The Judas Boy

by Simon Raven

  'But how?'

  'Flattery, advice and training for the local leadership; weapons and equipment; money. All provided on the q.t. by American secret agents. This was what they offered the Cypriots ... partly direct and partly through Athens; and the Cypriots, for very shame, had to pick up the weapons and fight. Poor Cypriots. One day they were happily yelling about freedom in the market-place ... and the next they found that someone had actually taken them at their word and given them brand-new rifles instead of empty ouzo bottles. It was now a matter of face: there could be no turning back.'

  'All this is rather nebulous,' Fielding said. 'Say what you like about the American secret service, on the face of it the Cypriot rebels were commanded by the patriot, Colonel Grivas, and armed with smuggled weapons.'

  'But who paid for the weapons? The Cypriots couldn't and the Greeks wouldn't. And as for the patriot Colonel Grivas,' said Percival, 'he was closely assisted at every step by a guerilla expert called Diomedes.'

  'And so?'

  'And so Diomedes was the nom de guerre of an American secret serviceman called Earle Restarick.'

  'Restarick,' repeated Fielding: 'I seem to have heard the name.'

  'Perhaps. He was mixed up with me in that business in Germany ten years ago.'

  That,' said Fielding with distaste.

  That,' said Percival. 'A project, you may remember, which Britain and the US had in common, so at that time we were on the same side. I found him a very interesting man.'

  'And now you're claiming that this Restarick later became the brains behind Colonel Grivas?'

  'The brains, and the bombs, and the cash.'

  'How can you be sure?'

  Percival dipped a slice of apple in his wine and bit it in two with a snap.

  'In this game,' he said, 'you get to know a man's style. I was working in Cyprus during the trouble, and more and more of the tricks pulled by the other side had what one might call Restarick's idiom ... which I remembered very well from the job we'd worked on together in Germany. And then, later on. I received information which proved that he was in Cyprus at the time. For that matter, he's still there now.'

  'Tell him about this idiom, this style.' said Max.

  'Restarick's favourite trick was a kind of four-dimensional feint. He would persuade his opponent to believe—to believe absolutely—in some situation, tactical, moral or intellectual. which simply didn't exist. In his response to the pressures of this mythical situation, Restarick's opponent would eventually take the action or strike the attitude which Restarick required of him. without Restarick's having to move a finger himself. In the end. this opponent would probably aim a desperate blow at some illusory figure of Restarick's creation—and the blow would go right through the shadow and land where Restarick wanted it to land. Several times in Cyprus he manoeuvred British patrols into firing on one another or on innocent crowds, he tricked British agents into denouncing one another, he even blackmailed an important officer into putting a time-bomb under the Governor's bed. Beautiful work,' said Percival, 'pure Restarick. He's quite indifferent, by the way, to the human or political results. He's only concerned with the immediate problem proposed to him and finding the neatest solution.'

  'Nevertheless,' said Fielding, 'although these exploits had Restarick's style, and although he was in Cyprus at the time, you can't prove that he was Diomedes.'

  'No.' said Max; 'not yet. But we can if we have just one more link.'

  'One more link,' said Percival. 'Pick up that link, achieve certain proof that Restarick was master-minding Grivas— and you can loose off the biggest anti-American scandal of a lifetime on twenty million television sets.'

  'And where is this ... link ... to be found?'

  'Concealed on a dead body,' said Max de Freville, 'in a tomb eight centuries old. It sounds rather bizarre, I agree, but the explanation is really quite logical ...'

  By the next day the wind had weakened, but not enough to allow the steamer from Athens to attempt the narrow entrance to the harbour. Two rowing boats were to convey passengers—at a cost of two drachmae per head for Hydriots, ten for other Greeks, and fifty for Fielding and Detterling—out to where the packet would anchor.

  While Fielding and Detterling waited to embark, Max gave Detterling messages for friends in London (whither Detterling must shortly return), Angela drank several large ouzos in the Taverna Poseidon out of sadness at her guests' departure, and Percival ran over the instructions which Fielding had been given the previous evening.

  'Remember,' said Percival, 'that they don't know either that this object exists or where it is hidden. So they won't be guarding it.'

