The Mandelbaum Gate (18 page)

‘What
do they want?’ Freddy said, lifting his head off the pillow.

‘They
want to know where you are. All day yesterday, and all this morning, you didn’t
come. They say your friends where you stay in the Jordan Embassy don’t know
where you have gone since Saturday. They look also for Miss Vaughan, who was a
guest in this hotel, and went to Jordan.’

‘I don’t
stay with anyone in any Embassy,’ Freddy said. ‘The Jordanian Embassy is in
Amman. I stay with friends in Jerusalem who are part of a welfare relief
mission. Everyone knows them.’

The
manager said, ‘Now I phone your office and tell them you are safe. Do you like
some tea, coffee?’

‘There
won’t be anyone there,’ Freddy said. To the Israelis Sunday was a week-day;
they always forgot that the Legation offices closed on Sundays.

Freddy
said, ‘It’s Sunday. There’s no one there.’

‘Sunday?’
said the manager.

Freddy
leaned up on his elbow.

‘What
day of the week is it?’ he said.

‘Today
is Tuesday the 15th of August. They look for you in the office two days. Where
you have been is not my business, Mr Hamilton, all right? As I say to him, we
can put you through to his room. He says, I been put through to his room but
there’s no answer from his room. Then another gentleman calls me to speak—’

‘It can’t
be Tuesday. It’s Sunday. I always come back on Sunday evening,’ Freddy said,
and lay back among the pillows. The manager departed. Freddy decided to compose
a very special set of bread-and-butter verses for Joanna, to compensate for his
boorishness. There had been a slight fuss about Barbara Vaughan in the garden.
You blow neither hot nor cold. He decided to have a rest first, and get up for
dinner, by which time he would have accumulated some executive energy to apply
to the verses.

His
younger colleague, Rupert Gardnor, anxiously disposed to laugh it all off as a
lark, arrived that evening with Dr Jarvis. Freddy sat up, fresh from sleep, and
began again. From what Gardnor told him, it appeared today was Tuesday indeed.
Freddy believed Gardnor. ‘I must have lost my memory,’ Freddy said. ‘I couldn’t
tell you where I’ve been. Hand me my wallet, like a good chap. I hope I haven’t
been robbed.’

They
decided Freddy had not been robbed. He said, ‘I must have had a touch of
sunstroke.’ Gardnor said, ‘I’ll wait downstairs.’ It was uncertain whether he
meant he would wait to see Jarvis or Freddy. Jarvis gave no response; he was
busy with Freddy.

Jarvis
said he would look back tomorrow and make a more thorough examination; the
pulse was a bit unsteady; the temperature was normal.

‘I’ll
be at the office tomorrow,’ Freddy said.

‘On no
account.’

Freddy
didn’t like to think of them discussing him down there. He got up and dressed
quickly.

He
expected to find Gardnor still in conference with Jarvis when he came down.
Instead he found Gardnor drinking in the courtyard.

‘The
vet gone?’ Gardnor said.

‘Yes,
he’s coming back tomorrow. But I’ll be in the office tomorrow.’

‘I’d
follow his advice,’ Gardnor said. ‘You might have a relapse. ‘How does he know
what his advice was? Freddy thought. He said, ‘It must have been sunstroke.’ He
ordered a drink and tried to be fair to Gardnor.

They
dined together. Gardnor said, after dinner they must find some quiet spot where
he could tell Freddy the latest. ‘The latest is rather amusing.’ By the latest
he meant some secret matter in the office.

Freddy
expressed himself keen to hear the latest. He said he didn’t feel very hungry. ‘And
the point is,’ Freddy said, ‘where did I stay? I must have slept. I must have
shaved.’

‘Well,
you didn’t sleep and shave on this side of Mandelbaum,’ Gardnor said. ‘It must
have been on that side. We’ve checked at the Gate, and you came through at 5.18
p.m. today.’

‘It
passes my understanding,’ Freddy said.

‘Could
you have been drugged? How do you feel?’

‘A bit
upset,’ Freddy said, ‘but I haven’t been drugged. Jarvis had a look at my eyes
with his torch and said, “well, at least you haven’t been drugged” — I suppose
he’d know.’

‘Oh,
yes.’

