Assuming, of course, that it was to Chakra he was going, which seemed extremely doubtful for one reason and another. To begin with, would the car ever make it? With every bump in the road it seemed disposed to burst asunder. And it was already as hot as a furnace; what would the hills do to it? Well, at least it’s old, he thought. It’s seen more life than the usual gloomy chariot and is probably correspondingly tough. But what about the driver? Alan looked past the folds of the grubby kaffiyeh in front to the unpromising features reflected in the rear-vision mirror—the unshaven jowls hanging in sweaty folds, the bloodshot eyes, the broken tooth. Surely, he reassured himself hopefully, only an honest man could look so villainous.
They were now crossing the Beka’a and he looked ahead to see if there was any sign of the agency car, but the road was deserted. If Sarah and Ishmael had reached Chakra safely, then surely they would have been returning by now. But he had only to think of them, the trick they had played on him, and anger swept all anxiety from his mind. For Sarah his special tenderness made some allowance; he concentrated all his rage upon Ishmael. How sick and tired he was of Ishmael’s stupidities! He wished to heaven he had never got caught in that fateful traffic jam, had never set eyes on Ishmael. He would break up the agency tomorrow if it didn’t break itself up after this last fiasco. He could imagine the Thornes wailing and complaining at the British Embassy, party abandoned at Baalbek in the middle of a crisis and on top of that business in Sofar. Tourists would be warned off. Well, what did it matter? He was fed up with Lebanon, the Lebanese, the Jordanians, the Syrians, the Jews. He would go back to London.
‘Can’t you go any faster?’ he shouted at the taxi driver. The man evidently put his foot down on the accelerator, for there was an enormous increase in noise, but little apparent difference in the speed at which they were travelling.
At last the road began to climb and then to wind in deep bends up the hills. The taxi made the ascent slowly, the roar of its engine an outrage in the silence. It was already late afternoon and the sunlight had lost some of its intensity; long inky shadows pointed down from rocks and thorn bushes and the hills ahead rose, sunlit, from the black gulfs of valleys.
They roared around another bend and Alan saw the agency car returning slowly round one of the sharp corners ahead.
Well, thank God, they’re safe! he thought. And for a moment his pursuit of them seemed childish and hysterical. What a fool he must look in this battered taxi, like some peevish Don Quixote. He imagined Sarah laughing at him, and flushed with anger.
Then the agency car appeared round another bend. The sun flashed on the windscreen and glanced away. He saw Ishmael alone at the wheel with no one beside him.
The two cars met on a piece of straight road. A rough stone wall had been built up on the outside edge and beyond it the land dropped abruptly, too steep and rocky even for terracing. There was no room to pass and the taxi driver, keeping to the centre of the road, drew to a halt. But Ishmael, swinging his wheel around, kept moving.
‘Look out, you fool!’ shouted Alan. Ishmael’s off wheels skidded on the loose gravel at the base of the wall; his rear mudguard scraped along the taxi’s bumper bar. He jerked to a halt.
The taxi driver shouted protests and waved clenched fists at Ishmael. Alan flung open the door. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? Look at that scratch!’
Ishmael too got out of his car in a blind, fumbling way, like a man half out of his senses. He made a move to approach Alan but stopped, as though his resolution had run down like the works of a clock and left him powerless. Alan noticed that his clothes were crumpled and dusty; there was a tear in his sleeve, but he was too angry to wonder about this. A feeling of impotent rage possessed him. Sarah, where was she? The irresponsibility of the man, taking her off like that and leaving her alone. And it was more than this. He felt stifled, oppressed by Ishmael, a parasite that was sapping his strength. And the man’s abject appearance only made it worse. He lashed out at him mercilessly.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? You’re not fit to drive a car!’
‘You will pay for this damage!’ shouted the taxi driver.
‘I thought there was room,’ muttered Ishmael.
‘You or anyone else in this Godforsaken place!’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Crawe. The insurance will fix it up.’
‘You should drive donkeys not cars!’ shouted the taxi driver.
‘Where is she?’ cried Alan.
‘She’s gone back to Beirut.’
It was such a stupid lie he did not even heed it. ‘Back your car. The road widens back there. I want to get past.’
