I saw an alleyway going off, its name neatly and newly painted on a wall: ‘Clean Street’. Captain Stevens had come here earlier in the day – to number 11. That spot had also been marked on Jarvis’s map, and I hadn’t had the chance to ask him about it.
Clean Street was only clean in comparison to Dead Camel Street. I walked along the dusty, broken cobbles to the last building, which was long and low, with arched windows of dusty glass, yet it seemed as if I was seeing only the tops of the windows, as though the building had been pressed down into the ground. There were two doors, both painted with a number 11, and one of the two stood open. It gave on to a stone staircase, which took me down to a further door, and from beyond this came the sound of a rapid whipping, and a desperate groaning. I pushed at the door as a cockney voice within roared, ‘What’s your purpose, John? What’s your purpose?’
My eyes roved over a vast, echoing basement packed with boxing Tommies. Well, Tommies and sepoys both. There were three boxing rings, and shirtless men in white shorts either scrapping in the rings or milling about in between, or hitting at punchballs, or skipping, which accounted for the whipping noise. I looked at one of the skippers, and he doubled his speed, commencing a kind of dance into the bargain. It took me a second to realise that a horn gramophone was playing American music – all shaking drums with a band of lunatic trumpeters trying to keep up. The walls were green tiles, shining with sweat, and hung with home-made banners. I read ‘51st Sikhs’, ‘53rd Sikhs’, ‘2nd Leicestershires’. Clouds of steam somersaulted through the unbreathable air. The place was evidently connected up to a generator, for it was lit by crude electric lamps that would flash occasionally – or had I blinked twice in disbelief?
A rather faint voice behind me said, ‘You are to sign in first, sir,’ but I paid it no mind. The man who’d been roaring ‘What’s your purpose‚ John?’ was now down to ‘Purpose, John! Purpose!’ He was an instructor at the ring closest to me. One fighter – the purposeless John, who was taking a pasting – wore leather headgear to soften the blows and save the brain. These were a new thing in boxing and my governor in the railway police, Chief Inspector Weatherill (a champion army boxer in his day), was dead against them. The other bloke, the one handing out the pasting, hadn’t bothered with one.
‘What are you, sir? Welterweight?’ said the instructor. He wanted me in that ring – wanted to see an officer get bashed. ‘Get stripped off, sir, and you can go against the southpaw.’ As I stood stunned, he roared out ‘Two minutes!’ and the pair in the ring resumed their scrap.
A southpaw was a left-hander, I knew that much. But in the flurry of the scrap, it was the devil of a job to see which man fitted the bill. ‘That bloke’ll be your mark, sir,’ the instructor said, seeing my difficulty, and indicating the meaner-looking of the two, the one without the helmet, ‘Irwin – the little machine-gunner.’
At this, I started. ‘Machine-gunner? What company?’
‘Eh?’
I indicated the ring. I was pretty sure neither fighter had yet clapped eyes on me. ‘The southpaw,’ I said, ‘the machine-gunner. What company?’
The answer came back slowly. It was quite a mouthful, after all:
‘Irwin, sir . . . he’s in the 185th Machine Gun Company. I know that, see, because I’m in the 186th.’
I hadn’t exactly been clutching at a straw. There wouldn’t be more than a dozen or so machine-gun companies in Baghdad.
‘Kit’s over there, sir,’ said the instructor, ‘in that room by the little blokes.’
He pointed over to some Indians, who were watching one of their fellows laying into a punchbag – only he did more prancing than punching, and his pals laughed at him for it. They were near a low archway. I ducked down through it, coming to a cooler subterranean room that was half swimming bath, half changing room, which is to say the boxing kit was tumbled about in a series of baskets placed on the stone edging of the pool. The place was empty, crypt-like – a flooded crypt lit by candle stubs, and cooler than the gymnasium on account of the water, which was greyish, but damned inviting all the same.
