by Denis Pitts
“They say that the Egyptian air force has bombed Paris.”
Miss McDougall waved her spotless white gloves airily.
“They couldn’t find Paris,” she said with contempt. “I doubt very much if they could find the Mediterranean.”
“I’d still like to see Scotland once more.”
“And leave our cats? Think of what might befall them.”
Jean-Paul slipped quietly out of their house and walked along the main street to the Kokkinos printing shop.
The electric motor on the flatbed press had finally burned itself out forever, and the gross Greek was grunting and gasping as he inked the big roller and slid it across the lead type.
He was printing notices in his biggest types, Arabic, French and English. They were piled all over the shop. The English version read: AIR RADE SHELTER.
“Big government contract, boy. Can’t stop. Is big cash-on-the-nail job. Then army comes, Kokkinos goes.”
When he returned to the prison, Jean-Paul found that the courtyard was filled with strangers, whole families who had been brought from the Jewish ghetto of Port Said in a swift army operation. They sat in lines on the dusty concrete while the guards counted them and civilian clerks wrote their names. Many of the women were crying and held their children close. The men sat silent, their hands on their heads.
Some of these men looked hostile. But most of them appeared to accept what was happening with calm and dignity. Some prayed in soft voices, and as he walked through their lines, Jean-Paul heard a strong voice begin to chant from the Torah.
Mr. Razziz was angry when the boy returned to his prison suite.
“Where the hell have you been?” he shouted. “I need you!”
The banker was ripping up pieces of paper and throwing them in balls into a corner of the room.
“I’ve just heard on the radio here and it’s for sure this time. The British and French are coming. They have fleet of ships twenty miles off Port Said, see? They’ll be here within forty-eight hours, see?”
He took a thick cardboard file and pulled the paper out savagely.
“God, all this work, what a waste. Ten months of work, that’s what we’ve done. All wasted.”
He stopped tearing the paper and turned up the volume on the radio set in his cell. He came close to the boy and leaned forward and began to whisper.
“Now listen, boy,” he said. “We are going, see? Getting out. You’ve been a good boy and I’m taking you with me.”
“Where?”
“Out of this country, anywhere except France. It has been good here in jail. God, it’s been good to be away from my enemies. But the French are coming, and if they get me it will be the very end, see? Lot of enemies in France. Okay, you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay, so we take a fishing boat. You’ll fix it, see?”
“The harbor is filled with troops.”
“They won’t notice one small fishing boat. We go to Lebanon, maybe Turkey, safe there, see?”
“It will cost a lot of money.”
“How much money?”
“Two hundred pounds maybe.”
Razziz rummaged in the back of a drawer in his desk.
“Five hundred pounds.” He handed a wad of money to the boy.
“I have arranged with the guards — by God they charge —for a taxi to take me from here at five in the morning. Make sure the boat is arranged by then.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Razziz leaned even closer to the boy.
“One other thing, Jean-Paul. Go to this address in the Rue Leopold and hand this note to a man called Ivor. He is holding a black briefcase winch contains certain property of considerable importance to me. Have it with you when you return.”
“There is little chance of me getting back,” said Jean-Paul. “It is almost impossible to move in the town. They are already bombing the Isthmus.”
The banker, even more agitated and nervous, looked at Jean-Paul through tear-moistened eyes.
“I have been good to you, haven’t I? Now help me, please.”
Jean-Paul said quietly: “Trust me. If I cannot get back, tell your driver to get close to the De Lesseps statue. I’ll be waiting in the parking lot there. I’ll get a boat if I can. If not, I’ll find somewhere for us to hide from the French. You’ll be safe, Mr. Razziz.”
*
The old fisherman gave the boy that classic look of the Levantine who is about to make a deal, a look which combines pity, greed and contempt.
“Fifty pounds to Beirut? Madness you speak, young fool, madness.”
“If the British come, they will destroy your boat anyway.”
They stood on the dockside. A fast naval patrol boat creamed out of the harbor and then began to crash its way over the choppy sea. Engineers were busily anchoring blockships all over the main basin. Hurried preparations were being made to sink these ships at a few moments’ notice. The watery sun was setting quickly.
The fisherman spat into the green water.
“Five hundred pounds, and even then I shall be offering my life to Allah together with the sons of my son and their sons.”
“For that we could take luxury suites on an ocean liner.”
The old man looked across the harbor.
“Find one.”
“One hundred pounds.”
Even though they both knew that the holocaust was but a few hours away, the old man and the boy entered into the spirit of bargaining with happy contentment.
“Two hundred and fifty.”
“Two hundred.”
“Two hundred pounds plus the fuel.”
Jean-Paul turned away so that the man could not see the amount of money he was carrying in his pocket. He counted out fifty pounds and handed it over to the fisherman.
“We’ll need some food, too.”
“Food you shall have. Perhaps it is a good idea after all. I have a cousin in Beirut and we have not met for many moons. It would be a good idea to take my family too, eh, boy, to meet his family?”
“Are you sure that this creaking old hulk will get us to Beirut?”
