The Mule on the Minaret Read online

‘It’s a fault on the right side.’

  Later that day the Controller explained to Reid in broad outline the scope and purpose of the work he would be undertaking.

  ‘There are two main branches of intelligence: M.I.6, that acquires information about enemy plans and movement, that operates in enemy territory; and M.I.5, which is us, that keeps information about our troops from getting to the enemy. Now, in our high echelon there’s a lot more to it than sticking up posters about careless talk. That’s the dreary, obvious side of security. It’s necessary, very necessary, but it’s a bore. The exciting side is ours, finding out what the German-Italian equivalent for M.I.6 is doing, stopping them, outwitting them and, when the occasion comes, sending back false information that will mislead them. It’s fascinating work. Think what it means if you can fool the Germans into keeping in Thrace a couple of Divisions that are desperately needed in Sicily. I think you’ll have fun with us, and what’s far more important, as far as you are concerned, you’ll be in the war as a belligerent at last.’

  ‘Shall I ask Cartwright about this?’

  ‘If you like. Perhaps you’d better. No, on second thoughts it had better come from me. I’m applying for you, after all.’

  * * *

  That evening Cartwright rang down to Reid. ‘Can you spare me a couple of minutes?’

  Cartwright was smiling genially. ‘You work even quicker than I do,’ he said. ‘Stallard was the man I wanted you to meet. I thought he might have something for you. I’m delighted that he has. I don’t know the one half of what his outfit does, but they are hand-picked. It’ll take a week or so before your posting is through. But there isn’t any need for you to wait for that. The sooner you move across to them the better.’

  Two days later there was another letter from Rachel, this time sent by air mail, acknowledging the first letter he had written from the Lebanon. It was dated December 28:

  ‘Dearest,

  ‘It was a great relief to get your letter, to know that you had arrived safely, and to be able to picture your new life. How far away it all does seem. I’ve thought of you so much these last few days. It’s the first Christmas that we haven’t been together, and on the surface it all looks so much the same: the kids coming back for the holidays, the Christmas tree in the drawing-room, and the staff coming in at five o’clock for their presents and Christmas cake and port; there were the same candles and decorations on the tree; and I went to the midnight service and tried to work out what time it was with you. It’s so silly but I always forget whether the clock goes back or forwards; the kids seemed to be having as much fun as ever; there was a rich array of presents. They miss you. But children take such a short-termed view of things; they only see the next thing on the list. Did you know that the Montereys were getting a divorce? I talked to Dorothy about it the other day. She told me that she had spent twenty minutes explaining to the children what it was all about. They listened quietly; when she had finished there was a pause. The children ruminated. Then the elder boy said, “Does that mean we shan’t go to St. Ives this summer?”, St. Ives being his family home. Is that pertinent? Perhaps it isn’t. But I thought it interesting. That’s the way children are; a short, short view; and, of course, when you come back they’ll pick up the threads as though there hadn’t been an interval. And perhaps that’s the way it should be. But it depresses me in a way. It makes everything seem so temporary and short-lived. But really there isn’t anything to worry over. They both had good reports. I’ll forward them by sea mail. They are happy and well; they are having a good holiday; there are parties and Christmas trees. Parents can’t be bothered to do anything for themselves these days, but they see to it that the children don’t feel too great a difference. I’m glad now that I didn’t take them to Canada after the fall of France. I was very tempted, as you know, with talk of invasion. I was so afraid that they might be starved. You were uncertain yourself, weren’t you? You couldn’t tell what was going to happen to yourself, you might have been posted anywhere, but nobody thinks now that there’s any real likelihood of invasion and with America in the war we shan’t starve. If we’d gone to Canada they might have found it very difficult to settle back into English life. They’d have absorbed a different way of living; there might, too, be a certain amount of resentment towards them on the part of those that stayed here. Who can tell? And after all we had that year together. It was a happy time, wasn’t it? One of our really happiest, I thought. We seemed so close to one another; perhaps the idea of danger helped. I so looked forward to those week-ends. Peacetime week-ends were always fun, but it was different when it meant your actually coming home instead of just not going into Winchborough; and I used to look forward all the week to those Fridays when I came up to London. Oh, I’m very glad we had that year.’

