Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  Yet it had not occurred to Sarah that she was seeing Thomas Edward rather more than mere coincidence permitted until the last day of his almost week-long stay in Cairo. By that time she had sat by his side at a dinner-party in another of Gezira island’s secluded and well-guarded villas, not far from the one Aaron was staying in.

  That evening the talk at table had mostly been gloomy. On the Western Front another French attack in the Champagne region had failed. The latest reports from Petrograd seemed to indicate that the Russian offensive was running out of steam and the Germans were rallying under Bruchmuller, the great artillery general. Ponting had attempted to cheer everybody up by proposing a toast to the Hejaz army and to Lawrence, who had turned up in Bedouin robes and headdress and drank lemonade throughout; but when the others had all dutifully sipped, in some cases drained, the glasses of very decent claret Ponting had manage to acquire, they seemed no more cheerful. To Sarah’s amazement they hardly spoke about their own war. It had seemed that not even Lawrence could bring himself to believe that the capture of a Red Sea port was worth half a mile of those blood-soaked vineyards or the Russian marchlands.

  Meinertzhagen had been the only one to sound a positive note, and then it was on a comparatively minor matter.

  ‘I’ll you what. The Hun is worried about those new Bristol Fighters the RFC is getting. I’ve been up twice in one of ‘em on a recce and we never saw one of their kites.’

  Sarah’s English was not quite up to this and Aaron, who was sitting on the other side of her from Lawrence, translated into French.

  ‘Not a hair of them,’ Meinertzhagen had gone on. ‘We caught one of their cavalry patrols on the hop. Gave ‘em a couple of squirts and they were off like the Grand National.’ He had taken a spoonful of his soup before adding, ‘Those that could still run, that is.’

  Sarah had understood the gist of this without translation and she had not liked it very much. She had realised that she was in the presence of someone to whom war was just a rougher kind of sport. But when she had looked around the table it did not seem to have bothered anybody else. Perhaps Lawrence, who had caught her eye, wore an expression that might have been halfway between admiration and horror. At any rate, he had changed the subject by suddenly posing a question. ‘Mr Aaronsohn,’ the little man had asked in his Oxford drawl, ‘do you really believe that when the Turks have gone – and I’ve no doubt that they will go, for they are a tired old empire – enough Jews will want to come to Palestine to start this homeland you yearn for?

  ‘Please don’t misunderstand me. Before the war I visited some of your settlements, particularly the ones around Tiberius, and saw the way they had enriched the land. I think Zionism and Arab nationalism could exist very happily together. Apart from the scientific help people like yourself can offer I suppose there is also the prospect of financial assistance from your richer brethren. People like Faisal have no money and it will be years before they can exploit the Mesopotamian oil. Perhaps Jewish banking could provide funds, but will they have reason to? Surely people like you and your family are the exception? Palestine is a hard country full of malarial swamps and brigands. Jews are a clever people – no doubt about that. But they are mainly city dwellers. Why on earth should they want to undergo these hardships?’

  Sarah and Aaron smiled at each other. It was a question they had heard before.

  ‘Tell me, Major Lawrence,’ said Aaron, wiping the corner of his mouth with a napkin. ‘Have you ever been to Poland or Western Russia? From time to time they are the same place, of course. Anyway, Galicia?’

  ‘Regrettably not.’ For Lawrence it was always a genuine matter of regret if he had not been somewhere.

