The High Place (12 page)

‘And you’ve seen Elisa since?’

‘Lord, yes! But not for the last year. And it’s no business of mine to run round to addresses asking silly questions. She must have some sort of syndicate behind her, but I daresay
you know more about that than I do. It’s beyond me what their game is. They may be using cigars as an international currency.’

‘And where do you come in exactly?’ I asked.

‘My dear sir, indispensable! If you want to supply the demand for fine Havana cigars in a day and age when most countries don’t allow the import, you need someone with my experience
of trade.

‘Well now, a minimum of essential information—that is all we can be expected to give one another on so short an acquaint­ance. There is in Cuba a group of small fincas that was
financed in the ’twenties and ’thirties by a firm of tobacco importers in Vienna. Used to supply the Imperial Court when there was one. Happy days of free trade, Amberson, happy days!
Not that I’d want to go back to them. It’s easier to make money in a world of government controls.

‘Rosa, the name was. I dare say they had been Spanish Jews. At any rate old Rosa didn’t survive Hitler. But the fincas had plenty of capital by then and they carried on. That’s
their mark’—he caressed the box on the table—‘Coriolano, and a gold band with a little emerald tobacco plant on it.

‘Elisa sent me out to Cuba with a couple of letters of intro­duction—one from Eugen Rosa, who was the old boy’s grand­son and one from a fellow called Urgin who had
spent years out there investigating soils and aromas and that sort of thing. Not that I wanted any favours. I’m a wholesale buyer, and for cash.

‘You’ll excuse me if I don’t tell you very much about my sales organization. A lot of this cigar business is on the level. What’s the only hospitality today, Amberson?
The real larks in aspic with a flunkey behind your chair? Government, embassies, all this United Nations nonsense, and what courts there are left—that’s the market for Coriolanos, and
the syndicate had the connections to capture it. Any judge of cigars will tell you there is nothing better, and he’ll thank God if he can get his fingers round one as a great favour.

‘And now we come to the point. Havana has done better than Coriolano at last. There isn’t much of the new brand yet, but it’s on the market. I offered a few myself—and
got a venomous couple of lines from Elisa just telling me what she thought of me. It’s no use my writing. I can’t make her understand. I have to see her, and explain that her syndicate
must sell both if they expect to keep their special clients. It needn’t even be Elisa I talk to, if there’s someone else—this Rosa would do—who’s a judge of cigars and
can put the case to her. I hoped that you would turn out to be the chap.

‘You see my difficulty. She has done a lot for me. There’s not much money in cigars, but, God’s Glory, I wouldn’t like to lose her foreign exchange business! I’ll
sell whatever they want me to sell, but I would like to be sure she understands that there’s a better cigar than Coriolano.’

‘What are your movements?’ I asked.

‘My dear sir, I am represented by our Mr. Poss, and he is always on the move. Nowhere long. A kill here and a kill there, and lie up in a hotel to complete digestion. And one hotel is much
like another. As soon as I’ve had a drink with the night porter, all are home to me. I wouldn’t mind a little place like this of yours, but not yet. Now what would you advise? I must
attend to some business in Cairo. Shall I see you again on my way back to Istanbul?’

I told him he could have a week or so in Egypt so long as he hurried back to Istanbul. This mysterious advice was simply to persuade him to leave immediately. It was essential to get him out of
Tripoli. I doubt if anyone in the town or port knew the name of Elisa Cantemir—she was just the tall woman from Kasr-el-Sittat—but Oliver Poss seemed remarkably efficient at discreet
enquiries; and if the devil put it into his head to visit Damascus or Aleppo he would at once be on to the knowledge, which he was evidently not supposed to have, of Elisa’s address and
occupation.

‘And not embarrass you on the way back?’ he asked.

I took a chance, and bluffed.

‘Poss,’ I said, ‘you mentioned that all we can be expected to give one another is a minimum of essential information. I’ll tell you this much. When I myself am at
Istanbul, I find communications very satisfactory.’

‘Fast, but far from satisfactory,’ he answered. ‘In fact, I should describe them as short, discourteous, unsigned, but undoubtly authentic although they bear a Turkish stamp.
Sir, I put myself in your hands without reserve and within reason.’

