The High Place

by Geoffrey Household

  Then I lit the cigar Poss had given me, and tried alternate puffs. Whether it would have been at once recognized as the better by the palate of a real connoisseur I could not tell, but it was certainly no worse. Then Poss up to a point had told the truth. To what point? The picture presented to me was im­possible. Elisa and the Secretariat were far too conscientious to risk a scandal for the sake of a few cigars.

  My servant, Boulos, whom I had placed at the obscure street door to watch for Poss, told me that he was startled by him. The man arrived with the silence and efficiency of a great cat. He patted Boulos on the shoulder, slipped a large tip into his hand and started up the stairs without even asking if it were the right house. I suppose he was accustomed to do business single-handed in alleys and courtyards which might to a stranger appear threatening. But Poss was unthreatenable. He had a confidence in his own judgment so absolute that it affects me as I write about him; and the dislike I feel for his memory is seen to be—well, just but inhumane.

  I did not offer to show him the garden which was now so sacred to me. We took our drinks on to the terrace, where he stretched and unbuttoned himself in satisfaction with the Medi­terranean and the moon. I told him that I expected to know very soon where Elisa was, and I might be able to get in touch with her quicker than he could. What exactly did he want? And where had he met her?

  ‘Mr. Amberson,’ he said, ‘I’ll be fair. The trouble with you is that I cannot get over the impression I am speaking to the British Consul. Confidence springs to my lips, takes one look at you and hides her head behind my dentures.’

  I laughed, and put a box of his own cigars upon the table.

  ‘That is of material assistance,’ he admitted. ‘And now—would you tell me what the devil you do with them?’

  I had thought out an answer to that during the afternoon.

  ‘I send them to Egypt by caique. El Mina is one of the centres of the caique traffic—schooners up and down the coast, and most of them avoiding customs duties when they can. I tran­ship those boxes—and others—for an account in Alexandria.’

  ‘Nearly good enough,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m a trader in the Levant,’ I replied, ‘and I am afraid we just get used to doing favours for our friends. In the eyes of the Arab it’s never wrong to swindle a government—especially the Egyptian Government.’

  ‘And the friend in Alexandria?’

  ‘Straight streets and a windy town,’ I said. ‘But it isn’t autumn yet and wouldn’t suit her.’

  ‘Here’s luck to you and your caiques!’ he exclaimed, raising his glass. ‘Confidence is flooded forth from her retreat. Now, I’ll answer your second question first—where did I meet Elisa? In a bloody great marshalling yard, what was left of it, outside Budapest. I was, my dear sir, being paid, for the first time in my life, to be international. A trusted servant of UNRRA. But let us not be harsh. They had no time for enquiries, and no judgment to do without them—a situation admirably suited to my cosmopolitan experience in trade.

  ‘I was in charge of a train—indeed of several trains. But this one had fourteen wagons of excellent American food consigned to the Ukraine. Amberson, there were but two destinies for the contents of those wagons. They might be sold by the Soviet Government to high officials and ballet dancers, or by me to hungry Turks who were prepared to pay. And in the marshal­ling yards was a state of muddle to which, I must admit, I had contributed. Some drunken Russian sentries, an underpaid yardmaster, and myself in an invaluable and welcome uniform! Sir, I was the only man on miles of rusty tracks who knew his mind—and that was to uncouple the food wagons at the rear of the train, and set them safely on their somewhat circuitous route to Turkey.

  ‘The front part of my train—oh, it was very military in­deed! But, hell’s bells, we’re all human! Elisa was allowed to stretch her legs, with a bayonet about two feet from her backside. Under the arc lights of the yard she had a head just like a skull, Amberson. All eyes. We hadn’t much time to talk. She said to me in English: “I’ll give you a thousand quid to get me out of this.” “Where?” I answered, for it was obvious that if she had it in her pocket she wouldn’t be on that train. “In Turkey or Roumania,” she said. I took another look at her, and that was that. “Turkey it is,” I said. So I broke open a case of prime ham, and contrived her absence during the distribution. Then I packed her in among the rations with a crate of beer and a can-opener, and didn’t see her again till the Turkish frontier.’

  ‘That’s not quite her story,’ I said to him, cold with jealousy.

