Since it was the Jewish Sabbath, Armande was reasonably certain of finding David Nachmias at home. He was not religious, but he conformed. The Agency employees, whose personal creeds varied from atheism to a mild infection of philosophical Judaism, were careful as bank managers in a town of Methodists to keep their activities unobtrusive on the day of rest.
She called him up, and guardedly, as she thought, indicated trouble. Abu Tisein abruptly cut the conversation short, and said that he would come at once to see her. Armande was piqued that he should doubt her caution on the telephone. The click of the receiver as he replaced it was sharp as a rebuke from a commanding officer.
She tidied her room and put away the overalls. For David Nachmias she was businesslike—not, however, in the sweater and skirt she habitually wore at her army office, but with the smartness of Calinot’s former secretary. Calinot’s secretary, she remembered, had been a very model of discretion on telephones, and had not, Repeat Not, changed since.
Her resentment vanished as soon as David Nachmias entered the room. Slow, massive and courteous, it was no wonder that Arabs liked him. He asked her immediately of Fouad, and she lied boldly that he had gone. That was her own business—and she had ensured that there would be no smell but flowers and a faint memory of perfume.
Armande gave him coffee, and told him of the sergeant’s visit. Abu Tisein listened unperturbed, changing one cigarette for another so smoothly that his chain-smoking was as natural and unnoticeable as the rise and fall of his chest. He did not interrupt her with a single question. His brown eyes held a mild and fatherly interest.
“We have made a mistake, Madame,” he said at last.
Armande felt only pleasure at the we. If any mistake had been made, Abu Tisein had made it, but she was ready enough to be associated with him.
“I could not guess that the French would collect arms in the Lebanon,” he admitted frankly. “It seems incredible that you, the British, should occupy a country and then allow to others so intimate a detail of administration. Well, well, you could have thought of no surer way of making the French unpopular.”
Abu Tisein relaxed into silent contemplation of his coffee. Armande watched him, fascinated; she had never seen a man think with so little outward sign of any mental processes at all. After some minutes she ventured to recall him to her own problem.
“What shall I tell these security people? Can I mention your name?”
“I would rather you did not as yet,” he replied indifferently. “I will see them myself.”
“As you like, of course.”
“After all, it is not an affair for policemen.”
“I suppose they have to do what they are told,” Armande answered, by her tone lightly defending Sergeant Prayle’s interference.
“True. Sometimes they must act. And action in the dark is always foolish. Is he honest, this sergeant?”
“Yes,” she said—and then wondered at her unhesitating reply. The odd scraps that she had heard from Prayle of his past life and present opinions were far from a guarantee of honesty.
“I know very little about them,” replied Nachmias apologetically.
“It seems so odd that none of these hush-hush organisations should be able to check up on each other. Isn’t there any one department which knows all the secrets?”
“Probably. But it is very far away. What is this Field Security? I know their officers. Yet I do not know exactly what they do.”
“A sort of comic Gestapo,” she answered.
“What? Gestapo? Here in Palestine?”
Abu Tisein looked almost angry.
“The completest amateurs!” Armande reassured him.
“All the more dangerous. The professional policeman is without too much enthusiasm. He is afraid of his job.”
“But what did happen to the arms?” she asked, emboldened by his nervousness to put the direct question.
“As you promised Wadiah, they were collected by soldiers in uniform.”
“Then what is all the fuss about?” Armande’s great eyes caressed him, soft with the tender amusement of a mother at the unnecessary evasions of her sons. “You have only to tell the general what happened.”
Nachmias did not respond. His face remained calm as a sultry summer evening.
“Madame, consider what you know. Wadiah is not lying. Prayle is not lying. But is it not possible that Major Montagne is lying?”
“I don’t understand. When?”
“I suggest to you that he knew all about the deal. He was lying when he showed surprise.”
“But why should he say he hasn’t got the arms, if he has?” she asked with some agitation. “I don’t understand. You ought to let me know what I have done.”
