Kurtz was still smiling, seeming to wait for him to go on. But Joseph had finished.
She had said yes. She must have done. Or yes to the next phase at least, because she felt a slight movement of relief around her, and then, to her disappointment, nothing more. In her hyperbolic state of mind she had imagined her whole audience bursting into applause: exhausted Mike sinking his head into his spidery white hands and weeping unashamedly; Marty, like the old man he had turned out to be, grasping her shoulders in his thick hands--my child, my daughter--pressing his prickly face against her cheek; the kids, her soft-footed fans, breaking ranks to gather round and touch her. And Joseph folding her to his breast. But in the theatre of deeds, it seemed, people didn't do that. Kurtz and Litvak were busy tidying papers, closing briefcases. Joseph was conferring with Dimitri and the South African Rose. Raoul was clearing away the débris of tea and sugary biscuits. Rachel alone seemed concerned with what became of their recruit. Touching Charlie's arm, she led her towards the landing for what she called a nice lie down. They had not reached the door before Joseph softly spoke her name. He was staring at her with pensive curiosity.
"So good night then," he repeated, as if the words were a puzzle to him.
"So good night to you, too," Charlie retorted, with a battered grin that should have signified the final curtain. But it didn't. As Charlie followed Rachel down the corridor, she was surprised to discover herself in her father's London club, on her way towards the ladies' annexe for lunch. Stopping, she gazed round her trying to identify the source of the hallucination. Then she heard it: the restless ticking of an unseen teleprinter, pushing out the latest market prices. She guessed it came from behind a half-closed door. But Rachel hurried her past before she had a chance to find out.
The three men were back in the resting room, where the chattering of the code machine had summoned them like a bugle. While Becker and Litvak looked on, Kurtz crouched at the desk deciphering with an air of utter disbelief the newest, unexpected, urgent, and strictly private telegram from Jerusalem. From behind him they could watch the dark sweat patch spread across his shirt like a leaking wound. The radio operator was gone, packed off by Kurtz as soon as Jerusalem's coded text began to print itself. The silence in the house was otherwise very deep. If birds sang or traffic passed, they did not hear it. They heard only the stop and start of the printer.
"I never saw you better, Gadi," declared Kurtz, for whom no one activity was ever quite enough. He was speaking English, the language of Gavron's text. "Masterful, high-minded, incisive." He tore off a sheet and waited for the next to print itself. "All that a girl adrift could wish for in her saviour. That right, Shimon?" The machine resumed.
"Some of our colleagues in Jerusalem--Mr. Gavron, to name but one--they questioned my selection of you, Mr. Litvak here for another. Not me. I had the confidence." Muttering a mild curse, he tore off the second sheet. "That Gadi, he's the best I ever had, I told them," he resumed. "A lion's heart, a poet's head: my very words. A life of violence has not coarsened him, I said. How does she handle, Gadi?"
And he actually turned his head and tilted it, watching for Becker's answer.
"Didn't you notice?" Becker said.
If Kurtz had noticed, he was not at present saying so. The message completed, he swung right round on his swivel chair, holding the sheets strictly upright before him to catch the desk light that came over his shoulder. But it was Litvak, oddly, who spoke first--Litvak who gave vent to a clenched and strident outburst of impatience that took his two colleagues by surprise. "They've planted another bomb!" he blurted. "Tell us! Where was it? How many of us have they killed this time?"
Kurtz slowly shook his head, and smiled for the first time since the message had come in.
"A bomb, maybe, Shimon. But nobody died from it. Not yet."
"Just let him read it," Becker said. "Don't let him play you."
But Kurtz preferred to extrapolate. "Misha Gavron greets us and sends us three further messages," he said. "Message one, certain installations in the Lebanon will be hit tomorrow, but those concerned will be sure to avoid our target houses. Message two"--he tossed aside his pieces of paper--"message two is an order, akin in quality and perception to the order we received earlier tonight. We are to drop the gallant Dr. Alexis by yesterday. No further contact. Misha Gavron has turned over his case file to certain wise psychologists who have ruled him as crazy as a bedbug."
Litvak again began to protest. Perhaps extreme tiredness affected him that way. Perhaps the heat did, for the night had turned very hot. Kurtz, still with his smile, talked him gently down to earth.
"Calm yourself, Shimon. Our gallant leader is being a little bit political, that is all. If Alexis jumps the wall and there is a scandal affecting our country's relationship with a sorely needed ally, Marty Kurtz here takes the rap. If Alexis stays our side, keeps his mouth shut, and does what we tell him, Misha Gavron takes the glory. You know how Misha treats me. I'm his Jew."
"And the third message?" Becker said.
"Our leader advises us that there is very little time. The hounds are baying at his heels, he says. He means our heels, naturally."
At Kurtz's suggestion, Litvak went off to pack his toothbrush. Left alone with Becker, Kurtz gave a grateful sigh of relief, and, much easier in his manner, wandered over to the truckle bed and picked up a French passport, opened it, and studied the personal particulars, committing them to memory. "You are the deliverer of our success, Gadi," he observed as he read. "Any gaps, special needs, you let me know. Hear me?"
Becker heard him.
"The kids say you made a fine couple up there on the Acropolis. Like a pair of movie stars, they tell me."
"Thank them for me."
Armed with an old, clogged hairbrush, Kurtz stood himself before the mirror and set to work to give himself a parting.
"A case like this, a girl involved, a concept, I leave it to the case officer's discretion," he remarked reflectively as he laboured. "Sometimes it pays to keep a distance, sometimes--He tossed the hairbrush into an open case.
"This one's distance," Becker said.
The door opened. Litvak, dressed for the city and carrying a briefcase, was impatient for his master's company.
"We're late," he said, with an unfriendly glance at Becker.
And yet, Charlie, for all their manipulation of her, was not coerced--not by Kurtz's standards, anyway. It was a point on which he placed stress from the outset. A durable basis of morality, he ruled, was essential to their plan. In the early stages, yes, there had been fancy talk of pressure, domination, even sexual enslavement to some less scrupulous Apollo than Becker; of confining Charlie in fragmenting circumstances for a few nights before offering her the hand of friendship. Gavron's wise psychologists, having read her dossier, put forward all sorts of fatuous suggestions, including some that were on the brutal side. But it was the tested operational mind of Kurtz that won the day against Jerusalem's swelling army of experts. Volunteers fight harder and longer, he had argued. Volunteers find their own ways to persuade themselves. And besides, if you are proposing marriage to a lady, it is wiser not to rape her first.