The High Place (28 page)

‘To him we are all the same!’ Juan exclaimed impatiently.

‘Do you complain of that, you who have committed murder?’ Tabas answered. ‘But to Philip you are not the same, nor should be. I give him only this guidance: among men who claim
to serve their fellows, learn to distinguish those who love from those who wish to lead.’

That was the nearest approach to practical politics I ever heard from Tabas. His words could profitably be written up in a polling booth. Certainly they cleared away any lingering doubts that
Grynes might have had, and he came with us gladly. He was even excited. A return to the world of necessary illu­sion, so long as he could go there with a clear conscience, must have been a bit
of a holiday for him.

At the office Ashkar’s sergeant was duly spinning out his job. Measuring the floor. Packing exhibits. Description of corpse, orifices and angles. He must have read an occasional detective
story, for I swear that none of this had ever entered into his routine. Normal procedure in a case of murder was merely to take signed statements with the help of a riding-switch, and sign the
witness’s name for him.

One of the troopers was inside, helping his sergeant and call­ing for God to admire. The other stood savagely on guard at the door with a carbine and fixed bayonet. Elisa’s garrison
had been turned out, and were waiting indecisively on the path. I explained to them that Juan had come to give himself up to the police and be questioned. They let him pass, for they had no reason
to be suspicious of Grynes and myself. They knew that since we both spoke Arabic we were obvious choices to deal with the local gendarmerie. The cyphers and code books which I carried, hidden among
papers, in a cardboard folder under my arm gave me an appearance of legal authority.

The sergeant put on a convincing show of being a stupid and unfuriated Arab. He struck the air before our faces, waved his pistol at us and drove us from wall to wall, whispering when his back
was to the window:

‘My father, in which room is it your will that I should put you?’

He snatched carbine and bayonet from his trooper at the door, foaming a little at the mouth for good measure, and drove us through the two doors into the wireless room.

We had ten minutes to go till 2.45, which Grynes employed in familiarizing himself still further with the transmitter. He got in touch with Istanbul without difficulty; they informed us at once
that, in view of the interrupted message of the night before, Paris was standing by to receive it direct from us if conditions were good enough. For a moment I couldn’t give their phrase
‘the night before’ a meaning. It seemed to me that weeks had passed since Gisorius sat at the instrument and sent his URGENT FOR CZOLDY.

We waited while Phil Grynes tapped and listened, tapped and listened, and fiddled with the dials. Without the fan it grew hot and stuffy in that little room. We passed through all the conditions
of sweat, from the first fat cold beads of excitement to flush after flush of moisture so that our hands stuck to the pages of cyphers.

Paris, said Grynes, was receiving him well enough to try. I passed him the sheet of figures. Juan and I sat in silence. The men in Paris who listened anxiously to the incoming dots and dashes
were so vivid a reality that I dared not speak lest Czoldy should hear me.

I knew enough Morse to recognize that several groups of numerals were going out over and over again. Reception was poor, and Grynes was compelled to repeat various parts of the message. He felt
our impatience, and kept it in check by looking over his shoulder from time to time with a cheerful grin.

At last he lifted his earphones and said:

‘Addressee has made arrangements for immediate delivery. They want to know if they should stand by after the usual time in case he wishes to reply.’

I answered that they should; and asked Juan how far the Paris headquarters were from the district of the Etoile where Czoldy was fairly sure to be staying.

‘Man! He won’t be at his hotel’, Juan declared with absolute certainty, ‘but somewhere nearby. Give him an hour, not more. And not less, because he has to decypher and
cypher.’

We tried to go out for a breath of air, but were driven back with insults. Ashkar had well trained his men in literal and un­questioning obedience—and they put into it all the
enthusiasm of the Arab for working himself into a rage, especially if pre­tended. The waiting colonists pressed closer to the door, and the light fell on their faces. I could see that they were
shocked at this brutal treatment of Juan Villaneda, even though they were Elisa’s men. I was afraid they might rush the sentry, and shouted to them as we were hustled back that they should
keep calm till the captain of gendarmerie arrived. As there was now no sound of transmission to be heard, we wedged the two doors open. The draught through the ventilators cooled the room.

