‘Don’t be angry or afraid, my dear, just because you are a possible suspect. At some time it has happened to everyone who is near the heart of a revolutionary movement. We have only to find Ashkar’s contacts, and you will be cleared.’
‘What about Ashkar?’ I asked
She hesitated, and then answered me with the serenity, the gentleness of one who had thought out a problem and filed away, for action at a later time, the irrevocable solution.
‘Eric, I shall never hurt you, never force you to know more than you must. You are English, and you haven’t suffered. Those who have—well, don’t condemn them. Try to understand. That’s all I shall ask of you: to understand. Not to do. Not to know.’
For Ashkar’s sake I was very near confessing. The only loyalty that remained to me was to him, and I clung to it. Then I perceived that Ashkar could lose neither his job nor his life until the Secretariat found out who was behind him; and since there wasn’t anybody behind him but myself, the longer they watched him and his contacts, the more they must be convinced of his innocence.
‘For your own sake and mine, don’t go near Ashkar for a while,’ she said. ‘Just stick close to your business.’
In the morning she went on to Beirut by taxi. There was a conference of UNESCO delegates, state-licensed to spread their harmless culture from one to another. Among them, she said, Kasr-el-Sittat had two propaganda experts who had been, in effect, trained by Goebbels, for they had monitored and analysed his speeches throughout the war. For all I know, those two may have brought the whole conference to Beirut in order to refresh their contact with Kasr-el-Sitta. I can think of no other reason why UNESCO should have chosen a small Arab port from which to effuse its rationed light.
Left alone among my crates and invoices to confront the danger to myself and Ashkar, I was aware of relief. Attack had been hopeless; defence was not. The point of the triangle which resisted that intolerable thrust was no longer infinitely small. It had an immediate weight to counter, and therefore took on a visible reality.
I had to see Ashkar at once—that very night if it were possible—in order to get back from him the box of doped Coriolanos which he had taken from Gisorius, and the two boxes which remained to him for future exchange. There was the risk, the certainty, that the Secretariat would send another traveller over the frontier with a second box of cigars, and see what happened to them.
What else would they do? Well, there was one obvious move. I asked Boulos if anyone had been watching the street, or seeking information about me. A stranger, a friend, the local policeman, anyone at all? In Boulos himself I had absolute trust. There were limits, of course, to his devotion. He would neither have fought for me nor resisted a determined interrogation for me (though I wouldn’t put it past him to do both for the head of his family), but he would not take money to spy on me.
Boulos had noticed nothing, and he was sure that my clerk and warehouseman were as reliable as himself. He delivered an impromptu oration in choice classical Arabic upon the privilege of serving me. I hoped privately that one-tenth of it was true, and replied with equal courtliness that a good son made a good father.
I observed that he had given no guarantee for his cousin, and asked after his health. I was answered by a stream of invective. The cousin had been in the local brothel for the last twenty-four hours, and was now sleeping off his debauch in a corner of the kitchen. Boulos assured me that he had gone through all my possessions very carefully to see that nothing had been stolen, and that in any case, as I well knew, the cousin was never allowed to pass the staircase door.
That put the matter beyond a doubt. Though the disreputable little beast was unofficially fed by me and occasionally tipped, he never had any money. Boulos, of course, denied that the cousin would ever have accepted a piastre to report on me, his host and benefactor, and I politely agreed with him; but neither of us was in the least taken in by this exchange of courtesies.
I tried not to hear what was going on in the kitchen. Boulos, as the senior member of a dishonoured family, was evidently taking drastic measures to obtain a full confession. I would not like to be awakened from a drowsy hangover by an irate cook with a hot stove at his disposal.
Boulos returned. His eyes did not belong at all to his round and inoffensive face.
‘He was paid,’ he said, ‘but by a stranger. He can only tell me that the man was a Turk.’
