blue lights pulled up, cosseting a shiny black Mercedes with a pennant. Usually when grand cars passed, she turned her head away in order not to give the occupants the satisfaction of being looked at, but tonight was different. Tonight she could walk tall; she had the answer in her hand. So she stared at them and was rewarded by a glimpse of a florid, overfed man in a black suit and silver tie; and a sullen wife with three chins and a mink rug. For great lies we need naturally a great audience, she remembered. A camera flashed and the eminent couple ascended to the glass doors, admired by at least three passersby. Soon, you bastards, she thought, soon.

  At the bottom of the steps turn right. She did so and kept going till she reached the corner. Be sure you do not fall into the stream, Helga had said for extra humour; Khalil’s bombs are not waterproof, Charlie, and nor are you. She turned left and began skirting the building, following a pebble pavement on which the snow had failed to settle. The pavement widened and became a courtyard, and in its centre, beside a group of concrete flower tubs, stood a police caravan. In front of it, two uniformed policemen were preening at each other, lifting their boots and laughing, then scowling round at anyone who dared watch. She was not fifty feet from the side door, and she began to feel the calm that she was waiting for – the sensation, almost of levitation, that came over her when she stepped on stage and left her other identities behind her in the dressing-room. She was Imogen from South Africa, long on courage, short on grace, hastening to assist a great liberal hero. She was embarrassed – dammit, she was embarrassed to death – but she was going to do the right thing or bust. She had reached the side entrance. It was closed. She tried the door handle but it didn’t turn. Dither. She put the flat of her hand on the panel and pushed but it wouldn’t budge. She stood back and stared at it, then looked round for someone to help her, and by then the two policemen had stopped flirting with each other and were eyeing her suspiciously, but neither came forward.

  Curtain up. Go.

  ‘I say, excuse me,’ she called to them. ‘Do you speak English?’

  Still they did not move. If there was a distance to be covered, then let her do the walking herself. She was only a citizen, after all, and a woman at that.

  ‘I said do you speak English? Englisch – sprechen Sie? Someone needs to give this to the Professor. Immediately. Will you come over here, please?’

  Both scowled, but only one of them came over to her. Slowly, as befitted his dignity.

  ‘Toilette nicht hier,’ he snapped, and tipped his head up the road where she had come from.

  ‘I don’t want the toilet. I want you to find somebody who will give this briefcase to Professor Minkel. Minkel,’ she repeated, and held up the briefcase.

  The policeman was young and did not care for youth. He did not take the briefcase from her, but he made her hold it while he pressed the catch and ascertained that it was locked.

  Oh boy, she thought: you just committed suicide and you’re still scowling at me.

  ‘Öffnen,’ he ordered.

  ‘I can’t open it. It’s locked.’ She let a note of desperation enter her voice. ‘It’s the Professor’s, don’t you understand? For all I know, it’s got his lecture notes in it. He needs it for tonight.’ Turning from him, she beat loudly on the door. ‘Professor Minkel? It’s me, Imogen Baastrup from Wits. Oh God.’

  The second policeman had joined them. He was older and dark-jawed. Charlie appealed to his greater wisdom. ‘Well, do you speak
English?’ she said. At the same moment, the door opened a few inches and a goatish male face peered at her with deep suspicion. He spoke something in German to the nearer policeman, and Charlie caught the word ‘Amerikanerin’ in his reply.

  ‘I am not American,’ she retorted, now nearly in tears. ‘My name is Imogen Baastrup, I’m from South Africa, and I’m bringing Professor Minkel’s briefcase to him. He lost it. Would you kindly give him this immediately, because I’m sure he’s desperate for it. Please!’

  The door opened wide enough to reveal the rest of him: a pudgy, mayoral-looking man of sixty or more in a black suit. He was very pale, and to Charlie’s secret eye he was very frightened too.

  ‘Sir. Do you speak English, please? Do you?’

  Not only did he speak it, he had sworn oaths in it. For he said, ‘I do,’ so solemnly that there would be no going back on it for the rest of his life.

  ‘Then will you please give this to Professor Minkel with Imogen Baastrup’s compliments and tell him she’s sorry, the hotel made a stupid muddle, and I’m greatly looking forward to hearing him tonight –’

  She held out the briefcase but the mayoral man refused to take it. He looked at the policeman behind her, and seemed to receive some faint reassurance from him; he looked at the briefcase again, and then at Charlie.

  ‘Come this way,’ he said, like a stage butler earning his ten quid a night, and stood aside to admit her.

