The Brothers Craft

by Peter Corris

  'A great trek, Dick,' he said. 'I'll require you to write a report for one of those stuffy journals you subscribe to.'

  'And what of your report, Basil?'

  He rubbed his forefinger beside his beaky nose. 'Verbal, only. But the funds will flow. You may be sure of that. And don't worry. The mares will receive the best of care.'

  His words stung me into a reply. 'Like the women in England, Basil?'

  'Have a care, Dick. Some things do not concern you. This is an altogether better conceived experiment. And it is only the beginning.'

  In Marrakech Basil lodged separately from me in order, he said, to conduct the sordid side of the business without involving or exposing me. He meant arranging to be paid for his services. This took some time. I saw less of the women but they appeared to be well cared for and Basil assured me that their pregnancies were progressing 'splendidly'. He was very happy during this period in Marrakech, my brother, and I, accordingly, was happy too in my fashion. We saw the sights of the city, took many photographs and both rapidly improved our Arabic. Basil's French was perfect and mine very nearly so. Sometimes we amused ourselves by posing as Frenchmen, sometimes as Germans. Basil was excellent company.

  One of my tasks was to give interviews to several journalists. 'Make it boring' was Basil's instruction and I did my best. Very brief reports appeared in the press and interest in the expedition quickly faded. I began to draft my scholarly articles and to organise the extensive collection of photographs. Eventually Basil announced that affairs had been satisfactorily arranged and that we could return to England.

  'What about the women?' I said. 'You can't take three pregnant concubines to England.'

  'They are safe,' was all he would say.

  Back in England Basil lodged a useful amount of money in my bank account and disappeared. My travels had unfitted me for the quiet life of schoolteaching and I followed a variety of outdoor occupations over the next few years—gamekeeper, gardener, fisherman. My articles appeared in the journals. I continued to work, in a desultory fashion, on my study of the Devon coast. I visited my mother dutifully, if irregularly. She was unchanged—perfectly sane and capable of all the tasks of a normal life but mentally and emotionally not present for others, even her son. I never spoke to her of Basil's doings. I wondered about the women and children as I continued my half-life, waiting, as I well knew, for Basil's return.

  In July 1940, like thousands of others, I was on the brink of volunteering for the army. The war had come as Basil had foreseen, but after the fall of France his prediction as to its outcome seemed astray. My distaste for Nazism had intensified and I was prepared to do my bit. As a graduate and 'gentleman' I suppose I could have aimed at a commission, but I had no highly placed friends and no knowledge of how to go about pulling the strings. In truth, I found my civilian existence to be without savour or meaning and I imagined that life as an infantryman would be interesting and, if short, what loss?'

  Briefly, I weighed up the various services but I was a landsman, a mountains and desert crosser. It was the army for me. I registered and reported for a medical examination. As I shuffled forward in the queue, shirtless, with braces hanging around my hips, a tall figure in the uniform of a major appeared at the elbow of the ill-tempered sergeant who was processing the would-be recruits.

  'You,' he barked, 'third in line there. Step out!'

  It was Basil, of course, scarcely recognisable in the tailored uniform with his hair short and a bristling but disciplined moustache. I stepped out of the queue and approached him.

  'Name?' he growled.

  'Craft.'

  'Follow me.'

  He turned smartly and tramped off down a corridor. I shambled after him and into a room. Basil kicked the door shut, gave a whoop of laughter and clasped me in a mighty hug that drove the breath from me. He released me and stepped back. 'You bloody fool, Dick. What d'you think you're doing? D'you want to get yourself killed?'

  'Not exactly, Basil,' I said. 'It's good to see you. And a major no less.'

  'Bloody cheek,' Basil said, 'should be a colonel at the very least, but the army's full of idiots which is why you're not joining.'

  'Yes I am. I can't stand the thought of the Nazis in Paris.'

  'Don't be silly. They'll look after it a damn sight better than the bloody French. I don't mean that you can't do your bit. But we've got other priorities, old son.'

