I did not agree with his estimate, and Oliver would have gone up in the air with indignation. But Boutagy came of Christian clans which had preserved their faith and homes and women against peasant and pasha through eight hundred years of raid and counter-raid. I asked what he proposed.
‘I shall go into the village with Ahmed’s head while the rest of you are out of sight above the valley. I shall hang it by its hair from a branch and call the men together and show them what the British Secret Service will do if they utter a word. Of d’Aulnoy and the rest they are to know nothing. You and Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec were never there. If they keep their foul mouths shut, they may be sure of our protection. If they do not, we shall take a head a week to provide company for Ahmed.’
I asked him if he was not afraid to go in alone.
‘Afraid of them? When I appear from nowhere with this in my hand—’ he pulled Ahmed’s head out of the bag and held it up to mine as if turning me to stone ‘—it is they who will be afraid. I am an Arab, a man of mystery, whom they have never seen before, telling them that all their friends are dead.’
‘The sergeant-major has taught you to ride a motorbike, hasn’t he?’
‘He has, sir. After office hours. I hope you did not mind.’
‘Well, you might bring mine up with you. It’s under Yasser’s house, the biggest in the village.’
There was an inevitable, unpleasant sequel to his plan which I will not expand. Obviously I had to poke Ahmed’s body into one of the outlying parts of the furnace.
Limpsfield and his detachment had hidden their bikes higher up the track. We were away in ten minutes. None of the citizens and police of Hermel, roused from their beds by the explosion and the glare, could have been more than half way to the farmhouse, and it was most unlikely that they would ever see us traversing the exposed slopes in the grey of dawn and through the rolling smoke. I led the party on Holloway’s bike. Boutagy rode pillion behind Limpsfield and Biddy behind Wilson, their seats padded by rags—of which there was no shortage when far enough from the flames to be collected. Holloway brought up the rear, riding the spare horse and driving the two packhorses in front of him. On that baked ground the motorcycles left little detectable track. What there was I hoped would be muddled by the three following sets of hooves.
When the sun rose we were already at the ford, and stopped to rest and wash. I discarded and buried my sweater and soaked my shorts in the stream. The remarks of my men when led by the skipper in his underpants with his shorts strapped to his belt and floating out behind showed more affection than discipline. There was also some ribaldry—when Biddy was temporarily absent—at Sergeant Wilson’s expense. That formidable bosom was never designed for riding pillion.
She was standing the journey bravely and cheerfully. Well, in happier and simpler days the gallant young wife may have cantered her pony up the Khyber Pass for all I know, and eaten a sheep with Pathan chieftains far more murderous than anyone on the slopes of Qurnat es Sauda—except possibly Holloway and me. I could not decide what to do with her. I had intended to send her straight home through the village, but Boutagy’s scheme made that impossible. One can’t go waving the valued butler’s head in front of his employer.
We were above the village before midday and halted in that trackless scrub beyond the clearing and rubbish dump while Boutagy went marching down with his bag. I crawled to the edge of the escarpment to watch, ready to intervene with a rescue party if required. I could see nothing of Boutagy since he was under the mulberry tree, but I did see the men he was addressing. They looked threatening at first, then all moved an involuntary step back at the point when he must have shown the head and hanged it from a branch. I could hear a faint wail of sorrow which was Ahmed’s requiem. Bowing and obsequious, they led Boutagy into Yasser’s house and surrounded him at a respectful distance as he wheeled out the motorcycle. It started at first kick—which it never did for me—even the carburettor obeying that cruel and sinister agent of the British Secret Service.
When he roared over the top of the ridge I congratulated him on his magnificent performance. He accepted my compliments, standing romantically to attention, but said he had bad news. Miss Valerie, though the house was watched, had disappeared while her mother and I were prisoners. The men anxiously protested their innocence and swore that not one of them would have harmed her if she had stayed.
