The Old Trade of Killing

by John Harris

  Crabourne’s mess hut was a bare sparse building stacked at one end with cartons and packing cases, with a wire screen at the window and a hissing primus on a table, and a rifle on an improvised rack above a tin trunk and a dented wash-bowl. I heard a spurt of music from the workmen’s camp as we arrived, barbaric and flat on the evening air, as toneless and thin as the wind itself, then someone started singing in a high-pitched voice that was more a screech than a song, and I saw the lamps yellow and glowing among the low mounds of the tents, and caught the drifting smell of the smoke from where the women cooked over fires made with camel-dung.

  Crabourne was waiting for us, together with his cousin and a small Jewish-looking man we’d not seen before, with a narrow face and a tall spire of curling hair that stood up above his forehead like the tuft of a cockatoo.

  ‘This is David Selinski,’ Crabourne said as we settled ourselves in the folding chairs that gave them a shred of comfort. ‘David’s looking after Qahait. He’s been having trouble over there with the workmen, so he’s joined us for the evening to report. They’re too sophisticated these days, I guess. They know all about union rules and proper hours.’

  His cousin handed us coffee poured out by a silent Arab and Crabourne splashed spirit into thick mugs.

  ‘Hardly brandy bowls,’ he said cheerfully, waving away the flies. ‘But I guess they suffice.’

  He pushed aside a pile of paper clips and measuring tapes and manila envelopes, to put his mug on the table, then he sat back and sailed into me without preamble.

  ‘You guys are barking up the wrong tree, you know,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing here.’

  He gestured in a peremptory manner, as though what he’d said should be sufficient to convince us, and reached for the mug again as though the matter were settled. I saw Morena glance at me and I shrugged. ‘We’ll look, all the same,’ I said.

  Crabourne frowned, as though stubbornness in anyone irritated him. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘this place was found only by chance. Though, God knows, it’s been searched often enough since the war by Ghad Ahmed himself.’

  ‘There were paintings at Faras,’ I pointed out. ‘I’ve seen pictures of them. There were plenty of other things, too.’

  He was unimpressed. ‘Doesn’t mean a thing,’ he said. ‘The desert’s full of paintings that have no connection with anything else. They found masses of them at Djanet in the Tassili Hills, and more at Jabbaren and Sefar and Adjefou. The French copied thousands.’

  ‘The Poles found pictures of Christ at Faras,’ I pointed out. ‘And remains of churches.’

  He shrugged again. ‘Some of these goddam churches that are found are so unimportant the tribes use them for goat-pens.’ He swung round on Selinski. ‘David,’ he said. ‘Do you figure anyone ever lived here?’

  ‘How could they?’ Selinski spoke with the soft sycophantic voice of an intellectual yes-man. ‘The paintings are spread over a dozen miles. That doesn’t seem to indicate a settled community.’

  ‘Or a treasure,’ Crabourne put in with a faint note of contempt in his voice as he looked at me. ‘The Qalami are nomads, in spite of their villages. And nomads don’t carry treasure with them.’

  We stayed for a while, fighting off the insects that came towards the light in terrifying swarms, with Nimmo hogging the girl in a corner while Crabourne lectured the rest of us rather like a teacher with a set of students. He had a lecturer’s manner and most of the conversation was taken up by his opinions. His cousin kept glancing over Nimmo’s head at him, with a hint of amusement in her eyes, as though she knew his faults and had learned to live with them, but Selinski obviously took them seriously.

  It was dark by the time we left, and as Selinski had to drive back to Qahait, we all turned out to see him go. The jeep moved away down the Depression, a black slug trailing a cloud of dust behind the long white beam of the headlights, then we said good night, Nimmo lingering over Crabourne’s cousin a little longer than he need have done.

  The night had come as abruptly as if a whole lot of lights had been dimmed in a theatre, and there was even something of the same theatrical effect. One minute everything was bright and in clear visual contact, and the next it was in darkness. But the stupefying hostile heat had vanished also and, driven by an urgent longing to find something of what we’d lost over the years, I let Morena and Nimmo go ahead and walked off alone into the Depression, past the low mound of soil they’d dug out of the caves to get at the paintings.