  He shrugged as he put the letter down. His face wore a wry expression. Was she writing as she really felt, or as she thought she ought to feel; or was she simply forgetting what she did not want to remember? They had been happy times, admittedly. He had looked forward to those Fridays, and Southwick was much more enjoyable when he wasn’t there all the time. Yet even so he had never known any real peace of mind once the danger of invasion had passed, when bombing had become intermittent and he had recognized that he could not stay permanently in the Ministry of Mines; that he had outlived his use there; and that he might have to apply to be returned to his professorship. Well, that was behind him now. He was in the war at last, if what Stallard had said was true.

  Chapter Five

  Reid had read Rachel’s letter in a fourth-floor office in a building that from a side street running parallel to the waterfront looked on to the St. Georges, on the one side, and the playing-field of a girls’ school on the other. The three lower floors were occupied by the M.E.S.C. (Middle East Supply Centre).

  ‘It’s as good a cover as you could have,’ Stallard had explained. ‘Lebanese of all denominations are going there every hour of the day. It won’t excite any curiosity if one of our secret boys is seen going through the door. It’s much safer than the Mission.’

  Reid also moved from the flat above the University to a room in the old town. Abdul Hamid found it for him. It was part of a large family flat owned by a Lebanese professor at the University who had two small children; the cost of living was rising and his salary was stationary. He was glad of the extra money. ‘He also hopes that you will buy material for him from the Officers’ Shop and groceries from the N.A.A.F.I. That is strictly against army regulations, but the law does not apply to you in your present position.’

  Reid’s lodging consisted of one large room with direct access to the bathroom; it also had an independent entrance, ‘Very convenient,’ Abdul Hamid explained with a leer. ‘No one will feel embarrassed about visiting you.’

  It was a congenial place. Through one window as he lay in bed he could see the high minaret of a mosque; through the other, at the end of a long vista of houses he could see the sea. Every morning while it was still dark he would be woken by the voice of a muezzin. Always an early riser he would make no attempt to get back to sleep. He would lie among his pillows brooding while the quick dawn broke. On the balcony of the house across the street two girls in long, white dressing-gowns, with their black hair flung loose over their shoulders, would hang their mattresses over the side of the balcony and beat their carpets. By six, tramcars would be running in the streets. By seven, the honking of car horns had begun. Breakfast was served to him in his room. When he left the flat at eight, the shops were open and the streets were crowded with veiled Moslem women; with Lebanese girls, their black Bryl-creemed hair worn long upon their shoulders; with Arabs walking two and two, in fezzes, swinging their beads, sometimes their little fingers intertwined. Along the sidewalks would be vendors of hollow bread, shaped in crescents, and shoe blacks with their little brass-bound caskets. His twenty minutes’ walk took him up the noisy main street, down which the trolleys ran. At the pivotal traffic point where a policeman stood u
nder an umbrella, he took the road that ran south to the sea. It was Beirut’s Piccadilly. At its head was Tanios, a kind of Fortnum and Mason where Duty Officers would procure picnic sandwiches. There were bookshops there and libraries. Kassab’s—the Liberty’s of Beirut—several Indian silk-shops, and Terses where you bought brocades.

  At the foot of the street he turned left along the waterfront. He had spent a good deal of his time on the French Riviera. It was oddly familiar to be taking morning after morning just this walk. The luxury hotels reminded him of the Croisette; the small sailors’ cafés of Antibes; the night-club section past the Nor-mandie had an air of Juan-les-Pins. Two hundred yards beyond the fashionable plage of the St. Georges was another beach highly unfashionable, like the stretch of shingle under the railway between Villefranche and Cap Ferrat. There was a cemetery like Mougins’ with tall cypresses. Here bougainvillaea trailed over high garden walls, the sky was blue and at the back of it all a perpetual backcloth, like the Esterelles, were the high snow-capped mountains of the Lebanon. It was as though the whole run of the coast between Cannes and Monte Carlo had been telescoped in essence into the limits of this few minutes’ stroll.