I was pretty sure what had happened—the cat getting out again. And right under the noses of a vigilant and determined organisation! I told Biddy that we should certainly find her at the section billet, but had an uneasy feeling that I could be wrong. Miss Valerie had had about enough of loneliness and inexplicable intrigue. She knew where to go to find simplicity.
The possibilities were daunting. You don’t see it? Well, I’ll give you a sample. Valerie fished out of the harbour. Valerie weeping over Ibrahim el Amr with his throat cut. Valerie shouting at her mother that they had been at it for months and that, no, he wasn’t a wog but Oliver Enwin. And Lord only knows what complications if Biddy started calling in old friends to the rescue!
I was determined to get a glimpse for myself of the other side of the hill and present the findings to Biddy in my own words before she could get unduly excited; one could be sure she would not serve her daughter’s interests as self-sacrificingly as she had served her country or me or whatever you like to call it. So I changed my plans. I sent her straight home through the village behind Sergeant Wilson, telling him to stay with her till further orders and to drive past the mulberry tree at such a speed that she would be wholly occupied by the bumps and ruts. She was very tired and not unwilling, assuming that Valerie must be with my men in Tripoli.
Before she left she cast a longing eye on the two horses and their load. I had long since decided that if the money was exchangeable it was to be hers—ill-gotten gains providing the strongest of all motives for silence. So I promised her that her baggage would be shortly delivered, allowing Limpsfield and the rest to think that the trunks belonged to her. There was no one to whom I could give the stuff back and I would never have given the section any reason for suspecting me of making money on the quiet.
So we threaded our way along the last of the Hermel track down to the plain through that maze of paths without any stop for explanations at the café—just a cheery wave to say that again we had found no deer.
On arrival I found that Valerie had never called at the billet and that neither Zappa nor Davila had heard any whispers of her presence in the town. I cleaned up and went down to have dinner at my El Mina bar. There I had news of her. She had turned up, looking very tired and dusty, in the course of the previous afternoon—it seemed like two years ago—and immediately asked for Ibrahim el Amr. The Christian proprietor had naturally never heard of him, but mentioned the name to a ragged old vendor of peanuts and sunflower seeds who used to hang around the bar. Only ten minutes later, the proprietor said, she had been fetched by a Moslem seaman from one of the Ruad caiques and had firmly refused any other escort. Though she had not been seen since, an anonymous note had been delivered, in neat European handwriting, that she was all right and that the police were not to be informed. There was more than a suspicion, I think, that she had fallen into my wicked clutches.
I congratulated the proprietor on his tact, said nothing and went home to bed. You’ll think that I was unchivalrous, wholly unconcerned at the fate of beauty in distress. But there was nothing I could do. The situation was entirely in Oliver’s hands. For all I knew, it could be the end of both of them if I started making enquiries and stirred up the rats’ nest. I presumed that news of the death of all the leaders had reached Tripoli, that the rising was off and that informed circles were looking for traitors and awaiting arrest in a state of screaming Arab hysteria.
Next morning I put on an affectionately laundered shirt and shorts, polished my Sam Browne and called at Ninth Army. The I (b) office rang with the Hermel I
ncident, as it was already christened. Sabotage? French agents taking action on their own? A quarrel between arms traffickers? Signals were buzzing between Army Headquarters, Beirut and Cairo, for it had been established that the explosion was no accident. The exploder and its wires had been found. My opinion was not asked. I was merely an interested audience for excited gossip.
On my way out I passed Reggie Paunce in the corridor. He stopped to say that if the local Gestapo paid more attention to their job than to private correspondence, it would be impossible for terrorists to carry on under their noses and then blow themselves up. I reminded him respectfully that we had nothing to do with civil security and that Hermel was a hundred miles from my district anyway.
