Jerusalem Commands: Between the Wars Vol. 3

by Michael Moorcock

  The emerald palms waved in a faint wind from the south.

  In the distant city, the muezzin began his long cry to the glory of God.

  I released her hand.

  ‘Thank you.’ She was almost pathetically sincere.

  I have never forgotten that moment.

  ‘I trust you,’ she said. ‘I have truly found my Lohengrin.’

  She hid in the cubicle when my driver returned. She would find her own way home. I was, she reassured me, not to be concerned for her.

  When I got back to my quarters I found every door wide open and the servants fled. The place had been stripped. Everything, including all my personal documents and every stick of furniture, was gone. No doubt the Pasha now knew what had happened to his car.

  I rushed outside but the driver had already left. I had little choice but to begin the walk back into Marrakech. In his present mood the Pasha would not be reasoned with. My only hope was to reach the mellah and lie low until I could get out to the airfield the next morning. I saw the hand of Brodmann in everything. Surely he must be directing this particular scenario? I began to understand the nature of the Pasha’s games with Miss von Bek and why she was so anxious to escape.

  While I hurried along the darkening road towards the city gate, the avenues of palm trees became sinister enemies, threatening a dozen different dangers, and sometimes I broke into a run. When I stopped to catch my breath, I realised my whole body was shaking. Another Westerner, without experience of a tyrant’s omnipotence, might not have begun to know such nervousness until much later. But my experience was already extensive. I could easily imagine what El Glaoui intended for me. I knew what torture could make me do. I remembered how I had longed for death and yet had done anything to remain alive. I was determined not to suffer such humiliation again.

  There was still also the possibility that the Pasha was enjoying some complicated practical joke at my expense, teaching me a lesson, perhaps, so that I would be a more loyal servant in future. It was all I could pray for. A miracle might save me, but nothing else. As I slipped through the narrow gate into the medina and began to pad through the dark serpentine streets leading to the mellah I wondered if I were not foolish in seeking out the Jew. Perhaps he was already dead? But I had no other hope. I scuttled like a doomed doodle-bug on a burning log, with every chance of escape an illusion. I could barely think for the tightness in my chest, the churning of my bowels and stomach, the thumping of my unhappy heart. I shall always regret not going straight to the Pasha’s palace and throwing myself on his mercy. I had proof of his trust in me. I could have saved myself the agony of being admitted to the Jew’s house, of being led through corridors and cloisters, across little cobbled streets, through doorways, down steps and into a dank, stinking warren of cubicles, each with a door from behind which came a dreadful, significant silence and I knew as the door closed behind me and the head of Monsieur Josef rose upon the Pasha’s jocular scimitar to confront me face to face that I had allowed myself to run like a panicked dog into El Glaoui’s own dungeons.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Beters.’

  The little man reached past me with the head still on the end of his sword and used it to push open a door. Mr Mix looked out at me and shrugged. ‘He was on to us from the start, I guess. Just characters in his damned melodrama. He’s better at this than we are.’ He used English which was mere babble to the Pasha. Our captor was no more irritated by it than by the chatter of monkeys. He was incapable of the imaginative notion that we could actually be communicating!

  The Pasha was chuckling as our jackets were ripped from our bodies. He looked at us with a kind of familiar affection so reminiscent of a lusting lover’s that I began to tremble and knew I must soon lose control of my bowels. I began to plead with him in the name of God to listen to me, to believe that I was his true and loyal servant, that others had encouraged me to betray him. Though a prince in my own country, I had served him loyally and celebrated his glory. My halting Arabic was responded to in haughty childish French. I had dishonoured him in every possible loathsome way. I had lied to him with infinite treachery. Worse - I had posed as a Moslem, when I was in fact a dirty little Jew from Odessa. I found this last the most wounding insult of all. He had made something up from Brodmann’s innuendo. I told him that these things were lies, I was already familiar with them. I knew who had told them to him and why. I mustered my dignity. I said that Brodmann had always been my enemy. He was a known fraud. A Bolshevik agent.

