Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  ‘Give my regards to Secher’s major,’ he was saying. ‘And all the pretty widows.’

  Suddenly he turned to Sarah. ‘You will miss your train, Fräulein. Why don’t you get aboard?’

  ‘I’m waiting for a friend.’

  ‘He can always get the next one.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sarah. She was thinking that Joseph might have been delayed for reasons beyond his control. The guard blew his whistle and there was a general slamming of doors.

  ‘Come on, I’ll help you. Is this your carriage? Is your luggage in?’

  His voice was full of concern and at the same time he had the door open and was almost pushing her up the steps into the compartment.

  At that moment there was a commotion by the iron gate and Lishansky appeared on the platform. He was obviously in some disarray: breathless, beads of sweat breaking from his forehead, holding onto his hat, his monocle bouncing uselessly by its black silk ribbon against his waistcoat. In his right hand he held a half-closed leather grip from which jutted what looked like a wooden doll with a round head and a black painted moustache.

  ‘Just in time, young man,’ reprimanded Maeltzer, holding the door open for him.

  Joseph gave him a blank look, trying to take in the words. He had some Yiddish, but his German was not very good. Polish was his native language and although they sometimes experimented in Hebrew he spoke French to Sarah Aaronsohn most of the time. ‘Wretched horse,’ he muttered. ‘It would have been quicker to eat it and walk here.’

  The train began moving, Maeltzer slammed the door.

  ‘Au revoir,’ he said, lifting his hat slightly.

  ‘Au revoir, monsieur,’ said Sarah.

  ***

  There was nobody else in the compartment and they were able to talk freely.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ she said. ‘Where were you? I was beginning to think you had been arrested. I was going to leave without you.’

  ‘I told you, the driver’s horse was the thinnest in Jerusalem. It was all I could get.’

  ‘And where did you get it?’

  ‘Jaffa Gate,’ he said, after a moment’s hesitation.

  ‘Why? Why didn’t you go to the Zion Gate? There are horse cabs there.’

  ‘Not always. Besides, I had business to do.’

  He stared out of the window, his face set. The train was slipping past stony terraces where a few black-haired goats grazed under the shade of the last remaining olive trees. Whole groves had been cut down for the hungry locomotives and many of the survivors had been grotesquely pollarded.

  ‘What business?’ She was not going to let him get away with it.

  Lishansky continued to look out of the window. Here and there groups of Syrian goatherds were visible, boys and their grandfathers squatting close to their animals and armed with slingshots and staves against civilian predators. Against the military kind they were helpless.

  ‘What business?’ she repeated. ‘Some worthless trinket from the souk, I suppose?’ And she tapped her foot against the bag from which the protruding doll’s head was plainly visible. ‘What, may I ask, have you got in there?’

  He sighed a caught-out boy’s sigh and brought the doll out of the grip. Except it was not a doll exactly. It was a wooden model of two acrobats or high-wire artistes, Latin daredevils judging by the pencil moustaches and large eyes with lustrous lashes. The main figure stood about a foot high and his feet disappeared into the kind of base normally associated with a lampshade or candlestick holder. In the upturned forehead, just below a cone-shaped hat with a white bobble on the end, was a hole into which Joseph now screwed an object about four inches long shaped like a child’s spinning-top. He went back to the bag and produced a second figure, smaller than the first, which was holding through its cylinder-shaped hands a balancing pole bent in the form of an inverted ‘U’, with two balls about the size of small apples at each end.

  The train was moving quite fast now, picking up speed down the gradient. The vibration made it impossible for Joseph to get his acrobats to perform their trick until it came to a halt at the little plateau of el-Burkeih, where it took on some more soldiers from a tented camp there.

  The smaller figure had a central peg-leg. Joseph held it by the pom-pom on its hat and placed its leg on the flat top of the spinning-top device sprouting from the other acrobat’s head. For a moment the smaller acrobat lurched backwards and teetered on one edge of its peg-leg, rocking from side to side at such a crazy angle that it seemed a matter of seconds before it fell to the floor. Gradually the rocking began to subside, and for a few seconds, although it was still in motion, it was obvious that equilibrium had been achieved.

