The Mule on the Minaret Page 20

  ‘I’m not in any hurry.’

  Nor was she. She had asked Kitty not to return too early. She leant against the settee, her back propped with cushions. She watched the expression of his face change as the music ebbed and flowed. Once again under the impact of the music, a spiritual expression came into his face. He was not handsome, but he was beautiful at such a moment. It was just as it had been at the earlier meeting, except that the moment’s magic was intensified by the change in his position. She had thought of him as her victim then; he was now her prisoner though he did not know it. That indeed was a large part of his fascination for her. He did not know what cords she had fastened round him, cords that would tighten in his absence. There was no escape for him, no escape from her.

  The record finished. ‘I’ll get your whisky now,’ she said. On her return from the kitchen she sat beside him.

  ‘Are you excited about going back to Beirut?’ she asked.

  ‘Not very.’

  ‘You’ll be glad to see your girl-friend, won’t you?’

  ‘I haven’t a girl-friend.’

  ‘What, a young man like you? And I’m told that the girls in Beirut are very pretty. They are very pretty, aren’t they?’

  ‘They are all right.’

  ‘No girl-friend, though?’

  ‘No girl-friend.’

  ‘Because you are faithful to your girl-friend here.’

  ‘I have no girl-friend here.’

  ‘Then where is your girl-friend?’

  ‘I have no girl-friend anywhere.’

  She raised her eyebrows in mock astonishment. She was enjoying this teasing of him in the same way, so she suspected, that an experienced man would enjoy teasing an inexperienced girl. ‘He’s actually blushing,’ she thought. ‘Yes, he is.’

  ‘Haven’t you ever been in love?’ she asked.

  He shook his head.

  ‘But you find girls attractive?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘What kinds of girl do you find attractive? Dark, fair, thin, plump?’

  He laughed, a little nervously. ‘I have not thought about it.’

  ‘Are you sure you haven’t?’

  Again he laughed, that same nervous laugh.

  ‘If you haven’t, they have,’ she said.

  ‘They? Who do you mean?’

  ‘The girls.’

  ‘What girls?’

  ‘That’s what I’m wondering. Which girls you attract. It’s a curious thing, so I’ve been told, that very often very young girls don’t like young men. They prefer older men, men of experience who can put them at their ease. It’s vice versa, so they say; young men prefer women with experience. Is that true in your case? Do you like married women?’

  Again he shook his head. He looked awkward, yet at the same time he seemed to be enjoying it as though he were being tickled.

  ‘I think I can guess the kind of girl you’d like, who’d be right for you; a girl about five years older who’s had some experience. That’s what you need. Shall I tell you what I’m going to do, when you come back. . .. You are coming back, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I’m coming back.’

  ‘I can be much more help to you than Ahmed could have ever been. But that’s not the only reason, is it, that you’ll be coming back?’

  ‘That’s not the only reason.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be at all happy if it were; I’d be very hurt. But you will come back. I know you will, and when you do I’ll have a party and ask two or three of the kinds of girl I think you’d like, about twenty-three to twenty-six, who’ve been about. There are quite a number of them in the various Ministries; and then you can see which you’d prefer. The only trouble is,’ she paused and her eyes were twinkling, ‘the trouble is that I might get jealous. I’ve a suspicion I could use you for myself.’

  She saw, at that moment, a look in his eyes that was partly anticipation, partly fear: the kind of expression that a mature man might see in a young girl’s eyes when he first approaches her; a girl who is terrified of what may transpire, but who will never forgive him now if he draws back.

  ‘Yes,’ she repeated. ‘I’m very sure I should be jealous.’ She swung round off the low, round cushion and knelt on it. She was higher than he was now, and she looked down on him. It gave her a heady sense of power. His eyes were shining. She lowered her face slowly over his, let her mouth rest on his; gently at first, then with a strengthening, deepening pressure. She let her lips open slightly, let the tip of her tongue slide between them. She lingered, then drew back her head. ‘He’ll never forget this,’ she told herself. ‘Never, never, never.’

