Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  “Well I’m not,” said Calderwell, though he was surprised to see the major’s crowns on his shoulders. Major and above were not usually involved in punch-ups. Not even colonials.

  “And to whom do I have the honour of speaking?” asked De Wet, picking up his service cap. Apart from Malley’s blood on his shirt his grooming was intact.

  Calderwell introduced himself and at the same time produced his warrant card, displaying it in the palm of his right hand so that the South African could have inspected it if somebody had remembered to turn the lights on.

  “Major De Wet, South African Army. I’m sorry, but I didn’t start this.”

  But you sure as hell finished it, thought Pickett. His fellow convalescent was obviously mending well.

  “He’s right Inspector,” said Jessica lighting a cigarette. “He didn’t start it. I’m afraid the other gentleman is very drunk.”

  De Wet went up to her and they moved slightly away from the group.

  “He’s also hurt,” said Pickett. “I think his shoulder’s been dislocated.” Malley had managed to get himself back into a chair and was still bleeding and groaning a bit. Mitzi arrived, having pushed her way through the little crowd that had gathered, and was dabbing at his nose and mouth with a napkin, occasionally pausing to shoot reproachful glances at De Wet. She hadn’t heard what Jessica had said.

  Malley groaned again.

  “Like to take a look at him George,” said Calderwell nodding to one of the other policemen, a large man with shoulders like an ox. Then he turned to Pickett. “Got any identification on you sir?” He had already heard the accent so he was not all that surprised by the details on the press pass.

  “The young lady’s right,” Pickett said. “He started it. But he’s just back from the Desert. Lost a pal. That’s why he was hitting the juice.” He looked at Jessica hoping she might continue with this ad libbing but her face was a mask.

  “Is he a reporter too?”

  “Photographer. Good one too. It’s mainly thanks to him that America knows about the Eighth Army.” Pickett could see that the policeman was not impressed. “Look, I’ll settle for any damages,” he said.

  “Damn right you will, “ said Calderwell handing back his press card “All of you will. And the drinks. Then I think you’d better call it a night. Whether you’re allowed back in this place will of course be at the discretion of the management.”

  At that moment Malley let out a yelp followed by a muffled, “Christ!”

  The policeman Calderwell had called George was standing behind him, beaming and lowering Malley’s right arm. “Slipped back in a treat,” he said. Mitzi, standing by with her bloody napkin, looked impressed.

  “Is he a doctor?” asked Pickett.

  “Police rugby coach,” said Calderwell.

  “You get a lot of injuries at rugby,” explained George in a north country accent. “It’s not like your football, all that padding.”

  “Yeah, we’re just a bunch of goddam softies,” said Pickett who was beginning to find Calderwell and his lumbering pal from the bleachers a sanctimonious pain in the ass. “God knows how we’re going to win the war for you this time.”

  “Same as last time I expect,” said Calderwell. “Wait until it’s almost over. Is that what the fight was about?”

  “No, it wasn’t,” said Jessica who was close to tears and furious with Malley. If this became a police matter she could say goodbye to her job at the Secretariat. She’d be lucky not to be sent home in disgrace. “Mister Malley is upset about Tobruk He stuck the first blow. It really wasn’t the major’s fault. He left this towards the drinks and the damage.”

  She handed over five Palestinian pounds. “He said he hoped this would be enough.”

  “Do you mean he’s gone?”

  “Yes, I think he was embarrassed.”

  Calderwel hadn’t noticed the South African slip away.

  “Any idea where?”

  “I’m afraid not. Perhaps he’s at the King David. He’s convalescing.”

  She didn’t tell him that De Wet had said he would telephone her at the Secretariat tomorrow.

  “Well,” said Calderwell. “No great harm done. It seems the injured party is also the guilty party.”

  He was weary with the whole business. After all, he was supposed to be having a night off with his lady, not moonlighting as a bouncer. If Mitzi hadn’t been singing he would probably have let the management sort it out. But the memory of her cradling the photographer’s head and mopping up his nosebleed rankled. Malley was still sitting in the chair, holding the bloody napkin to his face.