  ‘I thought as much. Look, you English see us Jews all wrong because you have a very limited experience of us. In Berlin, Vienna or Paris our race is more embourgeoised: there are Jewish doctors, lawyers, and the better kind of journalists – Herzl for example. Respectable people with some standing in the host community – unless things go wrong. You gentlemen may not be aware that the nastiest thing the Paris mob could think to call Dreyfus was Jew. In England you have extremes. There is either the old Anglo-Jewish aristocracy, the Mocattas, Sebags, Montefiores, Sassoons etcetera, some of them descendants of the Spanish Jews Cromwell let back in. They intermarried with some wealthy Ashkenazim who arrived from Germany and Holland shortly afterwards, the Rothschilds, Samuels and Montagues, and now you can’t tell them apart. In most cases they are more English than the English. In fact, they consider themselves Englishmen first and Jews second.’ Aaron had paused to sniff and let the corners of his mouth go down at this point, as if to indicate the error of his co-religionists’ ways. ‘Then there are your poor Jews. The jobbing tailors in the Whitechapel sweatshops sewing on twelve pockets an hour with Mr Singer’s wondrous invention and sleeping on the floor between the machines at night. These are the people who have been flooding into the East End of London since the Russian pogroms of the 1880s. A lot of them thought they were going on to America. Instead they were tricked out of their fares by crooked shipping agents. But who are these people? Where did they come from? I’ll tell you what a lot of them were. They were poor farmers, peasants, driven off the land on the Russian Pale by what they call the Czar’s May Laws. They were required to give written proof of ownership that the authorities knew they didn’t have. But that’s what they are – farmers. Strong men and women who were accustomed to rise at dawn and work outdoors until dusk. In Whitechapel and Bethnal Green their sons and daughters may have become myopic tailors, but the stock is there.

  ‘What I’m trying to say is that what you are looking at, gentlemen, your conception of the Jew, is the minority of European Jewry. Most of the descendants of twelve tribes in Europe continue to live on poor farms or in the ghettos. These are not your soft-handed bankers. For them life is hard, as hard as it is for the Syrian peasants in Palestine.’

  ‘It’s true enough,’ Meinertzhagen had said. ‘Before the war I happened to be visiting Odessa when there was a pogrom. Terrible business. I rescued one poor fellow from the Cossacks myself – murderous swines.’

  ‘Your allies now,’ the male Aaronsohn had said.

  ‘Yours as well, for the moment,’ Lawrence had responded softly and smiled at Sarah who, after a moment’s hesitation, smiled back.

  The next day there was a picnic trip down the river, the same khamsin wind that made Cairo so unpleasantly dusty filling the sail of their felucca and pushing them along at a fair lick. There were four of them on board: Sarah, Lawrence, Ponting and Meinertzhagen, making another of his rare social appearances. Aaron had declined to come on the grounds that he had seen enough of boats of all sizes to last him a lifetime. The smell of that Royal Navy destroyer still filled his nostrils.

  Ponting brought along a newly arrived Fortnum and Mason’s hamper crammed with tinned delicacies and bars of light and dark chocolate that melted as soon as the silver paper was removed. Sarah was amazed. Much of it was stuff she had never seen even in peacetime. For drink Ponting and Meinertzhagen had beer which they attempted to cool, once they had berthed under a clump of palms on the bank for lunch, by dunking it over the side in a canvas bucket, but since they were thirsty they drank most of it warm. Lawrence and Sarah sipped lemonade from a thermos. ‘I’m too long among the Musselmen for strong drink,’ the hero of Akaba had explained.

  Ponting, in one of his self-effacing moods, had kept apologising for his failure to arrange a tub of ice for the drinks, and Meinertzhagen had responded by teasing him about the brand-new silk puttees he was wearing with shoes instead of the usual riding boots and jodhpurs. The tropical puttees were from the main officers’ outfitters in Cairo, part of an extensively advertised shipment that had just been received from England.

  ‘I suppose we never wear anything but silk next to our skin,’ accused Meinertzhagen.

  ‘Only my hat, sir,’ Ponting had replied. His hair had thinned dramatically over the last year.

  Sarah h
ad sat up front with her back to the bow, feeling quite the lady as she twirled the white parasol Aaron had found for her.

  The boatman, lean and old at forty with grey stubble on his chin, graciously declined an offer of tinned pâté, preferring for some round, flat bread and goat’s cheese and a raw onion he had wrapped in a grubby rag. When he had finished he leaned back against the stern panel and lit up a large, sweet-smelling and loosely rolled cigarette. Very soon he was asleep, his mouth open to reveal the rotting stumps of his teeth.

  The conversation of his passengers had ceased while they paused to stare at him. Lawrence broke the silence.

  ‘Opium.’

  ‘Not a pretty sight,’ said Ponting.

  ‘Opium? Really?’ said Meinertzhagen, who had only ever encountered the drug in Sherlock Holmes mysteries. ‘Does it normally put people out as quickly as that?’