  'We?'

  Basil looked quickly around the bare room. He dropped his voice. 'You, me and the old firm. Still in business, though the world's gone crazy. What's the greatest desert in Asia, Dick?'

  'The Gobi, of course.'

  'Right.'

  'You're mounting a military operation in the Gobi Desert?'

  'Not exactly, but it might be just as well to think of it like that. We've got very high-level support—mountains and deserts, Dick, mountains and deserts.'

  I felt life flow back into me. All the instincts and desires I had repressed and deflected flowered again. I had no power to resist Basil and no wish to do so. He examined me critically. 'I must say you're looking a bit peaky, Dick. Perhaps a spot of military training'd do you good.'

  I must have looked alarmed for he laughed and clouted me on the shoulder. 'Joking, old son, joking. I know what you need. Get your clothes on. You're coming with Major Craft and you can spit in the eye of that sergeant if you want to.'

  The recruiting office was in Aldershot. Basil had a truck and a driver and we went first to my lodgings in Reading, where I collected my few belongings, and then to London. Basil had a large flat in Little Venice equipped with everything the man about town would need. I took a bath, used his toiletries and put on one of his suits (we were much of a size). Then we went to a restaurant in Soho where Basil wined and dined me like, as he said, an American general. This was one of his functions—to entertain Americans and others from whom beleagured Britain was seeking support.

  He kept up a stream of amusing chatter about his life as a soldier, which mainly seemed to consist of observing and exploiting the foibles of the rich and powerful. He would say nothing more about the Gobi Desert and when I asked him how he had known that I was going to be at Aldershot that day he waved the question aside.

  'Contacts,' he said. 'Must you smoke those damned things?'

  I lit another cigarette, my one defiance. I concluded from Basil's answer that he was somehow in touch with what has since come to be known as the intelligence community but was then simply called the secret service. After the meal we went to a brothel in Bayswater Road, where I took Basil's leavings and was his slave again.

  The arrangements which permitted us, in 1941, to enter Mongolia through Korea and Manchuria, then the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, must have been incredibly intricate. But enter it we did and we were provided with guides and animals and provisions for our journey. I knew nothing of the organisational details save this. The interests Basil served had influence which cut across political boundaries and conflicts and, in addition, he carried with him large sums of money in several currencies as well as gold coins. In Korea, Manchuria and Mongolia there was guerilla activity against the Japanese and also internal struggles between the different branches of the Chinese resistance. Passage through these war zones considerably lightened Basil's store of notes and specie.

  As always, Basil found a soulmate in the Mongol band leader Yhurr. Basil defeated him in a wrestling match which, when the tide of battle flowed against my brother, almost involved me in a murder. I came as near to shooting the Mongol when he had Basil in a choking hold as a slight finger pressure on the trigger of Basil's pistol. But Basil won and an unholy alliance was formed, resulting in my geological survey of another wasteland as rich in minerals and hiding places as Wadi Djoul. As previously, Basil emerged from this expedition successful in the terms set by his masters and for his own purposes. The two Mongolian girls he abducted, stole or bought (who could say what was the appropriate term?) he impregnated and conveyed to Ho
ng Kong.

  I was his collaborator, photographer and cartographer. With war raging in the East there was little need for the skills I had exercised in Africa. If the ragged band of adventurers who surfaced in Hong Kong attracted attention in the Crown colony which had been conquered by the Japanese in 1941, I knew nothing of it. We disappeared into the stews of Kowloon and remained there for almost a year. Much of this time I spent in an opium stupor, supplied with women by Basil, dimly aware of the progress of the pregnancies of his captives. I experienced drug-induced nightmares about being murdered by Yhurr as I was on the point of raping Xian Zu Famat, the younger and more attractive of the sisters Basil has acquired.

