The Miernik Dossier

by Charles McCarry

  “Do you believe they could have succeeded?” he asked. “With better planning and more skill, and in the absence of my Constable Mirghani, who opened fire before the order was given in order to warn Prince Kalash—yes. But they did not in fact succeed.”

  “Then you believe that Prince Kalash, even with his friends dead at his feet, would have surrendered to these fools?”

  “That, of course, was the unknown factor.”

  “You do not know my son. He would have died before submitting to capture. I admire your police work. It is impressive that you have all this information. But if a prince is murdered no good comes out of knowing who killed him. Prince Kalash would certainly have died along with his friends if the fight had gone the other way. Then what would you have told me? That his death was a mistake? I should not have been comforted.”

  At this point Prince Kalash entered. I repeated to him what I had just told the Amir. The prince received my report with more animation than his father had done. He was curious about the origins of the photograph he had found. “Find out where it comes from,” he said; “that information is very important.” I explained that the photograph had likely been supplied by the Soviet intelligence people. Tracing the photographer was not only an impossible job, but a meaningless one. Prince Kalash did not accept this line of argument; he wanted to know who in Geneva had betrayed him. I told him I would pursue the matter.

  It was apparent that the Amir would not again be anxious to risk Prince Kalash. I therefore presented to him an alternative plan. This involved his illegitimate son who is in a position of leadership in the ALF.

  “Highness, may I speak to you of this man Qemal who claims to be your child?” I asked.

  “He is my child,” the Amir said. “I remember his mother very well. She died young. The boy grew up here. I treated him as a son. One assumes that one’s sons will not become Communists.”

  All this I knew. The Amir must be permitted to speak rhetorically.

  “A son is a son,” I said. “The son of an Amir is always the son of an Amir. Not even Communists can change that. They can manipulate Qemal’s pride in his birth, but they cannot change that pride in its essentials. I know the boy. The fact that he is your son is the central fact of his life.”

  “Of course it is,” said the Amir. “Get to the point, Aly.” If he called me by my name I knew the storm had passed. “Highness, I ask you to treat Qemal as a son. I can get a message to him. I should like to tell him that he is welcome in this household. Bring him here on your word. Once he is here, let me speak to him— not as the head of the Special Branch but as your nephew and as his cousin. Let me tell him that if he delivers his Communist comrades to us, you will forgive him this foolishness.”

  “What good is that to him?” the Amir asked. “He wants more than my fatherly embrace. Look at what he’s done already. He wants power. He cannot help that, it’s in his blood. He has gone beyond forgiveness.”

  “The forgiveness need not be genuine.”

  The Amir’s eyes bored into the flesh of my face. “I do not,” he said, “betray my own son.”

  “The alternative is the death of many innocent men. I have told you of their plan to assassinate the leading figures of the government. Do you owe these men nothing, Highness? They have their positions because you do not object to them. All are honourable men. Many are members of this family. With the greatest respect, Highness, to do nothing is to betray them. We do not know what names are on the killing list of the ALF. God knows who we might send to his death.”

  The Amir closed his eyes and fell into one of his silences. This lasted for some time; it is uncanny how long he is able to remain still. As a child I believed that my uncle, when he closed his eyes and sat like a statue, was hearing the advice of the Prophet. Now, apparently, he was guided to a means of betraying Qemal without being himself obliged to play the traitor.

  “You may send your message to Qemal,” he said, opening his eyes. “But he must deal with Prince Kalash, who can make whatever promises he likes; Prince Kalash has no power to keep promises now. When he sits here as Amir he will not be bound by anything Prince Kalash has guaranteed.”

  Prince Kalash looked at me. He was as impassive as his father. I took my leave and began my preparations.

  77. NOTE BY THE KHARTOUM STATION.

  The information contained in the above memorandum did not come into our possession until 20 July, when Qasim returned to Khartoum. Qasim gave us no advance notice of his plan concerning Qemal—who was, of course, the agent we called “Firecracker.” It was therefore impossible to inform Qasim of Firecracker’s value to us, not to mention the considerable service he had already rendered to his country.