  * * *

  The party to welcome Aziz’s return was fixed for seven o’clock. It would go on till ten to accommodate those who worked late in offices. Reid and Farrar agreed to go there early. Reid had a dinner date afterwards with Diana.

  ‘I’ll be able to give you a first-hand report,’ he told her.

  ‘Do that,’ she said.

  Reid was curious to see whether he would be able to detect any difference in Aziz. Surely there would be some signs of change. But to his surprise on the surface Aziz was unaltered. He was as silent and detached as ever. He made no effort to do more than acknowledge congratulations. The only obvious change in him was superficial; he had exchanged his usual heavy black winter suit for a light grey summer one. It did not suit him. Black went better with his mournful countenance. Reid waited till the press of guests had thinned.

  ‘Congratulations. It must be a relief,’ he said.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Are you glad to be back?’

  ‘In most ways, yes.’

  ‘Did it seem strange being in a country that was not at war?’

  ‘There’s not all that difference. Istanbul is full of uniforms.’

  ‘But isn’t there a different tension in the air? The men here who are in uniform may be in action any day.’

  ‘There’s the same tension when you’ve a military dictator, and Turkey may be in the war at any moment.’

  ‘How do your friends there think the war is going?’

  ‘It will be a long war they say.’

  ‘But they have no doubt as to the result, I hope?’

  Aziz shrugged. ‘They are not sure. They guessed wrong in the First War. Some of them think that Japan and America cancel each other out, that Russia might make a separate peace, which would leave Germany in control of Europe.’

  ‘Do many Turks think that?’

  ‘Several do.’

  ‘You don’t yourself, I hope?’

  ‘I am not qualified to judge.’

  Reid hesitated. It would be interesting in the light of that admission to read the reports that he sent up on the blank spaces of the Palestine Post. He looked at Aziz more closely; perhaps there was a change in him after all, though not the kind of change he had expected. There was a glow about him. I wonder, he thought, I wonder.

  ‘Is your heart still moving on an even keel?’ he asked.

  For a moment Aziz looked puzzled, then remembering their last talk, blushed. Reid laughed. ‘I don’t believe it is. You remember the prophecy I made?’

  Aziz’s blush deepened. ‘Your prophecy has not been fulfilled.’

  ‘But is it unfulfilled?’

  Aziz smiled, but did not answer, and at that moment Madame Amin bustled up. ‘Aziz, dear, the Commandant has just arrived. You remember who he is, don’t you?’

  Reid moved away. ‘I’ve no doubt,’ he said to Diana afterwards, ‘that he is at least half in love.’

  They were dining in Sa’ad’s. It was their favourite restaurant. They liked its privacy; they liked its food; they liked the fact that it was more patronized by Lebanese than French and British. ‘It’s curious, isn’t it, that we should be so excited about what he has been doing in connection with our operation, but that to himself this operation may be far less important than this girl, whoever she may be. You would expect a young man who has been exposed to such
a shock to have a look of strain or guilt. Instead of that there’s an inner glow about him, because he’s met a pretty girl.’

  She laughed. ‘Perhaps the shock wasn’t so serious to him after all; perhaps he is rather glad to be working for the Germans. Perhaps he considers he has had a lucky break; he’s being paid to do something that he’s always wanted to. Have you thought of that?’

  ‘Frankly, I hadn’t.’

  ‘There are so many different slants on every situation.’

  ‘There are times when none of it seems real to me.’

  ‘Perhaps none of it is.’

  ‘The only thing that does seem real is you sitting across this table from me, holding your glass between your hands. And yet if I had been told thirty months ago that I should be here in the Middle East, working in the Secret Service, decoding cyphers, recruiting spies, sending messages in secret ink, all that which now seems so unreal would have seemed quite probable. Yet the one thing that is real, you sitting here, is the one thing I could not have imagined happening. It is so foreign from everything that I had pictured for myself.’

