The Chief looked pleased, even relieved. Gripping the escalator rail, he stepped on and stayed on. So did Jaspersen, and they surfaced together at the high rise of the elevators, each tightly clasping his resolution.
Arriving back in his office, Jaspersen found his In-tray fuller than ever, his blotter studded with messages. The office was quiet. It was time for lunch — time for Subsidiary and Specialized to converge on cafeteria and dining-room; for cronies from Public Relations, from Logistics, from Finance or Personnel to take up their positions on the warm ingle-benches about the Disarmament Bar; time for Jaspersen to send out for his plain yoghurt and ripe banana. He sat down at his desk and began to go through the messages. Can you address the Assembly of Non-Accredited Groups next Monday? Human Dignity Section will call back. Please call Mr Kauer in Forceful Implementation of Peace Treaties. Long-Range Planning has been trying to reach you. This last slip was marked RUSH.
‘You all right, Olaf?’ Pastore inquired from the doorway.
Jaspersen lifted his head in a manner intended to keep Pastore from entering. ‘Everything go smoothly up here this morning?’
‘Everything was as usual,’ Pastore said evasively. ‘Unification is now set for tomorrow.’
‘I guessed as much.’
‘You all right?’ Pastore asked again, hesitantly setting foot on the carpet.
‘Well — I was feeling a bit low this morning, as a matter of fact. Feel better now. It was probably the weather.’
‘You know what it is.’ Pastore nodded. ‘I’ve been talking to Luba. She has an idea that Tuesdays are some sort of psychological low-point. It’s an interesting theory — you talk to her about it. She thinks Tuesdays are the worst.’
7. A Sense of Mission
‘Carry your bags, Miss?’
It was the first remark addressed to her by those she had come to serve.
‘A taxi?’
She nodded, reluctant to begin by speaking English, startled to find her language apparent. She spoke to the porter slowly in Italian, the lingua franca of this island. Someone was to have met her; they hadn’t come. Yes, she would go to the hotel. Which hotel? Well — what hotels were there? A Bristol, a Cecil? A Majestic, perhaps?
The porter smiled. What she wanted was the Hotel of the Roses.
Only hours since she had stepped into the plane from the winter night of a northern city, Miss Clelia Kingslake was breathing mild morning air by the Aegean. The sun streamed down on valley, rock and green hill, and the driver leant against his taxi in his shirtsleeves. Miss Kingslake’s pang of ecstasy was not a bit the less for her having recently entered her fortieth year — quite the reverse, in fact. All the same, when her baggage was aboard and they drove off, she became distracted from her new surroundings, wondering if she could possibly have missed her as yet unknown colleagues. She was to have been met at the airport; so she had been assured before leaving Organization Headquarters the night before. There had been no one the least colleague-like in the waiting-room, and in any case they would have approached her. It didn’t matter — she could manage for herself and they had more important things to do. For the time being, the entire region was dependent on their vigilance. After all, wasn’t this an emergency mission?
The taxi rattled through a fertile valley towards the sea. When they reached the corniche, the driver slowed down, pointed out a row of Turkish houses, asked her why she had come to Rhodes.
She explained, on an assignment for the Organization.
‘Ah sì. La N ATO.’
Oh no, no. NATO was a military organization. Hers was a peace-keeping one.
The driver shrugged at this subtlety. He could not be bothered splitting hairs, and lost interest. Did she see those mountains across the sea? That was the coast of Turkey. And here, as they swung around a curve, was the city of Rhodes.
Clelia Kingslake had a glimpse of golden walls, of white shipping, of a tower, a fortress. She was revisited by ecstasy. A moment later she found herself in a driveway.
The hotel was formlessly vast, and brown — a dated wartime brown suggestive of inverted camouflage, as if it had been wilfully disguised as a military installation. Upstairs, however, unlatching the shutters of a charming, old-fashioned room, she looked down over terraces and a pebbled beach to the sea and, once more, out to the blue Turkish coast. The open French windows formed, with their outside railing, a narrow balcony. She pulled up a chair and, leaning her arm on the rail and her chin on her arm, sat there in the winter sunshine, happy.
