Arabesque (14 page)

“Oh, I don’t bubble at any time,” she smiled. “And one of me is too serious, I know. But the other me has a lot of fun all by herself. An ironical sort of fun.”

“Which is the conventional one?”

“Both—if you call good taste convention,” she answered firmly.

“Do I? Must apply the loaf to that. Your hospitality, for example. Hardly conventional, even by Arab standards. But in excellent taste. Well, I’ll have to make Fouad disappear for
you.”

“But how?”

“Just wave the wand.”

“Are you sure you can do it without getting into trouble?” she asked anxiously.

“Were you?”

Armande called in Fouad from the bedroom. Prayle stumbled through the Arabic greetings, watching the man as he gravely answered. His eyes were merry and honourable. He was neither sullen nor
effusive, and showed no sense of guilt. He was as naturally courteous as if he had met Prayle upon his own mountains and were inviting him to enter his house.

The word
devotion
sprang into the sergeant’s mind. That was his instinctive summing-up of Fouad. It was no rare quality among the Eastern Christians. They might be
easygoing—in every bad sense as well as good—but they could love.

He smiled into the composed and lovely little face that watched the pair of them so intently. Here was the girl he had imagined, with immense reserves of loyalty and courage. He packed away the
knowledge, to be squared some time, whenever his army life gave him the hour and the solitude for slow reflection, with her exasperating and unreal detachment.

“Hardest, first,” he said. “That moustache has got to come off.”

Fouad, recognising word and gesture, looked appealingly at Armande; then burst into sad and passionate Arabic.

“Not quite sure,” Prayle interpreted, “but I think he said that if he has to swing, moustache swings too. It would be a proud day, you see, and he ought to look his best. How
do you talk together, by the way?”

“Oh, Fouad understands simple French. I’ll get his moustache off him. Is there anything else you want?”

“Ravishing blondes,” he said thoughtfully. “I had shares in a dance hall once, and we used to make a packet out of selling beauty preparations—whenever our tame chemist
wasn’t all hopped up. No demand for mouse brown. But can do, I suppose?”

“Can do,” she laughed, “if I bleached him first. I’ll see my beauty parlour.”

“Good. His skin is so fair, you see, that he’d look quite a different person with brown hair and no moustache.”

Sergeant Prayle talked himself out of the room, remarking casually that he would see her or telephone her the following evening about their various troubles. He did not again refer directly to
Wadiah’s arms. Armande, amusedly seeking the cause of his embarrassment, suddenly realised—and her heart leaped up with appreciation of his queer delicacy—that he was eager to
impress it on her that there was no bargain, and that he completely dissociated the disposal of Fouad from the answer he demanded and expected.

Since it was the Jewish Sabbath, Armande was reasonably certain of finding David Nachmias at home. He was not religious, but he conformed. The Agency employees, whose personal creeds varied from
atheism to a mild infection of philosophical Judaism, were careful as bank managers in a town of Methodists to keep their activities unobtrusive on the day of rest.

She called him up, and guardedly, as she thought, indicated trouble. Abu Tisein abruptly cut the conversation short, and said that he would come at once to see her. Armande was piqued that he
should doubt her caution on the telephone. The click of the receiver as he replaced it was sharp as a rebuke from a commanding officer.

She tidied her room and put away the overalls. For David Nachmias she was businesslike—not, however, in the sweater and skirt she habitually wore at her army office, but with the smartness
of Calinot’s former secretary. Calinot’s secretary, she remembered, had been a very model of discretion on telephones, and had not, Repeat Not, changed since.

Her resentment vanished as soon as David Nachmias entered the room. Slow, massive and courteous, it was no wonder that Arabs liked him. He asked her immediately of Fouad, and she lied boldly
that he had gone. That was her own business—and she had ensured that there would be no smell but flowers and a faint memory of perfume.

Armande gave him coffee, and told him of the sergeant’s visit. Abu Tisein listened unperturbed, changing one cigarette for another so smoothly that his chain-smoking was as natural and
unnoticeable as the rise and fall of his chest. He did not interrupt her with a single question. His brown eyes held a mild and fatherly interest.