I was not surprised that Gisorius’ agent had chosen Boulos’cousin. He was a sharp and plausible little rogue, who preferred the life of an alley cat to any regular employment; he was often in the company of the more shady caique captains, and he acted as a runner for the establishment where he had just disgraced himself. His failing—as I knew, and a stranger could not—was that he spent any windfall at once and flamboyantly.
Boulos agreed that the family honour would be no worse off if his cousin had free board and lodging for a few days, so I called up the port police and asked them to put him inside on general principles and a charge of creating a disturbance. They were delighted at this opportunity to talk to him; and the smoothness with which they carried out the wholly illegal transaction, without mentioning my name at all, was a comforting reminder that I understood my adopted country, whereas Kasr-el-Sittat did not.
That cleared the cousin out of the way. I then told Boulos that I found it necessary to have a bout of malaria for two days and nights, and that he was to follow our normal routine of bringing up food and pretending to make my bed, so that callers, the warehouse and the general public would have no doubt at all that I was sweating, cursing and incapable on the other side of the staircase door.
Ashkar was a most difficult person to contact except at his own headquarters; and there I dared not go. Nor could I risk a telephone call—not that Kasr-el-Sittat was equal to tapping local lines (that was just the sort of job for which I was so valuable to them), but Gisorius, through Juan Villaneda, could easily control the gendarmerie’s register of incoming messages. Transport, too, was the devil of a problem, for of course I could not use my car. I looked over the bus schedules and the railway guide, and at last got an inspiration for, at any rate, a promising start. My ingenuity amazes me when I look back on it. I was interesting as a trapped ape who manipulates simple machinery to get at the bananas.
There was a train to Homs Junction shortly after dark which would take me through Tel Kalakh, the nominal customs post between the Lebanon and Syria. That post could make trouble for the merchant if it wished, so naturally I had a friend there. He wasn’t by any means a mere pensionary. The man was a wonderful shot, and I had introduced him to the delights of snipe-shooting. Like nearly all Arabs, he had considered snipe too small to be worth cartridges, and he was grateful to me for relieving the tedium of winter evenings in Tel Kalakh by a brand new sport.
My terrace, as I have said, commanded the sandhills and the sea. I kept under cover and watched until twilight to be sure that no one was taking an interest in my back door. After dark I slipped out of the garden gate, and ran to the station. Something over an hour later I was at Tel Kalakh.
I remained in the train, for I couldn’t think of any excuse for getting out unless I were invited. I put my head out of the carriage window, and asked a policeman on the platform if my friend the Customs Inspector was anywhere about. Yes, he was drinking coffee with the stationmaster. I sent a message to him enquiring whether he could spare time from his valuable and indispensable duties to come and have a chat.
The Inspector insisted, as I knew he would, that I should take a little something with him before the train started. He declared that he would not let it leave without me, and that in any case it would be held up for twenty minutes. So I returned with him to the stationmaster’s office and the coffee.
In reply to his questions, I told him that my car had broken down, and that I was forced to take the train through Homs to Aleppo. He played up beautifully with just the hospitable reaction that I expected. How could he allow me
to spend a lonely night on a slow train? Why didn’t I stay with him instead? He would find transport for me in the morning or when God willed, and it would be quicker than the train. No, we must all eat together, for the All-seeing Omnipotence, who knew that I was coming, had sent two brace of partridges to the very muzzle of his gun.
I allowed myself to be persuaded, and we settled down to gossip until suddenly he rose with a great oath.
‘I have forgotten the train!’ he exclaimed.
The three of us rushed out together to start the train, which had remained at Tel Kalakh an extra quarter of an hour, waiting for the purely formal all-clear of the Customs. It steamed out into the Syrian night, leaving us alone upon the country platform, where the steps of porters and police returning home echoed in the silence of the valley. At that moment my love of this people who had accepted me, of their manners and their generous impulses, was very great.
We ate the partridges at the Customs Post on the main road, where the Inspector and his chaps made me, by their own standards, very comfortable. I brought up the subject of Ashkar, whose character was always good for an hour of conversation. My friend, being a Moslem, did not at all approve of him. He produced the old accusation that Ashkar was more French than Syrian.
