The Mule on the Minaret (66 page)

Gustave appeared at breakfast next morning in a light, fawncoloured Cairene suit. He looked very smart and very Levantine. He did not look like a British officer on leave. Perhaps that was why he was being sent to Ankara. Gustave's head was heavy, but he was still clearly in the highest spirits. He had no qualms about his mission. But Reid could not restrain a feeling of foreboding as he waved him good-bye from his balcony. What on earth could they have found for him to do? He thought of writing a personal note to Farrar, then thought better of it. He sent an official signal: Operation Gustave launched.

There was a tap upon his door. ‘I think that this will make you smile, sir.' The Captain in charge of censorship handed him a sheet of paper at the foot of which was the imprint of purplish red lipstick. ‘What on earth is this?' he asked.

‘Some
bint
in Cairo.'

He stared. The lips had been pressed so firmly on the paper that you could see not only the full shape of the mouth, but the little minute grooves of skin into which the lipstick had not penetrated.
She had certainly kissed this paper as though she meant it. He stared. Then started. The handwriting was familiar. The script he had seen scrawled so often on memoranda in that Beirut office; the handwriting that he had so longed to see during his weeks in Deraa and had not seen there. He read the letter:

‘My dear, this is in frantic haste. I have been posted back to London. I leave in three days' time, so it's no good your trying to get that leave in Alexandria. I am disappointed. I'll write. Fondly.'

There was no signature, simply the imprint of her lips.

‘Who was this written to?' he asked.

‘A captain in the Iraqi army.'

‘How did his mail come under censorship?'

‘Through the wireless set, sir. He was one of the friends of that captain who was in the Fattuwa.'

‘Have you got anything on him?'

‘I haven't checked, sir, yet.'

‘You might then, will you? No, I tell you what. Let me see his file. I shall have to talk to Forester about this. One has to be careful dealing with Iraqi officers.' He handed back the letter. The Captain chuckled. ‘I thought you'd be amused, sir.'

‘I am, exceptionally.'

‘I wonder who she is.'

‘It looks like an English handwriting.'

‘Whoever she is, I'd say he was on to a good job.'

‘I'd say so.'

The file on this fortunate campaigner was not a long one. From it Reid learnt that Shawkat al Maslawi had been born in Mosul in January 1915. His father was a rich merchant, with family links in Istanbul and Damascus. His father had made a great deal of money during the famine of 1918. Shawkat had been educated at the Baghdad University and shortly before the war had been granted a cadetship to Sandhurst. He had passed out well and returned to Iraq in 1940 to take up a commission in the Iraqi army. His regiment had been engaged in the Rashid Ali revolt; and he had conducted himself with credit. As a result, he had been sent to Haifa for a short course at the staff college. ‘That's how he met Diana,' Reid thought. He was a very promising young officer. He did not appear to have any political affiliations. He was a keen polo player, which explained his friendship with Captain Jansell. There did not
seem to be anything wrong with him. He took the file down to Forester.

‘Do you know anything about an Iraqi captain called Shawkat al Maslawi?'

‘Everyone in Baghdad knows Shawkat.'

‘You would not expect him to be a subversive influence?'

‘The last person that I should.'

‘I'm beginning to feel that this censorship game is getting out of hand. It is taking up a great deal of time and we are getting nowhere.'

‘That is what every policeman feels about his files. He sits and waits and accumulates stray facts, then suddenly he sees it plain. It is as I told you like a jig-saw puzzle.'

‘That's all very well for a policeman who stays in one spot for several years, whose office continues when he retires, who is leaving a legacy to his successors. Our Centre is a wartime product. It'll fold up when the war ends or else it will be merged with another Centre. I want to leave everything in a tidy state. Besides, there's another thing I don't much like,' said Reid, ‘and that's this building up of files about innocent people. They may fall into the hands of security officers who don't understand why the names were entered in the first place. They'll think that there's something wrong with them; why else should they be on record. Would you like to have your name on one of our registers? I wouldn't.'

‘A policeman can't let himself be influenced by humanitarian considerations.'

‘Aren't we fighting this war to save humanity?'

