by Tom Stacey
The guard scarcely had an option, without risk of losing face. He passed across the clipboard. ‘You’re okay. Your friends’ll haveta wait.’
Jones took his time filling in his entry. He could smell Nasir and Ismail – the good odour of the skin of men who labour in sea air. As he wrote he echoed aloud the pen’s movement – name, time in, company represented, whom he was visiting. Give people time, the old old trick. Only after he had signed did he raise his eyes. ‘What was that you said, Jim?’
‘Your friends’ll haveta wait.’
But he knew the ‘Jim’ was like a brushing kiss.
‘I’ve got to have them.’ His face was full of apology for age and infirmity, from which none was exempt. ‘I’ve only one leg that works. I’ve really got to have them.’
‘Wassa trouble?’
‘A little paralysis.’
‘You want the sanatorium, buddy.’
Jones grinned a sort of dismissive assent, which said, But what could anyone do for me now? The thought of medical treatment hadn’t once entered his head throughout their voyage from the island.
‘Okay, granpa. Sign ’em up. No, they must sign. Who are they anyway? Can they write?’ The guard summoned his Arab counterpart. ‘They each gotta give the names.’
‘For God’s sake, Jim,’ Jones said mildly.
He was a master when it came to barriers. When all was done and he was limping between his companions to the main administration building which housed the communications centre he felt that same glow in the soul of any man who has put mastery to use. But the sun was still fierce and a dizziness bothered him like a swarm of gnats.
He directed his trio straight along the principal ground floor corridor towards the telex room. Nobody was about. A light shone through the frosted glass of the telex room. All three newcomers pushed in together: a young American unknown to Jones was on late telex duty in charge of a console of four machines, one of which was in action.
‘My name is Jones,’ he opened in his courtly manner. ‘This is Captain Nasir and this is Mr Ismail. I am correspondent of the London Post and I have to telex an urgent dispatch.’
The young man smiled emptily, shook each hand as it was put out, but kept his own name to himself. The presence of Arabs made him diffident. He was poorly built and his head seemed too heavy for his body. It took him a while to grasp Jones’s intention, and Jones omitted to explain the reason for his escort. He said in a flat voice: ‘You’ll need your message cleared by Public Affairs, sir. They’ll be in at 8 a.m. tomorrow.’
‘I am a friend of Mr Burroughs, your President,’ Jones told him assuringly.
‘Mr Burroughs is in Washington.’
‘I know.’
Of course he knew: once he got in among the local officials of the company, they’d huff and puff, especially when they found it to be news of obvious international importance. They’d crosscheck and doublecheck and finally pass the buck to headquarters in Washington.
‘So you’ll have to clear it with Public Affairs tomorrow. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry,’ Jones said quietly. Nothing was going to be easy. ‘Tomorrow’s too late. Look, I’ll show you the dispatch.’
When Jones moved, the Arabs moved with him like a bizarre drill-routine. They sat him at the machine next to the one in operation. World commodity prices were coming in.
‘Everyone goes home at two, here. Eight to two, that’s it.’
‘You don’t have a wirephoto facility?’ Jones asked.
‘No, we don’t. And you can’t use this telex, either.’ The diffidence had gone: it was hot sulk now.
‘I’m just going to show you the dispatch,’ Jones purred. ‘I’m not transmitting, dear boy.’
Jones, pressed the PREP key and began at once to type. As he tapped, his message came up on the screen.
‘Listen, sir’ – the young man’s voice rising – ‘we only allow qualified operators.’
‘I know. I am qualified. I’m seventy-six years old. I am qualified.’ Jones did not even turn to talk to him.
‘Not here,’ the young man returned, and crossed to hit the CLEAR button. The message on the screen vanished.
Jones folded his arms. He sat there large and uncoordinated and tired beyond resting. He was impervious to any hostility. He put out a hand and touched PREP: the light came on again and the machine was in readiness. The young man hit CLEAR again.
Ismail stepped up and stood right beside the young man. He lightly laid his black hand on his arm. Jones hit PREP again and resumed typing. The American did not move. What he wrote was:
‘FLASH. JONES HERE. I HAVE LEFT ISLAND WITH EXCLUSIVE EVIDENCE SIGNED BY THE EMIR PROVING NEW REGIME IS NOT REPEAT NOT LEGITIMATE. THIS EVIDENCE I SHALL WIREPHOTO FROM LOCAL NEWSPAPER HERE. MEANWHILE STANDBY MY DISPATCH AND INFORM EDITOR. ARE U READY?’
