Dear Illusion: Collected Stories

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘For another week or so. Then I disappear. And you?’

  ‘I’ve heard nothing precise. I imagine there will be plenty of work for my section.’

  ‘Indeed there will,’ said Harvey in a grim tone. ‘Not at first, perhaps, but later – no doubt of it. I must leave you shortly; I have a lot of clearing-up to do at the office. But if it reveals anything one-twentieth as remarkable as what I came across yesterday, I shall be very much surprised.’

  ‘You sound mysterious.’

  ‘I mean to. Excuse me a moment.’

  My friend went to the hall, where his dispatch case was, and presently returned carrying a folder criss-crossed with pink tape.

  ‘I found this where it should not have been,’ said Harvey. ‘Not so much misfiled, I venture to think, as hidden.’

  ‘Hidden some time ago,’ I suggested, looking at the condition of what he had brought.

  ‘It’s as old as we are – nothing in it that could be of the slightest interest to Master Hitler, otherwise of course it wouldn’t have left the Office.’

  ‘What does this red disc signify?’

  ‘Out of use now, but it used to mean “Destroy when acted upon”.’

  ‘Presumably not acted upon, then.’

  ‘Oh, it must have been acted upon, my dear fellow. When you read it, you’ll agree that whatever else might or might not have happened, what’s in here’ – he tapped the folder – ‘would have been acted upon all right, though I missed any record of how. No, kept for what I’ll call its curiosity value.’

  I was gazing at Harvey. ‘I’m to read it? Why?’

  ‘Why not, if you’ve nothing better to do? It’ll take your mind off our impending troubles. And you’re pretty close to being its ideal reader: you’re fascinated with the bizarre if anyone ever was, the business took place in your part of the world and you have a vivid imagination combined with strong nerves. I’ll be interested to hear what you make of it. Forgive me now – I’ll telephone and arrange a drink before I vanish. Give my love to Celia.’

  ‘Thank you, I will.’

  ‘I shall be sorry to miss your wedding. Good night.’

  When Harvey had gone I found a bridge four in process of gathering, joined it and played on in the card-room till past eleven. The next evening I took my fiancée to dinner and the theatre, and so it was almost forty-eight hours before I set about slipping the tapes off Harvey’s folder, with no great sense of expectation, for previous attempts of his to feed my taste for the ‘bizarre’ testified more to the goodness of his heart than his understanding of what might appeal to that taste. Only the previous month he had drawn my attention to a most commonplace tale of the supernatural in the Cornhill. But any distraction was welcome just then, with German troops reported on the move towards the borders of Poland and Celia visiting her widowed mother.

  Before I open the folder, so to speak, you may care to learn a little about the person who has taken it upon himself to describe to you its contents. I will begin by explaining what Harvey had meant, in the lounge at the Irving, by my part of the world: the general area of the eastern Mediterranean. It is mine in a double sense. I was brought up in the family of a British diplomat in one of the coastal cities there. Although my name – Robert Chalmers – could hardly be more British, and I have never held anything but a British passport, my parentage is unknown. Picture me as fair-haired and blue-eyed, with something about the eyelids of those blue eyes that earned me the nickname of ‘Chinkie’ at school, but, when I grew up, contributed not a little (so at least I have often been assured) to what I can without vanity call my considerable success with women. It is this that has kept me single, but recently, as you already know, I have been taking steps to end that state.

  Perhaps it is vanity after all that has led me to wander from my theme. Harvey had had in mind, of course, the second and, in the context, more significant sense in which the Levant is my place. My knowledge of Greek and Turkish, virtually that of a native in both cases, and the influence of my foster-father soon secured me a place in the appropriate section of the Overseas Office. I was thus already in possession of information necessary to the understanding of at least part of the contents of the folder. I knew, for instance, that after literally centuries of struggle and in response to pressure from the Allied Powers (Great Britain, France and Russia), Turkey withdrew the last of her troops from the island of Crete in November 1898. One of the documents in the folder proved to bear the name of a Cretan village and a date in January 1899.

