The High Place (20 page)

‘It is possible,’ he admitted. ‘But the chance I meant is that you know more than I do.’

I told him that even if I did, I wouldn’t buy my life—and that I was quite certain he wouldn’t turn loose an enemy of Kasr-el-Sittat for the sake of any information about his
accomplices.

‘Compliments all round!’ he said ironically. ‘But you have misunderstood. Your accomplices—we will go into that later. It wouldn’t surprise me if you had none. No,
the information I want is—what were your motives? Why Rosa, who was unimportant? Why not Czoldy or any of the others who have passed through your hands or Ashkar’s?’

‘I’ve told you that I had nothing to do with Rosa’s death,’ I repeated.

‘Disappearance, you said. Can it be that you take your orders through Ashkar?’

I told him that of course I did not, and that Ashkar was exactly what he had always thought him.

‘Then Ashkar killed Rosa,’ he said acutely. ‘And for some reason that he believed his duty. And Rosa’s death started—what?’

‘If I tell you, will you see that Ashkar comes to no harm?’

‘Man, how can I promise that? Are you forgetting the Secre­tariat? My power is outside Kasr-el-Sittat, not here. Remember the one chance I spoke of, and tell me your motives. God knows
there have been times when I too have been weary of life as you are! But you have a duty to Ashkar.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Why you are a traitor. I have not yet said a word to Gisorius of what I have discovered. Does that have no significance for you?’

I replied that he would naturally want as full a story as pos­sible before making his report.

‘Am I a policeman?’ he retorted. ‘No, there is far too much I do not understand. Your only chance is that I may take another view of your intentions. Put it this way,
friend—I am convinced of your loyalty until I am proved wrong.’

‘You are wrong,’ I said. ‘I changed those cigars, and I hoped to do it again.’

‘But why?’

‘Because I too think of the masses.’

‘The masses! You have never given a true thought to the masses in your life,’ exclaimed Juan contemptuously and, I hope, unjustly. ‘This isn’t a play, friend! No
attitudes!

‘Then put it that I’m a mere bourgeois sentimentalist,’ I replied. ‘I’ve seen what two wars have done, and I don’t want another.’

‘But what have those cigars to do with war?’

‘And no attitudes from you!’

‘Still you do not understand me,’ he said. ‘For the moment I am your judge, not Gisorius. And you have been clever enough not to be caught if I do not speak. I promise you
noth­ing. But your one chance is to tell me why you thought the cigars were worth your life.’

I was still uncertain whether his ignorance was not a pretence, a trap to find out how much I knew. I played for time, and asked him to what purpose he himself thought the cigars were being
smuggled out.

‘Interrogation,’ he answered.

‘Not very efficient.’

‘Why not?’

Slowly, waiting for his remarks and questions, I told him all I had learned of the effects of thiopentone. My hopes were ris­ing; his interest was far too keen to be simulated. I explained
to him that Urgin’s Coriolanos were mighty little use for police or underground interrogation—since a man who believed he had done his duty, and had no sense of guilt, would continue to
have no sense of guilt under the drug. The interrogator would get everything except the facts he wanted. Torture of body or nerves would be far more profitable than thiopentone.

‘Then they have lied to me,’ he said, ‘and to Urgin, too. And now—go on!’

My story must have lasted over an hour. I told him much of what I have written here, without, of course, the personal details, and with far more of political discussions that were relevant only
within the closed circle of the colony.

‘But police—they swarm like lice at these conferences,’ he objected. ‘Wouldn’t they suspect the cigars if some fool of a statesman starts shouting what he really
feels?’

‘Not if he were tired and had been drinking—even a single glass. His voice would be excited, but perfectly clear and normal.’

‘And what of a man who doesn’t drink at all?’

‘Safe, I suppose—for Czoldy wouldn’t take the risk. But are there many? You wouldn’t choose a teetotaller for a job which requires a pretence of
good-fellowship.’

Juan Villaneda brooded at the table, head in hands. Though his brain was swift and practised, he couldn’t get away from the gestures of a peasant to whom thought was a deliberate
effort.

