The only really unforeseen element was the dog-bite; what if the brute had rabies? Somewhere they bought some serum, and injected him just in case.
With Yanuka temporarily removed from society, the vital thing was to make sure nobody, in Beirut or anywhere else, noticed the gap. They knew already that he was of an independent and carefree nature. They knew he made a cult of doing the illogical thing, that he was celebrated for altering his plans from one second to the next, partly on a whim, and partly because he believed with reason that this was the best way to confuse his trail. They knew of his recently acquired passion for things Greek, and his proven habit of chasing off in search of antiquities while in transit. On his last run, he had gone as far south as Epidaurus without so much as a by-your-leave from anyone--a great arc, right off his route, for no known reason. These random practices had in the past rendered him extremely hard to catch. Used against him, as now, he was in Litvak's cool judgement unsavable, for his own side could keep no better check on him than his enemies. The team seized him and wafted him from view. The team waited. And in all the places where it was able to listen, not one alarm bell rang, there was not a whisper of unease. If Yanuka's masters had a vision of him at all, Shimon Litvak cautiously concluded, then it was of a young man in his prime of mind and body, gone off in search of life, and--who knows?--new soldiers for the cause.
So the fiction, as Kurtz and his team now called it, could begin. Whether it could also end--whether there was time, by Kurtz's old steel watch, for it to unfold as he determined--that was another matter altogether. The pressures upon Kurtz were of two kinds: the first, crudely enough, was to show progress or have Misha Gavron close his shop. The second was Gavron's threat that if no such progress was forthcoming, he would no longer be able to hold back the mounting outcry for a military solution. Kurtz dreaded this.
"You preach at me like the English!" Gavron the Rook squawked at him in his cracked voice, during one of their frequent arguments. "And look at their crimes!"
"So maybe we should bomb the English too," Kurtz suggested, with a furious smile.
But the subject of the English was by then not coincidental; for ironically it was to England that Kurtz was now looking for his salvation.
three
Joseph and Charlie were formally introduced to each other on the island of Mykonos, on a beach with two tavernas, at a late luncheon in the second half of August, just around the time when the Greek sun hits its fiercest heat. Or, in terms of the larger history, four weeks after Israeli jets bombed the crowded Palestinian quarter of Beirut, in what was afterwards declared to be an effort to destroy the leadership, though there were no leaders among the several hundred dead--unless of course they were the leaders of tomorrow, for many were children.
"Charlie, say hullo to Joseph," said somebody excitedly, and it was done.
Yet both behaved as if the meeting had scarcely taken place: she by pulling her revolutionist's frown and holding out her hand for an English schoolgirl's handshake of quite vicious respectability; and he by casting her a glance of calm and tolerant appraisal, strangely without ambition.
"Well, Charlie, yes, hullo," he agreed, and smiled no more than was necessary to be polite. So it was actually he, not Charlie, who said hullo.
She noticed that he had the military mannerism of pursing his lips just before he spoke. His voice, which was foreign and held under close arrest, had a daunting mildness--she was more aware of what was held back than what was given. His behaviour towards her was thus the obverse of aggression.
Her name was actually Charmian but she was known to everyone as "Charlie," and often as "Charlie the Red" in deference to the colour of her hair and to her somewhat crazy radical stances, which were her way of caring for the world and coming to grips with its injustices. She was the outsider of a rackety troupe of young British acting people who slept in a tumbledown farmhouse half a mile inland and descended to the shore in a shaggy, close-knit family that never broke up. How they had come by the farmhouse in the first place--how they had come to be on the island at all--was a miracle to all of them, though as actors they derived no surprise from miracles. Their benefactor was a wealthy City company that had recently taken to playing angel to the itinerant stage. Their tour of the provinces over, the troupe's half-dozen cadre members were astonished to find themselves treated to rest and recreation at the company's expense. A charter whisked them there, the farmhouse stood welcoming, and spending-money was assured by a modest extension of their terms of salary. It was too kind, too generous, too sudden, too long ago. Only a bunch of Fascist swine, they had joyously agreed when they received their invitations, could have behaved with such disarming philanthropy. After which they had forgotten how they came to be there, until one or another would sleepily raise his glass and mutter the company's name in a querulous, half-hearted toast.
Charlie was not the prettiest of the girls, by any means, though her sexuality shone through, as did her incurable goodwill, which was never quite concealed by her posturing. Lucy, though stupid, was gorgeous, whereas by accepted standards Charlie was rather plain: moche, with a long strong nose and prematurely shadowed face that was one minute childish and the next so old and mournful you feared for her experience of life this far, and wondered what more was to become of her. Sometimes she was their foundling, sometimes their mother, the one who counted the money and knew where the anti-sting was, and the sticking-plaster for cut feet. In that r?le, as in all her others, she was their largest-hearted and their most capable. And now and then she was their conscience, bawling them out for some real or imagined crime of chauvinism, sexism, or Western apathy. Her right to do this was vested in her by her class, for Charlie was their bit of quality, as they liked to say: privately educated and the daughter of a stockbroker, even if--as she never tired of telling them--the poor man had ended his days behind bars for defrauding clients. But class will out, whatever.
And finally, she was their undisputed leading lady. When evening came, and the family took to acting little dramas to each other in their straw hats and flowing beach gowns, it was Charlie, when she cared to take part, who was the best at it. If they decided to sing to each other, it was Charlie who played her guitar a little too well for their voices; Charlie who knew the protest folk songs, and sang them in an angry, mannish style. At other times they would lounge together in sullen council, smoking marijuana and drinking retsina at thirty drachmas a half-litre. All but Charlie, who would lie apart from them like someone who had smoked and drunk all she needed long ago. "You wait till my revolution dawns," she'd warn them, in a drowsy voice. "I'll have the whole bunch of you babies out there tilling turnips before breakfast." At this, they would pretend to take fright: where will it start,Chas?Where will the first head roll? "In bloody Rickmansworth," she'd reply, harking on her storm-tossed suburban childhood. "We're going to drive all their bloody Jaguars into their bloody swimming pools." And they would let out wails of fear, even though they knew that Charlie herself had a weakness for fast cars.
Meanwhile they loved her. Indisputably. And Charlie, for all that she denied it, loved them in return.