“We have made a mistake, Madame,” he said at last.

Armande felt only pleasure at the
we.
If any mistake had been made, Abu Tisein had made it, but she was ready enough to be associated with him.

“I could not guess that the French would collect arms in the Lebanon,” he admitted frankly. “It seems incredible that you, the British, should occupy a country and then allow
to others so intimate a detail of administration. Well, well, you could have thought of no surer way of making the French unpopular.”

Abu Tisein relaxed into silent contemplation of his coffee. Armande watched him, fascinated; she had never seen a man think with so little outward sign of any mental processes at all. After some
minutes she ventured to recall him to her own problem.

“What shall I tell these security people? Can I mention your name?”

“I would rather you did not as yet,” he replied indifferently. “I will see them myself.”

“As you like, of course.”

“After all, it is not an affair for policemen.”

“I suppose they have to do what they are told,” Armande answered, by her tone lightly defending Sergeant Prayle’s interference.

“True. Sometimes they must act. And action in the dark is always foolish. Is he honest, this sergeant?”

“Yes,” she said—and then wondered at her unhesitating reply. The odd scraps that she had heard from Prayle of his past life and present opinions were far from a guarantee of
honesty.

“I know very little about them,” replied Nachmias apologetically.

“It seems so odd that none of these hush-hush organisations should be able to check up on each other. Isn’t there any one department which knows all the secrets?”

“Probably. But it is very far away. What is this Field Security? I know their officers. Yet I do not know exactly what they do.”

“A sort of comic Gestapo,” she answered.

“What? Gestapo? Here in Palestine?”

Abu Tisein looked almost angry.

“The completest amateurs!” Armande reassured him.

“All the more dangerous. The professional policeman is without too much enthusiasm. He is afraid of his job.”

“But what did happen to the arms?” she asked, emboldened by his nervousness to put the direct question.

“As you promised Wadiah, they were collected by soldiers in uniform.”

“Then what is all the fuss about?” Armande’s great eyes caressed him, soft with the tender amusement of a mother at the unnecessary evasions of her sons. “You have only
to tell the general what happened.”

Nachmias did not respond. His face remained calm as a sultry summer evening.

“Madame, consider what you know. Wadiah is not lying. Prayle is not lying. But is it not possible that Major Montagne is lying?”

“I don’t understand. When?”

“I suggest to you that he knew all about the deal. He was lying when he showed surprise.”

“But why should he say he hasn’t got the arms, if he has?” she asked with some agitation. “I don’t understand. You ought to let me know what I have done.”

“You are aware, Madame, that the French are divided into two parties?”

“Vaguely. But they didn’t matter.”

“Perhaps not, when you were at Beirut in the days of their first enthusiasm. Now they do matter. There might even be open, violent collision. Catholics and royalists on one side,
socialists and communists on the other. Well, Madame, imagine that I was ordered to give arms to the left wing and not to the right. Do you understand now? Major Montagne can never say that he had
Wadiah’s machine guns. Nor can we. And the greatest, the very greatest discretion is essential.”

Armande felt utter revulsion from what she had done, from Nachmias and from the wasted year of her life, that waste which had been forgotten in triumph—and what a triumph! Then men had
time for this kind of ugly intrigue in the midst of a war for life and death? Poor, gallant France still keeping up its suicidal feuds in exile, and her own country encouraging and able and ready
to split a helpless ally! Then what was truth, and where in this miserable, needless conflict was it? If this were British policy, then all the accusations of French and German and Jew against
perfidious Albion were justified. Divide and rule, divide and rule—it was no better than Hitler’s conquer and rule.

Her eyes filled with tears. They spread upon her cheek before she could stop them.

“Madame …” protested David Nachmias.

“It is nothing,” she answered. “Leave me alone. I shall be all right.”

“But what is it?”

“Leave me alone. It’s not your fault. I should have known. These things have to be.”

“But what you did was magnificent!”

“Ours not to reason why!” she cried hysterically. “Magnificent? Magnificently filthy! Wadiah is worth all of you.”

