by John Masters
Lenya Muralev caught his scrutiny and the expression behind it, and said, ‘Do you have a wife?’ When Robin nodded she said, ‘She will not be happy that you are here. You dream and are happy sometimes, I think. Perhaps it will be better for her the way things will have to be. She will be happy thinking that you would have come back eagerly to her, that she and you could have lived happily ever after. Only you didn’t come back.’
Robin looked her steadily in the eye. He was not afraid of her. She was afraid of him, and not because of what he knew. She must be afraid all the time of Peter. Was Anne afraid? To Muralev he said, ‘Did you find the bird?’ Muralev took off his spectacles, fumbled in his pocket, and drew out the crumpled feather. ‘No.’
Robin wanted to say: You won’t find it here. But there was no need. Muralev knew that.
Muralev began to talk, the feather in his palm, while the woman fidgeted impatiently and Jagbir, next to her, kept his hand on his knife. Muralev talked of the Takla Makan desert, where he had never been. He would go there one day. Robin noticed Jagbir’s glance at the sky. Their ship would sail in less than three hours now. If they delayed their escape much longer her thugs would have time to arrive. Basra had the worst reputation of any city in the Middle East. He had not seen her make a signal, but a servant could have been following them on the bridge and gone off unnoticed to gather the cut-throats.
Muralev tried to explain why he must go to the Takla Makan, and Robin forgot about the ship and about the murderous gang already perhaps collecting in back alleys around the cafe. It was not easy to understand what Muralev meant. They spoke in Persian, and the ideas were abstract, while their vocabularies were limited to concrete things. Muralev talked of the monastic ideal which, in the West, men now laughed at; but in the East they did not laugh at it. He asked what made a Hindu mystic climb a tall mountain and stay on its summit in contemplation all his life. Why was such a man called a mystic?
Robin said, ‘Why, then? You’ve asked the questions. Do you have no answer?’
Muralev looked at him with sad eyes, his spectacles in one hand, the barred feather in the other. The shopkeeper lit a lamp in the back of the shop. Muralev said, ‘I have an answer. Desire. The mystic has desire--desire for God, if you like. What I have not solved is whether that desire is evil and selfish, or good and the true gift of God.’
Robin nodded. Muralev would never find the answer to that question because it was in its nature unanswerable. That meant--From the corner of his eye he noticed that the Turkish policeman was watching Jagbir’s back with bent brows. Suddenly Jagbir reached across the table, seized Muralev’s coffee cup, and dashed the dregs into his own face. After a second’s motionless pause he sprang to his feet, the coffee dripping from his cheeks, and cried, ‘You--!
To Gehenna with foreigners and unbelievers! Let us depart in peace. Cease from pestering us!’
The policeman started forward. Robin jumped up, shocked out of his preoccupation. A scene here, the policeman leading them to the jail, questioning, delays, imprisonment perhaps--Jagbir must have been mad. But the policeman shouldered past and began to shout at the Muralevs. Jagbir tugged impatiently at Robin’s sleeve. They ran into the street, turned away from the bridge, and plunged down an alley. ‘Where now?’ Robin muttered.
‘Our house, down this lane, over the second bridge. Hurry, lord!’
They dropped to a quick walk. The evening crowds closed in behind them. Robin said, ‘How did that happen?’
‘I was holding two gold medjidiyes behind my back.’ They reached the house and ran up the narrow stairs.
Jagbir said, ‘Have we got everything now? Out of the back window! Hurry, lord. That damned woman was already producing money, more than mine, before we’d got into the street.’
‘Do you think she realizes we are going out on the steamer? Does she know we live in this house?’
‘I don’t know. I think the meeting on the bridge was by accident. I don’t like it. Can they stop us getting on the ship?’
Robin considered. There was a way. If the Muralevs had laid a suit for civil debt against them or accused them of complicity in some crime, the Turkish authorities would arrest them on the ship. But it would take time to make the complaint and produce some proofs. They would find out when they reached the docks. Meantime, hurry! They dropped from the back window into an enclosed yard, climbed over a low wall, and turned towards the Shatt-al-Arab. They walked quickly, one behind the other, their hands on their knives. They had no rifle now; in Basra it would have made them look suspicious.
