The house was ancient and smelt of cat and her bloody mother. It was crammed with bad Greek furniture in the Empire style and hung with faded velvet curtains and brass chandeliers. But if it had been clean as a Swiss hospital or sloping like a ship’s deck, it would only have been a different madness, not a better or worse one. On the second landing, a cracked jardinière reminded her yet again of her mother: she saw herself as a small child seated at her mother’s side wearing corduroy dungarees and shelling peas in a conservatory overhung with monkey-puzzle trees. Yet for the life of her she couldn’t remember then or afterwards a house possessed of a conservatory, unless it was the first they ever had, in Branksome, near Bournemouth, when Charlie was aged three.
They approached a double door, Rachel pushed it and stood aside, and a cavernous upper room was opened to her. At the centre of it sat two figures at a table, one broad and big, one stooping and very thin, both dressed in cloudy browns and greys, and from that distance phantoms. On the table she saw papers strewn, to which a downlight from the centre of the ceiling gave disproportionate prominence, and already from some way off they looked to her like press cuttings. Rose and Rachel had fallen back as if unworthy. Rachel gave her a shove on the rump and said, ‘On you go then,’ and Charlie found herself making the last twenty feet alone, feeling like an ugly clockwork mouse that has been wound up and set to run by itself. Throw a fit, she thought. Clutch my stomach, fake appendicitis. Scream. Her entrance was the cue for the two men to bound simultaneously to their feet. The thin man remained standing at the table, but the big man strode boldly up to her and his right hand curved in on her in a crab-like gesture, seizing her own and shaking it before she could prevent him.
‘Charlie, we are surely glad to have you safely here among us!’ Kurtz exclaimed in a swift congratulatory flow, as if she had risked fire and flood to get to them. ‘Charlie, my name’ – her hand was still in his powerful grasp, and the intimacy of their two skins was contrary to everything she had expected – ‘my name for want of a better is Marty and when God finished making me there were a couple of spare pieces left around so He put together Mike here as an afterthought, so say hullo to Mike. Mr Richthoven over there, to use his flag of convenience – Joseph, as you call him – well, I guess you practically christened him yourself anyway, didn’t you?’
He must have entered the room without her noticing. Peering round, she found him on the point of arranging some papers on a small folding table set apart from everyone. On the table stood a personal reading lamp, of which the candle-like glow touched his face as he leaned across it.
‘I could christen the bastard now,’ she said.
She thought of going for him as she had for Rachel, three quick strides and one good swipe before they stopped her, but she knew she’d never make it, so she contented herself with a volley of obscenities instead, to which Joseph listened with an air of distant recollection. He had changed into a brown lightweight pullover; the bandleader’s silk shirt, the bottle-top gold cuff-links were gone as if for ever.
‘My advice to you is to suspend your judgment and your bad language until you hear what these two men have to tell you,’ he said, without lifting his head to her, while he continued setting out his bulletins. ‘You are with good people here. Better than you are accustomed to, I would say. You have much to learn and, if you are lucky, much to do. Conserve your energy,’ he advised, in what sounded like a distracted private memo to himself. And continued to busy himself with his papers.
He doesn’t care, she thought bitterly. He’s put down his burden and the burden was me. The two men at the table were still standing, waiting for her to sit, which was a madness in itself. Madness to be polite to a girl you have just kidnapped, madness to lecture her on goodness, madness to sit down to a conference with your abductors after you have had a nice cup of tea and fixed your make-up. She sat down nevertheless. Kurtz and Litvak did the same.
‘Who’s got the cards?’ she blurted facetiously as she punched away a stray tear with her knuckles. She noticed a scuffed brown briefcase on the floor between them, its mouth open, but not wide enough to see inside. And yes, the papers on the desk were press cuttings, and though Mike was already packing them away in a folder, she had no difficulty at all in recognising them as cuttings about herself and her career.
