The High Place (7 page)

‘I mean his right to be considered an altruistic thinker, failing any evidence to the contrary,’ I said. ‘To put it crudely, I sug­gest that the average commercial
traveller is a deal less prejudiced than the average intellectual.’

‘The interesting thing is that you believe that,’ he answered. ‘I don’t. I think your opinion is merely a reaction against the pseudo-science of the politicians. But we
must talk it out some other time. On your next visit, perhaps.’

These last words of his were, I think, a sort of casting vote. None of them showed any immediate change of mood. Even Elisa did not yet sit down. I was intensely curious both then and afterwards
to know how the discussion before dinner had gone, but since all were determined to create the illusion that there had never been any discussion at all, I tried to live up to their manners. It is
my guess that Gisorius would have preferred me to have no next visit anywhere, and that for Osterling, who always thought in human symbols, the possible damage I might do was nothing compared to
the certainty of upsetting Elisa’s balance and energy.

‘It’s the old question of the missionaries and the trader,’ said Osterling with a friendly smile. ‘We need you because you know the country.’

I said, more to Elisa than to him, that they seemed to be managing very well in Damascus. Elisa replied impatiently:

‘My dear, I was fifteen when I learned how to bribe an official without hurting his dignity.’

‘I will explain my own case, which is typical,’ said the stranger, ‘by the way, I think you have recognized me?’

‘I’ve only got so far as thinking I ought to,’ I replied. ‘Your face is familiar to me from newspaper photographs before the war. And something you stood for I
liked.’

‘So did I,’ he said. ‘We were on our way to a world then, But there is no return. My name, Mr. Amberson, is Czoldy.’

Czoldy, of course! His personality had fascinated both journalists and public in the ’thirties. In the League of Nations debates he used to dissect the soul and intentions of Nazi
states­men with an exquisite irony that couldn’t be openly resented and yet was unanswerable. It was odd to think of so passionate a European at Kasr-el-Sittat, but what might be in
Czoldy’s mind after the destruction of his life’s work and ten years of poverty, prison camps and humiliation was beyond my conjec­ture.

‘Are you here for good?’ I asked eagerly.

‘My dear sir, I wish I were! No, I am on the permanent staff of the United Nations. Where else should I be? I am like one of those palace servants who were slaughtered to attend their
royal master in the grave. We bear the seals of the nations, and there is no flesh on our hands. But I was giving you an example of our difficulties. Czoldy may visit Turkey. Why not? It is better,
however, that he should not be known to have visited Kasr-el-Sittat. So he must come by paths that seem to him, at his age, unnecessarily romantic. Is there a safer route, Mr. Amberson?’

‘There’s the sea,’ I said, ‘and you will have me at a port. But Kasr-el-Sittat is conveniently close to the frontier.’

‘Is that common talk?’ Gisorius asked at once.

‘No. You’re not discussed at all outside your own corner. And to local people you’re mysterious and feared—but just another monastery.’

Gisorius seemed pleased that I had understood the implica­tions of his question.

‘You were in Intelligence, weren’t you?’ he asked.

‘Not exactly. A very amateur political officer.’

‘I was with you, too, all through the war,’ he said. ‘You were going to fight on till the independence of Poland was restored, if I remember.’

He dipped a knee and held out his arm in a macabre and supplicating gesture that no ballet dancer could have bettered.

‘A cup of dust for your dead master, Czoldy! But it was fresh blood when I filled it.’

He recovered from his extravaganza with a smooth athletic­ism of body and mind that astonished me. One could not dislike a man who hid such volcanic vitality at the bottom of his soul.

‘That Captain Ashkar——’ he asked suddenly. ‘Should we pay him?’

His voice was dry and unpleasant, but he was doing his best, like a friendly commanding officer, to make me feel I was a fellow expert.

‘In Ashkar’s mind the frontier belongs to him personally,’ I answered, ‘and, believe me, he can’t be bribed. You can trust him to carry out his orders from
Damascus, not to talk, and no more.’

‘Shall we have him broken?’ Elisa asked.