In the morning I drove him down to Beirut to catch the Cairo plane. He took it kindly, and did not suspect that my only inten­tion was not to let him out of my sight till he was safely in
the air. When I asked him in what ivory or peacocks he meant to trade, he said he was investigating the arms traffic. He wasn’t a bit interested, he assured me, in how people chose to kill
them­selves, but rather in how they paid for their pleasure. He wanted to lay his hands on some free currency, and he reckoned that among the Egyptian Greeks who supplied the Jews and the
Egyptian Jews who supplied the Arabs there ought to be plenty of beautifully disguised credits for sale. My first impression of Oliver Poss as a well-dressed gipsy was not so very wrong; at any
rate he was most intelligible when considered as a sort of gipsy-banker. He had his stock-in-trade of luxury goods, but first among them was luxury money—untraceable, untouchable bank
balances which he was prepared to buy or sell. His pass­port—that which he used at our end of the Mediterranean—was Greek. I handled it with some amusement. He had even had the
impudence to describe his profession as merchant-adventurer.

I snatched a hasty lunch in Beirut, and turned back along the coast road through Tripoli to Latakia—a hundred and fifty glorious miles between sea and mountain which I always drove with
fresh delight—and so eastwards into the rocky highlands, bare and burnt by the summer heat, and north again towards the trees and the water. It was deep dusk when I drove through the white
gate of Kasr-el-Sittat.

Elisa was alone. When she came into the central hall of her bungalow to greet me, I could see through the open door to the right her desk covered with papers. It was a neat desk, though she had
but that moment risen from her chair; and she herself looked businesslike. There was nothing deliberate: no glasses on the eyes, no fuss, no suggestion of either nonchalance or purpose. She was
merely cleared for action. Her shirt and skirt of khaki drill had a functional simplicity, as if they gov­erned rather than hid the upward drive of blood and sinew to the long throat and
exquisite head.

She was woman enough to ask me why I hadn’t warned her by letter that I was coming. In answer I let her see herself, ever-new, through my own eyes. Then I told her that I had had a visit
from Oliver Poss, and assured her at once that he had not known she was in Syria, and still did not.

‘He’s not a man to arrive by accident,’ she said.

‘No. But it seems he has been shipping me cigars. So he thought I might lead him to you.’

She examined me fiercely and calculatingly, as if I had become for the moment an intrusive stranger. It was such a look as I might have had from Poss, but without his humour.

‘Don’t bother!’ I said. ‘I had him in my world, not his. So I told him a good story, and sent him off to Cairo.’

Her face cleared, and she laughed.

‘Yes, I believe you could,’ she replied. ‘I can just see you playing the old Arab trader in his mysterious office. But, Eric my dear, would you mind telling the whole story in
front of Osterling as well, and being cross-examined a bit?’

I said I was ready for anything, and especially some food and a bottle of wine; so we called at the kitchens, and walked over to Osterling’s quarters.

He received us with an eager and voluble courtesy. I suspect that it was his superb training rather than any real love of society which made him, both in speech and writing, such excel­lent
company. Or was it that he had so profound a conviction of the importance of his thoughts that he was determined to charm any listener into acceptance of them?

He was much intrigued by old Pop-eyes, as he called Tabas, and congratulated me on discovering so original a member of the colony.

‘He’s the craziest old coot we ever had,’ he said. ‘Do you know, he has already got a following among the garage hands? My studio audience. Whenever Pop-eyes prophesies,
and they are all agreed as to what he means, I use the quotation on a wider public.’

I asked why particularly the garage.

‘Oh, his Sancho Panza turned out to be a grand mechanic. Police training is always good. They only permit clumsiness in dealing with the public.’

Elisa, who could be easily exasperated by Osterling’s pretence of relaxation, mentioned that we had come on urgent business.

I told my story while Osterling played host and interrogator, carving cold duck for me and putting his questions with the deprecating and indulgent manner of some society lawyer.

‘What an admirable citizen is an international spiv!’ he re­marked at last. ‘He stands for liberty against all governments alike.’

‘He stands for Mr. Poss’s bank balance,’ I answered.

‘Does it matter? What about your Hampden and Pym? Heroes of revolt and why? Because they didn’t like paying taxes. What’s the difference between them and your business man who
is in revolt for the same reasons?’