Almost at once they saw the tracery of the ship’s yards above the warehouses. Lights on the hidden dockside shone up on the masts and lit the black smoke billowing away downstream on the wind. Crouched behind a crate, they saw five Turkish policemen patrolling the quay. A minute later a fat officer with a tasselled fez waddled down the gangplank, a large document in his hand, and took his place there. They saw the English captain’s bearded face, picked out by the binnacle light on the bridge.
They turned away. These arrangements had taken time. The Muralevs must have known for days that they were here, and had made their plans in good season. The next step was a Turkish prison, and in the prison a sudden illness, or an accident or a shot in the back while ‘attempting to escape.’
They crept back to the house the way they had come, over the wall, up through the window. Robin crouched down in a corner and covered his face with his hands. In the early days it had been exciting, but now, here in the stinking city, it had become horrible. Every night black rats ran over their bodies. By day the wind blew the smell of garbage down the noisome lanes. The task had become like that--rats, a foul smell, and above all, hopeless exhaustion. His nerves were overstrung to the point of snapping. For days on end his stomach would not hold the food he forced himself to swallow.
It was time to give up. A brave man would not have, but he would. He had had enough. Whatever it was that God had made him for, it was not this. That terrible woman looked more beautiful, more intensely alive, than when he first saw her in the dark room in Bukhara. Was it sheer lust of action that drove her to try and kill him now when his work was done and she knew that it was? Was his work so vitally dangerous to Russia that she would kill just to prevent him expanding his written report with his personal explanations? There must be a reason, but he could not grapple with the problem now.
They would have to go to the British consul, make him believe the situation, and then--what? The consul could not prevent their being arrested on whatever charge the Muralevs had laid against them. He could not explain why he was especially interested in them. They would still be dealt with as Khussro, the Afghan of Persian descent, and Turfan, the Hazara peasant, neither of them British subjects, neither deserving of any special privileges. The case would never come to trial. In truth the only man in Basra who could help them now was the Turkish governor of the Basra Vilayet. But there would be guards at the gates of his palace who would allow no one to enter without a pass. If the consul could arrange a private audience with the governor--on what grounds? Also, Lenya Muralev’s thugs would be all around the consul’s house by now. They’d never reach it.
There was nothing left to do, no path, no way open. It was true. But he couldn’t just say to himself, ‘All right,’ and die. He had to . . .
Jagbir said, ‘We’ll be late for our appointment with the Sheikh Abu Daabi.’
Robin burst out in near-hysterical laughter. It was something. Perhaps the Muralevs did not know about the sheikh. Thrown like that into his contemplation of nothingness, the sheikh became very large and important. He said to Jagbir, ‘Let’s hurry, then.’
They left the house by the same back way and hurried across the city. In the streets Robin heard feet behind him and could not be sure whether the sounds were real or existed only in his head. The streets were crowded. He heard so many feet, and some of them must be on a murderous errand because they pitter-pattered as fast as his own, no faster, no
slower. Jagbir gripped his elbow, and he found he had been on the edge of running--yet his feet dragged, and he seemed to cover no distance, hurrying always in the same place. Of the other feet, behind, some were bare, some in sandals, some made slippers go clack-clack. A ship’s siren boomed mournfully over the housetops. They began to run. So the feet were real; otherwise Jagbir would not have allowed him to run. He led, Jagbir followed, hissing encouragement in his ear. That was wise. If Robin had been at the back he would have stopped and given up, standing against the wall quietly, tired, until the feet arrived. He knew Sheikh Abu Daabi’s house and ran in without calling or knocking. The gates were open, there were two soldiers in the yard and an officer by the door. He saw them and recognized them for what they were, but the man standing by a curtain-hung arch was the sheikh, with whom he had an appointment. The sheikh held the curtain aside, they entered, and he followed them. Robin stopped in the room, turned, and said heavily, ‘I am here. Khussro. I had an appointment with you.’