‘You have got the right girl, you’re sure of that, are you?’ she said determinedly. She was addressing Litvak, mistakenly suspecting him to be the more suggestible on account of his spindly frame. But she really didn’t care whom she was addressing as long as she kept afloat. ‘Only if you’re looking for the three masked men who did the bank on Fifty-second Street, they went the other way. I was the innocent bystander who gave birth ahead of time.’
‘Charlie, we assuredly have the right girl!’ Kurtz cried delightedly, lifting both his thick arms from the table at once. He glanced at Litvak, then across the room at Joseph, one benign but hard glance of calculation, and the next moment he was off, speaking with the animal force that had so overpowered Quilley and Alexis and countless other unlikely collaborators throughout his extraordinary career: the same rich Euro-American accents; the same hacking gestures of the forearm.
But Charlie was an actress, and her professional instincts had never been clearer. Neither Kurtz’s verbal torrent nor her own mystification at the violence done to her dulled her many-stranded perceptions of what was going on in the room. We’re on stage, she thought; it’s us and them. As the young sentries dispersed themselves to the gloom of the perimeter, she could almost hear the tiptoe shuffle of the latecomers jockeying for their seats on the other side of the curtain. The set, now that she examined it, resembled the bedchamber of a deposed tyrant; her captors, the freedom fighters who had ousted him. Behind Kurtz’s broad paternal brow as he sat facing her, she made out the dust-shadow of a vanished imperial bed-head imprinted on the crumbling plaster. Behind skinny Litvak hung a scrolled gilt mirror strategically placed for the pleasure of departed lovers. The bare floorboards provided a boxed and stagey echo; the downlight accentuated the hollows of the two men’s faces and the drabness of their partisan costumes. In place of his shiny Madison Avenue suit – though Charlie lacked that standard of comparison – Kurtz now sported a shapeless army bushjacket with dark sweat patches at the armpits and a row of gunmetal pens jammed into the button-down pocket; while Litvak, the Party Intellectual, favoured a short-sleeved khaki shirt from which his white arms poked like stripped twigs. Yet she had only to glance at either man to recognise their communality with Joseph. They are drilled in the same things, she thought; they share the same ideas and practices. Kurtz’s watch lay before him on the desk. It reminded her of Joseph’s water-bottle.
Two shuttered French windows gave on to the front of the house. Two more overlooked the rear. The double doors to the wings were closed, and if she had ever thought of making a dash for it, she knew now that it was hopeless, for though the sentries affected a workshop languidness, she had recognised in them already – she had reason to – the readiness of professionals. Beyond the sentries again, in the farthest corners of the set, glowed four mosquito coils, like slow-burning fuses, giving out a musky scent. And behind her, Joseph’s little reading lamp – despite everything, or perhaps because of it, the only comfortable light.
All this she took in almost before Kurtz’s rich voice had begun filling the room with its tortuously impelling phrases. If Charlie had not already guessed that she was headed for a long night, that relentless, pounding voice told her now.
‘Charlie, what we seek to do, we wish to define ourselves, we wish to introduce ourselves, and though nobody here is given to apologising overmuch, we also wish to say we’re sorry. Some things have to be done. We did a couple of them and that’s how it is. Sorry, greetings, and again welcome. Hi.’
Having paused long enough for her to unleash another volley of curses, he smiled broadly and resumed.
‘Charlie, I have no doubt that you have many questions you woul
d like to throw our way and in due course we shall surely answer them as best we can. Meanwhile let us try at least to supply a couple of basics for you. You ask, who are we?’ This time he made no pause at all, for the fact was that he was a lot less interested in studying the effect of his words than in using them to gain a friendly mastery of the proceedings and of her. ‘Charlie, primarily we are decent people as Joseph said, good people. In that sense, like good and decent people the world over, I guess you could reasonably call us non-sectarian, non-aligned, and deeply concerned like yourself about the many wrong directions the world is taking. If I add that we are also Israeli citizens, I trust you will not immediately foam at the mouth, vomit, or jump out of the window, unless of course it is your personal conviction that Israel should be swept into the sea, napalmed, or handed over gift-wrapped to one or another of the many fastidious Arab organisations committed to our elimination.’ Sensing a secret shrinking in her, Kurtz lunged for it immediately. ‘Is that your conviction, Charlie?’ he enquired, dropping his voice. ‘Perhaps it is. Why don’t you just tell us how you feel about that? You want to get up right now? Go home? You have your air ticket, I believe. We’ll give you money. Want to run for it?’
