The Man Who Knew Everything

by Tom Stacey

  ‘The Emir would never stand for it. Thingumme’s about to be deported. The Emir wants him forgotten.’

  ‘I could give the Emir the main crack of the whip – lead with an interview with him. But I’d need a quote from Thingumme too.’

  ‘He’d never consent – his views being balanced by Thingumme. A complete upstart. An excitable student managed by the Russians. He spent three years in Odessa, you know.’

  ‘Hero of the oil workers even so,’ Jones insists. ‘The Emir’s income depends entirely on oil. It’s what the story’s about.’

  She looks up hot and perturbed under the rim of her floppy hat. ‘The Emir won’t even know you’re on the island. It’s against all the rules.’

  ‘Your father’s told him.’

  ‘The Wazir told him?’

  ‘So he said. Look, Romy, house arrest doesn’t necessarily mean incommunicado.’

  He can read the injury in her face. ‘If you press ahead with it, it’ll spoil . . .’ she begins, but doesn’t finish.

  They occupy different worlds. When she drops him off at the hotel – the original Darwish – there is a cable waiting for him from his Foreign Editor, SUGGEST 850 WORDER MAXIMUM GULF ROUNDUP INSIDE PROFRIDAY CUMBAKER EMIR CONTEST HOOK STOP HAST PIC BAKER QUERY CANST UPMOP BEIRUT HOMEWARDING STOP INFORMING LIZ ACCORDINGLY REGARDS BILL.

  Jones asks his taxi-driver to take him to wherever Al-Bakr is being held. The man pretends not to understand, then not to know. Jones makes a thin roll of a couple of dirty banknotes and pokes it over the driver’s shoulder from the back seat like a doctor’s implement going into an orifice. They set off and the driver pulls up several yards short of a carefully inconspicuous bungalow on the edge of the town. Jones steps out with his Rolleiflex round his neck. He can hear all the muezzins, one after another, launching into the call to midday prayer. No one appears to be guarding the bungalow, but as he approaches he can see through an open doorway a policeman in uniform playing backgammon with a weedy young man in civilian shirt and trousers, and another uniformed man to one side drinking tea from a glass. When the weedy young man catches sight of Jones he guesses immediately and reaches for his black and white chequered head-cloth to look his part. He is not more than twenty-five and already balding – a scrap of a man with delicate nervous fingers and his spectacles held together by tape. The policemen have looked up puzzled: they are expecting no English official.

  By the time they have moved to the threshold, fitting on their caps, they are surprised to see the tall figure sauntering back towards the taxi.

  That was as near as Jones ever got to Al-Bakr. A quarter of a century ago. It was the first time in his life that he had allowed another consideration to take precedence over the assignment.

  Rivers had apparently asked, ‘Why shut the school?’ and McCulloch was explaining that the old Emir knew that Al-Bakr, from hiding, was recruiting rank-and-file Arab oil and port workers into an underground union and presumably feared the infection might spread to the big secondary school where bored, pretentious students, some of them twenty years of age or more, were attempting to secure qualifications a changing world seemed to expect. Everyone knew they were undisciplined and indulged by their parents.

  A voice intervened from behind the raised copy of the Post. ‘There’s no groundswell of opposition.’

  ‘That so?’ Rivers had to say.

  ‘If you think you’ve come for a big story,’ Jones added, ‘settle down for a long wait. Months. Years, probably.’

  ‘We don’t think we’ve come for anything, do we, Phil, do we, Mick? It’s London trying to be clever.’

  When the old man brought his paper down at last it was like a curtain rising on a dead past. First he regarded Rivers, then McCulloch. ‘Are you leading on this school?’ he said.

  ‘It wouldn’t be very tactful,’ McCulloch answered. ‘We’ll run a single column down the right-hand side. We’ll lead on the loan to Egypt.’

  ‘What are we meant to do?’ Rivers protested. Events conspired to frustrate Rivers, which, for someone of his stature, they had little right to do. ‘We might as well get some lunch and take a swim, eh fellows? They give us lunch by the pool in this place?’ He fingered his shark’s tooth. ‘So you can’t get us an interview with this Al Whatsit, Gran? What about the imprisoned Prince, the Man in the Iron Mask?’