I put my hands on some kit that fitted – all save for the gloves and headgear. This last was the key item. The man Irwin had not looked my way, and he never would get sight of my features as long as I wore the protector, which covered the cheeks and temples as well as the skull. I would quiz him from behind it. After all, boxers did talk in the ring; they weren’t supposed to but they did. It was usually of the order of ‘Stand still while I clout you, you fucking rotter!’ but I would ask Irwin about what if anything he’d seen at the Baghdad railway station on the night the town fell.
Glancing about, I saw two of the protectors spilled out of a canvas bag. I put one on and I thought, I’m a fucking racehorse in blinkers. Feeling a prize chump in baggy shorts, I found my way back to the ring and to the instructor, who was bawling at his fighters, ‘As you were, gentlemen, as you were!’, at which they left off punching. Irwin stayed up, the other climbed down. The instructor went off somewhere, came back with gloves for me. I held out my hands, and he laced them without a word. My opponent shadow-boxed in the ring; or he was dancing to the American music. As he moved, he was in a bath of sweat.
‘See your stance, sir?’ said the instructor.
I put up my fists, and he immediately wheeled away, as though in disgust. But it was just that another bloke wanted his attention. This other bloke was a big bloke – heavyweight – and had blood coming from his nose. It was coming down on to his chest, and every so often he’d swirl it about all over his front in a manner rather child-like; otherwise he didn’t seem too bothered about it. The bloodied man tipped his head back, and the instructor watched his nose bleed for a while, then sent him away with a word I couldn’t hear, but which made the other laugh. The instructor turned back to me, and made no remark on my stance, but just said, ‘Keep your chin down, sir. Don’t hit him with this . . .’ at which he nearly hit me with the palm of his hand.
I climbed into the ring, and the instructor shouted ‘Two minutes!’ which was evidently the signal for ‘begin’ as well as ‘stop’, and Irwin the southpaw machine-gunner came over and clouted me. Whether he’d done it with his left or his right I was for the moment too dazed to say, even though the protector had somewhat lessened the force of the blow. He then started dancing again. I aimed a couple of blows at his midriff, which he defended easily. You were supposed to go for the solar plexus, but where the hell was that?
‘You were at the station with Captain Boyd,’ I said. ‘On the night the city fell.’
He gave me a left and right to the head.
‘No talking,’ he said. He was a Londoner. His plimsoles squeaked furiously on the canvas.
I tried the following lie: ‘I was at school with him.’
‘You don’t sound like you were. Sorry sir, are you an officer?’
‘I am,’ I said, and he went into a faster dance, as though in celebration at having an officer to bash. ‘He’s been found dead,’ I said. ‘At the railway station again.’
‘I’ve heard that, sir,’ said Irwin, still dancing.
I said, ‘Did anything funny happen there? First time around, I mean?’
Irwin came for me again, and this time I defended better, or thought I did, but the instructor, looking up, said, ‘Box hard, box hard,’ as though I’d just been nancying about.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Irwin, ‘and how do you mean “funny”?’
The instructor shouted, ‘As you were, as you were.’
Was this the end of the bout or the end of the round? Evidently the former, for my opponent said, ‘Go again in a minute, eh sir?’
‘Captain Boyd went into the station with another officer,’ I said.
He nodded, went over to his corner for a towel, came back.
‘Boyd was my C.O., sir. A good man. We were in an advance party with some infantry. This other officer was with this infantry lot . . . I mean as far as I could make out. He went in
to the station where the Turks were. A little later, Captain Boyd went in.’
‘What happened then?’
‘They came out.’
‘In what order?’
‘Captain Boyd first, then the other chap, as far as I recall . . . There was a lot of smoke floating about, sir, some pretty hard scrapping in the vicinity of the station . . . and the train was pulling out. It was a confused situation, sir, and there was a hell of a din.’
‘Two minutes!’ called the bloody instructor. Then, to me, ‘He’s a southpaw, keep left!’ (Having observed my performance, he’d dropped the ‘sir’.)
Irwin was immediately dancing again. Talk about ‘passed A1’; he was as fit as a flea. He walloped me a few times, and I suddenly found I hardly had the energy to lift my arms, let alone take a shot at him. We went into some close stuff, tangled arms, and I wasn’t so much sweating as melting. I’d been scrapping for a little over two minutes, yet I was practically asleep on Irwin’s shoulder.
