The High Place

by Geoffrey Household

  Ashkar’s reaction was quite unexpected. He embraced me. Why hadn’t I told him before, he complained. Why had I let him think that I, who had been an example to them all of justice and incorruptibility, had been dabbling in the dirt? Why hadn’t I known that his heart was with the British as always? I didn’t disillusion him. I let him keep his Arabian Nights dreams of an ever-present secret service.

  ‘First,’ he said, ‘my clerk shall meet with an accident.’

  ‘For God’s sake, no! It would only increase suspicion. Get rid of the cigars, and then let this clerk see everything you do.’

  ‘It is a pity.’ he said regretfully. ‘My sergeant is teaching him to ride, and it would have been so easy to set him on a mare in heat, and loose the stallion. Very well! Very well! I will send the three boxes down to you by safe hand. You remember my clansman who delivered you a letter? My orderly shall give them to him secretly, and he will bear them to Tripoli.’

  I said that would do admirably, so long as he filled up the space in his safe with something that looked like cigar boxes, but wasn’t. Then I asked him if he had any money.

  It was a pretty hopeless question to put to the one honest gendarme on the frontier. He produced with pride the equivalent of ten shillings and said that it was mine.

  My trouble was that I had left home with what cash there was in the office. It had seemed an adequate sum for all likely emergencies, but wasn’t enough to employ a taxi for twenty hours, to give the very considerable tip that would be essential to preserve the driver’s goodwill, and to get myself home from wherever I left him. I couldn’t take the taxi to Tripoli lest he should discover where I lived, and I couldn’t give him a cheque for fear of revealing my name.

  After I had guarded myself against so many possible accidents by which my movements might be traced, this was a nasty little inconvenient fact. A commonplace, no doubt, to men who must conceal their movements. I suspect that of criminals on the run just as many have been caught through lack of ready cash as have escaped because police or pursuers were checked at a critical moment by the same exasperating problem.

  I said good-bye to Ashkar—a more affectionate good-bye than our last, though undeserve—and told the driver to go back to Hama. We stopped for a very early breakfast on the way, and I made him idle away an hour or two, so that we reached Hama when the banks were open. I directed him to a hotel as if I lived there, and went in and out the back way, and round to the local branch of my bank. I didn’t want the driver to know where I had gone, for the national curiosity would cer­tainly have led him to get my name from one of the clerks. I asked the manager to telephone his Damascus office, where I had an account, and to cash me a cheque. That done, I returned to the very anxious driver, who was already arguing with the hall porter, and paid him off.

  Hama was a town where I had no business, and the last place where anyone would look for my tracks. Even so, I avoided any chance of being seen, and spent the day sleeping under a fig tree outside the town. I returned to Tripoli by a bus which got in after dark, and walked by the lanes on the outskirts of the town to my garden gate.

  After a bath and a long whisky and soda, I came to the con­clusion that I was pretty safe. The only risk I had taken was at leaving and entering Tripoli, where, at the station or the bus stop, I had probably been recognized by some casual citizen. There was no reason, however, why Kasr-el-Sittat should make enquires when they could so easily find out from my customers or my warehouse that I was home in bed.

  A week later Ashkar’s poor and ragged relative came boldly into my warehouse and asked for a job. Not by a sign of eyes or any slyness of bearing did he show that he had ever seen me before. He was just a labourer on the edge of starvation looking for work, with his possessions stuffed into a filthy waist-band. I took him into my office to interview him, and, to my intense relief, recovered from his rags the three boxes of Coriolanos. I put them back into the crate and nailed it up again. I hoped that when Urgin used the cigars for experiment or for the Secretariat’s requirements, he would either never discover that one of the boxes was doped, or, if he did, would assume that after all he had made the mistake that Elisa suspected, and sent a quite innocent box of Coriolanos out of the laboratory.