Repercussions? Well, I’ll jump forward and deal with the purely military angle while we are on the subject. The bodies of Moustofi Khan and those two Syrian notables were identified. So was the exploder, which had been stolen from a depot of engineering stores in Palestine. Jeremy Fanshawe, I heard, had several fruitless interviews with the Jewish Agency trying to find out which particular band of inflammable Zionists were carrying on a private war in the Lebanon. Abdullah el Bessam vanished without trace—due to the added fuel of all that fat no doubt. As for d’Aulnoy and the two Germans, gelignite leaves no evidence of nationality except in a laboratory. One must not forget—I certainly didn’t—that an army on active service abroad does not have the full resources of Scotland Yard.
No, no repercussions except for some questions, which I vaguely answered, about reported movements of my section in and around Sir. The only reprimand I received was for pulling Magnat’s leg in the matter of some lousy lieutenant of gendarmerie whose disappearance he was fussing about, together with a warning that I had to be more polite to the French and must not expect them to understand my thoroughly irresponsible sense of humour. I was also asked to co-operate with an official inquiry into what motorcycles, if any, had been lost or stolen in local campaigns, so we must have left tracks outside the farmhouse which were traced back to the Hermel road. But nobody bothered to look for them among the rocks and scrub on the flanks of Qurnat es Sauda. To this day I cannot find the Hermel-Sir track marked on any map.
I won’t say I foresaw all this as I left Headquarters, but it seemed a very possible outcome. I was not over-bothered about the baffled military. What could destroy me was Oliver Enwin and the dear Ronson-Bolbec family. Their joint capacity to get me shot at dawn with the option of the evening was far more imminent than that of Security Intelligence Middle East.
When I got back to my hotel the reception clerk, sounding very impressed, informed me that an Arab Dignitary was waiting to speak to me in the upstairs lounge. I pictured some Cadi or Imam from Homs with an awkward bit of evidence which would be most costly to suppress. A flurry of robes was sitting in a dark corner of the room, and at first sight I thought they contained some desert sheikh. His beard, though still scanty, had already a perceptible curl. I put on my best manners for the benefit of the waiter and ushered him to my room.
‘Just back from Mecca, Oliver?’
‘From Muscat. You should remember.’
‘You’ve heard the news?’
‘Yesterday at midday. It was you?’
‘I was among those present, yes.’
‘I don’t know how you could bring yourself…’
‘I have been waiting to express my feelings for Hitler for some time—ever since he fooled my beloved country into thinking he was an affectionate uncle. Where’s Valerie? And get on with it!’
‘Back in the valley.’
‘Does nothing ever change?’
‘Yes. She is married.’
‘You mean, you took advantage…’
‘Why not? I did not think she was likely to see you and her mother again, and it’s quite legal by Moslem law. But I am afraid the success of Field Security has complicated our future.’
Legal? Well, he had the requisite witnesses. He had the consent of the bride who was over the age of puberty. He paid a formal dowry. And a Moslem is at liberty to marry a Christian. The marriage was a farce since the bridegroom did not exist. But so long as he could remain Ibrahim el Amr, it was good.
‘Who has got the marriage certificate, if there is one?’
‘She has. In Arabic and French. She’ll have to produce it to Mummy some time soon.’
I was not surprised. These hillside affairs do tend to increase the population. I said that their chance of being reunited seemed to me slim.
‘I do not agree,’ he replied in a tone which suggested that he already considered himself the responsible father of a family. ‘I am leaving tonight by caique for Turkey. I shall need a few months to make a living. When I have done so, you can send me Valerie by the Taurus Express.’
‘But too many people know who Ibrahim el Amr is.’
‘No, they don’t. Tripoli thinks he is Youssef Mokaddem. So do the German agents in Turkey. And they are not likely to contact me till all this blows over, if ever.’
‘What about British agents?’
‘Try to check up on a citizen of Muscat who is living quietly in Turkey and has bribed the local police! You might get a reply from the Muscat Residency in six months that no Ibrahim el Amr is known. So what? He’s a refugee from Sumatra. His family has been there for a hundred years. And that’s the end of it. You can’t get a security report from the Japanese.’
