She gave it all: story within the story within the story. The car was the private property of a fashionable Munich doctor, name supplied, her current lover. Insured and registered in his name, see the false papers.
"Why is he not with you, this active doctor? It is Michel asking you this, you understand?"
She understood. "He had to fly back from Thessalonika this morning for an urgent case. I agreed to drive the car for him. He was in Athens to deliver a lecture. We've been touring together."
"How did you meet him in the first place?"
"In England. He's a buddy of my parents--he cures their hangovers. My parents are mountainously rich, hint, hint."
"For the extreme case, you have Michel's one thousand dollars in your handbag, which he has lent to you for the trip. Conceivably, for their overtime, for the inconvenience you have caused these people, they may graciously consider a small subsidy. What is the name of his wife?"
"Renate,and I hate the bitch."
"The children?"
"Christoph and Dorothea. I'd make a marvellous mother to them if only Renate would stand aside. I want to go now. Anything else?"
"Yes."
Like you love me, she suggested to him in her mind. Like you're a bit apologetic about launching me halfway across Europe with a earful of high-quality Russian plastic explosive.
"Don't be overconfident," he advised her, with no more feeling than if he were examining her driver's licence. "Not every frontier guard is a fool or a sex maniac."
She had promised herself no farewells and perhaps Joseph had done the same.
"So, Charlie," she said. And started the engine.
He neither waved nor smiled. Perhaps he said "So, Charlie" back, but if he did she didn't hear. She reached the main road; the monastery and its temporary inhabitants vanished from her mirror. She drove a couple of kilometres fast and came to an old painted arrow saying "jugoslawien."She drove on slowly, following the traffic. The road spread and became a car park. She saw a line of charabancs and a line of cars and the flags of all nations cooked to pale pastel by the sun. I'm English, German, Israeli, and Arab. She took her place behind an open sports car. Two boys sat in the front, two girls in the back. She wondered whether they were Joseph's. Or Michel's. Or police of some kind. She was learning to see the world that way: everyone belongs to someone. A grey-uniformed official waved her impatiently forward. She had everything ready. False papers, false explanations. Nobody wanted them. She was over.
Standing on the hilltop high above the monastery, Joseph lowered his binoculars and returned to the waiting van.
"Package posted," he said curtly to the boy David, who typed the words obediently into his machine. For Becker he would have typed anything--risked anything, shot anybody. Becker was a living legend for him, complete in all his abilities, somebody he should aspire ceaselessly to copy.
"Marty replies congratulations," the boy said reverently.
But the great Becker seemed not to hear.
She drove for ever. She drove with her arms aching from grasping the wheel too tight, and her neck aching from keeping her legs too rigid. She drove with her belly feeling sick from too much slackness. Then sick again from too much fear. Then sicker still when the engine stalled and she thought: Oh hooray, we're having a breakdown. If you do, then dump it, Joseph had said;run it into a side turning, hitch a lift, lose the papers, catch a train. Above all, get as far away from it as you can. But now that she had started, she didn't think she could do that: it would be like running out on a performance. She went deaf from too much music; she turned off the radio and went deaf again from the din of the lorries. She was in a sauna, she was freezing to death, she was singing. There was no progress, only movement. She chatted brightly with her dead father and her bloody mother: "Well, I met this simply charming Arab, Mother,marvellously well educated and frightfully rich and cultural, and it was just one long screw from dawn till dusk and back again...."
She drove with her mind whited out and her thoughts deliberately foreshortened. She forced herself to remain on the outer surface of experience: Oh look, a village; oh look, a lake, she would think, never allowing herself to break through to the chaos below. I'm free and relaxed and having a simply marvellous time. For lunch she ate fruit and bread, which she bought from a garage kiosk. And ice-cream--she had a sudden passion for it, like an appetite in pregnancy. Yellow, watery Yugoslav ice-cream, with a girl with big tits on the wrapper. Once she saw a boy hitch-hiker and had an overwhelming urge to ignore Joseph's orders and give him a lift. Her loneliness was suddenly so awful she would have done anything to keep him with her: married him in one of the little chapels scattered on the treeless hilltops, raped him in the yellow grass beside the road. But she never once admitted to herself, in all the years and miles of driving, that she was ferrying two hundred pounds of prime-quality Russian plastic explosive divided into half-pound sticks, concealed in the valance, cross members, roof-lining, and seats. Or that an older make of car had the advantage of box sections and girders. Or that it was good new stuff, well cared for, capable of withstanding heat and cold, and reasonably plastic in all temperatures.
Keep going, girl,she repeated to herself determinedly, sometimes aloud. It's a sunny day and you're a rich whore driving your lover's Mercedes. She recited her lines from As You Like It, and lines from her first part ever. She recited lines from Saint Joan. But of Joseph she thought not at all; she had never met an Israeli in her life, never longed for him, never changed her spots and her religion for him, or become his creature while pretending to be the creature of his enemy; never marvelled and fretted at the secret wars that were going on inside him.