In the silence, listening for the feet, he did not hear them. They must be outside, waiting. There was a fourth man in the room, a portly man in a long Arab robe. He held the end of it loosely over his face below the eyes. His eyes were dark and sunk in fat, his forehead was wrinkled, and he wore a fez. Glistening top-boots and the end of a gold scabbard poked out under his robe. Robin stared at him for a second, then dropped his eyes. He was like a king incognito, a personage whom everyone recognizes but pretends for the sake of formality not to recognize. The fat man’s inefficient disguise was like Queen Victoria’s calling herself Mrs. Windsor-Balmoral.
The sheikh said, speaking in slow French, ‘These are the persons I spoke of, sir. Khussro, this is Osman.’
Robin made a low salaam. The fat man was the Turkish governor of the Basra Vilayet, whose name was not Osman. There was an etiquette in these affairs and Robin said, ‘Osman, I am honoured to know you.’
The fat man said, ‘Good.’ He had a squeaky voice, the robe muffled his mouth, and his French was bad, but he could be understood. ‘We have not time to waste. Khussro, I want you to tell your master that we are interested in your business, and for the same reason. You will have realized that if our neighbours should seek to trade in the south--with headquarters in, say, Bushire or Shiraz--neither of us will learn until too late whether they intend to open further markets to the east, in India perhaps, or to the west. Their western market would be--’
‘Here,’ said Robin.
‘Precisely. I do not think that would suit you?’
‘No.’ He could not speak for the British or Indian governments, but it was impossible that either of them could allow the Russians to install themselves on the Persian Gulf at the expense of Turkey.
The fat man continued, ‘Very well. Our masters will doubtless be discussing these matters in other places. I have no official position, you understand.’ The dark eyes flashed warningly, and Robin nodded. It was clear now why Abu Daabi had insisted that the appointment be for after dark. The fat man went on. ‘So I cannot speak officially, but there will be advantages if, like our masters, we smaller fry keep each other informed. The sheikh here will always know where to reach me. You will tell your master?’
Robin bowed. The fat man insisted, ‘The top one you will tell? The Lat?’
Robin said, ‘The Lat.’
‘Good.’ The fat man got up. ‘Now I have to go. Farewell. And remember!’ He bustled to the curtain, pushed it aside, and clanked down the passage. Robin hurried after him. ‘Excell--Osman, sir, we are in trouble. The neighbours of whom you spoke--some of them have prevented us from boarding our ship. They--’
‘Do you think I didn’t know that?’ The fat man chuckled delightedly and clapped Robin heavily on the back. ‘Of course I was going to take you down to the dock. I have to have my little joke sometimes.’
Unaware of Jagbir’s contemptuous stare fixed on his back, and still chuckling, he climbed into the waiting carriage. Jagbir and Robin followed, then a lieutenant aide-de-camp squeezed apologetically in, two mounted outriders took their places behind the two before, and His Excellency set off incognito for the dockside. If he had not been incognito there would have been two full troops of cavalry and a trumpeter.
Robin sank back in the seat between Jagbir and the aide-de-camp. Opposite, Osman sat alone, saying nothing, his dark eyes darting restlessly from side to side.
It was finished, and the ship waited on the tide to carry him home. Lenya Muralev had tried hard to kill him because he had found the truth. The resources and cunning of the Turkish Empire had been secretly at work and had confirmed that truth. Next year, or the year after, the Russians were coming, centre and south, their main weight south. That was the level of truth. It must be.
Even as the carriage jolted in a deep pothole and he smelled the rotting sewage in the river, he knew it could not be. The plan, on the level of truth, would be Muralev’s plan. But every line of Muralev’s body, every look from his shadowed blue eyes, denied that this was his place. Here he was living a deception foreign to his nature. Robin could read the message because in his own body and in his own eyes was the same warning. No god left his coin here for you to interpret, no flying bird its feather.
Hayling would understand, even if he did not agree. But how could the Lat, the Viceroy, be told of these things? In only one way. By finding and placing before him some of those mutable things called facts. Robin thought again of Alexander; the true proof of his power was his legend, yet some men--most men perhaps--would take one of his coins to be more positive evidence. It was not so. Coins could be coined; legends and mysteries, never.