With Hadji and Abdullah out of the way, he had some reason for confidence—or what Oliver would call confidence. He told me how Abdullah had turned up in town and required Ibrahim el Amr to call on him. Oliver sent back one of his toughs with a peremptory reply that if any calling was being done Abdullah would do it.
‘He didn’t like risking his belly in that rabbit warren of warehouses,’ Oliver said. ‘He knew at once that I was not the real Youssef Mokaddem but hadn’t the guts to denounce me to my face. My chaps saw what sort of man he was and put on a show just to make him wobble with fear.’
However, Ibrahim el Amr knew that he had little chance of escape. He had bid his hand too high and Hadji had called the bluff. Then Valerie turned up, having jumped for her cedar branch in the darkness and nipped straight up the hillside while front door and back were guarded. She had managed to flit round the outskirts of Sir over channels and walls without being spotted, which I thought impossible. Foam-born Aphrodite must have cast a veil over her. At dawn she got a lift from a peasant cart going into Tripoli market. I haven’t much respect for Arabs, as you know, but one must admit that very commonly they have an unquestioning chivalry more straightforward than our own.
When Ibrahim el Amr heard of her arrival, he ordered his guerrillas to bring her in and pulled out all the stops of oratory. He exclaimed that many of them would be dead before the Germans landed, that the girl was bearing his child and that they must be married so that she could inherit his wealth. Valerie of course didn’t give a damn whether she was married to Oliver by Moslem rites or a witch-doctor with a pattern of intertwined testicles painted on his forehead. She remained orientally meek. She never gave away that he was anything but her Moslem lover. And by those rats down in the warehouses it was considered a triumph that one of their leaders should have bagged such a honey of obvious breeding from the ruling race.
Next day came the deadly news. With unknown retribution on the way, Ibrahim el Amr, like the rest of them, was free to do the best for himself that he could.
‘And what the hell do you think you’re going to do when the caique puts you ashore?’ I asked.
‘In these countries there is always something for an active man.’
‘But you don’t speak Turkish.’
‘It will take me four and a half months. Meanwhile there is Greek and Arabic.’
A vista of unpardonable crimes stretched away into the future. Helping a deserter to escape to a neutral country. Smuggling currency. Connivin
g at a pretended marriage to a pure little English lily with cousins in Parliament and the War Office. But, as against all that, and always assuming that some officious Turk or Briton did not intercept the caique, I should be delivered from Captain Oliver Enwin for good.
The temptation—combined perhaps with a measure of human charity—was too great for me. I walked over to the billet and collected the four trunks. While Oliver hid in the bathroom, my men brought them up to my room, undoubtedly thinking that I was going to make a discreet and thorough security check of Biddy’s possessions before I returned them.
The bent and loosened locks gave us no trouble except for two which we had to cut out. When Oliver saw the contents, I pointed out to him that some capital would ease his way in Turkey and that it would be even more effective in calming down the situation up at d’Aulnoy’s villa. I tipped the lot on to the floor and ordered him to go through it carefully without allowing so much emotion to cloud his money-changer’s eye.
Abdullah el Bessam’s pay chests contained the equivalent of about fourteen thousand pounds in packets of old notes and new, mostly of small denominations. Oliver took the new, saying that he was sure he could get rid of them at a discount while Biddy would at once land herself in gaol if she took wads of them round to the bank. We left her something over eight thousand in old notes which she could safely dribble out for daily needs or change in quantity.
His portion fitted into a single trunk. After we had said good-bye in my room, the night porter carried it downstairs and, at Oliver’s request, sent for a hamal who would take it down to El Mina on his head. The hamal set off at his professional trot with Oliver striding behind—a dignified, old-fashioned figure careless of effete townsmen who took taxis, charitable towards the poor who used the tram. I watched him saluted by a Moslem policeman and his answering gesture which deprecated so great an honour. That was the last sight I have ever had of him.
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