Arabesque (10 page)

“There are times,” Furney retorted, “when some damned idiot in Albion thinks he’s being clever.”

“Any bad characters been in Beit Chabab?” asked Prayle innocently.

“There are two harmless Rumanians. We know all about them.”

Wadiah, then, had not mentioned Armande’s visit. That fact was in itself suspicious. Prayle stored it away to be worried later.

“I simply cannot imagine who authorised this,” said Furney. “The only people it could possibly be are some of those new commando lads who take their orders direct from Cairo. I
promise you I will get on to Jerusalem in the morning and find out.”

“My dear Guy,” Montagne exclaimed with a sudden rush of emotion, “it is extraordinary how I trust you. You know, there is not another person in Beirut whom I trust.”

“That’s good to hear. But a great pity.”

“You think so? Do you know I am being followed?”

“By the Field Security?” asked Furney ironically.

“It is quite possible—but I shouldn’t worry about that. After all, we are allies. No, I am being followed by my own countrymen.”

“You exaggerate!”

“Look out of the window then.”

Furney got up. In the blazing moonlight Beirut was a black and white chessboard, upon which the cypress trees stood up like giant pawns.

“There is a Palestine policeman in plain clothes,” said Furney. “There is a girl talking to one of the batman drivers—who looks very shy about it. There is your own
orderly. And there is snot-nose.”

“And this good snot-nose, who is he?”

“He is a retired Lebanese gendarme to whom, I fear, you pay small and quite unnecessary sums for reports on any prominent Arabs who visit this office,” Furney replied.

“You are crazy, Guy! I know who comes to see you without employing a type to stand in your filthy street. But you are right that he is paid—to watch you and me.”

“That is puerile.”

“I think so too. But imagine! I, who fought for the republic in Spain, I, who was in prison at the outbreak of war. I have the power here. Do you think that is agreeable for the rats? Do
you think I do not report their intrigues? They keep me under surveillance, and they are right. But they have no money to do it properly. That is why they employ the animal you have so rightly
christened snot-nose.”

“Leave them alone then, and get on with the war.”

“Leave them alone? These rats who put politics before their country? Never! But they will have me out soon. I know it. And you will not find them so friendly.”

“I am going myself this week.”

“Going!” exclaimed Montagne regretfully. “Where?”

“Abyssinia.”

“My congratulations! It is full of little passionate Italians without their husbands. But we shall miss you. Who is taking over from you?”

“Rains.”

“Rains? He understands nothing, that type.”

“But sound, as they say. A harmless palace eunuch.”

“I should like to go with you, Guy. If I stay here, I shall be found with a knife in my back one of these days. You will see.”

“If you really believe that,” Furney protested, “you will have deserved it.”

“You will see,” repeated Montagne, his deep eyes burning with a sombre delight at being persecuted for his creed. “Well, you will not forget to let me know about Sheikh
Wadiah?”

He looked again out of the window, then picked up his kepi and sprang cautiously into the outer office, glancing, birdlike, to right and left.

“And now. Sergeant Prayle,” said Furney, threatening him with his pince-nez held between finger and thumb, “will you kindly have the blasted goodness to tell me what you meant
by
stage property
.”

“Just that,” Prayle answered. “You know.”

“I do not know. Explain.”

The sergeant resentfully devoted his brain to analysis.

“Arms,” he said at last. “How would you collect them yourself? Hush-hush coves of some sort—security or special service. But Ordnance wouldn’t collect them. Not
from source, I mean. Ordnance would collect them from the blokes who collected them, if you see what I’m after.”

“I do. Yes. Well, it must have been one of G.H.Q.’s private armies which visited Beit Chabab. They never have the sense to tell us what they are doing. They are so bloody amateur
that they don’t know whom to trust. I’ll talk to Jerusalem and Cairo in the morning and find out if there’s a simple explanation.”

“There isn’t,” said Prayle.

“Why?”

“It smells.”

“What of?”

“Flag days in Kensington High Street. Little doings winning the war with a nice, new brassière and a tray of poppycock.”

“If necessary,” said Furney thoughtfully, “could you go and interview little doings, as you call her? It’s out of our territory, but I suppose no one would
object.”

