The Age of Exodus
Page 30
“Not my ends,” said Lanchester. “The right ends. Listen, Forrester, forget about Townsend – I was simply using him as a cut-out. And you’ve got the wrong idea about me. I don’t hate the Jews. In fact, I want to protect them.”
“You astonish me.”
“If they return to Palestine they’ll be destroyed. They’ll be surrounded by Arab nations bent on their annihilation. If the United Nations is foolish enough to create a Jewish homeland and they flood back in, Palestine will become a killing bottle. The Jews will be exterminated to the last man.”
“The Jews I’ve met seem quite capable of looking after themselves.”
“Not without arms, which the embargo denies them. And if for some reason they do survive the first round, the Arabs won’t give up. A Jewish homeland will be a source of perpetual warfare in the Middle East for generations to come.”
“What about the possibility that the Jews will make a success of Israel, that they’ll lift the local Arabs to prosperity and serve as a beacon of hope for the whole region?”
“If they are not destroyed themselves, they will destroy the Arabs. The Jews are clever and industrious and they’ll grind the Palestinians into the dirt, and the rest of the Arab world will take revenge. The Arabs are a great people, as my cousin taught me: magnificent warriors of the desert, noble, clean-limbed, passionate, and they and the Jews will forever be at odds. Believe me, Forrester, anything I have done to stand in the way of this misguided notion of a Jewish state has been done for the right reasons.”
“Even though it involved murdering innocent people?”
“I’ve murdered nobody, as you know.”
“You tricked Theresa Palmer into setting Smith onto whoever you selected as the next victim and as a further cut-out you pretended to be St. John Townsend when you did it. For the longest time I couldn’t fathom where poor Charles Templar fitted into the pattern, and then I realised he had seen your preparations.”
“What preparations?”
“You wanted to influence the composition of whatever body the United Nations set up to consider the future of Palestine. For that you needed background information on likely candidates. Those were the research files that were accidentally delivered by the Foreign Office messenger to Charles Templar – for which both men paid with their lives. The messenger was dispatched very simply, poor fellow, because you didn’t want to draw attention to his death. But Templar’s demise had to be much more dramatic, didn’t it? That was the reason for all those threats: to distract him from realising the significance of the files he had accidentally seen. And he had to be killed, because if he had been alive when the other murders began, he would have known who was behind them.”
“This is all pure conjecture,” said Lanchester.
“But conjecture we both know to be true,” said Forrester. “My connection with Templar was the reason you tried to have me killed aboard the Queen Mary. And when that failed and I told you in New York that I was about to do some researches into St. John Townsend, you knew you had to try again, didn’t you? At Pier 751. With the shadow of Narak on the warehouse wall. I think you overplayed your hand there, by the way.”
“Not so,” Lancaster said sharply and Forrester knew again he had touched a nerve. He waited for the Foreign Office man to continue, but Lanchester restrained himself.
“Where did the idea of using Narak come from?” said Forrester. “I’m assuming your cousin told you of the archaeological expedition during which the effigy was found, and gave you his own speculations as to its true nature. He probably came up with the notion of linking it with the seven seals, too.”
“He did not,” said Lanchester quickly. “St. John was a great man, but more straightforward than people realised. He would never have come up with something like this.”
“But you did?” said Forrester.
Lanchester smiled, as his pride finally got the better of him. He glanced round the room to make sure they were alone apart from the automata.
“I have to say it was a stroke of genius,” he said. “We all knew about Templar’s famous seal: that gave me the idea of linking the seals with the Narak effigy. And of course I knew the effigy had seven cavities, so I could order up to seven deaths. All I had to do was slip a seal into the pocket of the chosen victim, and let Theresa Palmer send Smith to do his work and retrieve it, like a dog finding a buried bone. The seals, of course, had been given me by my cousin, and once he was dead, he couldn’t object. And because I knew the Narak effigy had been taken to New York, that gave me the perfect way of getting Palmer and Smith over there, where I wanted them for the United Nations meeting. It was simply a stroke of luck that William Burke was on the Queen Mary: in went the seal, out went the note to the power-hungry Mrs. Palmer and the deed was done. The same with Captain Loppersum. I had nothing against either of them, but they died for the greater good.”
“As I nearly did too,” said Forrester.