I said that I hoped to see him on my way to or from Aleppo, but that I did not want him to know I was coming. It was a matter, I added mysteriously, of an Alaouite girl, an orphan of singular beauty with hips like melons. Could the Inspector telephone Ashkar’s headquarters and find out where he was likely to be for the next couple of days?
He put through an official call, and told me that the captain was on a tour of the frontier, and would reach Kassab the next day, where he would certainly stay the night.
This was awkward, for Kassab was the frontier post on the road from Latakia to Antioch; to get there, any sane man would return to Tripoli and follow the coast to the north. I couldn’t now tell the Inspector that I wanted to go back to Tripoli, so I said I wouldn’t bother to see Ashkar at all.
In the morning my host put me on a fast lorry that was going as far as Hama; if I had really been bound for Aleppo, this would have been a first-rate lift on the way. As it was, I got off the lorry 160 long miles from Kassab. It might have been worse, for in Hama, where my name and face was quite unknown, I could safely hire a taxi; and there was a metalled road across the mountains to the coast.
I chose a powerful car with a fine, scoundrelly driver who responded instantly to cheerful indecencies. He reached Latakia in four hours—which would have qualified him for any Alpine trial—and only stopped twice, once to pick up and cut the throat of a chicken he had killed, and once to return a baby, which was not fair game, to its hysterical mamma.
Talking he never stopped, and I had ample time to judge him. Like most of his caste, he was wit, pimp, smuggler and blackmailer, and on the road he drove his competitor to the wall with the insolence of a renaissance Italian. I reckoned that he was a man to do anything for money, but unlikely, unless underpaid, to soil by betrayal the panache of his six cylinders.
A little way from Kassab, I told him that I wanted to be left in the woods by the side of the road, and that he was to go on to the frontier post with a letter from me to Captain Ashkar. He was not to deliver it while anyone else was present, nor to mention that a European had sent him. Then he was to drive Ashkar back to me.
This task my invaluable driver performed most shrewdly. He simply ran up to the frontier post with his empty car and said that Ashkar had ordered it. When Ashkar himself came out to remonstrate with him, he delivered my note, and the rest was easy.
The captain’s army training overcame his national habit of drawing out the preliminaries. He had come straight from his command in a military moo—and besides he disliked all mysteries that were not of his own making. He cut down his compliments to half a minute.
‘The cigars again,’ I told him. ‘You exchanged the box of one traveller, but has there been another since?’
‘Yes, three days ago,’ he grumbled, ‘but what the father of obscenities carried I neither know nor care. I told Villaneda that I should be on tour, and couldn’t look after him.’
‘God is great!’ I exclaimed. ‘And what have you done with the boxes?’
‘That which I took from the traveller is in a sure place. The other two are in my safe.’
I didn’t relish his implication that the safe was not a sure place, and asked him where the keys were.
‘There is only one, and I have it on me,’ he said.
I warned him that he was suspected of doing away with Eugen Rosa and exchanging the cigars, and that both our lives were in danger.
‘From Kasr-el-Sittat? I am used to threats from Kasr-el-Sittat. Have you forgotten our friend, God, and how he threatened to stuff my boots and breeches with what would be left on me? These half-wit colonists—well, I know they could have me retired on a pension. And if I am convinced that they intend to get rid of me, I will make their lives a burden in the time that remains. My brother, they have no consuls to protect them.’
Ashkar refused to believe that Kasr-el-Sittat had any greater power than their influence at Damascus. He was polite but sceptical about my guarded story of organizations abroad. A monastery to him was a monastery. Nestorians and Maronites—they too had protectors abroad, but not effective enough to bother the sleep of a captain of gendarmes.
He asked me where I was staying the night. I told him that I hadn’t yet had time to give it a thought, and that I mustn’t be seen in Latakia, for I was supposed to be in bed with malaria at home.