  It is our impression that Qasim’s proposals to the Amir were in the nature of a spur-of-the-moment attempt to salvage his operation to destroy the ALF and to rescue his own credit with the Amir. This turn of events could not have been anticipated except through advance briefing of Qasim on Firecracker’s role and identity. This would have constituted a breach of security that at the time was considered unacceptable.

  78. FROM MIERNIK’S DIARY.

  By last night I had regained control of myself. The killing unnerved me. As my own psychiatrist I know why only too well; the machine gun will never be my weapon. I see Mother’s face in every muzzle flash. How could I know those men would choose to attack us? Once they had done so, instinct took command. Some mystical force, occupying a place on the spectrum of emotion somewhere between rage and ecstasy, flooded into the cavity of my body. It is the primitive brain, not the mind, that controls men in all important matters. I did not consciously think of protecting Zofia, much less Ilona and the other males. One does not operate rationally at such moments. I ran into the darkness, meaning to kill, knowing that only murder would release me from the force that seized me. I had no thought for the lives of those men, no thought for the future, no thought for anything except the Sten gun that was dearer than any part of my own body.

  I do not dramatize; if anything, I fail to find language gorgeous enough to describe what I felt and what I did. The death-giver is beyond language, beyond thought, he enters another region of experience. No wonder the Society of Assassins, the SS, the Cheka took on the character of religious brotherhoods. They knew secrets other men dared not seize. It was only afterward, looking at those ragged blood-stained bodies, that I realized what I had done, and what my act meant in terms of the future. The dead men, in themselves, still had no reality for me. Only the act of killing had meaning. I realized that I had loved killing them. The after-emotion was similar, I think, to that which must be felt by a man who acts out an obsessive sexual fantasy. He dreams for years, lurks about schoolyards, reads in the newspaper of more courageous maniacs. At last he rapes a child. Joy is what he feels in fact; horror and remorse is what he knows he must feel in theory. He instructs his mind to repel the memory of ecstasy. The mind obeys, but the primitive brain lies down for a little happy sleep: he knows it will awake again, overpower the mind, and insist on a repetition of the crime. He watches over its cot with tenderness.

  Of course I knew who the victims were. Pathetic dolls manipulated by men like me. We plant the germ of an idea in them and send them out to die of their infection. Perhaps they were as happy when the bullets ripped into them as their ancestors would have been to receive the spear-blade that sent them to Allah. As they died in the moonlight did visions of Marx pass before them? Did an incantation by V. I. Lenin echo in their ears? The wretched will always find something they do not understand to die for. Death itself is their reward: Christ, Mohammed, and Beria must all have expired with a final little shiver of spiritual avarice, knowing that they had been the brokers of so much joy.

  Tonight—life! Or Kalash’s vision of it. He has himself been rather glum, but for different reasons from mine. To be the object of murder is not, for Kalash, a religious mystery but an insult to his position at the apex of the human species. Apparently he and his f
ather have worked out some suitable revenge, for today he was cheerful again. Late in the afternoon he had Paul and Nigel and me summoned to one of the gardens inside the walls of this astonishing palace. We found him sitting under a baobab tree whose branches provide a canopy above the little courtyard. A lion slept under a stone table a few feet away. (These beasts are household pets of the Khatar; slaves are specially trained to capture them as cubs and to acquaint them with human customs. They seem to be decorative rather than functional; I don’t believe they act as watchdogs, for example. Kalash in his blunt way had told Zofia and Ilona to be careful of them. “Girls who go near lions when they are menstruating often are killed. The beast smells blood and attacks. No amount of training can remedy this behavior. Otherwise they are quite harmless.” Kalash pays less attention to the lions than an Englishman to a dozing terrier. He is magnificent in his lack of sentimentality.)

  Kalash told us that he had arranged a party for us. Since Geneva he has talked about Somali girls, who are much valued here for their beauty and sexual ingenuity. From somewhere (probably the same corner of the palace where my sister and Ilona are sleeping) he had collected eight Somali girls—two for each of us. He had laid on a supper. Suitable clothing would be supplied to us by our servant boys. “Miernik,” he said, “I shouldn’t want your fastidiousness to interfere with your pleasure. I give you my word you have no disease to fear from these girls.” He set a time for the commencement of the party and left us.

