The Old Trade of Killing

by John Harris

  It was difficult sleeping, because the ground was stony, and a short, sharp quarrel broke out between Houston and Leach and Nimmo on who was to have the hammocks.

  ‘Not Nimmo,’ Leach insisted. ‘Not ’im. He’s used ’em all the time.’

  He plunged into the back of the lorry and I saw a pair of boots come flying out. Young Nimmo was up in a second and after him, and we heard the thump of a fist against flesh, and we were all there immediately, pushing between them. Nimmo was holding his jaw and he had his hand on the rifle. It was the first flare-up of temper we’d had, but it had been coming a long time and was by no means unexpected.

  Morena snatched the rifle away and pushed Nimmo aside.

  ‘Last time somebody threatened me,’ Leach said slowly, his face heavy and forbidding, ‘’e ended up in ’ospital for a couple of months.’

  ‘And I suppose you ended up in clink,’ Morena snapped.

  Leach nodded. His nose had peeled now and looked uncomfortably raw and pink in the shadows. ‘A month,’ he said. ‘It was worth it.’

  All the humour had gone from Nimmo’s face and there was a glow of evil in his eyes I’d seen once or twice in his father’s face years before. ‘Nobody hits me,’ he said in a low voice. ‘No matter how bloody big he is.’

  They shuffled apart at last, but the ill feeling was strong enough to cut with a knife.

  We descended into the Depression as soon as the sun began to rise next morning, moving cautiously – not because the going was difficult but because we were somehow unanxious to find out what was waiting for us down there. Leach was in front, driving the Land Rover, and I could see his head turning from side to side as he stared about him, as though he felt the Depression were full of ghosts.

  Houston, who was driving the lorry, seemed to be suffering from the same uneasiness.

  ‘Doesn’t look the same,’ he said slowly.

  ‘It’s twenty years later,’ I reminded him.

  We stopped as we reached the floor of the Depression, and stared along the flat plain to the shallow cliffs rising on either side. The heat was intense now and made you pant as it fought for the moisture in your body.

  ‘It’s different.’ As we drew up alongside the Land Rover, Leach spoke slowly, as though he thought there were a trick in it somewhere. ‘There’s more sand at the bottom ’ere.’

  ‘Could have come from the Sand Sea,’ I pointed out. ‘A steady north wind could have brought tons of it down.’

  We were all silent for a moment, aware of the oppressive silence that was menacing in its intensity, then Houston spoke, his voice hushed as though he were suddenly scared.

  ‘It was somewhere here we found the Paymaster,’ he said. ‘Over there.’

  He jerked his hand towards a cluster of rocks, and then we saw for the first time the blackened box of metal half buried in the sand, without wheels, doors, glass or seats.

  In the silence it seemed as though it were one of the ghosts that was troubling Leach, and abruptly I had the feeling that we were being watched, as though those eroded buttresses of rock hid figures which never shifted their gaze from us.

  Morena had climbed down from the lorry and was staring round him in that manner of his that I remembered so well from the war – standing still, a little apart from everyone else, his eyes moving slowly about him, full of caution and alertness. The others were climbing down, too, now, staring uneasily round them at the high flanking walls of limestone, and I noticed that Leach and Houston had drawn close to one another, as though they drew some comfort from each other’s presence.

  ‘This is it.’ Morena had walked over to the rusting wreckage now and was peering at it. ‘You can see the bullet-holes.’

  It was like passing through a time-barrier and seeing things happen that had first happened centuries before, and it gave me a strange feeling of having stepped back into the Middle Ages, because suddenly, with all that had happened since, the war – our war – seemed to belong to the Middle Ages.

  We stood by the wreck in silence for a moment, all of us touched, each in his own way, by memories, and I found myself wondering if they’d ever managed to turn up the Paymaster’s iron chest. There’d been a hell of a row when we’d got back to base. There’d been an enquiry, with no less a person than a colonel running it, and a lot of accusations had been made. We’d all been questioned and cross-questioned and for a fortnight or so had lived damned uncomfortable lives. In the end the CO had decided to court-martial me, to clear the air a bit.