‘You are utterly without logic or you would be with the Secretariat,’ he accused me suddenly. ‘What is your objection? At the end of their war it is certain they will have the
conditions they want. Freedom for the individual who can survive. The Secretariat at least can reason. But what is there in you that I can trust?’

‘As much as I myself can trust, and no more,’ I answered bitterly. ‘Hatred of the State, yes. …’

Juan’s contemptuous question seemed to force me down through all the floating rubbish half believed, the sewerage of ideas created by others and undissolved, until I reached a bottom of
sincerity.

‘Hatred of the State, but a belief that no violence can destroy it.’

‘You must grow a beard, friend, if you are going to play the old Kropotkin,’ he mocked, not unkindly. ‘Russia is the only country where you would be understood, and just as
surely shot.’

He left his barren end of the room, and joined me by the fire.

‘I must work with what I have,’ he said. ‘What you believe God knows! But at least I have a guarantee that you believe it.’

My humiliation was so great that I had forgotten. I asked him what guarantee.

‘That you have chosen pain, man! And that you know there is worse pain to come.’

He placed a hand on my knee with the sharp Latin smack of comradeship. I looked down at the long, stub-ended fingers. It was the hand of a guitar-player—a limited instrument but for its
power to reproduce the sigh of all humanity.

‘Here is a letter from her.’

I hesitated to open it. That powerful, neutral writing stared at me from the envelope. The broad down strokes of the ‘i’ and ‘A’ and ‘m’ were feminine, yet
tail-less and unornamented.

‘Read it,’ he said. ‘I have read it already. This is no time for delicacy.’

I have the letter before me now. It was the first and last that had a note of tenderness.

‘Friend,’ said Juan, ‘there is no return.’

When I had recovered myself, he asked me:

‘Why does she tell you to come now?’

‘To avoid suspicion,’ I said, though I knew it wasn’t true.

‘There is no real suspicion yet. There is only doubt. Doesn’t she mean that Czoldy has his weapon at last, and is sure of success?’

‘There is time,’ I protested. ‘There must be time.’

I could not, would not accept the inference that such a note should herald the four horsemen, and that fifth who rode only in the stars until we mounted him on earth.

‘Two weeks, perhaps,’ he answered. ‘The Greek question comes up at the end of the month. I see no opportunity for Czoldy till then. I have been watching the agenda.’

‘Watching it? What for?’ I shouted at him. ‘If you were suspicious, why in God’s name didn’t you act?’

I attacked him angrily for his futile ignorance, for accepting whatever stories the Secretariat liked to give him. I told him he would have done better to stick to his precious proletariat.

‘The way to revolution is no longer through the proletariat, and you know it,’ he retorted. ‘They won’t fight for liberty. They can’t see that they haven’t
any.’

His face flared red and gold like his country’s flag, but he kept his self-control. He had to defend his own honesty of pur­pose—to himself as well as to me. He admitted
furiously that he had played his part in devising the general policy of the Secre­tariat, and cursed all their subtleties that he hadn’t the experience of statecraft to understand. The
only one of them, he said, who could have roused a Barcelona mob was Elisa.

‘Man! Neither I nor my comrades abroad wanted war!’ he exclaimed. ‘And there was no reason to expect it. The West will not, and the Russians think only of defence. They believe
Marx. Yes, they still believe him! And according to Marx, Capital must be the aggressor.’

Then Juan produced an odd paradox, which I repeat for what it is worth; he certainly believed it himself.

‘Marx was right! But the power of private capitalism is finished, and the tyranny of state capitalism is more ruthless than the other ever was. Therefore, in the Marxian sense, the great
capitalist union is Russia. So, if only they could under­stand their own creed, they would know that the West cannot be the aggressor.’

The last two months had made him uneasy, and dissatisfied with the explanations that Osterling had given him. The usual game of creating tension between America and the social-democracies of
Europe had been carried, he thought, too far; it was propaganda that could only have a short-term effect, and would be utterly discredited when the newspapers recovered a sense of proportion.

