Friends in Low Places

by Simon Raven

  For although de Freville shared Angela’s letto matrimonale for companionship, their relations remained entirely platonic. The one thing of which each had always been deprived and which each now found in the other was tranquillity - the placid expectation of an unhurried, unworried and common progress from day’s beginning through day’s triviality to day’s end, when they would retire to lie side by side, just touching, as innocent and easily lulled as two children to whom the morrow could only bring sound nourishment and loving care. After five days of this, when de Freville had to return to his affairs, they both resumed their normal manner of life: de Freville the restless and ever more tedious supervision of his gambling tables in London, Angela the daily search for the nightly master of her flesh. Both knew what the other would do in his absence; both pitied and acquiesced; both waited eagerly, but without amendment of life, until they could meet again in Menton and once more be together and at peace. Although they had friends in villas up and down the coast, they visited them seldom, for the spell only worked, it seemed, in Menton, and a journey of even a few miles made them wary of each other and ill at ease. By the same token there could be no question of marriage, of a continuous life together where-ever fortune might take them: their association could be no more than a periodic rest-cure, therapy which could be taken quite often but could not be indulged in permanently without abdication from life itself.

  De Freville’s unexpected arrival during the Lewson regime did not cause embarrassment either to himself or to Angela: it simply meant that Lewson must go straight away in order to make place. Since such an outcome was in any case desirable, and since de Freville could now lend assistance should Mark prove obdurate, the arrival of the former was doubly opportune. Indeed trebly so; for de Freville knew much more than Angela did about the bit of “business” which she was hoping to put in Mark’s way to ease his predicament when he departed. So now, she thought, as she stood at her kitchen window watching them approach, we can discuss the whole matter sensibly and pack him off before night. I wonder where Max found him. . . .

  When this had been explained to her and her 40,000 francs had been returned, they all sat down to tea.

  “Right,” said Angela. “Owing to Max’s help you’ve got 60,000 francs in your pocket; so from now on you’re on your own. But there’s one more thing we can do for you. Tell him, Max.”

  She busied herself conscientiously about the teapot, with the air of a housemaster’s wife giving a farewell tea to a boy who was leaving suddenly because his father had gone bankrupt to prison. Max, cast for the part of the housemaster, leaned forward, took his tea with a grave nod of thanks, and began to speak carefully and even sympathetically of his plan for Mark’s future.

  “I have a friend,” Max said, “a Greek gambler called Stratis Lykiadopoulos, who is much in demand, because of his cool head and dignified presence, to play as banker for the big baccarat syndicates. With everything else, he is also supposed to be lucky, and the big money boys are nothing if not superstitious.”

  “Like Napoleon with his Marshals?”

  “Something of the kind. But like even the luckiest of the Marshals, Lykiadopoulos is not immune from errors of judgment. Two years ago he accepted, in the course of play, a cheque for three million old francs from a Frenchman called Jacques des Moulins. By the time the cheque bounced, des Moulins was far away; and my friend, since he had acted on his own responsibility, had to make up the three million for the syndicate - which, however, allowed him the use of its extensive agencies in an effort to trace the defaulter. Des Moulins was finally run to ground, in a pretty bad way, in Beirut. Although there was clearly no question of getting money from him, Lykiadopoulos, who is an amateur of human vagaries, went to see the man and enquired into his story. It seemed that he had been a professional diplomat of some promise, but had been dismissed the service, or rather, eased out of it, as the result of seducing the seventeen year old son of a certain Minister, to whom he had been acting as what we would call Private Secretary. Deprived both of livelihood and occupation, he had commenced gambling, run through his savings, and had then tried the coup de dishoneur on Lykiadopoulos in a final attempt to restore his position. When that failed, all had failed, and the poor wretch had fled East to hide his disgrace in the classical manner of his forefathers.”

  “Why didn’t he join the Legion?” Mark said facetiously.

  “For the same reason as you don’t. Because he was too lazy. And less concerned to redeem his past than simply to live safe from its consequences. He had managed to blackmail an aunt into sending him just enough money every month to drag out a miserable living in the brothel quarter near the Place des Cannons, where he was attended by an idiot Arab boy, of hideous appearance, to whom he was passionately devoted and who returned his devotion. Indeed, as Lykiadopoulos remarked to me later, here was an important lesson about human love: it is not directed towards a particular person, it is projected out of circumstance or need and will embrace the first attainable object in its path. The Titania story, you see.”

  He glanced quickly at Angela to see whether she had drawn the inference. If she had, she ignored it, placidly pouring and distributing fresh cups of tea.

  “It so happened,” Max went on, “that Lykiadopoulos was detained in Beirut for several weeks, there being some delicate negotiation about foreign currencies with which his syndicate had charged him. One of the more amusing results of this intrigue was that Beirut was swamped with Egyptian pounds going at one and sixpence each, but that need not concern us now. What you should know is that Lykiadopoulos, part from kindness and part from interest, went two or three times more to see des Moulins in his hovel and was able to do him several small kindnesses. And when Lykiadopoulos came for the last time to say good-bye, des Moulins did his best to show his gratitude. In settlement of the debt of three million, he handed him the only thing of value that he had: a letter. A letter which was the property of the French Minister he had served before his dismissal and which he had stolen on impulse when he left the Minister's house for the last time.”

