"Such as who? Who needs to die? Those poor sods you shoot up on the West Bank? Or the ones you bomb in Lebanon?" How on earth had they come to be talking about death? she wondered, even as she put the crazy question. Had she started it, had he? It made no difference. He was already weighing his reply.
"Only those who break completely the human bond, Charlie," Kurtz replied with steady emphasis."They deserve to die."
Stubbornly, she went on fighting him: "Are there Jews like that?"
"Jews, yes, Israelis surely also, but we are not among them, and mercifully, they are not our problem here tonight."
He had the authority to talk that way. He had the answers children long for. He had the background and the whole room knew it, Charlie included: that he was a man who dealt only in things he had experienced. When he asked questions, you knew he had himself been questioned. When he gave orders, you knew he had obeyed the orders of others. When he spoke of death, it was clear that death had passed by him often and very close, and might any moment come his way again. And when he chose to issue a warning to her, as he did now, he was quite evidently on terms with the dangers he spoke of: "Do not confuse our play with entertainment, Charlie," he told her earnestly. "We are not speaking of some enchanted forest. When the lights go down on the stage, it will be night-time in the street. When the actors laugh they will be happy, and when they weep they will very likely be bereaved and broken-hearted. And if they get hurt--and they will, Charlie--they will surely not be in a position, when the curtain falls, to jump up and run for the last bus home. There's no squeamish pulling back from the harsher scenes, no days off sick. It's peak performance all the way down the line. If that's what you like, if that's what you can handle--and we think it is--then hear us out. Otherwise let's skip the audition right now."
In his Euro-Bostonian drawl, faint as a distant signal on the transatlantic radio, Shimon Litvak made a first husky interjection: "Charlie never walked away from a fight in her life, Marty," he objected, in the tone of a disciple reassuring his master. "We don't just believe that, we know it. It's all over her record."
They were halfway there, Kurtz told Misha Gavron later, describing, during a rare ceasefire in their relationship, this point in the proceedings: a lady who consents to listen is a lady who consents, he said, and Gavron very nearly smiled.
Halfway, perhaps--yet, in terms of the time ahead of them, barely at the beginning. By insisting on compression, Kurtz was not in the least insisting upon haste. He placed great weight upon a laboured manner, on adding fuel to her frustration, on having her impatience racing out ahead of them like a lead-horse. Nobody understood better than Kurtz what it was like to possess a mercurial nature in a plodding world, or how to play upon its restlessness. Within minutes of her arrival, while she was still scared, he had befriended her: a father of Joseph's lover. Within minutes more, he had offered her the resolution to all the disordered components of a life so far. He had appealed to the actress in her, to the martyr, to the adventurer; he had flattered the daughter and excited the aspirant. He had granted her an early glimpse of the new family she might care to join, knowing that deep down, like most rebels, she was only looking for a better conformity. And most of all, by heaping such benefits upon her, he had made her rich, which, as Charlie herself had long preached to anyone who would hear her, was the beginning of subservience.
"So, Charlie, what we propose," said Kurtz, in a slower, more genial voice, "we propose an open-ended audition, a string of questions which we invite you to answer very frankly, very truthfully, even though for the meanwhile remaining necessarily in the dark about the purpose of them."
He paused but she didn't speak, and there was by now a tacit submission in her silence.
"We ask you never to evaluate, never to try to come to our side of the net, never to seek to please or gratify us in any regard. Many things you might consider negative in your life we would surely see differently. Do not attempt to do our thinking for us." A short jab of the forearm entrenched this amicable warning. "Question. What happens--whether now or later--what happens should either one of us elect to jump off the escalator? Charlie, let me try to answer that."
"You do that, Mart," she advised, and putting her elbows on the table, rested her chin in her hands and smiled at him with a look intended to convey dazed unbelief.
"Thank you, Charlie, so listen carefully, please. Depending on the precise moment you want out or we do, depending on the degree of your knowledge at that time and our assessment of you, we follow one of two courses. Course one, we extract a solemn promise from you, we give you money, we send you back to England. A handshake, mutual trust, good friends, and a certain vigilance on our side to make sure you keep the bargain. You follow me?"
She lowered her gaze to the table, partly to escape his scrutiny, partly to conceal her growing excitement. For that was another thing Kurtz counted on, which most intelligence professionals forget too soon: to the uninitiated, the secret world is of itself attractive. Simply by turning on its axis, it can draw the weakly anchored to its centre.
"Course two, a little rougher, still not terrible. We place you in quarantine. We like you, but we fear we have reached a point where you might compromise our project, where the part we are proposing, say, cannot safely be offered any place else while you are at large to talk about it."
She knew without looking that he was smiling his good-hearted smile, suggesting that such frailty on Charlie's part would be only human.
"So what we can do in that case, Charlie," he resumed, "we take a nice house somewhere--say, on a beach, somewhere pleasant, no problem. We give you company, some people similar to the kids here. Nice people but able. We fake some reason for your absence, most likely a voguish one that fits your volatile reputation, such as a mystical sojourn to the East."
His thick fingers had found his old wristwatch on the table before him. Without looking at it, Kurtz lifted it and set it down six inches nearer to him. Needing an activity herself, Charlie took up a pen and began to doodle on the pad before her.
"Once you are out of quarantine, we do not desert you--far from it. We straighten you out, we give you a sack of money, we keep in touch with you, make sure you are not incautious in any way, and as soon as it's safe we help you to resume your career and friendships. That's the worst that can happen, Charlie, and I'm only telling it to you because you may be harbouring some crazy notion that by saying ‘no' to us, now or later, you're going to wake up dead in a river wearing a pair of concrete boots. We don't deal that way. Least of all with friends."
She was still doodling. Closing a circle with her pencil, she drew a neat diagonal arrow above it to make it male. She had flicked through some work of popular psychology that used that symbol. Suddenly, like a man annoyed at being interrupted, Joseph spoke; yet his voice, for all its severity, had a thrilling and warm effect on her.
"Charlie, it will not be enough for you to play the sullen witness. It is your own dangerous future they are discussing. Do you mean to sit there and allow them to dispose of it practically without consulting you? A commitment, do you understand? Charlie, come!"
She drew another circle. Another boy. She had heard everything Kurtz had said, every innuendo. She could have played back every word for him, just as she had done for Joseph on the Acropolis. She was as keen-witted and alert as she had been in her life, but every cunning instinct in her told her to dissemble and withhold.
"So how long does the show run, Mart?" she asked, in a lacklustre voice as if Joseph had never spoken at all.
Kurtz rephrased her question: "Well now, I guess what you really mean is what happens to you when the job runs out. Is that right?"