The Old Trade of Killing

by John Harris

  There was some scattered shooting from them and one of the men in the lorries was hit, then, by the Grace of God, it worked and they shot off in a cloud of dust to the north, while we swung away to the south again for safety, hoping against hope they wouldn’t use their radio to set the armour on us.

  Finally, we began to get among the wreckage and the dead men and the little crosses with their sad simple messages scrawled in pencil – ‘Corporal John Brown, died in action’ – and then the date and the regiment, hurriedly set down for the Graves Registration people. After that it was tanks, still smouldering and smelling evilly, their interior fittings dragged out like the entrails of some wounded animal, with mess boxes, toothbrushes and the blankets of the crews scattered about with their little packets of biscuits, water bottles, webbing, mirrors, broken weapons and the photographs of their families.

  The one thing I remember about it all was that none of us had much to say. We were all beginning to feel the strain as we bumped and rattled over the rutted ground, knowing the retreat had become a rout and that we’d been left behind – far behind. Then we came across a tank that was still burning, fuming and spluttering with interior explosions, while every now and then Very lights burst through the overhanging coils of black smoke. Even as we passed, its petrol tank crashed open in a sheet of flame.

  ‘Anybody need a light?’ Houston asked uneasily.

  Morena was a tower of strength. He seemed to be everywhere, supervising everything, advising, correcting, helping, backing me up in everything I decided. One of the jeeps began to conk and he was at it every time we stopped, apparently never eating or pausing for breath. Nimmo, too, didn’t let me down, working like a madman with the sand-mats every time a lorry stuck, throwing the gear out as though he were crazy, shouting at the slow-moving Leach and the nervous Houston, whose eyes were always on the north, chivvying Gester and Morris, bullying, cursing, not letting up on any of them for a minute.

  All the time, as we went, sometimes swiftly, sometimes laboriously slowly according to the country and the whims of the trailing jeep, we experienced all the spasms of despair, hope and exhilaration that we’d felt a dozen times before as we’d jogged up and down the bare acres of the desert. And all the time, as we went, my mind was nagged with worry over the loss of the Paymaster.

  I felt I’d boobed badly, though I knew I’d done all that could have been expected of me. I’d risked my little command to do what I’d been told to do. I’d sent a responsible corporal and a responsible sergeant to find him, while I hung on in the north, waiting to be jumped every minute. But, though they’d found the Paymaster, they’d failed to find what he was carrying with him, which at headquarters would probably be rated more valuable, and therefore I’d failed too, because, in the end, I was the one who was going to carry the can.

  Even in my exhaustion, as we lay down at night, watching the sparkling horizon and the moving glows in the sky and listening to the flat thud-thud of guns, it worried me, and during the day, blinded by the glare and squinting at the horizon, it continued to worry me. I was young enough, in spite of my experience, to imagine that it was the end of the road for me. I worried as I posted the sentries and stared at the dusty maps on which I’d marked all the minefields and dumps with laborious care, and as I crouched at night over the glim of a cigarette with Morena, discussing the route in meticulous detail, and the food and the water and the condition of the engines, determined to get everybody back in one piece – just to show the bastards who’d left us behind to stew! – and terrified that I wouldn’t.

  Once Houston came up to us with a wry face. ‘Fixing up the route into the bag?’ he asked, and we both jumped on him for his defeatism and gloom, because Morena had by no means given up hope and, in spite of my worry, I certainly hadn’t. We’d spent the whole day and the previous night picking our way through Rommel’s scattered units, creeping past in the dark, not daring to breathe, or sidling along under the sun, behind the ridges of sand, ready to bolt for the south at the first hostile sign.

  ‘Shut your bloody rattle,’ Morena had snapped, and Houston went off, shrugging, outwardly indifferent but inwardly as uneasy as all of us.

  Failure still continued to nag at me. I was worried by the desert and by the limping jeep and by the responsibility for the lives of everyone with me. And because there were still times when I felt like an overgrown schoolboy, it was still nagging me when the lone, low-flying Messerschmitt caught us and hit the tank of one of the lorries so that it went up in a flare of orange flame.

