The Age of Exodus

by Gavin Scott

  “Our Lord’s words were misinterpreted by frail human beings,” said Glastonbury. “The immense change Jesus was predicting was in men’s hearts, not in the political structure of the world.”

  “Although the political structure did change, of course,” said Forrester, “when the Romans wiped Israel off the face of the earth.”

  “Never dreaming,” said Glastonbury, “that a tiny offshoot of the Jewish religion would end up taking over the Empire, and then half the world. There’s unintended consequences for you.”

  “Which I think gives me my answer,” said Forrester.

  “Does it, Duncan?”

  “Follow your conscience,” said Forrester, “and let the chips fall where they may.” He stood up. “A little frightening, though, isn’t it?”

  * * *

  As he returned to the college, once again Piggot popped out of his cubbyhole.

  “A letter and a package for you, Dr. Forrester,” he said. “I’ve already signed for them.”

  Forrester opened the letter in his room; it contained a note from Archibald MacLean.

  Duncan,

  I’ve talked to the people who were in charge of the pre-D-Day op. you spoke about, and they do have vivid memories of a man whose favoured MO was crushing his opponents to death. His name was Joseph Yeats and he came from the village of Strome, not far from Birmingham. In his early teens he was convicted of mutilating farm animals and sent down for two years. While in prison he was recruited by a criminal gang, who on his release employed him in several armed robberies. He was caught and sent back to jail in 1939. When his sentence was up he was conscripted into the Army.

  He was court-martialled not long after following an attempt to kill a sergeant during a training exercise, and sentenced to ten years hard labour. He would still be doing it if he hadn’t been given early release in order to take part in the pre-D-Day raids in Normandy in 1944, from which he was not expected to return. In fact, he was seriously wounded during the raid, hospitalised and discharged from the Army in 1945.

  My informant said he visited Yeats in hospital and as he left met another visitor, who was, apparently, a follower of our mutual friend Aleister Crowley.

  Her name, just for the sake of completeness, was Mrs. Theresa Palmer.

  And that’s all I can tell you.

  Hope it’s useful.

  Cheers,

  Archie.

  P.S. Stay out of this Smith chap’s way if you can, Forrester. I have a bad feeling about him.

  Too late for that, thought Forrester, and put the note in another envelope which he addressed to Roy Bell at the Yard. Then he opened the package.

  It contained, as he had expected, an air ticket to Geneva and a reservation at a hotel there. There was also a note from Aubrey Eban which read as follows.

  Dear Duncan,

  This is an imposition, but desperate times call for desperate measures. UNSCOP is approaching its final deliberations here and, to be blunt, I fear one or more of its members may be murdered before the vote.

  I also believe that this possibility is linked to the deaths you have been investigating, and that the knowledge you have gained may help avert a tragedy. I came to know and admire you in Cairo and my admiration only increased when I watched you training my fellow Jews in Palestine.

  I have now learned of the crucial role you played in the escape of the Exodus from France, and bless you for it. Please come to Geneva, my friend, as great events approach their climax. You may be able to avert a disaster. Sincerely,

  Aubrey Eban

  Forrester sat thoughtfully for a long time after reading this letter, and then got up and found a copy of the Authorised Version among his books, and turned to Revelation, chapters five to nine.

  Then I saw on the right hand of he who sat on the throne a scroll… sealed with seven seals…

  He read on:

  … and lo, in the midst of the throne and the four beasts … stood a lamb having seven horns and seven eyes… and the four beasts and the four and twenty elders bowed down before it.

  When he had finished with Revelation, he took down a book on Sumerian mythology, and began to search for references to the lamb with the seven horns.

  Days later, as term ended, he flew to Geneva.

  21

  SWITZERLAND

  Forrester had always had a soft spot for Switzerland since he first escaped from Gestapo pursuit by trekking over a Swiss mountain pass, and remembered his relief as he stumbled through the snow, saw the absurdly orderly perfection of a Swiss log pile and knew he was across the border. As he looked down at the deep valleys beneath the soaring peaks, the deep blue lakes and the alpine meadows he felt he was seeing a vision of what peace really meant.

