Doom's Caravan

by Geoffrey Household

  I sat down in the silent, empty office, wide open to some first impression of it which might later be useful. There was nothing. A blank. It was in perfect order—chairs, desk, blotter, typewriter, pencils all where they should be, and nothing in the waste-paper basket. Model for an A.D.S.O.’s office. Architect: Oliver Enwin. Across the passage was Boutagy’s room, once the shop. His red tarboosh, the emblem of his Christianity, rested on top of a filing cabinet. Below it were two grey army blankets, tidily folded, showing that Duty had compelled him to sleep the previous night on the office floor. Duty. Boutagy was more fulfilled by his constancy as a watchdog than alarmed by the responsibility.

  He was a curious looking fellow, for his face and his hair were both light brown. He reminded me of an albino, simply because the expected human contrast of complexion and hair was absent. He was about forty, but looked that evening years older. The lines of his round face, always deep, were slits full of bristles and worry, due more to affection for Oliver than the situation. Boutagy was his Limpsfield in a far lonelier job than mine.

  Over the wine I listened to his story. When Boutagy arrived at the office, Oliver had already gone. There was nothing surprising in that, except that he always let Boutagy know when he would be back—hours or sometimes days. At 8 p.m., official closing time, Boutagy went upstairs to his flat in case he had come back unnoticed and was feeling ill. The flat was locked. Yet Oliver could not have intended any long journey since his car was still in the garage.

  Boutagy went out to see a cousin of his who ran a small restaurant and acted as a very useful unpaid agent; he might know where Oliver was, having served him lunch or a coffee during the day. Sure enough the cousin had seen him early that morning. He handed Boutagy a sealed envelope with a message from Captain Enwin that he was to take it back to the office and open it.

  Boutagy did so and found the key of the flat. He went in with an unreasoning premonition that Oliver had committed suicide—though he could hardly have done so and locked the door on the outside. Bang in the middle of the breakfast table was another envelope addressed to him, containing the keys of filing cabinet and safe, the number of the combination and a short note. He took it from an inside pocket and gave it to me on his open palm as miserably as if it were an order for our immediate execution.

  My Dear Boutagy,

  I shall not be coming back. Here are the keys which you must keep on your person until you hand them over to the officer whom Colonel Fanshawe will send to relieve you. Telephone him at Headquarters in the morning to say that I have gone.

  Very sensibly Boutagy had tried to telephone immediately. Jeremy was out. Boutagy refused to leave any message with the Duty Officer beyond saying that Captain Enwin wanted to be called urgently first thing in the morning. Instinct or training had familiarised him with our custom of keeping all scandal in the family.

  So Oliver, judging precisely what Boutagy would do, had given himself at least twenty-four hours to get clear. His disappearance was clearly deliberate. It might have been forced by blackmail, threats or embezzlement, but all seemed extraordinarily improbable.

  I asked Boutagy what he knew of current investigations. Nothing special was going on, he said, and they had been passing through a quiet period. Captain Enwin had taken advantage of the lull to spend a lot of his time outside the office. On what business? Boutagy had no idea. He was less conversant with his employer’s secrets than I had thought.

  Had Captain Enwin looked worried? Not exactly, but for some days he had been unusually silent.

  ‘And I will tell you this between ourselves,’ Boutagy added. ‘When I came into his office one afternoon last week I thought he had been weeping.’

  Nothing remarkable in that for an Arab, nor for those of us who had been away long enough to suffer losses by death or adultery. But Boutagy’s tone was one of disbelief in his own observation. For him a British officer did not weep. His tears were turned to ice by duty or dried up by the daily grind of geniality.

  ‘Any private letters that day?’

  He did not know. He was exasperating. He had conceived his role as one of seeing nothing—an easier task than seeing everything and keeping quiet about it. If the morning mail came into his hands, he seemed to have handed it to Oliver as a little solid package, resisting all curiosity.

  ‘Anyone who would have killed him?’

  ‘Ah, yes!’ said Boutagy. ‘At least four!’

  I didn’t believe it for a moment. My knowledge of Arabs was never extensive, but the one quality I was sure of was their romanticism. Boutagy was creating an illusion of danger just as you do in those books of yours. You first persuade yourself, and then your public. In real life a modest man of good mental health has difficulty in believing that he himself or any of his friends might be worth assassination.

  I asked for the names and looked them up. One was a Kurdish agent, sacked for inventing reports. He ground his teeth and twisted his moustaches in Oliver’s office, possibly threatened assault and certainly threatened to sell all his secrets. As he didn’t know any, he could do no harm. He had then gone to Syria to offer his services to the French Deuxième Bureau and had been kicked out—literally. The French never had our patience. They made unnecessary enemies, but saved time.

  Two of the others were violent characters but safely in gaol. They were not security risks at all. Oliver had passed on information which came his way and invited civil police to prove it more formally and take action.

  The fourth was pure comedy—a great, black-bearded, greasy, Greek priest who had been making advances to the soldiery. I knew all about him, for at Oliver’s request I had unleashed one of my corporals on to him. He became a bosom friend of his reverence—honi soit qui mol y pense—and reported that the suspicious activities were purely homosexual and that the sinister black-beard did not know a tank from a farm cart.