He stopped.
‘Okay, that’s enough,’ the young man said.
None of them paid him noticeable attention. Jones’s great blotched hands were poised over the machine. He typed the Post’s number.
The answerback came up instantly. It was always a good moment, like a password exchanged across half the world. It was still early afternoon in London, but most of them should be back from lunch. Jones hit the SEND button. As his ‘flash’ message was printing out on the paper roller, he propped up his handwritten draft under the paper arm on the front of the machine: it wasn’t easy to decipher.
He flicked to open-line transmission and typed: ‘ANYONE THERE?’
‘YES,’ came the answer, ‘MOM.’ Then, ‘OK FILE AWAY.’ Jones typed his dateline and time slug and started: ‘THE LEGITIMACY OF THE NEW GOVERNMENT CLAIMING –’
‘OK, you win,’ the duty man broke out. ‘You hold it, I’ll call the people from Public Affairs out from home. They’ll pass your message.’
‘Too late, I fear,’ Jones replied.
The young man reached forward quickly and hit CLEAR.
‘Fuck you,’ Jones said. ‘You’ve broken the contact. Ismail,’ he continued in Arabic, ‘hold him.’
The instantaneousness of the response to the command took even Jones by surprise: Ismail swung the young man round, gripped his shoulders, butted him in the face, flung him to the floor, and stood on his neck with one broad sandalled foot, while simultaneously pulling upwards and twisting an arm, and grinning seraphically. A low whimper trickled out of the young man like an oozing of blood and mucus.
‘I’m bound to tell you, dear boy,’ Jones addressed him through the whimper, ‘that if it became essential to kill you, I would have it done with pleasure.’
After he got the Post wireroom again he found them upset, but this time moved the whole dispatch, though he mis-keyed frequently and had to restart several lines since the fingers of one hand proved not obedient. When he came to the dangerous passage about how the Emir passed him the message he did not pause or waver, for this was their common risk: the transmission and exposition of this story was what, if need be, the Emir would give his last breath for, as he, Jones, would also: two old blood-brothered men each in his given function.
When he had moved the complete dispatch he was spent and trembling. Nothing came back. He hit the BELL key. London wrote ‘MOM’. They were there, the dolts, but requiring their moment. Naturally. Then, ‘CHIEF SUB HERE, YOU THERE GRAN?’
‘WHAT ELSE?’ Cunt.
‘HOW COME YESTERDAY U FILED MESSAGE ENDING BUST BUST AND NO FURTHER EXPLANATION?’
‘WAS FORCED TO FILE IT BY EMIRS SON HATIM.’
‘U REALLY THREW US HERE.’
‘TANT PIS. TWAS YOUR DAY OFF.’
‘U CANT DO THAT TO US, GRAN.’
‘COME HERE AND DO BETTER.’
A silence ensued. Jones was glowering at the machine, at a lifetime of newsroom crassness.
‘DID U QUERY MY BUST TELEX?’
‘YES BUT NO JOY. THEY SAID THEY WOULD FIND U.’
‘I TOLD U NOT TO CALL BACK.’
‘WE HAD TO T
RY.’
‘U MIGHT HAVE KILLED ME.’
‘WE SENT U 3 WIRES TO DARWISH.’
The Darwish! A jam-jar of bluebottles.
‘DARWISH SEALED OFF. CABLE OFFICE SHUT ANYWAY.’
‘REUTERS MANAGED TO FILE FROM ISLAND.’
‘BUT NOT THE FACTS.’ The bastard. ‘HAVE U READ WHAT I JUST SENT?’
‘MOM.’
Foreign subs, to a man, were dolts, dyed in the wool, to whom abroad meant package tours to the Costa Brava. This one was possessed of the infuriating propensity to write headlines that slightly distorted the copy. Jones had met him on his last visit to London. He wouldn’t have known where to look for the island in his school atlas.
‘FINISHED?’ Jones typed.
‘MOM. TIS NOT CLEAN COPY.’
‘LISTEN, WANT EDITOR READ THIS STORY BEFORE I SWITCH OFF.’ His hands were shaking fearfully; how they still functioned for him he knew not. All that drove him now was a pure pulsing anger.
‘WE CALL U BACK.’