I suggested that Hampden and Pym and all of us in the room were prepared to suffer for their opinions, and the spiv was not.

‘Now I get nearer your conception of Oliver Poss,’ said Osterling. ‘I’ve never met him. He’s Elisa’s discovery. And what I’m feeling for is—would
he be in sympathy with Kasr-el-Sittat?’

Elisa and I simultaneously uttered an emphatic No!

‘A pity! Now is he likely to go to any trouble to find out more about what he believes to be a syndicate?’

‘I don’t know the weak points of your financial organization,’ I replied. ‘If there’s a door asking to be pushed open, he’d push it. Otherwise, I should say
he’s a master at minding his own business.’

‘You’re sure you yourself gave nothing away?’

‘Nothing. I’ve told you how I accounted for the imports.’

‘How do
you
account for them?’ he asked sharply.

I replied that I hadn’t the foggiest notion.

‘Why not to smoke?’

‘I haven’t noticed much self-indulgence at Kasr-el-Sittat.’

‘You really do deserve another glimpse of the amœba,’ he laughed—and I surrendered, as always, to the extraordinary grace with which he could clothe his imitation of
sincerity. ‘It is so simple. We have no right to deprive a man of his life’s work because he chooses to live with us at Kasr-el-Sittat. You’ve met Urgin, our biochemist. Well,
Urgin shouldn’t be limited to Latakia and cigarette leaf. He must have cigars, and he needs a lot of them. We couldn’t possibly afford to pay the Syrian duty. But let’s go and see
the laboratory.’

The east slope of Kasr-el-Sittat was a part I had never visited since first I was shown round the colony; it was full of barns, storehouses, and tarpaulin-covered dumps of machinery and building
material. Nobody lived there except Urgin, the man who had supplied Poss with a letter of introduction to friends in Cuba.

Urgin had the advantage of a flat that was built as a flat by the colonists themselves. It formed part of the laboratory block, which was constructed on steel girders set across the solid stone
walls of God’s old hashish and tobacco warehouse The only access was by a flight of outside steps leading to Urgin’s quar­ters, so that he himself acted as hall-porter to the
laboratory.

As we picked our way along the silent and much-encumbered paths, I said that Urgin seemed to have been set very far apart from his fellows.

‘You don’t like him, Eric?’ Elisa asked. ‘Well, of course you wouldn’t!’

I replied that I could only judge him by casual contacts, but that he was far too dogmatic for my taste, and—though possibly he didn’t realize it—opposed to the whole
philosophy of Kasr-el-Sittat. An individual to him was a random element of no statistical importance and mighty little historical influence.

‘Yet I never knew a man with more respect for the human body,’ she laughed. ‘You ought to like that.’

‘Amberson has an instinctive ideology,’ said Osterling. ‘He smells in Urgin the Marxist deviationist. And, of course, he’s perfectly right! All scientists have a strong
tendency to Marxism, for they know perfectly well that in the present stage of human development every discovery they make is a potential menace. Therefore they cling to a childish belief in
planning. Daddy Planning will be able to mend it. But don’t let it bother you, Amberson. Good God, give ’em the toys and money they want, and they’re as easy as soldiers for the
intelligent man to manage!’

Urgin opened the door a little sulkily, with an open book in his hand to emphasize the fact that he was enjoying his privacy. He brightened up when he distinguished Elisa among his three
nocturnal visitors, and received us with a warmth that was entirely sincere, though you heard him, as it were, fumbling for the switch which turned it on.

‘You know I never disturb you except on duty,’ she said, ‘or unless I’m invited.’

‘Invited?’ he protested. ‘I don’t have to invite you. You’re always welcome.’

‘Then sometimes you ought to tell me so.’

That was the only time I ever heard Elisa deliberately exploit her sex. Flirtation was a manner that I could have sworn did not enter into her values or even her calculations. And yet how right
she was! She ensured the peaceful devotion of whatever simple and honest soul Urgin kept for use outside his laboratory.

He was, I believe, a Lithuanian, but he had taken his degree at London University and spoke perfect English. He had no longer a country or a family, and assumed a pose of bitter
internationalism. I doubt if he considered, when alone in his flat, that small countries were as futile as he pretended.