Loving Monsters

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  – One night Milo introduced me to a tough old Arab with only half a foot who had sailed for years with Henry de Monfreid. De Monfreid? He was an astonishing French adventurer with an American father who couldn’t bear bourgeois life in Paris at the turn of the century and threw it all up to become a pirate in the Red Sea. That would have been in about 1910. He went to Djibouti and actually worked for the same merchant who had employed Rimbaud back in the eighteen-eighties. He soon discovered that the world’s biggest market for hashish was Egypt because it had recently been made illegal. In those days it came mainly from Greece, where it was a major export. De Monfreid devised a brilliant new smuggling route. He would buy the hash from villagers up in the Greek mountains, take it down to the port at Piraeus, load it as an innocent cargo on a steamer heading down through the Canal to the Indian Ocean, and offload it in Djibouti. Then he would smuggle it back up to Suez in a sailing craft of his own, a crude wooden boutre indistinguishable from a thousand other native vessels. Hugely risky. Bear in mind that this was during the First World War. Egypt and the Red Sea were even more than usually a hotbed of spies and informers living off the conflicting political designs of the great powers who intersected in the region. The British had the Canal; Lawrence of Arabia was in military intelligence and just about to get into gear to help the Arabs get rid of the Turks; the Ottoman Empire was fighting a rearguard action; the Germans were there; the French were there; the Italians were there. Plus the usual mixture of rogues, riff-raff and freebooters like de Monfreid himself, each looking for something to steal or someone to shop. It was an incredibly dangerous area and he had to run the gauntlet in his sailing boat all the way up the Red Sea and through the Gulf of Suez. The first time around he didn’t even have a reliable contact in Suez whom he could trust. He eventually got rid of the stuff to Greeks with family links to the growers he’d bought it from, and for nothing like its true value. By the time I arrived in Suez de Monfreid had retired or gone back to France or maybe he was pearl-diving down in Djibouti. But there were still plenty of people in Suez who had known him and there were even a few left like this old Arab Milo introduced me to who had actually sailed with him. I think they had run guns together.

  – By that time hash was heavily outlawed and the drugs trade which had once made Egypt famous had been much stamped on by Thomas Russell. Known as Russell Pasha, he was in charge of the Egyptian police until he retired after the Second World War. Do you know any Egyptian history? In de Monfreid’s day Russell’s predecessor, Harvey Pasha, had tried to do something about both drugs and prostitution. But not only was he an ass, he was hamstrung by laws called the Capitulations. These were a hangover from Ottoman days and had never been repealed. Effectively what they meant was that no foreigner in Egypt was subject to Egyptian taxes or law courts. Virtually every non-Egyptian in the country had a kind of diplomatic immunity. The year I arrived in Suez Capitulations were finally abolished, and although we foreigners were still immensely privileged we could no longer be quite so blithely lawless as in the past, especially with a man like Russell Pasha in charge of the police. So if the dangers of hash smuggling were increasing even as I landed in Suez, so were the rewards.

  – And that was what the Second Mate of the Otranto was doing. I soon found out they’d come by a slightly different route from ours on the Orontes and had stopped off at Piraeus after Naples. Some of the Orient liners did that, plus any number of other companies’ vessels. This red-haired fellow obviously had a contact in Piraeus who supplied him with hash. Presumably it came already moulded so it could be worn inside the shoes. Ah, those dear dead days before they’d thought of sniffer dogs! Then in Taufiq he’d simply hand it over to Milo for cash. Unfortunately for him the day I blundered in Milo had been unable to meet the ship and anyway it seems the Mate had never met him before: he normally turned the stuff over to an intermediary. As far as he was concerned anyone who came aboard in Taufiq knowing what was what and prepared to hand over twenty quid must be the right chap. It was a nice little sideline. What he didn’t realise was that the usual fellow had been arrested since his previous trip and all he knew of Milo was a brief physical description he’d been given in Piraeus. The poor man was so convinced I was an informer I expect he broke up the hash and flushed it into the harbour before I was back on deck.