  Two men were hit, but not badly, and we made tracks away from the place as fast as we could go before the black plume of smoke brought other aircraft to the scene and, dropping with exhaustion, our water gone so that we were as dried-out as old prunes, we ran into the rear of the army at last, where the defence was finally beginning to stiffen. We knew the Italian scout cars were back just to the north again because we’d been dodging them all the time, and when, reinforced and with their courage up again, they found us at last not far east of a battery of guns whose barrels had been smashed by their own gunners as they’d abandoned them, and a column of lorries all with shattered engines and split tyres, we had to run like hell.

  We were still eating breakfast when we first saw them over the horizon. Houston, of course, wasn’t there when he was wanted and they nearly got me as I waited with one of the jeeps for him to appear from the sand dunes where he’d gone to relieve himself. Then the dud jeep failed and there was a frantic minute of shouting as its occupants scrambled out and ran for the waiting lorry, and for a long time it was touch and go whether they caught us or not.

  But we made it, short of one lorry and one conked jeep, but with every man in the party still alive and reasonably fit. As we went bounding over the desert in our overloaded vehicles we heard the guns stuttering behind us and thought that it was the end of us, but then – blessed sight! – we saw a South African field battery just beyond the dunes and we went into them like a charge of cavalry just as their guns opened up, and the scout cars came to a halt behind us among the exploding shells, jinking and rolling on the uneven ground, and swung off jerkily to head back the way they’d come.

  We fell out of the vehicles as though we’d all been shot, gasping for a drink, and as the South Africans crowded round, lifting down our wounded and handing out bully beef and biscuits and water canteens, Nimmo and Morena stumbled up to me. They both looked gaunt and exhausted, their faces black with muddy dust, their eyes staring out of a mask of dirt, their mouths pale pink where they’d licked their lips.

  ‘We made it,’ I croaked.

  Morena nodded. ‘We made it,’ he said, his voice heavy with relief.

  ‘And now,’ I said, ‘I’d better contact the Colonel. He’s going to be bloody pleased, I’m sure.’

  Amazingly, our own major was just behind the battery, waiting for us, and he came up in a jeep and pulled to a halt.

  ‘I thought we’d lost you,’ he said. ‘We’d written you off.’

  ‘Not me.’ I managed a grin. ‘I don’t write off as easily as all that.’

  He scowled. ‘The bastards forgot you,’ he said savagely. ‘The whole bloody thing was called off and you should have been called in. The lot of you. But the sod who was responsible bunked off with the lorries and didn’t think to tell anybody.’

  Same as always, I thought. Same as always. Some toffee-nosed staff wallah from base! Some smooth bastard in pressed khaki and smart desert boots! I wanted to say something vicious and bitter, but I was too tired to care.

  Nimmo lit a cigarette, probably his last, and handed it to me to drag at. Leach was already humping equipment with the stolidity of a mule under Morena’s gaze, and I could hear Houston’s voice, high-pitched with excitement and relief.

  ‘Christ, we knocked ’em from here to Kingdom Come,’ he was saying. ‘They never knew what hit ’em.’

  Nimmo glanced at him and gave me a derisive grin, and as I stared at him with dazed eyes,
conscious for the first time of buckling knees and a blinding headache, I remembered the story of his paintings in caves down in the lonely Depression. It all came flooding back, now that the tension had gone, now that I had time to feel other emotions than nervousness and sullen determination and edginess, and I realised we couldn’t just ignore them.

  ‘You’d better make a report for the Colonel when we get back,’ I said.

  Soon afterwards the group began to split up. Bummer Ward was killed in the push from Alamein and Gester’s jeep went up on a mine near the Mareth Line. Smollett lost a leg and Morris died of wounds, then Morena was caught by shrapnel in Italy and we lost him, too, for a while, and when he returned both he and Nimmo were posted off to different companies to nurse new officers just out from England, just as they’d nursed me, while I was promoted and landed with a whole batch of newcomers who were still wet behind the ears and had to be taught everything I’d ever learned from Morena.