  I had brought my diary with me and I remained in the garden after the others left with the lion snoring gently beside me. As I was writing a few moments later, Kalash reappeared. “Tomorrow morning,” he said, “I have to go out into the mountains on an errand. There are some rather interesting ruins along the way, and it occurred to me you might like to see them. I can only take one of you as I will be accompanied by a couple of my father’s men. You are the obvious companion. Paul and Nigel haven’t your interest in archaeology.” It developed that he was talking about the stone relicts of the Darfur dynasties, so of course I agreed to go. He assured me that he expected to spend a peaceful day. “I shouldn’t think you’ll need your Sten gun this time,” he said. On some of these ruins are paintings of Christian saints on horseback. It is an interesting cultural puzzle that no one will ever solve. I suspect that Kalash is as much descended from these wild kings as from the Prophet.

  Just after dark my boy appeared and helped me into the regalia Kalash had provided—robes and a turban, which the child, giggling, wound around my head, walking in circles with the end of the cloth in his hand while I sat on a stool; Going before me with a lamp, he guided me through the passageways of the palace and into a square room hung with mirrors. The mirrors were placed at floor level—sensible enough, since one sits on cushions laid on the carpets. Kalash and the others were already on hand, reclining behind low tables laid with platters of food. I joined them and was given a glass of tea by the boy, who then withdrew. We were quite alone, the first time I had been out of sight of servants since we arrived at the palace. Nigel gazed frankly at his reflection in the mirrors. “I rather like the look of myself in this outfit,” he said. “I think I have the figure for it. As for you, Miernik . . .” I did look odd, but if one is going to wear fancy dress it’s good to wear it in a place where masculine beauty is meaningless.

  Music began to play, filtering through a screened door. I suppose the musicians were in the next room. With the first notes, the Somali girls entered. Not one of them could have been more than fifteen. Their faces were gentle, unmarked by experience, and wreathed in smiles. They approached Kalash on their knees. In Arabic he said to them, “You are late and we are hungry.” They rose with a collective giggle and two of them joined each of us. One immediately unbuckled my sandals and began to rub my feet. The other sat beside me and put bits of food into my mouth with her fingers. After each mouthful she would wipe my lips with a cloth. Variations of this went on with Kalash and Paul and Nigel and their girls. I tried to speak to them in Arabic but discovered that they did not understand the language. It was not a verbal experience that Kalash had arranged for us.

  After a time the girls danced. They were not particularly graceful, but they believed that they were, and that was rather charming. One or the other of them from time to time would sing. There was much giggling. The girls neither ate nor drank. Kalash lay back, utterly relaxed, and accepted the food and the caresses. Paul and Nigel seemed able to approximate his nonchalance. As for me, I gradually lost the excruciating self-consciousness I had felt on entering the room in Arab clothing. The girls were so eager to please, and so obviously unable to imagine any life but the one they led, that inhibitions were irrelevant. In Europe what we were doing would have been an orgy which could only have taken place in a pornographic novel; in the Amir’s palace it was as ordinary as prayer.

  At length I was no longer hungry. The girls kept trying to feed me until I refused three or four times. (I suppose this is part of the etiquette.) Then they led me to an alcove, where we lay down again. They arranged my limbs, glancing and nodding at me until I indicated that I was in a position of perfect comfort. They then removed their clothes and lay down beside me. Their bodies were remarkably beautiful: perfect breasts, long tapered rib cages, round buttocks carried high at the back, and the straight-calved long legs of their race. The only flaw, to my Central European eye, were the navels, which were protuberant and about the size of a walnut. One girl knelt and stroked my face with her breasts. The other rubbed my legs. I was still fully clothed; she reached under the skirts of my robe. Soon she left off this massage, which was intensely pleasurable (she seemed to know the location of all the nerve centers in the joints of the toes, ankles, and knees).