  He knew Switzerland had only survived the war by a miracle: the Nazis denounced it as a lost province of the Reich whose people were really renegade Germans. Nazi scholars told the Swiss they were offshoots of the German nation, along with the Dutch, the Flemings, the Lorrainers, the Alsatians, the Austrians and the Bohemians. One day, they were told, we Germans will group ourselves under a single banner, and whoever wishes to separate us, we will exterminate.

  Indeed, Hitler had started planning the invasion of Switzerland the day after France fell, and the Swiss faced up to the prospect of abandoning the cities of the plain and retreating to their impregnable Alpine redoubts for a last stand.

  But for reasons still not completely explained, der Führer never put his invasion plans into effect, and the Swiss, though surrounded by Axis powers, retained control of the vital trans-alpine road and rail routes between Germany and Italy. As well as many escaping Allied airmen and prisoners of war, the country took in more than twenty-five thousand Jewish refugees – more than any other nation. But as supplies dwindled, they turned away a similar number on the grounds that “the lifeboat is full”. Swiss banks also enabled the Nazis to turn the gold plundered from the Jews and conquered nations of Europe into Swiss francs, which the Reich could then use to buy strategic raw materials.

  But the Allies too sold large amounts of gold to Swiss banks to get the currency needed for their purchases. All in all, it could be said Switzerland survived the war by being useful to both sides, and among these uses was as a centre for espionage.

  The Abwehr set up in business there, as did the American Office of Strategic Services, whose Swiss operation was led by Allen Dulles. Forrester had had some dealings with Dulles, a ruthless womaniser who with his greedy, sanctimonious older brother John Foster Dulles, had been deeply involved in arranging loans to Germany, both before and after Hitler’s rise to power. Forrester had met the younger Dulles during the secret negotiations with top German generals for the Nazi surrender in northern Italy and neither liked nor trusted the man, though he suspected that he and his brother would continue to be malign and powerful forces long after the war was over.

  As the plane came down toward Geneva International Airport he marvelled again at the sheer scale and beauty of the lake and the way the city nestled beside the Rhône River as it flowed away into France. He could see below him the old sixteenth-century incarnation of the town on the south bank of the river, still surrounded by its walls, and even make out, further south still, the picturesque artists’ suburb of Carouge, where he had once been given shelter in an artist’s loft in return for posing as a Roman senator for a history painting, a wartime experience which still made him smile.

  A driver from the Jewish Agency was waiting for him as he came through customs, and took him to a modest hotel just off Rue de la Fontaine in the old town. There was a note at the desk asking him to meet Eban at the St. Pierre Cathedral in half an hour, and as soon as he had unpacked he stepped out briskly into the warm air of the cobbled streets.

  And stepped straight back in again, because there was a man on the far side of the street waiting for him.

  A nondescript man in a nondescript grey hat and tan summer jacket, reading a copy of the Journal de Genève. Ostensibly ther
e was nothing to suggest he had any interest in Forrester, but the sixth sense that had been honed to a razor’s edge during the war years convinced Forrester otherwise. Absurdly, he had mentally translated the paper’s main headline: CYCLIST COLLIDES WITH PEDESTRIAN IN CITY CENTRE. Yes, he thought, I am indeed back in Switzerland.

  He walked into the hotel kitchen, nodded to the kitchen staff as if he was an old friend, and left through a service door which led into a narrow alley. He took, at random, the first left turning he came to, and then the next, which led into Rue du Puits-Saint-Pierre. Here he stepped back into a doorway and watched the passersby for several minutes.

  None of them was the man he had seen, and he concentrated his attention on the entrance to the cathedral in case the watcher was already there.

  No sign.