An icy stillness descended over Charlie’s manner, disguising the chaos and momentary terror inside her. That Joseph was Jewish she had not doubted since her abortive interrogation of him on the beach. But Israel was a confused abstraction to her, engaging both her protectiveness and her hostility. She had never supposed for one second that it would ever get up and come to face her in the flesh.
‘So what is this, actually?’ she demanded, ignoring Kurtz’s offer to discontinue dealings before they had begun. ‘A war party? A punitive raid? You going to put the electrodes on me? What the hell’s the big idea?’
‘Ever met an Israeli before?’ Kurtz enquired.
‘Not that I know of.’
‘You have some racial objection to Jews overall? Jews as Jews, period? We don’t smell bad to you, have improper table manners? Tell us. We understand these things.’
‘Don’t be bloody silly.’ Her voice had gone wrong, or was it her hearing?
‘You feel you are among enemies here?’
‘Oh Christ, what gave you that idea? I mean anybody who kidnaps me is a friend for life,’ she retorted, and to her surprise won a burst of spontaneous laughter in which everyone seemed free to join. Except for Joseph, that is, who was too busy at his reading, as she could hear by the faint rustle as he turned the pages over.
Kurtz bore in on her a little harder. ‘So put our minds at rest for us,’ he urged, still beaming heartily. ‘Let us forget that you are in some sense captive here. May Israel survive or must all of us here pack up our belongings and go back to our former countries and start over again? Maybe you would prefer us to take a piece of Central Africa? Or Uruguay? Not Egypt, thank you, we tried it once and it wasn’t a success. Or shall we redisperse ourselves over the ghettos of Europe and Asia while we wait for the next pogrom? What do you say, Charlie?’
‘I just want you to leave the poor bloody Arabs alone,’ she said, parrying again.
‘Great. And how do we do that specifically?’
‘Stop bombing their camps. Driving them off their land. Bulldozing their villages. Torturing them.’
‘Ever looked at a map of the Middle East?’
‘Of course I have.’
‘And when you looked at the map, did you once wish the Arabs would leave us alone?’ said Kurtz, as dangerously cheerful as before.
To her confusion and fear was added plain embarrassment, as Kurtz had probably intended. Faced with such bald reality, her flip phrases had a schoolroom cheapness. She felt like a fool, preaching to the wise.
‘I just want peace,’ she said stupidly; though, as a matter of fact, it was true. She had a decent vision, when it was allowed her, of a Palestine magically restored to those who had been hounded from it in order to make way for more powerful, European custodians.
‘In that case, why don’t you take a look at the map again and ask yourself what Israel wants,’ Kurtz advised her contentedly, and stopped for a break that was like a commemorative silence for the loved ones unable to be with us here tonight.
And this silence became more extraordinary the longer it lasted, since it was Charlie herself who helped preserve it. Charlie, who minutes before had been screaming blue murder at God and the world, now suddenly had nothing to add. And it was Kurtz, not Charlie, who finally broke the spell with what sounded like a prepared statement for the press.