‘She told me, “I’m giving up the whole idea, to hell with that fellow!” She took a taxi.’
‘Back that car!’
‘Oh, Mr Crawe, you’re not going after her?’
In a moment of overwhelming horror Alan understood. ‘My God, Ishy! What have you done?’
‘She’s all right! She’s perfectly all right! There’s nothing to worry about—’ Ishmael broke off, his face quivering between terror and grief.
The taxi driver began shouting again in Arabic. ‘Why does this man stand here like a camel? Get your car out of my way! Are you so ignorant that you cannot drive backward?’ And to add force to the command he began to toot strenuously on his horn.
‘We’re not going on. We’re stopping here,’ said Alan, turning to him, grateful for the diversion. His head spun. He felt cold with horror. ‘For God’s sake, stop that row!’ he burst out angrily.
The man got out of the car, slammed the door and advanced upon him threateningly. Yet, when it came to the point, he seemed uncertain where his grievances lay. ‘You hired me to take you to Chakra! You are cheating me! This man ran into my car. He must pay for the damage!’
‘What damage? Your car has already passed the limits of dilapidation.’
‘You are cheating me!’ shouted the taxi driver.
‘All right,’ said Alan, wearily dropping the argument. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be paid. Now wait over there.’ Ishmael, what had Ishmael said? Sarah—No! It wasn’t possible!
‘You are going back on your bargain!’ shouted the taxi driver.
I’ll murder this man, he thought calmly. ‘Shut up!’ he said. ‘Shut up! Shut up and leave me alone! Now wait over there.’ The man, impressed by the light of menace in his eye, drew back, muttering, and Alan turned to Ishmael.
Ishmael was leaning on the car, his head on his arms, sobbing convulsively. Alan went to him and shook him roughly by the shoulder. ‘Where is she?’
‘She’s safe.’
‘Pull yourself together! What have you been doing?’
Ishmael shuddered and shrank away. Terror, grief, shame swept over him; he was half out of his mind. The time had come for confession—he saw that—there was no evading the moment. But what could he say? What had he done? What was it all about? He no longer knew. He was fighting for his home in Jaffa. That was it. He was going back. He began babbling, ‘The Jews, the Jews—’ but he suddenly saw that this was no good, that this would not do for Alan. Even he had never really believed it. ‘They threatened to kill me,’ he sobbed. ‘They put a knife at my throat. If you could see that Fuad. He just looks at you. He picks his teeth. I told them I was finished. They wouldn’t listen.’
‘Who is this man Fuad?’
Alan spoke sternly but quietly and Ishmael, who had expected an outburst of rage, stopped weeping and raised his head. He looked about him in a dazed way, surprised to find where they were. The taxi driver sat on a stone a short distance away, chewing a piece of grass, and Ishmael, noticing him for the first time, stared at him in perplexity. Who was he? he wondered, but felt too humiliated to ask. ‘I met him in Damascus six months ago. It was in a café. They started talking to me—this Fuad and a man called Nagib Fakhr. They said wasn’t I a refugee. They seemed decent chaps. They said they were working to get the Jews out of Palestine.’
‘You bloody
fool!’
‘That’s all very well,’ cried Ishmael. ‘They said did I always want to be a refugee, and didn’t I want my land back. What could I say? If I’d said to hell with that, I’m having a jolly good time in Beirut, they might have cut my throat on the spot. You can’t go round saying that kind of thing, not in Damascus. And anyway I do want to go back. They said it wouldn’t be dangerous. They only wanted a message carried every now and again from Damascus to Beirut. Just a piece of paper, that’s all. And if I didn’t do it someone else would, only it would be easier for me because I was going backwards and forwards all the time.’
‘And they paid you, I suppose.’
‘I didn’t care about that, Mr Crawe.’
Alan believed him. No, he thought, it would not have been money that would have tempted Ishmael, but the delicious attraction of something illicit—the contempt for the stop sign on the street corner, the Arab game of making a fool out of the law. ‘Go on.’