“You are aware, Madame, that the French are divided into two parties?”
“Vaguely. But they didn’t matter.”
“Perhaps not, when you were at Beirut in the days of their first enthusiasm. Now they do matter. There might even be open, violent collision. Catholics and royalists on one side, socialists and communists on the other. Well, Madame, imagine that I was ordered to give arms to the left wing and not to the right. Do you understand now? Major Montagne can never say that he had Wadiah’s machine guns. Nor can we. And the greatest, the very greatest discretion is essential.”
Armande felt utter revulsion from what she had done, from Nachmias and from the wasted year of her life, that waste which had been forgotten in triumph—and what a triumph! Then men had time for this kind of ugly intrigue in the midst of a war for life and death? Poor, gallant France still keeping up its suicidal feuds in exile, and her own country encouraging and able and ready to split a helpless ally! Then what was truth, and where in this miserable, needless conflict was it? If this were British policy, then all the accusations of French and German and Jew against perfidious Albion were justified. Divide and rule, divide and rule—it was no better than Hitler’s conquer and rule.
Her eyes filled with tears. They spread upon her cheek before she could stop them.
“Madame …” protested David Nachmias.
“It is nothing,” she answered. “Leave me alone. I shall be all right.”
“But what is it?”
“Leave me alone. It’s not your fault. I should have known. These things have to be.”
“But what you did was magnificent!”
“Ours not to reason why!” she cried hysterically. “Magnificent? Magnificently filthy! Wadiah is worth all of you.”
“He is. I admit it. But still, Madame, I do not understand.”
“No? Oh God, David Nachmias, are we living a hundred years ago? It was the fashion then—this beastly, crooked cleverness. But that is not what I thought I was serving. That is not why I am in the Middle East. I haven’t a country any longer after what you have told me. Don’t you see that I can never work for you again?”
“As you wish, Madame,” began Abu Tisein severely. “But you must never—”
“Never! Do you think I would talk of an indecency like that? Do you think I want to remember it myself? Oh, leave me and leave it, and go and build your Palestine. That at least is clean.”
Abu Tisein’s eyes were expressionless. There was a hint of pity in them, but neither protest at her emotion nor any fear of it. His very presence was a reminder that nothing mattered. Accept, accept, always accept! She was bitter at his complacence, but that calm made it easier for her to gain control of herself.
“I am sorry,” she said.
“I have been very mistaken in you, Madame,” he murmured regretfully.
“I dare say. I am sorry,” she repeated.
“I do not mean that as a criticism,” Nachmias assured her gently, “or only of myself. You were so self-possessed in Beirut—almost Oriental. I thought … well, it doesn’t matter what I thought. I was wrong.”
“A poule de luxe, like the rest of them,” said Armande savagely, flushing at her own vehemence.
“No! Never!” protested Abu Tisei
n.
Her angry desire to shake him out of his tranquillity had been well and unexpectedly fulfilled. She was sourly amused to see that he was shocked.
“Never, Madame, I assure you! But I thought that you cared for nothing, you understand, but purposes of your own. That was the impression you gave: that you were waiting for—for power to come to you. Power, yes, I thought you wanted that; but not through the methods of a … of ordinary women. And you have power. You are dangerous, Madame.”
“I am very weary of being called a dangerous woman,” said Armande, her tone deliberately implying that she was bored by such stupidity.
“Then be more open, more European.”
“More open?” she asked ironically.
Her respect for David Nachmias was vanishing. Hero of secret campaigns he might be—but to leave himself exposed to such a thrust!
“But that—that is it!” exclaimed Abu Tisein, rising with a slow, yet agitated dignity from his chair. “We are children in your hands. And why? What do you want? I said you must be more open. I do not mean more indiscreet and you know it. Discreet? Of course you will be discreet. You yourself might find difficulties if you were not.”
“No daggers, please, Mr. Nachmias.”
“And there again! Will you tell me what you are thinking? Not a word! Not a word!”
