So I entered the dining room more cheerfully, and there was Moustofi Khan sitting three tables away, with only two others occupied. I let my eyes sweep over him without interest and gave him a nod as I sat down—as if I had decided rather late that my manners were too British. He returned a casual smile and continued his meal.
He had that quality which the young describe as charisma and the rest of us, for the last two or three hundred years, have contentedly known as charm. Definitely an individual with his own standards. Steady eyes, but not questioning. A line of civilised irony about the thin lips. He carried an aura of decision about with him so that he appeared taller than he really was. The falcon comparison was good. It seems a big bird till it is on your fist.
If he wanted to make my acquaintance he was doing nothing at all about it. He could afford not to. It must have been his experience that most human beings, unless utterly self-centred or inhibited, felt and showed curiosity about him. When our eyes met for the third or fourth time I spread out my hands in a gesture of welcome and indicated the chair opposite my own. He at once rose and came over. I don’t know enough to say whether his manners were his own or whether all upper-class Persians have the same gift of ease. We might have been dining alone in our club—two members who did not happen to have met before. An Arab would have made an altogether over-courteous, over-exclamatory fuss.
We introduced ourselves and I remarked that I had heard his name mentioned up at Ninth Army. Yes, he said, he had occasionally been of use to the staff on the state of roads and so forth. We found a few acquaintances in common, including Brigadier Paunce. Moustofi Khan was charitable in his judgment.
‘He would die gallantly but so expensively,’ he said. ‘I am sure General Wilson is wise to cage him in an office.’
I asked him where he had learned his faultless English.
‘At Portsmouth. You won’t, I fear, be aware that there is a Persian navy. As a boy I thought I would make my career in it. But it seldom put to sea. So I returned to the life of the idle rich.’
‘Politics don’t interest you?’
‘Not as they are.’
He could not have put it more politely. With half his country occupied by the British and the other half by the Russians, there was not much for a politician to do except obey.
‘The people will forgive us?’
‘Might is right. We are used to it. And often enough the might was ours in the last 2,500 years. But at this point in our history we are not a warlike people, only a proud people.’
He was giving me plenty to think about—more especially that he had taken the trouble to be on good terms with dear Reggie Paunce as an insurance policy against unforeseen complications with the Ronson-Bolbecs.
I asked him if he would join me in a brandy.
‘Not here,’ he replied. ‘In private of course I drink. You must visit my house at Libwe and taste the white wines of Shiraz. Come whenever you wish.’
He explained his presence in Tripoli, casually offering the answers to questions which the security officer had not asked. He told me that he had been in Latakia—to get a special tobacco from his favourite curer—and that his car had broken down on the way back. So there he was in the hotel.
‘Tripoli is a town where I have no friends,’ he said, as if he normally travelled from the house of one wealthy Syrian to another. No doubt he did.
‘I hope you will not feel that in future.’
‘You are most kind. I shall not.’
‘Will your car be ready tomorrow?’
‘Not for several days. One can get no spares.’
All true. I checked the story afterwards. But most civilian cars, leaping from pothole to pothole along surfaces pulverised by the movement of divisions, could easily be persuaded to break down at any convenient time and place.
‘I have to go down to Baalbek tomorrow,’ I said, taking the plunge. ‘If you don’t mind the front seat of a fifteen hundred-weight truck, it would be no trouble to drop you at Libwe.’
He accepted with every appearance of gratitude and told me that I must arrange my business so that I could lunch with him. I went up to bed saying to myself that I had really been and gone and done it now. All the same I had the feel of Moustofi Khan. He was a man who would not hesitate to kill or discredit me if it suited his purpose. Meanwhile he was curious about me as I about him, and possibly had hopes of using me. But the initiative was mine, for I had taken him by surprise without time for any elaborate preparations.
I chose Lance-Corporal Gunn to ride in the back of the truck as escort. He had no languages, but had been a policeman in civil life—at Stratford-on-Avon of all places—and was a sound, reliable fellow who carried the English Midlands about with him along with some wisps of the imagination still floating over the streets of his birthplace. A likely man for Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, I should say; but he may have fetched up running a village store and Post Office. It’s sad that one can never know what happened to them all.
I decided to wear civilian clothes for lunch with Moustofi Khan. My motives were obscure and intuitive. I had a feeling that at some time I might want to be inconspicuous. I had also observed that when we wished to impress a public with our mysterious powers which didn’t exist it was helpful to emphasise the difference between ourselves and the orthodox mass of military. Moustofi Khan would be reminded that the chain of command behind sports jacket and flannel trousers was not quite the same as behind the uniform and the Reggie Paunces.
He did not comment when I picked him up and we drove in easy conversation through Homs and along the Baalbek road to Libwe. Passing the place on previous occasions I had hardly noticed it—just another large Arab village with rather more trees than usual. Moustofi Khan made me look beyond the dusty canyon of houses to the fertile plain, where the streams gathered from Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon on their way to the Orontes. He told me that Zenobia had built an aqueduct to carry the water from Libwe to her desert capital of Palmyra. He always gave me the impression that, for him, Islam was a mere incident in the continuity of the Middle East.