Ishmael tried to think, but his mind felt numb and foggy. He could no longer remember the slow, inexorable course of events that had led to his present misery. It seemed to him, as he tried to recall them, that at first he had been happy, that he had got a terrific kick out of fooling the Lebanese police. Could that possibly have been so? Now it seemed a hundred years ago.
‘They made me carry guns. I didn’t want to, but they said I was in it up to the neck and couldn’t get out.’
Yes, that was it. That was when he began to feel frightened. The first, the second time had gone off all right; then he had had a near miss in the customs on the Syrian border. A new batch of police were in charge, officious bullies who had taken no notice of the fact that the ALTL was a respectable travel agency, absolutely above suspicion and part owned by an Englishman. Not content with the routine examination of passengers’ baggage, they had stripped the seats off the car as well, and if it hadn’t been for some trouble with a Saudi Arabian that had distracted their attention, the game would have been up.
From that day the adventure had turned into a nightmare. He had lived through each day beset by fears and had started out of his dreams at night in a sweat of terror.
‘That business yesterday at Sofar,’ said Alan in the same calm voice. ‘The driver—’
Ishmael nodded eagerly. ‘Yes, Fakhr made me take him on.’
Alan turned away; he could not bear to look at Ishmael. He hated him and hated himself for his own simplicity. He saw himself as stupid and guileless as a child. He saw depths of courage and villainy in his friend he had never suspected. In fact, this was all illusion. Ishmael remained the proud, stubborn young man who had refused to back his car for a taxi driver, but to remember this was to admit compassion and for the moment Alan had set his mind against pity. He could think only of his own grudging protective affection for Ishmael and that this had been betrayed. Looking back on the past two years it seemed to him that Ishmael had devoured the best of them—and all for nothing.
‘Did it strike you,’ he burst out savagely, ‘that you have implicated me in your criminal idiocy? Every penny I have is in this firm. What about me? What about Georgette?’
Ishmael’s eyes opened in surprise. That he should have damaged Alan inadvertently through the agency had presented too fine a moral point for him to grasp. He saw it now. I’ve betrayed him, he thought in anguish. My beloved brother—I’m not fit to live!
‘And Sarah and her letter … These friends of yours, I suppose, did away with Colonel Ahmed.’
‘I don’t understand much about it, but I think Colonel Ahmed had been getting in their way and they wanted something to start the show off.’
‘So you agreed to get rid of Sarah.’
‘It wasn’t like that, Mr Crawe,’ he cried. But this part of his story was the most difficult of all to tell. He couldn’t possibly, he realised even as he plunged into it, tell Alan exactly what had happened. So he faltered and improvised. His tongue played tricks with him, leading him into positions it became impossible to uphold without contradiction. He was not a good liar; his natural disposition was a frank and open one, and his lies were never cunning or well planned but sprang from the impulse of the moment, usually to protect a friend from unpleasant realities, or in extreme cases, to save his own skin. So in the end he gave himself away by his own evasions and inconsistencies.
Less than an hour after his release from jail the day before, Fakhr had rung him up. ‘I simply can’t go on,’ he had told them. ‘They’d suspect me now! You see the risk it would be!’
Fakhr had answered smoothly. ‘Yes, of course, we understand. We’ll put you on to something else. We’ll get in touch with you in a day or two.’ Knowing them, Ishmael had understood that he was being promoted into higher villainy. What would they ask of him now? What crimes, what murders did they have in store for him? Seized with despair he had awaited their instructions. And then, miraculously, a chance for escape came his way. When Sarah went that night to Alan’s flat with her story of the letter and Colonel Ahmed, he saw his opportunity—that Colonel Ahmed should be sending messages to a high official of the Lebanese Security Police could have only one implication, and if Sarah delivered his letter, all the plans that Fakhr had so carefully prepared might go astray. And not only that—suppose the letter contained a reference to himself? He made up his mind then and there. After Sarah had gone he went to Fakhr and struck a bargain. If he handed her over to them, he said, would they leave him alone? They agreed, and what else could he do but trust them to keep their word when it was over.