  'But they will be watching me.'

  'Certainly. But if you just pretend to poke about, as though you haven't any particular line to follow, and then give 'em the slip, they won't know where you've gone or what you're up to.'

  'Easier said than done. Besides, suppose they try some really radical expedient—as in Yugoslavia?'

  'Unlikely. Restarick won't want to draw attention to Cyprus by murdering a well-known writer—who's there on behalf of the BBC—bang on the doorstep. Fielding Gray dead in Yugoslavia would have been well enough, but in Nicosia ... no. Odd as it may seem, the nearer you are to the centre of it all, the safer you'll be. From bodily harm at any rate.'

  'What other sort do you have in mind?'

  'Restarick,' said Percival, 'is devious. He has his plans festering away for the future, so he doesn't want a lot of inquisitive flies arriving in Cyprus to buzz round your corpse—because while they were at it they might sniff out even nastier lumps of putrescence. This means he wants you alive—at any rate as long as you're in Cyprus—but he also, for obvious reasons, wants you silent. So what does he do?'

  'You tell me. You're the expert on Restarick.'

  'He has recourse,' said Percival, 'to his favourite method. He brings pressure to bear on you by placing you in an exigent situation. Either a real one or, just as likely, an imaginary one which he's conjured up especially for you. In either case the pressure will be such—believe me. I've seen him at it—that you will be mentally anaesthetised, quite incapable of speaking a word in your own voice. That's the kind of thing you've got to watch out for with Restarick.'

  The steamer came into sight round a headland and sounded its hooter. Bare-footed boys ran round in circles with luggage. Angela came red-eyed out of the Taverna Poseidon.

  'So,' said Percival, 'the best of luck. You're absolutely sure where to find it?'

  'Yes.' Fielding shuddered. 'You've made it very plain.'

  Angela swayed up to them.

  'I do wish you weren't going so soon.' she croaked.

  'So do I.' said Fielding, thinking of her gartered stockings.

  The oarsmen called from the rowing-boats. Percival started to hum the Regimental March of Lord Hamilton's Light Dragoons, and Detterling clanked along the quay in time to it. Max took Angela's hand and gave his grisly smile at her, while Fielding settled his deplorable homburg as lightly on his head as he could.

  'That's right, old man,' said Percival: 'hang on to your hat.'

  Into a rowing-boat among a muddle of baskets, carpet bags, caged chickens. Detterling breathing heavily beside him: both facing to stern. Angela waving and slobbering, Max saluting to the peak of his yachting cap, Leonard Percival slowly parting his teeth in a grin like a portcullis. Past a row of moored caiques, past a group of idle sailors hawking and jabbering on a jetty, and so we say farewell to dirty and dishonest little Hydra, and ... through the harbour bar.

  At once it seemed as if the boat were standing on its stern and that chickens, carpet-bags, Fielding and all were being sucked straight into the sea. But just as he felt himself finally going the boat righted itself, dipped its bows, flung Detterling and himself back on to two squatting grandmothers in black, No one else had turned a hair: it was routine. Fielding and Detterling apologised, picked them-selves up, barked their shins on the cross-bench, received a mass of flying spray
on their trousers, and were sworn at by the boatman, who looked like Charon but rather more malignant. Huddled together on the floor, they achieved some kind of stability for the next three minutes, at the end of which, hearing greetings from above, they looked up to see the cold, black side of the steamer. About seven feet above them was a square opening, ten feet by ten. from which two rope ladders were now let down to their rowing-boat.

  First up, agile as spiders, were the two grandmothers. Then a deck-hand came half-way down the right-hand ladder and gestured to Charon. The latter passed up a suitcase, which the deck-hand caught with a swing of his arm and released again a split second later, so that it flew out of his hand and up through the opening in the ship's side. This procedure was repeated until all baggage was disposed of, whereupon Charon signed to Fielding to make the ascent up the left-hand ladder, the right-hand one still being occupied by the deck-hand, who was apparently telling Charon some kind of anecdote. Since the rowing-boat was lying in the lee of the steamer and was therefore rocking very little, Fielding anticipated no trouble in getting himself on to the rope ladder. This he gripped, then ran his hands up it while he manoeuvred both feet on to the rowing-boat's gunnel. It was at this stage that Charon pushed his craft clear of the steamer with a brisk lever movement of one oar, at the same time tossing up a large and rusty matchet to the deckhand on the second ladder, who, using the same powerful swinging arm action as before but opening his fingers a split second earlier, launched the tool edge foremost straight at Fielding's head.