Our message sent, I was overcome by the doubt which Juan had put into my mind. Suppose Elisa and the Secretariat were not plotting war at all, but merely planning to take advantage of it when it
came? Then all these heroics were completely misconceived. It seemed to me possible that I should find my­self a mere, futile, petty intriguer against Elisa.

To comfort myself with some vision of the future, I asked Juan if he had any general message ready. He replied that he had, and that as soon as he was securely in control of Kasr-el-Sittat he
would call in all the leaders abroad for a party con­ference. He wanted Tabas to remain till then.

‘He won’t,’ replied Phil Grynes. ‘He says we have no more to teach each other.’

I played on Grynes’ devoted care for his master, and pointed out that at Kasr-el-Sittat he had absolute liberty and three square meals a day.

‘But there is nothing to fear in hunger,’ he answered, as if I had suggested that their movements should be governed by the phases of the moon.

‘Friend, tell that to the man who has starving children!’ Juan retorted.

Phil Grynes compressed his face into still deeper wrinkles as he tried to find words for an answer which he felt rather than knew.

‘I suppose I do sound a bit like pie in the sky,’ he replied, ‘but if you don’t like Mrs. Cantemir’s solution and you won’t have communism, I don’t see
what else there is but religion.’

We talked for half an hour, eager as if a charter for the new Kasr-el-Sittat had to be improvised before Czoldy’s reply came through. At intervals Grynes put on the earphones and listened.
It was nearly 4 a.m. before he nodded to us and began to write on the pad in front of him. We leaned over to watch the quick scrawls of the pencil.

Czoldy had not bothered to use code. It was a pretty sure sign that our warning had struck home, and that he treated it as a matter of extreme urgency. I could imagine him
hastening from some café or obscure room where he had decyphered our message, watching to see that he was not already under police surveillance, and appearing, formidably decisive, at the
party headquarters.

Juan’s face was grim. He was too honest a man for this crisis. If we did not produce a clear, circumstantial and utterly convincing lie, we should not only fail but might drive Czoldy and
his Coriolanos into immediate action.

‘No one ever knew what happened to Eugen Rosa,’ I reminded Juan.

‘No one but you and I.’

I told him to give me a source which Czoldy would consider impeccable.

‘Theodore,’ he answered.

He was a good conspirator. I had a struggle to get out of him any details at all about Theodore. I didn’t want to know who he was, but simply where he lived and why Czoldy should accept
his information. At last he told me that Theodore was a high official of the N.K.V.D. and directly responsible to Gisorius for the internal organization of the party in Russia.

‘If the Soviet police knew what Czoldy intended, would they co-operate with the West?’ I asked him.

‘Of course. Every hand is against the anarchist. And besides, they would be afraid of being accused themselves.’

I wrote down:

‘Will that do?’ I asked.

Juan’s admiration was sour in his mouth. I think he felt illogically that an old comrade did not deserve so stupendous a lie, or perhaps it shocked him that I should profane the value and
courage of Theodore.

We gave Theodore, Rosa and myself their numbers, and coded the message in the Secretariat’s personal cypher. I was astonished that I too had been considered important enough to have a
number. I still see it. It was 37, and in Elisa’s writing.

When Grynes had finished the transmission, I wedged open the doors and took a cautious look at the office. Ashkar’s ser­geant had become bored with playing the detective, and was
standing in complete idleness by the door chatting to the few colonists in the worst of pidgin French, while his troopers listened admiringly. It was still dark, but the dawn wind was beginning to
blow; it carried from the bodies of Gisorius and the electrician the faint, fresh smell of a butcher’s slab. I went back into the wireless room. The lusty smell of the living was fouler, but
its associations were sweet.

