The Old Trade of Killing

by John Harris

  I passed a patch of acacia-like trees and a deep ditch, then I noticed an eruption on the face of the desert ahead of me and found myself wondering what it was, before I realised it was palm trees and small empty-eyed white houses. The glittering light lay everywhere and I couldn’t believe I was looking on civilisation again after so long. Then, just over to my right, I saw what looked like a stone bridge, and I remembered there’d been a bridge at Breba, built over a dyke that had been run across the fields.

  I saw thin wobbling rods through the blur that I realised were telegraph poles, and then a blue lorry rushing past in the distance on a road beyond the bridge, moving with the speed and freedom of spirit of a wild bird, and it seemed wonderful that it was so much alive. Then I was stumbling along a corrugated dusty road which kept bringing me to my knees with shattering jolts that jarred on every nerve in my body, and struggling through shallow sand-drifts that had left bare the roots of trees. I saw a man on an ass that tottered along on its toes like a ballet dancer, and a woman kneading fuel cakes of dung with long thin hands, and a camel walking in circles round a length of carved wood that I knew belonged to a well.

  Two girls standing in the still-shimmering heat of the afternoon, old petrol tins on their heads, stared at me, and, though I knew they were carrying water, I felt I daren’t stop to drink. I plodded on until I came to houses where the wind had drifted the sand against the walls, and people came out to watch me as though they didn’t know what to do to help.

  I must have looked like a dusty scarecrow as I stumbled past them towards the open space ahead where there was a flat-roofed police post with a flag flying. All the way across the square, doors opened one after the other and people emerged to watch me, a few children following me at a discreet distance, as though I were a monster out of the desert.

  The sun caught the side of a minaret by a snow-white mosque and glinted like gold on a brass drinking pot in a girl’s arms. I saw trees and the feathery tops of palms, and even oranges, and then a man came out of a black square that was a door and, as he hurried towards me, I saw with relief that he was in uniform and, because of it, I felt I could trust him to take over from me and sank to my knees at last, pointing backwards the way I’d come.

  Dimly I heard shouts and saw a big sand-coloured vehicle with a high body appear from behind a building. It stopped alongside, throwing the blessed relief of a shadow across me, and the man in uniform climbed aboard, talking loudly to the driver. Two more men came up alongside me, and I seemed to be giving them instructions and directions.

  ‘South,’ I kept saying, struggling against the dryness of my mouth to get the words out at all. ‘Due south. First one of them. Then two together.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ The man in uniform was bending over me. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. Due south. We never went off course at all. North all the way. For Christ’s sake–!’

  I tried to struggle up, with some idea in my mind of going with them, but the man in uniform smiled and patted my shoulder, then the lorry roared off, and as I felt the dust on my face, choking me, the village of Breba seemed to whirl and grow red and I sank out of sight in a blissful sleep.

  Epilogue

  When I woke up I was in bed in what appeared to be a hospital but what I learned later was the back room of the police post. It was cool, with a fan in the ceiling, and overlooked a deserted courtyard full of geraniums and Ali Baba jars. Bougainvillaea grew in at the window under a striped blind that was faded with the sun, and it was glitteringly bright outside and the flies were making the room loud with their buzzing.

  They’d set up beds in there, and Morena was alongside me, smiling weakly, fresh bandages on his body, looking as though all the moisture had been dried out of him by the sun. There was another bed just beyond, but it was empty.

  A policeman came in later and told me I’d slept for forty-eight hours. He was a Libyan, with a dark skin and a mouthful of teeth like gravestones, and it was a joy just to see his smile. He told me in halting English that the others had been found. They were all well, he said, and gave me water that was cool and tasted like wine. I could see my reflection in a glass-fronted case that looked absurd against the bare white wall because it was the sort of thing my mother had used to hold her china, and was probably some sort of loot from the desert war where Italian generals had always carried around everything but the kitchen sink.

  I seemed to have lost stones in weight and was starting a lovely beard, but my eyes were hollow and the lines that had long been forming on my face seemed to have been etched deeper by the sun.