  ‘Hatim?’

  ‘Yes, Hatim. Love ’im, Hatim.’

  ‘He’s under house arrest. In a villa.’

  ‘Couldn’t we visit?’

  ‘Not possibly.’

  ‘Just shoot the villa? The comings and goings.’

  Phil affirmed, ‘It’s shit-awful television.’

  ‘I doubt if you’ll get a picture of the villa,’ Jones said.

  ‘I bet we bloody can. We’ve got to shoot something.’

  ‘You’d get yourselves arrested,’ Jones told him.

  ‘For taking a picture of the outside of a villa? What sort of a fascist is this Emir? Why don’t we see the old codger himself? That’s what we’ve got to do.’

  ‘He doesn’t give interviews.’

  ‘He’ll bloody well give interviews when the people have dumped him in the dock.’

  ‘The people like him,’ Jones corrected.

  ‘Do they, Sandy?’ Rivers asked.

  Jones picked up the Post again.

  ‘By and large,’ McCulloch endorsed.

  ‘So when did he hold an election? No, look – we’ve got to go and do him.’

  Jones wasn’t going to tell him again that the Emir didn’t give interviews. Let him find out.

  Others began to swell the group – a London merchant banker, flabby and amiable and sharp, with whom McCulloch let it be thought he had a private understanding; young Carew from Reuters, a weasel of a man, who it emerged had made a good half dozen telephone calls within an hour of flying in; the oil company’s chief public affairs man, a wry American, with his cards, which perhaps were not high, held very close to his chest. All were by way of pecking fragments off of one another: when it came to the crunch, these Arabs weren’t predictable, they occupied their own, strange, Mussulman world . . . They treated Jones respectfully enough and sometimes consulted him on a point of fact, but as the conversation found its feet they paid him less and less heed. The consensus was that something was brewing. Fuad Al-Bakr, everyone seemed to know, had been smuggled back into the island in the past few days. The oil town was thick with rumour.

  More beer came: Jones was damned if he was going to have a round put down to his bar account: he hadn’t asked them to join him in the first place.

  The talk became such a mush of blather that he could only distinguish the recurring misjudgments like grit in gruel. Life seemed to him interminably long and mankind did not improve. He wondered what it was that was supposed to make mankind so important.

  He pushed himself up and went to the telephone booth in the foyer. He felt wobbly and it took him two minutes to remember the private number of the Diwan, the Emir’s principal secretary. Nobody answered. What did they suppose, these half-fledged know-alls? That the old Emir craved power? Hoarded it like a miser – he who had been born to it? It was an antique habit, an obscure and burdensome obligation. Like remaining alive. He dialled the palace number. An assistant secretary said the Diwan was in a meeting. Jones left a message that he had called. When he returned to the bar-room he sat by himself. He drafted his brief dispatch with another Tuborg. The school was closed, he wrote, as a precaution against agitation among groups of elderly students, known to be bored and restless, by elements of the so-called Gulf Liberation Movement directed by Fuad Al-Bakr, whose recent pronouncements, released outside the island, had become increasingly inflammatory. He copied it out in capital letters on a sheet of hotel writing-paper and gave it to the head porter to send down to Cable and Wireless.

  Then he ate hot meat pie and green beans which Abdullah brought him from the bar, and drank two brandies because he was not feeling himself. The gro
up he had left were still yattering away, occasionally breaking into laughter – the hooting of Rivers, the television anchorman (as he understood they were called), being louder than the rest. He considered a noticeable laugh to indicate a flaw in personality. They gave him no further attention, and when the porter came with the receipt from Cable and Wireless he realised they were all gone.

  3

  It was well after 4 p.m. as he emerged into the sun, climbed into his old Packard and drove noisily home. He was a little drunk and profoundly depressed. How dare these young puppies from London insult him to his face? As for the Reuters pipsqueak, sitting there drinking little and giving nothing away, he hadn’t consulted him on anything. He, Jones, happened not to know for certain whether Al-Bakr was back on the island and he was damned if he was going to find out unless he was obliged to.