  “If the letter was valuable, why didn't des Moulins cash in on it himself?”

  “He had kept it as a last resort, but when the time came to use it he had given up hope. He no longer had either the energy or the desire to change what he now regarded as his fate. When he called his bet of three million against Lykiadopoulos and supported it with a worthless cheque, he was asking God to tell him whether he should continue to live in the old way or resign himself, virtually, to death. God decided for the latter course and des Moulins accepted the decision. He would bury himself in Beirut with his pittance of income and his idiot boy until God disposed of him altogether. He was not unhappy, just numb; and he had, after all, someone even lower than himself to care for. As for the letter, it was no longer of any significance within his scheme of things: let Lykiadopoulos turn it into money if he could - for himself, he would stay at peace, lying down for ever in the dirt and darkness to his beloved idiot’s embrace.”

  “I see,” said Mark. “And what was in the letter?”

  “The letter,” said Max, in a bored, objective tone which he might have used to recite figures from an account book, “was from an Israeli businessman of German birth, now called Yahel. It had been entrusted to the Minister’s son - the one des Moulins later seduced - when he was on holiday in Israel with a school party in 1956. Indeed, there is reason to suppose that the whole expedition to Israel was arranged simply and solely so that a secret message might be delivered back to the Minister in France.”

  “Rather cumbrous?”

  “It is only in spy stories that things can be arranged slickly. In real life the wheels are all jagged and rusty from long exposure, and the grooves are invariably the wrong gauge... Cumbrous or not, the scheme worked. As soon as the boy returned, in mid-September of ’56, he delivered the letter to his father, and what it said was this. One: the Israeli Army had prepared a plan for the invasion of Egypt which could be
implemented at twenty-four hours’ notice. Two: the feeling of Ben Gurion’s Cabinet was definitely in favour of ‘close understanding’ with France as to common motives and ‘compatible lines of action’; the moment the French gave the least indication that they were prepared for discussion, the Israelis would meet them in a spirit of ‘total co-operation’.”

  “Nothing much more than is already known or suspected.”

  “Ah. Yahel’s third point was this. He had been in touch, through his agents in London, with a senior member of the British Cabinet, who had been charged by certain of his colleagues with the top secret conveyance of their - top secret - policy. Names, I should add, are firmly named. From what Yahel then says, it is absolutely plain, not only that a section of the British Cabinet was ready and eager to join in the fun, but the whole idea of tri-partite collusion - Britain, France, Israel - had originated in London and was the brainchild of the senior Cabinet Minister aforesaid. No question of just drifting in through force of circumstance, of tagging on to the column at the last minute. The guilt for the whole affair lies with one man, who deliberately and at an early date conceived the course of action, canvassed it among chosen friends, and conspired with foreign agents to promote all the necessary preliminaries. It was only after, and because, Israel had received the green light from London that the Israelis, speaking through Yahel, thought fit to approach the French.”

  “In other words,” said Mark slowly, “the whole crisis was engineered by a handful of Cabinet Ministers - regardless, one imagines, of the wishes of the rest of the Cabinet.”

  “And without the knowledge of the rest of the Cabinet. Which explains why some departments, notably those responsible for the armed forces, were so badly caught out when the balloon went up. Nobody had warned the warlords.”

  “But surely . . . the guilty Ministers would have made the perfect scapegoats when the whole thing turned out such a disastrous flop?”

  “Not on your life. Could the Prime Minister get up and say that unknown to himself and most of his advisers a small body of men had successfully conspired to bring the country into what might have been total war? No. The whole affair had to be explained away as a well-meant response to a difficult situation, or excused as the dutiful support of a misguided ally, or even admitted as downright muddle - anything you like rather than revealed as a pre-concerted plan. And this involved keeping quiet about the guilty ministers . . . most of whom, I grant you, have since been edged out of the way. But three at least are too talented, too necessary, to be got rid of, and are riding high at this very moment. That letter, Lewson, not only discredits some leading members of today’s government, it could destroy the country’s confidence, for many years to come, in the entire image of Conservative rule.”

  “Valuable, as you say.”

  “Worth more than three million francs. Especially in an election year.”

  “And Lykiadopoulos?”

  “Simply does not know what to do. Out of his sphere, he says. He doesn’t want trouble, he says: he has an inbred Balkan fear that he’ll be knifed or blown up the minute he comes within a hundred miles of politics. Unfair, he says, to the French Minister’s son: to be compromised at the beginning of his career for having acted as go-between when still an innocent boy.”.

  “So he is a sentimental man.”