‘WONT BE HERE. HAVE COMMANDEERED THIS TELEX AND MY FRIEND IS HOLDING DOWN OPERATOR BY STANDING ON NECK.’
‘MOM.’
What did the dolt suppose it was like? Sending in cricket scores from the press-box at Lords?
‘MOM,’ again. Then the Foreign Editor came on.
‘FOSTER HERE. TREMENDOUS STORY, GRAN. CONGRATS. COULD BE PAGE ONE LEAD IF U CAN WIREPHOTO EMIR’S ACTUAL HANDWRITTEN MESSAGE.’
‘WILL TRY PRONTO. NO FACILITIES HERE.’ Foster knew the field, once a foreign reporter himself: half his age, naturally, but knew the field a bit. Foster could spot the big story when it was put under his nose . . . What the hell did he mean Could be? They were always covering their backsides, the dodgy executives.
‘WHEN CAN WE EXPECT, GRAN?’
‘OHE HOUR. MAYBE 2.’
‘NOT LONGER THAN 2 IF POSS.’
Foster at least had a feel for the hot world at crisis time. Jones could have told him he had a stroke last night.
‘WE THINK AUTHENTICATION ESSENTIAL,’ the machine said.
‘NATCH.’
‘YDAY U HAD US AT 6S AND 7S.’
‘TWAS DIFFERENT THEN.’
‘UNDERSTOOD, WHERE WILL U BE LATER?’
Later? What later? ‘WILL TELL U WHEN I WIREPHOTO.’
‘OK. TKS. BI.
He could feel them pulling away, wanting him to let go of them.
‘IF EDITOR WANTS TO PHONE DOWNING STREET WITH MAIN SUBSTANCE, MAKE SURE NO LEAKS TO OPPOSITION.’ By which he meant the other dailies.
‘DONT WORRY. BI.’
‘TWILL PUT CAT AMONG PIGEONS.’
‘SOME PIGEONS. CONGRATS & BI.’
‘OK BIBI.’
The machine’s chatter ceased and London cleared with a kind of sigh. Jones ripped the top copy off the paper roller. The young American had given up whimpering. Ismail looked at Jones enquiringly. He signalled to let him up.
Ismail held him by the wrist as he got awkwardly to his feet. One ear was a deep red and a discoloration spread across the neck where Ismail’s broad foot had rested.
Jones opened his wallet.
‘Please accept my card. Send me the bill for the telex call. A copy of my dispatch is on your machine. We are not to have the pleasure of killing you. But if you dare make any move to prevent me or my friends leaving this compound, I will tell the world through my newspaper that this company supported the Marxist leaders of the coup d’état on Khouwair by attempting to suppress the truth. Are you clear?’ His speech was wonderfully unimpaired.
The young man’s eyes brimmed but no words came.
Now little Nasir and Ismail helped Jones to his feet. As they left the room in their strange trio drill-routine the young man was sitting on a swivel chair, face in hands.
Jones was elated. Two congrats: Foster had grasped the significance of the story all right – the repudiation of legitimacy, the role of the foreign ‘training unit’. It could yet be in time to forestall big power recognition, and raise the spectre of intervention. Foster was a good bloke, despite that Could be. ‘Some pigeons’! – but did Foster not see he was referring to Fleet Street rivals, not the usurpers?
It was nearly dark, the sun gone, prayer finished. The featureless landscape, dissolved into various deep colours, had regained its secrets and was pricked with lights. Half-night had replaced the plumes of smoke by vivid orange torches of the last remaining gas flare-offs, and the scent of a hidden industry lay across mile on mile of desert.
Exhilaration and his escort carried Jones all the way to the main gate. The pipsqueaks in the Darwish – how he would like to witness their faces when they got the playback from London. And now he wondered if Paul would see tomorrow’s Post. He gave a chuckle.
Ismail answered him, chuckle for chuckle.
Jones said, ‘Maybe my grandchildren will see the paper tomorrow.’
‘Anjilden,’ Ismail echoed.
‘Tomorrow,’ Nasir repeated sagely, being a word he recognised.
The gate guard merely nodded them through without leaving his box. The other taxi seemed to have vanished, but their own was still waiting and Jones was bundled in as before, in the back with Nasir, Ismail in front, and all the windows open to ventilate.
