Stewart, Angus (36 page)

'Fetch it,' Jay challenged bitterly.

'Get in,' was all Caroline said.

Once more they obeyed her wordlessly.

Achmed spoke first, darkly, in his own language. He sat, dulled eyes staring at the floor, shrinking from contact with any of them.

'That was what he intends to do to the boy friend, if you're curious,' Jay explained bitterly to Brown.

'Association of the . . . knife, I suppose,' Brown said.

He could so easily have sent the boy along and allayed Caroline's suspicions, Lom kept thinking: beyond that Lom had no explanation; hardly thought at all.

Caroline drove; back the way they had come.

'Idea being he knew about those mines,' Jay said eventually. No one needed to name Abdslem. 'But how did you?'

'Hunch,' Caroline said briefly. 'He talked too much.'

'Hunch? You did that on a hunch? . . . And the job was here, after all,' Jay added slowly. 'You deliberately fooled me.'

Caroline said nothing.

She would be some sort of spy, Lom thought. The job with his team had been what they called 'cover'. He lost interest: dipped one of the crescent-shaped cakes he had pocketed into the
majoun
jar.

'But
what
job? What bloody job?' Jay asked. He repeated himself in vain.

It seemed they had been motoring for ever. Pitilessly the sun scorched the
jol
.
The barren, stony plateau stretched unendingly to every horizon. Behind them their wake rose at first a turbulent skein of tawny wool against the colourless, polished dazzle of sky. Its dust particles dispersed only after hundreds of yards. The faintest thread marked the track before them; its single line forever hypnotically dividing into parallels at a constant distance that seemed to lie just in front of the, lurching, speeding wheels. The heat crashed the chest with a terrible weight. Jay felt his eyes heavy to move as bearings about which all fluid had caked and dried. He laboured to breathe.

Brown circulated tepid water. Violently Achmed thrust thy flask away. His eyes had found an area of the floor unoccupied by any of their feet, and held to it jealously. His body moved lifelessly with the swaying of the Land Rover, as if all sensation had been drained from it.

Jay looked at the terrible spectacle of dejection. He wet his cracking lips again from the water bottle. 'Fus,' he tried, 'the woman and Señor Brown . . . And your friend the soldier. It was a sort of war they were having . . . You saw how the soldier tried to kill them.'

'You too,' Brown put in succinctly.

Achmed said nothing. His eyes were hard glazed. Remorselessly the Land Rover crashed over a broken stretch of track without slackening speed. Achmed's head oscillated vacantly. There seemed no consciousness in him.

'Fus,' Jay said, his voice rising, 'it was wrong of the woman to kill the soldier. She's a cursed person.'

'Knock it off,' Brown said.

'By Christ, I'll expiate the blood feud here and now with your guts!' Jay swung savagely on him. Blood in fact had at that moment begun to flow from his own cracked lip. 'It was a dirty sort of war, Fus,' he repeated helplessly. 'I didn't know . . . I would have stopped the woman . . .'

Bolt upright, Caroline drove furiously on. 'And been shot,' her voice came back coldly.

'Jordanians,' Brown said absently, using his field glasses. 'Must be. They've got
agals
. I knew there were some with the Moroccan army.'

Looking up, Jay saw an encampment of men and camels perhaps half a mile away.

'Put me down here, please.' Lom spoke for the first time, as though they were passengers in some country bus. Brown and Jay stared at him together.

Lom shouldered only his camera. 'Yes, I want to be dropped.'

'I can't do that,' Caroline called back. 'Not till we're further clear.'

'My dear,' Lom began to protest, 'you have no jurisdiction over my—'

'Stop!' Jay said deliberately. 'Or I'll simply lean over your shoulder and put on the hand brake.'

Caroline braked.

'All she means,' Jay explained drily to Lom, 'is that if you tell anyone out there that an Arab's just been murdered by the British government you'll be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act—Right?' He looked at Caroline.

'That's quite right,' Caroline said tightly.

'I'd gladly join you, only as Achmed can't be so threatened I'm assuming he may be murdered at any moment too,' Jay concluded. In fact the further reaching consequence filling him with bitterness was that if Abdslem Kerim had not been somehow a lone worker the country was unlikely to be safe now for any of them.

Caroline made a disgusted noise. Lom had for a second looked apprehensive. Now he said simply:

'Of course I have no interest in your affairs. But I must go alone.'

Unsuccessfully, Jay endeavoured to interpret some echo. 'But all your stuff?' he shouted after Lom, as he set out towards the encampment. 'You've only the camera!'

'Let the child sell it,' Lom called back. 'Or please sell it for him.'

'Mad!' Brown muttered. He just wants to take photographs. But he was with the late captain. Suppose he's working for them?'

'He was,' Caroline said. 'My guess is he was just being casually exploited.' She engaged gear.

'The way Achmed and I were by you,' Jay said. 'Never mind Harold himself.' He watched retreating across the sand the stocky, inexplicable figure he had fortuitously met at Catherine Diergardt's tea party. Where he had met Naima. The Land Rover was motoring furiously once more. 'You're showing damn small concern for your patient suddenly,' he added. 'Are you a nurse?'

Caroline said nothing.

  *  *  *  *  *

Harrik Lom could see the tents ahead only dimly. Then the desert glare became blackness through which he walked purposefully on. And now all he could see was the rough texture of that wall, with the jagged crack, perhaps half a metre wide. He dropped his camera on the ground. It belonged here among the known. Among the black buildings that crumbled all about him, the cobbles, hard, unyielding underfoot, the terrible stench, the thin human sounds, the creak of the handcart wheels; carts laden with starved, translucent corpses, twisted wax, zigzagging uncertainly down the street
beside him, because those who pushed them were so weak. But all these things Harrik Lom could see, and that was why he left the camera behind. What he couldn't see lay beyond the wall, through the crack, where Pini and Sanya had gone. And that was why he was going too now. Because he couldn't see. He wondered how best he might abuse the men who found him on the other side.

