by Norman Lewis
Maria mentioned that they heard from Ernestina with increasing rarity, and put this down to the state of the mails.
Ernestina’s letter spoke of a world that was as remote and unreal as Celtic Britain of Arthurian legend.
I was asked to a party at Ubico’s new finca at Comalapa. Entertainment rather barbarous for my taste. The male guests were given horses but had to ride at a full gallop under a line from which chickens were hanging, tied by the legs. Winner was first past the post holding a bloody chicken’s head in his hand. Prize: an Arab stallion. This is Central America, and it’s the kind of thing you learn to accept.
The people I went with were the Iglesias. I believe I told you they invited me to stay with them as long as I felt I could. Nominally I’m paying my way by giving the children the odd lesson in English and acting as companion to Doña Elvira, who is perfectly sweet. Back to the General. The Iglesias’ town house is only about a couple of hundred yards from the Palace and every morning he and his officers — all of them are obliged to ride Harley-Davidson motorcycles — come tearing past down Fourth Avenue. If you’re one of the fourteen families, as the Iglesias are supposed to be, you can go out onto the balcony to watch them. If not you have to stay inside.
In spite of his fearsome reputation the Old Man, as we call him, is really quite charming. His one outstanding weakness seems to be a hatred of criticism, and it’s suicidal to suggest he’s a stooge of the Yankees. Did you see the story in Time about the deal with United Fruit? There was just the slightest sign of hesitancy in Congress about signing up, and he went in with a troop of dragoons. When a congressman brought the thing up again last week the Old Man walked up to him and broke his jaw.
We had another small earthquake yesterday. You can count on a slight tremor every second to third day. The latest fad here is earthquake parties. Most of the houses are built on one floor of very light material, so it’s rare for one to suffer serious damage. You have a rather glamorous-looking lightweight boiler suit to put on if a quake starts in the night, and you take your lamp and go next door, or maybe your friends come round to you, and you have drinks, and pass the time, and wait for it to stop.
With every letter Ernestina seemed to have gone farther away, and she was changing.
So far our duties in Philippeville had been largely ceremonial. Three NCOs, as ordered, patrolled the port, watched people fishing on the quay, occasionally boarded a ship to gaze blankly at the crates holding the cargo, then withdrew. In this way an hour might be used up after which they would stroll under the bland winter sun as far as the square for an illegal anisette at the Café du Commerce, or the Café de la Marine. Here, sooner or later, they might be joined by the pair who had paid routine visits to military units and installations in the area, where there was never anything to report. Frequently Sergeant-Major Leopold would come on the scene. He spent hours every day scrubbing and polishing his equipment and was the most perfectly turned-out soldier in the area, but had taken to the most bizarre fashion of wearing two guns. Hangers-on would come up to our table to bow and shake hands, and occasionally whisper secret information which — unless a French-speaker happened to be there — would not be understood. At this time a French presence had begun to manifest itself by the arrival of a battalion of Senegalese, black automata so intoxicated with the military life, according to one of their officers, that field punishment took the form of depriving them of drills and fatigues, instead of imposing more of such exercises and penances upon defaulters in the way of our armies. Few sights could have been more pleasant than to watch from our seats outside the Commerce the sturdy approach of the Senegalese, led by their trumpeters, on parade. And no more delectable moment than the silence following the end of a musical phrase when, with a single corporate movement, a score of trumpets would be flung high into the air, turning smoothly as they fell, splashed by the sun with a row of brass stars, then deftly caught, pressed to the rich indigo lips in readiness for the next perfectly synchronized spurt of martial music.
Back at the section office the informers, with an occasional word of encouragement in Latin from the FSO, would be wasting their poison on the desert air. When one of the French speakers happened to look in he was instantly captured and compelled to listen to horrific stories of plotted treacheries and intrigue. There was really no point in listening to any of it, because it was always the powerful colons who were the villains, and they were beyond our reach.