  ‘No? Well, no doubt she expanded it a bit. Played the tragic queen, eh?’ he asked, searching my face. ‘Ah, now I see! Well, well, Amberson, well, well, well! This clarifies the whole situa­tion. At last I understand those favours to a friend! But have you never discovered my dear sir, that Elisa romanticizes her­self? Oh, I can guess where she added the little touch of art! She was discovered by the Turkish police, you know. Very obstinate, the Turks! Only believe what they can see! “All right,” I said at last. “No girl friend, no grub for Turkey.” And she had to put up a show for them. God’s Glory, Amberson, she’s not my type at all! No planks for me, however well they’re carved! I like to know I’ve got something in my arms. A bit of bounce, eh?’

  I think I was even more angry than before, but it was an easier anger to disguise. I could forgive, contemptuously, his lack of taste. What annoyed me was his statement that Elisa romanticized herself. I saw that it was true. She did paint herself a little darker, a little more savagely interesting than was strictly accurate; and at once, in my own mind, I was hot in defence of that delightfully feminine trait, though it had never before occurred to me that she possessed it.

  ‘My motives were of the purest,’ added Oliver Poss. ‘A thousand quid, and I got it.’

  ‘And that ended your UNRRA experience?’ I asked.

  ‘Good God, no! I did just as much for them as for myself. They only found out about my record when they wanted to give me a decoration. By that time, Amberson, I was again a capitalist. Not very rich, you understand, but liquid.’

  ‘And you’ve seen Elisa since?’

  ‘Lord, yes! But not for the last year. And it’s no business of mine to run round to addresses asking silly questions. She must have some sort of syndicate behind her, but I daresay you know more about that than I do. It’s beyond me what their game is. They may be using cigars as an international currency.’

  ‘And where do you come in exactly?’ I asked.

  ‘My dear sir, indispensable! If you want to supply the demand for fine Havana cigars in a day and age when most countries don’t allow the import, you need someone with my experience of trade.

  ‘Well now, a minimum of essential information—that is all we can be expected to give one another on so short an acquaint­ance. There is in Cuba a group of small fincas that was financed in the ’twenties and ’thirties by a firm of tobacco importers in Vienna. Used to supply the Imperial Court when there was one. Happy days of free trade, Amberson, happy days! Not that I’d want to go back to them. It’s easier to make money in a world of government controls.

  ‘Rosa, the name was. I dare say they had been Spanish Jews. At any rate old Rosa didn’t survive Hitler. But the fincas had plenty of capital by then and they carried on. That’s their mark’—he caressed the box on the table—‘Coriolano, and a gold band with a little emerald tobacco plant on it.

  ‘Elisa sent me out to Cuba with a couple of letters of intro­duction—one from Eugen Rosa, who was the old boy’s grand­son and one from a fellow called Urgin who had spent years out there investigating soils and aromas and that sort of thing. Not that I wanted any favours. I’m a wholesale buyer, and for cash.

  ‘You’ll excuse me if I don’t tell you very much about my sales organization. A lot of this cigar business is on the level. What’s the only hospitality today, Amberson? The real larks in aspic with a flunkey behind your chair? Government, embassies, all this United Nations no
nsense, and what courts there are left—that’s the market for Coriolanos, and the syndicate had the connections to capture it. Any judge of cigars will tell you there is nothing better, and he’ll thank God if he can get his fingers round one as a great favour.

  ‘And now we come to the point. Havana has done better than Coriolano at last. There isn’t much of the new brand yet, but it’s on the market. I offered a few myself—and got a venomous couple of lines from Elisa just telling me what she thought of me. It’s no use my writing. I can’t make her understand. I have to see her, and explain that her syndicate must sell both if they expect to keep their special clients. It needn’t even be Elisa I talk to, if there’s someone else—this Rosa would do—who’s a judge of cigars and can put the case to her. I hoped that you would turn out to be the chap.

  ‘You see my difficulty. She has done a lot for me. There’s not much money in cigars, but, God’s Glory, I wouldn’t like to lose her foreign exchange business! I’ll sell whatever they want me to sell, but I would like to be sure she understands that there’s a better cigar than Coriolano.’

  ‘What are your movements?’ I asked.