  She did not speak. She lifted the glass to her lips and sipped it slowly. Her eyes softened. Her silence was supremely eloquent. She evoked poetry in him. As he spoke, as his sentences took shape he had the sensation of swinging incense before a shrine. She seemed to be saying, ‘Yes, go on. Go on. Now is your chance of saying it. I am receptive, responsive, waiting to be wooed with words. The chance may not come again; I may not be in this mood again, with you.’

  He swung the censer higher.

  ‘I could not have believed that anyone like you existed: you with your deep rich voice; you who are so tall but do not look tall, of whom I cannot think in terms of height, only in terms of beauty, of grace; the way you walk; the tones that come into your voice; the viols in your voice. You are like no one I have known; that I should meet you at all, that is a miracle, but that miracle of miracles you should be dining with me, and alone. I had no conception that . . .’ He checked. She had half closed her eyes. She lowered her glass and her lips parted, as though she were drinking in his words.

  ‘All my life,’ he went on, ‘I’ve been giving lectures. Sentences build themselves for me as I’m talking, but I never believed that I could talk like this, that I could have this sense of being lost but found, of being drowned but salvaged; of losing all identity but at the same time being myself, completely, for the first time in my life. Every time I see you I feel I am seeing you for the first time; there is that same shock along my nerves and senses that I knew when I saw you standing at the head of the Mission stairs; everything is for the first time always; a new adventure, a new landscape, the opening of a porthole on a long dreamed island.’ He stopped and smiled. ‘Do you know that we’ve barely finished our soup; that this is our first glass of wine; that no man makes speeches till he has reached the coffee and liqueur?’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been told.’

  ‘I’ve broken all the rules, in fact.’

  ‘That’s what you’ve done.’

  ‘You make one break rules, you know.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been told.’

  ‘You don’t mind my breaking rules?’

  ‘I’d have been furious with you if you hadn’t.’

  He stopped again. Her eyes were dilated and very tender. ‘You are coming back with me, aren’t you, afterwards?’

  ‘That’s why I’ve come here, isn’t it?’

  Chapter Nine

  Spring comes swiftly but gently to the Lebanon. Then suddenly the heat of summer falls: the hot, dry wind, the Khamsin, from the desert is followed by a clinging humid heat and the rich Beirutis hasten into the cool of the hills, into Aley and Brumana. On a May morning, with the fan whirring in the office, Reid studied the Amin Marun file. It had received a number of entries in recent weeks. The first folio contained an account of the first Monday in Tanio’s Café. Chessman had brought down a marked copy of the Palestine Post. The paper was brought to the Beirut office. It contained a special inquiry about Australians. Had many of them been observed recently? The paper was delivered by a friend of Abdul Hamid. It was intended that the paper should be brought on each occasion by a different bearer. Aziz was instructed to deliver his reply in the Bassoul Café on the following Thursday. He reported that he had seen a number of men in uniform wearing Australian hats, but that he did not think they were fighting troops. He thought they were working on the railway that was being constructed from the Turkish frontier to Cairo. He considered that the Lebanese did not consider the British armies in the Western Desert were strong enough to resist Rommel. They were wondering what their own position would be if the canal were to be captured. They believed that the British and French would evacuate the seaboard and set up a defence line on the Tigris, maintaining contact through Basra with Persia and the Russian front. Farrar had pencilled on the folio, ‘I wish the Germans would ask him for the sources of his information. I wonder if he made this up.’

