The Mule on the Minaret (40 page)

‘I don't think he's very likeable.'

‘I hope you won't go out with him, when he comes back.'

‘I don't suppose I shall.'

‘Suppose, only suppose?'

‘I get lonely sometimes. In a foreign country, with no relations. The evenings can be very dreary. It is lonely coming back after a day's work to an empty flat. It can be a relief to go out, even with a man you don't particularly like.'

She watched Aziz closely as she spoke. He frowned, and a pleasant glow touched her heart. He's jealous, she thought, that's why he doesn't like Alexis. Alexis is everything he isn't. But she did not linger on the subject. She switched on to a different topic. Jealousy was a dangerous ally. She had done enough. She had planted the seed. Let it grow quietly in the dark. It would not
need watering. In its own due time the first green shoots would show.

*   *   *

A week later a report came from Beirut. Alexis' mission had been most successful. He had been contacted on the telephone by a Turk, who spoke excellent English. ‘You will not know who I am,' he said. ‘But I think we have matters that we can discuss which would prove of interest and profit to us both. Will you meet me tomorrow afternoon in the Café Stanislas? Will you wear a red carnation? I shall be carrying an evening newspaper, and shall be wearing a grey cloth cap and a grey double-breasted coat.'

The conversation followed a conventional pattern. ‘It has been reported here,' so Alexis was informed, ‘that you have spoken in fashionable Beirut circles about the certainty of an Axis victory. You welcomed the prospect of this victory; you felt that a German victory would be of advantage to the Armenians. You dreaded an Allied victory in which Turkey participated on the Allied side. I do not, as a Turk, share your fear of what Turkey might do if left alone to settle the Armenian problem. I am a young Turk; one of the progressives. I deplore many of the excesses committed in the days of the Ottoman Empire. They will not be repeated by the new reborn Turkey. At the same time I am convinced that a victory for the Allies would be disastrous for Turkey. I want to see an Axis victory, and as soon as possible, before American intervention can be effective. I am wondering whether you would be prepared to assist the Germans to that victory.'

‘We have no idea,' the report continued, ‘who the intermediary is. He is not Chessman and Alexis' description of him does not tally with any of the characters in our Rogues Gallery. But there is no doubt that the German who eventually interviewed Alexis was the same man who interviewed Aziz. The interview followed a different course. This is, of course, only natural; Alexis was there of his own free will, while Aziz had been shanghaied. It was a blackmailing operation. The German was naturally bellicose and authoritative. He could treat Alexis as an associate, as an accomplice.

‘The meeting was extremely friendly. The German explained what kind of information he required from Alexis. He asked Alexis a number of questions. He had learnt very little about him from Aziz. It is surprising that the Germans did not ask Aziz for
more information about him. They must have had their own reasons for not letting Aziz know that they were proposing to recruit Alexis. We can only suppose that it was a part of their process of intimidation. They wanted to diminish Aziz in his own esteem; also to frighten him by telling him that he had produced no information of any value.

‘Alexis' description of himself and of his social milieu impressed the Germans. Here, they thought, was the man who could give them exactly what they wanted. They must have compared him with Aziz, greatly to his favour.

‘During the second meeting, they discussed the methods by which he should convey his reports. They are resorting to the device of secret ink, instead of the exchange of newspapers which they were employing in the case of Aziz. That was a clumsy method to which probably they only resorted because Aziz had been led to believe that a letter of his had been intercepted by the postal censorship. There is no such need for caution in Alexis' case. He has been given the number of a P.O. Box (3175), to which he is to write. The Germans are not proposing to write to him at all, unless they have some special reason. They believe that he has been adequately briefed. He has assured them that he will be paying regular visits to Istanbul. This suits our book very well. We shall provide Alexis with some notional characters and we shall maintain a steady flow of the kind of information that we want the Germans to receive. The possibilities of this operation seem to us very great.'

Eve chuckled as she filed away the document. In this confused story so many characters were involved; nearly all of them were in the dark to a greater or a lesser degree. She was the only one who was completely in the picture; she alone knew what Aziz was really like.

*   *   *

The day of Aziz's return approached.

