Silent War

by David Fiddimore

  I hadn’t handled that terribly well, had I? Hudd would kill me when he found out.

  ‘Maybe I am. But if I told you what it was, I’d have to kill you.’ I smiled to take the sting from it.

  ‘My women would literally skin you alive.’ He wasn’t fazed. ‘You must never cross a Kurdish woman, Charlie: devils incarnate.’

  ‘I’ll remember that.’

  ‘We removed nothing else, Charlie. Maybe the Jews or the French did. I will ask. Our family Frenchman may tell us, if the women ask him.’ There it was again; that little shudder inside.

  When I told Hudd, I asked him, ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’

  ‘The good news: it’s too nice a morning for the other.

  ‘He’s going to lend us a couple of pack mules and a couple of tribesmen to get the coins out of here . . .’

  ‘. . . and the bad news?’

  ‘He knows we’re looking for something else, but not what.’

  That stopped him for a minute. I tried a Josephine Baker number in my head. It was ‘After I say I’m sorry’.

  Hudd eventually sighed, ‘How’d that happen?’

  ‘I was asking him questions: I was clumsy. Sorry.’ Another pause. I finished the song.

  Hudd shrugged. ‘It happens. I’ve made mistakes like that. What else did they get from the plane?’

  ‘Radios, batteries, the seats . . . miles of electrical cabling, and the bloody machine guns of course. I didn’t ask about the other, but I think he’s truly intrigued. He thinks that the Israelis or the French must have had something away.’

  ‘What did you say about the other stuff?’

  ‘I told him to keep them. That’s when he offered me transport and free passage out of here.’

  ‘What goes around comes around,’ Hudd grinned. ‘Well done, Charlie.’ He’d stolen my bloody line, hadn’t he?

  We left the next day. The three wooden boxes were loaded on two donkeys, with enough blankets and supplies to get us across near a hundred miles of hill and dale. Not your friendly English hill and dale, but the unforgiving Kurdish variety. Mountain passes, dried-up river beds, and vegetation that wanted to rip your legs off. Van and his people turned out to see us go. Hudd had taken another forty coins from the boxes and handed them round, shaking hands with each person who received one. It was like he was handing out medals. I gave them Hudd’s man’s small pack and first-aid kit. They responded by whooping it up again, and shooting holes in the sky. Van gave me a hug, and called me brother . . . I think they were just glad of some company for a couple of days. The tribesmen he had picked to accompany us stood by the animals.

  Van told me, ‘These are my cousins; good men. They cannot betray you.’

  ‘I know. I wouldn’t expect any friend of yours to betray us.’

  ‘You don’t understand, Charlie . . . they cannot betray you.’ He muttered something to our two companions, who both grinned at me and opened their mouths. They had no teeth. And no tongues. Someone had been a bit too handy with a knife. Just the same as Levy’s man, Chig – what had these people got against tongues? At least we wouldn’t be plagued by their whistling on the trip. Van said goodbye, and led his people back inside their fortress. The hard silver wooden door was closed. They weren’t the types to watch us out of sight. I liked that.

  Chapter Twenty

  Over the hills and far away

  It was me that did the whistling. I couldn’t get that old school tune ‘Over the hills and far away’ out of my head. Hudd told me to shut up a couple of times. I didn’t pay much attention to him, but when our guides looked nervous and signed me to pipe down I complied. I worked out then that we’d moved onto some other bugger’s patch. These tribal leaders were like little local warlords, and we had to avoid them for three days. That meant no fires and cold porridge, until we came down the valleys and into the town.

  It was called Van, of course. Everything around here was called Van. There was Van and Tatvan and all the other little Vans clustered around one of the biggest inland stretches of water I’d ever seen: that was Lake Van, of course. The first time I saw it, it sparkled a deep blue green in the sun, and a deep green aromatic smell came off the bushes we pushed through. Like juniper.

  Our two guides were supposed to leave us and our boxes at a building known as the English House.

  The small plump man with specs who bustled out of the clapboard wooden house alongside the small church shook hands with all four of us.