  ‘At this time of the day, in this heat – certainly it can,’ said Lawrence. ‘Especially if you want it to.’

  ‘Do the Bedouin use it?’

  ‘Not much. Some would if they could but mostly it is regarded as a city Arab, Levantine habit. Also it’s dangerous. Some blood enemy might enter your dreams with a dagger and finish them for you. The Turks use it although they’re flogged in the army if they’re caught.’

  ‘Are they now?’ said Meinertzhagen, who had lit up his pipe and was puffing thoughtfully away. After a while he seemed to become bored and started tapping at the boatman’s bare and hugely calloused feet with his knobkerrie, gently at first and then with increasing violence. ‘You’d need a howitzer to enter this fellow’s dreams.’

  The Egyptian had woken slowly, stung into consciousness by the bastinado pains creeping up his legs, glared at his tormentor and then started fumbling with the knot of the rope that linked them to a palm. In the bow Lawrence and Sarah started to giggle, and as she caught his eye she realised the way he was looking at her and started to blush.

  A week later, back in Zichron Jacob, Sarah remembered that when she got over the shock she began to wonder if he would pursue the matter and what she would do if he did? She was beginning to find him not unattractive, although it was a pity about the height.

  The rest of that stifling afternoon passed in a dream of exchanged glances, of increasingly unlikely collisions of knees and hands as the slightest shift in position in the confines of the boat suddenly took on the most sensuous possibilities. Sarah had become filled with a delicious sense of anticipation. She could feel the melting starting between her legs. Once she had caught something in his look that she found really disturbing. Could it have been admiration? Not even Joseph looked at her like that.

  They had parted in front of the others normally enough.

  ‘A pleasant trip, Major. I enjoyed it.’

  ‘Yes, one of the better days of my war’ – accompanied by a wan smile which only Sarah had known was meant to illustrate that this was a mountainous understatement.

  She did not see him again. She learned later that he had gone up to Alexandria by train the same evening and boarded a Royal Navy ship bound for Akaba. But the next day a motorcycle despatch-rider had delivered a package to the villa where she was staying with Aaron. Her brother was out at the time and the soldier would not give it to the servant. ‘Miss Aaronsohn?’ he had asked when she went to the door. ‘Would you sign for this please, miss?’

  It was no bigger than her hand, scruffily wrapped in an old copy of the Egyptian Gazette and well tied with string that had been double-knotted. There was a luggage label tied to the string, on which her name had been misspelt in pencil, ‘Miss Sarah Aranson.’

  It felt heavy, solid. She had placed it on a table and cut through the string with a kitchen knife. When she had pulled the wrappings apart she found an oily blue kerchief that had itself been knotted. She could feel two things in it: a small box and something flat like a cigarette case, although the gun oil smell from the rag she was now struggling to undo had already alerted her to what it was. On Zichron Jacob they often put their weapons away like this. But it was so small.

  It was a nickel-plated Derringer, the nasty little two-shot hideaway pistol originally favoured by Mississippi river-boat gamblers and other low life. It had two large-bore barrels, one over the other, and a double trigger without a guard. A brown luggage label like the one on the package was tied to its pearl-handled butt. On it was written in the same hand that had misspelt her name, ‘In case the wrong person steps into your dreams – T.E.L.’

  It was quite an old Derringer – its metalwork was scratched and one of the butt plates was chipped at the bottom. There was some Arabic script along the barrel and she guessed that the weapon must have originally belonged to one of Lawrence’s Bedouin friends. The cardboard box that came with it contained eight stubby .44–40 Remington rounds, and there were four empty spaces where cartridges had been removed from their packing.

  Sarah had extracted one of the rounds. Its copper casing seemed quite tarnished but there was no sign of mildew or corrosion. There was a catch on the side and the Derringer broke open like a shotgun. She had slipped the cartridge in and then walked out onto the veranda in search of a target. She had not had to wait long.

