Arabesque

by Geoffrey Household

  It was about time, she admitted, that they closed down. The war was far away, and their branch of Intelligence could be left to the small and efficient band of professionals. Mr. Makrisi still seemed very busy, but she was not. She had no idea what he was up to; he was conspiratorial and uncommunicative.

  Major Furney passed her seat, stopped to examine some decorative cranes in a paddock behind the bushes, repassed her and then sat down.

  “It’s curious, Mrs. Herne, that we have never actually met before,” he said.

  “Isn’t it? I knew your face in Beirut, but not your name.”

  He thanked her very formally for her work. She couldn’t help feeling as if she were leaving school with an elaborate certificate. She realised, however, why Dion liked Guy Furney. The precise face could not hide the fact that he enjoyed himself. He might lack depth of character, but not of insight.

  “What I wanted to ask you,” he said, “is—what are your personal relations to Mr. Makrisi?”

  “We have very little personal relationship. He’s not a man one can help outside the game. I’ve darned his socks and looked after his diet a bit, but he doesn’t—well, he doesn’t encourage me.”

  “You like him, I suppose?” Furney asked.

  “Oh, yes. I’m so sorry for him.”

  “I’m glad your loyalty isn’t engaged in any way,” he said with a smile of relief.

  “My loyalty is exactly where it always has been, Major Furney.”

  “Yes,” he answered with some embarrassment. “I know it and I knew it. But that question is now—academic. Mrs. Herne, I have given Mr. Makrisi no work whatever for weeks. Does that surprise you?”

  “I suppose he has been making contacts for the future,” she said.

  “He had been busy?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m uneasy.”

  “Major Furney, it is utterly inconceivable,” Armande answered directly, “that Major Montagne would work for the enemy.”

  “I’m happy you said that, though it only confirms what I too was sure of. But then, what is he doing?”

  “I’m not in the picture enough to know.”

  “No, of course not. That was for your own safety, you see. Have you any idea whom he is seeing?”

  “There have been some Poles,” said Armande.

  “Could they be Russians?”

  “Not this lot.”

  “French? Jews?”

  “He’s the most bitter anti-Semite I ever met.”

  “It rankles, does it?”

  “In the bottom of his heart and all through.”

  “Arabs?” Furney asked. “Has he anything to do with Arabs?”

  “Naturally. All the time off and on. But you know who they are, I suppose. And there’s no one new.”

  “Dion Prayle said—You know his extraordinary snap judgments?”

  Armande did. It amused her that the Army should have picked up the Christian name which she had chosen for him. Dion, no longer self-conscious after her approval, had published himself as Dion.

  “Well when I first put you and Montagne on the job, I asked him to give me his impression on Montagne. He said that he had an inner light, and it wasn’t mine.”

  Armande warmed to Dion’s words, coming secondhand out of past time. Darling Dion! Like some twisted medieval alchemist—incomprehensible, but so often right.

  “That describes Montagne well,” she said, smiling.

  “But, he’s done splendidly for us. So have you.”

  “That doesn’t mean we don’t have a private life.”

  “No. And now there’s time for it. Could he be playing for the French? He’s never been particularly pro-British.”

  “He has not forgiven either French or British,” said Armande slowly. “And he doesn’t care what happens to either of us so long as we down Hitler. I hate that in him, but there it is.”

  “That sounds as if he might be a communist.”

  “He isn’t, Major Furney. He despairs of politics. He could be an anarchist, except that he’s too intelligent, fiendishly intelligent.”

  “Fiendishly? Inner light?” Furney repeated, a slight raising of his voice showing that he deprecated such exaggeration. “I wonder if you and Dion Prayle aren’t too much impressed by that satanic look of his. He always had it, you know. Well, put a name to all your apocalyptic suspicions, will you?”

  “How?”

  “Watch him.”

  “I’ve no organisation except his.”

  “I’ll give you the start of one,” he said. “Do you remember a certain Rashid, Rashid Abd-er-Rahman ibn Ajjueyn?”

