The collected stories (74 page)

At the rear of the tomb, overgrown with bushes and partly hidden by the thickness of black branches, was an iron ladder. It was fixed to the stone; it rose to the top of the tentlike roof. More to hide from the caretaker than to see where the ladder went, I climbed the iron rungs, and when I could not go any farther I looked down in amazement. I was looking straight into the chamber of the tomb.

This tomb, this stone tent, had a window! It was of thick glass and I could see in the narrow beam of my flashlight that it had not been tampered with. But I knew at a glance that the tomb had been plundered. A century of sunlight through this window had faded the stone walls in places and also printed on them the shadows of the objects I had seen in the Arab's room - the lamps, the crucifix, the string of camel bells. Where a thurible had been plucked from the dust, a disk mark remained, of its oval base. Only these shadows were left of what had once been in the tomb, except for the two coffins. They lay on the floor, at either side of a row of footprints. The larger coffin had been opened. Its lid, a fraction lopsided, had a freshly yanked nail at its end and showed a seam of darkness. But if I had not already seen Burton's bones, if I had not tried the lock that seemed so secure, I doubt that I would have noticed that the coffin lid was ajar or suspected any tampering. Even under the penetrating light of my pocket flashlight the tomb was very murky, and only serious scrutiny told me that it had been broken into. It was a terrible little coffin room; it was dusty; it was cell-like. It gave me a good idea.

The Arab, Abdul Wahab Bin Baz, had to be stopped. Now I knew how.

It was no more than a short stroll, using the footbridge over the railway tracks, to a row of shops. In one of these, with a sign saying ironmongers, I bought a large, flat padlock. It was very similar to the one the fanatic from Mecca had cut through in order to enter Burton's tomb.

It was now well after six. The church was shut, the gate was locked. I scaled the brick wall of the churchyard and took up my position at the top of the ladder, where I rested against the slanting

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (il): THE LONDON EMBASSY

window of the tomb. I was completely hidden; the graveyard was as dark as the bottom of a deep hole. In a doggedly destructive way, by breaking all the churchyard lights, the Arab had guaranteed that I would not be seen.

I thought: What if he doesn't come back?

And yet, Isabel Burton's coffin had not been disturbed.

Later than I expected, after seven, when my knees were about to give out, I heard the thump of feet in the churchyard - someone had come over the wall. There was a swishing sound, of legs moving in brambles and grass. If it was Abdul, and if he entered the tomb, I would see him through the window. I heard nothing for a while, and then there was a slow millstone sound - the marble door being swung open. When he entered the tomb, I ducked, and I did not move again until, some seconds later, I heard the door being eased shut.

It was not closed entirely. I climbed down the ladder and dashed to the front of the tomb and kicked the door. At that moment there was a cry from the vault, but I was quickly straightening the hasp and clapping the padlock on. There was no sound from inside. The Arab was sealed in. No one would hear him. He had asked for this - and now he was buried alive.

If you knew he was there and you listened carefully you could hear a faint mewing, which was all that was audible of his wild screams through the thick marble walls of the tomb.

'I thought it was him,' Miss Gowrie said, opening the door and with a look of apprehension still on her face. Fright takes a while to fade.

'He won't be back tonight,' I said. 'He may not be back at all.'

'He's out haunting houses, I expect.'

'Not exactly.'

'You come in and have a nice cup of tea,' Miss Gowrie said. 'Put your feet up. Look at the time! It's gone eight - you've had a long day.'

My day was not over. I told Miss Gowrie I had discovered where Wahab had stolen his brassware. I gathered up the objects and put them into a sack. I would return them to their rightful place, I said.

'May I sleep in Mr Wubb's room tonight?' I said.

TOMB WITH A VIEW

'What if he comes back?'

'Not a chance,' I said.

'You never know with blackies,' she said.

In his stale bed, in that small room that smelled of carpet dust and prayer sweat, I thought about Abdul Wahab and it occurred to me why he had broken into Burton's tomb. It was simple revenge. Hadn't Burton, the unbeliever, trampled all over Islam? In this Muslim's eyes, hadn't the English explorer violated the sanctity of his religion by dressing up as an Arab and entering Mecca? Burton was no respecter of taboos or traditions - he had plundered the secrets of Islam in his search for adventure.