  Forrester slipped out of the sunlight into the cool gloom of the soaring Gothic nave, looked around at the bare, image-free walls of the church and was struck once again how the austerity of the place reflected the great sea change in European history. Calvin himself had preached here, and there was the plain wooden chair in which he had sat between sermons. Was it just coincidence, Forrester wondered, that the stripped-down version of Christianity represented by Protestantism had flourished best in the continent’s chilly, northern latitudes, while the baroque extravagances of Roman Catholicism continued to dominate the warmer south? Had the Protestant reformation succeeded here because austerity appealed to souls living under grey northern skies and here, in particular, beneath the cold white beauty of the Alps?

  He stood for a moment in the shadow of a pillar and observed the entrance: no one came in after him. Then as his eyes became accustomed to the dimness he saw Eban waiting for him in one of the pews. Eban shifted along so that Forrester could sit down beside him.

  “Thank you for coming, Duncan,” he said, “I very much appreciate it.”

  “I’m not sure I can be of any use,” said Forrester.

  “I am not certain either,” said Eban, “but the fate of the Jewish homeland hangs on what happens here in the next few days, and I’m not prepared to leave any possibility unexplored.”

  “I have to be honest with you,” said Forrester. “I’m in two minds about that. It may be a disaster both for the Jews and the Arabs who already live there.”

  “Fortunately, I’m not asking you to make the decision,” said Eban. “The nations of the world have given UNSCOP that responsibility. All I’m asking you to do is to make sure their decision-making isn’t derailed by brute force.”

  “You said you believe there may be murder,” said Forrester. “Of whom and by whom?”

  Eban sat back in the pew. “I should start off by saying that there is great scepticism among many of my people, whatever Mr. Bevin said in the General Assembly, whether Britain really intends to abandon its mandate to rule Palestine.”

  “I can’t speak to that,” said Forrester, accepting that Eban was going to unfold what he had to say at his own pace, “but you should know ordinary people in Britain are getting heartily sick of Palestine. They think what’s happening there is both painful and as far as Britain is concerned, pointless.”

  “I share that assessment,” said Eban. “But the preponderance of opinion in the Foreign Office favours the Arabs over the Jews, and I believe the same sentiment exists in the British Security Services. In fact, if it had not been for your intervention, MI6 agents might have prevented the Exodus ever leaving Sète, might they not?”

  “True,” said Forrester briefly, “though I’d prefer if my role in that isn’t bandied about. There’s still some official uncertainty about what actually happened, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.”

  “Understood,” said Eban, “but the fact is that as matters come to a head we face multiple enemies in the British establishment. Multiple entities who do not wish the United Nations Special Committee to decide in favour of a Jewish homeland.”

  “But what specifically makes you believe there’ll be murder?”

  “What happened on board the Queen Mary and at Flushing Meadows.”

  “Neither Mr. Burke nor Captain Loppersum were members of UNSCOP. In fact, it hadn’t even been set up when they were killed.”

  “If they had not been murdered,” said Eban, “I believe they would have been members of UNSCOP, and likely to vote for the creation of a separate Jewish state.”

  “Is that just speculation,” said Forrester, “or do you have solid evidence?”

  “Research,” said Eban, “we do our research,” and for some reason the word triggered a memory, a memory at that moment too elusive to pin down.

  Forrester temporised. “You mean someone killed Loppersum and Burke because they might have been chosen for UNSCOP, even though UNSCOP hadn’t been invented?”

  “I agree it seems far-fetched,” said Eban. “But they were both of the right level of seniority to be selected by their governments to join any committee the UN created, and I know from my conversation with them that they both favoured the partition of Palestine, which is the most likely route to a Jewish homeland. And now they are both dead.”

  Forrester looked up at the great groin-vaulted nave: the physical embodiment of faith in the divine order of the universe. The dark side of which, of course, was fanaticism.

