Doom's Caravan

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘Not before I have had all your village women interrogated by Captain Magnat.’

  ‘They wouldn’t tell him a thing about it.’

  At last! There’s nothing like following up a good, red herring and taking the suspect along with you.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘But it’s so unimportant,’ she complained, seeing that she had been caught out and dropping a few more tears to ease our mutual embarrassment.

  ‘Then why not let me into the secret?’

  ‘It’s just that I promised. He’s very pro-British and working for us. He said that friends of Blaise were bound to be suspected and that I shouldn’t mention he was there.’

  ‘Well, is that all?’ I exclaimed with a pretence of relief. ‘I may know him. What’s his name?’

  ‘Moustofi Khan.’

  ‘How many times have you seen him in the village?’

  ‘Twice.’

  ‘Does he speak English or French?’

  ‘With me? English—beautifully. Such a charming man and full of compliments! He reminds me of an Afghan Emir who was so proud to be free of our house in Peshawar.’

  ‘Is he Afghan?’

  ‘Persian, I think. Ahmed just said he was an old friend keeping an eye on us all.’

  ‘I hope he brought along some money.’

  ‘Not from Blaise. From Moslem Charities—to buy two sewing machines for the village whenever I had time to find them.’

  She was not a woman to waste good cash on sewing machines if told that there was no hurry. So the transaction smelt detestably like a delicate bribe: a first payment which could later be repeated on other excuses until she was in his power and unable to extricate herself. I do not know to this day whether he asked her to find out if the rumour was true. And I’d rather not know.

  ‘What does he look like?’

  ‘Dark. Straight hair. He reminds me of a greyhound or a bird or something. I know. A hawk!’

  I nursed her back into her more comfortable role of condescending colonel’s widow, found myself now calling her dear Biddy and persuaded her that if only she had trusted me from the start there never would have been any awkwardness at all. I think she was not sorry there had been, for I was now a friend to whom she could talk without pretence. The first sign of humility I ever saw in her was when she asked:

  ‘What am I to do if I meet Moustofi Khan again?’

  ‘Nothing. Carry on as usual! And you need never tell him that I made you break your promise.’

  There was always the possibility that Moustofi Khan did work for us. Perfect liaison between the spy-catchers and the spy-masters must have existed somewhere in the Middle East, but obviously names and descriptions could not be divulged much below the level of the Director of Military Intelligence. When I made a casual verbal enquiry, Ninth Army could only tell me that Moustofi Khan had huge estates in Persia and a country house of great beauty off the Homs-Baalbek road. He was permitted to travel freely between the lot. I (b) was pretty sure that he was not directly employed by us—too big a man—but he was well known to the Legation in Teheran and had been helpful in small matters.

  I did not explain the true reason for my enquiry. Ronson-Bolbecs were taboo, and I had no intention of supplying a lead to points of weakness in the concrete of field works. But I was interested by those journeys between estates when nobody could know for certain where Moustofi Khan was, and I noticed how conveniently near to the Hermel track was the house by the Homs-Baalbek road.

  Chapter Three

  SECRET AGENT

  OUR RUMOUR WAS QUICKLY overtaken by reality. The Ninth Australian and the New Zealand Divisions came up from Egypt by the normal and less expensive route of the coast road—a force quite sufficient to deliver the enemy and their friends from minor temptations. Liaison with the divisional intelligence staffs also delivered me for some weeks from wasting time on the Ronson-Bolbecs.

  No more was heard of Yellow Socks, but the fat Iraqi—the other visitor to the valley who claimed to be a friend of Blaise d’Aulnoy—was identified by a stroke of luck. One could equally call it the natural effect of our efficient witch’s coven of thirteen, always out and about after significant trifles.

  It was Sergeant Wilson who came home with the name. He had been a clerk on the Stock Exchange, so I had given him a roving commission to keep an eye on the cornering of wheat—a popular method of getting rich quick in a country where the poor would have been on the verge of starvation if not for the supplies poured in by Ninth Army. He reported that a merchant at El Mina had borrowed a large sum from a fat Baghdad banker who had been in Tripoli for a couple of days in February. His name was Abdullah el Bessam. Dates fitted. Description fitted.

