The Man Who Knew Everything

by Tom Stacey

  He emerges into the cold autumnal London gloom, then hurries back to fetch the raincoat from the back of the door and puts his telephone back on the hook. Now he has entered the foyer of the Charing Cross Hotel and asks the hall porter for a stamp. The porter asks if he may enquire his room number, and Jones explains he was just meeting someone here for a drink, which the porter shows he doesn’t believe without actually saying so. Thus another minute or two are lost before the man reluctantly brings himself to sell a three penny stamp to a non-resident.

  Out in the station forecourt he casts about for a post-box. A GPO van is drawn up at a double pillar-box in the Strand which a postman is there and then emptying. Jones dashes across, but he is too late – the van has pulled away. He stands there in the near-rain. Then he sees the van held up at the lights into Trafalgar Square. He set off in pursuit at the double and hands the letter to the driver just as the lights are changing.

  That was the moment of the burning of those boats. Liz stayed on in their house in Essex and, when she died of the brain tumour nobody even told him about, the boys shared the proceeds equally. He had no other home to go to now.

  He didn’t feel up to finishing his cornflakes. He glanced down at the scrap of India paper. The ants were inspecting it. Would they not come for him after all? Everything was so quiet, even his parrot. The light was going.

  He finished the beer and shuffled out of his front entrance and round to the entrance of the other half of the compound. He felt exposed standing in front of the solid iron gates ringing and ringing without response. Would they be watching him now, in any case? After fully two minutes the postern door set into the gates opened a fraction. Then it was drawn back quickly, and there was his servant Aziz, wide-eyed, gripping him by hand and wrist, dragging him in. Aziz reeked of fear.

  Aziz conducted him into the majlis, a long dark chamber of alcoves, rugs and incense. It was cluttered with gadgets and gewgaws of foreign manufacture, all in execrable taste. His landlord Suleiman rose, lean, hunched, and wary. He was a cantankerous man at the best of times. The two men exchanged prolonged unhurried Arabic greetings and seated themselves on cushions on the floor. Half in English, half in Arabic, they mourned the turn of events. They warned one another of retribution at the hands of the new regime: police might call at any hour. Suleiman had word of the arrest of friends.

  Only when Aziz brought them cardamom-flavoured coffee did Jones reveal that he had been to the palace, and how he had been admitted to the Emir and found him lying in his bed injured. His account was punctuated by little grunts of alarm and admiration from the back of his host’s throat. Then he told how he had smuggled out a piece of handwriting bearing the Emir’s signature. Suleiman’s eyes narrowed upon his guest. Jones produced the scrap of paper.

  The elderly merchant brought out his spectacles and required Aziz to bring up the lamp shaded with maroon and cream plastic segments. First he read in silence; his head gave a little nod, and he began to translate haltingly: ‘ “In the name of the All-Compassionate. My hand was forced upon the paper which appointed my son Hatim in my place and that paper has no value in sight of God or man. Ahmed bin Turki al-Asnan. Emir.” ’

  It bore that day’s date by the hijra calendar.

  He laid the scrap of paper on the hard velveteen cushion beside him and smoothed it carefully with his middle finger.

  ‘If the people knew of this paper,’ the merchant began thinly, then all at once was overwhelmed by inward ferocity, ‘tonight they would take the sword and the gun against Hatim! The soldiers would not obey the orders of Hatim!’ It was all obvious, he continued. The common folk were in doubt as to what to believe: they had seen copies of the signed proclamation: it had been shown repeatedly on television: they lacked conviction to act. This paper would give it them!

  Suleiman’s eyes were ablaze. He was like a single tree in a still landscape, struck by a squall. He lifted the fragment from the cushion and shook it in his fingers. Eddies of this wind began to reach Jones. He could perceive that this little message was enough to wipe out all the new regime’s pretensions of legitimacy. The international community now had some justification to intervene if it chose, and it still might so choose. God, God, he cursed himself, let those fools in London not run his bust dispatch.

  A torpor welled from his depths. He, Jones, should make a move. But what? What could he do? If he were to send a genuine dispatch he would have to reach the mainland. A man might get there by boat, he supposed – but the port was closed.

