The High Place (19 page)

Ashkar refused to believe that Kasr-el-Sittat had any greater power than their influence at Damascus. He was polite but sceptical about my guarded story of organizations abroad. A monastery to
him was a monastery. Nestorians and Maronites—they too had protectors abroad, but not effective enough to bother the sleep of a captain of gendarmes.

He asked me where I was staying the night. I told him that I hadn’t yet had time to give it a thought, and that I mustn’t be seen in Latakia, for I was supposed to be in bed with
malaria at home.

That impressed him far more than anything I had said, and he enquired if I were sure of Boulos.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But his cousin was paid to watch me. Are you sure of all your own men?’

He became thoughtful.

‘Can this taxi-driver be traced?’ he asked.

‘Unlikely. I picked him up in Hama, and there’s no reason why Kasr-el-Sittat should look there.’

It was already night. We drove back towards Kassab, and about a mile from the frontier turned off the main road on to a track.

‘You will be safe there,’ said Ashkar. ‘I shall be about two hours. Shall I bring some food?’

The taxi-driver and I exclaimed together, for we had had nothing since a quick snack in Hama.

Ashkar’s heavy steps, each one resenting the absence of a horse, faded away up the road, and the woods were silent. I hoped to heaven that he knew the routine of the Kassab post, and that
we should not be disturbed. I didn’t want to be dis­covered acting suspiciously within a mile of the frontier.

The taxi-driver seemed to sense that I was an amateur.

‘Have no fear,’ he said. ‘I have done this before, but he was not on our side then.’

‘God prospers him who forgets the names of policemen,’ I suggested.

‘My licence is my living’ he assured me. ‘For me they are nameless as for their fathers.’

He curled up on the front seat and went to sleep, leaving me to meditate upon the improbability of Ashkar and myself ever being able to arrange a really secret meeting in this country where the
movements of every official and every foreigner aroused curiosity and gossip. The true problem of any agent employed by the Secretariat was not so much the tailing of Ashkar as knowing in which
café to sit and listen.

At the sound of hooves turning off the road and breaking into a canter on the soft red dust of the track, the taxi-driver rose out of his sleep into the bushes like a startled partridge. I was
not so accustomed as he to the rusted latches of the taxi door, so I had to remain where I was. Fortunately the horseman turned out to be Ashkar, arriving before his time.

We left the driver with meat and water and flat loaves of mountain bread. Though a Moslem, he seemed a little dis­appointed at the water, and Ashkar produced a bottle of araq, declaring it,
for the sake of the driver’s conscience, to be lemonade. Then we went up the hill out of earshot.

‘You are right. I am being watched,’ said Ashkar. ‘Ten days ago Damascus sent me a new clerk—a Christian, but I didn’t like him. I went back to Kassab just now to
ask my orderly about him; he too is an Ashkar, so he tells me the truth. This clerk is everywhere, even in my quarters. And he pays coffee for my men.’

‘Has he seen the inside of your safe?’ I asked.

‘I do not know. But some time he may have looked over my shoulder when I opened it. Even so he could not be sure, for the cigar boxes are behind a heap of files.’

I asked Ashkar then and there to decide upon some sure way of sending me back the boxes. I couldn’t allow him to destroy them. The Bari crate, from which I had taken them, had been in my
warehouse for a month and could stay there longer—for Poss’s deliveries were of course irregular—but soon or late I should have to send that case to Kasr-el-Sittat with the
correct number of cigar boxes in the false bottom. Before I came under suspicion, it wouldn’t have mattered how many boxes arrived. I could have told some story of the bottom being smashed in
transit, and got away with it.

Then Ashkar turned all gendarme on me, and insisted on keeping the box of Coriolanos which he had taken from Gisorus. He made it, of course, a ceremoniously veiled refusal, but he meant it. To
put bluntly what took him a good two minutes to say, that box was his evidence against Kasr-el-Sittat and a charge of drug-smuggling was his weapon in self-defence.

I had to explain a good deal more of Kasr-el-Sittat and its objects. I reminded him that if you looked at the reverse side of Villaneda’s innocent libertarian communism, it was
anarch­ism. He had heard of anarchism, and at once connected it with assassination.