  ‘You see, he’s like me,’ said Joseph. ‘You think he is going to fall but he doesn’t. He keeps his balance. He stays up.’

  Just then the guard released his brake and the train moved forward again with a jerk that almost threw them off their seats. The tiny acrobat flew off his perch but was saved from falling further when his balancing pole became entangled around the arms of the large figure.

  ‘Now you see,’ said Joseph triumphantly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sarah. ‘You’re the little daring one who takes too many chances, I’m the big steady one, and I’ve just saved you as usual.’

  She smiled, revealing the deep laugh lines she was due to get around her eyes when she got older. He smiled back and shrugged, relieved – as he always was – that the row was over.

  He put the toy back into the bag. ‘It’s for one of my brothers,’ he said.

  She nodded. In Joseph’s case a brother could as easily mean a Druse as a Jew. ‘And apart from your shopping – did everything else go all right?’

  ‘Yes – no problem.’

  ‘Can I have it?’

  He took out of the breast pocket of his suit a small roll of paper and handed it to her. She gave it a brief glance and then took off her left shoe and placed it between the sole and a bit of the leather lining that was coming away.

  The train gathered speed and was going quite fast down the Vale of Ajalaon. Sarah remembered how, as a fourteen-year-old girl, she had travelled up this slope on a train hauled by a steam engine so under-powered that it rarely exceeded walking pace. She had been accompanying her brother Aaron, who had persuaded their parents to let him show her Jerusalem for the first time.

  When they got to where the gradient was steepest, Aaron had announced: ‘I think you should have a bouquet, young lady.’ He had then opened the carriage door, stepped out – it was moving so slowly he barely had to break his stride – and run off into the meadows and started plucking wild flowers. As he picked, the train slowly began to gather speed. Had Sarah been a bit younger, or even a little older, she might have yelled and screamed and stamped her foot and demanded that he come back that instant. As it was, she was at that age when she would have died rather than draw attention to herself, so she just stood there, biting her bottom lip, watching her brother’s leisurely progress from one splash of colour to another. Of course, he knew how to gauge it so that it looked as though he had left it too late before breaking into a sprint and bounding back into the carriage. When Aaron presented his bouquet she had burst into tears and he had laughed and teased her until she felt foolish enough to join the laughter. But he had not played any more tricks on her that trip.

  Sarah could never recall feeling so abandoned again until today, when she had allowed the large man she had glimpsed talking to the one-armed German officer at Fast’s the day before to put her so firmly onto the train. She supposed she had allowed him to make up her mind for her because she knew that it was the right thing to do. Even so, Sarah was surprised she had permitted herself to be dominated the way she had. It was true the man’s size and greying moustache lent him a certain air of authority, but she was not normally influenced by this sort of thing. She remembered the urgency in his voice: ‘He can always get the next one.’

  And there was that ‘he’. The certainty that she was trave
lling with the person he had seen her with at Fast’s the day before. Was that simply intuition? She wondered what he did, this German out of uniform. Could he be one of them, a member of the Yishuv? There were many kinds of Jews in the Zionist community. And she had seen that fool Rosenblum talking to him before he came over to lecture Joseph and herself. But his clothes and his mannerisms were wrong for a Zionist settler. He lacked that strutting, devil-may-care manner Joseph and even people like her brother had. His poise came from a deeper confidence. His looks could be Jewish – the nose was prominent and slightly aquiline – but the same could be said for many people who were not. What then? A preacher? No. Certainly not. Her German was good enough to have caught that farewell remark about the pretty widows. A doctor? A surgeon? Yes, that might be it. That would account for the air of authority.

  Joseph dozed. He had a knack of being able to sleep any time, whereas her own racing mind sometimes found it difficult enough in bed. The train was moving well now. There was a brief glimpse of Syrian labourers digging trenches and gun pits under the direction of Turkish officers. Once she nudged Joseph awake to point out a fair-haired German in a white tunic supervising the erection of some barbed wire entanglements. ‘Look. They know the English are coming despite their little victory.’

