The Predator

by Denis Pitts

  None of them had expected the meeting of the four European leaders to start like this.

  “... obfuscation of the worst order,” finished the Prime Minister.

  The Chancellor of West Germany shuffled his feet anxiously and rearranged papers on his lap. The President of Italy adjusted his hearing aid and leaned forward with interest.

  The four men sat alone in the large drawing room of the house on the mountainside. The sun-drenched panorama of the island lay all around them through the huge picture window. None of them looked out.

  The President of France interrupted the Prime Minister.

  “Mr. Prime Minister,” he said. The calm in the Frenchman’s voice was forced, as was obvious to all of them. He spoke very quickly.

  “We have agreed to this meeting in order that we can have, the four of us, a frank exchange of views. Indeed, I have done you the courtesy of allowing this meeting to be held in English and not in French, which is the officially adopted language of the European Community. But I have not come here to listen to insults, especially delivered in that foreign tongue.”

  “A frank exchange, Mr. President?” The Prime Minister was warming to his attack. “Exactly. That’s what we agreed. And if we are talking in English, I’ll use a good old English expression and tell you that it is my opinion, and I’m damned sure the others agree, that you French are feathering your own bloody nests and you don’t give a tinker’s damn about the rest of us. Am I right? And don’t tell me that you don’t know what I’m talking about, because I happen to know that you spent a lot of your life studying idiomatic English while the rest of us were studying politics or working in coal mines.”

  “Gentlemen please.” The German Chancellor rose bulkily to his feet and made his way to the window. “No good will come of this abuse. The Common Market is in grave danger of collapsing, and we are here, meeting in secrecy, to attempt to do something positive to stop this rot. Now please let us be positive. No more language, please, Mr. Prime Minister.”

  The President of Italy peered over his glasses.

  “The Italian government is much concerned about unemployment and the insufficiency of those regional development funds which have been promised for so long,” he said in a squeaky voice. “And also I am concerned about the quota system imposed by the French government on so many Italian exports. It is in my view completely against the concept of the Common Market.”

  The President of France sat back in his armchair and looked along his slender aquiline nose at the Italian President.

  “You refer, of course, to wine and fruit, Signor President. Really, you cannot truly expect the people of my country to allow the bastardization of our great French wines by what, even you must agree, is an inferior product.”

  The Italian President was already beginning to struggle to his feet when the British Prime Minister slammed back into the argument, his harsh voice raised.

  “Oh my God, here he goes. Why do you French have to be quite so bloody arrogant on every possible occasion?” he said.

  The Chancellor interrupted from the window. “Gentlemen, I appeal to you once again. We have two days in which to discuss vital matters. I, for one, did not come here to talk about grocery bills. I am concerned with the more fundamental questions of power, monetary matters. You can be sure that the Common Market will collapse unless we can reach agreement.”

  “All right, then, let’s start with power,” said the Prime Minister, his three chins thrust out as far as they would go toward the Frenchman. “I’m saying that the French are conniving with the Arabs to cut oil prices to make the British North Sea Fields completely uneconomic, and he knows that I am right in what I say.”

  “Conniving?” said the Frenchman. “A lie and a gross insult.”

  “It’s bloody true, Mr. President, and you bloody well know it. Despite all the promises at the beginning, you are waging an economic war on a neighbor and a fellow member of the Common Market.”

  The Prime Minister jabbed a fat forefinger at the Frenchman.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Chancellor and Signor President, but I’m going to be frank ...”

  The exchanges among the four men became more vitriolic and acrimonious as the morning wore on.

  The Frenchman lost his Gallic composure and launched into a cruel tirade at the Briton. The aged Italian was shocked; and the German, after several attempts to pacify the others, gave up completely and sat looking gloomy and disgusted.