  ‘I know damned well you haven’t got the bloody money,’ he’d said. ‘But we’ve got to wrap these Provost bastards up. Now they’ll either have to put up or shut up.’

  The court-martial had absolved the lot of us, but it didn’t really clear the air. Nimmo, Leach, Houston and the others who’d gone to the Depression had been harried by the Provost Department for a long time afterwards, and the first thing that had happened when we broke through after Alamein and swept up to Tunisia was that an expedition had been sent down to the Depression to look for the money. Needless to say, they didn’t find it, and in the end they’d just accepted that Sheikh Ghad had got it, and even that had annoyed them, because when Rommel had driven us back he’d swapped sides with all his men and just before his camel trod on a mine that sent him to Kingdom Come he’d actually handed over to the Germans a column of soft-skinned vehicles that had fled his way to get round the Panzers.

  I snapped out of the memory, pushing it behind me quickly.

  ‘Where did you bury them all?’ I asked.

  ‘Further down,’ Houston said. ‘Near the rocks. It was too hard here then to dig. We went close to the cliff where there was some loose soil.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said.

  The track emerged from the sand as we moved along the floor of the Depression towards the east. We could see the smoke of fires and a lorry and a jeep and a high square vehicle that seemed as though it might contain some sort of laboratory. They were just up ahead of us now blurred a little by the heat that was making the rock faces dance.

  As we drew closer, we saw people standing by them, waiting for us.

  ‘It’s a woman, all right,’ Houston said eagerly.

  ‘Sure it is,’ Nimmo grinned. ‘I’ve never seen a man that shape before.’

  They began to walk towards us as we approached, a man with grey hair, tall and stooping, and a girl, small and slim and straight, followed by about twenty or thirty Arabs of all ages and in all kinds of dress from ragged robes to modern khaki shorts and shirts.

  The Land Rover halted and I stopped the lorry alongside, a few yards from the other vehicles. The man was the first to come up to us, with the girl just behind him, and, behind her, the Arabs in a half-circle, standing motionless – curiously motionless – still as stones, their hands by their sides, their black eyes opaque and unrelenting and full of an unexpected hate. As I stared back at their unyielding gaze, the uneasiness that had been growing on me ever since we’d reached the floor of the Depression increased.

  The man had moved forward again now, gesturing with his hand at our vehicles.

  ‘Who the devil are you?’ he asked, not angrily but with a frosty, mid-Western American voice that was full of surprise and curiosity.

  ‘My name’s Doyle,’ I said. ‘Alan Doyle. This is Leach, Houston, Morena and Nimmo.’

  ‘I’m Sloan Crabourne. Professor Crabourne. Marston University, Ohio. This is my assistant and my cousin, Philomena Crabourne Garvey. What are you doing here and what do you represent?’

  The girl was watching us, saying nothing, her face calm and interested. She wasn’t beautiful, though she had the sort of face that grows on you – awkwardly angled but with a pale perfect skin, short fair hair and lively grey eyes that made you feel full of excitement without knowing why. She had an inquisitive look about her at the moment, too, as though she’d been stiff with boredom and welcomed the diversion, and I had to wrench my gaze away from her to answer Crabourne.


  ‘We might ask you the same question,’ I said.

  Crabourne stared at us for a moment, his eyes resting curiously on Houston’s absurd head-dress.

  ‘I guess,’ he said slowly, ‘to put it simply, we’re archaeologists. Though perhaps that’s too simple. I’m the archaeologist. My assistants are artists. We’re copying wall painting.’ He gestured behind him with his hand. ‘The Ghad tribe discovered the painting of a bullock on the rock face of a cave here. For some reason best known to themselves they were doing some excavating work in the area and found it quite by chance. It probably dates from way back before Christ.’

  I saw Houston and Leach glance at each other and I felt a surge of hope as Crabourne’s words bore out what Nimmo had told us.

  ‘Since then,’ Crabourne went on, ‘we’ve found literally hundreds, probably of Negro origin, though some of the later ones are undoubtedly of Mycaenean or Egyptian influence. There are more at Qahait south of here. I’ve got an assistant and another group there. We’re trying to put them on record. Now I guess you’d better tell us what you’re doing here.’