“You were becoming a greater and greater nuisance,” said Lanchester. “And I did not get ‘carried away’ in arranging for the Narak silhouette to be projected on the warehouse wall where you were supposed to die. That was to ensure that your murder would draw so much public attention to that area of the Brooklyn docks that the Jewish blockade runner would have been flushed out. The newspapers would have had a field day, and forced the FBI to act. Unfortunately, you were a little too nimble for us.”
“Only just. And were you also behind the theft of the effigy from Columbia?”
“Only in an inspirational sense. That was where the money and enthusiasm of the New York occultists like Mr. Samson came into effect; mobilised very effectively, it should be said, by the energetic Mrs. Palmer. And with so much publicity, the perfect distraction for what was really going on.”
“You must have felt like the spider at the centre of a web.”
“Oddly enough, Forrester, that was not how I felt at all. In fact I felt – destined.”
“Destined?”
“Fate had placed me in a unique position to manipulate the levers of power. I knew all about the fumbling efforts of the diplomatic service and MI6 – even absurd front organisations like Industrialists International – to keep the Jews out of Palestine, but none of those efforts were driven by real passion. They were the schemes of bureaucrats eager to keep in with the Arabs, not of someone with real vision.”
“Someone who slid potential suspects on and off stage like cut-outs in a toy theatre,” said Forrester. “Drop a hint to MI6 and whoever you needed would be dispatched to New York or Geneva to create confusion.”
“Hints were all that was necessary, dear boy,” said Lanchester. “That’s the way the secret world works. I simply took advantage of it.”
“As you did of people like Theresa Palmer.”
“I merely put her delusions to a useful purpose,” said Lanchester, and Forrester felt an irresistible urge to puncture his self-satisfaction.
“Earlier this evening I told Mrs. Palmer that St. John Townsend had died six months ago, and explained how you had been making a fool of her ever since, leading her on with this made-up mythology of the object of power.”
“The woman was a fool,” said Lanchester. “It was a pleasure manipulating her. As her degenerate friends had tried to manipulate me when I was young. And by God it was worth it: my actions have saved the Middle East from generations of conflict.”
“You may be interested to know,” said Forrester, “that after I told her how you had deceived her, Theresa Palmer went up to her room and committed suicide.” There was a surprisingly long silence. Forrester could hear the ticking of a clock somewhere.
“Thus putting an end to an existence that was useless except in that it served a greater cause,” said Lanchester at last. “I trust you’re not expecting me to feel sorry for her.”
And he leant back in his chair, smiling – as a dark figure appeared in the doorway. Joseph Yeats, also known as Mr. Smith, the broken strap from Theresa Palmer’
s suitcase still dangling from one wrist, took a single stride into the room, picked Lanchester up by the neck, and lifted him out of his seat.
“Liar,” said Smith, and Forrester realised it was the first time he had heard the man speak. The voice seemed to come from the depths of the creature’s huge frame, as if from some dark cave. “Mrs. Palmer… good.”
“Put him down, Smith,” said Forrester. “You’ll strangle him.” But Smith took no notice, turning Lanchester slowly around to face him.
“Mrs. Palmer looking after me,” he said. “Mrs. Palmer raising me up. And you laughing at her, and killing her.”
Lanchester was trying to speak now, his eyes bulging. His lips formed words, but no sound came out.
“Now I kill you,” said Smith.
“Stop him!” shouted Crispin Priestley, rising from his place among the automata. “Stop him, Forrester!” But as Forrester came around the end of the table, reaching for Smith, Lanchester’s neck snapped like a dry twig.
“Oh, God,” said Priestley.
Smith looked dispassionately into his victim’s face, and then turned to Forrester.
“Dead now,” he said, dropped the body, and lumbered out.
“Go after him!” said Priestley, but Forrester shook his head.
“I think we’ll leave that to the Swiss police,” said Forrester. “I’ve had enough drama for one night. Haven’t you?”
26
THE VOTE
Twenty-four hours later Aubrey Eban was told to be at the Palais des Nations to be given a copy of the UNSCOP report.
It did not arrive. He began to pace the hallways impatiently, and wandered into the Assembly Hall of the old League of Nations where Haile Selassie had pleaded in vain for the League to help his nation in the face of Mussolini’s invasion. From there he went into the library and when there was still no sign of the report he entered the empty cafeteria and sat down at an empty table.
Just before midnight the doors of the UNSCOP chamber were flung open and the eleven members and their deputies filed out, several, Eban noted, with tears in their eyes. At five minutes after midnight the secretary officially handed Eban a copy of the UNSCOP report.
As he read it he saw that three members of the committee, Yugoslavia, India and Iran, had voted that the Arabs should be given a veto over any future Jewish immigration into Palestine.