“To Beirut? It will take us three times around Africa.”
They shook hands. The fisherman asked: “At what time do we depart? I need to know — I have many relations.”
“As the sun rises,” said Jean-Paul. “Be careful of your relatives. Each one will be a charge against your charge, and I am quite sure that my fare-paying passenger is richer than they.”
*
For most of the week there had been daily bombings throughout Egypt, although there had been little in Port Said itself except the continual wail of air-raid sirens. But on this night, the town trembled from the crash of British bombs in the south and Jean-Paul made his way through the blacked-out town by the lights of explosions and parachute flares which bathed the whole city in an eerie white glow.
Four batteries of Egyptian anti-aircraft guns were firing continuously, and at times he found himself running through hails of red-hot shrapnel. He moved warily, foxlike, waiting sometimes for several minutes in the shadows as parties of nervous soldiers and police ran, shouting wildly, through the streets. They blasted away at anything that moved — cats or dogs even — out of no more than the tension that had been building up.
He ran the last hundred yards or so to the house in the Rue Leopold. The apartment was on the second floor of the building. There was no light on the landing, and he had to feel his way up the stairs and run his fingers over the Arabic numerals on several doors before he found the one he wanted. He pressed the bell push several times before the door was opened by a man with long dank gray hair who carried a candle in an unsteady hand.
“No damn power,” the man said. “What is happening to the world. Who are you, boy?”
Jean-Paul handed him the note from Razziz.
“Come in,” the man said.
He ushered the boy into the apartment, which was lit solely by the candle in
his hand. There was a half-empty bottle of vodka on the table. Jean-Paul stood by as the man opened the envelope and read the note. Then he held the candle close to the boy’s face.
“So you’re his personal assistant, eh?” He leered. “Pretty, too.”
“The briefcase,” Jean-Paul said. “Where is it?”
The man walked unsteadily across the room to a cupboard. He fumbled for some time with a bunch of keys before he got it open.
“So my cousin is coming out at last,” he said. “I wondered when it would happen. He’s too late, of course. You’ll never get out. They’ve bombed the Isthmus and the whole town is cut off completely. Look over there, through the window, and you can see the English ships signaling to each other. Razziz will end up in a French prison, have no doubt of that. It wouldn’t surprise me if they started this whole war just to get their hands on him and his secret accounts — he’s told you about his secret places, I suppose? Some here, some there.”
He handed the briefcase to Jean-Paul.
“Tell my cousin that I shall stay in Port Said. I have to, or I would have been out of here several weeks ago. Anyway, the English say they will stay for a thousand years. If that is the case there will be some rich pickings.”
He pointed to the briefcase.
“Just in case you get any ideas,” he told the boy, “there’s no money in that case. I know. I’ve looked.”
Then he smiled, pinched Jean-Paul’s cheek and patted his bottom as he showed him out.
“Personal assistant, eh?” he said. His body shook with chuckling. “Razziz is showing good taste in his old age,” he said.
On the street again, Jean-Paul allowed his eyes to adjust completely to the light. It was a few minutes to midnight and five hours to sunrise.
The briefcase felt huge and conspicuous in his hand, and it was, he reckoned, one more reason why he had to avoid being picked up by the patrols.
But where to lie low in that town which was crawling so heavily with the army? He could never hide in the souks of Arabtown with this damn case — they’d slit his throat for it.
Perhaps Kokkinos was still in his shop; he started to walk in that direction. He had reached the corner of the Rue Leopold and was just about to turn into a familiar warren of small alleyways when a spotlight gleamed fiercely upon him from the opposite side of the road.
A voice roared at him to halt. He heard rifle bolts slamming into position.
“Come here,” the voice said.
Another voice said, “Shoot the little bastard, he’s a looter.”
Jean-Paul, his body flexed to leap and run, moved toward the light.
The first voice said, “Hurry up, you.” At that moment there was a banshee-like shriek as the truck was hit by a rocket and exploded into flames. The occupants were hurled, their clothes blazing, in all directions.
Jean-Paul was lifted into the air by the force and somersaulted several times before crashing into the relative softness of a pine tree in a small park.
He heard the aircraft as it flew low over the burning truck and then gunned its engines into a climb in search of further targets. Jean-Paul had grabbed instinctively onto a branch of the tree. He did not feel dazed, although his face and body were covered with small cuts.
The whole scene was lit now by the burning truck, and he heard the screams of the men who lay in the street. One of them struggled to his feet, his uniform blazing, and ran a few steps before collapsing in the gutter. He lay still, finally, his body smoldering and twitching.
It was only then that the boy realized that the whole town was exploding around him. Shells from the great battleships steaming offshore were hurtling into the seafront defenses; aircraft were flying in in regular waves, their rockets leaving fiery tracks in the sky. Somewhere not far away an ammunition dump exploded, and he felt the wind and the heat of it; the earth shook below the tree.
He was not particularly frightened; indeed, there in that pine tree, he was somehow exhilarated by the crashing of the shells and the bombs and the crackle of the anti-aircraft guns nearby and the fires which were burning brightly all along the length of the seafront.