‘I can't think why we are fighting it. But I see that you've set your heart on winding up this gang. I'm not going to hinder you. I get bored too, sitting in this office day after day.'

Reid was not bored, but he was feeling restless, as Stallard had prophesied he would; if Middle East had become a backwater, how much more so had Paiforce. He had to do something soon to justify his existence here. One of the Colonels in the British military mission to the Iraqi army was a friend of Reid's. He was a polo player. When they next met, Reid brought up the subject of Iraqi officers who played polo. The name of Shawkat soon drifted into the conversation. He appeared to be an excellent player. On the following Sunday Reid went to a race meeting. He did not find it difficult to have Shawkat pointed out to him. Shawkat was slim, graceful, of medium height; he had smooth, catlike movements.
Every muscle seemed under control. He was not very dark. He would have been very good looking had not his nose been marked by the scar of a Baghdad boil. He had very white and even teeth. He laughed a lot. Reid felt that he would like him.

Reid had read once that there were two entirely different forms of masculine response to the men to whom a woman that you loved or were in love with was attracted. It might be that she would be attracted in him by the same characteristics by which she had been in you, in that case you would feel a kinship with the man. You were the same kind of person. The fact that the same woman had loved you both was a bond between you. On the other hand, she might be attracted to a man who was the very opposite of you; drawn by the very characteristics in him that you lacked and whose deficiency in you had made her seek a change. He had not given her more or better of the things that you had given her; he had given her the things that she had missed in you; things that it was not possible for you to give. That man you would loathe with a hatred that only violence could assuage. He might have felt in that way about the French naval officer—the ‘sawn-off job'—who had succeeded him; to whom she had turned on the rebound, wanting someone as different as possible from himself. He might have longed for vitriol to throw in that man's face. But Shawkat could have been his friend. It was ridiculous that men like Shawkat should have their names on a police record.

Gustave returned thirteen days after he had left. He was in a quiet mood; he looked less Levantine; it had been grey and cold and wet in Ankara; he had lost some of the becoming tan that he had acquired on the Gezira golf course. He had lost a little weight too. It did not suit him.

‘How did it go?' Reid asked.

‘Fine, everything went fine.'

‘A complete success, as far as you know?'

‘Have you heard anything to suggest it hadn't?'

The question was put quietly, almost belligerently. As though he had gone suddenly on the defensive.

‘We've heard nothing here,' said Reid.

‘You haven't? No, of course you haven't. It was only Monday.'

He said it as though he were talking to himself. As he spoke, he lifted his left hand across his face, covering the left hand side of his mouth. It was a new trick. Reid, looking at him closely, noticed
that he had lost two teeth, one in the upper jaw to the left side of his mouth, the other in the lower jaw more to the centre.

‘I see you've had dentist trouble,' Reid remarked.

Gustave flushed. ‘I walked into a door in the blackout and knocked out two teeth.'

‘What a very curious accident.'

‘What do you mean, curious?'

The belligerent self defensive tone had come back into his voice.

‘I should have thought that when you hit that door, the teeth you damaged would be one above the other,' Reid explained. He would have also expected there to be signs of a bruising or cutting on the lip. There were not though.

‘Damned fool thing that blackout,' Gustave grumbled. ‘Can't think why they need one. Who do they imagine is going to start bombing them?'

At dinner that night, Gustave ordered wine for the whole mess. He was in the highest spirits; but Reid noticed that he was not sipping at his wine, but drinking it in fast, long gulps. He also kept moving his hand up to his mouth.

‘Tell us about the
bints
in Ankara,' the young officer in censorship was asking.

‘Now that's a very big question,' Gustave answered. ‘First of all, ye must ken. . . .'

Two weeks later, the Beirut summary concluded with the paragraph: ‘Our deception operation was carried out with complete success. We feel that it has made a definite contribution to the success of our war effort in this area.'

In a further appendix, Reid supposed, there would be a description of the exact nature of that operation. He would give a lot to read it. He was himself at work again on his bi-weekly summary. He wished he himself had something as dramatic to report. Farrar's report did not make him jealous, but it made him restless. He felt the need for action. It was high time he had Hassun under lock and key. He wanted to round off that campaign. He did not want to have to read Shawkat's letters to Diana or hers to him. That afternoon he sent off a signal asking Cairo's permission to start action. The permission came back at once.

