The Mule on the Minaret (76 page)

‘I'd like to hear it.'

‘And I'd be glad to get it off my chest. It was part of Nigel's deception campaign. That was the thing he really cared about. He was very upset when you wouldn't take over that wireless set for deceptive messages. I think he cooked up this scheme as a kind of protest: a gesture of defiance, a revenge. He cooked it up during
the Beirut congress with our chap in Istanbul, the tall thin-blooded one.'

‘Sedgwick.'

‘Yes, that's the chap. They were out to convince the Germans that Turkey was coming into the war on our side and that we were going to attack through the Balkans. If the Germans could be made to believe that, they would have to keep a large body of troops on the Turkish frontier; troops that they couldn't afford to spare. Nigel and Sedgwick decided that the best way to do this, was to send up into Turkey a Briton who would be provided with a great deal of false information in which he would himself believe. He would be instructed to contact in Ankara a member of the Bulgarian underground to whom he would hand over this information. The Germans would be tipped off; they would kidnap the Briton; they would torture him and under torture he would give them the information that he had handed over to the Bulgarian.'

‘What was to happen to the Bulgarian?'

‘He was to go back to Bulgaria.'

‘Did the Germans mind?'

‘They didn't mind what the Bulgarians knew as long as they themselves knew what they knew.'

‘Didn't it confuse the Bulgarian resistance?'

‘Not particularly, not for very long; we could let them know before it was too late, that the deal was off, and in the meantime it didn't do any harm to encourage the resistance movement.'

‘Wasn't it dangerous to give the Germans that chance of penetrating the Bulgarian resistance movement?'

‘We didn't expect to make much use of the Bulgarian resistance. Besides we could trust our friends there to take what is called appropriate action.'

‘And what about the Briton?'

‘He'd be let loose as soon as he had spilled the beans. He wouldn't be likely to confess. It was really a very neat scheme.'

‘Why had he to be sent to Baghdad?'

‘Because the attack could be launched more easily through Iraq which is a British sphere of influence than through Syria which is French.'

‘So that's how Gustave got his half-colonelcy?'

‘Exactly.'

‘But why Gustave?'

‘We had to have a very special person. Someone who would never think of himself as a coward; who would be proud of his rank and uniform; a loyal subject of the crown; yet someone who would crack under pressure: someone who had no idea that he would crack: and who would be so ashamed of himself after he had cracked, who would be so horrified by what he had done that the Germans would be convinced that he had spoken the truth. That was an essential part of the whole scheme; that the Briton should be overwhelmed by the enormity of what he had done.'

‘And Gustave filled the role in your opinion?'

‘Perfectly. He's only half British after all; and there's no type more ostentatiously British than the half-Briton. Gustave was a flamboyant personality. He'd always be the first to volunteer for anything yet he's got that alien weakness, that foreign craftiness: of which he is, or at any rate was, unaware. Let's put it this way, if a general had said to you, “Prof., can you be sure that you wouldn't crack under torture?” you'd have hesitated. You wouldn't have been sure. You wouldn't have volunteered. Though I'm not saying that if by any unpremeditated chance, you had been exposed to torture, you wouldn't have held the fort. But you couldn't be sure. Gustave, on the other hand, saw himself in the role of the traditional hero, “the drunken private of the Buffs”. That's why we picked on him.'

‘And how did you come into this?'

‘I was deputed to find his Achilles' heel.'

‘And how did you do that?'

‘It wasn't difficult. Everyone has some physical attribute on which he sets high value, on which his enjoyment of life depends; a pianist's fingers, an athlete's ankles. Gustave was crazy about women. It was his sport, his hobby, you knew that. In a curious way it was a bond between us. I like men, though I'm not crazy about them, as he is about women; but we have the same kinds of problem, he and I, and the lucky thing is we aren't each other's tea. We don't attract each other in the least, so we can compare notes about our separate campaigns. It's rather comfortable. One needs to have one person in one's life to whom one can say anything and it's pleasanter when that someone is of the other sex. So it was quite easy for me to say to him “Gustave, you must have asked yourself what it is that women find most attractive in you, what special feature. Several men seem to have fallen for my voice. What is it about you, do you think?' He answered without hesitation.
“My smile; not exactly my smile; but my teeth when I smile. They are so very white and straight. They suggest strength and health.” So there we are, I thought.'