  “Rashid! Very well.”

  “He’s devoted to you. He’d take your orders, and raise a few of his people to carry them out.”

  “Where is Major Honeymill?”

  “D.S.O. Posthumous, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh, no! Poor Toots!” Armande protested, fighting the shock of sorrow and her tears. “I didn’t know! I haven’t spoken for months to anybody in the army but Dion.”

  “They were playing hell with Rommel’s communications, and based on nothing themselves. They knew it couldn’t go on for ever.”

  “And Rashid got clear?”

  “Yes. He was wounded. But he and the few who were left passed clean through a German diversion carrying Honeymill’s body, and buried him at Derna. Rashid is out of hospital now, and at a loose end.”

  Armande compelled herself to concentrate.

  “He fought against us in Palestine, you know,” she warned him.

  “That doesn’t matter. Arabs give themselves to people, not causes. Rashid belongs to anyone he admires. Would you like him?”

  “More than ever—if you are satisfied.”

  Major Furner looked at her primly over his glasses.

  “I—er—don’t upset him, will you?”

  “I meant,” she replied with a Mona Lisa smile, “that it’s easier for me than it was to keep him as a friend.”

  “That’s all then. You can ring me up and fix a meeting whenever you need to talk. Is there anything else that you think you are likely to want?”

  “Could you help me to pay a debt?”

  “How much?”

  “Not that kind. A debt of friendship. You know the Rumanian I used to dance with at the Casino, and her mother?”

  “Indeed I do. A pure Byzantine type. Most interesting.”

  “I want her to have a real chance. Aren’t there empty planes going to South Africa?”

  “There are. But I can’t go shipping off pet cabaret girls. Only generals can do that.”

  “Suppose she had worked for you and her life were in danger?” Armande suggested.

  “Is it?”

  “Not in the least. But if it were, you’d put her on a plane.”

  “Oh my aunt! And her mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “They keep right out of the war. All Floarea Pitescu wants is to dance in the capital of the winner. I think Johannesburg would be a good stop on the way.”

  “I can’t do it. Really I can’t,” he said regretfully.

  “Whisper, Major Furney. The simple soldiery will believe anything.”

  Armande could not keep back her tears. All this while she had forced down a grim, military cover upon her longing for a lonely minute in which to weep for Toots; and now, thinking with half her mind of that day when he had first met and comforted her, the memory of his voice and of his laughing words, which she had just used in his own tone, came back to her too vividly.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Mrs. Herne,” Guy Furney was repeating. “In the end I’m just a mass of files like the rest of them. Give me their passports, and I’ll do it. I promise you it shall be done.”

  He patted her hand in agitation. Armande choked on a hoarse sound that was neither a laugh nor a sob. She who had never deliberately used tears on a man was childishly, ironically, astonished to discover how effective they were.

  Two days later Rashid c
ame to see her. She sat him, gallantly protesting, down on a sofa while she mixed a drink of heroic size. Drinks, furniture, flat—none of them belonged to her. This floating life did not disturb her, for Dion Prayle represented the reality of past and future. Her present, wrapped in this chrysalis of government possessions, was unimportant.

  Rashid had collected a Military Gross, and he pointed out the ribbon with a proud and reverent forefinger. Armande, too, was impressed, for the army, after nearly four years of fighting, had no medals later than the green and purple of the pre-war Palestine campaign—and Rashid was most certainly not entitled to that.

  He had none of the inhibitions of the British officer. He told the exploits of Honeymill’s force in full and fantastic detail. The flashing eyes, the rhythmic sentences, the quick, stabbing movements of head and hands, while his seated body preserved its dignity, reminded her of storytellers in the bazaar. There were occasional mentions of Alexander and Montgomery, presiding or interfering like Homeric gods, but the war in the desert, as handed on to Arab poets of the future, was evidently to be a personal struggle between Rashid and Rommel.

  “We fought with the British as equal to equal. We have beaten the Germans. And now we will deal with the Jews,” declared Rashid as a peroration.

  “Rashid Bey, shame on you!”