  What was the GLM, in any case? These credulous young reporters talked of it as if it were a genuine political force! It was nothing but a handful of recalcitrants and ex-students, motivated by envy, who had picked up a notion of fading socialist populism in the West. By putting out a few press releases they earned themselves wads of money from Libya and elsewhere which in turn enabled them to open offices in certain capitals. If the Western media didn’t take their pretensions at face value, they’d be seen as the semi-educated talking-shop they were. If he, Jones, let off one little bomb in a United States Information Service reading room and got Abdullah the waiter to call a press conference in Tripoli in the name of, let’s say, the ‘Pan-Arab Revolutionary Council’, these same simpletons would turn up with their notebooks and television cameras and scatter the world with forecasts of proletarian upheaval wherever a king or emir still ruled.

  As he entered the dark passageway beyond his front door, he heard the telephone ringing in the bedroom. He wasn’t going to run for it and, by the time he reached it, the ringing had stopped. If it’s London, he thought, they’ll put the call in again: it wasn’t yet 2 p.m. in London. He kicked off his sandals and lay on the bed against his pillows. He loosened his trousers and thought how immensely ancient his feet looked. Ancient and mute and wise. Had all his old wisdom gone to his feet? He felt an obscure loyalty to those gnarled, chipped extremities that had tramped the world with him, slaved for him, expected nothing in return. He realised he was drunk. He often noticed how drink would unpin his body and make it a random aggregate of parts and features which he himself looked upon from somewhere else.

  He did not wake until 8 p.m. Darkness surrounded him. He sat up. His whole body felt as if a weight had settled on it. He slid his old feet into his flip-flops and shuffled through to the bathroom and then into the kitchen. He tipped out cornflakes and poured on evaporated milk. Only a drop in the tin. He looked around vainly for another. Ants were moving over the sugar like columns of redcoats in the snow. He couldn’t bear cornflakes with too little milk. He opened a can of beer and took it back to the bedroom. He undressed now, and got into bed. He drank the beer slowly, and fell asleep again. At about 3 a.m. he woke. He lay awake in the dark, thinking. He had slept now almost continuously for about ten hours. He couldn’t sleep any more.

  About an hour later he got up and pottered through to the majlis. It was a stifling night. He switched on the air conditioning and it shuddered into life with a terrible effort. Still in his sarong, he sat down at the table laden with the disordered typescripts of his book. He took a plain sheet of foolscap and fitted it into his old portable. In the top right-hand corner he typed the Post Box number of the Darwish and the date. Of his sons, he chose Paul to write to because Gavin was intolerant of him and always had been. He could tell that was still so from the tone of Gavin’s occasional letters, and particularly from the letters of Gavin’s wife (another scientist: Gavin had met her at university) when he wrote enquiring about the grandchildren: neither she nor Gavin ever asked anything about his life – never a query, never a speculation. Their rare letters fulfilled a dry duty.

  The dedication to Romy was still there in the typescript: he sat for a long time questioning himself if it was necessary to change it or drop it, for the boys’ sake. He crossed it out and restored it by hand two or three times, before finally deciding.

  He said to himself that Gavin would take exception either way, since he had chosen to look upon the very profession of a roving reporter as incompatible with marriage and parenthood. Paul would bear with it. Paul knew about him in a way Gavin never would.

  He did not draft the letter first, but went at it straight out, x-ing over when he mis-keyed or started into a sentence that looked like working out unsatisfactorily.

  ‘My dear Paul,’ he typed, ‘I want you to take over my book The Men that Made History should I die before the project is complete.

  ‘I know that you are very busy and that you may find this rather a tall order. But I hope I can persuade you it will be worth your while.

  ‘You may wish to seek the co-operation of a young modern historian from a neighbouring university. If you do, I ask you not to pass the real responsiblity to him. If you give a free hand to anyone else I am afraid he will simply lift the material and produce a book of his own. The book is mine and there is quite a lot of good material in it.