This was one Muslim's reply: the Arab dressed as an English gentleman, prowling undetected in London - as anonymous as Burton had been in holy Mecca. There was a crude justice in what the disguised Arab had done to Burton's bones in the Mortlake churchyard. This was a civilized country and a different century, but the smell in that bedroom was of dust and bones and the stink of fanatical prayer.

I had set my wrist alarm to wake me before dawn. It was still dark when I crept out of Miss Gowrie's house. I liked the thrill -carrying the brassware and camel bells and Richard Burton's bones through the damp chilly streets to the graveyard where the tomb had been opened.

There was no sound at the door of the vault. I went around back and mounted the ladder and shone my flashlight inside.

Wahab lay on the floor, sleeping on his side. He woke when I turned the light on his eyes. This was the first time I had really seen him.

His dark face had a stretched look of panic - the expression certain fish have in fishbowls: trapped and pop-eyed, with fat swollen lips. His eyes were red and puffy, and he was at the last stage of terror. He was limp, making pleading faces at me - or rather at the light - and blinking at the brightness of it. He would have confessed at that moment to being Leon Trotsky.

He clasped his hands and implored me.

I breathed on the window. The vapor condensed, and with my finger I traced a cross in it and shone my flashlight on it. It is the simplest of symbols, but to the man from Mecca it was strange and unwelcome, and I was sure that it made him more fearful than the darkness he had endured in that tomb all night. It was now

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (il): THE LONDON EMBASSY

safe to remove the padlock: I had announced myself as the avenging Christian.

As soon as the hasp was released he pushed the door open and gasped - gave a whinny of fright - and then disappeared at the far end of the churchyard.

It was still dark. I had plenty of time to replace the thuribles, the lamps, the crucifix, and the camel bells, as well as Burton himself in his ornate and rotting coffin. Then I shut the door of the tomb and locked it. I had left everything just where it belonged in the tomb, as anyone could see.

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (il): THE LONDON EMBASSY

Smallwood's name and code had come up, and Sanger was scrutinizing the alignments of file references, the green letters and numbers.

He said, 'I don't even know this guy!'

He seemed angry with himself, so I said, 'It's nothing to be ashamed of. I only met him once.'

Sanger said, 'But this is the kind of guy we're supposed to know. It's why we're here!'

'Really?' I wondered if he believed what he had just said.

'Yeah - to meet the opinion-formers.'

'How do you know he's an opinion-former?'

'If you see a guy with a long white beard, wearing a red suit and carrying a bag of toys and saying, "Ho-ho-ho," you'd be pretty stupid if you didn't call him Santa Claus,' Sanger said. 'It's all in the profile. Look at Smallwood's. Look at those ratings. That's a pedigree and a half! Where'd you get his name?'

'From a little old lady.'

'That's funny, you know? We're in the business of information-gathering, and you stand there uttering pointless jokes and tiresome evasions. Give me a break. I hate unreliable witnesses.'

'It's no joke. The little old lady's name is Miss Gowrie.'

'Let's find out her bust size,' Sanger said and leered at the computer screen. 'We know everything.' Then suddenly he shouted, 'He lives in Clapham!'

'What's so funny?'

'The man on the Clapham omnibus,' he said.

It was the first time I had ever heard this picturesque description. It brought to mind the vivid image of a thinfaced man sitting alone in an old double-decker bus - a bowler hat on his head, and brass rails on the stairwell, and posters advertising Players Weights and beef tea pasted on the freshly painted red sides; the man swaying as the bus rattled on hard rubber wheels down an avenue of brown cobblestones.

I said, 'It has a nice sound.'

'It just means "the man in the street" - it's a legal term here. In American law he's called the fair and reasonable man. Didn't you go to law school?'

i haven't had your advantages, Al.'

'I can see that,' he said. 'Anyway, a lot of Foreign Service people have law degrees. See, they know the subtleties in the law, but how

THE MAN ON THE CLAPHAM OMNIBUS

can you expect the man on the Clapham omnibus to know them?' And he grinned. 'See what I mean?'