  4: The Castle

  Tom Llewyllyn went to see Gregory Stern in his London office. After congratulating Gregory on Isobel's pregnancy and hearing the gratifying details of an American paperback deal in respect of his most recent book (Queen Elizabeth II, The Bourgeois Monarch), Tom said:

  'I'm worried about Fielding Gray.'

  'I'm the one to worry,' Gregory said. 'First the BBC steal you, my best modern historian, to run their idiot programme, and then you steal my best novelist and send him off like bloody Byron.'

  'It wasn't quite like that, Gregory. And Fielding did need a change.'

  'So he's having his change and now you tell me you're worried.' Gregory ran two fingers along his upper teeth and then prodded an incipient pimple on his jaw-bone. 'So what's he done? Burnt down the Parthenon?'

  'He rang me up yesterday,' Tom said, 'yesterday morning. I'd sent him a telegram asking him to hang on in Athens for a bit in case we wanted to revise his instructions. And now here he is ringing up to say that he was going straight on to Cyprus, that I needn't think I could stop him, and that anyway it wasn't safe for him to stay in Athens.'

  'Mad,' said Stern, waving both hands in the air; 'you've paid him so muchmoney that you've made him mad. Cyprus ... He probably thinks he's Othello. Next time he rings up he'll be Tamberlaine going to Persepolis or Jesus Christ going up to his heavenly father. Why couldn't you leave him as he was—quietly writing novels in Buttock's Hotel?'

  'Stop exaggerating, Gregory. Fielding certainly sounded rather light-hearted but he was perfectly lucid.'

  'Lucid, you call it? All that about "not being safe for him to stay in Athens''. What sort of talk is that?'

  'There's still no need to exaggerate. I was hoping you might be able to suggest some sort of explanation.'

  'How should I explain such sotiserie?' 'Well, I wondered,' said Tom, embarrassed and reluctant, 'whether Isobel had been having any more of those ... hunches ... of hers?'

  'Isobel has no time for such rubbish. She is too busy bearing my son.'

  'Of course ... Gregory, you've known Fielding for as long as I have. You know as well as I do that such behaviour is quite untypical. Will you please try to say something helpful.'

  'What can I say, my dear?' said Gregory more soberly than he had spoken yet. 'Except that I always thought he wasn't so well balanced as he liked to appear.'

  'What would you do if you were me?'

  'In a very few days now,' said Gregory, 'Detterling will arrive back from Athens. Having spent hundreds of pounds of my money in the Grande Bretagne Hotel, he must at last condescend to come home and report. He will have seen Fielding, and he will tell us all about him. Detterling is an ex-officer and he will know what to do.'

  'So are you an ex-officer. And so is Fielding, come to that.'

  Gregory rose and went to the open window, through which came April bird-song and the evening trill of typists released to their lovers.

  'With Fielding and me,' Gregory said, 'it was only ever skin-deep. Although we may have looked the part, we always really relied on somebody else—usually the loyal and capable sergeant-major. But Detterling is the genuine article. He decides everything for himself and he relies on no one but himself to carry his decisions through.'

  'Then why did he end up as only a Captain?' Tom asked. 'He had a regular commission and nearly six years of war to prove himself. Younger men than him were made Generals.'

  'I've often wondered about that,' said Gregory, 'one day ... not yet awhile, but one day ... I shall ask him.'

  Fielding Gray walked up the path towards the Castle of Buffavento. At the bottom of the path, a hundred yards below him, the road up the mountain had ended in a small area of sand and stone, on which his taxi was now parked with its somnolent driver inside it. Below this again the mountainside, rock and scrub and fir, fell away for hundreds of feet and then checked its descent to undulate gently into the plain of the Mesaoria, whose livid blues and lush purples and treacly yellows made a huge cloth of motley on which the distant minarets of Nicosia were set like a tiny silver cruet.

