Nile Shadows jq-3

by Edward Whittemore

  I never doubted it.

  And they were led by Churchill himself.

  Who was probably raving drunk as usual. But you fought back with all your strength and Rommel will be personally toasting you this weekend. While in the meantime, a little privacy perhaps?

  The bar owner rose and dismissed his audience with a haughty gesture, almost losing his balance as he did so. But the yellowish blackmarketeer was quickly by the bar owner's side, his sickly eyes darting to and fro as he tendered his support, and in another moment he had the bar owner in an upright position and was steering him down the alley, the two of them hand in hand with their bodies rubbing together in the traditional Levantine manner of wholehearted cooperation.

  Early that evening, then, a British Major returned to the Irrigation Works after debriefing his agent, the unhealthy-looking pimp. The Major laid aside his pith helmet and went in to report to his Colonel, the man in charge of the Waterboys.

  ***

  It's about the Purple Seven alert that came in this morning, said the Major. It took some time to look into because the bar owner needed sobering up.

  The Colonel nodded. Let's call this Purple Seven the Armenian, he said. Go ahead.

  He's described as a small dark man of European origin, closely clipped beard, deep lines around the eyes, probably a drinker. Thin, wiry, getting on toward forty. A reddish hue to his hair, or at least that was the impression in the poor lighting of the bar. Nothing particular about the way he dressed except that it was definitely on the shabby side. Collarless shirt, rumpled and none too clean. An old suit that might have been secondhand, rather too big for him as if he had lost some weight recently, or perhaps just seen better days in general. Shabby overall, but otherwise ordinary in appearance.

  Or experienced, said the Colonel. Go on.

  He entered the bar shortly after Stern did, sometime around ten maybe. The bar owner's pretty useless when it comes to time, he doesn't own a watch and there's no clock in the bar. Stern and the Armenian sat together at the counter. The two of them were speaking English and the bar owner only understands a little. They drank the local cheap brandy. Stern had a couple, the Armenian rather more. Stern did the ordering and also the looking about.

  How?

  They were sitting sideways facing one another, each with an elbow on the counter, Stern positioned so that he had a full view of most of the room and also the entrance, which he could see over the Armenian's shoulder without moving his head. A curtain hung in the open doorway, separating the room from the alley. They smoked cigarettes while they talked, Stern's cigarettes, a cheap Arab brand. It was a quiet conversation at first, low tones, some gesturing. The Armenian was doing most of the talking at that point.

  But then Stern did some talking and the situation grew more heated, as if there were some kind of disagreement. The Armenian seemed to be the one who was disagreeing, while Stern's manner was more one of self-confidence or relief. But that might be a bit too strong. It's only based on an impression of an impression.

  Relief over something he'd learned from the Armenian? Why that impression?

  Stern began smiling at that point. Or smiling occasionally. We're on unsure ground here.

  Go on.

  The Armenian's reaction to Stern's relief or self-confidence or whatever it was, suggested puzzlement, not anger. He didn't seem to understand whatever it was Stern was feeling, or else he understood it but was reluctant to accept it. Something along those lines. It was at that point that the discussion became heated and the disagreement developed. Stern seemed to be trying to explain himself, or justify himself or whatever, and the Armenian was refusing to go along with it.

  I see.

  Stern would speak quietly, forcefully, for a minute or two while the Armenian listened, trying to understand what Stern was saying. Then the Armenian would shake his head no and gesture and argue again. Both men seemed tired, weary is a better word. Perhaps the disagreement was an old one, something they'd been through before. It went on like that until midnight and the explosion. Physically, Stern seemed exhausted, but also exhilarated. Again, that's only an impression of an impression. And that's all we have prior to the hand grenade.

  The Colonel nodded. Let's stay with that for a moment, he said.

  He rose and began pacing awkwardly back and forth, as if he wasn't quite used to walking on his false leg. There were no windows in the room. He filled his pipe and absentmindedly left it on a table.

  Stern seemed exhausted but happy or relieved, said the Colonel. What about the Armenian? He'd be a good ten years younger than Stern, maybe more. Exhausted too, physically?

  Impossible to say. Apparently he couldn't be read so easily.

  Why not?

  The way he moved or held himself. Tended to give less of himself away. More contained perhaps?

  Unlikely. But experienced, I'd say, definitely. No one ever gave less of himself away than Stern, although one never had that impression of course. Quite the opposite. Naturally your man wouldn't have known that. Whom did you send?

  Jameson.

  Excellent taste, observed the Colonel. I'd tend to trust his impression of impressions, so yes, we do have a few things here.

  The Colonel looked around for his pipe. The Major had his own questions to ask but the time for that would come later. He waited.

  Let's go on to the hand grenade, said the Colonel. How did it start?

  There were shouts outside in English and the sounds of scuffling getting louder, a brawl working its way down the alley. The owner was nervous and so were some of the others in the bar. The Armenian, whose back was to the curtain, turned around to look several times but Stern went on talking, appearing to take no notice. Of course he could see the curtain without moving his head, so he might have been taking an interest without showing it. In any case, Stern went on talking and the shouting grew louder.