‘What did the other officer do when he came out?’ I asked, drowsily. ‘Was he carrying anything?’
‘Lead!’ the instructor was calling, ‘Lead!’ but it was a lost cause, and he knew it.
‘He was,’ said Irwin.
He was at me again with fists flying.
‘What?’ I said, reeling back.
‘Don’t know. A package; a box. He held it under his arm.’
I put a pretty good right on Irwin’s ear.
‘And what did Boyd do?’ I said.
Irwin was dancing again. ‘He told us we were to stand by. And then . . .’
‘Yes?’
The instructor was shouting again: ‘Time! Time!’ which, thank Christ, brought an end to the bout, leaving the two of us standing in the middle of the ring at rather a loose end. My head burned though. I would have to take the protector off in a minute.
‘Some more artillery came up, and it was all back to – you know – confusion,’ said Irwin. He walked over to his corner, picked up a towel; I followed him. New fighters were climbing into the ring. I nodded at Irwin, and we touched gloves.
I asked, ‘What was the expression on Boyd’s face when he came out of the station?’
‘The expression?’ said Irwin, evidently appalled by the question. ‘Well, it was the middle of a battle. So I suppose he looked worried. We all did.’
I nodded. ‘The other chap?’
Irwin hesitated, and a slow grin came over his face: ‘Winked at me, he did, just as he was walking by. It was very fast so it might not have been a wink. But I believe it was.’
Luckily, Irwin did not follow me to the changing room, where I pitched away the cursed protector, had a dunk in the water, and put on my uniform. With head down, I headed back through the gym towards the door, where the faint voice piped up again: ‘You’ve to sign out, sir, if you would be so kind as to do so. And I don’t believe you signed in.’
A young sepoy sat by the door, with a ledger, a pen, blotting paper and a watch on a little table before him. The kid couldn’t have been more than sixteen. He spread his beautiful thin fingers over the paper, showing me where I should have signed in, giving my unit and the time, and where I ought to sign out, putting the time again. He gave me a pen, and I did what every other man did – wrote scrawl, which was a shame, everything being so beautifully presented by the boy.
‘Your time in was nine twenty-five,’ said the boy as I scribbled. ‘Your time out is ten fifteen.’
If you did P.T. or sports you could cut certain fatigues, and that was the reason for the ledger. My eye roved over the list of names, and the one I didn’t want to see came towards the end: ‘Captain W. P. D. Stevens’ of ‘Corps HQ’. He had booked in at eight ten, left at nine fifty-five. In other words, he’d been in the place when I’d arrived, and left at about the time I’d completed my bout with Irwin. Well, it would only signify if (a) he was in league with Shepherd, (b) he’d seen me, and (c) he worked out that I was quizzing Irwin, and why I was quizzing him. But I had a pretty good notion that he must have seen me.
I stepped back into Clean Street hoping for cooler air, and not finding it. I turned into Dead Camel Street thinking hard, only faintly aware of the drone of a petrol motor. I’d not gone ten yards before I was blinded by a horrible glare. I raised my arm to shield my eyes, and turned away.
‘That’s no bloody good,’ said a voice.
‘He’s blinded, Mr King,’ said another. ‘Dazzled, he is.’
The light swung away from me, so that it illuminated the camels’ heads on one side of the street only, and I was able to see its source: a great searchlight attached to a generator, an entire field searchlight company standing around it, together with Wallace’s King’s bloody camera, Wallace King’s assistant (who also wore a uniform without badges, only his was a private’s) and Wallace King himself. He held a loudhailer by his side.
‘This is Dead Camel Street!’ he called out. ‘It’s full of dead camels. It’s not every day you get a street full of dead camels.’ He raised the hailer to his lips for added emphasis: ‘It’s interesting! It’s a curiosity! Could you turn around and come back looking slightly less blasé about it? Just ignore the light. Go out of the street and come back in again.’
I went out of it all right, and found a different route back to Rose Court.