  Calderwell turned to him. “This war’s going to go on for a long time laddie,” he said. “And if you pick a fight every time somebody you know dies in it you’re going to get yourself into a lot of trouble.”

  Unaware of the excuse Pickett had made for his conduct Malley could not make out what this Limey was talking about. He was concussed and the words came from far away, signals from a distant planet. All he knew was that they sounded suspiciously like a reprimand. “Fuck you,” he said. At least that is what he thought he said. Muffled by the cloth on his broken nose the words sounded more like, “uggoo”.

  Calderwell chose to interpret this as a contrite if nasally impaired, “I know”, so he left it at that.

  Jessica went out into the blackout in search of a cab or a horse drawn gharry to take her back to her flat. There was no sign of a doorman. For a moment, just a moment mind, she had found it rather thrilling to have two men fight over her but the feeling hadn’t lasted very long. In fact, it made her feel like a bit of a tart. Just lately she had felt like this more often than she cared to admit.

  Outside Mitzi’s voice filled the night air. She was singing Falling in Love Again. Jessica sighed. She had always had mixed feelings about Dietrich. Behind her she heard a car draw up. She turned and saw it was a taxi. The vehicle came to a halt and out of it stepped her dancing partner, the man who had introduced himself as Maurice de Wet.

  11 - The Man in the Middle

  His Excellency, Sir Harold MacMichael, His Majesty’s High Commissioner in Palestine and Jessica’s new boss would sometimes confide to family and friends, “The trouble is, I’m piggy in the middle here and you know how both sides feel about pork.”

  To which an old chum, passing through Jerusalem after years spent governing some undiscriminating carnivores in the South Seas, had once observed, “Well, at least the buggers won’t be having you for dinner then Harry.”

  It was 8.15 am and the High Commissioner was in his shirt sleeves at the back of Government House feeding his hens before starting work. Much to the disgust of his Aide de Camp, Major Nicholl, who was cavalry and could be tetchy about form, he and Lady MacMichael had started to keep chickens. It was their domestic contribution to the war effort. What was a little stench and feathers about the place when you could get your own fresh eggs every morning? An example to all the Mandate’s increasingly urbanised citizens of the virtues of self sufficiency.

  There were also sheep. Fat tailed creatures imported from Transjordan that had become particularly partial to the delphiniums. The gardener’s boy was always stoning them away from these blue borders. Another problem was that his daughters were getting rather fond of them and he had the feeling there was going to be a dickens of a fuss when the time came to have them slaughtered though the head gardener had volunteered to do the job any time he liked. Most Arab men, even in the towns, could still cut a sheep’s throat if they only did it once a year at the Eid feast. He suspected they regarded it as good practise for dealing with those other warm-blooded mammals that went about on two legs.

  Sir Harold’s flock were prevented from straying by the double wired perimeter fence that had been strung around the great white house and its grounds seven years before when the Arabs started their revolt over the amount of Jewish immigration the British were permitting. Now the fence remained as a defence against Jewish terrorists who thought th
e British had not permitted enough. Three months ago some of them had planted a bomb next to the wire. It had exploded while he and his family were having dinner with Major Nicholl and young Hermione whose unlikely knowledge of shorthand had got her a job as his personal secretary when her husband Lord Ranfurly, a junior officer in the yeomanry, had been captured in the desert.

  Nicholl had rushed out into the night with drawn revolver. But the bomb had probably been intended as no more than a gesture. It was part of their riposte for the loss of the Struma, a crippled Danube cattle boat crammed with eight hundred or so Rumanian Jewish refugees all desperate for Palestine and cast adrift by the Turks on a freezing Black Sea where it mysteriously exploded. For 71 days it had languished in Istanbul with broken engines while, at his urging, London pleaded with Ankara not to permit any more vessels carrying illegal immigrants to pass through the Bosphorus and onto Palestine. Eventually the Turks had simply towed it back into the Black Sea and left it to its fate. Of course, nobody wanted it to end like that. But the camp at Athlit was still full of illegals from the last ship that they had allowed to disembark at Haifa. They were supposed to go on to Mauritius and be interned there for the duration of the war but the ships that might have taken them were being lost on the Malta run.