He had managed to corner as many water rights as Zenobia. His gardens were a paradise of cypresses, fruit and roses, which recalled Andalusia. The house itself, of brown brick, appeared too cubical and forbidding—an aspect which vanished as soon as one was inside, for the rooms looked inwards on to two connecting patios, tiled, flowered and fountained. There was a good deal of floor-washing and dusting going on, which bore witness to the fact—confirmed by the surprise of the servants—that master was not expected home that morning. In spite of this, lunch appeared very quickly in less than half an hour.
The variety of small and delicate courses which his silent servants placed in front of me was unending and—with the exception of a single roast snipe—selected to show off that exquisite white wine of Shiraz. It was a pity that I had to concentrate on self-control: first, to keep in mind that I was the guest of a probable enemy agent; second, to be so genial that I could not be suspected of knowing it.
Over the coffee he asked me if I had met the Ronson-Bolbecs. I replied that indeed I had, trying to smirk like a successful lover who wasn’t talking.
‘I went up once to see how they were getting on,’ he said. ‘What a lovely girl she must be to European eyes!’
An attempt at covering himself in case I had heard of his presence in the valley. I could not be dead certain that he had never gone up through Sir.
‘Only to European eyes?’
‘Those fair Madonnas—well, we can see their beauty. But for ourselves we prefer more pronounced features with more brilliant eyes. And of course her breasts are too small and her thighs too thin.’
I spotted it in time. I have never drunk Shiraz since, but it appears to act like twin carburettors in pepping up the intelligence. If a British officer and gentleman were even half in love with Valerie, he would n
ot discuss with strange Persians intimate details of her physique. At least Reggie Paunce wouldn’t. I’m none too sure of myself.
‘Possibly,’ I replied with a coolness straight from provincial drama of the eighteen-nineties, and pointedly changed the subject.
‘Did you know this Blaise d’Aulnoy who let them the valley?’
‘Very well. A man with an outstandingly creative mind—quite wasted on all the detail of administration. That was why he refused to join the Free French.’
I will not pretend that I could analyse that remark at the time; but I did remember that Magnat had accused d’Aulnoy of dreaming of the Empire of Charlemagne. Bored by administration? D’Aulnoy, more likely, had decided that the war was lost and that the only future for a creative Arabist was with Hitler and Pétain.
‘I have never been able to understand where French responsibilities begin and end,’ Moustofi Khan said.
I explained to him that there was no secret about it. The Free French governed Syria and the Lebanon, and the British were an allied army on their territory.
‘Start a riot in Tripoli, and the Deuxième Bureau would deal with it,’ I said. ‘Start putting Mickey Finns in the troops’ beer, and I should.’
A gross simplification, of course. But I wanted to play down the role of our own security organisation—or at any rate my own minor part.
‘Not much excitement in that, I suppose?’
‘No more than for a policeman at home.’
‘What control have you over the gendarmerie?’
As he had introduced the subject, I dared not be too silent.
‘None. That’s a French responsibility, and they must treat the Lebanese officers as equals. We had a very good man in Tripoli—a Lieutenant Khalid. It’s said he has bolted to Turkey or somewhere. I hear he had a case of rape hanging over him.’
Moustofi Khan shrugged his shoulders and insisted that all supposed loyal servants were crooks who hardly bothered to cover up corruption.
‘You and the French are more discreet,’ he added.
‘You are thinking of business majors in Beirut with contracts to hand out?’
‘Everywhere. You must have had offers yourself.’
‘I’m not important enough. Just a policeman, as I told you.’
‘Aren’t they asked to keep their eyes shut occasionally? Not of course on anything vital to the war effort!’
That was interesting. In England I should have taken it as just conversation; but I had now been long enough in the Middle East. The invitation seemed worth following up. I replied cheerfully that at the moment my captain’s pay was quite enough to live on, but if I found myself with another mouth to feed temptation might not be easily resisted.
‘No promotion likely to come your way?’
‘If I spoke Arabic, perhaps.’
‘What do you speak?’
‘Just French.’
And just an impulsive lie! To add the European languages which I did speak would have made me sound a better qualified security officer than I wished him to think.
He changed the subject. I forget how. He became a little patronising, as if an intelligent man such as I should understand the backgrounds and aspirations of the countries into which war had thrown me. He poured out history over me. He was not content, like the rest of us, to accept the past as ending at our feet; he saw the present as a mere point on a straight line stretching from past to future. Darius and Alexander, the Arab Caliphs and the Ottoman Empire—he lectured to me on the lot. It was our business, he said, if we had any dynamic imagination at all, to recreate the unity of the Middle East.
‘And then go?’ I asked.
‘Then be absorbed like the Crusaders.’