  3

  It is mere conceit that has made me linger over so detailed an account of my absurdities. That ingenious journey to Kassab was the last occasion on which I could feel myself to be a man of action, and find content in dramatics. It was futile, futile as a child’s game by which he passes through a string of satisfying incidents, and ignores the gaps between the beads. I have con­fessed what I did and what I thought, but those deeds and thoughts now seem to me a mere display of activity. Was it wholly useless activity? Yes, on the plane of events that were under my control. No, in the ultimate, fully-dimensioned pattern that emerged.

  Some three weeks after my return I was sitting in my office, spending a slack evening hour on the accounts, when my clerk announced Mr. Villaneda from Kasr-el-Sittat. I was glad of the distraction. I am no accountant. At the end of the half year I used to shut myself up for a whole blasphemous day and night until I understood why my official balance-sheet showed a profit or a loss.

  A distraction, yes. I took Juan upstairs, and opened a bottle or two. I felt no presentiment at all. There were a dozen objects for which he might have come to see me, and all more pleasant than accounts: a message from Elisa, some trouble with the colony’s agricultural machinery, or merely a night’s lodging and a friendly meal.

  He sat down in the corner farthest from the fire, and lit a cigarette. He seemed to avoid by nature the disorderly comforts of the north, preferring the tiles, the bare table, the windows that united him with the cleanliness of Mediterranean space. His face was drawn, and I remember thinking that never before had I noticed how straight and ascetic was the sharp line of his mouth.

  After a casual chat about Tabas and Grynes, I asked him if he had recently been on any of his cross-country wanderings.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘to Damascus and Hama.’

  The room was full of shadows. I got up and switched on the light. His eyes, as I expected, were too firmly fixed on me.

  ‘What took you to Hama?’ I asked.

  ‘Gisorius does not understand Syria,’ he answered. ‘I do.’

  I said that Hama was an unattractive town.

  ‘I want to understand this business,’ he insisted, trampling over me with his directness. ‘Ashkar—well, he is an honest man and he has obeyed you. But you? I could have sworn I knew your character, and I am not a fool. Tell me your story.’

  Against any of the rest, except Elisa, I was ready to fight through every interrogation and every trick they had learned; but Juan and I had, in judgment of human beings, the same set of values. Though by no means intimate friends, we understood each other without effort. I hadn’t a hope of lying to him success­fully, and we both knew it.

  ‘Which story do you want?’ I asked.

  ‘Is there more than one?’ he answered impatiently. ‘Listen, friend!’

  He told me that my bank accounts at Tripoli and Damascus had been watched as soon as I was. Bank clerks, he said, were the priests of capitalism, paid as poorly as other priests and yet as unaccountably discreet. But were they not Arabs? So friend­ship counted where money alone did not. Didn’t I agree that I myself could look at any bank account in Syria if I really wanted to? But that was beyond Gisorius, so the investigation had been left to him.

  That cheque drawn at Hama had seemed to him queer, out of the pattern, and when he discovered that I had been at home and in bed at the time, it seemed queerer.

  To leave no room for any illusions, he told me his move­ments step by step. He had gone the round of possible cus­tomers; they knew of my firm, but were sure that I did not sell direct to anyone in Hama. Then to the hotels. No trace of me in the registers, but one of the porters recognized my descrip­tion, and directed him to my taxi-driver. He had proved sur­prisingly loya
l to his unknown fare, but he couldn’t deny—having babbled about the trip to the porter and some of fellow-drivers—that he had been to Kassab. That was enough for Juan.

  ‘Yes, friend,’ he said, ‘you met Ashkar at Kassab, and you told him to get rid of his cigars. He is simple, Ashkar, when he is not in his frontier forests. He showed his safe too openly—and painted cardboard does not look at all like cedar boxes, especially when one is expecting a change. Now, where is Rosa?’

  ‘I’ll never persuade you that I had nothing to do with his dis­appearance,’ I answered, ‘but it’s true.’

  ‘Man, nothing makes sense in this! So for the present I will believe you. But tell me the truth and all the truth, for you have only one chance of life.’

  ‘I know. But I don’t want to take it,’ I said. ‘I can’t live a lie.’

  ‘We don’t understand each other. What is the chance you see?’

