A Little White Death

by John Lawton

  ‘Last October he was due three weeks’ home leave. He never went home. Charlie’s idea of leave was Spain or Morocco – I never heard of him taking home leave to go home to England. Perhaps you will say this is just as well – a man living under a cloud. Perhaps he did pick places where no one gave a damn whether he’d spied for Russia or even whether he still spied for Russia. Last year he chose to go home. He spent his usual ten days in Morocco and then he flew on to England. He visited his mother in Dorset – I gather they had not met in years – and he spent a weekend in London – I think he might have done the round of his old haunts, but the look on your face, Mr Troy, tells me that you did not see him. Whatever, he came back a changed man, dejected, angry, less willing to humour the insufferable Arthur, and his interest in the job vanished. I saw it evaporate like a dish of water put out in the noonday sun for the dog.’

  The image seemed a suitably Levantine one on which to pause, inhale deeply from his cigarette, and let the words sink in. He blew a billowing cloud of aromatic smoke at the ceiling and levelled his eyes on Troy.

  ‘And I heard the will to go on snap in him like a rubber band coiled too tight or a bowstring stretched too far. Something in Mr Charlie snapped.’

  Troy sat in silent awe of the man’s command of a language not his own, startled by his own recognition of this final metaphor. Years ago – in the 1920s – his father had taken him to France to one of those damningly nostalgic cultural get-togethers, organised by the then vast body of Russians in exile – Russians in hope – of Russian arts. Such were their numbers so soon after the Revolution they even ran their own émigré magazine, Teatr i Zhizh, and under the auspices of the Teatr crowd the then less than fashionable Le Touquet had staged Chekhov in the original. He had sat in the stalls through The Cherry Orchard, aged thirteen or so, enraptured by the play of ideas he soon learnt were wasted on more than half the audience – who surely were those cherry trees? – beautiful, useless. And then as the curtain fell, then rose again for the bows of the cast, his father rose too. ‘Where was the breaking string?’ he said. Cast and audience stared at him. No one answered. ‘Where was the bloody breaking string that comes with the sleep of Feers?’ he yelled. ‘Chekhov is quite clear: “My life has passed as though I’d never lived. I will lie down now . . . nothing . . . nothing . . .” a distant sound, as though coming from the sky, like the breaking of a string! Where was the breaking string? What do you think the play means without the sound of that string snapping?’ Troy had fled up the aisle to escape his father. Even then he was too important to the émigrés to be thrown out. They would have to reason with him, and Troy knew damn well that was nigh impossible. But in the ear of the mind he had heard that string snap even as his father launched full rant on the unfortunate players. He read the play on the train on the way back from Paris Plage to Calais and finished it on the Channel crossing. He could hear the sound of the breaking string and the life that broke with it. ‘Something snapped in Mr Charlie,’ Hussein said. Yes, thought Troy, of course it did.

  ‘Why is Alliss so convinced that Charlie has defected? Why can’t he just have vanished?’

  ‘He did board a Russian ship. Of that there is no doubt. Charlie was well known. A man from the dockyard did come to us with the story. Charlie boarded that freighter without so much as a briefcase, not even a hat or topcoat. I went to his room. It was as Arthur described it to you, the way I had described it to him. If he was setting out on a journey, he did not know it.’

  ‘Passport,’ Troy said. ‘Did he take his passport?’

  ‘It wasn’t in his desk. I looked. But then not to have a passport on you at all times is a sackable offence in this business. On the other hand, if he really was defecting I doubt it would be an issue. Who asks a defector for a passport? The real issue is this – where was he between eleven in the morning and four o’clock, between his sending of that telegramme – which of course was to you, although Arthur cannot figure that out—’

  ‘Said, please,’ said Troy, ‘please don’t tell him.’

  ‘Of course. It is your secret. The issue remains, where was Charlie between sending that telegramme and his boarding the ship at about four in the afternoon?’

  ‘The telegramme said he didn’t have much time.’

  ‘But hours, only hours?’