Clelia Kingslake was happy because, first of all, she was a Canadian. Fished out of the Annual Reports Pool at Headquarters, where she held a superior clerical post, flown to Rhodes at one day’s notice, arriving there to sunlight and sea, to trees in leaf, flowers in bloom, to the luxury of finding herself beside the Mediterranean — all this by itself might not have been thoroughly enjoyable to her strict northern soul had she not come to assist in a noble undertaking. She had been sent to serve the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean in their hour of need, and it was this that sanctioned her almost sensual pleasure in her surroundings as she sat gazing out from the Hotel of the Roses.
She was, in however modest a degree, the instrument of a great cause: in this setting redolent of antiquity she even risked to herself the word ‘handmaiden’. A dozen years earlier, in Toronto, she had diligently studied Italian in order to take her elderly mother to Rome. In the end, that summer, they had settled for Lake Louise, but she had kept up a little with the language. And this dormant ability had posted her now, miraculously, to an emergency mission newly established in the Mediterranean as an antidote to an international crisis.
An employee from the hotel was opening coloured umbrellas on the stony beach below. One or two hardy guests were bathing, although the sea looked neither calm nor warm. Apart from occasional shouts of ‘Herrlich!’ from the swimmers, the only sound was the rhythmic crunching of waves up the pebbled shore. ‘Sophocles long ago heard it on the Aegean,’ quoted Miss Kingslake to herself, and the consummation of the familiar line in an actual experience, combined with fatigue from an overnight plane journey, brought a rush of tears to her eyes.
The telephone rang and she jumped up to answer. It was the concierge. Yes, he had put the call through to her office. No, no one wished to speak with her. However, there was a message: a Signor Grilli (the concierge permitted his voice a faint smile, for the name meant ‘crickets’) would come to see her at eight this evening.
She put the phone down. She had expected to be called to work at once and was disappointed. It was considerate of this Grilli, who was in charge of the new mission, to give her a day’s grace, but she was anxious to take up her duties. She thought she would rest before unpacking and walking out to look at the town.
‘Grilli. Downstairs.’
‘I’ll be right down.’ She sat up, replaced the receiver, tried to think where she was. It was after eight. She sprang off the bed, pulled on her dress, combed her hair, alarming herself by muttering ‘My God’ as she fumbled with buttons and looked for her shoes.
When she came out of the elevator there was no one to be seen. The concierge directed her to one of the lounges. It was a large room beside the bar, decorated with graceful murals of the seasons, and the one person in it was paring his nails beneath the harvest. Miss Kingslake realized that, because of the name, she had been expecting a slight brittle figure, whereas the man who glanced in her direction, put away his nail file, and made a minimal effort to rise was a big man, a fat man, too young a man to be completely bald. His Sicilian ancestry — from which he had inherited the knowledge of the Italian language that had brought him on this mission — was not apparent.
She shook hands and sat down with an apology for keeping him waiting. ‘It must be the journey.’ She smiled. ‘I was in a deep sleep.’
He glanced at her a second time, looked away. His hands quivered with the suppressed need to fidget. He said, ‘You haven’t come here to sleep.’ When Mis
s Kingslake said nothing he went on, ‘I’ve been here three weeks. The first week I didn’t sleep at all. No time. Kept going on coffee and cigarettes. Just as well you weren’t here then, if you need so much sleep.’
‘I was assigned here only yesterday.’
‘And if you don’t work out, you’re going back just as fast.’
The waiter came up. Grilli ordered fruit juice, Miss Kingslake a sherry. The drinks were put down, with a big dish of peanuts, and Miss Kingslake asked, ‘When may I come to the office?’
‘Tomorrow, Sunday. A car will pick you up here at seven a.m. I’ll be in it.’ The flat of his hand smashed down among the peanuts, a massive displacement that scattered them as far as Miss Kingslake’s lap. He brought his fist back to his mouth and eventually continued. ‘Give Noreen a day off. If nothing else. Noreen’s been here from the beginning. Work! You ought to see that girl work. A truck horse. You know Noreen at Headquarters?’
‘Perhaps by sight.’