  There was a great humming silence, with a sliver of moon coming over the edge of the cliffs dead ahead, flooding the land with faint pale light that showed up the rocks with softly radiant contour lines and left the hollows as black patches like holes in the earth. I could see a fire flickering palely in the shadows, and there was a smell of food in the air coming from Ghad Ahmed’s camp. Above me was the full sweep of the night sky, a dark bowl riddled with stars that didn’t twinkle as they did in England but seemed to burn, enormous and brilliant, just above my head.

  The sense of being watched came over me again, as though the whole Depression had eyes, as though all those thousands of paintings that Crabourne was copying were staring at me, and I found myself listening suddenly, half expecting to hear the rumble of guns and see the rose-red flashes of light towards the north and feel the vibration through the soles of my feet of far-off heavy blasts. Then I relaxed, knowing it was my surroundings that were causing me unconsciously to reach back into memory. The Garden of Allah, the Arabs called the desert. The place where you could find a paradise on earth.

  I sighed, knowing I was searching for something from the past that didn’t exist any more. I was full of peculiar embitterments and ecstasies that were hard to bear, and was just about to set off back to the camp, my heart tight, my chest constricted, when I heard the chink of a stone nearby, and I whirled round.

  It was Crabourne’s cousin, a small slender figure emerging from the shadows.

  ‘Enjoying the moon?’ she asked as she appeared.

  I laughed. ‘At my age,’ I said, ‘the romance has drained away a bit.’

  She chuckled and gazed at me for a second. ‘How long are you going to he here?’ she asked.

  I shrugged. ‘God knows. How about you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nobody knows. Not even Sloan. There’s so much to do.’ She laughed. ‘There were five of us originally, but now we’re down to three, and David Selinski’s over at Qahait all the time. The other two just vanished.’

  ‘Vanished?’

  ‘She was German. Bit of an expert, I guess, and Sloan’s right hand. I came along originally to chaperone her, or her me, I don’t know which. She was fat and ancient. At least thirty-five…’

  I held my tongue like a coward and didn’t tell her I was forty, as old as some of the dug-outs I’d sneered at in just the same way during the war.

  ‘I guess the heat got them,’ she said. ‘It sure bowled them over.

  ‘Sunstroke?’

  She laughed. ‘No. Sex. They couldn’t work for pawing each other. Like a couple of hippos making love. After a fortnight she claimed she was ill and had to go to the coast, and he insisted on taking her in one of the jeeps.’ She chuckled again. ‘They never came back.’

  She paused, as though she had something on her mind, and suddenly I realised she’d been not only bored but a little scared, too, with only Crabourne and the Arabs down there in the silent Depression. Then she seemed to draw herself up, as though she were pushing her apprehensions out of sight to the back of her mind.

  ‘It’s funny to think that people once lived here, isn’t it?’ Her voice came slowly and sounded awed. ‘Lived here and left nothing but the paintings to show they’d ever existed or where they went. There must have been a lot of them, too. The paintings give quite a detailed picture of the life.’

  She stopped, as though afraid she were talking too much shop, and looked up at me. ‘I’m sorry Sloan’s so – so boorish about everything,’ she went on. ‘Personally
, I find it a pleasure to see someone around. Particularly as Sloan always seems as though he’s just been taken off a shelf and dusted after not being used for a long time. It’s his job, I suppose.’

  ‘What about Selinski?’ I asked. ‘You’ve still got him.’

  She smiled. ‘He’s what you’d call “devoted to his work”. We don’t really get on.’ She paused and went on in a faintly resentful tone: ‘It’s such a pity everybody objects so much to each other. Sloan to your party. Your friends to us.’

  I shrugged. ‘I think they find the desert more crowded than they remember it,’ I explained. ‘It’s a little disconcerting. Besides, perhaps they don’t like having people disbelieve them.’

  ‘Like Sloan?’

  ‘And Ahmed.’

