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; on 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 wire snippers, 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.
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 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.