  – The whole thing made me pretty thoughtful, I can tell you. I mean to say, five weeks’ salary disguised as a pair of filthy old cork insoles. Five weeks’ hideous tedium in Anderson & Green’s pesky office with Simpkins moaning on about his innards: all of it could be compressed into one nerve-racking transaction. Sooner or later any intelligent person considers such things, of course. Quick profits versus possible disaster. Would I dare? Do I have the nerve? And there’s seldom a clear-cut answer because everything depends on how desperate one is. The fact is, I wasn’t desperate. I had a decent education, no debts, no dependents, a British passport and a job. I told myself I should err on the side of caution but what I really meant was that the temptation wasn’t enticing enough. There was not much romance in petty smuggling. I felt I could do better, in the sense that each of us is suited to a particular kind of excitement and I already had some idea where mine might lie … Let me tell you a story.

  – One morning when I was about fifteen my father made me an odd proposition. Out of the blue over breakfast during the school holidays he asked me if I fancied going to a funeral. Just like that. Some big cheese at Lloyds had died and my father had been deputised to attend, probably representing his department or the agency or something. I’ve no idea why he asked me along. For company, perhaps, or because he thought it might be interesting. In any case I put on my only suit and went. It was held in one of those City churches. Wren? Gibbs? Hawksmoor? Very full, anyway, and with proper printed order-of-service cards. Lots of glossy top hats and left-over Edwardians in wing collars and spats. Afterwards we went on to the wake: a stand-up buffet in a hall with black beams, that’s all I can remember about the place. It was probably one of the livery halls.

  – I tucked myself into a corner and was doing quite well on crab sandwiches when I became aware of a man next to me doing even better. I can’t now remember his face but I can remember his presence, if you know what I mean. He was very easy, chatty, as if he’d singled me out as the only person in the room worth talking to. That certainly struck me at the time since I was easily the youngest and at an age when one hardly flatters oneself as being a fascinating conversationalist for an adult. I remember that and the speed with which he ate, which is the sort of thing that impresses schoolboys. I don’t know where my father had got to; I suppose he was circulating among colleagues and saying the right things. In any case this stranger must have assumed I was a relative of the deceased and I was obliged to confess I’d never met the man and couldn’t even recall his name from the service sheets in church. ‘Oh,’ said this chap, gobbling away at the sandwiches, ‘that’s shocking bad form. I didn’t know the fellow from Adam, either, but I certainly know who he was and where he worked.’ ‘But if you didn’t know him, why are you here?’ I must have asked. ‘I might ask you the same thing,’ he said, and then, ‘Can you keep a secret?’ Well, has anyone aged fifteen in the history of the world ever replied ‘No’ to that question? Of course I said I could, whereupon he confessed that he had only come for the food. I was a bit slow so he explained that he had no job, or rather that this was his job, and the dark suit he was wearing represented his only working clothes. I still didn’t understand. I expect I said I hadn’t known there was such a job as just going to funerals. Was he a professional mourner or a mute, or perhaps in charge of the catering? He nipped off to refill his plate and then came back and told me how it worked. What he did was to scan the columns of The Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Morning Post each day, note who was being married or buried and where, and simply attach himself to the occasion in the hope that sooner or later it would lead to a square meal. He said it worked perfectly nine times out of ten,
that he must have been to literally hundreds of weddings and funerals and had developed a pretty good nose for the ones that would be worth his while. What I liked about him was not just that he was so amazingly frank and confiding, which was flattering to a boy my age, but that he clearly assumed I would go into the same line of business in due course and needed some tips. ‘My main advice to a youngster like yourself, clearly at the outset of his career, is “Avoid the Jews.” Nice chaps and all that, and most generous with their nosh, but they’re so damned clannish they know everyone. One has much less chance of gatecrashing. Actually, not just Jews but pretty much all foreigners, I find. They’ve got a far better idea than we have of who a second cousin once removed is.’