  He started to try to explain it to his old neighbour. Could Suleiman organise a boum to put in to the creek on the south side? Apart from the port itself, it was the only place sufficiently deep to bring in a boat big enough to reach the mainland. Only a few fishermen lived at the creek. Jones could avoid the roads: he knew his way by the tracks in the dunes – at least he supposed he still did. Could they watch the whole coastline?

  Suleiman regarded him sullenly. ‘You must leave the paper for me, Jonas.’

  Had the man understood nothing of what Jones had been saying?

  ‘I shall need it, Suleiman.’ Anyway it was not Suleiman’s to keep. He alone had the right to the paper.

  The other glared. He still had the fragment in his fingers.

  Jones told him he had understood nothing. He would explain it all again. Moreover, he, Jones, must send a picture of the Emir’s message by wirephoto – an image transmitted by the telephone line – through the local newspaper on the mainland. They’d certainly have such a machine there.

  ‘What wirephoto, Jonas?’ Suleiman demanded narrowly.

  ‘The wirephoto transmitting machine which is how pictures from abroad reach newspapers. Unless people see the actual writing, the actual signature, they won’t believe it. The other nations must be made to believe. They won’t believe easily. The actual writing – that might convince them.’

  ‘We must have the paper here, Jonas.’

  ‘Certainly not.’ The man was an ignoramus, a semi-barbarian. ‘The Emir gave it to me.’ If he tried to snatch it back, it could be damaged.

  ‘His Highness the Emir,’ Suleiman rasped, ‘wrote the paper for everyone. How he know you will make the visit to him?’

  ‘He entrusted it to me.’

  ‘To the people,’ Suleiman corrected him mulishly. Then he said suddenly, ‘I will call my son.’ He summoned Aziz at once to find his son.

  ‘I must have the paper, Suleiman,’ Jones said quickly. ‘My dispatch will be useless without it.’

  ‘My son will make copies. He has that machine.’

  But it was this that tipped Jones into exasperation. He flared hot with anger. ‘He bloody won’t.’

  Suleiman now turned cautious and sinuous.

  ‘Why, Jonas?’

  Why? Why? Because he was not going to have those whipper-snappers in the Darwish getting hold of a photocopy and somehow transmitting it or its contents before he had filed. Not over his dead body. But he left Suleiman’s question unanswered. All he said was, ‘You have a boum in port?’

  ‘Perr-haps one which I can reach. Perr-haps.’

  ‘It’s a question of time, don’t you understand? If I cannot send my dispatch by tomorrow, for publication the next day, it will be too late. Don’t you understand?’

  How could he understand, this poor savage? There was no sentiment in power politics. One de facto was worth a hundred de jures. He had been in the business long enough to know. Most likely it was too late already . . . They sat in silence, the other still holding the paper. Only fifteen minutes to curfew. It was never wise to break a curfew the first day of a coup: the soldiery was invariably over-zealous and jumpy. If he was to be shot he wasn’t going to let it ever be said that he was inexperienced.

  Suleiman’s son entered, busy, chubby, self-important, with fear all over him. Though breathless, he greeted his father with formality, and acknowledged Jones politely. Suleiman told him of Jones’s visit to the Emir, of a possible requirement for
a boat. The fear at once sharpened into alarm. The smooth brow took on a sudden rash of furrows and his glance jerked to and fro between father and guest. He gave vent to a rapid speech of objection in Arabic. The line of his argument, Jones discerned, was that what his father proposed could mean the downfall of the family; to lie low, do nothing, could preserve it.

  Suleiman regarded his son with distaste. He told him he was unfit to carry his name. He would send for another son who had more than a girl’s courage.

  The son retorted that his father and Jonas were old men who had no life to lose. The Emir likewise: he had no right to make trouble.

  Repeating the young man’s last two words, Suleiman’s wrath exploded. Jones thought he would rise and strike the boy, but the assault remained verbal. They were indeed now standing, confronting one another, the son – the taller – having risked his objection, now cowed and silent. Here was Jones’s theory in action again – that an Arab never really grew up until his father was dead. The father led his son into the little paved garden, which Jones’s wall cut off. The tone of their voices – the son beginning to assent – dropped to one of conspiracy. Jones saw Suleiman showing him the paper in the fading light. Then abruptly the young man left.