There were lots of civilians in the streets now, most of them running away from the seafront, many of them hurt and covered in blood. He heard the bells of the fire engines and the wailing of the ambulance sirens as he climbed awkwardly down from the tree. It was then that he remembered the briefcase.
He spent some time searching for it in the little park, and found it by the convenient light of a parachute flare. It was lying in a small clump of dust-covered flowers and it had burst open; its contents were strewn around in the sand.
Jean-Paul had half expected the case to be filled with money despite the word of the man in the Rue Leopold apartment. But, as far as he could tell now, it had contained nothing more than three files of legal-sized note-paper covered with numbers.
He reassembled the files and put them back into the case. Holding it together under his arm, he padded out of the park and back into the nearest darkness.
A terrible panic gripped the town that night. Its people ran blindly and mindlessly through the streets, and the military police did nothing to help with their constant hysterical use of bullhorns. Army trucks roared through the town with men handing machine guns and grenades and great boxes of ammunition to anyone — the old, or infirm, or wounded, or underaged — yelling at one and all to use the weapons to kill the British.
Squads of looters roamed the streets, shooting in the plate-glass windows of the shops in the main street, loading barrows with cans of food, cameras, clothing, bales of silk and nylon.
In the few remaining hours before dawn, under an unceasing bombardment, Port Said was an uncontrolled madhouse, through which a small boy made his way to the sandstone plinth of the statue of De Lesseps, whose canal this war was all about.
*
The fishing dhow was already filled with its owner’s relatives; their goats and sheep and other livestock were tethered to the rail. The owner had been busy during the night collecting other passengers at grossly inflated prices, and now the long, graceful boat lay dangerously low in the water.
It was first light, and Jean-Paul could see that the port around them was desolate. The oil-storage depot was blazing steadily, creating a cloud of dense black smoke which rose a mile high into the sullen morning sky. The streets, shadowed by the smoke above, were littered with the burned-out shells of trucks and automobiles.
Even as Jean-Paul approached the dockside, there were fresh explosions as Egyptian engineers began to sink the ships at the entrance to the canal itself.
The old fisherman shouted up at Jean-Paul. “Sunrise,” he said. “The sun had risen quite far enough for me. It will be high over the town very soon.”
The boy looked along the length of the harborside. There were only a few soldiers, dazed by the bombardment, moving like sleepwalkers as they struggled to repair defenses and set up artillery positions in the midst of the rubble.
There was no sign of Razziz, and the only taxi in sight was a burned-out wreck. He had already looked inside this, but the occupant was just sufficiently recognizable for him to know it was not Razziz.
“Ten minutes,” he implored the fisherman.
There was a particularly loud explosion from one of the blockships and the air-raid sirens began to wail.
The fisherman shouted an order and an ancient diesel engine clanked into life at the stern of the dhow.
“Get in, boy,” he shouted. “If it was for King Farouk and all his jewels and harem I would not wait a minute more.”
The boy took one more despairing look along the dockside. Reluctantly, he climbed down the greasy steps and boarded the fishing boat. Its lines had already been released when he stepped onto the deck.
The dhow moved slowly away from the dock wall and made for the harbor entrance. It was nearly into the open sea when the French fighter pilot saw it. He circled and then came in low, out of the gray dawn
light.
The fishermen’s eldest son was just setting the braided sail of the dhow along the slender gaff when the rocket hit the boat.
*
He had not slept between sheets since he was a very small boy; the sensation delighted him. He turned frequently, feeling the smoothness against his skin, smelling the cleanness, rubbing his cheek against the pillow and burying his head deep into its softness.
French paratroopers had found him walking along a beach, soaking wet, still clutching the briefcase and oblivious to the battle which was going on around him. They might have shot him, as they had so many youngsters who had fired at them that morning with the hastily issued arms. But they questioned him, and when he answered them in fluent French, they put him in an ambulance.
He heard someone declare: “He appears to be French — there are a lot of them in Port Said. Doesn’t know his name. Probably got a bang on his head and lost his memory. Better patch him up.”
An orderly had undressed him and washed him and stitched his cuts. He had difficulty persuading the boy to release the briefcase long enough to take off his filthy vest and put a hospital nightdress over his shoulders.
“Don’t worry, little one, we’ll find your mamma and poppa and then we will take you home to France,” the orderly said in a gentle voice. “Your name?”
“Jean-Paul, monsieur.”
“And your father’s name?”
He was about to tell them, but then didn’t. He had heard the “and then we will take you home to France” and the voice saying “lost his memory.” He liked this kindness. He liked the sheets. The orderly was being especially kind to him, despite the sounds of wounded men in the next room.
“Poor kid,” he heard someone say. “He’ll probably remember after some sleep.”
There was a slight pain in his thigh, and he felt his eyelids sink so heavily that he could not raise them again. He tried several times and managed just once. He saw the smiling face of the orderly and the mass of blood on his combat jacket and then he slept.
*