‘But that did neither harm nor good,’ I told him. ‘These people are cleverer. They would use the politician instead of killing him. They would make him a little more foolish
than he is. They would turn him into a Selim. Now do you understand? The drug in those cigars is not one that a man takes for pleasure—or knowingly.’

Ashkar’s reaction was quite unexpected. He embraced me. Why hadn’t I told him before, he complained. Why had I let him think that I, who had been an example to them all of justice
and incorruptibility, had been dabbling in the dirt? Why hadn’t I known that his heart was with the British as always? I didn’t disillusion him. I let him keep his Arabian Nights dreams
of an ever-present secret service.

‘First,’ he said, ‘my clerk shall meet with an accident.’

‘For God’s sake, no! It would only increase suspicion. Get rid of the cigars, and then let this clerk see everything you do.’

‘It is a pity.’ he said regretfully. ‘My sergeant is teaching him to ride, and it would have been so easy to set him on a mare in heat, and loose the stallion. Very well! Very
well! I will send the three boxes down to you by safe hand. You remember my clansman who delivered you a letter? My orderly shall give them to him secretly, and he will bear them to
Tripoli.’

I said that would do admirably, so long as he filled up the space in his safe with something that looked like cigar boxes, but wasn’t. Then I asked him if he had any money.

It was a pretty hopeless question to put to the one honest gendarme on the frontier. He produced with pride the equivalent of ten shillings and said that it was mine.

My trouble was that I had left home with what cash there was in the office. It had seemed an adequate sum for all likely emergencies, but wasn’t enough to employ a taxi for twenty hours,
to give the very considerable tip that would be essential to preserve the driver’s goodwill, and to get myself home from wherever I left him. I couldn’t take the taxi to Tripoli lest he
should discover where I lived, and I couldn’t give him a cheque for fear of revealing my name.

After I had guarded myself against so many possible accidents by which my movements might be traced, this was a nasty little inconvenient fact. A commonplace, no doubt, to men who must conceal
their movements. I suspect that of criminals on the run just as many have been caught through lack of ready cash as have escaped because police or pursuers were checked at a critical moment by the
same exasperating problem.

I said good-bye to Ashkar—a more affectionate good-bye than our last, though undeserve—and told the driver to go back to Hama. We stopped for a very early breakfast on the way, and I
made him idle away an hour or two, so that we reached Hama when the banks were open. I directed him to a hotel as if I lived there, and went in and out the back way, and round to the local branch
of my bank. I didn’t want the driver to know where I had gone, for the national curiosity would cer­tainly have led him to get my name from one of the clerks. I asked the manager to
telephone his Damascus office, where I had an account, and to cash me a cheque. That done, I returned to the very anxious driver, who was already arguing with the hall porter, and paid him off.

Hama was a town where I had no business, and the last place where anyone would look for my tracks. Even so, I avoided any chance of being seen, and spent the day sleeping under a fig tree
outside the town. I returned to Tripoli by a bus which got in after dark, and walked by the lanes on the outskirts of the town to my garden gate.

After a bath and a long whisky and soda, I came to the con­clusion that I was pretty safe. The only risk I had taken was at leaving and entering Tripoli, where, at the station or the bus
stop, I had probably been recognized by some casual citizen. There was no reason, however, why Kasr-el-Sittat should make enquires when they could so easily find out from my customers or my
warehouse that I was home in bed.

A week later Ashkar’s poor and ragged relative came boldly into my warehouse and asked for a job. Not by a sign of eyes or any slyness of bearing did he show that he had ever seen me
before. He was just a labourer on the edge of starvation looking for work, with his possessions stuffed into a filthy waist-band. I took him into my office to interview him, and, to my intense
relief, recovered from his rags the three boxes of Coriolanos. I put them back into the crate and nailed it up again. I hoped that when Urgin used the cigars for experiment or for the
Secretariat’s requirements, he would either never discover that one of the boxes was doped, or, if he did, would assume that after all he had made the mistake that Elisa suspected, and sent a
quite innocent box of Coriolanos out of the laboratory.