‘I wonder how you are going to feel being on your own again?' said Kitty.

‘That's exactly what I'm wondering myself.'

‘It was one thing to have that succession of empty evenings when you didn't know there was an alternative, or rather when you didn't know what the alternative was. It'll make a difference now.'

‘That's what I'm afraid of.'

‘You'd better start going out on dates like I do.'

Eve did not answer. She looked thoughtfully at Kitty. She wondered whether Kitty, for all the variety of her experience, knew as much about love and love-making as she did.

‘I suppose,' she said, ‘that you find all these men different in some way.'

‘Of course I do.'

‘And that's the fun of it, finding in what way they're different?'

‘Naturally.'

‘You look at the man with whom you're on your first date. You say to yourself, “He looks like a dozen others, but there is something unique about him, something I've found in no one else,” and that's the kick about it, isn't it?'

‘Everyone knows that, surely.'

‘Each man has something new to teach you.'

‘He's a very peculiar man if he can't. Somehow I don't believe I'd go on a date with that kind of man. Instinct would warn me.'

‘But don't you think . . .' Eve paused. She was not exactly sure what she had in mind. She had not formulated to herself in words what she suspected in herself as a conviction. ‘Don't you think,' she said, ‘that you might be able to find all those differences combined in a single man, if you gave him the chance to show himself?'

‘What are you trying to say: “give him the chance to show himself.” I give him every chance I can. I'm most co-operative.'

‘Chance was the wrong word; wouldn't it be more exciting to think, when you're with a man on your twenty-seventh date, “It's going to be different in some way tonight.” Mightn't it be, if you expected it to be?'

Kitty laughed. ‘I believe you really are in love,' she said.

Eve did not answer. Really in love? That was something she did not know. Love! What did it mean? But this she did know, and knew for very certain: that each date was a fresh date, a landmark, a stage of progress. Why could not one man give you as much as a hundred men? If you were patient, if you waited, if you let the thing go deep. During those two weeks in Beirut she had thought proudly, ‘No woman will ever be able to give him as much as I have done.' Now, with even greater pride, she thought, ‘No man will ever be able to give me more than he has done, than he is doing.'

When the last night came, she thought, ‘Tonight it will be
different. There will be something new.' And it was, there was. Often in the days before, she had had the sense of being a horse, ridden by an impatient jockey, goaded towards the winning post. But now suddenly, miraculously, the roles were reversed; he was the charger, she the rider who was urging him towards the winning post, forcing him, spurring him beyond his strength; faster, faster; she pressed her knees into his flanks; tighter, tighter. Fantasy lit her frenzy. If only this were a real race she would have a whip, she'd flog him home. ‘One day I'll buy a whip,' she thought. Maybe he'd like it. She could make him like anything she liked. Faster, faster, faster.

Aziz's return to Beirut caused less excitement in the third-floor office in the M.E.S.C. building than his last one had. He was not potential, in the way that he had been, in the way that Alexis had become. Reid and Farrar discussed the issue. ‘His only real use to us now,' said Farrar, ‘is that we learn through him what the Germans want to know.'

‘That's something, surely?'

‘Oh, yes, of course; and we learn how much it's possible for a reasonably bright young man to pick up here in Lebanon, if he keeps his eyes and ears open. But . . . well, it's all secondhand, you know.'

‘Like Plato's shadows in the cave.'

‘Probably, Prof., probably, but it's a long time since I was
au fait
with that.'

‘Whereas Alexis is first-hand. He can send what we want sent up.'

‘Precisely. We're in control there.' He paused. He was sitting on the edge of his desk, swinging his leg. He looked singularly nonchalant, very much the kind of youngish man who would have exasperated one of the older school. ‘Lounge-lizard. What's he doing here in this playground, fiddling around with papers, when men ten years older than himself are driving tanks in the Western Desert?' But, he had with his elegance and verve very much the air of a crusader, fighting a modern war with modern weapons; there was nothing here of the First War
embusqué.
He looked round the room with its high steel filing cabinets, the repository of the section's work. He wore a pensive, puzzled look; then suddenly his face lit up.