Where to some small extent we could make our presence felt was in the case of the enormous base supplies depot established within the walls of one of the great farms owned by a colon called Redon. Here large-scale thefts were taking place, and I was called there after an Arab intruder had been shot dead by a guard. This man’s grotesque dress — a time-rusted frock coat worn over football shorts — convinced me that he had been a beneficiary of a hand-out of old clothes shipped from England, for distribution among our contracted work force, and that therefore he had been shot by mistake. This turned out to be true, for a pass found in his pocket showed him to be employed at the base.
A number of Arab boys averaging about thirteen years of age had been picked up at the time. Nobody knew what they were doing there, and they could not make themselves understood. They were taken to a shed for questioning by one of Bouchard’s gendarmes who as a preliminary measure — and he told me this was always done — had stamped on their toes with his heavy boots. I got rid of the gendarme, and took the boys — who had astonished onlookers by the stoicism with which they had supported the injuries inflicted upon them — to the commanding officer of the depot. He, horrified at this spectacle of crushed and bleeding toes, had them taken in a command car to Philippeville hospital. This incident opened a breach between myself and Captain Bouchard.
While at the base depot I took the opportunity of inspecting the stores that were being guarded so zealously. They included innumerable crates of non-freezing margarine, engine oil for use in sub-zero temperatures, and hundreds, possibly thousands — for they were crated up — of snow shovels without handles. The base unit’s sergeant-major confided in me that these were supplies intended originally for the abortive Norwegian campaign and, after having been transhipped in turn to Malaya and the Gold Coast, had finally been deposited here.
No case was ever reported of the loss of Arctic stores but depredations upon petrol supplies were constant and severe. Much of the petrol was contained in five-gallon cans which were easy to remove, and on the black market such a can fetched about fifty times its regular price. Petrol had come to be regarded as a form of wealth at a time when the bottom had fallen out of every market, and we heard rumours of huge quantities stolen from this and other bases being hidden away in caves in the interior. The rich colons, we knew, were at the back of those losses, although the thieves could only be Arabs mingling with the labour-force the Army employed. The wild shooting that had taken place may have discouraged these but the ensuing panic among the legitimate workers virtually brought activity of all kind to a standstill at the base.
Intelligence Corps sections worked largely through informers of which Michel Fortuna was a valuable example. Nine-tenths of the information we garnered by one means or another was rubbish, passed on in most cases by persons seeking to use us to settle private grudges. But Fortuna revealed hard and often startling facts, and made himself indispensable to the section. Soon a few truths relating to his own personality and career began to be revealed, but by the time we began to understand the kind of man we were dealing with there was no question of cutting ourselves adrift from him. Moreover we were slowly becoming acclimatized to a situation where people took allies where they could find them, prepared if necessary to make a short-term pact with the devil. There was little British suburban respectability in Philippeville. A day or so after our dinner at the Fortuna mansion one of the town’s upper-crust citizens happened to make reference to Madame Renée’s firm belief in the value of church attendance, adding that she compelled all h
er staff to attend regular Mass. At this point we understood that she ran the brothel. It was not an occupation that caused the raising of local eyebrows.
Fortuna worked diligently for our cause, moved undoubtedly by self-interest, although possibly gratitude as well. Whatever information AFHQ called for, Fortuna could always unearth it for us, and in consequence the FSO was complimented for his efficiency. Captain Bouchard, who was turning sour, warned us, ‘Always remember this man is a plain straightforward gangster.’ That was his problem, Leopold told him.
Bouchard came to us to complain about his lack of transport. His old Citroën was out of action for hopeless, makeshift repairs one day in three, and the three men of his Philippeville half-section were riding bicycles. How was he to be expected to carry out his duties, including among them the protection of our supplies depot from thieves? The FSO asked him what he proposed, and Bouchard asked him to requisition Fortuna’s car, to which our captain’s reply was, ‘We can’t let our friends down.’