  – Of course that brought me to my main question, which was how on earth did he get away with it? He was charmingly candid. ‘Well, of course, now and then I don’t, but that hasn’t happened for some time. The amazing thing is that it should work at all, but it does, over and over again. Most people if they don’t recognise you are far too embarrassed or polite to ask point-blank who you are. Especially at funerals. I once had to feign a weeping fit when that happened and I was most sympathetically escorted to somewhere quiet in order to compose myself. I was left alone in a drawing-room which happened to contain a decanter of the most glorious port I ever drank. You become accustomed to living a bit on the edge, just as you do to singing ‘Praise my soul the King of Heaven’ on a practically daily basis. You grow to like having to be alert all the time, carefully eavesdropping conversations for names, social nuances, atmosphere and suchlike. Of course, you need to have done your homework before coming. I’ve got Debrett and Who’s Who at home, a few solid reference books like that, and I take the social magazines and read the gossip columns. You’d be amazed how much one can get away with. “Of course we’ve met before?” says some lady with a black veil gropingly. She doesn’t care, anyway; this is just an ordeal she has to get through. All she wants to know is when she can slip away to be alone for five minutes with the gin in her handbag. “I doubt if you would remember me,” I say in that soft earnest tone you use when the Grim Reaper has given them all a nasty turn. “I used to work with Geoffrey years ago. One of the kindest and wittiest men it was ever my fortune to meet.” You can’t go wrong, you see. Nobody’s going to turn round and say that’s funny because Geoffrey was nearly as cruel as his conversation was dull. If I’ve allowed myself to get a wee bit tiddly on the bubbly at a wedding reception I might even pretend to be a very distant relative. It’s a bit risky, but so exciting I sometimes can’t resist. Apart from the food the advantage of weddings is that you have two families, each with their own friends, relatives and satellites. It’s perfect. Each side thinks you’re part of the other lot. So you can shake hands with complete strangers and say, “If you know of me at all, I fear it will be as the black sheep. I’ve spent most of these last twenty years in South Africa.” Everyone racks their brains but it’s a sure thing that every decent family will have some distant cousin who was banished to the Colonies. “Good God, you must be Roger’s … now let’s get this right, nephew? No, godson? Knew I’d get it. Well, good for you. Top up the old glass?” The most thrilling thing of all is to be invited back by the family after the reception. That’s damned dangerous. Still, by that stage nobody will ever challenge you outright. Quite unthinkable for a complete fraud to have got into the house, equally impossible for anyone to risk calling your bluff as you all sit down to luncheon. “Cousin Desmond,” you can hear yourself extemporising reminiscently in response to someone’s overheard remark. “Now there’s a name from the past. He was indeed in Jo’burg about then. Twenty-eight? Twenty-nine? Many’s the hand of gin rummy I had with him.” “Oh, surely you cannot mean that?” cries some sniffy old bird. “I’m quite certain the Canon would never have played those sorts of game. He was always a most serious young man at Lampeter.” Crikey, this Desmond was a canon, was he? Better watch it. Still, now you have some delicious choices open. Either you say “Oh, that Desmond. I do beg your pardon, I was thinking of someone quite else” and everyone has a nervous laugh and you take lots more cold salmon to cover up the hiatus; or you can say in a worldly but regretful tone, “Well, you know how it is at that age, so far from home …”, implying that gin rummy was followed in due course by strip poker. What I’m saying to you, young man, is that you must learn to observe people. Listen like a cat. Watch like a hawk. Miss nothing, and you can get away with anything. And on that note, and full to the brim with a complete stranger’s funeral bake-meats, I will take my leave of you. I wish you a long and happy life.’

  – I was pretty thrown by this, as you can imagine, and utterly fascinated at the same time. My father suddenly turned up and once outside he asked who that was I’d been talking to. It was a point of honour not to shop the man, and besides, he’d naturally never told me his name. I heard myself saying, ‘Oh, that was Rupert Barclay‚’ or ‘Henry Vansittart,’ just inventing a name, and my father said, ‘Ah yes, I thought I recognised him.’ I never forgot that. I never forgot the man at the funeral, either, but it was my father’s little social lie that really stuck. It so perfectly confirmed what my charming fraudster had just been saying. One could always start at an advantage because people were so scared of being thought ignorant. People want to believe: that’s the simple secret behind every scam, from the great religions down to freeloading crab sandwiches at a stranger’s function. They really do want to believe.

