The Baghdad Railway Club (8 page)

In the corridor, an Arab was sweeping the spotless carpet with a broom. He stopped and smiled at me, and I said, ‘Salaam alaikum,’ which seemed to amuse him no end. I knocked on the door of 226; no reply. I looked back at the Arab, who was still watching me, still smiling. He said something in his native tongue, perhaps ‘It is perfectly in order for you to go in.’ Anyhow, that’s what I did.

The room was just as dark as before, but hotter. A desk stood in the middle of it, but the bed remained, and Shepherd had spread some papers over it. I turned about. I had left the door ajar, and it wouldn’t do to close it – that would be to claim possession of the room. I moved over to the bed, where I saw a plan of Baghdad station and environs, written half in German: ‘Bahnhof of Baghdad’. I identified on the plan the blockhouse in which the station master apparently lived, and there was a tiny note next to this, which I could not read, and might have been hand-written on to the printed map. This map lay at the foot of the bed. Going up towards the bolster, there were documents in French, all bearing the same stamp or seal. I saw the word ‘Decauville’ – that was a French make of light railway track. There was a pack of playing cards in their box, perfectly normal British ones; there was also a novel. I picked it up:
The Good Soldier
by a certain Ford Madox Ford. I flicked through the pages. It was not
about
soldiering.

There were two steel cabinets by the wall. I walked over and tried the handle of the first – locked. I tried the second, and it opened – nothing whatsoever inside. I moved towards the desk. Eight drawers in it. I looked towards the door, and tried the first. It held a service revolver. I stared down at the gun.

‘Captain Stringer,’ said Shepherd, and I slammed the drawer and saluted.

He seemed thinner than before – browner too, of course, but still with the redness beneath. In fact our exchange of glances had sent the colour rising as fast on his cheeks as on my own.

‘Excuse me‚ sir,’ I said. ‘I’d just come to show you this map.’ I waved the scroll about stupidly. ‘It combines two other ones. I was looking for an India rubber because there’s a mistake on it.’ I unrolled the map, held the two ends apart on the desk.

‘Very good,’ he said, examining the map. He looked up at me and smiled. ‘And what is the mistake?’

We both studied the map. There was no mistake to be seen. Out of sheer gentlemanliness, it seemed to me, Shepherd broke the silence:

‘It seems to be absolutely . . .’

‘It’s just that I put an “h” on “Samarrah”,’ I said.

We both looked at the ‘h’. It seemed very tiny and inconsequential, and was evidently worth no further remark for Shepherd said, ‘Well now, how would you like a ride up there?’

I let the map curl up again. ‘Captain Stevens said we might be going.’

‘Do you fancy the trip?’

Did I have any choice in the matter? Instead of putting that question, I enquired, ‘What do we use for motive power, sir?’

‘An engine,’ he said, and this time he was embarrassed at
himself
, at the smallness of the joke. I knew that any information withheld by Shepherd, or any query deflected, would cause guiltiness in him, so that a fuller disclosure of data would follow. And so it proved. ‘A
DS 18
,’ he said, ‘to give the technical designation. It’s a rather large German locomotive.’

I nodded. ‘I saw . . .’

But what had I seen? I could not let on I’d been to the station. Once more, he came to my aid: ‘I think you’ll enjoy the run, Jim. The stations along the line could hardly be more varied in their appeal. I believe one or two even have a platform.’

‘Will we go beyond Samarrah?’

‘Oh, I hope so, a little way.’

You’d think we were in for a holiday jaunt.

‘But the line gives out up there,’ I said.

‘It does,’ said Shepherd. ‘Runs into the sand.’

‘Will there be any Turks thereabouts, sir?’

‘We might run into the odd stray patrol or two,’ he said, and he smiled kindly.

He was fishing in his tunic pocket, bringing out smokes. He offered me one, and I looked down at the packet: the couple walking along the beach, the four stars exactly, the unreadable script. There did seem a kind of damnable pride in his face as he offered them, a kind of defiance. But perhaps this brand was common throughout Asia Minor. Perhaps these were the Woodbines of Baghdad. I took one with slightly shaking hands, and Shepherd lit it for me.