“Not if you let Captain Wyne tell the Jerusalem section why I am there. We don’t like to have secrets in the family.”

“Of course. And try not to look so sinister.”

“Mislaid the bow and arrow, sir.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Look like Cupid.”

“All right! All right! Come and see me tomorrow afternoon, and I’ll tell you anything I’ve been able to find out.”

Sergeant Prayle rode his motorcycle carefully out of the yard. Halfway round the corner he accelerated into the traffic stream of the coast road. A staff car missed him by
inches and he fled to the middle of the highway, where he was instantly jammed between a six-ton lorry and a Free French hearse. Having bent his footrest and left the skin of his knuckles on the
nose of a golden angel, Prayle wheeled his bike into a side street and sat down on the nearest garbage can. There he cursed all army transport, army drivers and especially the sergeant-major who
had ordered him to take this vile, self-willed engine to Jerusalem.

He pushed his motorcycle as far as the back yard of an obscure and friendly wineshop and left it in a shed, threatening the anxious proprietor with the loss of his licence if the machine should
be discovered by civilians or military in quest of spare parts. Then he stood sulkily by the roadside to wait for a lift.

He was in a resentful mood. It was all very well to see Armande again—he had every intention of seeing her again—but he would have preferred an occasion when he could be avuncular
and helpful. What the devil had she been up to now that he had to go down and interview—not, for God’s sake, interrogate—that luminous, surprising little beast?

Throughout his glum and puzzled thinking, Prayle kept an eye on the traffic. He let all uncomfortable vehicles pass, for he meant to travel in luxury. At last he hailed and stopped a fast
fifteen-hundredweight truck with the seat alongside the driver unoccupied.

“Where are you going, chum?”

“Haifa. Any good?”

Prayle climbed into the empty seat, and offered the cigarette of introduction.

“What bunch are you, Sergeant?” asked the driver.

“Intelligence Corps.”

“Let’s see your A.B.64!”

Prayle pulled out his army pay book which was supposed, by general and quite illogical belief, to prove his identity. The driver gave it a casual glance.

“’S all right, Sergeant. One of your mates told us always to ask for it before we gave a lift. That’s all.”

“And do you?” asked Prayle.

“Ker-rist, no!” the driver exclaimed contemptuously. “If I can’t tell whether a mucker’s an honest mucker when he’s sitting in that muckin’ seat, a lot
of muckin’ use an A.B.64 is!”

“True,” said Prayle. “But some muckers aren’t so bright.”

“That’s a fact,” replied the driver, overtaking a small convoy with a burst of careful speed. “Tell you what, chum. Sergeant, I mean. I often thinks, I thinks, if we
weren’t all such a lot of bloody muckers, there wouldn’t have to be so many muckin’ rules.”

“Army of the future,” said Prayle.

“Just so, chum—if there is any army of the future.”

The truck was swinging easily round great curves, through mile after mile of olive. Under the trees were camped the Australians, their tents and camouflage nets blending with the red earth and
the sheltering green.

“I was in Greece,” said the driver.

“Lucky!” Prayle answered.

“Well, I dunno about that. Ah! To be out of it, you mean,” the driver said, suddenly comprehending Prayle’s shorthand speech. “These blokes,” he went on, waving a
thumb at the busy troops, “they must think the whole world outside Australia is made of olive trees. Camped under ’em, fought under ’em and hid under ’em. Cor! The times
there’s been nothing but an olive tree between me and a Stuka! Well, ’ere we are!”

They shot out of the cultivated land, and away along the sparkling edge of the Mediterranean. On the landward side the coastal plain narrowed to a strip of stony soil. Here and there were the
neat rows of temporary crosses and the burned-out skeletons of vehicles left over from the Syrian campaign.

Sergeant Prayle, no longer distracted by the skill with which his driver found a third traffic lane where there was only room for two, returned to his impatient thoughts of Armande. Cairo had
made exhaustive inquiries, but no branch of Intelligence, from the very secret to the would-be secret, knew anything about Wadiah’s arms. He was thankful that Furney had sent him down instead
of leaving Armande to some earnest soul in Jerusalem, who would either bluster or endeavour to extract information from her with provocative and professional tact.

