"On the way where to?" she asked, but once more struck his reserve.
Their hotel had a roofed interior courtyard, with old gilded banisters and potted plants in marble urns. Their suite looked straight down on to the fast brown river, and across it at more domes than are in Heaven. Behind the domes rose a castle with a cable car that switched up and down the hillside.
"I need to walk," she said.
She took a bath and fell asleep in it, and he had to bang on the door to wake her. She dressed and once more he knew the places to show her and the things that would please her most.
"It's our last night, isn't it?" she said, and this time he didn't hide behind Michel.
"Yes, it's our last night, Charlie; tomorrow we have a visit to make and then you return to London."
Clutching his arm in both her hands, she wandered with him through narrow streets, and squares that ran into each other like drawing-rooms. They stood outside the house where Mozart was born, and the trippers were like a matinée audience to her, cheerful and unaware.
"I did well, didn't I, Jose? I did really well. Say it."
"You did excellently," he said--but somehow his reservations meant more to her than his praise.
The doll's-house churches were more beautiful than anything she had imagined, with scrolled golden altars and voluptuous angels and tombs where the dead seemed still to be dreaming of pleasure. A Jew pretending to be a Muslim shows me my Christian heritage, she thought. But when she demanded information of him, the most he would do was buy a glossy guidebook and put the receipt in his wallet.
"I fear that Michel has not yet had the time to launch himself upon the Baroque period," he explained, in his dry way; and yet again she sensed in him the shadows of some unexplained obstruction.
"Shall we go back now?" he asked.
She shook her head. Make it last. The evening darkened, the crowds disappeared, choirboy singing issued from unexpected doorways. They sat by the river and listened to the deaf old bells chiming at each other in stubborn competition. They started to walk again and suddenly she was so floppy she needed his arm round her waist just to keep her upright.
"Food," she ordered as he guided her into the lift. "Champagne. Music."
But by the time he had rung room service she was fast asleep on the bed, and nothing on God's earth, not even Joseph, was going to wake her.
She lay as she had lain in the sand on Mykonos, her left arm crooked and her face pressed into it; and Becker sat in the armchair watching her. The first weak glow of dawn was appearing through the curtains. He could smell fresh leaves and timber. There had been a rainstorm in the night, so loud and sudden it was like an express train crashing up the valley. From the window he had watched the city rock under the long slow onslaughts of its lightning, and the rain dancing on the glistening domes. But Charlie had lain so still he had actually stooped over her and put his ear to her mouth to make sure she was breathing.
He glanced at his watch. Plan, he thought. Move. Let action kill the doubt. The dinner-table with its uneaten food stood in the window bay, the ice bucket with its unopened bottle of champagne. Taking each fork in turn, he began scooping the lobster meat from its shell, dirtying plates, mixing up the salad, spoiling the strawberries, adding one last fiction to the many they had already lived: their gala banquet in Salzburg; Charlie and Michel celebrate the successful completion of her first mission for the revolution. He took the champagne bottle to the bathroom, and closed the door in case the pop of the cork should wake her. He poured the champagne down the basin and ran water after it; he flushed the lobster meat and strawberries and salad down the lavatory and had to wait and flush again because they wouldn't disappear the first time. He left enough champagne to pour a little into his own glass, and for Charlie's glass he took lipstick from her bag and drew traces round the brim before adding the dregs from the bottle. Then he went to the window again, where he had spent much of the night, and gazed at the rain-soaked blue hills. I am a climber weary of the mountains, he thought.
He shaved, he put on his red blazer. He went to the bed. stretched out his hand to wake her, and drew it back. A reluctance, like a heavy tiredness, descended over him. He sat down in the armchair again, his eyes closed, he forced them open; he woke with a jolt, feeling the weight of the desert dew clinging to his battledress, smelling the scent of damp sand before the sun had burned it dry.
"Charlie?" He again reached out, this time to touch her cheek, then touched her arm instead. Charlie, it's a triumph; Marty says you are a star, and that you have presented him with a whole new cast of characters. He called his Gadi in the night but you didn't wake. Better than Garbo, he says. There is nothing we can't achieve together, he says. Charlie, wake up. We have work to do. Charlie.
But aloud he merely said her name again, then went downstairs, paid the bill, and obtained the last receipt. He walked out the back of the hotel to collect the hired BMW, and the dawn was the way the dusk had been, fresh and not yet summer.
"You're to wave me off, then appear to take a walk," he told her. "Dimitri will bring you separately to Munich."
fourteen
She entered the lift without speaking. It smelt of disinfectant and the graffiti were scratched deep into the grey vinyl. She had shoved the toughness in her to the front, the way she did at Demos and talkins and all the other junkets. She was excited and she felt a sense of impending completion. Dimitri pressed the bell, Kurtz himself opened the door. Behind him stood Joseph, and behind Joseph hung a brass shield with a beaten image of Saint Christopher dandling a child.
"Charlie, this is truly great, and you are great," said Kurtz, with a soft, heartfelt urgency, and clutched her intensely to his chest. "Charlie, incredible."
"Where is he?" she said, looking past Joseph at the closed door. Dimitri had not come in. Having delivered her, he had taken the lift down again.
Still speaking as if they were in church together, Kurtz chose to treat her question as a general one. "Charlie, he is just fine," he assured her as he released her. "A little tired from his travels, which is natural, but fine. Dark glasses, Joseph," he added. "Give her dark glasses. Do you have dark glasses, dear? Here's a headscarf to hide that lovely hair. Keep it." It was of green silk, a rather nice one. Kurtz had it ready for her in his pocket. Crammed close together, the two men looked on while she made a nurse's head-dress for herself in the mirror.
"Just a precaution," Kurtz explained. "In this business, we can never be too careful. That correct, Joseph?"
From her handbag, Charlie had taken out her new powder compact and was straightening her make-up.
"Charlie, this could be a little emotional," Kurtz warned.
She put away the compact and took out her lipstick.