  By that time, of course, everyone knew the invasion was near and, in addition to all the working-up we had to do as a group, we all had other things on our minds. Those of us who were left were ordered back to England for the second front and, with the Germans in retreat everywhere, from then on the only thing that filled my brain was the thought of peace. There were a whole lot of new things to learn about fighting in Europe and the only thing that seriously concerned me just then was learning them quickly so that I might have a chance of being alive to see the lights go on again. I wasn’t sure by this time that I was glad to leave the desert. I don’t think anyone was. In spite of all the cursing and the complaints, we’d grown used to it and understood it – but there was still a long hard road to travel before we’d finished and by this time I was determined that I was going to be there when we reached the end of it.

  It was really only when I’d lost touch with them all that I remembered the pictures Nimmo claimed to have found. We were pushing up to Germany by then, through acres of ruined fields and charred houses and splintered forests, with the muddy ground carved up by tank tracks and trampled by the boots of thousands of marching men. It was bitterly cold, with the frost-rime on every hedgerow, and all the grassland seemed to be flooded and every puddle was starred by new ice, and I was trying to keep warm over a fire that some Americans had started in a broken-down barn.

  It was as I thought longingly of the warmth of Africa that I remembered the Qalam Depression and the long wait there, and the boob I’d made over the Paymaster, and then, suddenly I began to think of the pictures Nimmo had found and wondered if anything had ever been done about them.

  I was still thinking about them, wondering if they’d been lost again, when someone came to tell me the Colonel was looking for me and that there was a new job to do, and I promptly pushed Nimmo and his pictures to the back of my mind. After all, I decided as I thrust between the steaming, half-frozen men, it was all over and done with now. Whatever had or had not been done, there was no reason to worry my head about them. I’d never hear of them again.

  At least, that was what I thought.

  But I was wrong. Dead wrong.

  Part One

  Off to See the Wizard

  One

  In the confusion of peace it seemed I lost touch with everybody I’d known. After demob I tried for a while to do some writing, but nothing came of it, and in the end I went back to newspapers and ended up in Fleet Street.

  Perhaps because I’d done a lot of unwilling travelling during the war they decided I might know something about it, and they gave me a page and told me to write about holidays abroad, which were just then becoming popular. I stuck it for a while and then moved on to something else, but nothing ever seemed to come to anything and I could see myself ending up like all the rest of the galley slaves, written out and indifferent, unable to work up any enthusiasm for anything.

  My contract had just finished, and I was wondering whether to make a change into something else entirely, when a letter from Nimmo found me, curiously warming as it came across the years. It was addressed to ‘Captain P A Doyle’ and asked me to meet him in a pub near the London Docks, and, when I went there, smart as hell in my shiny exploited journalist’s suit, I was surprised to find Jock Houston and Tiny Leach and Wop Morena there as well. The old nicknames came back immediately we met.

  It startled me a bit to see them after so long – because they’d all changed so much. Nimmo had lost that great mop of red hair he’d had and his face was deeply lined, as though he’d spent some time abroad. Tiny Leach looked enormous, because his waist had disappeared entirely now, and Houston, who’d always been small and spare, had developed into a thin, desiccated, dry little man. Morena was the least changed of the lot. His hair was thinning but he still seemed square and solid as teak, though the old grim unsmiling look that had always been in his eye had gone and he looked a lot more human than I’d ever remembered him. He’d served in Kenya and Korea and there were little white marks round his eyes where he’d been wounded by a grenade on the Imjin.

  They all of them came forward to greet me with a lot of back-slapping and drink-offering, because, rank or no rank, I’d been one of them and put up with everything they’d put up with.

  ‘You’ve put weight on,’ Nimmo said. ‘You’re a big boy now.’

  It was only when they started producing photographs and I looked at myself in the mirror over Nimmo’s head that I realised how much I had changed. The old dewy look had gone and a few more years of responsibility had put lines on my face that I’d never really noticed before.