  El Glaoui frowned and clapped his hands to silence me. He laughed at me. ‘The famous Russian film star becomes another whining dog of a Jew. Do you subbose I allow Mademoiselle Rosie to have any secrets from me? You will be tortured for a few weeks and then you will be blaced in the basket of your Italian master’s balloon, which will be set on fire just as you are released into the atmosphere. You will be heroes in the Western Bress. Thus all, with God’s help, shall be broberly concluded.’ He spoke with the satisfaction of a theatrical producer putting the finishing touches to his plot. He almost waited for our applause. He told me to join Mr Mix in the cell. ‘I have to go to Tafouelt to deal with some rebels. They are duty. But I will have you taught a few tricks while I am away.’ He clapped again, this time for slaves who appeared carrying first Mr Mix’s heavy Pathé camera and then the bag I had stowed under the seat of my Bee. These were placed at our feet. Now El Glaoui purred. ‘Mademoiselle Rosie left these for you.’ He did not bother to watch as we were chained to the wall, but as an afterthought he had the Jew’s head placed on top of my bag where it stared at me, rather resignedly, until at last it was dragged away by the rats.

  * * * *

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I HAVE BEEN WITNESS, this century, to the murder of Christian decency. It was surprising how quickly rats began to bother Mrs Cornelius after the Convent of the Poor Clares was pulled down across from her flat. They were attracted first to the rubble and then they sniffed the south side of the street and found her. She had never minded a few, she said, but this was a bloody plague. We both mourned the passing of the Convent. It had been a bastion of Christian wholesomeness in surroundings of pagan squalor. Its brick was mellowed by more rural days, when the meadow ran to the brook not always downwind of the tanneries. Some Georgian manor had doubtless been levelled to provide the Convent with land and no doubt that, for its contemporaries, was the beginning of the end. It is always the beginning of the end, always the best and the worst. No matter how thoroughly attacked, the city shall always triumph. It is folly, as the Nazis did, to try to resist this fundamental condition.

  What are you? he said. Some Peradur? Some Gascon rapiero? Nothing so romantic, I told him. You give me too much credit. What else could I say? It was the same with the Jew in Arcadia. I have always admitted I was grateful. But I was no male Venus, born of the sea, as he described. In a poet these fancies are always discounted, so one does not complain. Gascon rapiero? Nothing so courageous, I said. Nothing so blind. I saw Moorcock, the one they all despise and pretend to be friendly with. He is their favourite journalist and swallows their lies. He was picking about in the ruins of the Convent after the demolition people had broken down the walls and most of the buildings, their frozen bulldozers rearing over fruit trees and vegetable gardens, squatting on lawns where the nuns used to play cricket and have picnics in the summer. It was like the War. The Convent, that sturdy Victorian acknowledgement to the needs of the spirit, was one of the first buildings to rise here, in 1860, and one of the first to fall. They are going to be council flats, she says. We need more council flats, do we, and less solace for the soul? And what else to serve them? Betting shops? Burger bars? Off-licences? I have yet to see a bookshop or a flower shop flourish in the shadow of this authoritarian concrete. For years the wall bore the slogan ‘Vietgrove’ and something about Eichmann. We set our watches by that wall, says the Cornelius boy, doubtless enjoying some self-induced high on Ajax and powdered milk. I warned him. It is why he is getting such a nasal
accent. People will take him for an American. And yet the fall of the Convent symbolised the fall of Notting Hill. Now there are Liberal MPs and magistrates and worse living in the houses on the other side of Ladbroke Grove. I saw Moorcock putting something in his pocket. It was obvious he was looking for money.