In reconstructing what I remember of this conversation, I may have given an impression of myself as a bumptious rabbit in a trap. That was not so. All my emotions—and I do not mean just
those overwhelmed by Elisa—were passionately devoted to Kasr-el-Sittat, and blind as the loyalties of the many dead whose chief crime was to adore a leader. I could even forgive Gisorius and
admit that in his place I too might have refused such a gamble as myself. Logic? When one is under the excite­ment of a revelation, there is no logic. These were my people, and the purpose of
my life was momentarily clear. Even so, I could not quite forget my old army sympathy for an official trying to do his duty under difficulties, and to that extent I was on the side of Ashkar.
Entire sincerity towards either party was impossible, but Elisa’s question at least allowed me to be an honest middleman.

‘No, don’t try to break him,’ I replied. ‘You might get a crook who would be harder still to handle. And up to a point I can deal with Ashkar for you.’

I waited for the enquiry about Eugen Rosa. I was prepared to say that I would ask Ashkar to investigate. But nobody men­tioned him or even seemed on the verge of a question. I began to
suspect that they did not connect him with Ashkar at all, and that there must be other places along Rosa’s route where he might have disappeared. This guess, as I found out later, was a good
one.

‘You’re happy on your beach,’ Osterling remarked.

‘Yes. It’s a home. And it’s friendship that counts with the Arab more than money. Let them feel you like them, give a favour for a favour—and this country is
open.’

‘The port too?’ Gisorius asked.

‘Within reason.’

‘Heavy crates?’

‘My business is machinery, and if the crates bear my marks——’

‘And could you land, for example, Czoldy or me or a party in my charge?’

‘Not at El Mina. On the open beaches, yes. But I’d remind you that seamen always talk. And I can’t guarantee anything at the Turkish end.’

Gisorius looked at me ironically.

‘I see you have not fully appreciated all that Elisa Cantemir told you,’ he said. ‘In Turkey, if I am discreet, I am allowed considerable liberty of action.’

That was my first and last meeting with the whole Secretariat of Kasr-el-Sittat.

2

And now began three even months of my life when I had a clear conscience and the satisfaction of success. A clear con­science? Well, a man who has been brought up to common honesty should at
least mark carefully his own illegalities. I can only say that I did not. The smuggling which I carried out for Kasr-el-Sittat was too easy and conformed too closely to the morality of the country.
Of course if conscience had bothered me I could have found a thousand excuses to satisfy it, for my motives to me were pure; but I never seemed to feel the neces­sity for any excuses at
all.

The work was not nearly so melodramatic as the Secretariat feared. Their collective intelligence, brilliant and wary though it was, did not move easily through the subtleties of an Arab country
in which government was a matter of vague intentions and vaguer obedience. I used to explain to them that they were operating in a land so free as to be a practical example of their own
ideal—a paradox which amused Osterling and roused Elisa to violent argument.

My cover was perfect. In Tripoli and El Mina gossip was good-humoured and mildly envious. They discussed, of course, the visits of Elisa to my house and hidden garden, and I like to think that
the woman and the setting sometimes turned their light minds to imagine beauty that in fact was real—but, if I know them, they probably thought I had seduced Elisa in order to get
Kasr-el-Sittat’s orders for agricultural machinery.

Our biggest import was the wireless transmitter. It was shipped to me from New York as an electrically-driven milking machine. The suction pipes and attachments of a milker were packed on the
top of the case, and I had no difficulty in demon­strating to a friendly and interested customs inspector that a milking machine was what it was. From then on Kasr-el-Sittat could
communicate—of course by Morse only—with all its secret offices in Europe. I never knew the technicalities of the network. Kasr-el-Sittat itself used the call-signs of a ship.

Then there were the boxes of seeds and tools which pur­ported to have come from London via Italy. All I knew of these little shipments was that the boxes had false bottoms. So primitive a
method of smuggling would have been discovered at once if they had been consigned to anyone but a regular merchant with the correct official friends. For me, however, customs examination was merely
a disagreeable routine. If I wanted to move my goods at an awkward time, or if the docu­ments were too complicated for the easy-going, I was allowed to show the clerks how the clearance should
be done; and if the port were busy, customs examination sometimes took place in my own warehouse after hours and over drinks.