‘Now tell me about your long journey,’ he said, perching on the desk. ‘What sort of a voyage did you have?’

He seemed to want all the details, and when I’d run out of them he said, ‘By the way, we have our own Railway Club here in Baghdad.’

‘I saw the notice,’ I said.

‘Come along on Saturday. Anybody can have the floor, as long as they speak on a railway subject. You’ve missed my party piece by the way, luckily for you. I spoke last week.’

‘On what, sir?’

‘Oh, a very out-of-the-way subject: the passenger railways of Turkey.’

I lunched alone, on a kind of stew with currants in it. I was only one of half a dozen blokes in the canteen, which was in the grand dining room of the Hotel, half of which had been given over to the storage of packing cases. Reaching into the inside pocket of my tunic, and touching a certain envelope that I’d kept close about me since my arrival, I revolved the idea of going off to the British Residency to communicate with Manners, but decided I’d better put in a full day’s work beforehand.

Recrossing the lobby, I saw the police team, and I was itching to ask, ‘What did the station master tell you?’ but discretion prevailed. I walked over to Part One Orders, and there was a new notice: officers were to wear their guns at all times.

Stevens returned to room 227 half an hour after me, and continued writing his letters to the Indian government. After his polite enquiries about my voyage, Shepherd had put me to writing a report on the very
Decauville
light rail systems he’d been reading about himself. He’d said he wanted to know how they would adapt to desert conditions. I said I didn’t know desert conditions. What I knew was mud. He’d said‚ ‘You will do after Monday,’ and told me to make a start anyhow. It seemed to me that, for all his politeness – and on the face of it, he was about the most considerate officer I’d ever come across – he hadn’t much interest in anything I might write, but that he’d brought me out here because I could drive and fire an engine. I guessed that he’d taken Stevens on for the very same reasons – unless the fellow was his partner in crime.

Shepherd had said I might knock off at about four, and when the time came, I went up to my room, and had a wash. Jarvis had already packed my things prior to our move to new quarters, but there was no sign of him, and I had two hours until our rendezvous on Park Street. After my adventure of the night before, I was all in. I went down to the mess where I put my hands on an electrical fan. The moment I got the thing started, it blew the ash off the cigar of a fellow smoking on the other side of the room. Luckily, he was only a Second Lieutenant. I put my hand up to signal an apology and he waved back as if to say, ‘Don’t mention it, old man.’ Satisfied by this, I immediately went to sleep, and dreamed of what looked like rain clouds appearing over Baghdad, much to the relief of all the men on the ground. Only they were not rain clouds but dirigibles, Turkish ones, and they began dropping bombs. I was awoken by the roar of the motor on one of these dirigibles, which turned out to be the noise of the fan. I turned it off, drank down two glasses of the boiled water, moved over to the window. There was a little less dazzle to the day, and the men were working on the wires again.

I set out for the British Residency, which was the second HQ of the Corps, so to speak. Getting there was a matter of following the wires along the riverside alleyways. As I walked, alternately through dazzle and shadow, I took the envelope from my pocket. ‘Now as to communication, and encryption thereof,’ Manners of the War Office had told me, ‘we have decided in your own case to take the simplest possible approach.’

The thin booklet I had been handed by the boy scout summoned by Manners – and which I took from its envelope as I walked now – was headed ‘Railway Clearing House Code Book’.

‘Secret code,’ Manners had said, keeping an absolutely straight face, but letting me know it was costing him quite an effort to do so.

‘Not
very
,’ I had said.

I’d seen this booklet, or close variants thereof, lying about in many a railway office. Anyone sending a standard sort of railway message was supposed to make use of it, not so much for secrecy as for money-saving. It was drilled into any clerk that telegraphy was expensive, and brevity essential. But in practice the book was not much used, for the messages represented by its codes were too simple, and it was regarded as a rather comical production. Opening the book at random, I saw – under the list of code words related to ‘Duty’ – the word ‘Chute’. ‘Chute’, I read, meant ‘Proceed to the following station for relief duty’. Why did it mean that? No reason. There was seldom any obvious connection between the word and the message, although I’d always thought that railway clerks with time on their hands must spend long hours trying to make one.
The bloke required for the duty at the other station would be sent down a chute to take up his position.