  ‘Where has he gone with the paper?’ Jones demanded.

  ‘He is returning. Five minutes.’

  ‘Where’s he gone with it?’

  ‘He will show it to my other son, who will find the master of the boum. Insh’allah.’ Suleiman seemed perfectly calm.

  ‘He is not to copy it.’ A growl.

  ‘Why, Mr Jonas?’ the old Arab reiterated stubbornly.

  Jones had thought of a good reason, now. ‘If copies get around town, before the world has the facts, it would ruin everything. Hatim and Al-Bakr will put out a statement that they expect reactionary elements to forge documents in the name of the Emir. “Beware false documents”, they will warn.’ Fleet Street knew it as a ‘pre-emptive disclaimer’.

  ‘He is showing it to my son Fahad, to persuade him. That is all. Why should he copy? I have said my word!’ he concluded petulantly.

  ‘I need it at once, Suleiman. I must leave now.’

  Jones saw the hands of his watch closing on the curfew deadline. In the silence he felt his heart like a sluggard in his body. He did not want to have to do any of this. If it fell to him, he supposed vaguely it would be the last thing he would ever do. Then the young man re-entered and handed the fragment of paper to his father, who passed it to Jones.

  ‘My sons will arrange the boum, insh’allah,’ Suleiman announced. He smiled. ‘Without, it is finish, khalas.’ He took Jones’s arm and led him affectionately to the door. They could switch mood in seconds, these Arabs. ‘You, Jonas, are the friend of our people,’ he announced proudly. The words were like those of the cheap aide, but this man spoke from the gut, and Jones smiled too: two ancient caverns letting the light in.

  Jones said, ‘Tell Aziz to look after my parrot.’ He made a squawk.

  As the merchant’s iron door clanged behind him, calls to prayer broke out all over the city like air-raid sirens. The whole place was battened down and full of fear. He was turning the key in the lock of his own front door when the amplified muezzin of the little mosque immediately opposite burst forth like a personal warning of dread menace. There was not another soul in the narrow street, not so much as a dog.

  An envelope had been pushed under the door. He bent to pick it up. As he read, a smile flickered once again. It was McCulloch, writing in frantic tones that he was under house arrest, his telephone cut off, and could Jones stir the Embassy into action? The other newsmen were holed up in the Darwish unable to move or file.

  He assembled his sarong, a razor, soap, a tooth-brush, a packet of Kensitas, his transistor radio, his passport, and water in a Kia-Ora bottle. The light in the patio was quickly disappearing. He glanced at the letter for Paul propped against the amphora. As he started to leave by the dark passageway to the front door, his ears were accosted by a tortured exclamation in Japanese, Ee-oo-i oo-ah-ahahuh ay-oh! which by phonetic alchemy could be traced to Shakespeare.

  He turned back to the parrot’s cage.

  ‘Bye-bye, Trudi,’ he said.

  ‘Bye-bye, Trudi.’

  She had not spoken for days. Most of her conversation had been taught by Romy, and If music be the food of love, play on was Trudi’s feat.

  He drove by backroads. The streets were blind. On the edge of the town the half-wild pack of dogs was assembling early for its nocturnal scavenge. As luck had it, he did not encounter a single soldier or military vehicle. The old Packard now nosed in among the maze of possible routes through the salty dunes of the southern littoral. The engine without its silencer was wildly rowdy but here it didn’t matter. These dunes were uninhabited. He was driving without lights and darkness closed in on him like a windowless room that contained just him and his straining engine. Twenty years ago he had known all the ins and outs among the dunes. Now he felt quite uncertain. The creek was only eleven miles from the town but the ground had lost its features, a jumbled wasteland under the blackness. Ten m.p.h. was the maximum: there was no hurry now.

  After four or five miles he guessed he had lost his direction. He was guiding the Packard through the clumps of saltbush and sea- grasses. The old car mounted a tussock and was brought up sharp. At once both drive-wheels spun. It was as if the car had read his uncertainty. He tried to rock it off, but the wheels were burrowing into soft sand. He got out and knelt beside one half- buried wheel, took out Hatim’s gold pen and applied its tip to the valve pin. When he had released half the air first of one wheel, then of the other, he climbed back into the car, backed off the tussock and manoeuvred round it. Before he regathered speed, he caught the soft sand again; now the front bumper was up against clubbed roots, blocking him as the rear wheels spun. He didn’t bother to inspect the wheels. He took his things out of the car, and leaving the doors unlocked began to walk.