  ‘Alan Weir. Been expecting you. Not really English: South African, but every time I said South African these beggars said English, and eventually they won. Wanted me to be English, you see. Now I’m sub-Consul for these parts. Trade mainly.’ He made you breathless just listening to him.

  ‘Charlie Bassett,’ I told him. ‘You’re the South African Consul?’

  ‘No, British. Don’t worry, you’ll understand eventually.’ He wore a dodgy dog collar on top of a grubby shirt. He was about fifty.

  ‘And you’re a priest?’

  ‘Minister. Methodist. Don’t let it worry you though.’ He seemed determined that nothing was going to worry me. That was interesting.

  Hudd gave the guides another gold coin each. They were delighted. One opened his shirt to show me that he already had two strung on a horsehair lanyard around his neck.

  ‘Made him rich,’ Weir told us.

  ‘What will he do with it?’

  ‘Buy another wife. He already has one; you can tell that from the tattoo on the back of his hand.’ I’d travelled with the guy for nearly four days, and hadn’t noticed the blue star just above a knuckle.

  They helped us carry the boxes into Weir’s house. Two boxes took two men each to lift. The third was lighter. They left that for me. I was sweating before I put it down. After Şiwan’s people had left, laden now with panniers of flat breads, yoghurt, fresh water – and big toothless smiles – the minister told us, ‘Some people might think your boxes safer in the church, but they’d be wrong. There is more than one Islamic sect, you see, and whenever they fall out with each other they burn our church down.’

  I thought about it. ‘That doesn’t make much sense.’

  ‘Does, you know. It’s the only thing they can agree upon. Come and have some tea: you’ve missed lunch.’

  I don’t know what I’d expected, but cheese and watercress sandwiches, in proper white bread, weren’t all that high up on the list. Earl Grey tea, too. I recognized it as such because it was what Grace’s mother once served me in the orangery of her huge house, when I was still getting on with them. There we were, sitting beside a small fortune in gold coins, at the end of the fucking world, enjoying an English afternoon tea. I told you: surrealism is all around you – all you have to do is look.

  Weir’s guest room looked exactly the same as Şiwan Van’s. Even the furniture, carpets and beds had come out of the same shop. Maybe they had used the same interior decorator. We shoved the boxes under the beds. Then I had a bath – the first hot water in nearly two weeks – and went for a snooze. Hudd was already on his back and snoring. Even from across the room, he smelled worse than our donkeys. When I awoke it was dark through the small window, and I was alone. I had a hard-on. That happens to men, you know, but we don’t often talk about it. I was also thinking about Haye with an e. That was interesting.

  When Hudd came down to the dining room he had spruced himself up. We dined local style, cross-legged on carpets around a low table. There was a mudbrick stove in the corner, throwing out a decent heat, and finer carpets between the niches in the wall. These small hollows contained candles, highly polished brass pots and small religious paintings . . . and a large wooden crucifix propped up in a corner reminded us where we were. The food had been served by a rather beautiful girl of about eighteen in native clothes; bright silks. She laughed a lot, and surprised me by joining us once the food was on the table. Her eyes and hair were as black as crows’ feathers.

  ‘My wife, Arzu,’ Weir offered
. ‘Turkish. She was a server in our church in Ankara when we met. So we had to come out here.’

  I smiled at her, pointed to myself and said, ‘Charlie,’ and to Hudd, and said, ‘Hudd.’ Then, ‘Thank you for putting up with us.’ I spoke laboriously, hoping that she could follow it. She smiled back prettily. I bet she did everything prettily.

  ‘You are welcome; Alan likes entertaining, but doesn’t often get the opportunity.’ The only sign that English wasn’t her first language was the way she strung out the five-syllable word.

  Hudd nodded, and said, ‘You speak wonderful English.’

  ‘I learned at the English School. Alan taught me.’

  ‘Minister,’ I said to him. ‘Consul, and teacher too . . .’

  ‘Head teacher . . .’ she corrected me.

  ‘Keeps me off the streets,’ he said, and laughed.

  ‘. . . and he sells the bus tickets,’ she added. I liked the way that smiles moved between them as if they were speaking a private language.

  Ah, I thought, and asked him, ‘Where does your bus go?’