‘She’s in our department there — Logistics. Not one of your fancy do-nothing departments. She’s been in most of these emergencies — Suez, Lebanon, Cyprus, now here. If I had to go on another mission like this, I’d say give me Noreen.’ Another peanut spun into Clelia Kingslake’s lap. ‘Rather than any six others.’
‘Can you give me an idea of what I’m to do?’
‘We all pull our weight here. I don’t know what you do at Headquarters and I don’t care. Here you’ll do anything that comes to hand. Cables, letters, typing, accounts —’
‘I can do any of those things.’
‘You’ll do all of them. You’ll be in with the Cap.’
‘The Cap.’
‘Captain Moyers. He’s been seconded from Near East Peace Preservation. Assigned to us as Military Observer, but he’s turned his hand to everything during the crisis. A Canadian like yourself. But a great guy.’ The eyes were wandering again, contentiously raking the walls, lingering suspiciously on Primavera. ‘A rough diamond, but a great guy. He’ll be here any minute. He went out to the airfield to meet Mr Rees.’
Miss Kingslake pondered. Rees was head of the Logistics Department at Headquarters. ‘He’s here?’
‘Three-day tour of inspection. Oh, all the big brass have been through here this month — the Director-General himself came through, you know, on his way to the trouble spots. Mr Rees was too busy to come before.’
He pronounced it as if it were all one word, Mysteries. Miss Kingslake, her own gaze wandering, noted that the murals were by Afro. ‘I don’t want to keep you.’ She allowed herself to add, ‘I’m sure you need your sleep.’
Grilli was leaning forward, his hands splayed over the chair arms. All at once he changed colour. He hoisted himself up, vast and padded — it was as if the armchair had come to its feet — and shot out between the glass doors into the lobby.
Mysteries, surmised Clelia Kingslake, signing the bill. She followed. Grilli was bowed over a little cricket of a man, while a military figure strode about the lobby roaring orders in English. When Miss Kingslake came up, Grilli introduced her.
‘Mysteries, this is Miss Kingslake, the newest member of the mission.’
Rees shook hands. He looked Miss Kingslake in the eyes and held her gaze. ‘Miss Kingsley,’ he said quietly, ‘I want you to know that people like you are continually in our minds at Headquarters. Sometimes staff members in the field tend to feel forgotten. Believe me, they couldn’t be more mistaken. I want you to know that it’s fully appreciated, the wonderful work you are doing here.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Believe me.’
The three men were to dine together. Miss Kingslake was grateful that no suggestion was made that she should join them. While Grilli accompanied Rees up to his room, the Captain came over to Miss Kingslake, cap in hand, and introduced himself.
The Captain was also a fleshy man, though short. His face was red and puffy. He wore heavy dark glasses with square dark frames. The regularity of his black moustache suggested an inept disguise — another case of bad camouflage.
‘We’re sharing an office, I think?’ said Clelia Kingslake, when they had exchanged names.
‘So that’s his idea, is it?’ The Captain shot her a necessarily dark look. ‘More room in his office than in mine. What-have-you and so on. Could have requisitioned another office from the locals.’
Miss Kingslake said, with a helpful air of making light of things that was one of her more difficult characteristics, ‘Oh well — it’s an emergency mission.’
The Captain slapped his cap against his leg with annoyance. ‘Emergency, bah. I’ve been in the Eastern Mediterranean five years. Seen nothing but a lot of so-called emergencies. Let them kill one another — best thing that could happen, what-have-you and so on. Or drop an atomic bomb on the lot of them.’
Miss Kingslake stared. ‘The Organization —’
‘Organization!’ The red face inflated with facile rage. ‘A lot of clots, that’s what they are, this Organization of yours. A lot of clots.’
Miss Kingslake turned away. The Captain followed her to the elevator. ‘And the Arabs. Don’t talk to me about the Arabs.’
She made no attempt to. The elevator arrived.
‘Vehicle at O seven hundred hours sharp. What-have-you and so on.’