  It had been quite an evening, but it hadn’t taken me long to discover we hadn’t come together merely for a celebration.

  After a while, Nimmo produced a small round bowl from a briefcase and put it on the table in front of us, and I’d noticed immediately how Houston and Leach had leaned forward and how their faces had grown tense.

  ‘Ever seen one of those before?’ Nimmo asked.

  ‘Where did you get that?’ I asked.

  ‘Qalam, 1942.’

  ‘From the Depression,’ I said immediately. ‘The time you went out to bring in the Paymaster.’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Is this what you were doing while I was sweating on the top line waiting for the Germans? Digging it up?’

  He grinned. ‘I didn’t think much about it at the time,’ he explained. ‘In fact, I forgot all about it until I turned it up a year or two ago. You remember I told you we’d found a cave and some pictures?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘There were a few old plates and bowls in there, too.’

  I looked up at Leach and Houston and they both nodded eagerly.

  ‘I didn’t think much about ’em then,’ Nimmo continued. ‘They seemed so battered, I just thought they were cooking pots left behind by some tribe who’d been passing through the Depression and had had to do a bunk quickly because the war was coming too close, and I just picked this one up as a souvenir. But I’ve had it identified at the British Museum since. It’s Mycaenean, they think. And it’s gold!’

  I stared at him, and saw the others all watching me carefully. ‘Gold, for God’s sake!’

  ‘Gold. When I found it, it was so dirty, it looked like brass.’ He smiled and tapped the bowl. ‘If that’s gold,’ he said, ‘so might all the other things be gold, too.’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘We decided we’d like to go back and find out. If they are gold, they must be worth quite a bit. Whether the law of treasure trove applies to Libya or not, I don’t know, but there must be some sort of market value for these things – even if only to a museum.’

  I stared at him again, caught by the implications behind the discovery. ‘Did you ever make that report out for the Colonel?’ I asked.

  He shook his head and I noticed for the first time that there were streaks of grey in his hair. ‘Never had time,’ he said. ‘If you remember, we were busy just then with Rommel, and after that we never stopped.’

&
nbsp; ‘We went through ’em like a dose of salts,’ Leach said with a swift rush of pride, like a small boy recalling a fist fight.

  ‘When I did think about it again,’ Nimmo went on, ignoring him, ‘it seemed to be too late. We’d long since bypassed Qalam, and we were rather occupied with winning the war. Italy and then D-Day remember? I never thought of it again until some time ago, and when I got it identified as gold I remembered I’d found it with a few others in the cave where we saw the wall paintings, and that I’d been so impressed by the pictures I’d taken the precaution of taking bearings and making a few drawings of the outside in case we’d made some archaeological discovery. I nearly stripped the attic to find them.’

  He opened a file and on a sheet of faded paper I caught a glimpse of neat professional sketches of what looked like cliffs and rock formations and groups of numbers.

  ‘So that’s why you took so bloody long,’ I said. ‘Drawing a lot of pictures. You told me all you did was take bearings.’

  He grinned. ‘Well, you know how it is,’ he said. He paused, smiling, then went on quickly, indicating the bowl. ‘Ever since I got this identified as gold,’ he said, ‘–and it wasn’t until about nine years after the war – I’ve been thinking of going back. I never did, of course. First of all I found that the bloody area was under the authority of the Libyan Army and you couldn’t get in, then I – well, I hadn’t the cash. A bit of trouble. You know how it is.’ He grinned and behind his smile I saw a hint of the old sly evil Nimmo and wondered what he’d been up to and who else had lost money besides. He seemed to guess what I was thinking and winked before going on.

  ‘Every time I thought about it there was something in the way,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d never make it. Then I met Jock Houston here one night a month or two back. In a pub in the West End.’

  ‘I was chasing a bit of stuff,’ Houston said quickly, and as his eyes shone he didn’t seem to have changed much in spite of the extra years. ‘Met her in a bar the night before. Square legs and a bust like buns bursting out of a bag. Good job I didn’t catch her. Instead I walked into Jimmy and here we are.’