The booklet contained a folded sheet of flimsy paper.

‘Open it out,’ Manners had commanded.

I had done so in his office, and I did so now, seeing the following words in capitals, with their meanings set down alongside in lower case.

The beauty of the cipher – according to Manners – was that the words in capitals corresponded to the ciphers in the railway code book. In that, as I knew without looking, ‘Anchovy’ came under the heading ‘Missing and Tracing’, and meant ‘Item certainly sent; have further search made, and wire result’, while ‘Rustic’ was under ‘Forwarding’ and meant ‘Wire full particulars of despatch under delivery’.

Now the telegraph clerk in the British Residency – a trusted man supposedly, but you never knew – would either have an understanding of the railway codes, and believe that I really was asking the Head Clerk‚ Department F, War Office – Manners, in other words – to wire further particulars in some railway matter. (Not completely unlikely, since I was in the railway office of Corps HQ.) Or he would just be baffled by the word ‘Anchovy’, recognising it as some new code, separate from the standard military ciphers (with which he would be closely familiar). The third possibility was that, as a student of codes in general, the clerk might recognise ‘Anchovy’ as belonging to the railway code, know its meaning as given in that book, but realise that in this particular communication it was being given some new meaning. In which case, as Manners had said, ‘So what?’ For he would not know the new meaning, and could not discover it without having sight of the paper I now held in my hands.

And whatever he thought, it was the clerk’s job to send the message.

Also listed on the paper were the words I might receive by way of reply:

I recalled that in the railway code ‘Christian’ stood for ‘Nothing to indicate sender or cosignee’. I could not remember the railway meanings of the other words.

I was restricted to this cipher. Therefore, I could not send ‘Boyd is dead. What do I do now?’, much though I would have liked to.

Manners had considered the code a very clever dodge indeed, and amusing into the bargain. ‘However,’ he had said, ‘I would much prefer that you did not use it. The matter is too sensitive. Unless you wire “Rustic” you will remain in Baghdad for a month collecting evidence and acting quite independently.’

Should
I need to send a wire, he had stressed, it was imperative I did so from the telegraph office of the Residency, since the strategic and diplomatic communications were sent from there rather than from the telegraph office of the Hotel. The men at the Residency were more trusted, in other words. To make use of that office, a fellow needed a document of authorisation, and I had one of these in the same envelope as the code. Most of the words on this chit were typewritten. The important ones, however, were scrawled in a shockingly bad hand that I could not read. It began, ‘For the Attention of’, and then I couldn’t make out who it was for the attention of. Then it said, ‘Captain J. H. Stringer is hereby authorised to despatch and receive telegraphic communications of level . . .’ and the level I couldn’t make out either. It was signed by an unreadable personage (it
might
have been ‘Manners’) of ‘Department F, War Office’.

I approached the gates of the British Residency, which was another palace on the river, this one set around a quadrangle.

‘It’s no go, sir,’ said the sentry, when I explained my business, showing all necessary credentials.

‘You mean you won’t let me in, Corporal?’

‘By all means go
in
, sir. You’ll find they’re serving tea and cakes on the veranda. Only, the telegraphic office is shut.’

‘What is it, Corporal? Half-day closing?’

‘Some wires are down, sir.’

‘Cut by the natives?’

‘Ten-to-one on, sir. The telegraph office in the Hotel ought to be operating, sir. Why not try there?’

I shook my head. ‘That’s out,’ I said. ‘I must send to . . .’

I looked through the gates and saw, in the quadrangle of the Residency, the man with the cine camera – bloody Wallace King. He stood by the side of the thing, for now he had an assistant to turn the handle, and the lens pointed directly at me. I turned on my heel, and the sentry called after me, ‘Come back tomorrow, sir! Be all fixed up by then!’

In the labyrinth once more, I reflected that Wallace King and his camera would be the death of me. The man was a liability. But at least this reverse put off the question of whether I should send ‘Gruff’ or ‘Relax’, the two options I’d been revolving.