Ishmael’s voice faltered into silence. Humbly, he waited for Alan to pronounce judgement upon him. He was ready to accept whatever punishment his friend might prescribe for him. His political indiscretions had aroused terror, but no twinge of guilt in him. Why should he feel guilty? He owed nothing to the world but repayment in its own currency of grief and pain; but he had betrayed his friend, the man to whom he owed his life, his prosperity, his happiness. No punishment could be too heavy for this crime. His mind, having grasped the notion of his own treachery, now magnified it, for if he was to suffer, then it was necessary for him to suffer greatly. He believed in heaven and hell, but not in purgatory. His imagination played upon a variety of striking penances. I shall cut off my right hand, he thought, the hand that sealed the bargain with Fakhr. Or put it in a vice and crush it till the bones are broken. I shall cut out the tongue that led me into this treachery.
But still Alan kept his silence. The taxi driver, sitting on his stone, coughed and spat into the dust. Ishmael looked at him in surprise and saw that around them on the hills the shadows had lengthened. Long thin clouds, burnished into a shining gold, hung stretched out over the mountain ridges. He had not noticed the advance of the afternoon and the slanting golden light looked strange to him, as though he had wakened from an afternoon sleep and looked outside to see that time had passed over him. Fear, not of Alan and the Lebanese police, but of God, touched Ishmael.
He spoke, to break the silence. ‘Mr Crawe, what are you going to do?’
Alan knew that Ishmael’s big soft eyes were gazing at him, imploring for a kind word, a gesture of understanding, but he could not bear to look at him. He said coldly, ‘We’ll have to go and get her.’
‘You can’t do that! They’ll kill you! You must believe me. They only want to keep her quiet so that she can’t take that fellow’s letter.’
Alan looked around him at the silent hills. They seemed cruel and revengeful, blistered with sunlight and scarred by dark wounds of shadow. It seemed to him that Sarah might well be dead. ‘Where is she?’
‘At Ain Houssaine, in the house next to the church. It belongs to a fellow called Jemali. It’s much the best thing to just leave her there. You haven’t got a chance of getting her out on your own.’
‘Ishmael, get in the taxi. He’ll take you back to Baalbek. I don’t know what’s going to happen over the next few days; you’ll have to manage on your own. Go to Beirut. Get out of here on the first
plane you can get hold of, you and Georgette. You’re always talking about opening a London office. Well, now we’ll have to think about it seriously. If I don’t see you before you go, I’ll write to you at the London bank. I advise you to get out as quickly as you can.’
Poor England, he thought, God help it! The great garbage-can, the repository for all the world’s rubbish, anyone too silly or soft to stick it out at home. As if it hasn’t enough troubles, and now, on top of them all, Ishmael.
‘Oh, Mr Crawe!’ Ishmael nearly sobbed with relief. He wanted to throw his arms around his friend’s neck and embrace him, but restrained himself. Experience had taught him that it was unwise in moments such as these to fuss around his friend with too many apologies and too much gratitude. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going on to find that wretched girl and bring her back. I knew she’d be trouble the first moment I saw her. Do you know I think she’s actually in love with that dead man. Anyway she’s my responsibility and I have to find her.’
‘But you can’t Mr Crawe, you simply can’t. This car won’t take that road. You’d have to have a jeep. Besides you’re not armed and they are living in an arsenal. And what about those people in Baalbek? There are five of them and only one of her. If they kicked up a fuss or went to the press, you’d be finished. Come back with me and calm them down. Tell them anything. Tell them it was a case of life and death and when they see she isn’t there, they’ll believe you.’
‘You’re probably right,’ said Alan slowly. ‘We’ll go back to Baalbek and phone the police.’
‘No, no, Mr Crawe, only the Embassy as a last resort. And it isn’t that yet. Georgette and I have to get away first. We’ll catch the eleven-thirty plane. It’s hardly ever full.’ He had taken over. It was Alan who faltered and compromised. ‘You read what that fellow said. Look, it isn’t only the letter which they’ve probably got hold of by now. She’s their hostage. That’s why she’s perfectly safe, and why she has to be safe. I think Fakhr isn’t sure whether or not Colonel Ahmed is alive. If he is they’ll swap her for him. She’s English Mr Crawe. And so are you. If you went up there they’d have two aces in their hands.’
Arms for Adonis Page 16