  Then the curtain flew back and something came lobbing into the room. The owner saw it all right but he didn't know what it was. Nobody knew what it was except Stern.

  The Colonel frowned, looking down at the floor, a sad expression.

  Yes, he said softly. I can imagine.

  Stern hit the Armenian in the chest and sent him flying, continued the Major. The owner was standing near them at that moment, behind the counter, and he saw the Armenian's face when Stern hit him. The Armenian was astonished. Obviously he had no idea what was going on. At that point the owner went down, threw himself on the floor behind the counter. It was an instinctive reaction to Stern hitting the Armenian, a dive for cover. Not away from the grenade, which he didn't recognize, but away from Stern.

  The roar went off and that's all we have from the owner until the glass stopped showering down.

  Mirror behind the counter?

  Yes.

  The Colonel found his pipe. He went over and sat down on the sofa, using his hands to move his false leg into a straight position.

  Stern?

  The grenade must have been coming directly at him. He had time to hit the Armenian and knock him clear, and that was that. Full in the chest probably. Nothing much left above the waist.

  The Colonel struck a match. Ever been close to that? he asked. Had it happen right next to you?

  No.

  It's the worst sound in the world. Does something to your brain. For an instant you're no longer human.

  It's another existence, primeval, black. You see something inside yourself. Go on.

  There was the roar and the shattering glass and smoke and confusion, said the Major. When the owner showed his face, men were screaming and pushing out the door. Bits and pieces everywhere, and blood.

  The Armenian was still sprawled in the corner where Stern's blow had sent him. Besides the two Arabs who were unconscious from opium on the far side, the Armenian was the only other man left in the room.

  He lay there on the floor in the smoke, staring up at the spot where lie and Stern had been sitting. Slowly he got to his feet, dre
amlike, and just stood there staring. The owner was dazed and he did the same thing, just stood there staring. But the owner was watching the Armenian.

  Yes, said the Colonel, the fascination is incredibly intense. You don't know whether you're alive or dead and you're not in your own body at all. In fact you have no body. It's strange . . . a kind of sudden sense of pure consciousness. Your mind looks around and the first thing with any sign of life utterly captivates you. At that moment the merest flicker of an eye contains all the mystery of the universe. Go on.

  The Armenian still didn't move, he just stood there staring. After a bit the owner came to his senses and began screaming himself. People shouted and stuck their heads in, and there was nothing really after that until the policeman arrived.

  What kind of man?

  Average, unfortunately. The confusion and damage got to him but not much else, except for one curiosity.

  When he first came in, something about the Armenian struck him as peculiar. But only vaguely, he can't recall it exactly. It happened when he first glanced around the place and he might have only imagined it, or it could have been a trick of peripheral vision. Anyway, it was a sensation of something unusual, in the sense of inappropriate or out of place. At least that's my interpretation of it. The policeman isn't able to describe it with any degree of accuracy, apparently it only flashed through his mind. But what it amounts to is, he had the sensation the Armenian was smiling. Staring and smiling. And that's all we have on the incident itself.

  The Colonel nodded.

  But there's one other very curious fact, added the Major. The owner says the Armenian came to the bar yesterday morning, very early. There was nobody else there and he'd just started his cleanup when all of a sudden the Armenian came rushing in with a wild man.

  A what?

  That's how the owner describes him. A ghostlike figure in rags, an Arab, thin and small and caked with dust and dirt, hair matted and eyes bulging out of his head. According to the owner, he looked like a desert hermit who'd been off in a cave somewhere for years. He seemed deranged. He was clawing at the air and making strange sounds as if he couldn't breathe. The Armenian came rushing in with this wild man and ordered coffee and the two of them collapsed in a corner. Then the wild man began to sob and a moment later they were rushing out again, the Armenian in the lead, the wild man running after him.

  Nothing more specific on this other man?

  The owner kept mentioning his eyes, frantic bulging eyes. Frightening, wild. He was convinced the man was insane. That was the only time the owner has ever seen this other man, and it was the only other time he has ever seen the Armenian.

  And lastly there's this, said the Major, placing a small length of worn curved metal in the Colonel's hand.

  The bar owner found it on the floor after the policeman left. It was lying at the foot of the counter where Stern and the Armenian had been sitting. So far as I can see it's exactly what it appears to be, an old Morse-code key. From the last century, probably.

  The Colonel turned the small piece of worn metal between his fingers. The key was highly polished from innumerable handlings.

  Stern used to carry that, murmured the Colonel. It was a kind of good-luck charm. He was never without it.

  The Colonel frowned. He took a bottle of whiskey from a cupboard and poured into two glasses. The Major sipped his whiskey, waiting. The room was in the heart of the building and few sounds reached it.

  The Colonel worked on his pipe in silence. Finally he picked up the other glass.

  Are you and Maud friendly these days?

  Yes. Should I speak to her?

  The Colonel shook his head.

  No. You see, I think we've stumbled upon an operation that belongs to somebody else, and the reason we found out about it is because something went wrong in that bar. I'm sure the Armenian's name was never supposed to turn up in a police report. No, certainly not. As for Maud, it's not possible that she has anything to do with the operation, because if she did, I would have to have been told.