That impressed him far more than anything I had said, and he enquired if I were sure of Boulos.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But his cousin was paid to watch me. Are you sure of all your own men?’
He became thoughtful.
‘Can this taxi-driver be traced?’ he asked.
‘Unlikely. I picked him up in Hama, and there’s no reason why Kasr-el-Sittat should look there.’
It was already night. We drove back towards Kassab, and about a mile from the frontier turned off the main road on to a track.
‘You will be safe there,’ said Ashkar. ‘I shall be about two hours. Shall I bring some food?’
The taxi-driver and I exclaimed together, for we had had nothing since a quick snack in Hama.
Ashkar’s heavy steps, each one resenting the absence of a horse, faded away up the road, and the woods were silent. I hoped to heaven that he knew the routine of the Kassab post, and that we should not be disturbed. I didn’t want to be discovered acting suspiciously within a mile of the frontier.
The taxi-driver seemed to sense that I was an amateur.
‘Have no fear,’ he said. ‘I have done this before, but he was not on our side then.’
‘God prospers him who forgets the names of policemen,’ I suggested.
‘My licence is my living’ he assured me. ‘For me they are nameless as for their fathers.’
He curled up on the front seat and went to sleep, leaving me to meditate upon the improbability of Ashkar and myself ever being able to arrange a really secret meeting in this country where the movements of every official and every foreigner aroused curiosity and gossip. The true problem of any agent employed by the Secretariat was not so much the tailing of Ashkar as knowing in which café to sit and listen.
At the sound of hooves turning off the road and breaking into a canter on the soft red dust of the track, the taxi-driver rose out of his sleep into the bushes like a startled partridge. I was not so accustomed as he to the rusted latches of the taxi door, so I had to remain where I was. Fortunately the horseman turned out to be Ashkar, arriving before his time.
We left the driver with meat and water and flat loaves of mountain bread. Though a Moslem, he seemed a little disappointed at the water, and Ashkar produced a bottle of araq, declaring it, for the sake of the driver’s conscience, to be lemonade. Then we went up the hill out of earshot.
/> ‘You are right. I am being watched,’ said Ashkar. ‘Ten days ago Damascus sent me a new clerk—a Christian, but I didn’t like him. I went back to Kassab just now to ask my orderly about him; he too is an Ashkar, so he tells me the truth. This clerk is everywhere, even in my quarters. And he pays coffee for my men.’
‘Has he seen the inside of your safe?’ I asked.
‘I do not know. But some time he may have looked over my shoulder when I opened it. Even so he could not be sure, for the cigar boxes are behind a heap of files.’
I asked Ashkar then and there to decide upon some sure way of sending me back the boxes. I couldn’t allow him to destroy them. The Bari crate, from which I had taken them, had been in my warehouse for a month and could stay there longer—for Poss’s deliveries were of course irregular—but soon or late I should have to send that case to Kasr-el-Sittat with the correct number of cigar boxes in the false bottom. Before I came under suspicion, it wouldn’t have mattered how many boxes arrived. I could have told some story of the bottom being smashed in transit, and got away with it.
Then Ashkar turned all gendarme on me, and insisted on keeping the box of Coriolanos which he had taken from Gisorus. He made it, of course, a ceremoniously veiled refusal, but he meant it. To put bluntly what took him a good two minutes to say, that box was his evidence against Kasr-el-Sittat and a charge of drug-smuggling was his weapon in self-defence.
I had to explain a good deal more of Kasr-el-Sittat and its objects. I reminded him that if you looked at the reverse side of Villaneda’s innocent libertarian communism, it was anarchism. He had heard of anarchism, and at once connected it with assassination.
‘But that did neither harm nor good,’ I told him. ‘These people are cleverer. They would use the politician instead of killing him. They would make him a little more foolish than he is. They would turn him into a Selim. Now do you understand? The drug in those cigars is not one that a man takes for pleasure—or knowingly.’
The High Place Page 14