  ‘Istanbul; if your backsides can bear it. Takes three days on wooden seats . . . now, where do you want to start; lamb or goat?’ He lifted the lid on two steaming dishes of meat and vegetables. The smells rose orange and yellowy from them, and thick, like London fogs. My mouth literally watered. I almost missed the blue star on the back of his hand as I handed my plate to him.

  ‘So that’s your plan. It’s prosaic but very simple: I like that. We are going to escape on a bus. Why do buses always make me think of Piccadilly Circus?’

  I was lying back on my bed talking to the dark. The room was warm – the stove chimney climbed up one corner – I was full, and I’d even had a bottle of beer to round the meal off: Weir made his own, and had told us earlier:

  ‘Not strictly supposed to – but the Muslim administration turns a blind eye to Europeans as long as we are still useful to them. Owner of the flour mill, for example, is a very devout man, but about twice a week he will call in and ask me for a glass or two of “medicine” for his bad chest, and I send him reeling home a few hours later. He always leaves a sack of best flour. He’s also the chairman of the local tribal council, so I never have a problem with labour for rebuilding the church after it has been burned down.’

  I’d smiled. ‘That sounds like an interesting arrangement.’

  ‘It is: you can always come to interesting arrangements with God.’

  Now Hudd replied to me, ‘You couldn’t be more wrong if you tried.’

  ‘I’m not riding four hundred miles on a donkey, Hudd.’

  ‘You’ll do whatever I tell you to do. I do the logistics; you’re only the brains of the outfit.’ That made me laugh. Somehow I was laughing more frequently and more easily these days. I wondered if it was anything to do with Şiwan’s tobacco.

  ‘How old do you think Alan is?’ I asked.

  ‘Fifty. Fifty-five maybe?’

  ‘Bit of an old goat, isn’t he? Arzu can’t be twenty yet.’

  ‘Ask me again when you’re fifty yourself, Charlie. You may see things differently then.’

  I’d got my pipe going and a nice fug up. Hudd didn’t complain this time. It wouldn’t have occurred to me back in the Fifties to have asked anyone if they objected.

  ‘When are we leaving here, Hudd?’

  ‘As soon as I find out what those Israelis are up to, and if they got the paper money; I haven’t forgotten it ya’ know. If they were up on that plateau a coupla weeks ago they could still be about. I don’t know if they got the dosh, but I want to be able to tell your Mr Watson one way or the other. Can you send him a signal from here?’

  ‘I can try. There may not be anyone listening now he knows it’s a cock-up.’

  ‘OK. Try: tell him where we are, and that we’re still looking for the dollars . . . and use your bloody code book.’

  ‘Yes, master.’

  ‘. . . and cut out the sarcasm.’

  ‘Yes, master.’ He threw a carpet-covered cushion at me.

  Watson responded immediately. After that there were gaps in the transmission while we decoded between separate bursts. He surprised me by asking after our welfare first. Warm, fed and safe as we’ve been in days I sent him. He came back with Take no chances: not worth another loss. He couldn’t bring himself to signal Not worth another death – we British can be oddly squeamish at times; I’m sure you’ve noticed. Or maybe Watson had a soft side after all. I told him where we were, and how we were fixed, and that I’d stick to my broadcasting schedule the next day. I signed off.

  ‘He must be sleeping alongside the radio,’ I told Hudd. ‘He’s worried about us.’

  ‘Not as much as I am.’

  ‘How are you going to find the Israelis?’

  ‘How big is this town, Charlie? Two hundred houses? Three?’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘All we have to do is stick around long enough, and I think they’ll find us.’

  ‘Oh.’ I wasn’t sure that I liked that.

  The smell of the smoke from the stove lingered in the room. It wasn’t unlike the smell of peats burning I’d come across in the west of Scotland a few years earlier.

  I was sleepy when I asked, ‘What do they burn in the stove, Hudd? It smells sweet . . . just like peat.’

  ‘Camel and horse dung. They dry it out in long barns in the summer, an’ it lasts all winter.’

  Kurds with turds, I thought. That was even better.