  Rashid, unabashed, happily patted the unseen knife that lay upon his lean stomach.

  “Willah!” he cried in his deep, gargling voice. “Only the British stand between the Jews and this! And the British are going. Everyone says so. Then we shall have Americans, have seen them. They can fight. But they will not fight for the Jews as you did.”

  “Café talk, Rashid,” she said in gentle reproof.

  “I repeat what they say,” he admitted. “Who am I to know the truth? Perhaps there will be no Americans. Perhaps the British will stay for ever, and my home is ever open to them. But I think they will leave us alone with the Jews.”

  “And if you are—haven’t they a secret army called the Hagana, and trained by us too? Are you so sure?”

  “I am a soldier. Mrs. Armande. By God, I have no other trade, and I understand it. I know the Hagana. They will die like men. They will win every battle against us, but they cannot be everywhere at once. The Jews are surrounded by Islam. If we raid them, they can punish us. They will. But they cannot occupy, for there is nothing to occupy. How then will they force us to peace?”

  “Damascus isn’t far away.”

  “By God, Mrs. Armande, you should be a soldier! Your thought has the sharpness of the sword. Well, let them take Damascus—but they would need more warrior Jews than there are in the world to hold it! And meanwhile, Damascus is farther from Tel Aviv than Tel Aviv from Jordan.”

  She let Rashid rave himself out, aware that in the unfamiliar, exciting presence of a European woman he became intoxicated by his own personality. To Rashid, Armande guessed, she was real and solid and a friend, but incredible. It was hard to imagine a parallel experience for herself; to her and her like no social situation was wholly unprecedented. She could have talked to a black chieftain or a Siberian peasant with equal ease, knowing, instinctively, what was the common ground, and, historically, what were the obvious differences. Perhaps if the black chieftain had been educated at Oxford and yet wore no clothes at all, she would encounter something of what Rashid felt towards a woman with whom his intellect and emotions effortlessly marched, who yet broke every one of his traditions and conventions.

  She told him as much as it was wise for him to know: that the British Secret Service (to him, who would be impressed by it, she used the unnecessarily dramatic name) wanted information about the movements and contacts of a Mr. Makrisi. When he was ready, he could come to her flat, meet this Mr. Makrisi and also leave with him, so that any men he might post in the street could recognise the person to be followed.

  Armande herself knew where Mr. Makrisi was likely to be found at certain hours; thus, if she were not suspected, it was child’s play to put Rashid’s men back on his track when they lost it. She did not like this assignment; it tasted of treachery. She had, after all, worked with Montagne for some eight months, always loyally and sometimes admiringly. She was sure that Furney’s uneasiness was justified—his vague suspicions squared too well with her own—but she hoped with all her heart that Montagne was not engaged in anything that need be taken over-seriously, and that his activities could be unobtrusively checked in good time.

  When she brought the two together, Rashid immediately disliked Mr. Makrisi; he was so ceremoniously polite that it was obvious. She knew the reason. Mr. Makrisi could not keep out of his voice that faint irony with which the French, except for their rare spirits born to command, were wont to treat Arab peoples of whatever religion. Rashid might have put up with this from a Frenchman, simply assuming that it was one of the inevitable and unimportant European discourtesies, but he resented the tone on a little Egyptian clerk.

  Fortunately their conversation was limited, for Rashid’s arabic was the classical tongue of northern Arabia, and Montagne’s was his own personal adaptation from the Algerian. Armande was frequently called on to interpret through French and English.

  “He won the war all alone, your friend,” said Montagne.

  “Perhaps. But you are not to annoy him,” Armande answered.

  “Annoy him? I? I adore the Tartarins. I envy them. Do you not know, even you,” he cried bitterly, “how I wish that I had died at Bir Hachim?”

  “What does he say of Bir Hachim?” asked Rashid.

  “That the French, too, fought magnificently,” Armande replied, not wishing to translate exactly and thus arouse a suspicion of Mr. Makrisi’s true nationality.