  These documents varied in category and provenance. Some were straightforward signals or decodes; others were reports of assorted lengths, many of them copies of notes the British agents in the field had delivered to what would in these days be termed their control – the location of which I will not even now divulge. What I had before me was an account of an operation assembled from the control’s dispatches to London and additional matter supplied here which I will refer to as I go along. A more or less connected story emerged. I have amused myself, having as I do something of a literary turn of mind, by dramatizing that story wherever possible. I assure you that I have neither added nor altered anything of substance.

  Let me begin with information from the official dossiers of the two agents involved. The younger, Michael Courtenay, had been born in 1870, educated at Rugby and Brasenose and recruited by the Department (nowhere referred to by any fuller title) in 1895; he was expert in opening locked doors, safes and the like; his interests, perhaps rather quaintly, embraced cricket and the then new-fangled science of psychology. A photograph in poor condition nevertheless showed him to have been a broad-shouldered, heavy-featured young man with a determined look. His superior officer was eight years his senior, Guy Barnes by name, of similar education and a distinguished record of service in the Department. With his unruly hair and wide eyes he resembled, I thought, a poet or musician rather than the severely practical creature required by his trade.

  Far above the head of either man it had been concluded that, however warmly to be welcomed on other considerations, the Turkish departure raised certain hazards for the Allies. It rendered the island more vulnerable to the intervention of third parties, of which the most likely was Italy, lately in aggressive mood, her disastrous Abyssinian adventure concluded only two years before – not that she showed at the moment any sign of an interest in Crete. The departure itself might be a feint, a prelude to return in greater strength – not that this was foreshadowed by any known development in Constantinople. What was quite certain was that the newly appointed High Commissioner for the island, Prince George of Greece, had arrived to take up his office on 21 December 1898, and hardly less so that he had enemies there and near by. All in all an unobtrusive intensification of vigilance seemed desirable. Together with his colleagues in the area, Courtenay received orders to keep an eye on comings and goings, to watch for and report anything which his two and a half years’ local experience told him was unusual. He passed the message on to his village informants and settled down to wait in the little shipping Office that disguised his true function.

  He had only a short time to wait. Early in that January there came to see him a middle-aged fisherman whom I will call Vassos and who had shown himself to be reliable and observant. Courtenay asked for coffee to be brought. (He does not say so, but since in the Greek-speaking world nothing of importance is ever discussed except over coffee I have thought the inference a safe one, like others I have drawn here and there.)

  ‘You have news for me, Vassos?’

  ‘Yes, kyrie. I don’t know what it means, but it is news.’

  ‘We will try to understand it together. Speak.’

  The visitor was silent for a short space. Courtenay thought he seemed agitated about something. (This he does say.) Finally he began: ‘Last night I take out my boat to go to my lobster pots, near the side of the bay where there is the headland with the big house on it.’

  ‘I know the place. Go on, man.’

&nb
sp; ‘I beg pardon, kyrie. I have reached the pots but not brought out my lantern when a light flashes from the house. That surprises me because I think the house is empty, as it has been for over a year, but then I remember the chandler has told me three men have come to it a week ago. While I watch, the light flashes again, and it flashes on and off, on and off, twice, like that, and then all the house is dark. Then I look out to sea and there another light flashes, and again all else is dark, and this is much more strange, because now I hear an engine, a big one, and what must I think of a ship with a big engine all dark except for the flashes in these waters where there are so many small craft? So I wait, and soon the ship comes, and she is big, bigger than my cousin’s kayik. She’s just passing me when some more lights come on, at the landing-stage under the house, but they are dim, as if someone has smoked the glass of the lanterns, just enough to see by, except . . . The anchorage is too small for the ship to tie up alongside, so she turns and comes in stern first, beam on to me. When they’re ready, some people disembark; they have the dim lanterns too.’

  ‘How many?’ asked Courtenay.