Personally he belived that Sheikh Wadiah’s precious receipt was a fake, mocked up to deceive the French, and that no arms whatever had been delivered to any British troops. But if it were
a fake, who had put Wadiah up to it, and who had got hold of the right paper and stamp? If not Armande, then Armande must know. She was no fool, and she had been a month at Beit Chabab,
tête-á-tête every day, they said, with that damned old wog.

She was self-sufficient, all right, and outwardly self-reliant. It might well be that she was the hand-picked employee of one of the army’s ultrasecret organisations. Furney himself had
said that he did not rule out the possibility of Armande working for some branch of G.H.Q. which had never taken the trouble to let the security people know what they were doing. And then they
raised hell when their agents were arrested!

Ten miles away a great bare headland sprawled across the horizon, and dropped sheer into the sea—Palestine and Armande on the other side of it. Prayle dryly reflected that she would be
completely at her ease, back in a nice, smug British civilisation. She was difficult enough when foot-loose in Beirut; now she would be calling on the High Commissioner’s wife, if he had a
wife, and strongly resentful of interference by sergeants—the more so as she was involved with David Nachmias in some conceited idea of her own.

He felt no guilt at suppressing Armande’s connection with Nachmias; until the connection was clearer, it was no business of Furney’s. To relate the mysterious behaviour of Armande to
the general mystery of Jewish activities might be embarrassing for her. The security people saw Zionists under their beds; once Armande had appeared on the files as mixed up in their intrigues, the
suspicion might remain for always.

Was she herself a Jewess? He was sure that she was not. She had none of the characteristics—except, perhaps, that she was sometimes unnecessarily anxious to show that she was intelligent.
As for David Nachmias, he was above suspicion. Prayle had checked his record, and it was clear. Abu Tisein had risked his life on one journey after another to Syria and the Balkans. He had served
most gallantly the garrison of the Middle East.

The truck bounded through the French Customs, waved on by an international committee of Lebanese gendarmes, of French
douaniers
, of British military police, and climbed the bare
headland to the British post of Ras Naqura. While the documents of the queue of service vehicles were being checked, Prayle looked down, suspiciously, upon the unfamiliar world of Palestine.

Beneath him lay the whole plain of Lower Galilee, closed in the south by Mount Carmel and the Nazareth hills. On the coast the Jewish settlement of Nahariya suggested a German seaside resort,
transported, trees, neat gardens and gabled roofs, to an oasis among the sand hills. Beyond was graceful Acre, and at the end of the sands, twenty miles away, the port of Haifa, its tall buildings
forming streaks of white, through the smoke of industry and the haze of the Mediterranean, against the dark green mass of Carmel. Gunfire rumbled across the bay as the A.A. defences and the
warships in the harbour opened up on a practice shoot or perhaps an unidentified aircraft. East of the city the cooling towers and storage tanks of the great refinery thrust up their huge and
unmistakable corpulence as proof of the inefficiency of Italian bombers or the excellence of the defences. It was a Jewish-British world that Prayle looked down upon, foreign to the Mediterranean.
Acre, a miniature city of towers and walls and minarets, was all that seemed to him to have sprung by a natural birth from the historic soil of Palestine.

A security corporal strolled down the line of waiting vehicles and noticed Prayle’s cap badge.

“On leave, Sergeant?”

“No. Bound for Jerusalem on special deatchment. Is there anything going direct? This friend stops at Haifa.”

“Can do. There’s a Palestine police truck leaving for Jerusalem after lunch. Come and have a bite at the canteen and I’ll fix you up.”

Prayle said good-bye to the driver, and pressed him warmly to drop in on Field Security when he was next in Beirut. His crooked smile assured him of a welcome, yet showed that he understood how
thirsty the driver would have to be before daring to set foot in such a den of striped tigers. The sergeant’s sympathetic curiosity led him to wish to see again everyone he met. He loved to
settle down in the evening with one of his pickups, and listen to him stolidly endeavouring over a drink to explain the inexplicable.

He ate a dish of eggs in the canteen, and then took his seat in the back of an open truck with three British constables of the Palestine police who were returning to Jerusalem from escort
duty.