At the same time there had been an attempt at assassination in Moscow, which had been kept quiet because the government could not afford another purge. To Juan it was foolish and ill-timed. When
he protested, Elisa and Gisorius had assured him that it meant nothing, that the underground had got out of control.

‘And so I think that Czoldy will succeed,’ he said. ‘They have shown up the West as divided. They have put the Kremlin between a fear and a fear. If the cigar does all you say,
war is now certain.’

I misread this attitude of his. Taking it as an acceptance of the inevitable, I grew excited.

‘Calm, man! Calm!’ he ordered. ‘The Secretariat is not so powerful as you think. They have sacrificed so much to secrecy that the heart is weak. I have told them so a hundred
times. He who controls Kasr-el-Sittat controls the party.’

‘They can count on loyalty,’ I said.

‘You think so? Yet sheep are sheep.’

In Juan’s tone there was no longer any anger or even dis­illusionment. He was calculating the interacting forces in a field that was familiar to him. What Czoldy and Osterling had
learned as national leaders in the nineteen thirties, he too had learned through union and syndicate and civil war. He was accustomed to the capture and recapture of a party or its individuals.

‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked, holding out Elisa’s note.

‘To come, friend, and to be silent. We do not want to destroy Elisa or Kasr-el-Sittat—true? Well then, be silent,’ he repeated, ‘and obey. It wouldn’t please me at
all if I had to hand you to Gisorius to save myself.’

1

T
HE FIRST RAINS CAME, PITTING AND FASTENING THE DUST
which had blown, since the harvest, from field to field between Sinai and
Syria. The ground, except in gardens such as mine, was still too hard to receive the blessing of the water that returned to sea in its full original volume through every dry and waiting
wadi
. From
my terrace I could see the choppy and discoloured semi-circles at the mouths of three tem­porary rivers, dyed brown, grey and orange, where the earth bled into the Mediterranean.

I decided to leave for Kasr-el-Sittat at once, knowing that their local road might be impassable for some days after the winter rains set in for good. It was a week since I had seen Juan
Villaneda and received Elisa’s note. I had employed it to set my affairs in order as if for a successor. I expected to return, but I shrank from any contemplation of that Eric Amberson who
would walk again up the stairs from the warehouse.

When I drove off the highlands into the chain of little valleys that led to Kasr-el-Sittat, I found the colony’s indefatigable rank and file already at work on the road. The farm tractors
were hauling stone; and here and there, on the verges, were concrete culverts ready to be dug in and covered. To avoid the last ford, where even in summer the smooth, racing water was never below
the hub-caps of my car, a new track had been cut out of the escarpment by bulldozer and explosive. The surface was being gravelled and rolled by local labour; and downstream, where the river was a
clear, lead-coloured cataract between narrow walls of rock, the red girders were in position and wait­ing to carry a bridge.

I suspected that the rough diversions around work in progress had proved too much for my front springs, so on arrival I went through the garage into the workshop. I found Phil Grynes busy with
broken caterpillar tracks. He said that, Cripes, he was glad to see me—in a tone which expressed relief rather than any compliment. After inspecting the car and assuring me that the forge
could easily manage a new leaf, he led me out into the open.

My first question about Anton Tabas had been turned aside by a grudging remark that he was all right. I now tried again.

‘The fact is,’ said, ‘that he’s a bit silent—carrying on like he used to do the last month at Cæsarea.’

‘And you? Still quite contented?’

‘Oh, I’ve got everything I want,’ he replied.

His voice made it perfectly clear that having everything he wanted still wasn’t enough. I took up the invitation to ask questions.

‘Oh, no!’ he laughed. ‘That side of it is all right. A Greek, she is. And it’s a marvel to me she’ll look at a man at all after what she’s been
through.’

‘Has Anton got any objections?’

‘He? He just told me to ask myself what harm it would do to others. And when I said straight off that it wouldn’t do any, he told me to give her the love that I gave to him. Well, I
can’t do that, but I see what he means.’