"I could christen the bastard now," she said.
She thought of going for him as she had for Rachel, three quick strides and one good swipe before they stopped her, but she knew she'd never make it, so she contented herself with a volley of obscenities instead, to which Joseph listened with an air of distant recollection. He had changed into a brown lightweight pullover; the band leader's silk shirt, the bottle-top gold cuff links were gone as if for ever.
"My advice to you is to suspend your judgement and your bad language until you hear what these two men have to tell you," he said, without lifting his head to her, while he continued setting out his bulletins. "You are with good people here. Better than you are accustomed to, I would say. You have much to learn and, if you are lucky, much to do. Conserve your energy," he advised, in what sounded like a distracted private memo to himself. And continued to busy himself with his papers.
He doesn't care, she thought bitterly. He's put down his burden and the burden was me. The two men at the table were still standing, waiting for her to sit, which was a madness in itself. Madness to be polite to a girl you have just kidnapped, madness to lecture her on goodness, madness to sit down to a conference with your abductors after you have had a nice cup of tea and fixed your make-up. She sat down nevertheless, Kurtz and Litvak did the same.
"Who's got the cards?" she blurted facetiously as she punched away a stray tear with her knuckles. She noticed a scuffed brown briefcase on the floor between them, its mouth open, but not wide enough to see inside. And yes, the papers on the desk were press cuttings, and though Mike was already packing them away in a folder, she had no difficulty at all in recognising them as cuttings about herself and her career.
"You have got the right girl, you're sure of that, are you?" she said determinedly. She was addressing Litvak, mistakenly suspecting him to be the more suggestible on account of his spindly frame. But she really didn't care whom she was addressing as long as she kept afloat. "Only if you're looking for the three masked men who did the bank on Fifty-second Street, they went the other way. I was the innocent bystander who gave birth ahead of time."
"Charlie, we assuredly have the right girl!" Kurtz cried delightedly, lifting both his thick arms from the table at once. He glanced at Litvak, then across the room at Joseph, one benign but hard glance of calculation, and the next moment he was off, speaking with the animal force that had so overpowered Quilley and Alexis and countless other unlikely collaborators throughout his extraordinary career: the same rich Euro-American accents; the same hacking gestures of the forearm.
But Charlie was an actress, and her professional instincts had never been clearer. Neither Kurtz's verbal torrent nor her own mystification at the violence done to her dulled her many-stranded perceptions of what was going on in the room. We're on stage, she thought; it's us and them. As the young sentries dispersed themselves to the gloom of the perimeter, she could almost hear the tiptoe shuffle of the latecomers jockeying for their seats on the other side of the curtain. The set, now that she examined it, resembled the bedchamber of a deposed tyrant; her captors, the freedom fighters who had ousted him. Behind Kurtz's broad paternal brow as he sat facing her, she made out the dust-shadow of a vanished imperial bed-head imprinted on the crumbling plaster. Behind skinny Litvak hung a scrolled gilt mirror strategically placed for the pleasure of departed lovers. The bare floorboards provided a boxed and stagey echo; the downlight accentuated the hollows of the two men's faces and the drabness of their partisan costumes. In place of his shiny Madison Avenue suit--though Charlie lacked that standard of comparison--Kurtz now sported a shapeless army bush jacket with dark sweat patches at the armpits and a row of gunmetal pens jammed into the button-down pocket; while Litvak, the Party Intellectual, favoured a short-sleeved khaki shirt from which his white arms poked like stripped twigs. Yet she had only to glance at either man to recognise their communality with Joseph. They are drilled in the same things, she thought, they share the same ideas and practices. Kurtz's watch lay before him on the desk. It reminded her of Joseph's water-bottle.
Two shuttered French windows gave on to the front of the house. Two more overlooked the rear. The double doors to the wings were closed, and if she had ever thought of making a dash for it, she knew now that it was hopeless, for though the sentries affected a workshop languidness, she had recognised in them already--she had reason to--the readiness of professionals. Beyond the sentries again, in the farthest corners of the set, glowed four mosquito coils, like slow-burning fuses giving out a musky scent. And behind her, Joseph's little reading lamp--despite everything, or perhaps because of it, the only comfortable light.
All this she took in almost before Kurtz's rich voice had begun filling the room with its tortuously impelling phrases. If Charlie had not already guessed that she was headed for a long night, that relentless, pounding voice told her now.
"Charlie, what we seek to do, we wish to define ourselves, we wish to introduce ourselves, and though nobody here is given to apologising overmuch, we also wish to say we're sorry. Some things have to be done. We did a couple of them and that's how it is. Sorry, greetings, and again welcome. Hi."
Having paused long enough for her to unleash another volley of curses, he smiled broadly and resumed.
"Charlie, I have no doubt that you have many questions you would like to throw our way and in due course we shall surely answer them as best we can. Meanwhile let us try at least to supply a couple of basics for you. You ask, who are we?" This time he made no pause at all, for the fact was that he was a lot less interested in studying the effect of his words than in using them to gain a friendly mastery of the proceedings and of her. "Charlie, primarily we are decent people as Joseph said, good people. In that sense, like good and decent people the world over, I guess you could reasonably call us non-sectarian, non-aligned, and deeply concerned like yourself about the many wrong directions the world is taking. If I add that we are also Israeli citizens, I trust you will not immediately foam at the mouth, vomit, or jump out of the window, unless of course it is your personal conviction that Israel should be swept into the sea, napalmed, or handed over gift-wrapped to one or another of the many fastidious Arab organisations committed to our elimination." Sensing a secret shrinking in her, Kurtz lunged for it immediately."Is that your conviction, Charlie?" he enquired, dropping his voice. "Perhaps it is. Why don't you just tell us how you feel about that? You want to get up right now? Go home? You have your air ticket, I believe. We'll give you money. Want to run for it?"
An icy stillness descended over Charlie's manner, disguising the chaos and momentary terror inside her. That Joseph was Jewish she had not doubted since her abortive interrogation of him on the beach. But Israel was a confused abstraction to her, engaging both her protectiveness and her hostility. She had never supposed for one second that it would ever get up and come to face her in the flesh.
"So what is this, actually?" she demanded, ignoring Kurtz's offer to discontinue dealings before they had begun. "A war party? A punitive raid? You going to put the electrodes on me? What the hell's the big idea?"
"Ever met an Israeli before?" Kurtz enquired.
"Not that I know of."
"You have some racial objection to Jews overall? Jews as Jews, period? We don't smell bad to you, have improper table manners? Tell us. We understand these things."
"Don't be bloody silly." Her voice had gone wrong, or was it her hearing?