A small favour granted to Fortuna for his numerous services was a permit to drive his elderly but perfectly maintained car through the streets of Philippeville bearing a windscreen sticker that proclaimed its owner to be engaged in essential duties for the Allied forces. By this valuable concession he achieved the advantage of mobility. He had established himself as boss of an ill-defined area within a radius of possibly thirty or forty miles of Philippeville, of which he had lost control during his imprisonment. Now, with our aid, he was able to visit all the small towns and villages that had seceded and take over again. Anyone who opposed him — and this included several mayors — would be denounced as a pro-Vichy plotter, and placed on our blacklist, or that of any other section operating in the area. We only knew half of what was going on, but apart from that we did not greatly care. Let the Algerians settle their differences in their own way, was the general verdict, so long as they were kept out of our hair.
The theft of petrol continued to be the greatest of our problems and Fortuna promised to solve this, too. The worst culprit, he told us, was a colon of White Russian origin named Malakoff, the owner of a huge vineyard, producing an annual ocean of hard Algerian wine, much of which went to France for blending and bottling under a French label, while the rest was turned into industrial alcohol.
All the colons dealt in stolen petrol, and having notified the Sous-Préfecture, as agreed, of our intention to do so, we had already searched several farms. No petrol was ever found, but it was not unusual for the house to be filled with the stench of its disposal down lavatories. Clearly Malakoff was one of Fortuna’s personal enemies, and this was his way of dealing with him.
Malakoff too had done his best to ingratiate himself with the Allies, and with some success. He had recently arranged a boar-hunting party for important British and American officers from AFHQ. They took part in this under the impression that Malakoff was the personal representative in Philippeville of General de Gaulle. He had shown our FSO a letter from the General, which Captain Bouchard assured us was forged.
By all accounts this hunt had been a singular affair, organized in such a way that however terrible a shot a guest might be, it was virtually impossible for him not to get his boar. There were no boars on the Malakoff estate, but Arabs had been sent into the interior to trap a large number of them which had been scientifically lamed in such a way that while able to walk without an obvious limp, they could not run. These were released from the top of a low hill after the guns had been stationed at intervals along a road that encircled it. Dogs then drove the boars down the slopes to their inevitable execution. A shortage of shotguns and cartridges at the time compelled some of the junior officers to use tommy-guns, or even pistols, but even these got a boar. At the end of the fusillade one of the guests was found dead with a bullet through the heart. With so many bullets flying about there was nothing extraordinary about this. The French were unaccustomed to take serious precautions to prevent sportsmen from shooting each other, and this they frequently did. Discussing the incident with Fortuna we learned, however, that the dead man was a French liaison officer at AFHQ who was known to have done Malakoff a bad turn in the past. ‘He must have been weak in the head,’ Fortuna said, ‘to fall into a trap like that.’
However much General de Gaulle may or may not have sought to recommend Malakoff, he laboured beneath the disadvantage of being on our black-list, and therefore had been unable to obtain a sticker like Fortuna’s to affix to the windscreen of the spectacular Delahaye mouldering away in one of his outhouses. He had lost ground too, according to the FSO, not so much because one of his guests had had to be taken back to Algiers in a coffin, but because he had directed the massacre of the boars in an absurd red jacket and peaked cap of the kind worn by French fox hunters. From other sources we learned that, some years before, Malakoff and Fortuna had been in a High Noon-style encounter, which Fortuna had lost. I tackled him about this and he readily admitted what had happened. Malakoff, having been warned by Fortuna to stay out of Philippeville, had strolled into the Café du Commerce one day, accompanied by two friends, and told the waiter to get a message to Fortuna that he was there and waiting. ‘I got into the car and went down straight away,’ Fortuna said, ‘making the mistake of taking with me a new Walther pistol I had never operated before. As I walked through the door Malakoff stood up. I pointed the gun at him and pressed the trigger. Unfortunately the safety catch was on. Next moment I felt a kick in the stomach. Somehow or other I dragged myself out, got into the car and drove home.’ At this point he took out his most cherished possession — an X-ray photograph showing a bullet lodged against the wall of his heart. ‘It’s still there,’ he said. ‘They don’t want to take it out. Funny about the pain in the stomach, though. It’s all I felt.’
