Little Drummer Girl by John le Carré

Author:John le Carré [Carré, John le]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Suspense, Mystery, Thriller, Modern
ISBN: 9780340733639
Publisher: Hodder Hb
Published: 1983-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

13

The monastery lay two kilometres from the border, in a hollow of boulders and yellow sedge. It was a sad, desecrated place of caved-in roofs and a courtyard of broken cells with psychedelic hula girls painted on the stone walls. Some post-Christian had started a discotheque here, but, like the monks, had fled. On the concrete pad intended as a dance floor stood the red Mercedes, like a warhorse being tended for the battle; beside it, the champion who would ride it, with Joseph the administrator supervising at her elbow. This is where Michel brought you to change the number plates and see you off, Charlie; this is where he handed you the false papers and the keys. Rose, wipe down that door panel again, please. Rachel, what’s that scrap of paper on the floor? He was Joseph the perfectionist once more, ordering every tiny detail. The communications van stood against the outer wall, its aerial gently nodding in the hot breeze.

The Munich number plates were already bolted in position. A dusty German “D” had replaced the diplomatic sticker. Unwanted rubbish had been removed. With meticulous care, Becker now began introducing eloquent souvenirs to replace it: a thumbed guidebook to the Acropolis shoved into a door pocket and forgotten; grape pips for the ashtray, fragments of orange-peel for the floor; Greek ice-cream sticks, scraps of chocolate paper. Next, two cancelled tickets to the ancient sites of Delphi, followed by an Esso road map of Greece with the route between Delphi and Thessalonika marked in fibre-tip pen, with a couple of Michel’s scribbled marginal annotations in Arabic close to the point in the hills where Charlie had fired the gun one-handed, and missed. A comb with a few black hairs in it, the teeth smeared with Michel’s pungent German hair lotion. A pair of leather driving gloves, lightly sprayed with Michel’s body-mist. A spectacles case by Frey of Munich, the one that went with the sunglasses which had been inadvertently smashed when their owner tried to pick up Rachel at the border.

And lastly he submitted Charlie herself to an equally searching scrutiny, covering the whole surface of her clothed body, from her shoes to her head and down again by way of her bracelet before he turned—reluctantly, as it seemed to her—to a small trestle table on which were laid out the revised contents of her handbag.

“So now put them in, please,” he said finally, when he had made another check; and watched her pack everything in her own way— handkerchief, lipsticks, driver’s licence, coins, wallet, keepsakes, keys, and all the meticulously calculated junk that, on examination, would testify to the complex fictions of her several lives.

“What about his letters?” she said. A Joseph pause. “If he wrote me all those hot-breath letters, I’d cart them round with me everywhere, wouldn’t I?”

“Michel does not permit that. You have strict instructions to keep his letters in a safe place in your flat and above all never to cross a frontier with them in your possession.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.