“He is. I admit it. But still, Madame, I do not understand.”

“No? Oh God, David Nachmias, are we living a hundred years ago? It was the fashion then—this beastly, crooked cleverness. But that is not what I thought I was serving. That is not
why I am in the Middle East. I haven’t a country any longer after what you have told me. Don’t you see that I can never work for you again?”

“As you wish, Madame,” began Abu Tisein severely. “But you must never—”

“Never! Do you think I would talk of an indecency like that? Do you think I want to remember it myself? Oh, leave me and leave it, and go and build your Palestine. That at least is
clean.”

Abu Tisein’s eyes were expressionless. There was a hint of pity in them, but neither protest at her emotion nor any fear of it. His very presence was a reminder that nothing mattered.
Accept, accept, always accept! She was bitter at his complacence, but that calm made it easier for her to gain control of herself.

“I am sorry,” she said.

“I have been very mistaken in you, Madame,” he murmured regretfully.

“I dare say. I am sorry,” she repeated.

“I do not mean that as a criticism,” Nachmias assured her gently, “or only of myself. You were so self-possessed in Beirut—almost Oriental. I thought … well, it
doesn’t matter what I thought. I was wrong.”

“
A poule de luxe
, like the rest of them,” said Armande savagely, flushing at her own vehemence.

“No! Never!” protested Abu Tisein.

Her angry desire to shake him out of his tranquillity had been well and unexpectedly fulfilled. She was sourly amused to see that he was shocked.

“Never, Madame, I assure you! But I thought that you cared for nothing, you understand, but purposes of your own. That was the impression you gave: that you were waiting for—for
power to come to you. Power, yes, I thought you wanted that; but not through the methods of a … of ordinary women. And you have power. You are dangerous, Madame.”

“I am very weary of being called a dangerous woman,” said Armande, her tone deliberately implying that she was bored by such stupidity.

“Then be more open, more European.”

“More open?” she asked ironically.

Her respect for David Nachmias was vanishing. Hero of secret campaigns he might be—but to leave himself exposed to such a thrust!

“But that—that is it!” exclaimed Abu Tisein, rising with a slow, yet agitated dignity from his chair. “We are children in your hands. And why? What do you want? I said
you must be more open. I do not mean more indiscreet and you know it. Discreet? Of course you will be discreet. You yourself might find difficulties if you were not.”

“No daggers, please, Mr. Nachmias.”

“And there again! Will you tell me what you are thinking? Not a word! Not a word!”

“But why so much mystery?” asked Armande. “You call me dangerous. You tell me to be discreet. You tell me to be more open. You threaten me. And all the time I am not thinking
at all. I am just listening.”

“For what?”

“For nothing at all.”

“And when you are alone, what do you think then?”

Armande smiled. There was no answer to so stupid or so deep a question.

“M. Nachmias, I shall not speak a word of what has passed between us. So far as all this official curiosity goes, you will satisfy it. That’s what you want, isn’t
it?”

“Yes. And I shall do so.”

“And give my compliments to you charming wife. We shall see each other often, I hope.”

“Good-bye, Madame.”

“Good-bye. And do not worry about your secrets,” she added with a smile.

After leaving Armande’s flat Sergeant Prayle went slowly downstairs, stopping on the three landings to read the cards and name plates on the front doors. He had no
conscious professional interest; as a civilian he would have done the same—to the exasperation of anyone walking with him who happened to be in a hurry. He liked to acquire an imaginative
picture, which might or might not be true, of how people lived and why they lived where they did.

On each floor there were two doors. On the ground floor there was a third door, facing the entrance to the block and unlatched. This he opened, being curious about the layout of the flats, and
discovered the furnace, boiler and oil tank. Only then did it occur to him that if the door had a hole for an eye, an hour or two on watch might be profitable. Should Armande go out to see the
secret department for which she believed she was working, she might—though God help him if he were caught!—be followed; and if anybody interesting came, he could tell by listening
carefully to the steps whether the visitor had gone up to her penthouse.