  ‘It is not far from being finished, although I have not yet decided on a cut-off date. The main requirement is to dovetail in the interpolations and notes, some of which as you see are in my handwriting and therefore difficult for most people.’

  He paused here and shuffled all the way back to his bedroom to fetch his cigarettes. The night was quiet and heavy with heat. He could hear the crickets in his garden and Suleiman’s tree-frogs from across the wall. That was all. He noticed his parrot was awake and he thought, why shouldn’t she be – I am. He took his Kensitas back to the majlis, and lit one up. It helped him proceed.

  ‘I am only writing this letter because lately I have grown very tired. I have been experiencing what old Winston called “the sullen advance of decrepitude”. If I had the money for a proper secretary the book would soon be finished.

  ‘Let me assure you, my dear boy, that if you spend a little money on having it pulled together, you will get it all back, and more too, when it is published. Some of it is sensational. Future historians of the period can hardly afford to overlook it.

  ‘Don’t dismiss this as the ravings of an old man.’ (He first typed ‘lonely old man’, but he didn’t want Paul to think of him as pathetic.) ‘My opportunities to witness the major events of our century were unique. It is not relevant that I am forgotten now.’

  He kept his cigarette in his mouth all through, with the butt going soggy and the ash dropping on his sarong; and as he typed the telephone began to ring in his bedroom. It rang unheard for fully two minutes. Then it stopped, and almost immediately began again. It continued for a further half minute and stopped again. It was about 4.25 a.m. local time.

  He had a feeling there was something else he ought to say to Paul, but he couldn’t summon whatever it might be. He rather fancied it might be something to do with the dedication, but that was surely much too big a subject to open up here. If he left the dedication in, Paul would surely respect that. Now he wondered how to conclude the letter. This wasn’t the place for pleasantries about the family. So he just typed ‘Love from’. Then he looked back at the date. Should it carry today’s date? He wasn’t intending to send if off today, so perhaps he should leave it undated. He didn’t know when he might send it: he just wanted to have the letter ready written, in case. He turned back the roller and typed brackets round the date. Then he pulled the sheet off the typewriter, read it through carefully, touching it up in ink here and there, making little scoops under the x-ings out to link one word with the next, as he had been taught to do half a century ago for the sub-editors. He signed ‘Daddy’ at the foot of the page, typed the envelope and propped it against an amphora where anyone would notice it.

  He began to put in order the draft sections he had already rough-typed, then the pages of n
otes he had made; but after a while he was side-tracked by a missing source and became engrossed in a book about the Vatican between 1940 and 1942 when hedging its bets against an ultimate Nazi defeat. Because it was Saturday and there was no Sunday edition of the Post to file for, he did not trouble to tune into the BBC World Service news at 7 a.m.

  Had he done so he would have heard the lead item reporting, in full, a broadcast from the island monitored in the previous hour.

  ‘The broadcast,’ said the BBC, ‘announced the replacement of the ruler of the Gulf island emirate of Khouwair by his younger son. The seven-minute announcement, according to the broadcast, was given by Hatim bin Ahmed al-Asnan, who has been held in detention by order of his father, the Emir Ahmed, for the past eighteen months.

  ‘The broadcast stated that the Emir had signed a decree appointing his son, Hatim, as Regent, on the grounds of his age and failing health, and that Hatim had assumed the role of President-Regent. The country would be ruled henceforth as a republic, and, as President-Regent, Hatim bin Ahmed had already appointed Fuad Al-Bakr, leader of the hitherto banned Gulf Liberation Movement, as Prime Minister.

  ‘All international treaties were to be honoured, the broadcast stated, but the agreement with the American-controlled oil company, which operates the island’s oil production on behalf of the State’s Ministry of Petroleum Production, was under review. Immediate recognition had been accorded by the Soviet Union, which, the broadcast claimed, had already promised defence and technical assistance.

  ‘Any person making a disturbance or carrying a weapon would be shot on sight. A curfew would be strictly in force between sunset and dawn until further notice.

  ‘The broadcast ended with an exhortation to the people to remain calm and loyal to the Government and the country, which had entered upon what it called a new and glorious phase of its history.