  Rashid, finding at last a subject upon which he could get to know his quarry, proceeded to map the battle with the aid of cushions. Montagne added a rolled-up tablecloth to represent the enveloping Germans and Italians, and lumps of sugar for the minefields. As Rashid had actually seen the ground, and Montagne had read everything on the engagement that he could borrow from Furner, there was room for argument; Rashid, with proper subtlety, allowed Mr. Makrisi the best of it. Armande relaxed in her chair and let them play happily upon the floor. They left together, still discussing Bir Hachim, and on the friendliest terms.

  During the next three weeks Rashid called several times at the flat for additional information on Mr. Makrisi, and once with a dashing, blustering demand for money to reward his men. He was evasive, difficult, exclamatory, claiming results but refusing to admit what they were. Armande, taught by Wadiah and clients at the Casino, knew her Arabs. It was not hard for her. Whether Christian or Moslem, they resembled European woman so much more than European man. They welcomed hypocrisy so long as it was pleasant; they surrendered instantly to a mixture of strength and courtesy, but felt an instinctive and unforgiving dislike of those who were incapable of either. She waited patiently and took pains that Rashid should be devoted to her as a woman whatever he might think of her as an agent.

  At last he came to report, grinning with such candour and confidence that Armande knew perfectly well he was determined to tell no more than half the truth.

  “It was easy,” he said. “He told me in the first week. He wanted me to work for the Arabs.”

  “Against whom?”

  “The Jews, of course.”

  “That would be against us. Against me, Rashid Bey.”

  “I do not know. Perhaps. But who am I? What do you know of Makrisi’s friends, Mrs. Armande?”

  “Nothing,” she answered, smiling. “I want you to tell me.”

  “Believe me, Mrs. Armande, I am out of politics. I am a soldier.”

  “You are all a soldier should be, Rashid Bey.”

  “By God, you are beautiful! I would give three hundred black goats to your father for you.”

  “But I am already married, my dear. And I have explained to you that our marriage is as serious as yours.”

  “Then we are friends for always. Brot
her and sister as if we had played in the same dust. And I will never betray you.”

  “Nor will I betray you, my brother Rashid.”

  “And you remember Major Toots,” he continued with some agitation. “You know how I loved him. I will do nothing that he would not order.”

  Armande suddenly saw light. This magnificent creature, nervously advancing and retreating, was full of mistrust. He suspected that he was being double-crossed, and that, so far from being engaged to report on Mr. Makrisi. Makrisi was really engaged to report on him.

  “Rashid,” she said, “I too love the memory of Major Toots. I will never ask you to do anything that he would not order. Tell me—why do you think I doubted you?”

  “By God. I thought no such thing!”

  “But if you had thought so, why would you have thought it?”

  Rashid grinned with delight at this courtesy.

  “Why, Mrs. Armande? Billah! I will tell you why. Because your Makrisi incites me against the Jews, yet he makes secret visits to a house of Jews.”

  “What about it? Can’t he have friends of all religions, as you and I?”

  “Yes, but he is not open as you and I. My men have watched him. He goes secretly to this house. Two of the Jews he meets in a café near the station, also secretly, and once he gave them a small parcel. This is not mere friendship. This is what you told me to find. But what does it mean? Am I the hunter or the gazelle?”

  “The hunter,” she said, “and a very good one, my dear. I can’t make any more of this than you, but we will see what they think higher up.”

  Armande decided to test Montagne herself before she made any report, and arranged, by a pretence of aimless boredom, for him to invite her to dinner at one of the small native eating places which he patronised. She had a cautious respect for Montagne’s acute instinct for danger, sharpened by years of official and unofficial intrigue, but she reckoned that there would be nothing for him to suspect so long as she stayed within a part that was or had been natural to her. She gave deliberate expression to the worst in her—moody resentment of her treatment by Abu Tisein. She had, in fact, very little resentment left, only a broad, warm, healthy anger. It was absurd to brood over a petty black-listing by Security when she was the trusted agent of a department of Intelligence at least as secret and as important to the war.