  Pretending to take photographs of miscellaneous piles of burning timber and smouldering plaster, of the few trees the machines had left standing, he would stoop and rub the mud from some object, some cracked cup or empty bottle. Most of the time he threw his discoveries away, but clearly he was occasionally lucky. I recalled some old talk of a treasure, of tunnels and secret escapes, but this was a familiar chimera. I for one had learned no longer to pursue them. Noting that Moorcock went back to the ruins every evening after the demolishers had knocked off, I was one day enough ahead of him to leave four old pennies and a threepenny bit on a slab of masonry near the altar below the dramatic crucifixion whose vivid greens, reds and yellows still blazed their message to the world. I left through the wire fence they had put up along Latimer Road and returned via Kensington Park Road to Blenheim Crescent in time to see him digging around in the rubble, taking miscellaneous pictures as usual, pausing to stare almost bewilderedly about him as if he had for a moment lost his bearings. At other moments he seemed physically to be tasting the tragedy of this 20th-century destruction, this proof that Faith had again given way to Speculation. When he had at last left I hurried through the gloomy evening, over the mud and ruins to the altar. The money was gone, of course. I told Mrs Cornelius. She laughed and said he was probably looking for souvenirs. It keeps him happy, she said. ‘Happy?’ I said. ‘Theft is supposed to keep you happy?’

  They are all the same, these people.

  I can remember no sense of discomfort from my incarceration in El Glaoui’s prison. My mind was too keenly focused, I think, on avoiding the anxieties of what was to come. I already understood that this night was the luxury I would look upon with nostalgia and I tried to make the most of it, but it is difficult to exercise one’s sensibilities in such circumstances, as the air grows staler and the silence of the prison begins to echo with little cries and groans, with whispers and prayers, which means that the jailer is momentarily absent. Some of the wetter, more mutilated sounds, said Mr Mix, were beginning to get on his nerves. He began to tell me a wild tale of how, when he had his cinema seized, the US Consul had offered him work as an agent, getting them, as he said, ‘the goods on the Pasha’. In turn they loaned him a good-quality camera. But they could give him no official help. ‘I guess I was right. The US Consul won’t welcome me back in Casablanca. I hate to imagine what the Pasha’s going to do to us.’

  I knew all too well what was in store for us. I was tempted to share vicariously in the Pasha’s forthcoming pleasure and tell Mr Mix what parts of his body would be altered first, but in the end my ordinary humanity stilled my tongue. There was no point in panicking the poor negro. It would only make him sweat, and the air was bad enough already. So I let him continue with his elaborate tale of spies and international intrigue. He described a vast complex of rivalries, in which Italy played an increasingly dominant part. This, said Mr Mix, was not wholly to the United States’ taste. His job was to get a detailed plan of the Pasha’s strengths as well as his financial needs and sexual predilections. It was a story I could believe of some Hungarian Secret Service plot, but not of the United States Government. Once, my irritation got the better of me and I told him the whole thing sounded as if he had been reading too many dime novels. In turn this brought me to recalling my idyll with Miss von Bek over the Sahara and I began to pass my time by resurrecting those moments until I had remembered virtually the entire action and some of the dialogue of The Tyneside Leopard Men up to those final scenes where Blake, that exemplary Englishman, clambers from the wreckage of the glider and addresses the remains of the evil Cult as they advance towards him. ‘I warn you, my dear baroness, gentlemen, I have a Smith and Wesson in my hand and I know how to use it.’ If Sexton Blake were at this moment in Morocco it would not be long before I were free. But it seemed I must reconcile myself to an eternity of torment. My night was spent in humble prayer.

  In the morning Hadj Idder personally brought us fruit and coffee. He seemed to feel a certain remote concern for us. He had our upper bodies released but our legs remained manacled. As we ate he read to us from the French newspaper. Mr Noel Coward and his people were staying at the Transatlantique and that evening were to be El Glaoui’s guests before the Pasha was called away on military business in the south. ‘What a pity you will miss him. Mustafa will be working on your feet about then. He is a very witty man in French and even more in English, they say.’ He lost interest in the paper and stood idly looking about the cell as we ate, turning what was left of the Jew’s skull with his slippered foot. “They did this themselves,’ he offered. ‘They sent the head here. They did not wish the Pasha to relax his protection of the mellah.’ He looked at us with sudden enquiry as if it were important to him to be believed. His beloved master’s reputation was as ever his chief concern.