  For some reason, I was sober at the time the two girls gave birth. The events were within a few days of each other. Xian's child was a large, pale male blob with a deformed foot. The other, also a male, was an angelic creature with huge eyes, petal-like skin and perfect limbs. Basil had made arrangments. He wanted to view the children when they were a few days old. I made my own arrangements, contrived for him to see the perfect child first and in the most attractive circumstances. I allowed him to glimpse the monster only briefly and its mother not at all.

  'She is close to death, Basil. The birth was difficult. Neither mother nor child will survive another twenty-four hours.'

  Basil was indifferent. He was entranced by his exquisite son.

  'A divine being,' he said.

  I readily agreed and suggested that he could leave the untidy details to me.

  Basil had drunk a lot of the champagne I had provided. Triumph made him careless. He waved his hand airily. 'Do what you will, Dick. That boy is a treasure. The rubbish can be disposed of.'

  I poured more champagne, but drank little myself. I smiled, echoed some of Basil's views on genetics and refrained from smoking. I had learned something of the arts of manipulation from my brother. Basil departed with the mother of the paragon a few days later. I made arrangements for the succour of Xian and the oversized monster. Later I paid for an operation to correct his deformity. Like calls to like. I knew that I was bound to Basil for life, but even slaves can dream of, and facilitate, the freedom of others.

  Basil raves beside me. He looks old and wasted. I feel young and full of life. I understand why writers have joy in their eyes. They achieve completenesses. Things are nearing their end for my brother and me. Those whom I have wronged, please forgive me, those whom I have helped . . . I laugh as I sit here on the stony floor of a cave in the Australian desert. It all seems so clear. I had the gift of love and thought it was a curse. Basil had power and thought it could carry him to happiness. How wrong we both were. I wish I had talked to my mother. I suspect she knew everything, foresaw everything, and remained silent because it was all so terrible. I lock Basil's head in a grip like Yhurr's and raise the cup to his dry lips . . .

  34

  ENTRY FOUR

  Randolph Craft was registered as my son and I continued to provide support for him and his mother for many years. After leaving Hong Kong I never saw the child again, although I would have liked to. However, I could not risk alerting Basil to the fact that the child had survived and enjoyed my protection. He would have seen this as a double betrayal. I had a secret from Basil—it was a small morsel of power but something at least.

  I returned to England and this time was successful in joining the army. Half-successful; whether as a matter of age, education or Basil's intervention, I was assigned to safe clerical duties at Aldershot. I spent the war filling in forms, moving goods and personnel about the globe, while I was fixed in one of the dullest, most artificial environments in the British Isles. I tried to interest myself in my duties but they were humdrum beyond belief. I attempted to start an affair with the all-too-willing wife of an officer. But my impotence was humiliatingly complete. I began to drink a good deal, simulating heartiness in the NCOs' mess, but the comradeship was false and the alcohol gave me an ulcer.

  In defiance of Basil's order, I wrote several articles about the many interesting sociological and geographical features of the Mongolian expedition. Little had been published in English about the apparently barren Gobi Desert which turned out, like all deserts, to be a rich habitat to the natives who knew it as intimately as their own bodies. Yhurr's band lived a narrow, brutish existence to all outward appearance, yet every member was a useful, successful and fulfilled individual. Xian and her sister were members of a pariah group of some kind and the word used by Yhurr to describe them meant 'dead trees', signifying that they had lost their connection with the land.

  All of this and much more I put in the articles I wrote. I worked long and hard on these exercises and they were of a very high standard. Each was rejected by journals I had published in before. Further, the submitted copies and supporting material were not returned. I saw Basil's hand in this very clearly. Once again, I was obliged to resort to subterfuge. I submitted an article to a very obscure journal—The East Anglia Geographical Gazette—and had the pleasure of seeing the piece published and of outwitting Basil.

  I was demobilised in November 1945 and used my deferred pay and considerable savings to travel around Britain for the next few years. I was looking for somewhere to live cheaply, somewhere to bury myself and conduct an existence that might afford me some of the satisfaction the Mongolians enjoyed. I imagined myself in a cottage by the sea with a moorland behind me—expanses of land and sea in which it might be possible to blend harmoniously, answering to deep calls of the spirit and not the cheap twitterings of sex, 'entertainment' and society.