“But why so much mystery?” asked Armande. “You call me dangerous. You tell me to be discreet. You tell me to be more open. You threaten me. And all the time I am not thinking at all. I am just listening.”
“For what?”
“For nothing at all.”
“And when you are alone, what do you think then?”
Armande smiled. There was no answer to so stupid or so deep a question.
“M. Nachmias, I shall not speak a word of what has passed between us. So far as all this official curiosity goes, you will satisfy it. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“Yes. And I shall do so.”
“And give my compliments to you charming wife. We shall see each other often, I hope.”
“Good-bye, Madame.”
“Good-bye. And do not worry about your secrets,” she added with a smile.
Chapter Eight
The Heathen
After leaving Armande’s flat Sergeant Prayle went slowly downstairs, stopping on the three landings to read the cards and name plates on the front doors. He had no conscious professional interest; as a civilian he would have done the same—to the exasperation of anyone walking with him who happened to be in a hurry. He liked to acquire an imaginative picture, which might or might not be true, of how people lived and why they lived where they did.
On each floor there were two doors. On the ground floor there was a third door, facing the entrance to the block and unlatched. This he opened, being curious about the layout of the flats, and discovered the furnace, boiler and oil tank. Only then did it occur to him that if the door had a hole for an eye, an hour or two on watch might be profitable. Should Armande go out to see the secret department for which she believed she was working, she might—though God help him if he were caught!—be followed; and if anybody interesting came, he could tell by listening carefully to the steps whether the visitor had gone up to her penthouse.
The Sabbath peace was over the house. There was not a sound from the tenants replete with lunch and patriotic piety. Sergeant Prayle gingerly opened the furnace doors. It seemed impossible to heat a poker in the oil jets. He twiddled a cock in the same abstracted curiosity with which he opened the throttle, and produced a blast of flame that seemed, for a panic-stricken second, uncontrollable. By nervous trial and error he mastered the mechanism, then heated a thin bar of old iron, and bored a hole in the top let-hand corner of the door, above the hinge.
As evening drew nearer, the house awoke. A plump and pretty woman, all smiles and dirndl, came gamboling down the stairs with a merry little daughter. Two old men with beards followed, and hung about arguing in the hall before they surrendered to the winter sun. Then entered four earnest and respectable citizens with portfolios of music under their arms; they stopped at the floor where a Dr. Finkelkraut (of Philosophy) had one flat, and a Dr. Pincas (of Economics) the other. Shortly afterwards came Abu Tisein. He walked straight to the boiler room, threw open the door and looked inside. When Prayle, flattened against the wall, recovered from his surprise at this decisive and evidently habitual precaution, Abu Tisein’s steps were travelling upwards. The sergeant waited long enough to be sure of Nachmias’s destination, then hastily put a block of buildings between himself and Armande’s roof.
He returned to the office in a dream of Armande. There was a smack of youth in this Fouad business, just sheer, impulsive, generous youth. Impulsive and alone—didn’t that give the key to the fate of Wadiah’s arms? She was an adorable, blazing little fool, for all those mannerisms which provoked him, a fine little fool going her own way boldly up the wrong street. Whatever she had done, he was certain that she was justified by his own standards, but those standards were a damned sight too intangible for the army.
He found Sergeant MacKinnon very ready to leave the office in charge of a duty clerk, and to start the Saturday evening’s serious drinking. They settled down in the back room of an Arab hotel, which catered specially for quiet and thirsty sergeants. Prayle laid himself out to be entertaining. He found this only too easy, as the double whiskies came in and the empty glasses went out, until the sober observer within him questioned whether he was being amusing to anyone but himself. That bottomless pit of a Scot, however, was at last slowly mellowing, and began to talk Palestine. That was where Prayle wanted him.
“How’s the local recruiting going?” Prayle asked.
“More Jews than Arabs we’re getting.”
“Nice, clean fun for them to be at the right end of a tommy gun for once.”