  I went out with Boutagy and had a late meal. Food and wine produced no more information from him. Worry had reduced this affectionate, faithful dog of a man to imperial suet pudding. He was incapable of saying anything except what could have happened? and saying it rather too loud. I let him come to the comforting conclusion that this was a straight case for the Palestine Police and that loss of memory or temporary insanity must be responsible.

  Alone in Oliver’s flat I carried out a desultory search for clues. My only discovery was that a lot of paper had been burned in the iron stove and the ashes crushed—all his private correspondence presumably, since there were no letters in the drawers or lying about. Like the office, his flat gave the impression of being prepared by a house agent for the next tenant.

  There were dozens of books neatly ranged on flat surfaces. His Majesty’s furnishing did not run to a book-case. The poetry and fashionable novels of the nineteen-thirties were well represented, along with some literary criticism. Quite half his reading was Arabic. I was surprised to find nothing at all on archaeology and made a note of it. There could be a hundred explanations—heavy books, for example, left with some Egyptian friend—but I wanted to know what explanation was right. In the absence of any concrete evidence I felt that his library could be as revealing as his accounts.

  Corporal Zappa turned up soon after breakfast. Since a lie, if it is to be convincing and easily remembered, should be as near the truth as possible, I told him to say that he had been working on accounts with Captain Enwin and me.

  Zappa was plain, urban English in type, but actually of Anglo-Italian parentage. He spoke his father’s language with elegance and his mother’s with a strong Birmingham accent. His contempt for human nature was so marked that I suspected the Zappas must have been politicians or members of the Mafia. However, it was a useful quality on frontier control. For him everyone was guilty until proved innocent.

  ‘By the way, what kind of accountant were you?’ I asked.

  ‘A Turf Accountant.’

  ‘A bookie?
’

  ‘I’d have had a branch office of my own this year.’

  ‘No wonder you think we’re all crooks.’

  ‘Nothing honest but horses, sir, and that’s only because we bring ’em up to beat hell out of the others.’

  All the section must have been well aware of his former profession, but I was not. I suppose they knew I would consider bookmaking disreputable, in which they were right, and be prejudiced against Zappa where they were wrong. The section had three loyalties: to the job, to each other and to me. The last two were nearly but not quite the same until I was in serious trouble.

  The office accounts were straightforward, and I had no need of Zappa. Cash in hand was in the safe with a rubber band round the notes and an unnecessary label stating the amount—further evidence that Oliver’s disappearance was planned. Assuming that ‘Habib’, ‘BX’ and ‘43’ really existed, all was in order. Fanshawe would know which agents the code names represented and what sums Oliver had been authorised to pay them.

  His bank statements for the last two years were in the drawer of his desk upstairs along with the usual advices from the Pay Department. I had a feeling that he had not deliberately left them but had just shoved them back in the drawer after checking his position. Our resentment of the Pay’s mistakes and obtuseness produced the Freudian effect of forgetting all about their exasperating correspondence.

  ‘Every time Captain Enwin was credited with some back pay he drew a cheque for twenty pounds exactly,’ Zappa remarked. ‘What for?’

  For me no column of figures can be made to tell a story; but when Zappa pointed out the dates it was obvious that three times Oliver had taken out twenty pounds over and above his normal cash drawings. This happened whenever he received a lump sum which was long overdue or had been disputed.

  What for? A trivial question but fair. The drawings were out of the pattern of his regular living expenses and suggested that he might be paying back a loan or, just possibly, paying some unauthorised agent himself and hoping to get a refund from Fanshawe at a later date.

  The only other discovery of interest was that a claim for eighty-eight pounds had been accepted and paid into his bank three days before he disappeared. He had drawn this out, plus his small balance, showing that he had waited for the money to come in. That seemed to rule out suicide—a possibility which had worried me ever since I found that his .38 revolver was missing. All other army property and his uniforms had been pointedly left behind.

  It was the end of my amateur investigation, though I stayed in the office another two days supervising the removal of documents and hoping for more evidence. I didn’t get it. Oliver’s motive seemed to be in those papers, burned and so carefully crushed. Jeremy Fanshawe, when he read my report, was good enough to say that at least I had made something out of blank nothing. Perhaps he was being ironical, for I never wrote a report with less facts in it. His own enquiries had produced little more—only that this was not the first time that Oliver’s behaviour had been inexplicable. He was in line for a fellowship in oriental languages at Cambridge, but had cleared out before even taking his degree, giving no reasons to anyone. When I asked Jeremy what he proposed to say to the next of kin, he answered that he wasn’t going to say anything and that Oliver was bound to turn up some time.

  Bound to turn up some time. It begged the question. His crime was desertion, forgivable among fighting troops under unbearable strain, but not to a trusted officer living in a comfortable flat and keeping office hours. And he wasn’t bound to turn up. I had talked to an Australian deserter who made himself so popular and useful in a remote Christian Arab village that he managed to live there for three months before news of him came to us. He had not even a common language with his kindly hosts.