  The office staff consisted of one other officer, a lieutenant called Finchley, the son of an English businessman, and an Egyptian recruited in Cairo who acted as accountant and administrator with no share in the intelligence side of the office’s work. Diana handled the personal correspondence. There was a corporal in charge of the files, two typists and a batman chauffeur. Reid had a room to himself, while Diana shared a room with Finchley who said that the sound of typing did not disturb him.

  ‘It’s nice that I’ll be seeing you every day,’ he said to her.

  ‘That’s what I’ve been thinking.’

  ‘But I was beginning to enjoy my evenings as Duty Officer.’

  ‘Only beginning? I’d liked them from the start.’

  * * *

  On his last morning in Beirut Stallard laid out his plan of campaign to Reid and Farrar.

  ‘You are as much on the same level as a G.2(Ops.) and a G.2(I); and it seems a little invidious to leave Nigel in charge of that flat and all the greater amenities involved by it, but as I see it a flat will be of much greater use to you, Nigel, than it would be to the Professor. Nigel, you’re an extrovert: you talk a lot; not too much, not at all too much. It’s gay, I like it. You’re different, though, Professor: your forte—Diana put me on it and I noticed it myself—is your capacity to make people talk; you draw them out. You’re at your best in tête-à-têtes, or as a chairman for a group of three or four; the result of the tutorial system. I’d say that quiet lunches and dinners rather than cocktail parties were your line.

  ‘Then, again, Nigel speaks reasonable Arabic and he knows this parish. My idea is that he should find the people who can be useful to us and then hand them over to you; I picture Nigel as a public relations man, seeing groups of people, picking the two or three who might be suborned, intimidated, generally recruited, then saying to you, “Prof., try your luck with him.” It’s wise not to have the two of you living in the same flat, and there’s no need to let the world know that you are working in the same outfit. But there’s no need for you not to go about as friends. Some people carry security to an extreme. They are so anxious to deny information to the enemy, that they wouldn’t allow an attack in the Western Desert for fear that the Germans would discover what kinds of tank we have. If you were to stop going around together, people would imagine that you had quarrelled. There’s no point in that; besides, when they realized that you were working under the same roof they would be suspicious. No, none of that. It’s all very simple. Explain that the Professor is forty-three years old, that he’s used to a quiet life, that he needs evenings by himself and that you’re too social for him. And I’d say by and large that was pretty true. That’s the general strategy, it’s up to you to work out the tactics. Good luck to you both, and remember this is an important area. It looks a pretty playground at the moment; it won’t be so pretty if Rommel breaks through to the canal and the Turks decide to join the Axis. On your toes, in fact.’

  No, thought Reid, he isn’t a faux bon homme.

  On his first morning in the M.E.S.C. building, Farrar handed Reid a file marked ‘Amin Marun.’

  ‘Before I came up here they kept me for a month in Cairo with their files. You’ve met Amin Marun; if you read their file you’ll have a good idea of the way we work. There are a few things to remember first. If a report is marked “A +” it means it comes direct from Abdul Hamid. If it’s marked “A” it means it is a good report. Anything marked “B” is something to be taken with a caution. “C” is no more than a rumour. But if there are a lot of “C”s, it is worth investigating.’

  ‘Do all reports come through Abdul Hamid?’

  ‘Not all of them, not by any means. We have a number of representatives scattered through the country. We also correspond with our branch in Istanbul. They have a link with the Turkish War Office whom we call “Aunt Mildred”. She is very useful to us. There are code names that you’ll find the clue to in another file. Ask Diana about that. I’d read it all through first, as though it were a novel; then take it slowly a second time, make notes and after that ask questions. By the way, T.B. is me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Short for Toby Belch.’