  Joseph yawned. ‘I wish they’d hurry up.’

  By nightfall they had reached Lod, where the train rested while the locomotive was refuelled and rewatered. Sarah and Joseph slept fitfully. Sometimes Turkish officers would peer in but when they saw she was accompanied by a male they went on their way again.

  They came through Hadera just as dawn was breaking. By the time they got to Caesarea, where the fat Moudir would sleep for another two hours, the sun was a bowler hat of molten metal on the horizon.

  The train did not stop at Zichron Jacob nor at Athlit and as usual they had to put up with the frustration of travelling the extra twenty miles north to Haifa from where they would have to hire a gig to the settlement. Just before Haifa they looked out at the Mediterranean and saw first a smudge of smoke and then the quite distinct silhouette of a British monitor.

  10

  After he left the station Maeltzer headed back towards the Old City in the same dilapidated hansom that had brought Joseph there. The young Zionist had been quite truthful about the state of his transport. The horse had suppurating sores on its rump and every time it took a step its ribs stretched so tightly that the journalist thought they were going to burst through its skin.

  The sun was climbing rapidly but the heat was by no means unpleasant and the air was scented with wild flowers and conifers. Maeltzer sniffed at the fragrance and smiled and allowed himself to lean back in the upholstery and stretch out his legs and close his eyes. It was always such a relief to get his despatches off. Of course, there was still much that could go wrong between Jerusalem station and their arrival at the proper place. But that was a matter now out of his control and it was not his habit to worry much about things he could do nothing about.

  For a while he thought about the Aaronsohn girl. Thank God she had got on the train! It was ridiculous for her to linger around Jerusalem a moment longer than necessary when there was so much conjecture about the whereabouts of her brother, and every Turkish officer was trying to look down her blouse.

  Maeltzer was contemplating this, his hands clasped loosely beneath his paunch, when he realised that the horse had stopped moving altogether. He opened his eyes, prepared to find it dead between the traces, but it was still upright, flies buzzing around its twitching ears. A Turkish soldier was holding the horse by its bridle while another, a sergeant, was talking to the driver. Maeltzer asked the NCO in Turkish what was going on.

  ‘An English officer has escaped, effendi,’ the sergeant replied in a mixture of Turkish and Arabic. Maeltzer guessed that the man was probably a Kurd.

  ‘One of the prisoners you took at Gaza?’

  ‘Yes, effendi. One of those we treated like brothers and showed the holy sights and the Christian places.’

  Spoken like a true fanatic, thought Maeltzer. He decided that the man was probably an eastern Kurd, possibly from somewhere around Kirkuk where the Germans were rumoured to be prospecting for oil. He could see that he was tired and irritable and had obviously been up half the night searching for this ingrate Inglisi.

  Tired though he was, the Kurd could not resist going through the charade of inspecting the effendi’s papers. Maeltzer watched him closely. He had yet to meet an ordinary Turkish solider who could read.

  The journalist’s laissez-passer was a unique document, wheedled out of a major on Mustafa Kemal’s staff whom he had rewarded with a handsome ivory-handled Colt revolver. The pass had two large red wax seals and three lengthy sentences in copperplate classical Arabic, the gist of which was that by the Grace of Allah and his Prophet Mohammed, blessed be His name, the bearer enjoyed the protection of the Sublime Porte and woe unto those who hindered him in the pursuit of his lawful duties in military areas.

  The soldier furrowed his brow and moved his lips – only partly bluffing for he could understand the familiar Koranic phrases in the document and, being an intelligent man, it infuriated him that he could not understand more.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Maeltzer, beginning to get impatient. ‘What does this Inglisi look like?’

  ‘He is a young man, tall and thin with bandages on his legs. He has hair the colour of dirty straw.’

  ‘Has he a moustache?’ asked Maeltzer, tugging at his own.