‘It's only occurred to me,' he said, ‘this very moment. We've
reached a watershed; all this time that I've been here—and most of the time that you've been with me—we've been building up a pattern of defence that could switch over to the offensive at any moment. Our traps are baited. We have Alexis trusted by the Germans, ready to tell them anything we want; we've got Aziz less trusted by the Germans, but as far as we are concerned he's a monitored exchange. Then there's Chessman on the Taurus; there are those chaps in Aleppo and Damascus busy spreading rumours in the bazaars. We've got all these vice-consuls and third secretaries in this and the other embassy and legation, wearing uniform, looking like soldiers, but actually assembling information. We have built up an underground; now we've got to find out what we can do with it. We're trained, we're ready, we're on the ball. Where are we to go? You see what I mean, Prof.? The watershed: we've reached it. It's now up to us to find where and how we can attack. Boy, this is where we start.'

At first light on the morning of 23rd October, Montgomery launched his long-awaited attack at Alamein. For a week the issue hung in doubt, then the tanks broke through and Rommel's Army was in full retreat. ‘This... is not even the beginning of the end,' announced Winston Churchill, ‘but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.' In the first week of November a conference of the I.S.L.O. departments was called in Cairo. ‘You'd better go to that,' said Farrar. ‘You've never been to Cairo.'

Reid half closed his eyes. For weeks now he had been wondering how he could wangle a visit there, and now miraculously the chance had come. ‘I'd like that very much,' he said. Cairo, with Diana a few yards away. Diana in the office where he would be reporting every morning. Diana again, after all these weeks. ‘When does the conference start?' he asked.

‘On Monday week. Why not go down on the Friday train and spend the week-end sightseeing?'

‘That would suit me fine.' This time he would not make the mistake of arriving unexpectedly.

‘Dear one,' he wrote, ‘I'm so excited. I'm coming to Cairo for that conference. You know what it's all about. I aim to check in at Shepheard's on the Saturday. Which meal will you have with me on the Sunday? Could you leave a message at my hotel?'

He wrote only one other letter, to Gustave. That was at Farrar's suggestion. ‘I wish that you'd look up that young man who came out with you for the Mission. I forget his name. You called him
“Gustave”. I'm curious about him. I've an idea that we might have a special use for him. Find out all you can.'

So he wrote to Gustave, suggesting that they dined together on the Saturday. Gustave could put him wise.

He reached Cairo in the early afternoon. There were two messages waiting for him: one from Gustave, saying he would call for him at eight-fifteen; another from Diana saying that lunch would be fine, that she would call for him at one-fifteen. So that put paid to that. He could siesta and have a bath and enjoy the rare privilege of not having to go into an office at five o'clock.

The light had faded by the time he came downstairs. The large Oriental lounge, with its cushions, its fountains and its divans, was mainly empty. He walked on the terrace. The evening was warm enough for a man to sit there without an overcoat. He wished that he could have been here before the war, so that he could have compared its present with its past. Was it so different? There were dragomans with smart jackets and tarbooshes; there were shoe-shine boys with their black brass-bound caskets; in the street there were the drivers of taxis and arabanas soliciting custom; there were vendors of postcards, cigarettes and beads; there was a brisk bustle in the streets; but there were not many British officers. Most of them were in their offices. Those who were on leave were resting. It was early yet for them.

He walked into the street, turned right and sauntered towards the gardens. Farrar had given him a map of the city. ‘Sharia Soliman Pasha,' he had been told, ‘that's what you must make for first.' It was crowded now and the shop-windows glittered. In Beirut he had often thought, ‘who could imagine that there was a war going on five hundred miles away?' Here, it was hard to believe that this affluent international metropolis was the headquarters of an army, engaged in mortal combat. Beirut was a delightful, picturesque Mediterranean township; but Cairo was a city. And once again, looking at the men and women who hurried or loitered past him, many of the women veiled, many of the men in red tarbooshes, many of them wearing the baggy pantaloons that were ready to accommodate the birth of the Messiah, here as in Aleppo and Damascus, he had the feeling of how remote from this people was the war being waged between the Axis and the Allies. This was not their war. They had become involved in it, but it was not their war.