We waited. Phil Grynes was asked to accept a message relayed from New York, and we decyphered it to pass the time. They requested authority to use World Opposition funds for the defence of some
fool who had been preaching nineteenth century anarchism in California. Juan refused as decisively as Osterling would have done, and reminded them sharply that it was party policy to support the
extreme right in a democratic state and the extreme left only in a totalitarian state.

Then at last Czoldy’s reply came through. For a moment Juan and I hesitated to extract the meaning from the groups of numerals. We had been so sure of success—influenced no doubt by
the deceptive ease with which he had sent his order to America—and now the reaction came back the stronger. Juan’s voice cracked as he read out the figures, and I snapped at him that
they were mutilated. It took us a minute of argument to reach the obvious conclusion that Czoldy was not using the code in which we had replied to New York, but the personal cyphers. Then we
hadn’t long to wait.

Czoldy replied, and he gave his future address and the name under which he would be known. Grynes confirmed receipt and signed off.

When Ashkar arrived half an hour later and led us out into the office, he was solemn and worried. Elisa and Osterling had truthfully stated that Juan had imprisoned them and murdered Gisorius.
They had denied any knowledge of his motives, but implied that they suspected him of all manner of illegalities. They must have quickly satisfied themselves that Juan was not the influence behind
Ashkar, and so they had impressed this solid policeman, known to be interested in their cigars, that Villaneda was the man he was after.

The hour that I had foreseen and chosen was on me, but there was one constructive act that I could do—and that was to leave Juan in firm control of Kasr-el-Sittat with Ashkar’s
con­fidence in him unshaken.

‘They are quite wrong,’ I said. ‘Their evidence is hearsay. They weren’t there. Bring in Osterling and confront him with Villaneda.’

I seated myself in Osterling’s chair and laid out the code-­books and sheets of figures on his desk. Nobody protested at my enigmatic position. Ashkar evidently decided that I had at
last come out into the open as the secret agent in charge of the case.

When Osterling was brought in by a trooper, he bore himself well. His traditions were too old and too gallant for him to show the slightest indignation; but the two sleepless nights of anxiety
had marked him. He was no longer a force, a grace, whose age was what you chose to give him. He was an erect and polished old gentleman.

I spoke to him in English, which Ashkar did not understand, and told him how we had passed the night. Then I let him read the text of the four messages that had gone back and forth between
ourselves and Paris.

‘So Grynes was an operator,’ he said. ‘We are both fortunate.’

‘Why you?’

‘Because he is not a man to lie to me.’

He held out to Phil Grynes the sheets torn from the pad and covered with the neat groups of figures.

‘Did you send and receive these?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Grynes answered.

He still seemed doubtful, wondering perhaps if there were no way in which we could have deceived Grynes himself.

‘Do you know anything of the case of an anarchist in California?’ I asked.

‘I do.’

‘Then read these.’

It was the final proof. He met my eyes, looked casually away and met them again. The colour came back into his face. He forced himself to imitate the Osterling of every day, and indeed he became
him. It was a good memory to leave behind, a com­pliment to himself and to us.

‘Theodore …’ he said reflectively, and then added in the tone of an interested seeker after truth:

‘That part was an invention?’

‘Of course.’

‘To warn Czoldy. I see. But why did you want to warn Czoldy? Why not let him be arrested?’

Only then did I realize that he took the rest of the message as literal fact, and believed that I had really handed Eugen Rosa over to Moscow. I did not answer him.

‘Our old game of sparing Elisa? Villaneda to take the blame and you still to appear the benevolent neutral? But, my dear Amberson, she knows it was you who gave this puzzled gendarme his
orders, you who again put her into the power of—well, boots and breeches.’

I told him savagely that I could do nothing else, and that I had made my choice deliberately. He observed me with concern but without pity as if I had been a promising young official whose
career had been irrevocably smashed.’