  ‘Much the same, I suppose,’ I said.

  He stared at us for a moment, then he exploded. ‘But this is plain goddamned silly,’ he snapped. ‘Why two groups? We got permission to come here.’

  ‘So did we.’

  ‘We got the backing of Unesco and the Libyan Academy of Archaeological Sciences. Who’s backing you?’

  ‘Us,’ Leach said bluntly. ‘Me, him, him, him and him.’

  Crabourne stared. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We put up the money ourselves.’

  Crabourne looked angry. ‘You guys are poaching on our territory,’ he said sharply.

  It seemed to be time to lay our cards on the table. ‘On the contrary, I said, ‘perhaps you’re poaching on ours. We were here long ago and found the first of your paintings long before you did. In 1942, to be exact. We were operating just to the north of here. A patrol came down here to rescue a group of men. They’d been caught by Messerschmitts. They’re buried here. We buried them.’

  Crabourne looked interested and the anger left his face. ‘Say, those’ll be the graves we found. Four of ’em. Up against the cliff. Ahmed says it was a Britisher who’d come to bring money to them.’

  I glanced at the girl. ‘Who’s Ahmed?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s in charge of the diggers.’ It was the first time she’d spoken and her voice was warm and steady and I saw Nimmo and Houston staring approvingly at her. ‘He’s our interpreter, too, and helps with the photography. He said he was a boy of ten at the time.’

  ‘We’d better have a word with Ahmed,’ I suggested. ‘The money was never found and I was responsible for it.’

  ‘Is that what you’re here for?’ Crabourne asked.

  I shook my head again and told him the reason for our journey, but his lip curled and he made a derisive gesture.

  ‘There are no ornaments here,’ he said. ‘There’s no trace of human habitation, in fact, outside the pictures. No monuments, no tombs, no mounds that might hide a lost city. The Qalami simply liked painting, that’s all, and this Depression and the cliffs at Qahait simply provided a suitable place for it.’

  ‘It seems to tie up with the paintings, all the same,’ I insisted.

  He gestured again with a trace of irritation. ‘For God’s sake!’ he said. ‘For ornaments you’d need a church, and for a church you’d need a city. There’s nothing like that here. You’re wasting your time.’

  He clearly resented us, but I felt we had as much right there as he had. ‘Why can’t we help each other,’ I suggested, ‘and pool results? We have a map of where they were found.’

  Crabourne gave a twisted smile. ‘Treasure Island, eh?’ he said. ‘Long John Silver.’

  His sarcasm irritated me and I answered sharply. ‘It was made in 1942. Here. By the men who came down here.’

  Watched by the circle of silent Arabs, all of them listening, their eyes moving quickly among each other, Crabourne considered the information for a moment, then he nodded, though not very willingly.

  ‘Well, a map’s a map,’ he said. ‘I suppose, in fact, I’d be mighty interested if you did find something, though I don’t figure you will. Ask Ahmed.’

  Ahmed was a sullen young-looking man with a lean handsome face and a thin nose like the blade of a scimitar. He didn’t bow to me as he might have done twenty years before, and I noticed he showed even less interest in Nimmo’s treasure than Crabourne.

  ‘There is nothing,’ he said softly in English. ‘I know. I am a Qalam. We are all Qalami here. From Qalam and Qahait and Qatu. I was here when your people came down to bring us the money during the fighting. I was a boy at the time. I had a rifle. The money never came.’

  ‘I saw it coming,’ I said.

  Ahmed’s eyes flashed angrily. ‘It didn’t arrive,’ he snapped. ‘We heard the aeroplanes. We found the dead men. One of them was a Qalam - my own cousin. They’d been buried. But there was no money.’

  It didn’t seem worth arguing about. Not now. Not after twenty years. The Paymaster and his companions were merely mouldering bones under the thin soil of the Depression now, and the jeep was just a blackened pile of rusting metal. Whoever had taken the money had doubtless spent it long since. But Ahmed seemed still to regard it as important, as though it nagged like a knife under the ribs of his tribe. With his young aggressive face, he reminded me a little of Nimmo.