  She was appalled. This wasn’t in the script. Not in Khalil’s or Helga’s or anybody else’s. What happened if Minkel unlocked it under her very eyes?

  ‘Oh I can’t do that. I have to take my place in the auditorium. I haven’t got my ticket yet! Please!’

  But the mayoral man had his orders too, and he had his fears, for as she shoved the briefcase at him he leapt away from it as if it were on fire.

  The door closed, they were in a corridor with lagged pipes running along the ceiling. Briefly they reminded her of the overhead pipes at the Olympic Village. Her reluctant escort walked ahead of her. She smelt oil and heard the repressed thunder of a furnace; she felt a wave of heat across her face and considered fainting or being sick. The handle of the briefcase was drawing blood, she could feel the warm slime of it trickling between her fingers.

  They had reached a door marked ‘Vorstand’. The mayoral man tapped and called, ‘Oberhauser! Schnell!’ As he did so, she looked desperately back and saw two fair boys in leather jackets in the corridor behind her. They carried machine guns. Christ Almighty, what is this? The door opened, Oberhauser stepped in first and stood quickly aside as if disowning her. She was in a movie set for Journey’s End. Wings and rear stage were sandbagged; great bales of wadding lined the ceiling, held in place by chicken wire. Sandbag barriers made a zigzag walkway from the door. Centre stage stood a low coffee table with a tray of drinks. Beside it, in a low armchair, sat Minkel like a waxwork staring straight towards her. Opposite him his wife, and next to him a tubby German woman with a fur stole whom Charlie took to be Oberhauser’s wife.

  So much for the talent, and crammed into the wings among the sandbags was the rest of the unit, in two distinct groups, their spokesmen shoulder to shoulder at the centre. The home side was led by Kurtz; to his left stood a randy, middle-aged man with a weak face, which was Charlie’s swift dismissal of Alexis. Next to Alexis stood his wolf-boys, their hostile faces turned towards her. Facing them stood bits of the family she already knew, with strangers added, and the darkness of their Jewish features in contrast to their German counterparts was one of those images that would remain a tableau in her memory for as long as she lived. Kurtz the ringmaster had his finger to his lips, and his left wrist lifted for him to study his watch.

  She started to say, ‘Where is he?’ and then, with a rush of joy and anger, she saw him, apart from everyone as usual, the fraught and lonely producer on his first night. Coming swiftly to her, he placed himself a little to one side, leaving her a path to Minkel.

  ‘Say your piece to him, Charlie,’ he instructed her quietly. ‘Say what you would say and ignore everyone who is not at the table’ – and all she needed was the clack of the clapperboard in her face.

  His hand came near to her own, she could feel the hairs touching her skin. She wanted to say, ‘I love you – how are you?’ But there were other lines to say, so she took a deep breath and said them instead, because that was, after all, the name of their relationship.

  ‘Professor, a most terrible thing has happened,’ she began in a rush. ‘The stupid hotel people sent your briefcase to my room with my luggage, they saw me talking to you, I suppose, and there was my luggage and there was your luggage and somehow that crazy boy just took it into his dumb head that it was my case –’ She turned to Joseph to tell him she’d run dry.

  ‘Give the briefcase to the Professor,’ he ordered.

  Minkel was standing up, looking wooden and far away in his mind, like a man receiving a long prison sentence. Mrs Minkel was making a show of smiling. Charlie’s knees were paralysed, but with Joseph’s hand on her elbow, she managed to topple forward, holding the case out to him while she said some more lines.

  ‘Only I didn’t see it till half an hour ago, they’d shoved it in the cupboard there and my dresses were all hanging down over it, then when I did see it and I read the label, I nearly had a blue fit –’

  Minkel would have accepted the briefcase, but no sooner did she offer it than other hands spirited it to a large black box lying on the floor with heavy cables snaking from it. Suddenly everyone seemed scared of her and was cowering behind the sandbags. Joseph’s strong arms gathered her after them; his hand shoved her head down until she was looking at her own waist. But not before she had seen a deep-sea diver muffled in a heavy bomb suit wade towards the box. He wore a helmet with a thick glass visor, and under it a surgical mask to stop it fogging from inside. A muffled order commanded silence; Joseph had drawn her to him and was half smothering her with his own body. Another order signalled a general relief; heads rose again, but still he held her down. She heard the sounds of feet departing in orderly haste, and when at last he released her, she saw Litvak hastening forward with what was evidently a bomb of his own, a more obvious affair than Khalil’s, with trailing wires not yet connected. Joseph meanwhile was leading her firmly back to the centre of the room.