  After a meal of tough old mutton and cups of intolerably sweet mint tea the man in uniform whom I’d met when I’d first staggered into Breba appeared again. He seemed to be some sort of official and for an hour or more he badgered us with questions.

  ‘What happened?’ he kept asking with desperate earnestness, as though he sensed some tragedy. ‘What happened to your transport? Why were you off the road?’

  ‘Because it was safer,’ I said, shaking my head with weariness at the nagging questions. ‘If we hadn’t got off the road none of us would have reached here.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because of Ghad Ahmed.’

  ‘Ghad Ahmed?’ His brows came down. ‘Who is this Ghad Ahmed?’

  It took a little doing to remember all that had happened, but slowly, prompted by the police, we went through the whole story, right from the beginning, right from the moment we’d first reached the Depression and seen Crabourne’s party there in front of us and caught the first scent of something wrong. It took me all my time to give them instructions where to find Houston and Leach and Selinski and all the others we’d left behind on the way, and, as I spoke, the uniformed man’s face grew horrified.

  ‘There will have to be an enquiry,’ he kept saying. ‘There will need to be an investigation. This is serious.’

  ‘You’re damn right it was serious.’

  ‘But all this shooting! All these lives lost! This isn’t wartime!’

  ‘You’d never have noticed the difference,’ Morena commented dryly.

  The man in uniform straightened up. ‘I shall have to inform higher authority,’ he said. ‘I think this is too important for me to handle.’

  After that they left us alone for a while and I was able to sleep some more, and when I woke up again Nimmo appeared. He looked well while I knew I looked like hell, and I experienced a moment of childish disappointment at the knowledge. After all my worries I’d proved nothing except that he could recover faster than I could.

  He was in borrowed clothes and seemed a little embarrassed and shy with us, but there seemed no enmity as he asked how we were – as though, as his exhaustion had dropped away from him, so had his bitterness.

  ‘They’ve been in touch with the coast,’ he said. ‘The Embassy’s sending someone down to go into it. The old boy out there’s worried silly by what’s been going on.’

  After a while he went away and came back with Phil. She, too, was wearing borrowed clothes, but, apart from the dark rings under her eyes, she looked as though she’d never been out in the desert.

  She also seemed embarrassed and shy, and stood near Nimmo all the time. She told us that the American Ambassador had got permission for them to leave before any enquiry was held and had even advised them to go. They’d been offered a lift in a police car to the coast and they’d decided they might as well accept.

  She stood by the bed for a moment, staring at the glittering brightness outside. The afternoon sun seemed to have paralysed all activity, regulating life like an unwritten law as it always had, driving everyone indoors until it sank towards the horizon and the doors opened at last and the shops woke up and the veiled women appeared in the streets. For a long time she said nothing, standing awkwardly, devoid of friendship or dislike, but merely depressingly neutral, then she thanked us haltingly.

  ‘We owe a lot to you both,’ she said slowly. ‘The drawings are undam
aged. They’ve gotten them out. We shan’t have to do them again.’

  When they left, moving out together, her hand in Nimmo’s, they looked so heartbreakingly young I felt as old as God and probably just as weary.

  ‘The drawings are undamaged,’ I repeated slowly. ‘We shan’t have to do them again. That’s a bloody relief I must say.’

  After that, Migliorini and the newspapermen came down from the coast, and we were photographed together. Later we saw pictures of the drawings Crabourne had done and the headline said ‘TREASURE FROM THE DESERT’. Then an Englishman came to see us who, it seemed, was on the staff of the British Ambassador. He was a languid young man, not much older than Nimmo, with dark glasses and a lazy manner and a limp handshake like a warm wet fish.