  All four knew that it had been hopeless from the very outset. The Common Market had not healed the nationalistic wounds imposed over the centuries and had created little more than a token unity among its members. It could have succeeded; but the brave concept of the 1950s was eclipsed now by an almost unbearable world recession, and the great countries of Europe were striving for individual survival rather than unity.

  At noon precisely, there was a loud knock on the door of the drawing room. The shouting stopped. A servant in a white jacket opened the door. He was a well-trained servant and took care not to appear to notice the expressions of fury on the faces of the leaders of the Continent, or the atmosphere in the room, which was taut and heavily charged.

  He smiled.

  “Gentlemen, Mr. Becker is expecting you on the terrace for lunch.”

  3

  It was still a common practice in the Egypt of 1947 for an unwanted baby to be left to die in the nearby desert or for it to be dropped into the Suez or Sweetwater canals. The female of the species was especially likely to be so served; the male was only slightly more favored. Such is the cruelty and stark reality of the Islamic faith. Port Said is a predominantly Moslem town; and life in the teeming Arabtown quarter is more raw than in most such places in the world.

  For the first five years of his life, Jean-Paul Becker was pampered as no other child in that town could have been. His many mothers were each ever-willing to pet him, to hold him and love him. And they fought often for the right to push his huge, ornate carriage along the Rue Mustapha.

  He responded with a display of infantile intelligence which amazed and delighted the harlots who fostered him.

  He learned to speak each of their languages, and he quickly mastered the workings of the abacus upon which the nightly takings of the brothel were counted and apportioned.

  He grew strong and healthy, and at an early age developed the capacity to use his bright, inquisitive blue eyes to charm and beguile.

  Jean-Paul Becker reached his sixth birthday — though he didn’t know it; affectionate as his mothers in the brothel were, they weren’t observers of birthdays. But as it happened, on the same day, the new President of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, signed a morality decree which made prostitution illegal. Brothels were closed by the thousand, among them, of course, the Maison Dina. The girls were arrested, some for deportation, most for a short stay in crowded jails before furtively re-entering their profession. The bewildered child was labeled and ticketed and dispatched in a truck with several other children to an undisclosed destination.

  The madam, more obese than ever now, promptly died, quite noisily, of a heart attack.

  The whole affair took place, with unnecessary melodrama, at dawn, and lasted less than an hour.

  By nine o’clock that evening, the establishment had reopened with twelve girls newly imported from Alexandria under the management of a hefty Nubian lady with one eye who was the mistress of the local head of the morality police. She renamed the place “Nite Club Paradiso” and introduced both a modern cash register and a juke box.

  They did not know, but the harlots and the little boy were taking part in a revolution. The new dictator of Egypt had assumed command of a country that was sickened and saddened by a cynical decay produced by centuries of occupation, reoccupation, colonial overlords and corrupt kings. It was a country greatly shamed by its defeat at the hands of an emergent Israel; and Nasser vowed that he would change the very nature of the Egyptian people, who were soured by the defeat and smoldered with the d
esire for revenge.

  But this was a country plagued not only by almost every known disease, spread mainly by the filthy waters of the Nile, but by illiteracy and by an international reputation for its mass poverty and its vice, which, according to this reputation, took almost every known form from public bestiality to dirty postcards.

  Nasser began with the young. One of his first acts was to create a Youth Brigade in which he foresaw the nucleus of an Egyptian army that would eventually crush Israel.

  In perhaps the biggest operation of its kind since Herod, he began the round-up of thousands of urchins from the streets and docksides and slums of Cairo, Port Said and Suez. He ordered for them a rigorous regimen of military training and enforced education.

  The boys brought in from the streets each bore a label which gave their name, last known address and occupation. Some were divers, boys who could stay under the murky waters of Port Said and Suez harbors for two or even three minutes, digging for tourists’ pennies in the mud below the cruise ships. Some were “gully-gully” boys, contortionists who could squeeze themselves into suitcases carried by their elder masters. Some were thieves. Mostly they were beggars — half-starved, puny and pathetic children who had survived only by their capacity to rip at coat tails and grovel for piasters.