  Above him, as he walked slowly but steadily up the winding path, Fielding could see the Castle: low and scaly, like a dragon crouching along the ridge, legs splayed to clasp it. The sun was burning down from the zenith: there was no wind: the cicadas hummed morosely. The knights castellan, Fielding thought, did they walk up this path, at noon-day, in full armour? And what kind of armour did they wear, those old crusaders? Chain mail, plate armour, leather jerkins? Plate armour was surely very rare when this castle was first built, and by no means every knight could afford a coat of chain; but leather? Leather, he knew, could keep out Steel, for did he not owe his own life to the leather band inside his homburg, which had been proof against the flying matchet? Yet somehow leather seemed beneath the dignity of a crusading knight, even if he were so poor and unimportant that he was condemned to make up one of the band that garrisoned this castle, a younger son and landless man, far from home and far from Jerusalem.

  However that might be, even this suit (from the best men's shop in Athens) was uncomfortably hot. He stopped, set down the small grip which held his picnic lunch, lifted his homburg and wiped his forehead. Never mind; only another sixty or seventy yards to the top. Before starting again, he looked down at his taxi. How could the driver bear to stay inside that metal carapace (like plate armour) in this heat? And for that matter, the man ought to be up here with him if he was serious about his job. For the driver, Fielding knew, must be the man whom 'they' had told off to watch him. Whenever he asked the concierge at his hotel to send for a taxi, even for very short journeys inside Nicosia, the same man turned up in the same car. There could only be one explanation. Fielding did not resent his custodian and made no attempt to avoid him: better know by whom he was watched and how than tremble every time he passed a beggar. Besides, as he was demonstrating so clearly just now. the man was grossly inefficient—an amateur and not even enthusiastic. Lulled by several days' routine sightseeing in Fielding's company—Bellapaix, Salamis, Paphos —he had doubtless decided that Fielding had nothing to go on and was simply killing time. At first he had lurked behind Fielding round temples and theatres and museums, but by now he seemed thoroughly bored. Too bored, thought Fielding, to climb the steps to the Castle of Buffavento; for what (he imagined the driver as thinking) could this mouldering relic of the crusaders have to do with an up-to-date intrigue in a world of time-bombs and taxis? Sleep on, dull child of
your age, soothed by the cicada.

  Fielding replaced his hat, jacked up his bag, and went on up the path. After a little, this brought him to a flight of straight and narrow steps, and these in turn to a small natural platform. To his right, a path led away to the east, along the very spine of the mountain ridge, between trees which grew just below it on either side. To his left a rather wider path ran some sixty yards to the castle gate, beyond which an open court was visible. Ignoring the castle for the moment, Fielding walked straight across the little plateau. Far below him, the glittering sea stretched north to the coast of Turkey, which seemed, in the distant haze, like some long white flickering wave slowly rolling towards him.

  He shook his head to dispel this illusion and walked along the path to the castle. Pausing in the courtyard, he could have sworn that he heard the splash of water. Why not? There must be a spring up here somewhere, or the castle would have been indefensible. The pleasing noise reminded him of coolness, and he walked on out of the courtyard, through a wide stone doorway, and into a long and shady gallery, in either wall of which, both to north and south, was a series of magnificent windows that reached down from arched summits just below the ceiling to sills at the height of his waist, in all their depth framing nothing but blue sky. It appeared that just here the ridge narrowed and sharpened; for when he looked out to the north he seemed to be hanging directly over the sea; and similarly, to the south, it was as though a dropped stone would have plummeted straight down into the Mesaoria.

  More like a cloister than a castle, he thought. What could this superb room have been? An ante-chamber, perhaps from which loiterers and petitioners might admire the view? But no, he thought; surely—it had to be—this was where the knights would have died. Sitting on either side of a table which would have run almost the entire length of the gallery, they would have looked out of the windows into a sky which was somehow all the more immense for being framed, and then they would have risen, when the last of the Commanderia had been drained from the tankards, and looked down, either on to the spread chart of the terrain they were there to hold, or else on to the sea and then away beyond it to the land of the paynim, where Richard of England was riding under the Cross.