  “Not only that,” said Eban, “but the Australian and the Dutchman who were appointed to the committee instead of Loppersum and Burke have much less sympathy for the Jews than the two who died.”

  Forrester thought back to his conversations with Van Houts, the former governor of the Dutch East Indies on the boat, and Brian Cross, the Australian diplomat at the General Assembly. What Eban said was true.

  “And neither of those two gentlemen have shown much sympathy for our position since UNSCOP began its deliberations,” said Eban.

  “How is the committee divided now?”

  “There are eleven members. The chairman is a Swedish Supreme Court justice called Marius Hansen: slow thinking and slow speaking. The Dutch representative, Van Houts, seems to equate the Jews with the troublesome natives he had to deal with in the Indies. The Australian Brian Cross’s main enthusiasm seems to be attending parties. The Canadian, George Carr, is very old-fashioned, very independent and very hard to budge. Caspar Fernandez, the Peruvian, says very little and could go either way. There are two others from South America: Perez from Uruguay, who talks a lot, gets sentimental and likes to party just as much as Mr. Cross. I have hopes of Escobar, the Guatemalan, because his country has a dispute with Britain over Belize. All the South Americans were much affected when they saw British troops forcing the women and children of the Exodus off the boat at Haifa.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Forrester. Eban nodded briefly.

  “Novak of Czechoslovakia is a friend of Jan Masaryk, their Foreign Minister, which puts him in an awkward position, because he knows damn well the communists are busy trying to push Masaryk out and turn the country into a Soviet satellite. He’s an awkward, shambling, troubled fellow; I feel sorry for him. Then there’s Djurik from Yugoslavia, who’s a bit of a nonentity, and two Muslims, Zaheer, a judge from India, who sounds more British than the British and Khorasani from Iran. And there you have it.”

  “So which way is the committee leaning?”

  “Opinion has shifted this way since we flew to Palestine, but there was a significant moment when we arrived here.”

  “What was that?”

  “A proposal that the committee visit the DP camps to find out what the Jews there thought about a Jewish homeland.”

  “Which would be good for your cause,” said Forrester. “The Jews in the camps are desperate to go to Palestine, aren’t they?”

  “Exactly,” said Eban. “And the significant thing was that the committee members from India, Iran, Yugoslavia, Peru and Czechoslovakia either voted against visiting the camps or abstained.”

  “Not good news for you.”

  “Fortunately, the other six voted in favour
of the visit, and they went. That’s where they are now.”

  “And you’re hoping that when they return there’ll be a solid majority for what you want.”

  “I am, but if the majority is too small, the General Assembly may dismiss the committee’s report. It may come down to a single vote.”

  “And that’s why you’re afraid of another killing.”

  Eban turned to face him.

  “This is on a knife edge, Duncan. If somebody gets rid of a single sympathetic member of UNSCOP, and they’re replaced by a less sympathetic alternate, then a Jewish homeland will almost certainly be dead in the General Assembly, probably forever. That’s why I’m asking for your help, because the fate of every surviving Jew in Europe could depend on it.”

  “But why me?” said Forrester. “I’m assuming you have people from the Jewish Agency here too.”

  “We do,” said Eban, “but too many of them are known to the British security services and can be neutralised. We are up against an insidious enemy, and they are almost certainly British. You have better connections than any of our people; you know the British establishment as most of them do not.”

  Inwardly, Forrester gave a wry grin. It was only a few weeks since Ernest Bevin had asked for his help because he knew more about the Jewish resistance than his own security people. Now the Jews were recruiting him because he knew more about the British.

  “Presumably no one is likely to make a move against any member of the committee until they get back from the camps – that is, until it’s clear which way they’re likely to vote.”

  “I agree.”

  “When do they return?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “And where are they staying?”

  “At the Chateau Bougerac. Do you know it?”

  “It’s a fairly grand hotel, isn’t it? A little way out of the city.”

  “Not far from the Palais des Nations, where the formal deliberations take place.”