  He was bored with the whole affair, and it was obviously a bloody nuisance to have to drive all the way from the coast to Breba on a hot day. He reminded me of some of the specialist half-colonels who used to come up from Cairo to give us pep-talks before operations and got medals for sitting at desks – smooth young men with good connections who were always too intelligent to risk their own necks and preferred to do the talking to dimmer people like me and Morena, while they stayed themselves where it was cool and there was plenty of pink gin.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be all right. They’ve picked up the last of the jeeps. They’ve found the men who stole it. They’ve got the whole story. Confirms what you said. No trouble now. This chap Ghad Ahmed’s known to the police at Qahait and Qalam as a bit of a troublemaker.’

  ‘A bit of a trouble-maker,’ Morena said. ‘Christ, they should have seen them in action!’

  ‘Yes, well’ – the young man shrugged – ‘you know how it is. Anyway, it’s all over now and we got the money all right. Hell of a long way to go, though. Pity you couldn’t have brought it with you.’

  Morena glared. ‘Pity we didn’t let that bastard Ghad Ahmed have it in the beginning,’ he said bitterly. ‘It might have saved us all a lot of trouble. I don’t suppose anybody gives a damn, anyway.’

  ‘’Fraid that’s true,’ the young man said easily. ‘HM Government won’t miss it when you consider what a penny duty on cigarettes brings in, in the course of a year.’

  We got a lift to the coast in a car belonging to a couple of oil men, both of them so young they seemed to be children, and the aircraft we caught at the coast was full of more of them coming out, so full of hope and youth and energy they made me feel ancient.

  We got a letter of thanks from the Ambassador and another from some vague department in London who said there’d eventually be a reward. But the department that had rustled up the money in 1942 had long since disappeared, they said, and the file had been passed around so much in the years between they’d almost forgotten about it, and it would take some time.

  I never saw Phil again, though later I saw a picture in the paper of her, dressed in virgin white, getting married to Nimmo. ‘EXPEDITION HERO MARRIES’, the paper said. ‘DESERT BROUGHT THEM TOGETHER’. Not half it didn’t. So bloody close you couldn’t have got a fig leaf between them.

  Nimmo wasn’t so different from his father, I thought. In fact, we’d all acted according to character in the end. Houston hadn’t got what it took, and probably never had had, and Leach, the prize scrounger, had gone on scrounging to the limit and couldn’t stop. Morena was still Morena and I was still me, in just the same way, only more so. Nimmo had come out expecting to get a share of the loot and because he hadn’t managed it he’d done just what his father would have done in the same circumstances and run off with somebody’s girl instead.

  As Morena said with a smile over the last beer at London Airport before we parted, me for Fleet Street again, him for his garage in Reading: ‘It was always the same poor bastards who copped it and always the same clever sods who got all the credit.’

  Which, when you come to think of it, was right all down the line.

  Nothing had changed. We’d been arrogant enough to think we might be as good as we’d been twenty years before. But we weren’t. We weren’t. Only in the desert had time stood still. Only the desert remained the same, hiding everything, shrouding the good and the bad alike with its advancing sand, covering Crabourne and Selinski as it had the Paymaster and Houston and Leach, and Ghad Ahmed with his fervent ambition.

  As we’d moved, the desert had closed behind us, the lonely wind obliterating the marks we’d made with our tyres, the sparse trampled grass taking fresh root, the shifting sand covering the ashes of the fires we’d built, so that anyone coming afterwards could never tell who’d gone before – so that there was nothing left except the limitless spaces and the timeless quality of the nights and mornings.

  Only the young men with their instruments and energy knew how to deal with it. For men like us, working by the old methods, using wheels instead of wings and navigating by the seat of our pants, for us there was no going back, after all.

  Synopses of John Harris Titles

  Published by House of Stratus

  Army of Shadows

  It is the winter of 1944. France is under the iron fist of the Nazis. But liberation is just around the corner and a crew from a Lancaster bomber is part of the fight for Freedom. As they fly towards their European target, a Messerschmitt blazes through the sky in a fiery attack and of the nine-man crew aboard the bomber, only two men survive to parachute into Occupied France. They join an ever-growing army of shadows (the men and women of the French Resistance), to play a lethal game of cat and mouse.