  A crow, not the sleek black variety of Europe but one of the desperate grey and black corpse disposers of Asia, had wobbled down and started strutting about what passed for a lawn. Sarah had got to within about five feet of it before she squeezed the trigger with her arm outstretched. It had made a lot of noise for a little gun. What remained of the crow’s head was now some distance from his body. Sarah had been impressed.

  On the morning before she left Cairo her brother had taken her for a dawn ride around the Pyramids and pointed out the Signals’ aerials on top of Cheops.

  That’s what they should give us,’ Aaron had said. ‘A wireless, not pigeons.’

  ‘Major Ponting told me wireless signals can get intercepted.’

  ‘So can pigeons – with a grain of feed.’

  Sarah recalled his words as she ran a fingernail along the wire netting of the loft and the birds executed nervous little sidesteps on their perches. It was typical of Aaron to find fault in any idea that was not his own.

  ‘Oh yes, you’ll soon be going home,’ she said.

  4

  Yeomanry Camp, El Marakes: 28 July 1917

  ***

  Shortly before reveille there was an unexpected guest. As a result of this Private Calderwell never did get to see the Saturday races and how one of the youngest subalterns brought Captain Valintine’s grey past the winning-post five lengths ahead of the Australian horse in second place.

  The visitor was discovered in a very bedraggled state by one of the cooks, who was scratching and farting and thinking about getting some tea going when he spotted it huddled by the still dew-wet canvas of the C Squadron mess tent. The cook picked the quivering pigeon up – Its feathers were heavy with salt water spray and as he held it he discovered the steel message cylinder attached to the bird’s right leg.

  The cylinder went to the sergeant cook who took a malicious delight in breaking into the Squadron Sergeant Major’s dreams with news of its arrival. Eventually it came to the bell-tent of the adjutant, who was halfway through being shaved by his Egyptian servant. The officer sat on the edge of his camp bed with a towel around his neck, his face half-lathered, staring at the cylinder as if he was the victim of some ill-advised practical joke. The servant, soapy razor still in hand, wore a long green jellaba and a bemused expression.

  After he had unrolled the little scroll of paper in the cylinder the adjutant saw that, unless he really was the butt of some elaborate hoax, the message was written in code. Both sides of the thin paper were covered with carefully printed groups of block capitals. Each group contained five letters. The adjutant looked at the sergeant cook who had brought the cylinder to him. The NCO’s face was composed, inscrutable.

  ‘And where’s our little Mercury now, Sergeant?’

  ‘Beggin’ your
pardon, sir?’

  ‘The bird, sergeant? The pigeon?’

  ‘He’s still in the mess tent, sir.’

  ‘Fat bird?’

  ‘Fair to middlin’ sir.’

  ‘Hmm. How about a little roast pigeon for the officers’ mess tonight?’

  The cook frowned. ‘You don’t think it’s War Office property sir?’

  ‘So is a tin of bully beef, Sergeant. Besides, we must never pass up a chance to live off the land.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  When the NCO had gone the adjutant wiped the soap off his face and walked over to the regimental headquarters tent from where he called Brigade on the field telephone. It took some time for the clerk there to locate the intelligence officer. When he did come on the line he made, the adjutant thought, some rather fatuous remarks and said, in a not very convincing way, that he would call back. The Yeomanry officer went back to his shave.

  About an hour later the intelligence officer was on the line. There was a new note of urgency in his voice. The cylinder should be delivered as soon as possible to a certain Major Ponting, who was to be found in Advance Intelligence Headquarters at Wadi Ghuzze above the railhead at Deir el Belah. Major Ponting also wanted his pigeon back.

  ***

  Shortly before Wadi Ghuzze the road deteriorated into little more than a goat track and the lorry threw up great clouds of dust behind it. Crouched in the open rear of the vehicle was a strange, sub-human thing, a shapeless hulk with huge bug eyes. This was Calderwell, his body shrouded in a ground-sheet and his eyes protected from the desert grit by a pair of motorcycle goggles which Isaiah Mace had pressed on him.

  ‘You’ll need these,’ he had said as Calderwell fussed about the bell-tent, buckling on equipment and feeling resentful that a newly promoted lance-corporal had chosen him for the escort job for no better reason than that Calderwell was one of the new draft and he didn’t want to upset his old mates.