There were fourteen of them in all, including Litvak, but they spread themselves over the four floors with such a discreet and catlike orderliness you could hardly have told there was anyone there at all. Their morale had never been a problem, and the Hampstead house raised it even higher. They loved the dark furniture and the feeling that every object around them seemed to know more than they did. They loved working all day and often half the night, and coming back to this temple of gracious Jewish living; and living out that heritage as well. When Litvak played Brahms, which he did very well, even Rachel, who was pop-mad, put aside her prejudices and came downstairs to hear him, though--as they were not slow to remind her--she had at first kicked against the very idea of coming back to England at all, and had made an ostentatious point of not travelling on a British passport.
With such a fine team spirit, they settled to the wait like clockwork. They avoided, without even being told, the local pubs and restaurants and unnecessary contact with local people. On the other hand, they took care to send themselves mail and buy milk and newspapers and do the things that the inquisitive otherwise notice by omission. They bicycled a lot and were hugely tickled to discover what distinguished and sometimes questionable Jews had been here ahead of them, and there was not one who did not pay his wry respects to the house of Friedrich Engels,or to the tomb of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery. Their transport stable was a smart little pink-painted garage off Haverstock Hill, with an old silver Rolls-Royce in the window marked "Not for Sale" and a proprietor called Bernie. Bernie was a big, growling man, with a dark face and a blue suit and a half-smoked cigarette and a blue Homburg hat like Schwili's that he wore while he did his own typing. He had vans and cars and motorbikes and number plates galore, and on the day they arrived he put up a big sign saying"contract business only. no callers." "A bunch of bleeding poofters," he told his business friends coarsely. "Called themselves a film company. Hired everything in my bleeding shop, paid me in bleeding used-oncers--well, how can you bleeding resist?"
All of which, to a point, was true, for that was the fiction they had agreed with him. But Bernie knew a whole lot better. Bernie too, in his day, had done a thing or two.
Meanwhile, almost daily, tidbits of news came in by way of the London Embassy, like the word of a distant battle. Rossino had called again at Yanuka's flat in Munich, this time accompanied by a blonde woman who satisfied their theories about the girl known as Edda. So-and-so had visited so-and-so in Paris, or Beirut, or Damascus, or Marseilles. With the identification of Rossino, new avenues had opened in a dozen different directions. As often as three times a week, Litvak held a briefing and a free discussion. Where photographs had been taken, he held a magic-lantern show as well, with short lectures on known aliases, behaviour patterns, personal appetites, and habits of tradecraft. Periodically he mounted quiz competitions with amusing prizes for the winners.
Occasionally, though not often, the great Gadi Becker slipped in to hear the latest word, seating himself at the back of the room apart from everyone and leaving as soon as the meeting ended. Of his life away from them they knew nothing at all, nor did they expect to: he was the agent runner, a breed apart; he was Becker, unsung hero of more secret missions than most of them had had birthdays. They called him affectionately "the Steppenwolf,"and told each other impressive half-true stories about his feats.
The call came on day eighteen. A telex from Geneva put them on standby, a cable from Paris gave the confirmation. Within an hour, two-thirds of the team was on the road, headed westward through black rain.
seventeen
The company was called the Heretics and its tour had opened in Exeter before a congregation straight from the Cathedral: women in the mauve of half mourning, old priests permanently on the brink of tears. When there was no matinée, the cast drifted round the city and yawned, and in the evenings after the show they took wine and cheese with earnest disciples of the Arts, because it was part of the deal that you exchanged beds with the natives.
From Exeter, they had gone to Plymouth and played in the naval base before mystified young officers who agonised about whether stage hands should be awarded the temporary condition of gentlemen and admitted to their mess.
But both Exeter and Plymouth had been cities of devilment and wild living by comparison with the dripping, granite mining-town far down the Cornish peninsula, with cramped alleys steaming with sea-mist, and stunted trees made hunchback by the gales. The cast was spread round half a dozen guest houses, and Charlie's luck was a slate-gabled island entirely surrounded by hydrangeas, where the drumming of the London-bound trains as she lay in bed made her feel like a castaway taunted by the glimpse of distant ships. Their theatre was a rig inside a sports hall, and from its creaking stage she could smell the chlorine from the swimming pool and hear the sluggish thud of squash-balls through the wall. Their audience was the headscarf-and-lentils brigade, whose drugged, envious eyes told you they would do it better than you if they ever sank so low as to try. And their dressing-room, finally, was a women's locker-room, and that was where they brought her the orchids--while she was putting on her make-up ten minutes before curtain-up.
She saw them first in the long mirror over the hand basins, floating through the door, wrapped to the neck in damp white paper. She saw them hesitate, then advance uncertainly towards her. But she went on with her make-up as if she had never seen an orchid in her life. One spray, carried like a paper-wrapped baby across the arms of a fifty-year-old Cornish Vestal named Val,with black plaits and a vapid, disregarded smile. Russet.
"I hereby declare you to be fair Rosalind," said Val skittishly.
A hostile silence fell, in which the entire female cast savoured Val's irrelevance. It was the hour when actors are at their most nervous, and their quietest.
"I'm Rosalind," Charlie agreed unhelpfully. "Why?" And went to work with an eye-liner to show she didn't care very much what the answer was.
Making a brave ceremony of it,Val laid the orchids in the handbasin and scurried out, while Charlie picked up the envelope in full view of everyone who cared to look. For Miss Rosalind. Continental hand, blue ballpoint instead of black ink. Inside, one continental visiting card, high gloss. The name not printed but raised in spiky, colourless capitals on the slant. anton mesterbein, geneva. Below it, the one word Justice No message added, and no "Joan, spirit of my freedom."
She transferred her attention to her other eyebrow, very carefully, as if her eyebrow were the most important thing on earth.
"Who is he, Chas?" said a Rural Shepherdess at the next-door basin. She was just out of college, mental age fifteen.
Frowning into the mirror in her concentration, Charlie critically studied her handiwork.
"Must have cost a bomb, mustn't they, Chas?" said the Shepherdess.
"Mustn't they, Chas?" Charlie echoed.
It's him!
It's word of him!
Then why isn't he here? Why is the note not written in his hand?
Trust no one,Michel had warned her. But especially mistrust those who claim to know me.
It's a trap. It's the pigs. They've found out about my drive through Yugoslavia. They're setting me up to snare my lover.
Michel, Michel! Lover, life--tell me what to do!
She heard her name being called: "Rosalind--where the hell's Charlie? Charlie, for Christ's sake."
In the corridor, a group of swimmers with towels round their necks stared without expression at the sight of a red-headed lady in threadbare Elizabethan drag emerging from the women's locker-room.
Somehow she performed. Perhaps she even acted too. During the interval, the director, a monkish soul whom they called Brother Mycroft, asked her with a strange look whether she would mind "taking it down a bit" and she meekly promised him she would. But she barely heard him: she was too busy scanning the half-empty rows in the hope of glimpsing a red blazer.
In vain.
She saw other faces--Rachel's, Dimitri's, for example--but did not recognise them. He's not there, she thought in despair. It's a trick. It's the police.