  I found the place, a cottage on the Yorkshire coast north of Scarborough. I had the North Sea at my front door and the north York moor at my back. I could fish, grow vegetables and keep poultry and a cow. I could bake and make butter and cheese. I saw myself as self-sufficient apart from staples such as books, tea and tobacco. Buying the cottage almost exhausted my funds, so this subsistence mode of life would be a necessity as well as a pleasure. I moved into the tiny stone house with feelings of contentment and hope greater than I think I had ever known before. I had done something myself—something that offered me a chance of happiness.

  On the second day of my occupation a telegram arrived. It was from Basil and it read: 'Mother near death. Come immediately.' I travelled at once to London but arrived several hours after my mother had died. She lay in her bed in the small house in Swiss Cottage she had occupied since Alexander Craft died. I looked at her body; the face as composed and withdrawn as ever, and felt only a dim sadness that I had never known her. I kissed her cold forehead and some powder the undertaker had applied came off on my lips. I shuddered at the taste and smell of it and hurried from the room.

  Basil, also a civilian and evidently prosperous to judge from his clothes, the Daimler and the chauffeur, made all the arrangements. I noticed that he was addressed as 'Professor Craft' and quizzed him about it as we were driven back from the burial at Highgate. Basil and I had been the only mourners, although I thought a small group of people who looked like gypsies were displaying an interest in the proceedings.

  'Perfectly legitimate, old son. Held a chair for a time in one of the best medical schools in France.'

  'Which one?'

  'One of the best. Now, to business. Mother's estate divides equally between us. Doesn't amount to much, a few thousand pounds each I'd guess. She had the house she lived in as well as a couple of others she owned and rented. Should have been more but the Huns got a few of her properties in the blitz. I suppose not even father could have anticipated that.'

  'You anticipated it,' I said. I still had the same feelings for Basil—a sense of the possibility of wholeness in his company, a need and wish to approve of him and to feel his approval.

  'Yes, I did, didn't I? Well, it was obvious. Point is, Dick what's your next move? Want to know your choices?'

  It was typical of Basil to construct a conversation in this way, setting the agenda. 'Tell me,' I said.

  'You can take your couple
of thousand quid and go back up to Yorkshire and freeze your arse off, read yourself blind and smoke yourself to death.'

  'Or?'

  'You can come with me to Mexico and feel the sun and the warm winds. You can taste some of the women there and try some of the drugs they have. Give you visions I'm told. You always liked visions.'

  I could feel the excitement rising inside me, the juices flowing through my body. 'Did I?'

  'Mountains and deserts again, Dick,' Basil said. 'Mountains and deserts.'

  Our expedition from Culiacán in Mexico through Death Valley in the United States was a triumph of the will and spirit. As I have written elsewhere, the test on this journey was not that imposed by isolation, but by the temptations of having civilisation so near. My skills as a land navigator were tested to the utmost by Basil's insistence that we give as wide a berth as possible to Mexican and American towns. Consequently, we laboured along in the foothills and barren wastes, conserving water and energy, protecting ourselves from the sun and living off the land as if water, beans and medicines were as inaccessible to us as they had been to Cortés.

  Basil's ally on this undertaking was Pedro Cordobes, who headed a band of cutthroats known as Cordobes' Beasts. Basil liked Cordobes and his latter-day Comancheros so much that, as he confided to me one night, he was tempted to join them in their life of robbery and debauchery. 'They are the true anarchists, Dick,' he said. 'They live in true harmony with the random violence of this planet and its dominant species.'

  'They are also murdering, illiterate savages,' I said, 'without an inkling of what goes on beyond the confines of these badlands and with no notions of science, literature or art. I cherish the belief that you still attach some value to those things, Basil.'

  'True, I do,' Basil said. 'But I wish in some ways that I didn't.'

  'Perhaps you can be a bandit in your next life,' I told him. 'You are a scientist in this.'