  The next folio was a report from Fadhil. ‘Aziz brought me the following list of exports to Germany from Turkey. I have compared the list with the one supplied by Istanbul. The two lists are identical. Aziz is reliable to the extent that he does not tamper with material. He might have held back some of the information that he was given so that he could use it on a subsequent occasion. His account of his experiences with Aunt Mildred tallied with the account that we had already received. He assumed that I knew of Ismail’s sudden attack of panic, but not that there had been an exchange of packets and that Ahmed had received a box of toilet water by hand of Eve Parish, nor that I knew that Eve had promised to supply him with information. He told me about this and suggested that he should supply me with information through Eve. I asked him how he was going to collect this information. He told me that he would take my inquiries by hand on his next visit. I asked him when that would be. As soon as he could manage it, he said. I objected that that might be several weeks, since he could not go up to Istanbul till the end of the spring term at the A.U.B. He knew that, he said, but it would be worth my while to wait because the information that he got from this British source would be much superior to anything that he could get from any of his own friends. I asked him why he did not correspond in secret ink. He told me that it was too risky. I pooh-poohed this nervousness. He was being more nervous than the wretched Ismail. What danger could there be? I was aware that he had every reason to be nervous of the Turkish Censorship, since it had, so he believed, detected his correspondence with Ahmed. But he did not know that I knew this. I pressed the point. I was very anxious to see whether he would betray his real cause for being cautious about the censorship. I mocked him, I told him he was a coward. I hoped to irritate him into explaining his reasons in self-defence. He did not, however. He remained surly and impassive. Yes, he agreed, he probably was a coward. He could not help it, that was the way he was. He adopted a take it or leave it attitude. I recognized that I was much less important to him now that he was in the pay of the Germans. I tried to catch him out on this point, to force him into an admission that he did not care whether he worked for me or not.

  ‘ “Listen,” I said. “These gramophone records are important to you.” He said that of course they were. “Well, don’t you realize that I can’t continue to supply you with them unless you are giving me in return the information I require? It is a matter of exchange.” He realized that, he said. “Don’t you realize,” I went on, “that in business you have to have your facts on the hour? Situations are fluid. The market changes from one day to the next. If there are going to be these gaps I shall be in the dark. This list is very valuable. I do not question that, but it may be out of date within a month. Come now, won’t you think it over? When you go up in August, won’t you take up those writing inks and arrange a regular system of communication in the way that we had planned with Ahmed?”

  ‘But I could not draw him. He said that he was sorry, that this was the best that he coul
d do. The risk was too great. He insisted that the information he was getting from this new source was so authentic that it was well worth my while to wait for it. It would have been impossible for me to suspect from his manner that anything unexpected had happened to him in Istanbul. He appeared to have changed his mind in view of Ismail’s sudden panic and the advice he had received from Eve. My conclusion is that he is a pretty cool operator.’

  The next folio was a report by Farrar:

  ‘I have decided to keep a close watch on Aziz. He has an invitation to drop in to the flat whenever he likes, which is convenient for him, as the University is close. He often has an hour to spare and does not want to go back home. He is very fond of the Prof, and we have a number of good records. He has come to think of us as a second home. I have been experimenting as to his quickness to pick up significance of gossip. The other day, for example, I said to the Prof, that we should invite Major Strudwick to dinner in a day or two. Strudwick is a G.2 in the 7th Australian Division. He was bound to be moving soon, I said; they wouldn’t keep such fine fighting troops on garrison duty when there was need of them in the Western Desert. I did not stress the point at all, but Aziz caught on to it. In the next Palestine Post instalment he reported a rumour that the Australian Division was to be shortly sent to the Western Desert. As far as I know no such rumour is current in Beirut. It is possible that Aziz might be useful in a deception scheme. But one cannot be certain that he will get the nuance of our conversation; moreover, we have to be on our guard against careless talk.

  ‘I am in search of a direct double agent whom Aziz can introduce to the Germans. It is not easy to find one; we cannot approach a Frenchman; that would cause difficulties with our French colleagues. Moreover, we could not trust a Frenchman. He would almost certainly be acting for some group of Frenchmen. A Lebanese is the obvious choice, but not through Aziz’s mediation. They would be awkward with each other. My inclination is an Armenian. Aziz would not think of him as a compatriot. Armenians are children of no-man’s-land. Their hand is with everyone’s and against everyone’s. They are mercenary; they have to be. They live by their wits. I have my eye on a cousin of Annabelle K’s—Alexis Belorian. He is twenty-three years old. He has just graduated from the A.U.B. He is studying law. His parents are rich. I am asking Abdul Hamid to furnish a report on him. He is handsome, dark, dapper, very much a ladies’ man, a coureur des jupes. Might be just the man for us.’