He stared at her dumbfounded. ‘How did you tip the Germans off; through that Armenian, Belorian?'

‘Yes.'

He shook his head. ‘To think of you, mixed up with a thing like that.'

She laughed. ‘Don't be so shocked. It was all very practical, and in the last analysis, highly economical. Why waste time on toenails?'

He winced. It was the ruthless, brutal kind of remark that shocked him yet at the same time attracted him. She hated war so much that she was prepared to relish its loathsomeness, like Bunyan's pilgrim ‘Eyes take your fill of the filthy spectacle.' No bannered broidery for her. Yet all the same . . .

He remembered Gustave as he had been on the convoy, hopeful and high-hearted; he remembered his depression when he learnt that he had come out on a fool's errand, his dread of going to Egypt as a subaltern. Gustave was so mercurial. He had been on the crest of the wave that night at dinner in Cairo at the Turf Club: how proudly he had carried his crown as adjutant in Baghdad: that last dinner and his comic speech. He had not had a care in the world that night. Never again could he be the same light-hearted person. For ever he carried the burden of a disgrace. How astutely Diana had diagnosed his weakness. He remembered how on his return he had kept lifting his hand across his mouth, in self-defence. Once a friend of Reid's, a man vain of his appearance, had on a tour in the South of France got his teeth stained with a cheap local wine. He had kept lifting his hand across his face; just as Gustave had. Every time that he took out his plate, Gustave would be reminded of that dark hour of shame.

With the eyes of vision, Reid pictured the torturers at work. Perhaps there had been no torture: pain was a challenge: pain was a concentration of reflexes. Very likely they had given him injections, so that the gums were numbed. Then they had taken out a tooth. They had shown him his reflection in a mirror. There had been no hurry. They had inserted the needle in the lower jaw. They had waited till the jaw was numb. Then once again he had been shown his reflection in the mirror. Then the dentist had lifted his upper lip on the other side. The sharp prick once again,
and then as he had waited, his nerves had broken and for the rest of his life now he would be spiritually maimed.

‘It's pretty grim to think of Gustave idling there in Alexandria with this upon his mind,' he said.

‘It's grim to think of all the relics from the First War who are still alive, their faces shot away, with half their limbs.'

‘I suppose one couldn't tell him now; now that it's over.'

‘Tell him what? That he'd been handpicked for cowardice. And remember this: remember two things, first that he doesn't know that anyone knows that he broke down. As far as he's aware British Intelligence is delighted with his work, they made him a half-colonel. He is perhaps terrified that some document may be discovered in German files, referring to what he did. But the betting is a million to one against it. And that fear will grow less every day. There's that and then there's a second point. There was no advance through Turkey, he has no human lives upon his conscience.'

‘Do you think he'll ever be the same man again?'

‘Are any of us, ever about anything, the same man or woman again?'

She leant forward across the table. There were two inches of wine still in her glass. She closed her hands round the glass and lifted it to her lips. It was an act of ritual. She looked at him, steadily. When she spoke her voice had softened and grown deeper. ‘Do you remember almost the first day in our office, when you brought me round that file about Aziz, when you were so deeply shocked. It's the same thing again, you know; a general mustn't count his casualties before a battle. He must think of the grand strategy, not the individual. That operation of Nigel Farrar's may have immobilized three divisions. How many Allied lives do you think that saved? Can you set the chip on Gustave's shoulder against that?'

The sentiment of what she said was harsh, but once again there were those viols in her voice. He half closed his eyes. He remembered that day in Beirut so well; and how he had said, ‘Thank God you are in this office to keep me sane,' and they had gone out to lunch at Sa'ad's and that lunch had been the beginning of how much.