Just before seven Clelia Kingslake came down to the hotel lobby. A second sleep, a bath, and a new day had made a difference to her spirits. Waking in the dark that morning she had thought the situation over. Was it not true, after all, that she — through no fault of her own — had come belatedly to a mission where others had been under strain? That she had encountered them, yesterday evening, at the end of a fatiguing day spent in the faithful performance of their duties? Miss Kingslake’s heart brimmed with understanding as she climbed into her claw-footed bathtub.
How much she had to be thankful for, she exclaimed to herself as she climbed out. In all her time with the Organization, she had longed to go on such a mission. Not that she discounted for a moment her two years spent in the field with the Survey of West African Trust Territories, a rewarding experience in useful work and heartening esprit de corps: but SWATT, an economic mission, could hardly compare with a dynamic political mission such as this one. It was the immediacy that took Miss Kingslake’s breath away.
Twice before she had been assigned to a peace-keeping mission, only to be forestalled at the moment of departure — once by a bloody revolution in the country of her destination, another time because of a slipped disc. Now it had all come to pass. Even a lag in the Reports workload had helped to facilitate her sudden departure: only two days before, she had completed proof-reading on appendices for the World Commodity Index.
Environment would always have been secondary to Miss Kingslake’s wish to serve — adverse conditions, in fact, would merely have challenged her to make light of them in her helpful way. Almost guiltily, then, having fastened her skirt, did she cross to the windows and look out on the Anatolian sunrise as she buttoned her blouse. She had no right to expect that the fulfilment of her desires would take place in so much comfort.
She dwelt again, indulgently, on the encounter with her new colleagues. Grilli, a young man, evidently insecure, had been abruptly elevated to a position of unnerving responsibility. When Miss Kingslake’s industry, her goodwill, made themselves apparent to him, his manner would change. And had he not himself described the Captain as a rough diamond? A display of diamantine qualities would soon put the Captain’s opening remarks in perspective. Pazienza, thought Clelia Kingslake to herself, smiling in the glass as she put on the jacket of her best blue suit.
A black Chrysler was waiting in the hotel driveway, and Grilli was in it. Miss Kingslake greeted the Rhodian driver who handed her in, and asked his name.
‘Mihalis,’ he told her. ‘Michele, Michel, Mike.’
Grilli said, ‘The others are late too.’
‘You aren’t at this hotel?’
‘Managed to find a mo
dern place.’ He jerked his head inland. ‘Brand new. Air-conditioned. Music piped in.’ They sat in silence. He looked steadily at the folds of her skirt, then reached out and took her sleeve between thumb and finger. ‘Buy this out of your per diem advance?’
Pazienza, Miss Kingslake said to herself. She thought, This man is afraid of women. But she harboured the knowledge unwillingly and had not the faintest idea of what to do with it. The mere realization in itself suggested something unsporting, an abuse of power.
The driver opened the door. Rees appeared, carrying a camera and a briefcase. Grilli made an attempt to stand up inside the car.
‘Sorry to keep you busy people waiting.’ Rees settled himself on the other side of Clelia Kingslake. ‘I overslept, I’m afraid. The plane journey, change of hours — it’s quite an adjustment.’
‘Certainly takes it out of you,’ Grilli agreed sympathetically.
‘I hardly remember where I was, this time yesterday. Malta, was it, or Herakleion?’ Rees smiled benevolently at Miss Kingslake. ‘How do you do.’
‘Cecilia Kingslake,’ Grilli said. ‘She’s the latest arrival. I think you —’
Rees shook hands, turning to her full face. ‘Miss Kingsland,’ he said gravely, ‘I know from experience that staff members in the field tend to feel forgotten. It’s natural, being so far from Headquarters — natural, but mistaken. Believe me. You people, and the wonderful work you’re doing, are in our thoughts at Headquarters every day. I want you to know how much you’re appreciated and remembered.’
‘I do know. Thank you.’
Grilli moved uneasily. His hands shifted back and forth over his knees. ‘Here’s the Cap.’
The Captain strode from the hotel, got into the front seat, turned and nodded curtly. Something had happened to him in the night. He was redder and flabbier, out of sorts and breath. The driver jumped in beside him, closed the door, reached for the starter.
‘Well, get going, man!’ cried the Captain impatiently.
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