  China Seas

  In this action-packed adventure, Willie Sarth becomes a survivor. Forced to fight pirates on the East China Seas, wrestle for his life on the South China Seas and cross the Sea of Japan ravaged by typhus, Sarth is determined to come out alive. Dealing with human tragedy, war and revolution, Harris presents a novel which packs an awesome punch.

  The Claws of Mercy

  In Sierra Leone, a remote bush community crackles with racial tensions. Few white people live amongst the natives of Freetown and Authority seems distant. Everyday life in Freetown revolves around an opencast iron mine, and the man in charge dictates peace and prosperity for everyone. But, for the white population, his leadership is a matter of life or death where every decision is like being snatched by the claws of mercy.

  Corporal Cotton’s Little War

  Storming through Europe, the Nazis are sure to conquer Greece but for one man, Michael Anthony Cotton, a heroic marine who smuggles weapons of war and money to the Greek Resistance. Born Mihale Andoni Cotonou, Cotton gets mixed up in a lethal mission involving guns and high-speed chases. John Harris produces an unforgettable champion, persuasive and striking with a touch of mastery in this action-packed thriller set against the dazzle of the Aegean.

  The Cross of Lazzaro

  The Cross of Lazzaro is a gripping story filled with mystery and fraught with personal battles. This tense, unusual novel begins with the seemingly divine reappearance of a wooden cross once belonging to a sixth-century bishop. The vision emerges from the depths of an Italian lake, and a menacing local antagonism is subsequently stirred. But what can the cross mean?

  Flawed Banner

  John Harris’ spine-tingling adventure inhabits the shadowy world of cunning and espionage. As the Nazi hordes of Germany overrun France, devouring the free world with fascist fervour, a young intelligence officer, James Woodyatt, is shipped across the Channel to find a First World War hero…an old man who may have been a spy…who may be in possession of Nazi secrets.

  The Fox From His Lair

  A brilliant German agent lies in wait for the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France. While the Allies prepare a vast armed camp, no one is aware of the enemy within, and when a sudden, deadly E-boat attacks, the Fox strikes, stealing secret invasion plans in the ensuing panic. What follows is a deadly pursuit as the Fox tries to get the plans to Germany in time, hotly pursued by two officers with orders to stop him at all costs.

&nbs
p; A Funny Place to Hold a War

  Ginger Donnelly is on the trail of Nazi saboteurs in Sierra Leone. Whilst taking a midnight paddle with a willing woman in a canoe cajoled from a local fisherman, Donnelly sees an enormous seaplane thunder across the sky only to crash in a ball of brilliant flame. It seems like an accident…at least until a second plane explodes in a blistering shower along the same flight path.

  Getaway

  An Italian fisherman and his wife, Rosa, live in Sydney. Hard times are ahead. Their mortgaged boat may be lost and with it, their livelihood. But Rosa has a plan to reach the coast of America from the islands of the Pacific, sailing on a beleaguered little houseboat. The plan seems almost perfect, especially when Willie appears and has his own reasons for taking a long holiday to the land of opportunity.

  Harkaway’s Sixth Column

  An explosive action-packed war drama: four British soldiers are cut off behind enemy lines in British Somaliland and when they decide to utilise a secret arms dump in the Bur Yi hills and fight a rearguard action, an unlikely alliance is sought between two local warring tribes. What follows is an amazing mission led by the brilliant, elusive Harkaway, whose heart is stolen by a missionary when she becomes mixed up in the unorthodox band of warriors.

  A Kind of Courage

  At the heart of this story of courage and might, is Major Billy Pentecost, commander of a remote desert outpost near Hahdhdhah, deep among the bleak hills of Khalit. His orders are to prepare to move out along with a handful of British soldiers. Impatient tribesmen gather outside the fort, eager to reclaim the land of their blood and commanded by Abd el Aziz el Beidawi, a feared Arab warrior lord. A friendship forms between the two very different commanders but when Pentecost’s orders are reversed, a nightmarish tragedy ensues.