Hassun lived in North Baghdad, in a detached two-storeyed house. It was built of the traditional mud coloured bricks. It was indistinguishable from its neighbours. Reid and Forester made an afternoon reconnaissance. It would be an easy house to surround. ‘Not that he'll try to escape,' said Forester. ‘We aren't arresting Public Enemy No. 1. No sawn-off shot-gun business.'

They made their plans for the next day. The school holidays had not yet begun. Hassun's last class ended at half past four. He invariably went straight home. Two policemen would watch the house. As soon as Hassun returned, one of them would ride on his bicycle to the nearest police post where Reid and Forester would be waiting. The police post was only five minutes' drive away. ‘It'll work out very simply,' Forester assured him.

To Forester it was a humdrum operation. He had arrested hundreds of men and women during his long career in the police force. But Reid's heart was pounding as he sat in the small bare room. He was a reader of detective stories. He had read so many accounts of men being arrested. He had wondered how accurately the author had entered into the mind of a criminal. He had never dreamt that one day he would be present at an arrest. He wondered how Hassun would behave. He pictured Hassun at that very moment in terms of his own routine as a teacher. He saw Hassun seated at his desk, speaking from his lecture notes; looking up at the clock, saying: ‘Two more minutes. We will stop now. Tomorrow we will discuss the implications of Louis XIV's decision to secure for his grandson the throne of Spain. There are no more
Pyrenees.' There would be a scuffle, a shuffle as the students collected their books, and hurried to the door with their chorus of ‘Good afternoon, sir.'

He saw Hassun tidying up his desk, glancing at his first notes for the next day's lecture, as he had himself so often done. ‘There are no longer any Pyrenees.' When would Hassun deliver that lecture now? Would he ever deliver it?

He savoured the dramatic irony of the situation, pictured Hassun walking to the common room, knotting his scarf round his neck; it was beginning to get cold; pausing to exchange a few words of gossip with a colleague, making a plan perhaps to take a cup of coffee with him on the following morning. That colleague would wait alone in that noisy café. Hassun would collect his bicycle. He had ridden out of that courtyard on it so many hundred times. How often in the next few weeks he would relive in detail that last ride?

The door bell in the police post rang. The policeman on duty answered it. A policeman with a bicycle stood in the doorway. He spoke to Forester. ‘That's us,' said Forester. ‘We're on our way.'

It all went as smoothly as Forester had promised. The door was opened by a nondescript man of middle age and medium height. He was wearing a dark cloth suit in Western style. He had taken off his collar; and the shirt open at the throat gave him an ill-kempt look. Forester spoke to him in Arabic and Hassun led them out of the small hall into the sitting-room. A woman and two small children were sitting over a brazier. It was cold and they were wearing coats; the woman pulled her veil up over her nose and mouth. Reid could not follow the conversation. He watched Hassun's expression. It did not change. The children were staring with wide, goggling eyes. Reid looked around him. The walls were decorated with enlarged photographs, presumably of relatives. Carpets were stretched over the chairs and sofa. There were a couple of low tables; on one of them was a brass coffee set; on the other a number of small articles, match boxes, ashtrays, knives in the black and white Asmara silverware, with the traditional designs of date palms and small river boats. There were no books. Hassun addressed some remarks to his wife. Forester turned to Reid. ‘We are going to search the house. We are looking for the wireless transmitter.'

One of the policemen stayed with the wife and children. The other accompanied Reid and Forester. There was an underground
room for use in the hot weather. It was furnished with a table and four chairs. There was a litter of children's toys. There was a small kitchen and an eating annex next to the room into which they had been shown. Nowhere would a transmitter have been concealed. There were only two rooms upstairs, the parents' and the children's bedrooms. They were tidily kept. Reid was surprised at the small number of clothes on hangers. They kept most of their clothes in suitcases. There was a small black suitcase that might have been the one that Chessman had put into Hassun's compartment. Reid called Forester's attention to it. It contained a collection of shirts and underclothes. Forester looked at the inside of the suitcase. Then he emptied the contents on the bed.