  But she knew Stern had been killed, said the Major, and someone had to tell her. A Purple Seven alert comes directly to us. So we were the first to know of Stern's death, and we're still the only ones who do know. Unless, of course, you've already passed the information along.

  I haven't, said the Colonel. I will tonight. But as for us being the first to know of Stern's death, that's not quite true, is it?

  The first to know inside, I meant. The Armenian knew, of course.

  Yes, our Purple Seven knew. Our man with the Armenian name who's conveniently in transit while dealing, in Coptic artifacts. Our small shabby European who wears a secondhand suit and likes to have his morning coffee in a Cairo slum with some wild Arab hermit from the desert, and who has all the signs of being an experienced professional. He knew.

  And told Maud?

  That's right, said the Colonel. But what I meant before is that she can't have anything to do with the operation itself, as such. It's obvious she must have a good deal to do with some of the people involved in it. From a personal point of view.

  Wasn't her connection with Stern known from the beginning?

  Oh yes. Stern was the one who recommended her to us, and he was right on target as usual. She's been a fine addition. But tell me, what do you know about Stern?

  Only what comes through from the files, replied the Major. That he seemed to be able to find out almost anything.

  Ever wonder why that was so?

  Excellent contacts, I assume.

  Yes, the best. The French and the Germans and the Italians, Turks and Greeks and Arabs and Jews—he had them all. And why was that, do you suppose?

  Because he must have made it his business to have them, said the Major. Because that was what he did.

  His life.

  Yes, what he did. But I'm beginning to wonder about that . . . what Stern really did. Stern gave information as well as took it, but the real reason people trusted him was because they always felt, deep down, that he was working just for them. In the end, just for them. We believed that, didn't we?

  In answer, the Major frowned. In the short time he had worked for the Colonel, there had been some extremely sensitive operations set in motion almost entirely on the basis of information supplied by Stern.

  And there must have been many other such operations in the past, so he found it difficult to follow what the Colonel now seemed to be suggesting about Stern.

  That's not to say he wasn't working for us, continued the Colonel. It's just that ultimately . . .

  The Colonel broke off, trying to order his thoughts. For some reason he had suddenly recalled an obscure incident from before the war, Stern's escape from a Damascus prison in the summer of 1939.

  The episode had never made any sense to the Colonel, because Stern had been due for release from the prison within twenty-four hours.

  Yet Stern had risked his life to escape. Why?

  Later he had talked about it with Stern and Stern had turned the whole affair into a joke, moving around in his chair in his awkward way and belittling any courage it might have shown on his part, claiming simply that he had felt more useless than usual and had decided on a sudden whim to try to prove his superiority over his Syrian guards. Stern had even showed the Colonel the scars left by the thumbnail he had ripped away during the escape, clawing his way through some masonry, deep ugly scars slashing up the back of his thumb. The Colonel remembered how painful they had looked at the time, but Stern had dismissed them with a shrug.

  It's nothing, Stern had said, laughing. Really painful wounds never bother with the body, do they? They cut deeper and the scars they leave are elsewhere.

  And then they had gone on to talk of other things. But now the incident in Damascus troubled the Colonel and he began hunting through Stern's file. He seemed to recall that Stern had said he had gone to Haifa after the prison escape, and had hidden in Haifa until the war had broken out a few weeks later, turning everyone's
attention elsewhere.

  The Colonel stopped at a page in the file. He had found the corroborating evidence taken from the reports of other contacts that Stern had been in Haifa in August 1939. But when the Colonel looked at the evidence now, he realized that all the scattered bits and pieces of information had been provided by contacts who were known or suspected Zionist activists, involved with illegal immigration into Palestine.

  The Colonel turned more pages in the file. Stern's unlikely adventure had also brought Poland to mind.

  Why the association? Simply because the German invasion of Poland had followed so soon after Stern's escape?

  No. There was a connection and he found it. A short paragraph from an informer's report to the Turkish police in Istanbul. To the effect that the informer had seen Stern in Istanbul shortly after his escape from Damascus. That Stern had been carrying a forged Polish passport and had been frantically arranging a secret trip to Poland. To the Pyry forest near Warsaw, on a mysterious mission of great importance.

  Or so the informer had speculated, offering a personal opinion without a trace of evidence to back up his claim.

  Under normal circumstances the Colonel would have smiled at these cobwebs of conjecture. The Turkish police were wildly inaccurate about everything, and Istanbul was notorious for its legions of aspiring informers who would gladly claim anything in exchange for a minor official favor. And in this case not even the informer's identity had been included in the report. Even the fact that the informer had subsequently been found dead floating in the Bosporus meant nothing, given the situation in Istanbul in that last summer before the war.

  Pure invention from some desperate refugee. Ridiculous rumors whispered across a café table and set adrift in the clouded brain of a Turkish policeman lazily puffing hashish, dimly trying to focus his eyes on the crotch of a serving-boy across the way.

  And yet?

  The Colonel closed the file. He frowned.

  Perhaps he had made a serious mistake in accepting Stern's explanation of what he had been doing in those last few days before the war began. Perhaps Stern had actually made a secret trip to Poland without telling anyone about it.