  As Sir Harold was fond of reminding his staff, the policy of His Majesty’s government in Palestine was neither pro-Arab nor pro-Zionist. It was pro-British. And you couldn’t get a pint into a half-pint pot. Even if things were as bad for the Jews in Nazi occupied Europe as the Jewish Agency here made out there simply wasn’t enough room in Palestine to give them all a home. The old Zionist slogan, “a land without a people for a people without a land” was rot. Agriculturally, Palestine could hardly support its own Arabs and they showed no inclination to leave. Why would they? It was their country for God’s sake. The Zionists spoke of this historical attachment to the Land, Eretz Israel and all that yet most Zionists, most Jews, were of very diluted Semitic stock and often as European looking as he was. There had never been any previous attempts to settle British ruled territories that were already densely populated. Canada, Australia, New Zealand and parts of east and southern Africa, yes. That fool Herzl had been offered Uganda for his Zionist experiment and turned it down. And Uganda was a bloody paradise compared with this place! Everybody knew that hardly any European Jews would have wanted to come here if it hadn’t have been for Hitler. Eastern European Jews went to America, yes. Also to France and, to a lesser extent, Britain. That was because of the Russian pogroms. But most Jews didn’t want to come to come and work under Palestine’s baking sun and risk its malaria and typhus and marauding Arabs though he had to admit those who did were often an industrious bunch.

  Strangely, they tended to have a lot in common with the Arabs too. For a start, both sides could be damn untrustworthy, downright treacherous when they wanted something badly enough. There were people in the Palestine Police, senior British officers, who were convinced that the Jews on the Struma had blown themselves up rather than risk forcible repatriation to General Ion Antonescu’s Romania with its watchful German legation and Antonescu’s determination to meet all the racial requirements for Romania’s entry into the Greater Reich.

  Then there had been talk that the Struma had been torpedoed. If so, the most likely culprits were the Russians who were determined to stop Germany getting strategic materials through Constanta, Romania’s Black Sea port, and willing to sink any ships, even if they were neutrals, that appeared to be heading for it. Even so, there had been a lot of criticism in the American press and it had not been assuaged by his announcement that His Majesty’s Government had agreed to allow the young man who was the only survivor from the sinking of the Struma to settle in Palestine. American Jews had complained of “Hitlerian methods” and sent a letter to Ambassador Halifax in Washington with a copy to the New York Times. And the Yanks took their Jews seriously. MacMichael sometimes thought that Palestine, despite Churchill’s Zionist sympathies, must be one of the biggest bones of contention between London and Washington. The Americans seemed to think that any Jew who wished should be allowed to settle in the Mandate even if it meant that the Palestinian Arabs would fas become a minority in their own country.

  What the Masters of the Great Melting Pot never admitted was that they were in no hurry to let any more Jews into America. Lot of anti-Semitism there too. He had been reading a telegram from the Washington embassy the other day about an outbreak of swastika daubing on synagogues. People forgot the German influence in the States, thought they were all pro-British. But a lot of Americans were from German and Irish stock and far from friendly. Look at that bastard Joseph Kennedy, rich as Croesus and some said a former bootlegger, who at the beginning of the war had been the US ambassador in London. He had told everybody who would listen that the hopeless and degenerate British were bound to lose and could only save themselves by accepting Hitler’s peace terms.

  His task finished, the High Commissioner replaced on the roof of his hen house the chipped soup bowl he used to feed his fowl. Like the rest of Government House’s china it bore the royal crest. He then retrieved the jacket to his light grey pin stripe that was hanging on the outside knob of the scullery door and walked around to the front of the house rather than put the kitchen servants in a flutter by entering through their domain.

  Sir Harold was a tall, lean man with the habits of good grooming and exercise that had helped him retain his looks well past the foothills of middle age. There was a hint of pomade in the thinning pepper and salt hair combed straight back from the high forehead with its bushy eyebrows and the moustache below the straight, thin blade of a nose trimmed to the point where no crumb would find more than the briefest sanctuary there.