  You had the Baghdad section and it was then that you came into the story. Instead of putting my enquiry through the proper channels I sent you a signal direct as one friend to another. You won’t remember it, but your reply was typical and illuminating. It went something like this:

  NOTHING KNOWN AGAINST ABDULLAH EL BESSAM BUT WOULD GLADLY IMPALE HIM MARKETPLACE FOR DELECTATION POPULACE STOP AGE 51 GROSSLY FAT WEALTHY AND MAKING MORE OUT OF WAR STOP NOTED HOMOSEXUAL AND DESERVEDLY SUFFERS FROM PILES STOP CAN BE IDENTIFIED BY ANTIQUE CUSHION CLAIMS IT BELONGED CALIPH ISLAM STOP DESPATCH FOURTEEN LEBANESE SLAVEGIRLS CIF BAGHDAD SECONDHAND WILL DO.

  Yes, you may well ask what happened to Abdullah el Bessam. But time passes, and we with it. He’d be dead by now in any case.

  In the same week that I received your reply Captain Magnat called at my office. My guilty conscience had compelled me to avoid him since the disappearance of Khalid, for it was his duty to conduct the investigation and I was none too sure how innocently I could meet his eyes. However, Magnat’s business had nothing to do with the gendarmerie. He merely wanted to know if I could arrange for a traveller to Turkey to lose his baggage for half an hour when taking the Taurus Express from Tripoli. That was well within my powers and I was happy to oblige.

  It occurred to me that I had not used him enough. I did not mention Moustofi Khan’s name, but I asked if the Deuxième Bureau had any information about d’Aulnoy’s social life and friends.

  ‘I have so often had to remind you, my dear captain, that our files are secret.’

  ‘I know. How about dining with me tomorrow?’

  ‘I shall be delighted as always. But it would be on false pretences. How the devil do you suppose there could be anything of interest about a prominent and trusted administrator?’

  ‘Well, there ought to be something. Suppose he was your boss and wanted to sack you for being an anti-clerical, revolutionary socialist, what little hint would make him change his mind?’

  ‘You have the most extraordinary ideas of French colonial administration.’

  ‘It is efficient at all levels.’

  ‘Thank you. Very probably d’Aulnoy would not want it widely known that he was given to unnatural practices.’

  ‘Exclusively?’

  ‘By no means. An all-round amateur.’

  ‘The remoteness of his house was to ensure discretion, you think?’

  ‘Unlikely. Up there in the valley all his visitors would be known to the people of Sir. A house in town with a back door would be better.’

  I said that in my experience hedonists who appreciated the charms of both sexes usually had very good taste.

  ‘You are right. For d’Aulnoy, it was said, nothing over sixteen. There were never any complaints. He paid generously and had marked delicacy for a pro-Boche.’

  That gave me a picture of the man which house and valley confirmed. It did not sound as if a gross Baghdadi in his fifties was likely to appeal to him, except perhaps as a companion for orgies. But mutual sympathy in a harsh world might have led to close financial relationships. That would do for the moment.

  We were now well into April—the point at
which, as I look back on it, my necessarily private investigation began to be complicated by problems of sex. They should have no part in war’s simplicities. In my experience the average man—always assuming reasonable leave and a friendly whore-house—consciously enjoys his freedom from the exactions of women. Slave girls, you wrote in your signal. Very typical! Even if there had been lots of emancipated female students in Baghdad University, as there probably are today, you and your thirteen lecherous scoundrels would have chosen something less demanding.

  Valerie turned up at the billet, having ridden in from Sir alone. She was adjusting herself to her environment with growing confidence ever since her pet deserter had taken to long walks. For some time I had seen nothing of him, but he had evidently told her that I was in their secret and could be trusted.