  Jean-Paul Becker was taken to the Gamal Abdel Nasser Training Establishment Number Five, which was at a disused army encampment on the outskirts of Port Said.

  He was brought there in a truck with six other boys of varying ages. He wore a smart new suit of white cotton, which had been made for him by a tailor customer of the brothel. His shoulder-length blond hair was clean and curly.

  The other boys in the bouncing truck stared at him sullenly. He fought back tears for much of the journey. The policemen who accompanied them were completely indifferent.

  The little boy was frightened and bewildered. Only a few hours ago, he had known the security of twelve loving women. Now, on his sixth birthday, he was being plunged into the world of men and men’s ways.

  The label he wore said simply: “Becker, Jean-Paul. Found, Port Said. Occupation, Pimp.”

  He was grabbed by a huge camp barber in army uniform and sat heavily on a stool.

  “Who left you behind, sonny? An Inglise? American?”

  He felt the clippers slice along his scalp. Tears started to flow now.

  “Cry, little one. You’ll have a damned sight more to cry about when they’ve finished with you here.”

  He felt the scalding hot water on his head and smelled the foul carbolic soap as it was rubbed in. He heard the sound of the razor against his head.

  “Over there, that’s where they scrape the crabs off you.”

  Jean-Paul was lifted off the stool and thrust toward the bath house. He saw a mass of black hair on the floor. His own golden hair glistened in the center of the pile.

  He was bathed and a doctor thrust a metal device in his ear. The doctor was a kindly man with gentle, sympathetic brown eyes.

  “Don’t twitch, it won’t hurt. Have you swum in the canal?”

  Jean-Paul shook his head nervously.

  “There are nasty animals in the canal which get in little boys’ ears and eat out their brains. You haven’t got any.” The doctor pinched the boy’s skin gently.

  “The first one with any meat on him today,” he said to an orderly. He looked at the label which now hung around Jean-Paul’s neck.

  “Pimp, eh?” he said. “Must be a favored occupation. He’s clean. No malnutrition, no special diet, no bilharziasis, lungs clear. Physically perfect, in fact.” The orderly wrote quickly on a file.

  “Okay, sonny, run along over there and they’ll make you into a soldier.”

  He was given a uniform — black blouse and khaki trousers with a brilliant scarlet cravat around his neck. He was lifted into a pair of sandals and sent to wait outside.

  Dressed now, and segregated, he almost towered over the other youngsters and marched, his bald head held high, across the playground to hut number five. On their way they passed another group of boys, who were chanting as they marched, “Nasser, Nasser, Nasser, Gamal Abdel Nasser!” From an adjoining hut he heard another chant: “Kill-kill-kill, we have to learn to kill.”

  There were six in his group, and there were six vacant seats in is classroom. The prefect who had marched them beckoned them to their seats without interrupting the lecture in progress.

  The instructor was a fat young man in denim uniform. He wore sergeant’s stripes on his shoulder, and he was striding up and down between the desks, banging occasionally with a leather-covered officer’s baton. The children sat bolt upright, and any movement by them provoked a prod in the center of the spine with the baton.

  “To sum up this lesson,” said the sergeant. “If the sacred soil of this fatherland is to be stained, let it be stained with Israeli blood.

  “What did I say?” he bellowed.

  “Blood,” the boys chorused.

  “What did I say?”

  “Blood!”

  “What did I say?”

  “Blood, blood, blood!” they yelled.

  “Whose blood?”

  “Israeli blood.”

  “Who are our enemies?”

  “Israeli invaders.”

  “Who are our friends?”

  “The Arab world.”

  “Yes,” he said slowly. “The Arab world, which stretches from the ocean to the gulf, will unite and drive the Israeli thieves into the sea. And you will be at the forefront of the battle, you, the sons of Egypt.”

