The High Place (16 page)

It was true, of course, that no statesman from East or West could actually declare war at a conference table, but whether, after his outburst, he resigned or not, chaos would have been created.
Resignation could only prove that his government had lost its nerve at the last moment and that fact, combined with the success of the Osterling-Tassen propaganda in showing the West as divided,
was the grimmest invitation. Mood, in fact, was the Secretariat’s real explosive. The cigar was merely a trigger device. Its timing could safely be left to Czoldy. He came directly under the
Assistant Secretary-General of his branch, and he would know as well as any man when mood was at the breaking-point.

There, on the beach, my emotional decision against Elisa was immediate; but it was not a logical decision. I believe and believed that our civilisation is rushing towards an ant-heap discipline
and welfare, and that progress must be checked if any recognizable human spirit is to survive. War was the surest way to check it. The Secretariat was right. To the eternal ques­tion of the
revolutionary—are you prepared to destroy the liv­ing for the sake of their descendants?—Elisa answered Yes, as the communist, for his own millennium, must answer Yes. But I, as she
had so often called me, am a sentimentalist. In that, and perhaps only in that, I prove myself one with my own English ancestors. We are not good fanatics. We would protest against the Last Coming
itself as too sudden and unimaginative a revolution; and our deep, unrealized belief that time does not run in human days shows us, I think, to be in harmony with the universe.

Emotional decision, yes, was easy. Every other thought, except horror, was inhibited. I left the beach and the black specks of burnt paper with a picture in my mind which obsessed me. I saw
myself as the infinitesimal point of an inverted tri­angle, resisting the thrust of the powerful base. The image was so vivid, the point so small that contemplation made me dizzy. It was a
nightmare, as if one should consider and be forced to consider an immense sphere balanced upon a pin-point. The mind knows it to be impossible, and yet retains the vision, shud­dering away from
it until physical sickness relieves imagination.

1

O
N AND ON THROUGH THE NIGHT ENDURED MY DESPAIR,
bearable to me without madness only because, in the end, I called it fatalism.
My love and the overwhelming power of the Secretariat were both against me. With each hour that passed the demand of my conscience for action became clearer, and clearer the hopelessness of any
open opposition. That was as well, for I was compelled to move in the way of the Levant along the easiest path, submissive and unsuspected, employing the only quality left to me, the
underling’s gift for subtle and treacherous intrigue.

It was September 20th, the day before the opening of the Conference Elisa had said that Gisorius was leaving that night for Paris after a swift visit? Why? Why not keep away from Czoldy at a
time when any meeting of the two should not be risked? Was it possible that the box of Coriolanos which Rosa should have delivered to Czoldy had never been replaced?

The more I thought of it, the more likely it seemed to me. They must have investigated for anxious months before they could be sure that Rosa and his box were not, somewhere, in the hands of
interested police. And then it would take some time for Urgin, who must have worked long and lovingly over each masterpiece, to produce another full box. A full box was essential. There could be no
gambling, at a critical moment, on a man choosing the cigar intended for him. Oh, I could imagine the exasperation of Elisa and Osterling, as Urgin re­fused to be hurried! They could fool him
completely over in­tangibles such as politics, but they couldn’t compel him to dope cigars with his volatile thiopentone (rather than something else which amused him more) without some
gross lie which might arouse his suspicion.

I decided to start at once and have lunch with Ashkar. I had some urgent business in Aleppo which would serve as an excuse for my sudden absence from home, if the question ever arose. Then, I
remember, I began a note to Elisa and tore it up. I could not bring myself on the same journey to visit Kasr-el-Sittat.

There were no leaves to fall; the autumn dust, borrowing their movement, sailed in sunlit eddies of pink and orange past the windows of Ashkar’s billet, as we tasted the new wine and
washed down a roast hare stuffed with olives. When his orderly had served us and left, I asked Ashkar what he had done with the box of cigars he had taken from Selim. He was horrified at this
unmannerly mention of a forgotten and discreditable episode, and answered that if he had known I liked cigars he would have sent a trooper riding to Cairo to get some for me.

