She shifted restlessly.
"Repeatedly, in my letters, in our long discussions, I have promised to bring you to the point of action. But I have prevaricated. I have delayed. Until tonight. Perhaps I do not trust you. Or perhaps I have learned to love you too much and do not wish to put you in the front line. You do not know which of these is true, but sometimes you have felt hurt by my secrecy. As your letters reveal."
The letters, she thought again; always the letters.
"So how, in practical terms, do you become my little soldier? That is what we are discussing tonight. Here. In that bed you are sitting on. On the last night of our Greek honeymoon.
Maybe our last night ever, for you can never be sure that you will see me again."
He turned to face her, nothing rushed. It was as if he had bound his body in the same careful bonds that held his voice. "You weep a lot," he remarked. "I think you are weeping tonight. As you hold me. Pledging yourself to me for all eternity. Yes? You weep, and while you weep, I tell you: ‘It is time.' Tomorrow you shall have your chance. Tomorrow, in the morning, you shall fulfil the vow you swore to me by the great Khalil's gun. I am ordering you--asking you"--carefully, almost majestically, he went back to the window--"to drive that Mercedes car across the Yugoslav border, northward and into Austria. Where it will be collected from you. Alone. Will you do that? What do you say?"
On the surface, she felt nothing beyond a concern to match his apparent barrenness of feeling. No fear, no sense of danger, no surprise: she shut them all out with a bang. It's now, she thought. Charlie, you're on. A driving job. Away you go. She was staring straight at him, hard-jawed, the way she stared at people when she lied.
"Well--how do you respond to him?" he enquired, jollying her slightly. "Alone," he reminded her. "It's some distance, you know. Eight hundred miles through Yugoslavia--that's quite something, for a first mission. What do you say?"
"What's in it?" she asked.
Whether deliberately or not she could not tell, but he chose to misunderstand her: "Money. Your début in the theatre of the real. Everything Marty promised you." His mind seemed as closed to her as it was perhaps to himself. His tone was clipped and deprecating.
"I meant what's in the car?"
The three minute warning before his voice became hectoring. "What does it matter what's in the car? A military message perhaps. Papers. Do you think you can know every secret of our great movement on your first day?" A break, but she did not answer. "Will you drive the car or not? That is all that matters."
She did not want Michel's reply. She wanted his.
"Why doesn't he drive it himself?"
"Charlie, it is not your task, as a new recruit, to question orders. Naturally, if you are shocked--" Who was he? She felt his mask slipping, but did not know which mask it was. "If suddenly you suspect--within the fiction--that you have been manipulated by this man--that all his adoration of you, his glamour, his protestations of eternal love--‘ Yet again he seemed to lose his footing. Was it her own wishful thinking, or dared she suppose that, in the half darkness, some sentiment had crept up on him unnoticed, which he would have preferred to hold at bay?
"I mean only that if, at this stage"--his voice recovered its strength--"if the scales should somehow fall from your eyes, or your courage fail you, then naturally you must say no."
"I was asking you a question. Why don't you drive it yourself--you, Michel?"
He swung swiftly back to the window and it seemed to Charlie that he had much to quell in himself before replying. "Michel tells you this and no more," he began, with strained forbearance. "Whatever is in that car"--he could look down on it from where he stood, parked in the square and guarded by a Volkswagen bus--"it is vital to our great struggle, but it is also very dangerous. Whoever was caught driving that car at any point in those eight hundred miles--whether the car contains subversive literature or some other kind of material, messages perhaps--to be caught with it would be extremely incriminating. Not all the influence--the diplomatic pressures, good lawyers--could prevent that person from having a very bad time indeed. If you are considering your own skin, that is what you have to consider." And he added, in a voice quite unlike Michel's: "You have your own life, after all. You are not one of us."
But his faltering, however slight, had given her an assurance she had not felt in his company before. "I asked why he wasn't driving it himself. I'm still waiting for his answer."
Once more, he rallied, too strongly. "Charlie! I am a Palestinian activist. I am known as a fighter for the cause. I am travelling on a false passport which may at any time be compromised. But you--an attractive English girl of good appearance--no record, quick-witted, charming--naturally for you there is no danger. Now surely that is enough!"
"You just said there was a danger."
"Nonsense. Michel assures you there is none. For himself, maybe. But for you--none. ‘Do it for me,' I say. ‘Do it and be proud. Do it for our love and for the revolution. Do it for all we have sworn to each other. Do it for my great brother. Are your vows meaningless? Were you merely mouthing Western hypocrisies when you professed yourself a revolutionary?' " He paused once more. "Do it because if you don't, your life will be even emptier than it was before I picked you up at the beach."
"You mean at the theatre," she corrected him.
He barely bothered with her. He remained standing with his back to her, his gaze still upon the Mercedes. He was Joseph again, Joseph of the pressed-out vowels and careful sentences and the mission that would save innocent lives.
"So there you are. This is your Rubicon. You know what that is? The Rubicon? Cut off now--go home--you can take some money, forget the revolution, Palestine, Michel, everything."
"Or?"
"Drive the car. Your first blow for the cause. Alone. Eight hundred miles. Which is it to be?"
"Where will you be?"
His calm was once more unassailable, and once more he took refuge in Michel: "In spirit, close to you, but I cannot help you. Nobody can help you. You will be on your own, performing a criminal act in the interests of what the world will call a gang of terrorists." He started again, but this time he was Joseph. "Some of the kids will make an escort for you, but there is nothing they can do if things go wrong, except report the fact to Marty and myself. Yugoslavia is no great friend of Israel."
Charlie hung on. All her instincts of survival told her to. She saw that he had once more turned round to look at her, and she met his black stare knowing that her own face was visible where his was not. Who are you fighting? she thought; yourself or me? Why are you the enemy in both camps?
"We haven't finished the scene," she reminded him. "I'm asking you--both of you--what's in the car? You want me to drive the car--whoever does--however many of you there are in there--I need to know what's in it. Now."
She thought she would have to wait. She had expected another three minute warning while his mind whirred through the options before it printed out its deliberately desiccated answers. She was wrong.
"Explosives," he retorted, in his most detached voice. "Two hundred pounds of Russian plastic explosive divided into half-pound sticks. Good new stuff, well cared for, capable of standing extremes of heat and cold, and reasonably plastic at all temperatures."
"Oh well, I'm glad it's well cared for," Charlie said cheerfully, fighting off the tidal wave. "Where's it hidden?"
"In the valance, cross members, roof-lining, and seats. As an older make of car, it has the advantage of box sections and girders."
"What's it going to be used for?"
"Our struggle."