  A retirement of that sort would be child’s play for Oliver, able to pass himself off as a traveller from any Arab land; but he would never stand the boredom of it. He was essentially urban—not at all the type to find in the simplicities of desert and village relief from the complications of the west. He enjoyed complications so long as they were those of his Arabs. I said that I could well imagine him setting himself up as a letter-writer in the Aleppo bazaars; but Jeremy wouldn’t have it. Not even Oliver, he replied, could slip through the strict security network of the towns.

  I kept on trying to arrive at a private solution based on what I knew of him. It wasn’t much. I had never spent a whole day or a gay night with him. I granted him industry, loyalty and a sympathetic understanding of all peoples east of a line from Istanbul to Alexandria, but I did not know what fire was in his belly. What, for example, were his problems of sex? What religious beliefs or instincts had he? And what about the cursory judgment that he was ‘wet’? One could not just reject the opinion of fools as meaningless. In the context of their way of thinking they had spotted a weakness.

  That led me off into consideration of the difference between Oliver and myself. We ought to have appeared similar types to a narrow-minded soldier. I knew and loved the other half of the warring world, west of that line from Istanbul to Alexandria, and I liked to think of myself as more European than British. Whether I was or wasn’t an amoral nihilist, as Jeremy said, I went my own way, sometimes disconcertingly. Yet I knew damned well that I would never be described as wet.

  Probably that was because I could play the heavy military man with the best of them. Then why was it that Oliver Enwin could not? Perhaps he showed too often that he thought discipline unimportant. To me it was an essential quality of the society—the near communist society—of the Army. To him it was rubbish under foot, obstructing his close and continuous study of Arab culture.

  Shallow, too vague analysis. It did leave me, however, with a strong sense of the Something Else in Oliver and a near certainty that it was so essential to him that it had prevailed over duty and disgrace. My most imaginative theory was that he had made some extraordinary archaeological discovery, Islamic or classical, which demanded his immediate attention and was far more important to him than Security. So far as his character was concerned, I was on the right lines. But the motive would not do. There was nothing to prevent him asking for a week’s leave and getting it—or more if he could arouse Jeremy’s easy sympathy.

  This at last brought home the unpleasant fact that Oliver could not under any circumstances tell the Something Else to Jeremy, though one could tell him any mortal thing and be sure of a casual, cordial understanding. The possibilities, I had to admit, were sinister. I still could not believe in treasonable activities, but I felt a lot more ruthless towards him than when searching for pitiable scraps of truth in that abandoned office.

  * The branch of the General Staff responsible for counter-espionage.

  Chapter Two

  KNIGHT ERRANT

  SOON AFTERWARDS, IN JANUARY 1942, my section and I were moved up to Ninth Army and posted to Tripoli. The Enwin case ceased to be any business of mine and I was left to imagine the messages passing between the bare trestle tables of the I (b) staff all over the Middle East. We would have to assume that, however unlikely, any secrets which Oliver kept in his office or his head could be known to rebellious Arabs and Zionists or the enemy or the lot.

  The Nazareth office was closed. Nothing was ever suggested against Boutagy, but he was not taken on elsewhere. That much I knew because he wrote to me asking if I could find him a job in the Lebanon. He did not complain. God, no! He understood, like any honest inhabitant of that coast, that he was nothing but a louse squashed between Bey and Pasha. I badly needed a reliable interpreter, for none of us spoke more than soldier’s Arabic. So I asked for and got him. Approval was prompt, which indicated that consciences were evil and I had come to the rescue.

  I had nothing much to do in Tripoli beyond giving security lectures to Australians and watching for complications which might be too subtle for Military Police to handle. The section was in a comfortable billet tucked away behind
the avenue to the port and I myself lived at the Grand Orient Hotel—which was very far from grand but sufficed, as any hotel will where the French have been cursing long enough at the unfortunate manager and his staff. I was the only British officer in the place—a mysterious and usually cheerful ornament—for it had been put out of bounds to troops on the grounds, I suspect, that if Australians wanted to drink they must go and do it somewhere less respectable.

  Meanwhile my colleagues between Palestine and the Turkish frontier were having the time of their lives as the listening posts of Ninth Army. Apart from the Australian Corps, it was not an Army at all and consisted of odds and sods scattered over the immensities of Syria. Since the Free French who governed the country—officially—were short of administrators and inexperienced, trouble could flare up anywhere. Our most important task was to give ample forewarning of it.

  I had the job which was the dullest of all; but one never knows where the boring routine of military security will lead. Sometimes you think you see the tip of a tail sticking out of a crack. If you are not too disillusioned by that time, you take a closer look at it. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it is not a tail at all. But it can happen that there is a rat on the other end.

  The least likely person to restore my sense of being some use to somebody was Lance-Corporal Holloway. He had been sent up to me as a replacement and I ought to have sent him back again; but I didn’t. We could afford to carry a passenger who had been a cavalryman in the Indian Army. He was good for morale when we had to live hard. He could make a party go. He could be trusted to sober up any of his mates before Limpsfield or I had a chance to be professionally shocked. He was an accomplished thief. His person was the smartest in the section and so was his motorcycle, though it lacked a velvet nose with which to show grateful affection.