  The sergeant’s eyes were wild with fervor; his voice rasped hoarsely from an hour of haranguing. He had hardly noticed the new intake. When he did, he saw the eyes of Jean-Paul Becker, strikingly blue in their bald setting, standing out in a row of intent brown eyes.

  “You boy,” he pointed the baton at Jean-Paul. “Your name?”

  Jean-Paul sat silent, tonguetied. He had not seen men like this before. The men in the brothel had soft, friendly eyes. This man’s eyes glared and shone with a fierceness which terrified him.

  “Your name, little blue eyes?”

  The other boys giggled.

  “Silence, you heathen pigs, gutterscrapings, scavengers,” the man shouted.

  “You, the one with English eyes. Your name.”

  Jean-Paul felt his body shaking with fear. He mumbled his name. The sergeant-teacher leaned very close to him. “Your name?” he roared.

  “Jean-Paul Becker,” he said.

  “Another piece of imperialist filth,” said the teacher. “Very well, Jean-Paul Becker. Tell me, who is the leader of the glorious revolution?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then you will learn it,” the man said. “The name of the leader of the revolution is Gamal — Abdel — Nasser.” Jean-Paul looked at him blankly.

  “Say it, boy.”

  The boy mumbled again.

  “Right! Stand up and shout it!”

  Jean-Paul was totally confused now. The shock of being dragged from the comfort of his home and of seeing his mothers being led screaming away, of watching the madam lying, shuddering in agony on the brothel floor, of being hurled into a truck by a callous policeman, and now this, was too much.

  “Shout it, you whore’s son,” the sergeant yelled into his ear. “Shout it, shout it!”

  The boy’s face flooded with tears. He shook and retched. The other boys were laughing aloud now. He felt something begin to grow in the bottom of his chest and begin to well, slowly at first, past his pounding heart, and suddenly he roared it into the sergeant’s face.

  “Leave me alone!”

  That evening, as the crimson sun dropped violently behind the Sahara, five hundred boys stood in the parade ground to watch the Egyptian flag lowered.

  They also witnessed the sight of a little boy running around the perimeter of the ground, his face gray with exhaustion, his legs buckling under him, his voice piping out the endless chant: “Gamal — Abdel — Nasse
r.”

  But neither they, nor the instructors, saw the fiercely growing adultness in his blue eyes.

  ELBA, 1215

  The large round table on the terrace was protected from the sun by a gay striped awning. Covered with an orange tablecloth, it was laid, with Italian simplicity, with yellow linen napkins, plain cutlery and four large Venetian water glasses and a matching jug filled with icewater. The six chairs around the table had been hand-fashioned of wrought iron and had deep cushions and armrests that matched the tablecloth.

  Becker was at the far end of the terrace, giving instructions to a gardener, when the first of his guests emerged from the house. It was the German Chancellor, looking tired and deathly serious.

  Becker was wearing a cream-colored open-necked shirt, green slacks and open-toed sandals. His heavily tanned face and athletic build contrasted with the unhealthy pallor of the German.

  “A long session, Herr Chancellor?” said the host. He spoke in faultless German. He smiled with a warm sympathy. “Let me get you a drink.”

  The German loosened his collar.

  “For God’s sake, a big Scotch,” he said. “Yes, my dear Jean-Paul, it has been a long session — and so damned difficult. There has been, as you may have gathered, a considerable difference of opinion.”

  Becker remained smiling and said nothing. He raised his hand and there was a waiter by the Chancellor’s side in a matter of seconds.

  “A big Highland Mist for the Chancellor, please. In a tall glass.”

  The other leaders emerged in turn onto the terrace, and each of them was greeted solicitously by Becker.

  The Italian President sat heavily in a sunchair and drank Pellegrino water, and the Briton asked for a sweet sherry. The French President surprised them all by asking, most specifically, for a Gordon’s gin and Schweppes tonic with a slice of lemon and a lot of ice.