  It was a bulky file but after half an hour’s study of it, Reid was reaching the conclusion that it contained very little solid information. There was an opening entry stating how Farrar had met the Amin Maruns at a party given by a Lebanese merchant who possessed a consignment of dates in Basra that he wanted to transport to Syria. There was an account of the Amin Marun background, which he already knew. There was a description of Aziz.

  A copy of the office’s weekly summary was sent to I.S.L.O., M.E.F., with a limited distribution list. ‘It is believed,’ Reid read in it, ‘that there are possibilities in a young Turk who is staying with his aunt, the wife of a Lebanese merchant. He is a problem child and if we could find some way of exerting pressure on him he might serve as a channel for false information to Turkey. On the other hand, by judicious blackmail, we might force him to give us valuable information on his return to Turkey. A lot depends on whether he passes his next exams. If he fails I shall suggest that he goes to Alexandria. He might accept the suggestion out of a reluctance to return to Turkey. I think he has no sympathy for his father. In Alexandria, without the security offered him by his aunt, it would be easier to detect what his special weakness is. When we have detected that, it will be easy to decide what is our most fruitful method of approach.’

  A report marked ‘A’ from his English teacher at the A.U.B. stated: ‘A low potential: no feeling for the language: no wish to acquire it. Well behaved in form.’ A ‘B’ report from a fellow-student ran: ‘Speaks fluent French but does not write it grammatically: does not interest himself in community activities: not popular, not unpopular, a cypher.’ Another ‘B’ report indicated that he kept late hours, that he often looked tired at morning classes.

  Interspersed with these reports about Aziz were entries about the aunt and uncle. Censorship had been put on all mail entering the Amin Marun household and addressed to Aziz at the University. Madame Amin’s correspondence had been submitted to a V.I. lamp but there were no indications of secret writing.

  It all, in Reid’s opinion, amounted to very little. His interest began to wane. Then suddenly his attention was startled by an ‘A+’ report.

  ‘I had been asked,’ it said, ‘to make any discovery I could about Aziz’s love life. I called at the company’s flat after dinner; we drank several whiskies; the atmosphere was cordial. The professor joined us later; we talked for a little, then I offered to see Aziz home. “It’s early,” I said, when we were in the car. “Why not go somewhere for a drink?” He shook his head. “I’ve had enough to drink.” “I know a place where we can find nice girls.” “No, thanks.” We drove towards his home. I did not hur
ry. I put my hand on his knee. He made no response. I moved my hand higher. Still no response. I paused, waited. He shifted. He crossed his legs. It was not that he repulsed me; I do not believe he was aware that an advance had been made towards him. He is a very curious young man.’

  Reid stopped, astounded. He re-read the report. It could only mean one thing.

  He crossed the passage to Farrar’s room.

  ‘This file,’ he said. ‘Is this the truth?’

  ‘The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.’

  ‘This report of Abdul Hamid and Aziz, in the car?’

  ‘Sinister was the word you used.’

  ‘But we’re encouraging this, abetting a crime.’

  ‘Steady, now, steady; we’re abetting nothing, and it’s not a crime here, remember. The places where it’s a crime are very few. No one worries about it in a Moslem world. It’s the women they worry about, not the men. It’s difficult for a young Moslem to find a girl-friend. He has no alternative.’

  ‘Then if that’s the case, why seduce him, if it gives you no blackmail hold as it would in England?’

  ‘Seduce is a big word. A young man like Aziz knows his own mind. He’s one thing or another or perhaps both things. We want to find out the kind of young man he is. Then we know what use to make of him.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You’ll find more sinister things than that in our files before you’re through.’

  ‘I’ll be on my guard.’ He turned back towards the passage; as he did, the door of the next office opened and Finchley walked out through it. Diana was alone. He went straight in.

  ‘Are you doing anything for lunch?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m not, no.’

  ‘Then would you have lunch with me? It’s short notice; but this file has been a shock to me.’

  ‘Which file is that?’

  He handed it across. She glanced at it. ‘Oh, yes, I know. I can understand, one has to get used to that kind of thing in this game.’