  ‘My dear sir, I am represented by our Mr. Poss, and he is always on the move. Nowhere long. A kill here and a kill there, and lie up in a hotel to complete digestion. And one hotel is much like another. As soon as I’ve had a drink with the night porter, all are home to me. I wouldn’t mind a little place like this of yours, but not yet. Now what would you advise? I must attend to some business in Cairo. Shall I see you again on my way back to Istanbul?’

  I told him he could have a week or so in Egypt so long as he hurried back to Istanbul. This mysterious advice was simply to persuade him to leave immediately. It was essential to get him out of Tripoli. I doubt if anyone in the town or port knew the name of Elisa Cantemir—she was just the tall woman from Kasr-el-Sittat—but Oliver Poss seemed remarkably efficient at discreet enquiries; and if the devil put it into his head to visit Damascus or Aleppo he would at once be on to the knowledge, which he was evidently not supposed to have, of Elisa’s address and occupation.

  ‘And not embarrass you on the way back?’ he asked.

  I took a chance, and bluffed.

  ‘Poss,’ I said, ‘you mentioned that all we can be expected to give one another is a minimum of essential information. I’ll tell you this much. When I myself am at Istanbul, I find communications very satisfactory.’

  ‘Fast, but far from satisfactory,’ he answered. ‘In fact, I should describe them as short, discourteous, unsigned, but undoubtly authentic although they bear a Turkish stamp. Sir, I put myself in your hands without reserve and within reason.’

  In the morning I drove him down to Beirut to catch the Cairo plane. He took it kindly, and did not suspect that my only inten­tion was not to let him out of my sight till he was safely in the air. When I asked him in what ivory or peacocks he meant to trade, he said he was investigating the arms traffic. He wasn’t a bit interested, he assured me, in how people chose to kill them­selves, but rather in how they paid for their pleasure. He wanted to lay his hands on some free currency, and he reckoned that among the Egyptian Greeks who supplied the Jews and the Egyptian Jews who supplied the Arabs there ought to be plenty of beautifully disguised credits for sale. My first impression of Oliver Poss as a well-dressed gipsy was not so very wrong; at any rate he was most intelligible when considered as a sort of gipsy-banker. He had his stock-in-trade of luxury goods, but first among them was luxury money—untraceable, untouchable bank balances which he was prepared to buy or sell. His pass­port—that which he used at our end of the Mediterranean—was Greek. I handled it with some amusement. He had even had the impudence to describe his profession as merchant-adventurer.

  I snatched a hasty lunch in Beirut, and turned back along the coast road through Tripoli to Latakia—a hundred and fifty glorious miles between sea and mountain which I always drove with fresh delight—and so eastwards into the rocky highlands, bare and burnt by the summer heat, and north again towards the trees and the water. It was deep dusk when I drove through the white gate of Kasr-el-Sittat.

  Elisa was alone. When she came into the central hall of her bungalow to greet me, I could see through the open door to the right her desk covered with papers. It was a neat desk, though she had but that moment risen from her chair; and she herself looked businesslike. There was nothing deliberate: no glasses on the eyes, no fuss, no suggestion of either nonchalance or purpose. She was merely cleared for action. Her shirt and skirt of khaki drill had a functional simplicity, as if they gov­erned rather than hid the upward drive of blood and sinew to the long throat and exquisite head.

  She was woman enough to ask me why I hadn’t warned her by letter that I was coming. In answer I let her see herself, ever-new, through my own eyes. Then I told her that I had had a visit from Oliver Poss, and assured her at once that he had not known she was in Syria, and still did not.

  ‘He’s not a man to arrive by accident,’ she said.

  ‘No. But it seems he has been shipping me cigars. So he thought I might lead him to you.’

  She examined me fiercely and calculatingly, as if I had become for the moment an intrusive stranger. It was such a look as I might have had from Poss, but without his humour.

  ‘Don’t bother!’ I said. ‘I had him in my world, not his. So I told him a good story, and sent him off to Cairo.’

  Her face cleared, and she laughed.

  ‘Yes, I believe you could,’ she replied. ‘I can just see you playing the old Arab trader in his mysterious office. But, Eric my dear, would you mind telling the whole story in front of Osterling as well, and being cross-examined a bit?’