  Biting, kissing, stroking, and tickling, one from the direction of the head and the other from the feet, the two girls met at the center of my body. As four hands and two mouths moved over my skin, I touched theirs. It was soft and smooth like a pelt, as if lacking pores; I have never felt such skin on a white woman. The girls were extremely inventive—though I suppose “inventive” is the wrong word. They had been trained in skills developed over generations by these desert people who look on appetite as a Slav looks on painting, as something which exalts and instructs each time it is experienced. One of the icons that will hang in my mind henceforth is this: a supple black girl gazing intently into my face with a look of great kindness, little lines of effort between her large eyes; she opens my lips and, counting my spasms, spits delicately into my open mouth in perfect rhythm with me.

  The girls cleaned themselves like cats and went to sleep. I rose quietly and stepped out of the alcove. In other alcoves, Paul and Nigel slept with their black girls twined around them. I saw nothing of Kalash, who doubtless copulated in some other more regal place. Outside the door, asleep on the bare stones, was my servant boy. He awoke, fetched his lamp, and led me back to my room. Even as I write this the odor of the Somali girls (pepper and musk) still clings to my nostrils and my skin tingles. I understand why sheiks and amirs fear revolution: who would want to live without Somali girls once he has had them?

  Miernik must. I think of what lies ahead. I know what I must do, which means taking myself out of the world for a time. What a queer successor to the desert saints is Miernik! What I have just done with the Somali girls is what those wild believers fought with prayer, hair shirt, and a diet of excrement. How they must have disgusted God. He was preparing temptations that make sex pale. In my desert, it is not pleasure and indulgence that provide the occasions of sin, but the opposite. In this desert, I plan meticulously to do what my nature tells me not to do: suffer, deny, betray. That is my assignment on earth; I sought it myself, and now—ten thousand kilometers from Warsaw—it is within my grasp. As earlier explorers passed through this continent looking for the source of the Nile, I trudge toward my rendezvous, seeking the very spot, the X on the map of political idealism, where the long river of futility empties into an ocean of sand.
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br />   O poetic! I wonder if God anticipated that Christianity (and all its branches that are the various forms of civilized politics) would prove to be the means by which men concealed their own nature from themselves. If so, He has a queer idea of mercy.

  79. REPORT BY AN OFFICER OF THE AMERICAN STATION IN KHARTOUM.

  1. On 11 July I proceeded west to the Wadi Abu Hamira to rendezvous with Firecracker. He did not appear, but I found his written report [reproduced in 73] buried in the roots of the acacia tree designated as a deaddrop. I left a message instructing him to report at this spot at 0200 on any day through 15 July. At 0200 on 12 July I found him awaiting me. Firecracker was in a highly nervous state and immediately asked me for one thousand pounds. He explained that he believed he might have to flee the country on short notice and he wanted to be well supplied with cash. I explained that his pay was being deposited regularly in Barclay’s Bank at Kampala in accordance with our agreement. I gave him fifty pounds (sterling) in five-pound notes and secured his thumb print on the receipt (attached).

  2. Firecracker was asked to identify “Richard.” He was unable to supply details. He assumes “Richard” is a Soviet officer who will provide advice and support to the ALF during the remainder of “Golgotha” and thereafter. Soviet control in Dar es Salaam has provided no details as to the means of transportation to be used by “Richard.” Firecracker is convinced that “Richard” will arrive by parachute, but that is, of course, pure speculation. I instructed Firecracker to obtain a photograph and full description of “Richard” immediately on his arrival.

  3. Firecracker stated that he fears for the safety of “Richard.” The execution of Ahmed, on what other members of the ALF believe were Soviet orders, has produced great anger in some of the men. So far this has been directed toward the Soviets, and not primarily against Firecracker, who was Abmed’s executioner. Firecracker concedes that he has not been able to assume full control of the ALF headquarters since Abmed’s death. The latter was, it would appear, a more popular and powerful figure than Firecracker led us to believe. Firecracker now thinks it possible that some members of the ALF will kill “Richard” on his arrival in revenge for the death of Ahmed. Firecracker states that he has argued against this course of action, pointing out that it would mean the loss of the ALF’s only source of money and arms. He believes that he will be able to restore his authority if given time, and stated his intention to radio Dar es Salaam recommending that “Richard’s” arrival be postponed. I advised against this action, stating that any such radio message would have the effect of arousing the suspicions of Firecracker’s putative Soviet superiors.