‘Sunstroke,’
Freddy said, and accompanied his friend to a quiet corner of the public lounge
where Gardnor, in a quiet but gleeful voice, described the latest. This was an
involved story about an Israeli counter-intelligence ruse. Freddy felt very
drowsy and wished Gardnor would go home.

‘The
Israelis,’ Gardnor breezed on, ‘are anxious about an intelligence leakage that
they’ve traced to Beersheba …’ Freddy felt his eyelids droop, and propped
them open as it were with invisible matchsticks. Gardnor’s story was connected
with the water-pipe-line project, planned by Israel to stretch from Galilee to
the Negev, and, branching beneath the desert scrub, to blossom there. This plan
had already aroused wild hostility from the Arab States, as much by its
symbolism as by its practical advantage to their enemy, Israel. The Arab Press
and radio presented the plan as one designed mainly to deprive their people of
their own rivers and so kill them off. It was no secret either, in this year of
the Eichmann trial, that the pipes were already being laid. In the Israeli
press the exact diameter of these huge water-pipes, 108 inches, had been
published, but many Arab agencies, prompted both by the accepted rules of
propaganda and by genuine suspicion, had reported these monstrous sucklings of
Arab life-blood to be the largest known, although, they said, the exact
dimensions were as yet withheld by the Israelis.

Gardnor
now described to Freddy how the Israeli Intelligence, keen to track down the
spy who they knew was operating from Beersheba, had arranged to spill from a
rail truck two sections of the metal pipes. For several weeks they had lain by
the side of the track gleaming in the sun for all to see who passed on the parallel
motor road, and then were explained by government press officers as having
fallen accidentally from one of the goods wagons which bore these pipe sections
regularly to their destination. The pieces of pipe-line were even pointed out
to tourists by the guides, to show off the great engineering plan by which the
wilderness of the Negev would open like the rose in a few years’ time. Those
pipes over there, the guides would say as they drove slowly past the spot — our
water-pipes, to bring water from the north to cultivate the desert; they are
108 inches in diameter; look at them!

Gardnor
said to Freddy, who sat round-eyed with the effort to keep awake, ‘… and in
fact, I happened to see them myself when I was down there last Sunday week, and
I thought at the time that they looked rather big, you know. Of course, one can’t
actually judge these measurements if one isn’t an expert, and, of course, I
only saw them from the road, which was about two hundred yards from the place
where the pipes were lying. But anyhow, it
did
cross my mind at the time
that those sections of the pipe-line
did
look a bit bigger than I’d
expected, from the official description. And of course 108 inches in diameter
is a lot, anyway. Well, anyway, what the Israelis had done —Oh go home, Freddy
thought, sitting with his eyes forced wide.

He
began to close in on his ordeal, and to consider his own dumb sufferings, a
course of mind which Freddy normally abhorred. Gardnor’s hushed confidence
continued to scorch Freddy’s eardrums, and he sat and put up with it, not
caring whether he followed the story or not.

‘…
The Israelis, you see, were after the spy chap operating in the area. And what
the Israelis had done,’ Gardnor assured Freddy, ‘was to build a special couple
of pipe-line sections far bigger than those they’re actually going to use, and
to plant them beside the track. Great huge fellows they were — as I say, I saw
them myself and they looked enormous, as I say. And of course, they kept a
watch on the spot. Well, last Sunday night —’

‘Last
Sunday, the 13th?’ Freddy said. His eyes moved to Rupert Gardnor’s face, which
had faintly checked its expression at this interruption. Freddy’s mind was
fixed on last Sunday and its adjacent days as on an aching tooth and its touchy
neighbours. Freddy said again, ‘list Sunday, Rupert, did you say?’

But
Gardnor was mercilessly intent on cheering up a colleague in his misfortunes. ‘Last
Sunday,’ Gardnor said more clearly, moving closer in the evident assumption
that Freddy had not heard his lowered tone. ‘Yes, last Sunday night,
apparently. Well, they kept a watch …’ Freddy was touched and soothed by the
man’s polite implication that there was nothing really the matter with him, and
that nothing really had happened. The man was behaving exactly as he himself
would have done, of course; that was to say, one would naturally take the line
that a few days’ lapse of memory suffered by a chap in one’s own department was
different from what it would be if it happened to anyone else. He allowed his
eyes to relax from their propped-open fixedness.