But Sweden, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, Uruguay, Peru, and the Netherlands had said that when the British mandate ended, Palestine should be partitioned between Jews and Arabs to allow the creation of an independent Jewish state, including the Negev desert.
And Australia had abstained.
It was not unanimous, but the majority was solid enough. Indeed, the report exceeded all expectation of the Jewish Agency, who saw it as the first Jewish political victory in three decades of almost unrelenting tragedy. Almost exhausted by the sheer emotion of it, Eban and his colleagues went back to their hotel, opened a bottle of champagne and began cabling the news around the world.
In the early hours of the same day, in the Chateau Bougerac, Forrester and Crispin Priestley had given the Swiss police an edited account of what had led to the deaths of Theresa Palmer and Toby Lanchester, and within an hour the manhunt for Joseph Yeats got under way.
It proved fruitless.
Some weeks later the trail ended in the Simplon Pass area, where, among the snows of the Alps, Yeats, like Frankenstein’s monster in the Arctic simply disappeared.
Within weeks, the UNSCOP report had been delivered to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, and in November of that year the Assembly voted for the creation of the State of Israel.
Meanwhile Forrester returned to Oxford, where his Citroën Traction Avant had now been fully repaired.
He wrote to tell Gillian Lytton about it, and said he hoped that when she returned to England he could drive her to Scotland and take her to the Isle of Skye.
Some weeks later she replied that she had come to realise that much though she cared for him, she knew he was not ready for a new relationship, and perhaps never would be, and that she had become engaged to a young American congressman from Boston.
When he received this letter, Forrester drove to Scotland anyway, and stopped the car on a mountain road looking westward towards the island, remembering Gillian’s voice on the Queen Mary.
Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing,
Onward! the sailors cry;
Carry the lad that’s born to be King
Over the sea to Skye.
He wound down the windows, letting the scent of the heather and the breeze from the distant glittering sea blow through the car, and sat there for a long time, contemplating his future.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
A surprising amount of this story is true. Ernest Bevin’s would-be assassin has described the attempt to kill him, in approximately the circumstances given in the book.
The sequences in the United Nations General Assembly are a compressed version of the decision-making that took place in 1947.
UNSCOP was a real organisation and did vote in the way described, though the delegates have been fictionalised..
Most of the events ascribed to the President Garfield in this book happened to the President Warfield, a similar vessel which changed its name, when it escaped from Sète, to Exodus 1947.
Ernest Bevin treated the refugees aboard the Exodus 1947 as he is described treating those in the book.
Industrialists International was indeed a front organisation set up by MI6, engaged in acts of sabotage against the Aliyah Bet movement.
After the United Nations approved the creation of the State of Israel, Arab attacks on Jews in Palestine intensified, and in February 1948 David Ben-Gurion instituted conscription for the settlers.
In May 1948 the last British troops left, the State of Israel was declared, and the surrounding Arab nations set out to destroy the new nation.
Thanks to the supplies of arms and military vehicles gathered beforehand, often illegally, and war surplus planes purchased secretly in America, Israel was able to fend off its attackers, and significantly extend its territory before armistices were signed with the Arab states in 1949. With Israel’s victories, however, came the challenge of finding a just solution for the Arab inhabitants of Palestine whose lives had been thrown into turmoil by the tides of history.
Forrester’s friend, UNSCOP liaison officer Aubrey Eban, formerly an officer in the British army, changed his first name to Abba, and later became Israel’s Minister of Education, Minister for Foreign Affairs, and finally Deputy Prime Minister.
The conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, foreseen by Toby Lanchester, continues to this day.
Gavin Scott
Santa Monica
May 2018
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gavin Scott is a Yorkshire-born screenwriter, novelist and journalist, working in Hollywood and based in Santa Monica, California. He spent twenty years as a radio and television reporter for BBC and ITN, and among many others interviewed John Fowles, J.B. Priestley, Christopher Isherwood, and Herge, creator of Tintin. He is writer of the Emmy-winning mini-series The Mists of Avalon, developed and scripted The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles for George Lucas, created the screenplay of the BAFTA-nominated movie The Borrowers, and wrote Small Soldiers for Steven Spielberg. His first two novels in the Duncan Forrester series were The Age of Treachery and The Age of Olympus. Gavin can be reached via his website, www.gavinscott.co, and is happy to answer questions about the series. Find Gavin on Twitter at @gavinscott942
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