  ‘No,’ said Troy. ‘He meant days. He sent for me. He held this room for me for a whole week.’

  ‘Then something changed his mind. And changed it in less than five hours.’

  ‘He knew the game was up or he’d not have written to me. We’d kept our distance. He’d no more seen me these last few years than he’d seen his mother.’

  Hussein stubbed out his cigarette, leant across to his jacket, pulled out the packet and lit up another straightaway. He picked a flake of tobacco off his tongue and played with a phrase.

  ‘The game was up. The game was . . . up.’

  He smacked his lips over the ‘p’s. Rendered this lost fragment of Cymbeline as if into a foreign language for Troy. ‘How very English.’

  Another billow of smoke blown at the punkah, another wellconsidered phrase.

  ‘Whose game?’

  ‘That rather depends on where he was, don’t you think?’ Hussein nodded slowly.

  ‘Can you find out?’ said Troy.

  ‘What do you think I’ve been doing for the last four days?’

  Hussein was right. It was an utterly stupid question on Troy’s part. The man was a journalist. It was as though someone had read him lesson one of Teach Yourself Detection.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said faintly.

  ‘But – it may well take another day, possibly two. Can you stay that long?’

  He couldn’t, but it looked as though he would have to, or return home without a clue as to Charlie’s whereabouts – and to be clueless was, after twenty-seven years a-coppering, the condition he hated most; insomnia or impotence would be preferable.

  ‘A day in Beirut wouldn’t hurt,’ Hussein was saying. ‘You have not been before?’

  Troy shook his head.

  ‘There are many ways of passing the time. Beirut is . . .’

  Hussein paused for reflection but came up with only a cliché.

  ‘. . . It is the crossroads of the world. The great bazaar. Lemons from Antilyàs out, Citroëns from France in. Everything passes through the port. Everything. Everything from anywhere. It is the city that proves Kipling wrong. East really does meet West in Beirut.’

  He rose, stubbed out his cigarette and reached for his jacket.

  ‘If the weather turns, you could drive out to Bayt Mirí for lunch – the view will take your breath away – or you could catch a tram into the Suq and buy silk for your wife, or get a pair of sandals made. God knows, everyone does. Or if the weather really cheats the season, you could just stand on your balcony and watch the harbour life. I’ll be back tomorrow evening or the morning after.’

  § 4

  The weather turned. Troy cheated Alliss of his breakfast à deux and hung out the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign until almost noon. When he emerged the clouds had cleared, the wind had dropped and there were the makings of a tolerable day.

  He rode a rattling red tram down the Rue Georges Picot. He loved trams. They’d been gone from the streets of London ten years or more. He missed them. The tram stopped at the upraised hand of a gendarme in the Place des Martyrs. Troy got off and walked back up the Georges Picot, a cobblestoned street of tiny shops, open to the street, topped by rusting iron balconies, selling everything, silk and sandals included. Corny though it was, Said Hussein was right, East encountered West in its bit of everything. The sense of a black market, of an illicit trade, hung about the place for all its legality. Not so much Kipling as Masefield, thought Troy. What could be more fitting to the sense of place than that Quinquireme of Nineveh, bound for sunny Palestine in the precise beating metre of Masefield? Ivory, apes and peacocks; sandalwood, cedar and wine. Lemons out, Citroëns in – citron, Citroën. In t
his bazaar the twain did indeed meet. Young men in sharp suits like Hussein’s moved quickly up and down, almost oblivious to the bustle. Troy all but expected one of them to come up to him and offer to sell him what was left of the British Empire. A man in half and half – baggy pants, the frayed jacket of a discarded blue suit, topped off by a traditional kaffiyeh headdress – laboured under the burden of a huge block of melting ice wrapped in sacking and precariously perched upon his back. And a man with no concession to several thousand years of cultural crossing, in full Arab dress, herded sheep between the tramlines.

  Troy looked from the shepherd to the shops, gazing, he thought, at the future – symbolised on the wall of a food shop, where a bunch of ripening bananas hung between signs advertising Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Slurping the world level. Once all the world was wilderness; one day it would all be cola.