All this was so smooth, so much in the normal, unhurried movement of El Mina’s day, that, as I say, it never gave me a moment of anxiety. I didn’t like the caique traffic, but only
twice did I have to organize it—once for Czoldy and a party of three, and once for two Russians who were taken on board at Istanbul and landed on the Syrian coast after dark.

It was safer that Ashkar should be of the common opinion that my interest in the colony was commercial and licentious, so I never approached him directly on questions of the frontier. I kept in
the background, but managed to get rid of that unsatis­factory arrangement by which he was expected to keep his eyes closed. He was requested, instead, to keep them open; and he adopted a
neutrality so benevolent that our few clandestine travellers were all but handed over to him for forwarding.

Again it was friendship, the friendship of Ashkar and Juan Villaneda, which produced the result. Villaneda had been born in Spanish Morocco, and the North African dialect of Arabic was one of
his native language; it hadn’t taken him long to pick up the classical Syrian speech. He loved to refresh himself by contact with the simple, and to them he appeared as mis­sionary rather
than monk. In his occasional wanderings through Syria and the Lebanon he was a walking advertisement that Kasr-el-Sittat was full of harmless cranks.

That, I thought, was his chief use to the colony—that, and the firm friends he made among the villagers and the very poor. When I suggested to Elisa that I should arrange an interview
between Ashkar and Villaneda, I had no idea that Juan was of any importance. Indeed, it was Ashkar’s respect for him that made me ask questions and discover his key position in the
colony.

On the day of the meeting I arrived at Ashkar’s billet well before Villaneda, and explained to him over lunch that by talk­ing to this friendly and eccentric Spaniard he might satisfy
him­self that Kasr-el-Sittat was not interested in petty smuggling. Ashkar took it very well, remarking sententiously that a gen­darme could lose nothing by increasing the circle of his
acquaintances, and might in an emergency gain much.

Juan Villaneda, with the good sense of Mediterranean man, arrived after we had had a comfortable siesta. He was not seen at his best when delivered at the door by a powerful American car, for he
looked like any poor Syrian who could just afford a suit of European clothes. To win the heart of a suspicious stranger he should have come on a dusty donkey or on foot.

‘I do not often travel like this,’ said Villaneda at once, ‘and I don’t like it. A man can’t stop and talk on the road. I see a face that pleases me, and by the
time the driver has stopped I a half a kilometre further on. Then reverse, you say? But, my friends, confidence has gone. Would you talk to a man who comes roaring at you backside
foremost?’

Ashkar smiled in his moustache, while preserving perfect dignity and uttering the conventional exclamations of welcome. To impress the unknown envoy he had put on his best uniform and shiniest
boots, and posed a careful group of his orderly and horses.

Villaneda’s sincerity of manner was a little too abrupt for the long formalities of Arab courtesy, but now he took the shortest route to the captain’s heart; he admired the horses,
and plunged straight into the sporting slang of the breeder. Ashkar uttered a word of warning as Villaneda closely examined a foul-tempered roan taken over from one of the French Light Squadrons,
but the horse seemed to be just as impressed by the Spaniard’s knowledge as I was myself.

He was a compact, sturdy little man. His round face, vigor­ously invaded by thick eyebrows and black, coarse hair growing low on the forehead, was that of many southern peasants, but the
nose and mouth were sharp, mobile and sensitive. A peasant, you would have said, but one who had far more interest in spirit than soil.

We sat formally on hard chairs in the shade, while Ashkar pressed on us cold savouries and wine—a commercial brand with gaudy label which he kept for conventional hospitality merely
because it was expensive. I turned the conversation to Kasr-el-Sittat, and, so far as I could, paraded Villaneda’s character for inspection.

He played up beautifully, offering flowery thanks to Ashkar, as representative of his government, for the freedom that Syria allowed to the colony.

‘Christian and Moslem alike,’ he said, ‘you have learned charity from each other. Where but here could we have found such a refuge and such tolerance?’

‘To the poor, the whip. To the wealthy, tolerance.’ Ashkar answered, as if complimenting the colony on its prosperity.

Villaneda caught the allusion, and flung it merrily back.

‘Shall the guest prove ungrateful?’ he asked.