  ‘My people spoke of it with bitterness for many years,’ he went on. ‘The soldiers sent lorries and cars and many men. They questioned all my people. But they never sent any more money.’

  ‘They might have done,’ I pointed out, ‘if you hadn’t changed sides.’

  His eyes flashed again, but he ignored the comment. ‘There were soldiers here for years,’ he said. ‘All the time. Men from the bases in the north. They pretended they were doing field exercises. But we knew what they were looking for, because there was a shepherd who saw four men with a vehicle on the day the money should have come. One of them a big man like the one with you, and one with hair like fire.’

  ‘Those were my men, Ahmed,’ I said. ‘I sent them here to find the money. But there wasn’t any money. It had gone. Instead, they saw gold ornaments in a cave.’

  He spat contemptuously. ‘There are no gold ornaments,’ he said, and I saw Crabourne nod approvingly. ‘My people would have found them long ago if there had been.’

  Something in the way he spoke and in the way he held himself, one foot forward, his head up, curiously proud and absurd in his white shorts and baseball cap and sun-glasses, made me start wondering.

  ‘Your people?’ I asked, feeling sure he’d stressed the point so that I wouldn’t fail to take it.

  He nodded slowly, his lips thin and tight under the cruel curve of his nose.

  ‘My people,’ he repeated. ‘I am the son of Sheikh Ghad.’

  Five

  We set up our camp within a few yards of Crabourne’s, parking the lorry and the Land Rover alongside each other. As we were going to be there for some time, we set about making it more or less permanent and dug out the tent and the fly-sheets from under the stores. With two extra air mattresses we could now all sleep in comfort without a fight every night for the hammocks.

  Crabourne’s camp was a spartan set of crude stone huts erected by the Arabs and roofed with plaited palm-fronds brought down especially from Qalam. There were also a few olive-drab army tents with the camouflage still on them and the spring gone from the guy-ropes so that the dusty canvas hung forlornly in the heat, and a wired enclosure that was used as a stores dump and a parking area, for the jeep and the five-ton truck and the big van like a pantechnicon that they used for a technical studio and photographic dark room. The place was neat but it had a look of squalid impermanence about it. Somebody had tried to plant some flowers, but they had dried out in the heat and stood up stiff and stark like the withered legs of dead birds, and the palm-frond roo
fs of the huts, like the tents, were heavy with dust, their colour dulled to a matt brown.

  Just beyond the group of vehicles was the Arab encampment, a few low tents covered with red tanned goatskins, with brightly coloured rugs in front. There was a group of goats and camels, supercilious, bad-tempered and ridiculous, that the tribesmen kept with them for transport and for milk, and a few women, blue-tattooed on forehead and chin, in barbaric silver jewellery, who eyed us with bold curious eyes as we passed them. They were offshoots of the Tuareg and doomed to disappear before long – a shiftless, immoral lot who had no word for virginity. Even the prestige that had sprung from their warlike history was fast disappearing against the dazzling competition of the oil men and the mineral seekers who were traversing the desert with fat-bellied planes and helicopters and their magnificent trans-desert highways. There was little left for them now except menial work such as labouring for Crabourne, casual thieving or a little quarrelling with neighbours, incidents that were whipped up by such tribe-minded leaders as Ghad Ahmed seemed to be.

  We’d been invited over to Crabourne’s camp for an evening drink, but only Morena and Nimmo and I went. The other two pleaded that the heat was affecting them more than they’d expected.

  They were still in the strange mood that had come on them as we’d descended the Depression, their light-heartedness draining away as soon as we’d passed Qalam. Inevitably Houston had tried his charms on Phil Garvey, but he hadn’t got very far and had returned to the tent full of snide remarks on her figure and her morals, and lewd suggestions about what might happen when we’d been there a little longer. There’d been a brief exchange of words with Leach, when Leach had failed to understand one of his tasteless jokes about her, and now they were silent and remote and curiously angry – as though they resented Crabourne as much as he resented them. There’d been a few muttered remarks during the morning as we’d pitched camp, and a grumbling undertone all through the midday meal from Leach, and, though they’d subsided now to a panting fury at the heat, they still hadn’t got over their inexplicable bitterness.