  “All gamblers are. A compensation for their way of life. But the real trouble with Lykiadopoulos is that he is being inept. He is so conditioned to dealing with short-term issues at the gaming table that he cannot think straight through when it comes to the longer distance. He cannot even distinguish clearly between the two kinds of market: between buyers who would pay for the letter in order to cry scandal and those who would pay, even more heavily perhaps, in order to ensure silence. He will not understand that a sale on the latter terms would guarantee, among other things, that there could never again be any risk of anyone getting at that wretched boy.”

  “Greeks don’t think in such terms. They are inured to a tradition of regurgitating personal honour, of vendetta, which ensures that no issue ever dies. Take the fortunes of the House of Atreus. ...”

  “Retribution inspired by a primitive religion,” said Max crossly. “There is no reason why this letter should cause any unpleasantness at all. All he has to do is negotiate its sale, for a large sum of money, into safety and oblivion.”

  “For a treasury cheque, you think?”

  “There are special funds for this kind of thing.”

  “Why not leave Lykiadopoulos to do as he likes? It’s his letter.”

  Angela collected the tea things on to a tray.

  “Since Lykiadopoulos has no use for the letter,” she said demurely, “I . . . we . . . thought it might come in handy for you.”

  “I see. I just march up to him and ask for it.”

  “Listen to Max,” she said, as if encouraging a petulant child to pay attention to paternal homily.

  Max grunted and heaved himself out of his chair to hold the door open. Angela passed out with the tray.

  “You can finish your little talk while I do the washing up,” she said. “Then we might all go for a nice walk.”

  Really, thought Mark, if I see much more of this “little woman” pose, I shall scream. Aloud he said.

  “Well? How do I get hold of it?”

  “You don’t sound grateful.”

  “I'll be grateful all right ... if you’ve got any kind of feasible suggestion.”

  “It’s very simple,” said Max. 'I'll give you a note of introduction. As I’ve told you, he’s a sentimental man. So you then take advantage of your opportunities to find out where the letter is and steal it.”

  “Very simple, I’m sure.”

  “You can’t expect the whole thing on a plate.”

  “Supposing I’m not his type?”

  “Anybody as young as you is his type.”

  “Supposing there’s someone else?”

  “He’s not one to refuse a little extra.”

  “Where is he then?”

  “In Venice. Hotel Danieli. He’s to run a big bank out on the Lido in about ten days’ time. You’d better do your stuff before it starts - he’ll be rather pre-occupied when it does.”

  “Just tell me this,” said Mark: “why are you so keen to have your own chum robbed?”

  “I’m keen, or rather Angie’s keen, to get rid of you on fair terms. As for my chum, the letter’s not doing him any good. Last and by no means least, I shall be interested to hear what you do with it.”

  “I’m not quite with you.”

  “Corruption in high places,” said Max patiently, “is a hobby of mine. I don’t exploit it, because I’ve already got my own little corner in human weakness, but I enjoy collecting instances. I told you just now that gamblers were sentimental. They are also desperately in need of reassurance. I’m not a gambler any more, but I live through gambling, and I too require constant reassurance.”

  “Reassurance about what, for Christ’s sake?”

  “I like to be reminded that the world is run, even at the highest level, by petty-minded and venal men. It makes me feel more secure - that I’m inside the regular pattern, that I’m conforming with an important human norm. You let me know how you dispose of that letter, what people say, what they want it for, and I assure you you’ll find me generous. Just a straight-forward account of the facts, that’s all. And don’t amuse yourself with sending me lies, Lewson. Because sooner or later I’d find out, and then God help you.”

  “And what will you do with this information?”

  “Hoard it like a miser’s gold. Take it out, during the long winter nights, and gloat over it. Compare it with the pompous speeches, the unctuous voices on television, then laugh myself silly and go contented to bed.”

  Angela came in.

  “I’ve done your packing,” she said to Mark meekly.

  “There’s a train at six. You can be in Milan by mid-night and go on to Venice tomorrow.”


  “And we can all come down to the station,” said Max happily, “to see,you off.”

  “Don’t worry. I shan’t hang around.”

  “My dear chap, a pleasure. I shall enjoy the walk, and Angie’s a great one for stations.”

  “Stations are such fun,” she murmured.

  So a little while later they all left the house and walked down the road, Mark Lewson carrying the single grip that contained all his movables, Max and Angela arm in arm like a married couple of long standing.

  2

  A GAME OF CHESS

  _____________________________________

  ABOUT THE same time as Mark Lewson was taking his seat at the chemin-de-fer table in Menton, two elderly gentlemen sat down on a terrace in Somersetshire. Although a chess board was set ready for play on a table between them, and although they went through the formality of moving the pieces, their attention to the game was cursory; which was not surprising, as they had both played much the same match together, down to the last tactic and almost to the last move, many times before. For the most part they looked neither at the board nor at each other, but gazed over the lawn beneath the terrace and the valley beneath the lawn and then away to the distant line of the Quantock Hills. When they spoke, it was as though they were taking part in a play and were addressing their words, quietly but firmly, to an audience on the grass below.