  He stared a moment too long. A hand pulled him sharply backwards and a donkey saddled with wooden crates of oranges blundered forward and missed him by fractions of an inch. Troy turned to see who had pulled him clear, and found himself facing three women. Mother, daughter and granddaughter, it seemed. The mother wore black from head to foot. All he could see of her were dark eyes above the veil. The daughter, a woman of thirty-something, was dressed conservatively western, rather like a French woman of modest means ten or twelve years ago might have done – a longish skirt, a sleeveless blouse. But the granddaughter wore the uniform of ubiquitous youth, the teenage costume that could be found on the streets of London or New York, or it seemed, Beirut – T-shirt, blue jeans and sneakers. Which had saved him from going under the hoof of a determined donkey? The mother was the nearest. It had, he concluded, been her. He thanked her politely in French.

  The granddaughter replied.

  ‘Ce n’est rien, Monsieur. Ma grandmère ne parle pas le français.’

  They vanished after the donkey. Walking abreast down the cobbled street, leaving Troy thinking that he had seen colonialism in miniature, history compressed into half a century of a single family.

  § 5

  When Troy got back to the Saint-Georges, before he could even ask for his key the concierge told him that a man was waiting to see him. Simultaneously he gestured over Troy’s shoulder. Troy turned, expecting to see Hussein, but there sat a man with a face like a walnut, perched nervously on a plush red chair, wearing a multicoloured shirt in the Hawaiian style, sharply pressed black trousers and an expression that told Troy he was deeply unhappy at being there at all. A small man in his late fifties with short grey hair, and a bushy grey moustache hiding most of his top lip. He got up as Troy approached. He was even shorter standing up, no more than five foot two.

  ‘You are Misterfred?’ he said, rolling name and title into one to produce an appropriate near-homonym of ‘mystified’. Pretty much what Troy had felt for days now.

  ‘Yes,’ said Troy to both.

  ‘Please, sir, could we go to your room?’

  They rode up in the lift in silence, and when Troy had closed and locked the door behind them, the man pulled his shirt from his trousers and removed an envelope hidden in the waistband.

  ‘From Mr Charlie,’ he said. ‘Mr Charlie.’

  Troy opened it. The letter was written in biro on the back of a receipt for dry cleaning. Troy turned over from ‘T b cllcted Tues 5pm 2 pr gents trsrs 1 drss Shrt’ and found, ‘Freddie. Stay put. I’ll get a message through as soon as I can. Tell nobody. Charlie.’

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘From Mr Charlie, last Tuesday.’

  ‘You saw him the day he left? When?’

  ‘It would be about half past two, sir. In the afternoon. Perhaps a little later.’

  ‘Where?’

  The man regarded Troy blankly as though each of a series of rather simple questions must mean more than it appeared to.

  ‘At my place of work.’

  ‘And where do you work?’

  The dark eyes lit up. At last it seemed he and Troy were on the same wavelength.

  ‘Oh, sir. Did I not say? I am Abu Wagih. Head doorman at the British Embassy. I am a Druze, sir. All we servants of Her Majesty are Druze.’

  He smiled, beamed at his own forgetfulness, and the pleasure of revelation and understanding. All the same, Troy could hardly believe this. Would rather not believe this. It put wheels within wheels.

  ‘Charlie was at the embassy?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir. From just before noon until just after two thirty. Almost three hours. He came for his meeting with Mr Smith. On his way out he wrote this letter and said I was to give it to his good friend Misterfred at the Saint-Georges. My son is bar-waiter in the hotel, sir. Every evening I ask, “Did Misterfred come today?” and every evening he say, “No, Misterfred did not come today. Perhaps he will come tomorrow.” Until last night. Last night I came and saw you with the fat English one, and so I went away. Mr Charlie was most anxious that I give you his letter alone.’

  ‘Smith?’ said Troy.

  ‘Beg pardon, sir?’

  ‘You say Charlie saw a Mr Smith.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘An Englishman?’

  ‘I know no Arabs called Mr Smith, sir.’