  ‘That the Secretariat will tell Elisa nothing, for her sake.’

  ‘It is possible,’ he admitted. ‘But the chance I meant is that you know more than I do.’

  I told him that even if I did, I wouldn’t buy my life—and that I was quite certain he wouldn’t turn loose an enemy of Kasr-el-Sittat for the sake of any information about his accomplices.

  ‘Compliments all round!’ he said ironically. ‘But you have misunderstood. Your accomplices—we will go into that later. It wouldn’t surprise me if you had none. No, the information I want is—what were your motives? Why Rosa, who was unimportant? Why not Czoldy or any of the others who have passed through your hands or Ashkar’s?’

  ‘I’ve told you that I had nothing to do with Rosa’s death,’ I repeated.

  ‘Disappearance, you said. Can it be that you take your orders through Ashkar?’

  I told him that of course I did not, and that Ashkar was exactly what he had always thought him.

  ‘Then Ashkar killed Rosa,’ he said acutely. ‘And for some reason that he believed his duty. And Rosa’s death started—what?’

  ‘If I tell you, will you see that Ashkar comes to no harm?’

  ‘Man, how can I promise that? Are you forgetting the Secre­tariat? My power is outside Kasr-el-Sittat, not here. Remember the one chance I spoke of, and tell me your motives. God knows there have been times when I too have been weary of life as you are! But you have a duty to Ashkar.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Why you are a traitor. I have not yet said a word to Gisorius of what I have discovered. Does that have no significance for you?’

  I replied that he would naturally want as full a story as pos­sible before making his report.

  ‘Am I a policeman?’ he retorted. ‘No, there is far too much I do not understand. Your only chance is that I may take another view of your intentions. Put it this way, friend—I am convinced of your loyalty until I am proved wrong.’

  ‘You are wrong,’ I said. ‘I changed those cigars, and I hoped to do it again.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because I too think of the masses.’

  ‘The masses! You have never given a true thought to the masses in your life,’ exclaimed Juan contemptuously and, I hope, unjustly. ‘This isn’t a play, friend! No attitudes!

  ‘Then put it that I’m a mere bourgeois sentimentalist,’ I replied. ‘I’ve seen what two wars have done, and I don’t want another.’

  ‘But what have those cigars to do with war?’

  ‘And no attitudes from you!’

  ‘Still you do not understand me,’ he said. ‘For the moment I am your judge, not Gisorius. And you have been clever enough not to be caught if I do not speak. I promise you noth­ing. But your one chance is to tell me why you thought the cigars were worth your life.’

  I was still uncertain whether his ignorance was not a pretence, a trap to find out how much I knew. I played for time, and asked him to what purpose he himself thought the cigars were being smuggled out.

  ‘Interrogation,’ he answered.

  ‘Not very efficient.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Slowly, waiting for his remarks and questions, I told him all I had learned of the effects of thiopentone. My hopes were ris­ing; his interest was far too keen to be simulated. I explained to him that Urgin’s Coriolanos were mighty little use for police or underground interrogation—since a man who believed he had done his duty, and had no sense of guilt, would continue to have no sense of guilt under the drug. The interrogator would get everything except the facts he wanted. Torture of body or nerves would be far more profitable than thiopentone.

  ‘Then they have lied to me,’ he said, ‘and to Urgin, too. And now—go on!’

  My story must have lasted over an hour. I told him much of what I have written here, without, of course, the personal details, and with far more of political discussions that were relevant only within the closed circle of the colony.

  ‘But police—they swarm like lice at these conferences,’ he objected. ‘Wouldn’t they suspect the cigars if some fool of a statesman starts shouting what he really feels?’

  ‘Not if he were tired and had been drinking—even a single glass. His voice would be excited, but perfectly clear and normal.’

  ‘And what of a man who doesn’t drink at all?’

  ‘Safe, I suppose—for Czoldy wouldn’t take the risk. But are there many? You wouldn’t choose a teetotaller for a job which requires a pretence of good-fellowship.’