  At the mention of the name the worries that I’d guessed had been plaguing her burst out as she let her guard down, and there was a note of relief in her voice as she replied.

  ‘Whatever Sloan says,’ she pointed out firmly, ‘I’m glad you’re here. I prefer it that way.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She moved her shoulders. ‘Sloan’s a professor. He has his head in a book all the time. The only things he sees are what are written in the sand. Perhaps it’s because I’m a woman, but I seem to see more.’

  ‘What, for instance?’

  She jerked her shoulders again. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ she said helplessly. ‘Something. Something not quite right. Suspicion. Dislike. Watchfulness. Something like that. Ghad Ahmed’s people are hardly Ivy League types, are they?’

  I laughed, and she went on quickly.

  ‘The very sight of you coming across the Depression did me good.’ She gazed around her. ‘What is it about this place?’ she asked, her voice unexpectedly sharp and nervous. ‘What is it that gets everyone on edge so?’

  ‘Are they on edge?’

  ‘Sure they are. Ghad Ahmed doesn’t like us. In fact, I think he detests us. Yet his people are working for us. They’re always working. In spite of their union rules, they work when we don’t want them to. They do no harm, but I wonder why.’

  I laughed. ‘Perhaps they’ve heard of our treasure, too.’

  She looked up at me, puzzled. ‘Do you really believe there is a treasure?’

  ‘I saw the bowl,’ I said. ‘I really did. Nimmo’s father had it. He said it was from one of these caves where he saw the first of your paintings – long before the Qalami found them and reported them. He was impressed enough by the pictures to make drawings and take bearings. He felt the pictures were important enough for someone to come back one day and find more like them and copy them. Leach was with him and so was Houston.’

  She was silent for a while, thinking, then she looked up at me. ‘It’s a bit like Zerzura, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘The Place of Little Birds. The legendary city in the desert with the sleeping king and queen.’

  ‘You’ve heard that one, too?’

  ‘I don’t believe that, either.’

  ‘Look,’ I said, desperately keen to convince her. ‘Those Messerschmitts that killed the Paymaster back there. Nimmo said their bombs had disturbed the rocks. And why not? A bomb might well have unearthed the first of your pictures by moving soil or stones that wouldn’t be disturbed by normal things like wind or rain. So why not a cave with treasure?’

  She seemed impressed, in spite of the smile on her face. ‘Perhaps that’s what Ghad Ahmed’s after,’ she agreed. ‘It would certainly explain all his eagerness.’

  She stared around her, her face pale in the moonlight.

  ‘What is it about this place?’ she said again, half to herself. ‘I noticed it even when we first arrived. There’s something I don’t like about it. There are too many people interested in it and what we’re doing. First us. Then Ghad Ahmed. And now you.’

  Six

  It was the heat that woke me next morning. I was bathed in sweat and the glittering white light outside was without shade of any kind. I could hear the chatter of voices against the cliff and through the open flap of the tent could see that Crabourne’s party were already at work.

  ‘They start early,’ Leach commented heavily, squatting on the ground with an enamel mug in his hands, his eyes on the basket-boys near the spoil-mound and the slender figure of Phil Garvey moving about near one of the caves.

  We’d not got into any kind of routine about rising or starting work, but Houston, more by accident than by design, had found himself crouching unwillingly over the stove, and we breakfasted off beans and bacon. The bacon was soggy and the beans were over-cooked into a brown mash and Houston was only vaguely apologetic as he served it up.

  ‘Sorry, mates,’ he said. ‘I seem to have lost the knack.’

  ‘You never ’ad the knack,’ Leach growled. ‘It was always like this when you cooked the grub.’

  And then I remembered that it was, and I began to recall all the other little things that Houston had always failed to do, the way he’d always been carried on everybody else’s shoulders, the way he’d always been quick to draw attention from his faults.

  He was shrugging now at Leach’s complaint, indifferent as he had always been to criticism.