I pretended to be impressed, and in my turn assured him that I too was ready to visit the ends of the earth to satisfy his lightest wish; friendship, I went on in a lowered tone, was the motive
behind my question.

Ashkar fixed me with expressionless brown eyes, searching to divine my hidden meaning. He said shortly that everything which belonged to Eugen Rosa had been buried.

‘And you are still sure Selim will never talk?’

‘He is dead.’

I showed no particular interest, and drank my coffee in silence. After a bit Ashkar began to rumble and curse, as the story erupted through the stratified layers of gendarme.

‘By God, I am a child! By God, my years have gone for nothing! By God, I trusted myself to a fool! I told you Selim was mad. I told you that he boasted, and that I showed him, written down
in good Turkish, all he confessed to me. I knew his plans, his associates, his routes. It was the end of Selim. He had thrust such a curb behind his teeth that I could break his jaw with my little
finger. And then! Then he behaves as if he had said nothing!

‘He ran a string of stolen camels from Antioch to Harim by the very route he told me of. When I heard, I could not believe it, but the tracks of his passage were there. As soon as he
re­turned to Antioch, this time with a load of hashish, I sent word to the Turks and told them where he would camp. The Turks are without our respect for justice. I counted on that, and for the
first time in all this business I was not wrong. Selim was shot while trying to escap.’

‘When you took the cigars from Selim, had he smoked any?’ I asked.

‘One. And another he carried between his fingers, lit, when he came to tell me about Rosa. He said,’ added Ashkar grimly, ‘that he would burn off my eyelids so that I should
see the better.’

‘Suppose there were hashish in those cigars?’ I suggested.

‘Hashish!’ he exclaimed. ‘It could be! His eyes and his babbling, yes! But Selim’s speech was clear. No hashish-smoker ever spoke as he did. And then’—he
looked at me so mild an enquiry that I could ignore it if I wished—‘the cigars came from Kasr-el-Sittat.’

‘That is why I am here.’

His face still did not change, but the elasticity seemed to leave those powerful jaws on each side of his jaw-bone, so that the iron-grey stubble stood out and became the dominating colour. I
knew what he was thinking: that in any battle with Kasr-el-Sittat—and battle there would be—he must finish the loser.

‘White drugs?’ he asked.

‘Not quite. A mixture of white and hashish that is now fashionable in Europe.’

I was leading him towards the path I wanted him to take, but my suggestion was not, I think, wholly untrue. Urgin did experiment with hashish and had isolated the alkaloids. I believe he used
them in minute quantities in order that his thiopentone should simulate more exactly the effect of alcohol.

‘Does Villaneda know?’

The mere fact that he could ask this question—and that a dozen times I had put it to myself—shows the trust that Juan Villaneda inspired. I didn’t want to destroy as yet the
bridge between Ashkar and Kasr-el-Sittat, so I denied that Juan knew anything at all about drug running.

‘No. A group of colonists are smuggling for their own account,’ I said, ‘and the quantities are too small to be worth a scandal.’

‘Small or not, it shall stop,’ he grumbled. ‘I? I, who have shaken the hand of Russell Pasha and been commmended by him to my government, shall I allow this? By God, shall my
troopers sit drinking with the Turks, and say that their Christian captain is corrupt?’

‘You needn’t allow it,’ I answered, ‘but if you use the wisdom of Solomon, Kasr-el-Sittat will never know. To-night Juan Vil­laneda will bring you a traveller for
Turkey. See him before he crosses the frontier and examine his baggage. If he is carrying cigars, take the box from him, look at it and return it unopened. But do not return the same box that you
took.’

I went out to my car, and came back with three full boxes of twenty-five Coriolanos.

‘Give him one of those,’ I said, ‘and no one will ever be the wiser till the buyer finds out that ordinary cigars without the drug have been delivered to him.’

Ashkar smiled with relief, appreciating the flavour of a cun­ning that he might have prepared himself. I have never had a better compliment than his immediate belief. Of course he recognized
the box of Coriolanos as identical with that which Eugen Rosa had carried; otherwise he had really no evidence beyond the fact that I had explained the illogical, unaccountable behaviour of
Selim.

‘If the trick works, it will do for the present,’ he said. ‘But after?’