  She looked delightful in a green tweed coat and jodhpurs—a breath of long-legged fresh air from the shires or, perhaps, the North West Frontier. Limpsfield showed her in with such military panache as was possible when interrupted in taking a typing lesson from Boutagy, and then went down to cuddle the horse—or at least to see that nobody stole its tail while it was hitched to the section truck.

  ‘What have you done with Ahmed?’ I asked.

  ‘I simply told him that I would call for the mail myself and did not require him. Have I ruined your reputation?’

  ‘Done it nothing but good.’

  ‘Oliver told me to give you a message. Tel Ayub. On the shore. Tomorrow. Same time.’

  ‘It’s not Wednesday.’

  ‘I think he has given up whatever he was doing.’

  ‘The hell he has! What else did he tell you?’

  ‘I am supposed to be in love with you.’

  ‘Nobody will believe it. You are too glorious.’

  ‘Well, I’ll play on one condition. I want him in Tripoli.’

  ‘But he is not under my command.’

  ‘He says he is. Don’t you find him easy to work with?’

  I said that I should find it easier if he wasn’t so damned arrogant. She got near to admitting that quality in him; she even admired it.

  ‘You don’t understand him,’ she said. ‘He was left on his own when he was ten. His father was well off but went bust—and committed suicide, I think, though Oliver has never said it in so many words. He never speaks of his mother either. I believe she had cleared out before the tragedy. Then an uncle got him into one of the charity grammar schools.’

  She sounded for a moment like Biddy and I replied coldly that as often as not the officers I really respected came from the old-fashioned grammar schools.

  ‘I didn’t mean it that way. You should have known I didn’t. I meant that Oliver has always had to go on telling himself what he is worth. He could have been a don at Cambridge and then chucked it all up to follow me.’

  The picture of Oliver as an incisive, determined, young don made sense at last. I thought it a pity that the determination had been concentrated on Valerie rather than his career. But his was not the common case of a raw intellectual swept off his feet by some cheap, sexy bitch. He had recognised physical perfection and collected character when he saw them and nothing less would ever do.

  ‘You don’t propose to call on him in Tripoli?’

  ‘Everyone will think it very natural if I call on you,’ she said demurely.

  The duplicity of it! I had enough troubles and there lacked only this, as the French say. The more I learned of that girl, the plainer it was that a simple-minded security officer would have to strip off a lot more veils before he even arrived at the ostrich feathers. If Oliver did come to Tripoli and was caught, the only hope I could see for my future was to use her to muddle the court martial.

  ‘What is your mother going to say?’

  ‘She believes in the export business.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘You can be very convincing when you want to be. Your real interest is in Blaise d’Aulnoy, isn’t it?’

  ‘Partly. I’ve never asked you where you first met him.’

  ‘In Paris, in 1938. Mummy took me there for a month.’

  ‘The best hotel, I suppose?’

  ‘No. An old-fashioned one in the Faubourg St. Germain.’

  She missed the irony. I had forgotten that she was not aware of all I had discovered about her mother. She knew of course how poor they were at the moment, but at that time, four long years past, she probably did not appreciate how relentlessly Biddy was gambling in futures.

  ‘How old were you then?’

  ‘Nearly sixteen.’

  I cleared off the subject at once and reserved judgment. Biddy never hesitated to exploit her daughter’s amazing loveliness, but she was not as infamous as that. I could imagine her plotting a brilliant marriage a year or so later on d’Aulnoy’s next leave and the connoisseur’s pretended and exulting interest. Seventeen and middle forties? Well, but such an old friend, my dear, with money and no limits to his career.

  ‘Lunch?’

  ‘I can’t. I’ve been told to look at sewing machines and come straight back. Can one buy them on credit?’

  ‘I doubt it. Everything is three times its normal price and for cash.’

  ‘Thank God for that!’

  The next day I ran out to Tel Ayub and down a path to the sea, there deserted and melancholy. Oliver was looking much scruffier with a shortened and untidy beard—more like the edge of the desert come to town than a freshly-laundered money-changer. We sat down between tall rushes and the sand where no one was in sight but fishermen half a mile away hauling in a seine.