“Well, I wouldna’ say that doesna’ count for the poor bastards,” said MacKinnon judiciously. “But ’ties also a grand chance to hae the Hagana trained by British sergeant-majors. A fine little army the Jews will have after the war, Sergeant Prayle, for they’ve Scots instructors at the depot.”
“No trouble in getting a man into one of the Arab companies, I suppose?”
“Verra few questions asked. But what question d’ye think would be hard for him to answer?” asked MacKinnon acutely.
Sergeant Prayle took refuge in obscurities until two more doubles had strengthened the bonds of good fellowship.
“Well,” he said at last, “the truth is, bo, that the man’s got a good name, but he’d better have another.”
“Ye’ll answer for him in all that matters? And I dinna mean their national sports of rape and murder.”
“He’s O.K. He’s a fighting man, and he’ll take to his officers.”
“Now ye shouldna’ tell me nor the skipper unnecessary details. Our responsibility for this country is verra grave. Here’s to ye, Sergeant Prayle! Ye’re a credit to the Corps, mon, Ye’ll be wanting some papers for him, I take it?”
“Difficult?”
“If he were a Jew, he couldna’ get a false identity without the order of the Jewish Agency. But Johnny Arab is an old soldier—he puts finance before politics, if ye see what I mean. Has your chum five pounds to spare?”
“If I can get a casual.”
“Aye, the skipper will do that for you. Well now, I’ve a friend—” MacKinnon looked fiercely at Sergeant Prayle—“and she’s a schoolteacher and a respectable girl, and I’ll thank ye not to mention her name in the office, for there’s my own reputation to be considered as well as hers. Her father is the mukhtar of a Christian village—if ye can call them Christian, for to my way of thinking it’s wog popery and naething more. Now if ye see him and say ye come from me, maybe he’ll do your dir-r-rty business. And if ye’ll gie your glass to the black man with the grin on his face, he’ll fill it for ye, and then we’ll have a bite to eat.”
Prayle downed another double whisky, got up and grimly focu
ssed the door. Not for anything would he have it said or admit that he could not mix business with pleasure without passing out. Sergeant MacKinnon rose with no less dignity. He drew himself to attention and stood bold upright. Prayle’s sober observer noticed with admiration that MacKinnon was not even swaying.
“Mon Prayle,” said the Scot, “I dinna hold with foul language to foreigners. But”—his indignant voice rang clear and steady as a bugle—“there has been ar-r-raq in the whusky!”
MacKinnon, still holding himself with soldierly stiffness, leaned from the perpendicular and crashed full length to the floor; once there, he wriggled twice, curled up his legs and settled down with a comfortable snore to the sleep of a professional soldier who was accustomed, whatever the night had brought, to parade at 6 a.m., smart, clear-eyed and clean-shaven.
Sergeant Prayle took him home in a taxi, receiving sympathetic assistance at both ends of the journey, and put him, still sleeping, to bed. Methodically he wrote down the Mukhtar’s name and address, and himself rolled into his blankets.
In the morning he took an Arab bus to the village. He could not read his own writing of the night before, but fortunately remembered the name. It was a peaceful hollow among the hills, some ten miles from Jerusalem, seeming much as the Crusaders had left it, with trees, an eager spring and a church built over the imprint of Elijah’s head. From his fellow passengers of all three religions Prayle learned that originally the village had been a Moslem holy place (for to them, too, Elijah was a respectable prophet) and had been handed over to the Christians by one of the sporting bargains common in the twelfth century. The Jews, for once in a position to apply the higher criticism, pointed out that the mark of a head which really existed, was imprinted in late Roman concrete.
The Mukhtar had an exaggerated respect for Sergeant MacKinnon and all his works; the sergeant’s name and the cap badge of the Intelligence Corps were sufficient introductions for any business. Prayle’s courtesies were cut short as the Mukhtar plied him with a light white wine, which did a world of good to his aching head, and then hurried out to kill chickens for a feast.
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