‘It will do till seller and buyer decide that neither of them has lied. And even then—who will think of the minute when the box was in your hands?’

‘And always these Coriolanos?’

‘If they change the brand, I will change it too.’

Then he made a very acute remark—jovially, but with the first shade of disrespect I had ever heard from him.

‘You run between friends like a money-changer in the bazaar,’ he said, and both are profited.’

I admitted that indeed my second motive was to protect a friend in the colony, and told him that neither he nor his orderly should mention my visit, and that he and I should never
com­municate with each other unless we had taken the most extreme precautions.

‘Do you not want to know whether the traveller carried cigars or not?’ he asked.

Certainly I could not bear the suspense of remaining in ignor­ance. I gave the problem some thought, and suggested he might send me a message by Juan Villaneda. I didn’t want to risk
so much as a telephone call between us.

‘But how?’ he enquired.

‘After the traveller has gone on his way, will Juan Villaneda eat with you?’

‘If God wills.’

‘Then if the traveller was carrying a box of cigars and you succeeded in changing them, give Villaneda stuffed vine leaves. If he had the box, but you could not change, give him cold meat.
If there was nothing, whatever else you like.’

Ashkar took to the old trick at once, and asked no more ques­tions. He merely looked, smiling a little sternly, at the boxes of cigars I had so readily produced which bore no customs stamps.
I saw on his face, or imagined that I saw, the regret of an honourable man at the lower standard of his associate. Never again, I knew, should I be able to persuade him that I was not involved in
the secret dishonesties of Kasr-el-Sittat.

When I left Ashkar, I was angry with him and with myself. I drove away to Aleppo, over the melancholy plain, carrying on a resentful dialogue with him in my imagination. I wanted to explain to
him that I would have broken every law in Syria for Kasr-el-Sittat and its ideals—but, if that were so, what about my treachery? I took refuge in the childish satisfaction that, right or
wrong, I had taken action.

The colony rented a house in Aleppo, where two of the com­panions were always in residence. They met visitors arriving by train, collected mail and supplies, and sent a car or truck every
second day to Kasr-el-Sittat. I called on them to find out if they had any news of Juan Villaneda. He never had much patience with the placid life of Kasr-el-Sittat, and was continually passing
through Aleppo on the way to and from his contacts with the dusty masses, without which he felt himself to be a fraud.

They told me that he would probably bring in the next batch of visitors returning from the colony. Sure enough, two days later, I found him at Aleppo station, where he was seeing off a typically
odd collection of guest: two gentle and disillusioned Hindus, a gorgeous South American woman whose unexpected bare feet and sandals were an obvious tribute to the monasticism of Kasr-el-Sittat,
and a jolly Frenchman in a beret, whose politics, however burning, were causing him at the moment less excitement than the sleeping accommodation allotted to the South American.

Juan called me over at once to talk to the Hindus, who wanted to know some complicated detail about hotels in Basra, whence they were sailing for home. They seemed a little disconcerted by
Kasr-el-Sittat. No doubt they recognized a spiritual content, but found the expression of it unfamiliar. I wondered what they made of that Brahmin, Osterling, or he of them. I wondered, too, why
the Secretariat, who were such masters at making use of the innocent, didn’t send out their contraband by such visitors. I found the answer at once. They never took an unavoidable risk. It
wouldn’t do for a customs offer to be smoking thiopen­tone in a confiscated cigar. A pious Moslem who didn’t drink but enjoyed an occasional smoke of hashish would have no doubt at
all that the cause of his intoxication was the cigar, and might even find it enjoyable. That, certainly, was one of the reasons why Rosa and Gisorius had not left Syria by a legal route. Customs
examination at departure from the Turkish air­port could be overcome by Gisorius’ influence, and by Czoldy’s on arrival in Paris.

I walked away from the station with Juan Villaneda. He led me to a thatched booth, outside the old khan of the pilgrimage, where the proprietor had a few bottles of good sherry for Christian
consumption. They had been bought cheap, said Juan, from the restaurant car of the Taurus Express. The question of wine gave an easy lead to Ashkar, and I asked Juan whether he had seen him
recently.