I found I was wandering amid displays of dates, pastries, biscuits, breads. A sort of roof began to close over my head: wooden beams running between the houses with rushes laid over. Four sepoys came bearing down on me from the opposite direction, the second patrol I’d seen in ten minutes. This would be on account of the cut wires and – perhaps – the discovery of Boyd. I turned two more corners, and broke free of the labyrinth, finding myself walking towards the bridge of boats. Two army vans crawled across it, forcing the Arab river-watchers hard up against the rope barriers on either side . . . And the call to prayer was once more rising up from all over the town. Many Arabs were coming towards me along the river bank road, and I had a feeling of helplessness. I was outnumbered. But they began diverting to the right, towards a steeply rising terrace fringed by palms. It rose up towards a glittering mosque.

I came to a brick and timber quay: a hurly-burly of loading, men and animals. Even the gulls seemed to say ‘Allah! Allah!’ A hot wind rose, sweeping dust off the top of a crumbling yellow brick wall that stood over the road from the quay. It enclosed a garden of palms, orange, lemon and other trees. In this garden – rising up from the river – a horse rider came and went between the trees, and I moved closer to the wall, trying to make sure of what seemed on the face of it an impossibility. The rider was a woman – a white woman. She wore jodhpurs, a white shirt, and some species of bowler hat. It was a funny sort of hat, but then everybody in this town wore a funny sort of hat, and she carried hers off particularly well. There was in general a trimness about her, and this taken together with the command of the horse . . . it all added up to a person I would like to have seen at closer quarters. But as I moved towards the wall in the fading light, an urgency came into the world, so that the wind rose, the prayer-call reached higher notes, the horse’s canter became a gallop, and it was up through the trees, clear of them, over a stretch of gravelled track by flower beds, and gone from sight through the gate of a castellated wall.

I took from my pocket the map Jarvis had supplied. He’d taken a good deal of trouble over it. Some of the highlights of the eastern bank were marked: The Hotel GB, The Residency, Big Bizarre. (By which I took Jarvis to mean ‘Bazaar’.) Some streets were drawn in, and the names given them by the Tommies were set down: Dog-Pack Square, Straight Street, Cemetry View (as Jarvis had it), Clean Street, and here number 11 – the intended destination of Stevens – was marked although no reason given as to why. The park I now faced was also marked. With my back to the river, I looked at it. To the right of it lay streets with names that seemed to take their cues from the park: Rose Lane, Jasmine Lane, Lemon Tree Grove, and the address I’d been allocated, Rose Court. Beyond the park was the Cavalry Barracks, then the North Gate of the wall, which was the principal one. If Turks came back, they’d come by that way.

I began skirting the park (where thoughtful-looking Arabs sat under trees), making for Rose Court. As Baghdad streets went, Park Street was pleasantly wide and smooth, and to demonstrate the fact, a smart phaeton came trotting along it pulled by a well-groomed horse. But it was in the nature of this place that the horse should lift its tail as I looked on, and that it should deposit on the road bricks a considerable poundage of shit, which was then scattered by the wheels of the carriage in the vicinity of one particular set of open gates, beyond which I saw dark red roses. The place corresponded to Rose Court on my map.

I was half an hour early for Jarvis, but I crossed the road and passed through the gate, where I saw many rose beds, fertilised by other instances of the stuff the horse had dropped. The garden air was overcharged with the dizzying smell of roses and horse shit, and the twisting sounds of evening birdsong . . . And voices. These came from behind a thicket of palm trees, and they were very English voices – one upper-class, one not so. Something told me to retreat from them, and I backed into a second area of palms, this one enclosing a rectangular ornamental pond of very green and dead water with rose petals scattered over it, unable to sink. It was Jarvis and Shepherd who were speaking. I could not make out particular words, although Jarvis broke through with ‘. . . That’s it, sir . . . reported by the station master . . .’

There was then a question from Shepherd – and the soft civility he’d shown to me was evident, even though here was an officer addressing a private soldier. They separated after additional muttering, and I watched Shepherd go through the gate. As he crossed the threshold, a sudden rattle of piano music from one of the apartments in the compound seemed to cause him to give a skip, and to move away down the street at the double.