  This harmless question evidently troubled Vassos. He swallowed and said, ‘Either sixteen or seventeen, kyrie.’

  ‘That’s near enough. All men?’

  ‘Ten at least, kyrie. With some I couldn’t be sure.’

  ‘Did you get a good look at any of them?’

  Vassos said in a changed tone, ‘Once there was a bright light for some seconds, perhaps a match, and I saw . . . I saw . . . no, I could not have seen.’

  ‘What could you not have seen? What ails you?’

  ‘No, kyrie, forgive me, I can’t say. On the head of St Peter I swear it was nothing you asked me to look for.’

  ‘Oh, very well. Did anyone see you?’

  ‘Certainly not. I waited till they were all gone and then I paddled away; I didn’t even row at first.’

  ‘Excellent. Can you take me out there? We will be two fishermen who happen to be passing.’

  ‘When, kyrie?’

  ‘Now, if possible.’

  After some thought, Vassos said, ‘Better tomorrow morning, kyrie, I will speak to my cousin. Can you be at the harbour by six o’clock?’

  ‘Yes. You’ve done well, Vassos. Here.’

  ‘Evkharisto, kyrie.’

  ‘Parakalo. Kal’ iméra sas.’

  A couple of hours after Vassos had left the office, a large, well-built young man with baggy trousers and a dirty face was riding an elderly donkey along the path that led from the base of the headland to the house at its tip. When still some fifty yards from his objective he found his way barred by a freshly painted iron railing with what proved to be a locked gate in it. There was a bell attached to this gate, but instead of ringing it, the obvious course, the new arrival tied up his mount to the railing and wandered in apparent perplexity along it first to his left, finding that it ended at a precipice, or rather projected a yard into thin air, then in the other direction far enough to see that it ran down a broken slope to the water’s edge. Where it crossed naked rock each upright was rooted in a heavy cross-bar. Those three earlier residents had not wasted their week. The railing would not have kept out a determined and properly equipped intruder, but it was quite enough to see to it that idle curiosity remained unsatisfied. The intervention of some olive-trees and a dip in the ground gave a poor view of the house itself from the landward side of the railing, except that it appeared to be shaped like an L or perhaps a T and had one or more outbuildings close to it.

  While the person with the donkey, who carried a pannier of fresh figs, was looking vaguely in that direction, a man came out of the little olive-grove. He wore servants’ clothing and as he approached he called out in a Peloponnesian accent, ‘What do you want, you there?’

  The other swept off his straw hat and bowed. ‘Greetings to your honour.’ His accent was Cretan and rustic. ‘Would your lordship care for some of my fine fruit? Two piastres for the whole.’

  ‘We need none. We have our own supply.’

  ‘One and a half piastres.’

  ‘I tell you we need none,’ said the servant, halting while still some yards short of the gate. If he had a key, it was not to be seen. ‘Be off with you, fellow.’

  ‘One piastre. My figs are the most delicious in all Crete. His highness the Count would much enjoy them.’

  ‘Count? What Count?’

  ‘Count Axel, your master, distinguished sir.’

  ‘Count Axel is not here. Now go.’

  The Peloponnesian turned his back and retreated the way he had come. After making a blasphemous gesture and muttering a number of imprecations, the unsuccessful vendor of figs resumed his donkey and went off down the path. Not a hint of menace, said Courtenay to himself, just total discouragement, designed to set the word going about that there was no profit to be had at the house on the headland. What meaning was to be attached to the implied denial of Count Axel’s existence, followed by the explicit denial of his presence? – his existence, and his status as the recent purchaser of the house, having been easily enough established by earlier inquiry in the port. Perhaps no more than a simple desire to be obstructive. Axel – presumably a Scandinavian name. Could Sweden or Denmark have any designs in Crete?