He undoubtedly meant me to take all this as after-lunch fantasy with strong, pro-British leanings. So I might have, if I had not suspected that his sympathies were on the other side. What I was getting were Moustofi Khan’s hopes of the Germans—for nobody else had time for dynamic imagination—and if their armies did manage to cross the Nile or the Caucasus his dreams could be near reality. One could not then set any limits to Hitler’s luck, and it was natural enough that an able and ambitious man like Moustofi Khan should see himself as Gauleiter east of the Tigris and look forward to the eventual absorption of the conquerors.
Our complicated duel had faded out. There was nothing else in our conversation worth repeating. I turned down his offer of a quiet siesta, saying that I had to be in Baalbek by five o’clock. So I climbed into my truck with Lance-Corporal Gunn driving, and relaxed thankfully into a lump of brainless digestion, alert, like any other animal, only to the road behind. As soon as I was sure that we were not followed we pulled into a lane where I had half an hour’s sleep. After splashing my face in an irrigation channel I felt as good as new. Another testimonial to Shiraz.
Gunn had enjoyed his lunch as much as I, but with iced Lager. I asked him what were his impressions of our host’s estate and employees, and got a reply which revealed a lot more than the woolly ambitions of Moustofi the Great.
‘Holloway’s famous car, sir. I wanted to have a look at the roses. Used to take care of the gardens of a pair of police cottages,’ he added apologetically. ‘And so the wog gardener chap showed me all round. When we were in the courtyard at the back of the house I saw a grey Peugeot, number 1461.’
‘Did he know that you saw it?’
‘Shouldn’t think so, sir. We were in a sort of potting shed and I spotted it through the window when somebody opened and closed the garage door on the other side of the yard.’
That was the first real evidence proving that Moustofi Khan and Yellow Socks were connected. It could mean that Yellow Socks had been in the house at the same time as myself, or that the car had been stowed away in Moustofi Khan’s garage until a new, safe number could be arranged—possibly difficult without the help of an influential police officer like Khalid.
Now, what would you say marked the Field Security characters in the Middle East? A certain sophistication? The possession of general, cosmopolitan knowledge which worried us into asking questions instead of accepting facts? I was at that time only a reckless liability to my section and my superior officers, but the dutiful worry remained. No cook could have prepared in less than half an hour such a lunch as Moustofi Khan had given me. And why should I have been served one snipe instead of the usual two—a mere mouthful not even justifying a change of wine to red?
Then for whom had the meal really been prepared? Two persons already in the house? There was plenty of room for them behind the succession of doors which rambled round the patios. The many small dishes also suggested that there had not been quite enough solid food to go round.
So I chose to guess that a lunch for two had been cooked for Yellow Socks and some important companion and that Moustofi Khan and I, arriving unexpectedly, had shared it with them. That was why I got a single snipe. My reasoning was hardly worthy of the name—no sort of criminal evidence at all. But when there is no crime it is permissible to play about with a hunch until it is either proved wrong or too damned dangerous to follow up.
I decided to follow up this one, taking reasonable precautions for my health. I told Gunn that before returning through Libwe we would wait where we were long enough to have completed the journey to Baalbek and back. If no one was on our tail after Libwe we would take the road to Hermel. He was to drop me out quickly wherever I directed him to stop, and he should then return to Tripoli and tell the sergeant-major to pick me up next day between eleven and twelve at the same spot.
Just before we arrived at the path which Limpsfield and I had followed I slipped out of the truck into the fairly adequate cover of a low growing fig tree. Gunn went on until he could turn. I had to take the risk that someone might see him going back to the Homs road without me, but the chance of this was slight. I could guess enough of Moustofi Khan�
�s tactics. He and any other clandestine travellers used the Hermel-Sir track at night, sliding in and out at dawn or dusk when they would pass, if seen at all, as casual riders exercising their horses. It stood to reason that there could be no permanent guard at this end of the track. If there were, it would inevitably be known in Hermel.
I must admit that I doubted the validity of all these wide assumptions when the truck had passed me on its way back and I was left alone by the roadside. There was much more greenery than when we had discovered the track, but a man could be seen a long way off.
That cut both ways. I too could see anyone before he could recognise me, and then vanish into knee-high cover until the coast was clear. So I elected not to wait for dusk and to put my trust in the melancholy emptiness around me. The ruined farmhouse was about a mile away and hidden from the Hermel road by a low ridge. I avoided the path in case I walked slap into some interested stranger where it curved at the foot of the higher ground, and made my way across country to the ridge. On top of it were the remains of a stone wall from which I could look down on the farmhouse without showing more than my head.
Limpsfield and I had of course ridden past the ruin without a thought. Now, in the light of later knowledge, I could appreciate what an admirable assembly point it was for entering or leaving the track; anyone could wait there undisturbed until told that it was safe to move on. The house was by no means so dilapidated as it looked. The roof had fallen in and little was left of the living quarters except a tumble of partition walls, but the lower storey of stables and storehouses was intact, surrounded by four good walls of solid stone with a stout door in the arched entrance.
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