  ‘Continue your explanations,’ he ordered in her ear. ‘You were describing how you read the label. Go on from there. What did you do?’

  Take a deep breath. Speech continues.

  ‘Then when I asked at reception they said you were out for the evening, you had this lecture down at the university, so I just hopped a cab and – I mean I don’t know how you can forgive me. Look, I must fly. Good luck, Professor, have a great speech.’

  On a nod from Kurtz, Minkel had taken a key chain from his pocket and was pretending to select a key, even though he had no briefcase to play with. But Charlie, under Joseph’s urgent guidance, was already making for the door, half walking, half carried by his arm round her waist.

  I won’t do it, Jose, I can’t, I’ve spent my courage like you said. Don’t let me go, Jose, don’t. Behind her she heard muffled orders and the sounds of hasty footsteps as everyone seemed to beat a retreat.

  ‘Two minutes,’ Kurtz called after them in warning.

  They were back in the corridor with the two fair boys and their machine guns.

  ‘Where did you meet him?’ Joseph asked, in a low fast voice.

  ‘A Hotel Eden. A sort of brothel on the edge of town. Next to a chemist. He’s got a red Coke van. FR stroke BT something something 5. And a clapped-out Ford saloon. I didn’t get the number.’

  ‘Open your bag.’

  She did so. Fast, the way he talked. Taking out her little clock radio, he replaced it with a similar one from his own pocket.

  ‘It is not the same device that we used before,’ he warned swiftly. ‘It will receive on one station only. It will still tell the time, but it has no alarm. But it tr
ansmits, and it tells us where you are.’

  ‘When?’ she said stupidly.

  ‘What are Khalil’s orders to you now?’

  ‘I’m to walk down the road and keep walking – Jose, when will you come? – for Christ’s sake!’

  His face had a haggard and desperate seriousness, but there was no concession in it.

  ‘Listen, Charlie. Are you listening?’

  ‘Yes, Jose, I am listening.’

  ‘If you press the volume button on your clock radio – not turn it, but press it – we shall know he is asleep. Do you understand?’

  ‘He won’t sleep like that.’

  ‘What do you mean? How do you know how he sleeps?’

  ‘He’s like you, he’s not the kind, he’s awake all day and night. He’s – Jose, I can’t go back. Don’t make me.’

  She was staring pleadingly at his face, still waiting for it to yield, but it had set rigidly against her.

  ‘He wants me to sleep with him, for God’s sake! He wants a wedding night, Jose. Doesn’t that stir you slightly? He’s taking me over where Michel left off. He didn’t like him. He’s going to even the score. Do I still go?’

  She held him so fiercely that he had difficulty breaking her grasp. She stood against him with her head down, against his chest, wanting him to take her back into his protection. But instead he put his hands under her arms and straightened her, and she saw his face again, locked and bolted, telling her that love was not their province: not his, not hers, and least of all Khalil’s. He started her on her journey, she shook him off and went alone; he took a step after her and stopped. She looked back and hated him; she closed her eyes and opened them, she let out a deep breath.

  I’m dead.

  She stepped into the street, straightened herself and, crisp as a soldier and quite as blind, marched briskly up a narrow street, passing a seedy nightclub displaying illuminated photographs of girls of thirty-something baring unimpressive breasts. That’s what I should be doing, she thought. She reached a main road, remembered her pedestrian drill, looked left and saw a mediaeval gate tower with a sign for McDonald’s hamburgers written tastefully across it. The lights turned green for her; she kept going and saw high black hills blocking the end of the road and a pale, clouded sky twisting restively behind them. She glanced round and saw the Cathedral spire following her. She turned to her right and walked more slowly than she had ever walked in her life, down a leafy avenue of patrician houses. Now she was counting to herself. Numbers. Now she was saying rhymes. Jose Goes Down Town. Now she was remembering what had happened in the lecture hall, but without Kurtz, without Joseph, and without the murderous technicians of the two unreconciled sides. Ahead of her, Rossino was pushing his motorbike silently out of a gateway. She walked up to him, he handed her a helmet and a leather jacket, and as she started to put them on, something made her look back in the direction she had come from, and she saw a lazy orange flash stretch towards her down the damp cobble like the path of the setting sun, and she noticed how long it stayed on the eye after it had disappeared. Then at last she heard the sound she had been dully expecting: a distant yet intimate thud, like a breaking of something unmendable deep inside herself; the precise and permanent end to love. Well, Joseph, yes. Goodbye.