He was on his way back. Almost at once, whether Hayling sent him or refused to send him, he’d have to go again. There was Anne waiting for him, but he’d have to go. He had found no solution to the private mystery or to the public problem. Somewhere coin and feather, Peter Muralev and Robin Savage, truth and deception, legend and fact, would come together.
At the docks the aide-de-camp scrambled down and whispered to the police lieutenant at the foot of the gangway. Robin and Jagbir went on board, the police lieutenant saluted, the aide-de-camp returned to the carriage, ‘Osman’ clattered away. A last tremendous blast from the siren, and the lascars ran the gangplank inboard. The lascars called out, and on the quayside men cast loose the hawsers. The ship drew away, her engines pounding and her single screw thudding heavily in the deep, fast tide.
CHAPTER 17
When some of the excitement had died down Anne left the tent, the telegram held tightly in her hand, and walked to the edge of the lake. The tents were spread in orderly confusion under the trees behind her. A belt of chenars and pines and deodars ringed the lake except on the far side, where a high wall enclosed a Kashmiri leper colony.
From the dining tent Caroline Savage’s quiet, penetrating voice called, ‘Tiffin time. Come along.’ Two banjos twanged to a stop as Robin’s stepsisters, two half-grown girls, answered the summons. The smooth voice of Shivsingh Rawan, Robin’s foster brother, the young Rajah of Kishanpur, called, ‘We’re coming, mother.’
She was not hungry. To-morrow Robin would be here. Here--the family encampment of Hildreths and Savages by the little lake outside Srinagar in the Vale of Kashmir. Robin. She stared at the lake but could not avoid seeing the wall, so she closed her eyes.
She turned to find Colonel Rodney Savage at her side. He took both her hands in his own, and she looked inquiringly up at him. He was tall and now, in his middle age, resembled a greying eagle. He had retained the sidewhiskers that used to be fashionable in his youth. They curled around on his thin, sunburned cheeks and gave him an air of strangeness, as if he had stepped down from a portrait gallery. His eyes were deep-set and icy-blue under undisciplined eyebrows. Black hairs sprouted from beneath the sleeves of his jacket, and grey bands streaked his thick jet hair. She had never met him until he and her father had arranged to take this leave together in Kashmir. They had done it so that when she had her babie
s both sides of the family would be present.
He was Robin’s father, and Robin did not like him. But she had found him, from the first minute, everything she expected a man to be. He shot wild birds, yet he loved them. He risked his life to kill ibex and markhor on the mountains, yet he spent more time talking of their wonderful ways than of how he had shot them. He drank steadily and had a fine port-and-leather complexion, but she had never seen him even remotely near drunkenness. He smoked strong black cigars and smelled entirely male, and his flesh was hard.
He said, ‘So your husband and my son are coming back to us to-morrow.’
She smiled uncertainly. ‘Are? They’re the same person.’ Colonel Savage said, ‘Are they? For your sake I had hoped not.’
She said, ‘Do you know what he’s been doing? I don’t want to know secret things, but I would like to find out what sort of life he’s been leading. It will make it easier these first few days if I know.’
‘I know a little, Anne. Hayling came down to the southern front specially to tell me. Robin’s work has taken him through some of the loneliest, wildest parts of Asia. He’s done the work brilliantly. What the work has done for him’--he gripped her hands tightly--’we’ll find out soon.’
She said slowly, ‘I wonder whether he felt the loneliness. Whether he thought of us sometimes.’
Her father-in-law hesitated, then said, ‘Not often, I’m afraid. We’d be deceiving ourselves if we imagined that he kept longing to be back with us, or even thinking much about us, any of us. A man in his position, on work like that, can think only of his circumstances from hour to hour, and of his task. We have to be content to be a sort of floor beneath his feet. Then at the end he may realize that the floor has been there all the time, supporting him. Then--he may wonder whether we’re a good floor or a poor one, wonder even whether he needs a floor at all.’