‘Charlie, we are not here to attack your politics. You will not believe me at this early stage – why should you? – but we like your politics. Every aspect of them. Every paradox and good intention. We respect them and we need them; we do not laugh at them at all, and in due course I surely hope we may return to them and discuss them openly and creatively. We are aiming to address the natural humanity in you, that is all. We are aiming at your good, caring, human heart. Your feelings. Your sense of right. We mean to ask nothing of you which conflicts in any wise with your strong and decent ethical concerns. Your polemical politics – the names you give to your beliefs – well, we would like to put them on a back burner. Your beliefs themselves – the more confused they are, the more irrational, the more frustrated – Charlie, we respect them totally. On this premise, you will surely sit with us a little longer and hear us out.’
Once again, Charlie hid her response under a fresh attack: ‘If Joseph’s Israeli,’ she demanded, ‘what the hell’s he doing driving round in a dirty great Arab car?’
Kurtz’s face broke into that ploughed and wrinkled smile which had so dramatically betrayed his age to Quilley. ‘We stole it, Charlie,’ he replied cheerfully, and his admission was followed at once by another round of laughter from the kids, in which Charlie was half tempted to take part. ‘And the next thing you want to know, Charlie,’ he said – thus incidentally announcing that the Palestinian issue was, at least for the time being, safely stored away on that back burner he had spoken of – ‘is what are you doing here among us and why have you been dragged here in such a roundabout and unceremonious fashion. I will tell you. The reason, Charlie, is that we want to offer you a job. An acting job.’
He had hit calm water and his bountiful smile showed he knew it. His voice had become slow and deliberate, as if he were announcing the numbers of the lucky winners: ‘The biggest part you ever had in your life, the most demanding, the most difficult, surely the most dangerous, and surely the most important. And I don’t mean money. You can have money galore, no problem, name your figure.’ His big forearm swept away financial considerations. ‘The part we have in view for you combines all your talents, Charlie, human and professional. Your wit. Your excellent memory. Your intelligence. Your courage. But also that extra human quality to which I already referred. Your warmth. We chose you, Charlie. We cast you. We looked at a big field, many candidates from many countries. We came up with you and that’s why you’re here. Among fans. Everybody in this room has seen your work, everybody admires you. So let’s get the atmosphere right. On our side there is no hostility. There is affection, there is admiration, there is hope. Hear us out. It’s like your friend Joseph said, we are good people, the same as you. We want you. We need you. And there are people out there who are going to need you even more than we do.’
His voice had left a void. She had known actors, just a few, whose voices did that. It was a presence, by its remorseless benevolence it became an addiction, and when it ceased, as it did now, it left you stranded. First Al gets his big part, she thought, in an instinctive rush of elation, and now I do. The madness of her situation was still quite clear to her, yet it was all she could manage to bite back a grin of excitement that was tickling at her cheeks and trying to get out.
‘So that’s how you do your casting, is it?’ she said, mustering a sceptical tone once more. ‘Knock ’em over the head and drag ’em in handcuffed? That’s your usual way, I sup
pose.’
‘Charlie, we are surely not claiming that this is usual drama,’ Kurtz replied equably, and once more left the initiative with her.
‘A part what in, anyway?’ she said, still fighting the grin.
‘Call it theatre.’
She remembered Joseph and the fun fading from his face, and his clipped reference to the theatre of the real. ‘So it’s a play then,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you say so?’
‘In a sense it is a play,’ Kurtz agreed.
‘Who writes it?’
‘We handle the plot, Joseph does the dialogue. With a lot of help from you.’
‘Who’s the audience?’ She made a gesture towards the shadows. ‘These little charmers?’
Kurtz’s solemnity was as sudden and awesome as his goodwill. His worker’s hands found each other on the table, his head came forward over them, and not even the most determined sceptic could have denied the conviction in his manner. ‘Charlie, there are people out there who will never get to watch the play, never even know it’s running, yet who will owe you for as long as they live. Innocent people. The ones you’ve always cared about, tried to speak for, march for, help. In everything that follows from here on, you have to keep that notion before you in your head, or you will lose us and you will lose yourself, no question.’
She tried to look away from him. His rhetoric was too high, too much. She wished he would train it on someone else.