  Early the next morning an observer at the house could have noticed (and doubtless one or more did) the antics of a large fishing kayik in the waters close to it. The wind was steady enough, the sea calm, but some inexperience or ineptitude at sail or tiller saw to it that the boat, borne only by the current, drifted past the tip of the headland at a speed low enough to keep it within a couple of hundred yards of that spot for several minutes. Shouts and curses filled the air; men ran to and fro on the deck. Courtenay, crouched below the gunwale with his binoculars, saw no more than one thing of the least significance, but it was enough to make him send for Barnes.

  ‘Bricked up?’ queried Barnes on the evening of the next day. ‘Are you sure? How recently?’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Courtenay. ‘Not being a bricklayer I couldn’t tell how recently, but I’d wager it was brand-new work, certainly less than a year old. I’m still trying to find the man who did it. Of course, it might have been one of them.’

  ‘There being no point in blocking a single window . . .’

  ‘And no window-tax or anything of that sort . . .’

  ‘We’ll start looking in the morning.’

  They looked for the best part of two days – through the stout naval telescope Barnes had brought on Courtenay’s advice, their vantage-point a secluded spot on the far side of the bay from the house. It was established at once that the outbuilding noted by Courtenay had had at least two of its windows bricked up, and gradually that, to go by Vassos’s figures, there were either five or six persons in the party who never ventured into the air. At morning, noon and evening someone emerged from the main house carrying a large tray covered with a cloth and disappeared round the corner of the outbuilding, to where the door must be, later retrieving it piled with empty dishes. Another visitor, on both afternoons, was a tall man with white hair and a complexion proclaiming an origin far to the north of where he now was.

  ‘Count Axel,’ said Barnes.

  ‘Yes, but who’s he going to visit?’ asked Courtenay. ‘Who can he be keeping in there? And why on earth?’

  Neither had any idea.

  They also looked through their telescope, taking alternate watches, for the best part of a night. The moon, approaching the full, gave them an excellent view. The man they had identified as Count Axel visited the outbuilding from 9.27 to 9.53. By eleven the house was in darkness and the grounds, as far as could be seen, deserted.

  On the second afternoon, a messenger from Courtenay’s Office ran them down and said that a jobbing builder had called there, saying he was the man he had heard the English kyrios wished to see. Courtenay went and was back within the hour, looking well satisfied.

  ‘There are three windows and the fellow
bricked them all up,’ he told Barnes. ‘But he was very helpful about the type of lock he installed in the door.’

  ‘It should present no difficulty?’

  ‘None whatever to me. You it might take some minutes. My informant also told me what I needed to know about the way the inside is laid out, and supplemented our observations of the buildings as a whole. I’ll pass it on to you later. Tonight?’

  ‘Midnight. I believe you about that gate, but even if you could open it in one second you’d be certain to be spotted – there must be a twenty-four-hour watch on it. So it’s a boat to the tip of the headland where you go ashore and I wait for you. We’ll be in shadow till the very last minute. Will your inquisitive fisherman convey us?’

  ‘Jump at it; he loves a bit of excitement.’

  However, when the proposition was put to Vassos, so far from jumping at it he refused outright, and only a solemn undertaking that in no circumstances would he be required to leave his boat, together with a substantial increase in his fee, changed his mind for him. He would muffle his oars and be out of sight near the base of the headland at 11.45.

  ‘There’s one characteristic of the door I neglected to mention earlier,’ said Courtenay as they approached the rendezvous. ‘It has a hinged flap a hand’s-breadth deep or more at the bottom.’

  ‘Deep enough to allow a loaded tray to pass when the flap is raised.’

  ‘That was how I saw it.’

  ‘What do you expect to find, Courtenay?’

  ‘Weapons. Ammunition. Perhaps explosives. Enough to cause the authorities to institute a raid.’

  ‘Behind blocked windows?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking again about that. Vassos had a very poor view of those people when they were landing. Half a dozen of them might well have been masked or hooded. They can’t be expected to remain in that state for days on end, so they live where only one man can see them, their leader. Because if a servant saw them he might recognize them, or be able to describe them later, when the job, whatever it may be, is done.’

  ‘Let’s hear your views on the job,’ said Barnes.