  In the morning we discussed our problem. The difficulty was that if either of us wandered around on his own we would be taking a big chance. On the other hand, both of us sallying forth together would leave our boxes unguarded, and that wasn’t such a good idea either. We tossed for it. I got to stay at home while Hudd did our first recce. Neither of us was happy about it, but it was the best option. He could have gone out with Weir, but that would only draw attention to the minister, and ultimately us. Despite what he had said before, Hudd wanted to keep our presence at Weir’s house as discreet as possible.

  I waved him off like a wifey waving her husband off to work. I cleaned and checked my small pistol, and then read one of Weir’s books. It was Trouble Shooter by an American named Louis L’Amour. Weir had an amazing collection of Westerns propped up between two massive Bibles. There’s a message in there somewhere. Arzu flip-flopped in and out on bare feet from time to time: tidying, dusting, moving from room to room. Every time she passed near I got a whiff of her scent, stopped thinking about my book, and began thinking of other things; and she knew it. Maybe I should buy myself a camera, and try out Nancy’s lines. Alan Weir walked through on one occasion speaking aloud – he was composing his next sermon in his head. He wore an amused smile. The day dragged on, and after our days up in the hills it was like being in prison. I even looked forward to Hudd’s ugly old mug reappearing.

  When it did we sat in the kitchen because it was warmer, and Arzu prepared us Turkish coffee. Weir was out bothering his flock.

  ‘There are a few Europeans around,’ Hudd told me. ‘Most of them are from the oil companies. BP has an office here, and so has Shell. They’re exploring. So are the Americans and the French. It’s a bit like a gold rush. The first one to find major deposits of oil will come up with an offer the government and locals can’t resist – but the companies won’t bid until they’ve actually found the stuff.’

  ‘Is there much?’

  ‘Loads and loads of it, apparently. It will just depend on whether it’s cost-effective to get it out of the ground.’

  ‘What about Şiwan’s Jews?’ Even as I said that I felt uncomfortable. ‘I don’t like saying that word anymore; isn’t that odd?’

  ‘The Nazis discredited it. Jews don’t mind calling themselves Jews; it’s only us. We think it makes us sound like Nazis. I know what you mean: the Israelis have murdered British soldiers and nurses, torn the Middle East in half, and still we can’t call them what they call themselves. I usually say I
sraelis, but whenever I say it I feel like a coward.’

  ‘What about Şiwan’s Israelis, then?’

  He made the effort and said, ‘I met a drunken Welshman who said there’s a bunch of Jews living in a villa down by the lakeside.’ He grinned: like he didn’t mean it.

  ‘Well done. Was he one of your oilmen?’

  ‘No. He works for the British Council.’

  ‘What’s he doing up here?’

  ‘Looking for poets, he said.’

  ‘Are there any?’

  ‘Loads, apparently, and nobody knows what to do with them . . . they’re nowhere near as useful as oil.’

  I heard Weir come back and call a greeting. Arzu joined us at the table and helped Hudd draw a map on which he marked out the bars where men smoked, and drank coffee, and the small bazaars where people wandered. Weir came in after five minutes, and looked over her shoulder. They bickered amiably over whether the shops were marked in the right places. Their alterations had made the map almost unintelligible.

  I asked Hudd, ‘What’s it for, anyway?’

  ‘Your turn now: you can visit a few places tonight, and see what you can turn up. You’ll need a map ’cos there ain’t no street lights out there. Leicester Square it isn’t.’

  ‘What do I use for money?’

  ‘Alan’s changed a couple of sovereigns for me. You can buy a small family an’ all their goats for that.’

  ‘. . . and camels’ teeth,’ Arzu added. ‘My father said that when he was a boy he could buy spices with camels’ teeth.’

  ‘What would people want camels’ teeth for?’

  ‘For good luck, of course!’ There was no denying it. She had a delicious little giggle.

  They dowsed the lights at the front of the house that night, so that no one would see me slip out if the place was being watched. Just before she opened the door for me, Arzu gave me a peck on the cheek, and I felt her hand in the pocket of my leather jacket. It paused when she touched my pistol, and then moved past it.

  She wasn’t being improper; she whispered, ‘For good luck,’ and her hand was gone.