The place was silent. No sign of Ahmad or Jarvis. I stripped off all my sweat-soaked clothes. I lit a lamp . . . and the main room was all in perfect order – there were not even any flies. But I became aware of a steady ticking. The sound froze me. I could not detect the source of it. I picked up the lamp, and carried it about the room, listening hard. The ticking was louder near the bed. It came from underneath the bed. The lamp would not fit under the bed, so I lit a match, and moved it towards the thing. It was made of wood and brass. I shook out the match, reached in again, and pulled the device a little way towards me. After further contemplation, I pulled it again.
The answer broke in on me only when I turned it upside down. The contraption was quite involved, but in summary I held a rectangular wooden block with a spindle threaded through it. The block was smeared with grease; I swiped at it with my finger and put it to my lips – Ahmad had used the fat from whatever meat he had cooked for me three hours since. The mechanism periodically turned the block through a hundred and eighty degrees so that the flies that had been on the top were deposited into a mesh cage beneath. And the cage seethed with flies. I set the flytrap next to the light, and sat naked on the floor, contemplating the little prisoners. Why must they fret so? Wouldn’t they be better off keeping still in this incredible heat? I put the thing back under the bed but decided, two sleepless hours later, that its tick was keeping me awake. I took it out into the rose garden, where I left it. I then thoroughly soaked my bed sheet at the creaking water pump.
I lay down again under the wet sheet, but I knew sleep to be a luxury out of the question. I was concentrating now on breathing.
Chapter Eight
I climbed out of bed with the sun, and opened the door to Jarvis’s room. He was asleep, twisted up in his one sheet, with four empty bottles of Bass lined up by his bed. One more bottle, I reckoned, and I would have had to say something, not least because I knew he had some driving duties in prospect for that day. There wasn’t much else in the room, beside the bottles. He appeared to keep most of his belongings stuffed into his pack, which leant against the wall next to his rifle. There was a book open on the floor near my boot. I leant down and read the spine: The City of the Khalifs.
It was Ahmad who prepared the breakfast: yoghurt, figs, coffee. I ate them in the scullery as he glowered at me.
From the stone sink, he indicated Jarvis’s room, saying, ‘He . . . trouble.’
‘Why?’
‘Make scream,’ he said. He opened his mouth wide to reveal a jumble of black teeth, and raised his hands to his face, making a dumb show of screaming. It was worse than if he had screamed.
‘In his sleep?’ I said,
and Ahmad nodded.
‘Really,’ he said.
I asked Ahmad, ‘Are there Turkish cigarettes for sale in Baghdad?’
‘Turkish,’ he said, ‘Turkish gone.’
‘But their cigarettes?’
‘Many cigarettes here. Turkish gone,’ he said again, and he smiled. ‘You boot them out. You booted.’
‘I know,’ I said.
Silence for a space.
‘Is good,’ he said, contemplating me.
‘What?’ I said, and he indicated the open door, and the rose garden beyond. ‘Beautiful weather.’
‘It’s far too hot,’ I said.
‘In London ugly weather.’
‘I am not from London,’ I said, and he folded his arms and scowled at me, repeating, ‘In London, ugly weather.’
The labyrinth baked, and I baked in it as I threaded through the alleyways towards the British Residency. I would send my message to Manners before putting in my day’s work with Shepherd. In fact, I hoped it would be only a half day, since it was Saturday.
A new sentry directed me to the telegraph office, and I crossed the quadrangle in the direction indicated, passing a pool where a fountain was supposed to come out of stone fruit, but did not. The Turks had stabled horses here, and that was the fragrance of the quadrangle, while in the interior the smell of hot carpet took over. The place was museum-like, with great oil paintings of desert scenes and fancy carvings around the door frames. On the second floor, one of these doors was marked ‘Post Room’ and as I passed by, a pock-marked and dishevelled-looking Tommy came out of it, with a bunch of keys in his hand. He did not salute, but eyed me with curiosity. He was not the sort of man who ought to have come out of that sort of door.
The Baghdad Railway Club Page 10