  He could see quite well now, and the swiftly risen moon guided him by its position at his left. He stumbled often, more than he considered necessary. He kept mistaking the height of the dune ridges and the density of the glaucous saltbush thickets which were ghostly in the moonlight but cast shadows like men. Low thorns and thistles tore his bare ankles. He welcomed the mild pain because it brought his body closer to him and sharpened him against his lightheadedness. The distance was greater than he recollected and he wondered if he was walking in a circle; but the moon was still where it should be. Soon rents began to appear in his trouser-ends, for the thorns were hard as claws.

  When he first glimpsed ahead the infinite spectacle of moonlight on the waters of the creek, he felt sick with a sort of vertiginous fear. He saw Romy waiting for him and looking at him from some distance out there in the water. He walked on, over the last overhanging dune of the foreshore; as he came down the firm strand to wash his ankles and the little crabs scuttled agilely into the wave-edge before him, he noted the trembling of his legs and how oddly his heart was lolloping about inside him.

  He had never returned since that day.

  Nothing was left of Romy’s onshore excavation, not a vestige of evidence that anyone ever dug here. Sand was always quick to reclaim its domain. The Department of Antiquities and Heritage had developed other sites since. The cable drum was still there, buried more deeply now; in its turn it would become an object for excavation. In immensely ancient times this creek had been a haven for ships plying the Gulf trade; the long-buried settlement here dealt in frankincense and limes and copper ore for bronze, and probably in ivory and gold, all those goods Romy had listed in the fish market. The tel mound she had uncovered was of such paltry elevation that it was the cable drum they came to take as their point of reference – so many yards up or down from the drum. When she began to dig, she found that the settlement spilled out beneath what was now the sea and that beyond it in the creek lay hewn stones that must have formed a harbour arm.

  As he c
ame out from the wave-edge, a wild dog ran up the shore and began to growl and bark at him monotonously. This set off a dog barking in the cluster of fishermen’s palm-frond huts up-creek. He crouched behind the cable drum, lest anyone looked out and saw this tall European interloper, so late at night, in a place none visited nowadays. He could not be sure that this scattering of fishtrappers knew yet of the upheaval and the curfew. News had a way of travelling across open spaces . . . The main editions of the Sundays would be going to press in Fleet Street, their front pages locked up now. In an hour or so each of the night news editors would be receiving copies of their rivals’ first editions by means of the time-honoured network of collaborators in the dispatch rooms. How much did any of them know?

  He tried to pick up the BBC World Service on his transistor and chanced upon an exceptionally clear signal. When the news came up, the island’s events were again the lead item. A Reuters report from the island was quoted, stating that the people had taken the news of the Emir’s abdication quietly and that forces loyal to the President-Regent were in control of all parts of the island, but that the airport and normal communications were still shut down. The new government under the premiership of Fuad Al-Bakr was expected to be announced early the next day. The coup d’état, though unexpected, was reported as ‘entirely without bloodshed’.

  It all seemed cut and dried, a fait accompli. He felt himself to be engaged on a worthless escapade. The smug young weasel from Reuters had evidently persuaded someone to let him move a helpful dispatch. Quite likely all the newsmen would be running about town in the morning. That puffed-up ignoramus from television would be concocting a film about the passing of a repressive regime and the dawning of the enlightened rule of the people. When the visiting journalists were gone the executions would begin . . . The broadcast told of Mid-Eastern anti-Western governments, plus the East European satellites, recognising the new regime. The familiar cynical bandwagonery. Jones knew that once the major Western powers conceded recognition, that would be that. The strutters and cheats would have it; the last heart would be out of common folk and what they always feared, that man was a cold race, would be shown true; there could be no more blessed threat of the Emir’s friendly neighbours intervening, for the West would restrain them. If the fools in London were to print on Monday the dispatch he had tried to bust (and, God knows, fools they were), he himself would have helped tip Britain and America into recognition.