  I asked him, perhaps impatiently, why the devil Valerie had to pretend to be having an affair with me.

  ‘An added insurance policy for your safety.’

  ‘Any opinions on what I am insuring against?’

  ‘Yes and no. But play your hand as I tell you. Field Security always suffers from militarism and conceit. You used to be very co-operative.’

  ‘You seem to think you are still an A.D.S.O.’

  ‘No. I am only trying to help an ex-colleague.’

  ‘In the intervals of rutting on the hillside like a bloody stag.’

  ‘Has it never occurred to you that the best agents have a satisfactory sex life?’

  He added that he was taking time off from the one-man bank and living rough.

  ‘All right for money?’

  ‘Yes. I have been changing forged fivers at a considerable discount. So far as I know, they are circulated by the German consul at Alexandretta.’

  ‘But that’s a crime! You can’t!’

  ‘You ordered me to be the dead Youssef Mokaddem again. So I let it be known that I was. As a notorious pro-German I’ve found out plenty, but no connection with Khalid’s attempt on you or the Hermel track. Now, let’s have your report!’

  My report! Ex-colleague! Which of us in God’s name was on the run?

  I did not mention Moustofi Khan, for Oliver had refused to spy on Biddy and I was now quite confident that I could handle her myself; but I asked him if the name Abdullah el Bessam meant anything to him.

  ‘Yes, of course. He has connections with the East Indies, and so possibly with Japan. Why?’

  ‘He is the fat Iraqi who called on the Ronson-Bolbecs.’

  ‘It could be that I am paying out certain sums of cash for Abdullah el Bessam. I believe I am.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I have only heard hints. Just possibly arms buying, subversion, rebellion.’

  One hears it said so often that the Arabs were all pro-British during the war. They were not. The crowned heads were, for they depended on us to keep their thrones for them; and the mass of the people, like the silent majority anywhere, preferred the status quo to alarums and excursions. But you’ll remember, as I do, the squadron of the Transjordan Frontier Force whi
ch refused to march against Rashid Ali and how the whole crack regiment had to be pulled out as untrustworthy. Yes, there were always potential leaders watching and waiting for their chance. One accepted their drive for complete independence, but it seemed odd that there should be so many conspirators who preferred the Germans to the French and British. They had three adequate reasons. Germans had never held authority in the Moslem world; their armies appeared to be the lords of the future; above all, they could be trusted to deal with the Jews.

  Oliver thought as I did—let alone Ninth Army—that any general rising was highly improbable so long as we had troops to spare. On the other hand no one could prophesy what might happen if we were defeated in the desert. I told him that it was his obvious duty to return to Damascus at once and confirm or dismiss his vague suspicions.

  ‘I will. But is it quite clear that I am working for you and nobody else?’

  That was obvious, so I let the remark pass without taking a closer look at it.

  ‘What’s my payment?’ he asked.

  ‘Freedom from arrest.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Tripoli when I come back.’

  A deliberate shake-down with Valerie prompting her hero of the Secret Service! I wasn’t having any. I told him flatly that I was prepared to keep my mouth shut so long as he was useful but that I would not connive at settling him in Tripoli as Youssef Mokaddem or under any other name. He was quite unimpressed.

  ‘We can easily fix it between us,’ he said.

  I returned to my section thankful for their companionship and sanity. The position was getting beyond me—a nightmare in which I was smothered by responsibilities I had no right to take. I was merely the gun dog of I (b), allowed to point at game and then get to hell out of the way of the line. That’s what I longed to do: to write a report and gratefully receive a biscuit and a pat. But a fine pat in the ribs from the end of a boot it was going to be for failing to retrieve Captain Enwin, eating a gendarme and burying the carcase.

  The sensible half of me was seriously considering how I could get posted to some theatre of war so remote that high-powered interrogation would not be worth the trouble, while the obstinate remainder, still committed to the investigation though blackmailed by its own secret agent, was talking very much against its will to Corporal Davila.