‘How close we are,' he thought. He looked at her, with a slow fond gaze. Her beauty was in the early summer of its flowering. Never had she been more radiant. He had lost her once, but that had been in wartime, in a period of shifting sands and on foreign
soil. Now they were on solid ground, in their own country, in a land that had become foreign to them both. Their compatriots were alien to them and they to them; but they, he and she, were familiar to each other. They had shared so much. They were bound by the fact that they had been involved in, could understand, and could justify in terms of the exigencies of their particular brand of service, an action for which there was no moral justification whatsoever; an action that was despicable and base in terms of the decencies of human conduct. Could they, who had been through things like this together, ever build a life for themselves with anyone who could not share it with them. Surely they belonged to one another.

Swooningly the memory returned of that enchantment in Damascus, of all those winter afternoons, of all those summer nights in Beirut. Through her he had attained to a whole higher range of living. She had been a gateway to unguessed delights, a window opening on the immortal meadows. She had been, she had given him so much, yet somehow, miraculously she had needed him. His staidness had been the compliment of her flamboyance. They were a pair. His spirits soared.

Rachel on his first night home had dismissed him as a man who had always stood upon the touchline, who never committed himself, who was the eternal chairman. But that was only because he had never seen anything he really wanted, anything he had to have. But now he had. It had needed this episode to shock him, to galvanize him into a realization of himself.

He knew what he wanted now, he wanted Diana back, wanted her as his own, for always. Rachel did not need him. She would never do more than tolerate him, anymore than he would her. Had she not said ‘This is the easiest letter I have written in my life'? He could do as much for the boys, more possibly, outside the range of their home than in it. He could give them a second home. Before the First War, divorce would have been a scandal for a Professor. It wouldn't now. There were no obstacles. The road stretched clear. His heart exulted; slowly he would woo her back: slowly the radius would be shortened, a month, six weeks: it need not be longer. He sighed softly. Had he ever known such peace of mind before?

He sipped the last mouthful in his glass. ‘We've been talking all this time about our friends,' he said. ‘We haven't said anything about each other.'

‘I know, and that was what I was waiting for.'

‘What are your present plans?'

‘I fancy they'll surprise you. As a matter of fact we've only missed each other by a month.'

‘How, where, I don't understand. I thought we'd just found each other.'

‘Only to lose each other. I'm bound for Baghdad next week.'

‘For the same firm?'

‘Lord, no. I'm going to be married.'

‘To whom for heaven's sake?'

‘This may surprise you. To an Iraqi officer that I met in Cairo.'

His fingers tightened within his palms. Steady now, steady. You mustn't let her know you know.

‘Would I have come across him?'

‘I wouldn't think you would. He avoids court circles. Very much the army man. He's a Captain. He was trained in England. Shawkat al Maslawi.'

‘Oh but I do know him, or rather know about him. I've seen him at the races. He's a fine fellow. Everybody says so. Oh, but I'm so glad, Diana. So happy, for your sake.'

And that was the story that Reid recalled, seventeen years later as he boarded the Beirut bound Pan American clipper at Idlewild. As the guest of the Iraqi Government he was travelling first class, a thing he had never done before. He settled himself into the big deeply upholstered seat and stretched out his legs towards the footstool. What a difference was made by that extra allowance of eighteen inches. Four seats instead of five across the aircraft. Precisely the same difference as there was between first and second class in an English railway carriage. The moment that the ‘fasten your seat belts' sign had been switched off, an air hostess was at his side. What kind of cocktail would he like?

‘Could I have a glass of champagne instead?'

‘Of course you could, sir.'

It was a Krug '53. Rich, and full: chilled but not cold, with a youthful effervescence. He had effected to despise champagne when he was young. It was only good at eleven o'clock with a dry biscuit, after a heavy night. In
boîtes
where it was
‘obligatoire'
he had said, ‘You can put a bottle in a bucket if you like; but bring me the wine list, it's burgundy I want to drink.' But later in middle age he had come to find that champagne did for him something that no other wine could do. One's palate changed. Also one's metabolism. Many of his friends had to limit themselves to Scotch Whisky now. He was glad to have been spared that fate.