  He asked us if we had eaten and drunk enough. We said that we had. ‘This is a matter of state security,’ he explained. ‘It is unfortunate. There are forces amongst the French that are inimical to my master’s desires. If there was some way of releasing you, believe me, I would do so. But you have nothing with which to bargain.’ I had the impression that he had been put up to this by the Pasha, perhaps to sweeten our torment. I quelled the hope that the visit had a different purpose. ‘Normally Europeans are not treated in this way, especially celebrities. But there is a certain amount of overcrowding at the moment due to the various rebellions and the Pasha’s family problems.’ He had grown a little apologetic. He was hesitating, as if he had some secret he wished to share. I looked up at him enquiringly.

  ‘Si Peters,’ he said, ‘I have as you know admired several of your cinema adventures and especially enjoyed your cowboy roles. I would feel privileged if I could have your autograph before the Pasha returns from Tafouelt. Perhaps on a small poster I was lucky enough to come by?’

  He did not appear upset by Mr Mix’s poorly suppressed sniggering and spluttered congratulations that with such fans I might never need enemies.

  I told Hadj Idder I would be honoured to oblige and perhaps he in return would see that a note was sent to a friend of mine currently staying in Tangier. His name was Mr Sexton Blake.

  This impressed him as I had hoped. He frowned and said that he believed something could be arranged to suit everyone’s honour.

  He came back a few minutes later with the show-card for The Buckaroo’s Code and presented it to me, together with a large silver fountain pen, so that I might sign upon my own veiled face and recollect, too poignantly, my happy days in Hollywood with Esmé and Mrs Cornelius. How I wished now that I had been content and weathered Hever’s blackmail until another studio recognised my talents, but it was too late. I had let that terror the shtetl had put into my womb determine my actions. Now I must make my intellect rule or I would almost certainly die, and my dusky comrade with me. I wrote across my face in Arabic Hadj Idder - May God help us all - Your brother ‘Ace’ - and then in English, Happy Trails, Pardner - Yore pal, The Masked Buckaroo! The portly African seemed genuinely touched by the sentiments and kissed me several times on both cheeks, murmuring that God must surely help the faithful, and it was then I began to understand how he would dearly love to see us go free. But if we escaped, surely even Hadj Idder would have to forfeit his life? I told myself hopelessly that I was, as the Swiss say, clutching at feathers.

  Hadj Idder did not carry away his trophy, but stood in deep thought before at last saying what was on his mind. ‘I think my master might bury his pride in this case,’ he said, ‘if you were, for instance, to undertake some small service for him.’ I remained suspicious. Cat-and-mouse was T’hami’s favourite game.

  ‘A service?’

  ‘Something to ease his present em
barrassment with the French. I understand that you are friendly with Lieutenant Fromental, in spite of his opposition to the air fleet?’

  I admitted I had enjoyed the young man’s company from time to time.

  ‘Yet you were aware he was a spy?’ Hadj Idder looked directly at me suddenly. I was, even in my present position, sceptical of this statement, but I said nothing.

  ‘If you were to confide in the Pasha,’ Hadj Idder continued, ‘perhaps a little of what this creature Fromental said to you about spying for the French. How he deliberately sabotaged our work and so on. If he were seen by the Quai d’Orsay as, let us say, failing in his duties or exceeding his power, it would be useful to our master. Or possibly he made some sexual advance? You must be aware of something you could put in a letter - ‘

  ‘That’s one of the lousiest things I’ve ever heard.’ Mr Mix was outraged. ‘We get free if we rat on a friend, is that it?’

  ‘Fromental will not be harmed - just despatched to another, less sensitive, post. It is all the Pasha wants.’