  Juan Villaneda brooded at the table, head in hands. Though his brain was swift and practised, he couldn’t get away from the gestures of a peasant to whom thought was a deliberate effort.

  ‘You are utterly without logic or you would be with the Secretariat,’ he accused me suddenly. ‘What is your objection? At the end of their war it is certain they will have the conditions they want. Freedom for the individual who can survive. The Secretariat at least can reason. But what is there in you that I can trust?’

  ‘As much as I myself can trust, and no more,’ I answered bitterly. ‘Hatred of the State, yes. …’

  Juan’s contemptuous question seemed to force me down through all the floating rubbish half believed, the sewerage of ideas created by others and undissolved, until I reached a bottom of sincerity.

  ‘Hatred of the State, but a belief that no violence can destroy it.’

  ‘You must grow a beard, friend, if you are going to play the old Kropotkin,’ he mocked, not unkindly. ‘Russia is the only country where you would be understood, and just as surely shot.’

  He left his barren end of the room, and joined me by the fire.

  ‘I must work with what I have,’ he said. ‘What you believe God knows! But at least I have a guarantee that you believe it.’

  My humiliation was so great that I had forgotten. I asked him what guarantee.

  ‘That you have chosen pain, man! And that you know there is worse pain to come.’

  He placed a hand on my knee with the sharp Latin smack of comradeship. I looked down at the long, stub-ended fingers. It was the hand of a guitar-player—a limited instrument but for its power to reproduce the sigh of all humanity.

  ‘Here is a letter from her.’

  I hesitated to open it. That powerful, neutral writing stared at me from the envelope. The broad down strokes of the ‘i’ and ‘A’ and ‘m’ were feminine, yet tail-less and unornamented.

  ‘Read it,’ he said. ‘I have read it already. This is no time for delicacy.’

  I have the letter before me now. It was the first and last that had a note of tenderness.

  Eric,

  There was a morning when I told you that soon you would be with us at Kasr-el-Sittat, and you were glad. When I remember how much you can tell me with no words, I know that I use too many.

  It is time to come to me. Do not worry about your busi­ness. We will talk about that, for it might be useful to us. But come, and bring your garden with you—all of it that matters.

  ‘Friend,’ said Juan, ‘there is no return.’ />
  When I had recovered myself, he asked me:

  ‘Why does she tell you to come now?’

  ‘To avoid suspicion,’ I said, though I knew it wasn’t true.

  ‘There is no real suspicion yet. There is only doubt. Doesn’t she mean that Czoldy has his weapon at last, and is sure of success?’

  ‘There is time,’ I protested. ‘There must be time.’

  I could not, would not accept the inference that such a note should herald the four horsemen, and that fifth who rode only in the stars until we mounted him on earth.

  ‘Two weeks, perhaps,’ he answered. ‘The Greek question comes up at the end of the month. I see no opportunity for Czoldy till then. I have been watching the agenda.’

  ‘Watching it? What for?’ I shouted at him. ‘If you were suspicious, why in God’s name didn’t you act?’

  I attacked him angrily for his futile ignorance, for accepting whatever stories the Secretariat liked to give him. I told him he would have done better to stick to his precious proletariat.

  ‘The way to revolution is no longer through the proletariat, and you know it,’ he retorted. ‘They won’t fight for liberty. They can’t see that they haven’t any.’

  His face flared red and gold like his country’s flag, but he kept his self-control. He had to defend his own honesty of pur­pose—to himself as well as to me. He admitted furiously that he had played his part in devising the general policy of the Secre­tariat, and cursed all their subtleties that he hadn’t the experience of statecraft to understand. The only one of them, he said, who could have roused a Barcelona mob was Elisa.

  ‘Man! Neither I nor my comrades abroad wanted war!’ he exclaimed. ‘And there was no reason to expect it. The West will not, and the Russians think only of defence. They believe Marx. Yes, they still believe him! And according to Marx, Capital must be the aggressor.’

  Then Juan produced an odd paradox, which I repeat for what it is worth; he certainly believed it himself.