  – Well, there I was in Suez with all manner of tasty rackets going on around me, yet something told me they weren’t for me. Not on moral grounds, nor even because they were risky. No, it was simply that they weren’t my kind of racket. Even then I knew I would be more at home with misrepresentation of some kind. I wanted to be people other than myself. I’d been quite a good actor at school and very much taken by the whole idea of being able to project a different character if I chose. Maybe the fellow at the funeral had picked up on that: it takes one to know one, sort of thing. Have I mentioned that when I was a kid I used to pretend to be my own brother? Well, as you know, I haven’t got a brother. But if I was sent down to Starr & Britt to buy a cabbage, say, I would buy it and go off with it and dawdle around looking at the fire engines in the fire station opposite for ten minutes. Then I’d leave the bag with the woman in the sweetshop and nip back to the greengrocer and ask Mrs Britt if my twin brother had just been in. And she’d say, yes, he’s just bought a cabbage for your mum and honest to God, I can’t tell you two boys apart. It used to give me a thrill. It made me feel scot-free in some way as if there was nothing I couldn’t do because I could always pretend it had been my imaginary double. Even when I got into trouble and was caught and obviously the culprit, I still felt it wasn’t really me it was happening to because the real me was undetectable. A bit like the Invisible Man. You could see his gin and tonic being raised and lowered but you never glimpsed the man himself. Actually, I think that’s me to a T, although a biographer might not agree.

  – Now, the only one of Milo’s rackets in Suez that piqued my curiosity was his line in pornography. As I’m sure you know, generations of travellers and especially servicemen came to associate Suez with ‘feelthy postcards’. Most of them weren’t at all filthy, not by today’s standards. The enterprising were cashing in on that delightful piece of racist doublethink which made it possible to get away with pictures of girls with nothing on so long as they were not Europeans. Basically, the blacker and more ‘native’ they were the more you could have close-ups of their breasts and pretend that any interest they aroused was anthropological. The French always had a good line in these, especially from their North African colonies. In Egypt you could buy a lot of French stuff shot in Algeria. Girls with bare nipples would be subtitled something faintly educational like Jeune Mauresque. If the girls were decked out in finery or lying on a couch draped with saddle-rugs they would be given more provocative titles such as Odalisque or Une Ouled Nail, implying they were prostitutes and
would willingly remove their clothes for you even if you weren’t an anthropologist.

  – This kind of ‘meet-the-nations’ photography had been going on since at least the eighteen-seventies and in 1936 it was still a staple part of the stuff Milo was turning out from pirated plates. He had a mass of material to choose from. Various Brits had been at it for decades in India and Malaya; Germans like von Gloeden and von Plüschow had been busy in Sicily; Vincenzo Galdi did it in southern Italy. You know, places with warm climates and low incomes. Mostly they were the pictures on cards you dropped into the post-box in Suez or Port Taufiq to épater the folks at home. Milo had other lines that were very much feelthier, and that was where the real money was. –

  *

  It is hot up under the Caramanli’s roof. Milo is developing films in the dark room, Jayjay is next door pegging out fresh prints to dry on wires strung from wall to wall. Eyes, mouths, breasts and all manner of inflamed membranes are festooned across the room. The air smells of acetic acid. Unfortunately it is not possible to dry the prints on the hotel’s flat roof overhead because that is the province of the laundrywomen who each morning hang out the Caramanli’s yellowed sheets and threadbare towels. Jayjay has remarked that if these ladies are already steeled to the hotel’s bed linen they probably won’t be too shocked by pictures of Nubians mounting each other, but Milo is firm. He doesn’t give a hoot about outraging their sensibilities, it’s their gossip he doesn’t wish to incite.