  ‘Well, it is a bit tiresome, all this cooking, isn’t it?’ he said fretfully. ‘Why can’t we mess with that lot over there? They’ve got a Wog to do it. It might even be company in the evenings. Something better to look at than your ugly mug.’ His eyes strayed across to Crabourne’s compound, bright and shining and faraway. ‘That girl’s got a pair of pippins,’ he said. ‘Wonder who she gets to scrub her back in the bath, because she can have me any time.’

  Nimmo, who’d been watching Phil Garvey through the tent flap, turned and gave him a sharp look, and Houston shrugged.

  ‘Well, she has, hasn’t she?’ he said.

  It was soon breathtakingly hot and seemed to be growing hotter all the time, but someone had to go to the well at Biq Qalam and I decided to start off by being friendly with Crabourne’s group and offering to fetch water for them. Morena offered to go with me, chiefly, I think, because Houston and Leach were already getting on his nerves, too.

  Biq Qalam was off the direct route between Qalam and the Depression and we’d not bothered to go out of our way to it the day before, feeling that there’d be plenty of time to collect water later, and Crabourne jumped at the chance and even offered us one of his drivers, because both he and Phil Garvey were overworked and he needed Ghad Ahmed with him to keep the men at their soil shifting.

  Out of the Depression there was an unexpected breath of wind from the north that was surprisingly cool and refreshing, and we reached the well in good time and, in return for a few tins of bully beef the Qalami there helped the Arab driver to fill the cans and stack them on the lorry.

  It grew hotter as the day progressed and the wind faded almost to nothing. The plain seemed to be heaving in waves as the air shimmered, and I was already looking forward to the blessed relief of evening. We sat in the shade of the trees, among the tufty grass where flakes of encrusted salt gleamed, and Morena played his mouth organ softly as we smoked and waited.

  ‘You ever go to any of those Old Comrades’ dinners?’ he asked suddenly, the words coming unexpectedly from nowhere, as though he’d been thinking about them for a long time.

  ‘Once,’ I said. ‘Only once.’

  He nodded. ‘Same here. It seemed to be run entirely by blokes who never got nearer the desert than Cairo. Came as a bit of a disappointment. Wasn’t the same.’

  He gestured. ‘This is different, too. Something missing nowadays.’

  His words had mirrored my own thoughts exactly. ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘It’s different.’

  ‘Funny how disappointed you feel about it, isn’t it?’

  He nodded at the desert. ‘It used to get me, this lot,’ he said. ‘You know how it did. I remember sitting at the top of the Depression waiting for the others to come back with that Paymaster. We couldn’t see what was going on in the Depression an
d we were alone, but I wasn’t scared. I sat up there with Gester and Smollett, with old Morris reading his poetry and pretending he liked it, while Nimmo went down with Bummer Ward and Leach and Houston. I wasn’t a bit disturbed about it. Now…’ he shrugged and frowned ‘…well, now it’s not the same. There’s something wrong somehow.’

  ‘You’ve noticed, too?’

  ‘Yes.’ He threw away his cigarette. ‘It worries me. I keep wondering what’s going on in that black hole Ghad Ahmed calls his mind. And then there’s Leach. He’s just a fat slob now. And Houston’s a bit of a wash-out, too, when you think about, it, isn’t he?’

  He sighed. ‘But it’s not that. It’s not just because it’s twenty years later and we’re older. There’s something else. Something I don’t like.’ He paused and looked hard at me. ‘I think there’s something bloody queer going on around here,’ he ended.

  Work had finished by the time we got back to the Depression. The Arabs were listlessly packing up for the day and Ghad Ahmed was by the spoil-heap placing sheets of drawings into folders.

  We climbed down slowly from the lorry, our knees stiff aware how dry and desiccated we felt under the blazing sunshine, and conscious all the time of a row of eyes watching us from near the low heap of the spoil-mound, where the workmen were just downing tools and squatting on dusty haunches with their baskets and mattocks. Ghad Ahmed began to move among them, smarter-looking than the rest, definitely a chief’s son in his neat trousers and shirt, a baseball cap on his head and dark sun-glasses on his curved nose. He was peering towards the tent alongside our vehicles, scrutinising it carefully.