  I said I was ready for anything, and especially some food and a bottle of wine; so we called at the kitchens, and walked over to Osterling’s quarters.

  He received us with an eager and voluble courtesy. I suspect that it was his superb training rather than any real love of society which made him, both in speech and writing, such excel­lent company. Or was it that he had so profound a conviction of the importance of his thoughts that he was determined to charm any listener into acceptance of them?

  He was much intrigued by old Pop-eyes, as he called Tabas, and congratulated me on discovering so original a member of the colony.

  ‘He’s the craziest old coot we ever had,’ he said. ‘Do you know, he has already got a following among the garage hands? My studio audience. Whenever Pop-eyes prophesies, and they are all agreed as to what he means, I use the quotation on a wider public.’

  I asked why particularly the garage.

  ‘Oh, his Sancho Panza turned out to be a grand mechanic. Police training is always good. They only permit clumsiness in dealing with the public.’

  Elisa, who could be easily exasperated by Osterling’s pretence of relaxation, mentioned that we had come on urgent business.

  I told my story while Osterling played host and interrogator, carving cold duck for me and putting his questions with the deprecating and indulgent manner of some society lawyer.

  ‘What an admirable citizen is an international spiv!’ he re­marked at last. ‘He stands for liberty against all governments alike.’

  ‘He stands for Mr. Poss’s bank balance,’ I answered.

  ‘Does it matter? What about your Hampden and Pym? Heroes of revolt and why? Because they didn’t like paying taxes. What’s the difference between them and your business man who is in revolt for the same reasons?’

  I suggested that Hampden and Pym and all of us in the room were prepared to suffer for their opinions, and the spiv was not.

  ‘Now I get nearer your conception of Oliver Poss,’ said Osterling. ‘I’ve never met him. He’s Elisa’s discovery. And what I’m feeling for is—would he be in sympathy with Kasr-el-Sittat?’

  Elisa and I simultaneously uttered an emphatic No!

  ‘A pity! Now is he likely to go to any trouble to find out more about what he believes to be a syndicate?’

&nb
sp; ‘I don’t know the weak points of your financial organization,’ I replied. ‘If there’s a door asking to be pushed open, he’d push it. Otherwise, I should say he’s a master at minding his own business.’

  ‘You’re sure you yourself gave nothing away?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ve told you how I accounted for the imports.’

  ‘How do you account for them?’ he asked sharply.

  I replied that I hadn’t the foggiest notion.

  ‘Why not to smoke?’

  ‘I haven’t noticed much self-indulgence at Kasr-el-Sittat.’

  ‘You really do deserve another glimpse of the amœba,’ he laughed—and I surrendered, as always, to the extraordinary grace with which he could clothe his imitation of sincerity. ‘It is so simple. We have no right to deprive a man of his life’s work because he chooses to live with us at Kasr-el-Sittat. You’ve met Urgin, our biochemist. Well, Urgin shouldn’t be limited to Latakia and cigarette leaf. He must have cigars, and he needs a lot of them. We couldn’t possibly afford to pay the Syrian duty. But let’s go and see the laboratory.’

  The east slope of Kasr-el-Sittat was a part I had never visited since first I was shown round the colony; it was full of barns, storehouses, and tarpaulin-covered dumps of machinery and building material. Nobody lived there except Urgin, the man who had supplied Poss with a letter of introduction to friends in Cuba.

  Urgin had the advantage of a flat that was built as a flat by the colonists themselves. It formed part of the laboratory block, which was constructed on steel girders set across the solid stone walls of God’s old hashish and tobacco warehouse The only access was by a flight of outside steps leading to Urgin’s quar­ters, so that he himself acted as hall-porter to the laboratory.

  As we picked our way along the silent and much-encumbered paths, I said that Urgin seemed to have been set very far apart from his fellows.

  ‘You don’t like him, Eric?’ Elisa asked. ‘Well, of course you wouldn’t!’

  I replied that I could only judge him by casual contacts, but that he was far too dogmatic for my taste, and—though possibly he didn’t realize it—opposed to the whole philosophy of Kasr-el-Sittat. An individual to him was a random element of no statistical importance and mighty little historical influence.