‘…
kept a watch on those pipe sections. Eventually, after a couple of
weeks — as I say, last Sunday night — they spotted a man hanging round the
place. He got over to the rail track and started measuring the diameter of the
pipes. Well you see, these were the specially planted ones, not the real ones,
which are in
fact
108 inches in diameter. These were much bigger. And as
expected the Arabs got the information within the course of the night. It was
also received by an Israeli agent over in Jordan, who signalled back the news
over no-man’s-land at dawn. The size of the fake pipes was, I think, something
like 195 inches, but that isn’t the point. The point is, the Israelis have got
their spy over here — the man who was measuring it. He’s an Israeli employed by
a quite innocent detective agency in Beersheba — and the Arab Intelligence, of
course, are now in a stew as to whether the diameter of the fake pipes, I think
195 inches, really is the size, or whether the official size —’

‘The
size of those fake water-pipes,’ Freddy said suddenly, for no reason that he
himself could think of at present, ‘is 185 inches, not 195. The size is 185
inches, that I know.’

Gardnor’s
immediate reply was a long silence, which was the first of the silences in
conversation that Freddy was to encounter. and which now woke Freddy out of his
half-doze. Then Gardnor said, ‘How do you know?’

‘What?’
said Freddy.

‘Oh,
nothing,’ Gardnor said. ‘Only the information didn’t reach Jordan until Sunday
night, and there was nothing about it in our office until after they’d arrested
their spy. We got a memo, Monday morning, from the Israeli Intelligence, and I
suppose the Americans are in the know as well, in case we took the ruse
seriously and started making inquiries and representations and so on. But you
weren’t there in the office, Monday morning. That’s why I’m wondering how you
know anything about the affair.’

‘I don’t
know anything about it. At least, only what you’ve told me,’ Freddy said, in
distress. ‘But you’re right … my dear Rupert, I honestly don’t know where I’ve
been since last Saturday afternoon. It will come back. A touch of sunstroke —’

Gardnor
smiled in an embarrassed way and said, ‘Oh yes, I know, but you do seem to have
heard something about the fake water-pipes, and you seem to be informed about
the exact size. And all this stuff, you see, came to us as Top Secret, of
course.’

‘I’ve
heard of Topper Secrets,’ Freddy said.

‘That’s
true. It isn’t so very significant. But one wonders … it’s rather as if you’d
picked it up somewhere, and one wonders … well, Freddy, do you mind if I
mention this at the office? I mean, if I don’t, it wouldn’t be quite the thing,
you see, Freddy. What would you do?’

‘I’d
put in a report,’ Freddy said. ‘You’ll have to do so.’

‘I
know.’

Freddy
said, ‘I think if I could get some sleep it would all come back.’ Gardnor was
really in rather a hurry to observe his duty.

‘Of
course,’ Gardnor said. sitting upright now, very tense and anxious, ‘it would
be better if you put in a statement yourself. I prefer it, quite honestly.
Could you write it tonight?’

‘No,’
Freddy said. ‘It’s your job, if you feel it’s so terribly pressing. You know
you’d be questioned, anyway.’

‘Well,
I’ll say it’s done with your approval, and I’ll send you a copy. Do you mind if
I have another drink? Makes you feel like the bloody Gestapo when you’ve got to
do a thing like this and report an ordinary conversation with one of your own
chaps.’

Freddy
said, ‘Oh, come!’ He sat back with closed eyes while Gardnor ordered his drink,
and shook his head when Gardnor asked him if he wanted one.

When
Gardnor’s whisky arrived with a tinkle of glasses and loose change Freddy
opened his eyes again. Gardnor said, ‘There’s another point, Freddy, that may
have escaped you. It isn’t so much a question of what you’ve heard in the
missing days, as a question of what you might have said, presuming you’ve been
in the way of hearing things of a security nature.’

‘The
point hasn’t escaped me,’ Freddy said.

Gardnor’s
face, which was normally placid and healthy from a recent sun-tan, looked
pasty, as if he had eaten something that disagreed with him.