  As he got to the front of the house one of the Arab staff was raising the Union flag on the short jack staff on the roof. He looked at his watch. 8.29 exactly. He gave the fellow a kind of half salute to acknowledge his punctuality and then knocked on the door. It was opened by a middle aged Arab doorman in baggy blue trousers who answered to the Ottoman title of Kavaas. At the sight of Sir Harold he always managed to raise his eyebrows in surprise though the High Commissioner had been coming to work through his own front door for six months or so now, ever since he started keeping chickens.

  Sir Harold walked through the ground floor of Government House to his office where that morning’s Palestine Post and several deciphered telegrams from London already awaited him. Again he removed his jacket, this time hanging it on a coat hanger hooked to hat stand in a corner of the room. Then he sat down with the newspaper.

  For once its front page splash was not directly concerned with war news but Churchill’s victory the day before in the House of Commons where he had defeated a “no confidence” motion on his premiership by four hundred and seventy-five votes to twenty-five. And yet there seemed no end in sight to the recent string of British defeats that had prompted it. Down the page a smaller headline proclaimed: 8TH ARMY REPULSES FIERCE AXIS ATTACK. And beneath it in a lower case letters: Heavy losses on both sides.

  Like many others Sir Harold prided himself that he knew how to read between the lines of censored wartime reports. It was a bit like doing a simple crossword. For instance, it was quite obvious from the main verb in that headline - “repulses” - that the Eighth Army was on the back foot. And unlike most of the Post’s readers Sir Harold would shortly have the somewhat morbid pleasure of having his worst suspicions confirmed when Nicholl’s daily briefing telegram from GHQ Cairo had been decoded. Auchinleck was going on about Rommel’s supply difficulties again and the importance of standing firm. “We are fighting the Battle of Egypt.”

  Some people thought they were already on the verge of fighting the Battle of Palestine. There was an advertisement on the Post’s page three, placed there by the Jewish Agency, regarded by the majority of Jews in Palestine as their legitimate government, urging its men to enlist in the British forces. “The struggle is between the Bible and Mein Kampf
,” it proclaimed. “Hitler’s victory means our destruction; self defence is our salvation. There can be no nationhood without a youth under arms. Jewish units of the British Army are the representatives of Israel on the battlefield.”

  “Quite so,” muttered Sir Harold who was much vexed by the entire question of arming the Yishuv. There was no doubt in his mind that some Zionists saw the war as a golden opportunity to arm themselves to the point where they could turn all of Palestine into a Jewish state. Its western and eastern boundaries would be the Mediterranean and the River Jordan. There would be no question of partitioning the territory between the Jews and the Arab majority. The winners would take all.

  In 1939, only six months before hostilities started, the government White Paper on the Mandate had made it plain that Jewish immigration to Palestinewas coming to an end - seventy-five thousand were to be allowed in over the next five years and that was it. But despite this the Agency had been encouraging Jews to join the British forces from the moment they heard poor Chamberlain on the BBC Overseas Service telling the world that Britain was at war with Germany.

  Sir Harold had recently learned that twenty thousand Palestinian Jews, perhaps a few more, were in British uniform. Less than seven thousand Palestinian Arabs had volunteered and there were over twice as many. He was not at all surprised at this. The Arabs did not feel that British war interests coincided with their own. They saw the recruiting sergeants from the Jewish Agency outside His Majesty’s recruiting offices, some even wore blue and white armbands bearing the Star of David if they could get away with it, and drew their own conclusions. The British were arming the Jews. And they were right.

  In the last war Zionist volunteers from America and Britain had been accommodated in various battalions of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, crudely referred to as the Skinback Fusiliers by the army’s uncircumcised majority. But, apart from the Zion Mule Corps, in 1914-18 the War Office had been careful not to give these battalions an official Jewish identity. Now the Agency’s friends in the House of Commons were demanding the formation of a fifty thousand strong Jewish Home Guard in Palestine as if the Jewish Settlement Police were not enough!