'The average man,' I said.

'Right. A bloke, as they say here. Only this guy' - he was tapping the display screen of the computer, where Sir Charles Smallwood's paragraph was illuminated - 'this guy is no ordinary bloke. One thing's for sure. The Clapham address is a front. Probably a pied a terre. Baronets don't live in Clapham.'

He had no phone, or else it was unlisted. I wrote to him in Clapham, at the address shown on the computer, inviting him for a meal. He was prompt in refusing. I invited him for a drink. He replied saying he was tied up: he was going to be in the country for a few weeks. I liked 'in the country' - it meant out of town. I let those weeks pass. I wrote again. Was he interested in a pair of complimentary tickets to the London premiere of Up North, a black folk-opera performed by the Harlem Arts Collective? No, he was not. There was a practiced politeness in his refusals - he was good, not to say graceful, even lordly, at declining invitations. His handwriting had a black and spattery loveliness. He was a hard man to raise.

This sharpened my desire to meet him, and in the interval I had discovered something about the Smallwoods. They were English Catholics - it said so on our computer. There is something faintly exotic about Catholics in England, something spooky and tribal and secretive. They worry people. They are like Jews in the United States, and they are seen in the same way, as outsiders and potential conspirators. They are feared and somewhat disliked, and they are always suspected of not supporting the Protestant monarchy for religious reasons. The Smallwoods traced their ancestry back to the reign of Henry VIII, when they had been recusants - dissenters

- and it was their boast that in four hundred years not a single day had passed without holy mass being celebrated in a secret chapel at Smallwood Park, in Hertfordshire. They were like early Christians: they were persecuted, they hid, they clung to their faith, they remained steadfast - and he was one of them.

He lived within walking distance of my apartment in Battersea

- up the road and just on the other side of Lavender Hill, on Parma Crescent. I walked past the house three times before summoning the courage to knock. The house was one in a terrace of twenty, two-up, two-down, with the shades drawn and two trash barrels

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (il): THE LONDON EMBASSY

in the front yard - the other houses had rose bushes or hydrangeas. There was an unwashed milk bottle on the front step. Surely this was the wrong house?

Not seeing a bell or knocker, I rattled the metal flap on the letter slot and waited. After a moment there was a shadow on the glass of the door. The door opened, but only a crack, and from this a hidden face spoke to me, asking me what I wanted. It was the voice of a man muttering into a blanket.

'I'm looking for Sir Charles Smallwood.'

'No admittance on business,' the man said.

What did that mean?

'This isn't business,' I said. 'This is a social call.'

'And you are?'

I still could not determine whether the man I was speaking to was Sir Charles Smallwood. I had a feeling that he was some sort of manservant. He was tetchy and suspicious and overprotective, and even - like some English servants I'd seen - domineering. I told him who I was and gave him my American Embassy calling card, with the eagle embossed on it in gold. It had been specially designed by a team of psychiatrists to impress foreign nationals.

'Please wait there,' he said.

He shut the door and left me on the front doorstep, but less than a minute later I heard him shooting the bolt inside, and saw his shadow again on the glass, and the door was opened to me.

There was no hallway. I walked from his front step into his front room in one stride. And I was sorry now that I had come, because clearly this was the man's bedroom. There was a cot and a chair beside it, and it was heated by an electric fire - the orange coils on one bar. It was not enough heat. On the floor, propped against the wall, was a very good painting in a heavy gilt frame. It was black and incongruous and instead of hinting at opulence it gave the room the air of a junk shop.

I said, 'I hope I'm not intruding.'

'It is rather awkward - your coming unannounced. Will you have tea?'

'No, thank you. I can't stay.'

'As you wish.'

He wore a torn sweater and paint-splashed trousers and scuffed shoes. He might have been a deckhand, spending some time ashore in this small room. If this was Sir Charles's servant, he was being

THE MAN ON THE CLAPHAM OMNIBUS

treated rather poorly. He had hair like pencil shavings, the same orangy woody color, the same crinkly texture.

He said, 'Perhaps a glass of sherry?'