  Touché, thought Troy.

  ‘An Englishman you knew?’

  ‘No sir. Each year a Mr Smith would come to see Mr Charlie. But always a different Mr Smith. The family of Smith is very big I think, sir. Perhaps it is a tribe?’

  Big? It was infinite. The nom de plume of the dirty weekend for three generations.

  Unsure of the protocol in the matter, Troy rummaged in his pockets and came up with two five-pound notes. Somehow offering a man sterling rather than the local currency made the transaction seem less like a bribe and more like a reward. As though he might frame the notes rather than spend them.

  Protocol seemed satisfied. Abu Wagih smiled and trousered the loot.

  ‘Not a word to anyone,’ said Troy.

  ‘Indeed, sir. “Mum’s the word,” as Mr Charlie used to say.’

  ‘I don’t suppose’, Troy said, pushing his luck, ‘that Charlie said what the meeting with Smith had been about?’

  ‘Yes, sir. He did say something about it being “a bollocking waste of time”. Then he said, “Goodbye, old chap.” Most odd. Usually he would ask after my sons, and after several minutes as I recited who was where and doing what, he’d say, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” and then he would walk away. Always the same, asking after my sons, and in the proper order of their birth, then the same phrase, “Don’t let the bastards” . . .’

  Abu Wagih stopped. As though he had realised for the first time the full meaning of Charlie’s words, that he would not be back, that the bastards had, at long last, ground him down.

  An hour or so later, the sun was setting. Troy sat on the terrace beneath a vast red parasol, sipped a citron pressé, and watched the sun sink into the Mediterranean. The last hardy hearty roared by on waterskis, rubber-suited against the January day. Small boats and big boats dotted the seascape all the way to the horizon. He knew next to nothing about boats and ships. The little ones, the ones with single masts, he was pretty certain were sloops. The bigger ones sailing into the network of wharves and warehouses on the north side could be anything – he could not tell a bark from a barquentine, a square-rigger from a schooner.

  A day without the cutting wind, a day albeit far from his fantasy of floating around in shirtsleeves, had warmed him, literally, to the Mediterranean. He was, he had always thought, ‘not a Med person’. He had been dragged uncomplainingly on several grand tours as a child; he had seen towers lean and heard bridges sigh, and gazed unimpressed on the dug-out ruins of a city that bore his own name; but had never seen himself as a man to laze away his days on a Greek island, or become one of those Englishmen in exile, Graham Greene in Antibes, D. H. Lawrence on Sardinia, or Robert Graves on Majorca. He took holidays, when he took them, in England. With his pigs and his long-playing records – though he had yet to get a
round to the joys of stereophonic sound – and his books.

  A waiter coughed politely to drag Troy back to the real world and the present day.

  ‘A package for you, M’sieur. Delivered by hand.’

  It was one of those padded envelopes, bulky and heavy. Charlie. It had to be from Charlie.

  Troy ripped it open. Inside the package was a second envelope and a short, typed, unsigned message.

  ‘Sorry. Change of venue. Still, you always did want to visit the old place, didn’t you?’

  In the second envelope was a Soviet Foreign Ministry letter of authorisation in lieu of a visa, stamped and signed and counter-stamped and countersigned, made out in Troy’s name, and four airline tickets – Beirut to Athens by Zippo Charters, Athens to Moscow by Aeroflot, Moscow to Zurich by Aeroflot and Zurich to London by BOAC. He checked the itinerary. He had two days in Russia. Two days in Russia. The old country. Land of his father, land of his grandfather and all their fathers before them. It was the last place on earth he wanted to be.

  § 6

  Said Hussein found him, checking out of the Saint-Georges in the morning. He looked at the suitcase, he looked at Troy and drew the obvious conclusion.

  ‘You know where he was.’

  It was not a question.

  ‘Yes,’ said Troy.

  ‘You’re not going to tell me.’

  ‘I can’t. Believe me, I can’t.’

  ‘You’re not playing the game, Mr Troy. If I had been the one to find out, I would tell you.’