Fortuna directed the plan of attack against Malakoff. One of his contacts placed an order with him for petrol, to be collected on a certain day, and on that day we were to descend on the farm, this time without notice being given to the Sous-Préfecture. Malakoff’s stock had fallen so low, we thought, that no one would particularly care what happened to him. To be on the safe side, Fortuna suggested, we might take a gendarme with us, although on no account revealing to him the identity of the target. To conserve the element of surprise he thought we should take the farm in the rear, and in this way avoid being held up by a man stationed at the gate, who might be able to give the alarm.
So often in the surgery of the Army is the wrong limb removed. The intelligence on which we acted was beyond question, our planning meticulous and our preparations thorough. Our weak spot was our maps. The large-scale maps issued to us were of the wrong area, and the small-scale ones we had been able to procure locally seemed vague, and possibly out-of-date. However we set out enthusiastically enough in the section truck, our sergeant-major wearing his two guns for this important occasion, and our accompanying gendarme with hand-cuffs in his haversack and an arrest warrant in his pocket on which a space had been left blank for the name to be filled in.
It was five days from Christmas, the weather eternally fine, with a thin, piercing sun and the pink laterite of the vineyards hatched with the innumerable lines of the vines out of leaf. Nothing is more anonymous than a vineyard, and the domaine houses, set well back from the road at intervals of two or three miles, seemed to have surrendered to this conformity, for they were alike in every detail of their architecture, and at this season devoid of all signs of life, except those that provided a temporary perch for storks migrating from southern Europe. We passed the Malakoff farm’s guarded gate, on the main road, from which there was no building in view, and then watched for a side-turning, marked with dotted lines on the map as a track. When one came into sight a map-reading argument arose between those who believed that we were turning off too soon, and the old soldiers, led by the sergeant-major, whose word was law and who insisted that we were on the right road.
In a matter of yards a house came into view, porticoed, with a wide roof of shallow pit
ch, identical with all the other domaine houses, and — apart from a forecourt of crazy-paving — remarkably like a villa in a Roman mosaic. The sergeant-major posted two men to guard the rear of the house. The windows were shuttered and the atmosphere was one of abandonment. There was no one about but some excited Arabs who seemed to spring like startled genii out of the ground when we began to hammer and kick at the door. They received my Adenese-plus-School-of-Oriental-Studies Arabic with expressions of the most profound bewilderment, and many valuable minutes were lost before a French-speaker could be found to tell us that the Malakoff house was two miles away.
With this it was clear that the operation had collapsed. Nowhere do the jungle tom-toms of communication work more efficiently than in North Africa. We saw no remedy other than to return to the road and make our entry to the Malakoff domaine by the main gate, and by the time we arrived, Malakoff was ready for us waiting to open the door. He held out a soft, well-manicured hand: a young, bald man with an ivory, light-shunning face, a velvet smile and gold ornaments at the opening of his shirt and his cuffs. ‘Messieurs,’ he said. ‘Soyez les bienvenus.’ In the cool, vaulted background, a betrousered Vietnamese girl waited with a tray of champagne. Malakoff as an Arab-hater was known to recruit his female staff, as did many colons, in the Far East. The Algerian French called them boyesses and they were much appreciated for the extreme subservience of their deportment and the relative hairlessness of their bodies.
Malakoff did not long outlive this encounter. At about this time a number of severe air raids by German and Italian planes were carried out on the harbour of Philippeville and, in the course of one of these, a man seen wandering in the prohibited zone of the docks, said to have been signalling to the raiders with a torch, was shot dead by a sentry. This was Malakoff. Later, though, another version of his end was supplied by a contact. Malakoff, he said, had been kidnapped, drugged, carried by rowing boat into the port, and put ashore and abandoned, reeling and staggering about in the semi-darkness. After that someone had rung up the unit guarding the port and told them that a spy had just landed from a submarine. Whatever the truth of it, Malakoff died, and by local custom was buried within twenty-four hours, his funeral said to have been the most splendid since the outbreak of war.