They moved out of the built-up area that surrounded the oil company compound and the neighbouring College of Petroleum Technology. The broad illuminated highway took them in thin traffic across a stretch of open desert, past the turning back to the seaport and the slip-road to the airport. Jones felt in his pocket for the Rothman’s pack: the Emir’s message was safe. As a small boy at school on Wenlock Edge he and his fellows used to play ‘The Baron’s Game’. One of the masters was the captive Baron, with about a quarter of the boys assigned to guard him in his glade in the woodlands. The rest were each given a little slip of paper representing some personal possession like ‘the Baron’s gold watch’ or ‘the Baron’s false teeth’ that had to be smuggled through to him, evading his custodians. Though tall for his age, Jones was greatly celebrated for worming past the defenders and pulling off that last desperate dash with his vital object . . .
Another vehicle was unexpectedly pulling alongside them. The occupants were calling, gesticulating – young Arabs. What recklessness was this? As the two cars slowed for the lights, they were accosting him, Jones, with shouts and leering faces through the open window. ‘Inglisi!’ they yelled. ‘Inglisi!’ They looked like North Africans – Egyptians, Libyans. Their teeth were bared at him, snarling. What madmen these mainland drivers were! Their car swayed and swerved alongside, inches away. And now one of them was trying to pass Jones some object, some small thing held in the hand thrusting out of the window. The other taxi leapt to mind, the threat it portended, how he had been marked on landing.
‘No!’ Jones roared. He fumbled for his window winder. ‘No! NO!’ and recoiled, but the youth continued to thrust the object across, and they swerved away, laughing and waving, the object tumbling off the back of the front seat to the floor at Jones’s feet, where he supposed it would kill them on the instant. At Jones’s alarm, their driver had yanked the taxi to a halt at the roadside.
Not all that far away, which is to say, across the dark straits, at Jones’s only home, Sandy McCulloch is knocking on the door, with Rivers beside him. He does not knock too hard, for although the alley is empty they are breaking curfew and could be shot. There is still a remnant of daylight in the street, enough for them to see the new red Arabic slogan scrawled on the white wall. McCulloch whispers, ‘They may have taken him in. I couldn’t get him yesterday either.’
‘Poor old crock,’ Rivers says.
They have come here because Jones is the one man McCulloch can trust to authenticate the Emir’s handwriting on the photostats now secretly circulating in the town, all descendents of the copy covertly made from Jones’s original by Suleiman’s son. Their idea is that if it proved genuine, McCulloch should sneak into his newspaper offices and wirephoto it to Associated Pres
s – the rival news agency to Reuters – of which McCulloch is the accredited stringer. Actually, this is Rivers’s plot, since he is intensely frustrated at being prevented from reporting for television, and now wishes to embarrass the usurpers and engage in some journalistic daredevilry. ‘Just to stir it up, you mean, Lou?’ McCulloch has queried, but Rivers, to whom McCulloch defers on the grounds both of his fame and his own temporary recruitment as guide to ‘The World This Week’, assured him it was central to the story and would give the other side a ‘shot in the arm’. ‘But they’re occupying our building,’ McCulloch persisted. At which Rivers looked at him with disdain, adding that if nothing was ventured, nothing was fucked. Sandy McCulloch caught a whiff of sacrificial role-playing, yet Rivers has persuaded him as far as here.
McCulloch finds one half of the door to be unbolted. Indeed, it seems to have been forced. He pushes it open.
‘Gran?’ he calls quietly.
They enter by the dark passage. A light burns. The parrot’s cage is open and the bird gone. They move to the majlis. The parrot watches them from foliage in the narrow strip of garden.
The majlis is in a shambles, all the drawers yanked out, tipped upside down, cushions scattered, books heaped on the floor. The place has been raped. Rivers is pained for the old man. ‘Holy shit,’ he says. ‘He’s had visitors.’
‘Official,’ McCulloch endorses.
‘They taken him in?’
‘His car isn’t outside.’
They move back through the patio to the bedroom: it is in a similar state of violation.
‘What now, Lou? No point in trying to send a thing like this unauthenticated.’
The voice from the garden freezes them.
‘Bye-bye, Trudi.’
With good foot first, then a shaking hand, Jones fumbled for the object on the taxi’s floor and retrieved it – viprous, ludicrously tiny, sharp-edged. A light inconsequential box. He had to put on his spectacles to decipher the lettering by the street-lighting: a cassette tape of the Rolling Stones. What better to appeal to so manifestly English a man, far from home, than a taste of his traditional music – a gesture of spontaneous Arab generosity well worth a little virtuoso driving.