  ‘No,’ said the soldier, hardly glancing up. He had just worked out Sublime Porte and was beginning to feel rather pleased with himself.

  Maeltzer thrust his large head at the Kurd and patted his belly. ‘And do you think I’m keeping him in here then?’

  The Kurd handed the document back without a word and then waved them on with an abrupt toss of his hand. Once again the horse defied veterinary science and the wheels of the hansom began to turn at quite a respectable rate. Maeltzer glanced back to see the Kurd staring after them. Now that, he smiled to himself, is a very angry man.

  He tried to resume his former position, but the road had become too bumpy to lie back in comfort. He sat up and surveyed the surrounding countryside.

  To the left the land started out flat and rocky, with a few wizened olives, before slanting down to the south-west as the Judaean range crumbled onto the plain. There was not much on it. A few black-haired goats, and beyond them an old man who might have been their shepherd walking slowly in the direction of the station. Not much cover there. If the young English officer was around they would soon flush him out.

  Maeltzer had no doubt that the escapee must be the same Second Lieutenant Anthony Buchan whose parents would shortly be receiving his note informing them that their son was alive. He could not recall any other English officers with ‘hair the colour of straw’ and bandages around his legs. Where did he expect to run to, especially with those knees of his?

  Maeltzer watched the goatherd take a few stiff-legged, old man’s steps before collapsing into the shade of a carob. After he had repeated his erratic progress once again, Maeltzer realised whom he was watching. It was obvious that Buchan’s legs were not going to take him much further.

  ‘Walk, you idle sod,’ Buchan said out loud. ‘Go on. Walk.’

  But first he had to get up. He sat leaning back on his hands with his legs outstretched on the ground. A mixture of blood and pus was seeping through the bandage on his left knee. Things were not going well, but Buchan told himself he had been brought up to play to the final whistle. He had slept in fits and starts through a long night. More than once he had debated whether he should take advantage of the night and get going, and on each occasion he had been swayed by the argument that sentries would be on the look-out for Arab pilferers and therefore more alert. Eventually he started walking as the dawn came up. He had collapsed and dragged himself to his feet again a dozen times before Maeltzer marked his erratic progress.

  Now h
e was in the process of a debate, or rather he was the audience of a debate in which he would be required to make the casting vote. He was familiar with both speakers. In fact, they had moved into his head at the onset of pubescence – about the time he had first started reading the novels of Rider Haggard and G. A. Henty – and never stayed away for very long.

  Speaker Number One’s argument was short and to the point, and what it lacked in wit it made up with the passion of its convictions. ‘Of course, you can do it,’ this speaker was saying. ‘Naturally, it’s difficult. If it wasn’t difficult it wouldn’t be worth doing. My dear fellow, I know your knees feel like a colony of maggots have taken up residence, but you’re not going to let something as trivial as that upset you, are you? Surely you’ve got more backbone than that?’

  The other speaker was more eloquent, teasing. ‘Why don’t you just stop this nonsense?’ he demanded. ‘Just walk off the pitch. Tell them you don’t want to play anymore. You don’t have to play, you know. It really is about time you realised that life isn’t a game, and that you’re an adult not a schoolboy.

  ‘The trouble is with you is that you’re so damn anxious to please, to impress. You worry far too much about what others think. You’re never your own man and it gets you into trouble. Look at you now. You’re not exactly a born soldier and you’re lucky to have survived a battle. And yet you’re throwing away the chance to spend the rest of the war honourably tucked up in a PoW camp.

  ‘Do you think they’ll say, “What a gallant fellow Buchan was!” Of course they won’t! Heroes don’t have bowel movements. Certainly don’t have diarrhoea. When did Mr Henty ever have a hero with the squitters? Think of With Buller in Natal or With Moore at Corunna or On the Irrawaddy or At Aboukir and Acre or With Cochrane the Dauntless. You can see them on your shelf at home now, can’t you? That’s what they’re going to remember most about you. Can’t you hear that Yeomanry captain talking about it when it’s all over?