3

It is mere conceit that has made me linger over so detailed an account of my absurdities. That ingenious journey to Kassab was the last occasion on which I could feel myself to be a man of
action, and find content in dramatics. It was futile, futile as a child’s game by which he passes through a string of satisfying incidents, and ignores the gaps between the beads. I have
con­fessed what I did and what I thought, but those deeds and thoughts now seem to me a mere display of activity. Was it wholly useless activity? Yes, on the plane of events that were under my
control. No, in the ultimate, fully-dimensioned pattern that emerged.

Some three weeks after my return I was sitting in my office, spending a slack evening hour on the accounts, when my clerk announced Mr. Villaneda from Kasr-el-Sittat. I was glad of the
distraction. I am no accountant. At the end of the half year I used to shut myself up for a whole blasphemous day and night until I understood why my official balance-sheet showed a profit or a
loss.

A distraction, yes. I took Juan upstairs, and opened a bottle or two. I felt no presentiment at all. There were a dozen objects for which he might have come to see me, and all more pleasant than
accounts: a message from Elisa, some trouble with the colony’s agricultural machinery, or merely a night’s lodging and a friendly meal.

He sat down in the corner farthest from the fire, and lit a cigarette. He seemed to avoid by nature the disorderly comforts of the north, preferring the tiles, the bare table, the windows that
united him with the cleanliness of Mediterranean space. His face was drawn, and I remember thinking that never before had I noticed how straight and ascetic was the sharp line of his mouth.

After a casual chat about Tabas and Grynes, I asked him if he had recently been on any of his cross-country wanderings.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘to Damascus and Hama.’

The room was full of shadows. I got up and switched on the light. His eyes, as I expected, were too firmly fixed on me.

‘What took you to Hama?’ I asked.

‘Gisorius does not understand Syria,’ he answered. ‘I do.’

I said that Hama was an unattractive town.

‘I want to understand this business,’ he insisted, trampling over me with his directness. ‘Ashkar—well, he is an honest man and he has obeyed you. But you? I could have
sworn I knew your character, and I am not a fool. Tell me your story.’

Against any of the rest, except Elisa, I was ready to fight through every interrogation and every trick they had learned; but Juan and I had, in judgment of human beings, the same set of values.
Though by no means intimate friends, we understood each other without effort. I hadn’t a hope of lying to him success­fully, and we both knew it.

‘Which story do you want?’ I asked.

‘Is there more than one?’ he answered impatiently. ‘Listen, friend!’

He told me that my bank accounts at Tripoli and Damascus had been watched as soon as I was. Bank clerks, he said, were the priests of capitalism, paid as poorly as other priests and yet as
unaccountably discreet. But were they not Arabs? So friend­ship counted where money alone did not. Didn’t I agree that I myself could look at any bank account in Syria if I really wanted
to? But that was beyond Gisorius, so the investigation had been left to him.

That cheque drawn at Hama had seemed to him queer, out of the pattern, and when he discovered that I had been at home and in bed at the time, it seemed queerer.

To leave no room for any illusions, he told me his move­ments step by step. He had gone the round of possible cus­tomers; they knew of my firm, but were sure that I did not sell direct
to anyone in Hama. Then to the hotels. No trace of me in the registers, but one of the porters recognized my descrip­tion, and directed him to my taxi-driver. He had proved sur­prisingly
loyal to his unknown fare, but he couldn’t deny—having babbled about the trip to the porter and some of fellow-drivers—that he had been to Kassab. That was enough for Juan.

‘Yes, friend,’ he said, ‘you met Ashkar at Kassab, and you told him to get rid of his cigars. He is simple, Ashkar, when he is not in his frontier forests. He showed his safe
too openly—and painted cardboard does not look at all like cedar boxes, especially when one is expecting a change. Now, where is Rosa?’

‘I’ll never persuade you that I had nothing to do with his dis­appearance,’ I answered, ‘but it’s true.’

‘Man, nothing makes sense in this! So for the present I will believe you. But tell me the truth and all the truth, for you have only one chance of life.’

‘I know. But I don’t want to take it,’ I said. ‘I can’t live a lie.’

‘We don’t understand each other. What is the chance you see?’

‘That the Secretariat will tell Elisa nothing, for her sake.’