  *  *  *  *  *

'Papers!' Jay remembered suddenly. 'That checkpoint. What about the papers?'

Caroline produced the sheaf from the pocket of her bush jacket without comment. Over her shoulder, Jay took them. He studied them with mounting horror.

'This is a carbon copy you know. It lists all our names. Do you realise what that means?' he almost shouted, as Caroline continued to say nothing. 'Your friend had associates higher up. Who let us in here in the first place. So supposing they mistake Abdslem's disintegration for an accident? My
address
even is still on this bit of paper. So's yours.'

'I'm taking the midnight 'plane from Marrakesh if we can make it,' Caroline said. 'There'll be money for you if you want to leave.'

'You're taking the midnight 'plane from Marrakesh,' Jay echoed stupidly. 'Just clearing out.' He looked at Brown. 'What about you?'

Brown drank more whisky. 'It's time for a family move to Tunisia. I want to finish my book on Gide.'

'We'll see about that,' Jay said grimly. 'Within ten days you're having your bloody M or whoever produce you a Decree Absolute. Yes, "all correct in Somerset House",' he mimicked bitterly.

Brown started, with the uncorked bottle half way to his lips. 'What do you mean?'

'I mean,' Jay said 'that I'm flying Nashib to Gibraltar tomorrow and having him made a ward of court. He's a British subject now, remember. And if you don't bestir yourself then, I'll see Naima files suit for divorce citing Manolo as co-respondent. Manolo, no less.'

The bottle remained idiotically poised at Brown's chin. He stared at Jay with sore, red eyes. 'You wouldn't.'

'Oh, but I
would
,
Simon! And I
will
.
Either way you'll lose Nashib. You're just going to have to earn more irregular payment for another dirty job.'

'But I can't! How?' Brown was looking desperate.

'The proposed job in Black Africa, perhaps?' Jay suggested sourly.

'Shut up both of you!' Caroline snapped. 'We're coming to the check.' She spoke rapidly to Achmed in Arabic. Now, over her shoulder, she passed a heavy wrench to Brown. 'I've told the boy if he makes any move you'll stun him with this. Jay, if you think, you won't interfere.'

'Bloody hell!' Jay muttered incredulously. To Achmed he made a pleading gesture to keep quiet. But he was still not registering at all.

'Why not detour?' Brown asked tensely.

Pityingly Jay looked at him. 'Just try lobbing the bottle cork a few yards out there,' he indicated the track side. 'Secret Agent! I wouldn't hire you for temporary Cub Master! Even if you were a castrato,' he added as afterthought.

'You're both being so thoroughly childish!' Caroline called angrily back. It was the first sign of tension she had betrayed since the first seconds after the disaster.

The deceptively pathetic barrier loomed ahead. Caroline braked several yards before the brightly painted pole. Evidently she was
to be content with nothing less than leaping officiously down from the Land Rover. She seemed to be in argument with one of the sentries. Suddenly, imperiously, she pointed at the small command hut. The soldier appeared to be pleading. Then an extraordinary thing happened. The man was stripping off his uniform; had actually thrown himself in the dust at Caroline's feet. The terrifying malignance on her face as she stood over him could only be imagined, as her back was turned towards the gaping watchers in the Land Rover. Now she had swung on her heel and was coining back towards them. The second sentry raised the barrier and saluted. They swept noisily through, Caroline's face a mask of hauteur.

'Well . . .?' Brown stammered.

'I asked for radio link with a 'phone number in Rabat, then changed my mind and dismissed him from the army,' was all Caroline said.

Jay and Brown stared at one another; their mutual amazement forging a temporary truce.

'But you would hire her for Guide Mistress?' Brown got out.

'They're simply not used to women in authority,' Caroline added more lightly. 'I wonder how many of these people could believe they have a woman Ambassador in London.'

Brown turned his lower lip down in a despairing gesture at Caroline's back. 'That's straight nepotism. The king likes keeping things in the family.'

'So do you, it would seem,' Jay came back relentlessly. 'Simply as convenience. Are you proposing to take Naima to Tunisia?'

'Well . . . no.' Brown met his eyes uneasily. 'I wasn't'

'So there we have it,' Jay said. 'You achieve your dubious repair, or that's my guess, at the price of this girl's freedom. Just until guilt catches up with you again. It can't but. There's nothing but phoneyness echoing phoneyness right down the line. On top of which the two of you make my tenure in the country impossible by murdering a Moroccan and virtually pinning my name and address on the corpse. It's great. All for what? That's what I'd like to know.'

Jays' eyes wandered once more over Achmed. His dejection was uplifting. Brown too looked defeated now, quite beaten. Anyone more charitably disposed towards him than Jay was at that moment might have seen him as a confused child. One about whom things had got hopelessly out of control. The heat was unrelenting. Baked by eight hours of sun, the earth threw up as intense a smouldering as came from above them. The Land Rover sped on towards the mountains.

'They were communists,' Brown said tonelessly; and Jay could sense he was deliberately striking out in defiance of Caroline. 'Dan Gurney was almost certainly murdered by them. And Halliday too.'

'So they were communists!' Jay affected amazed enlightenment.

'You've lost your job when I reach London,' Caroline put in quietly.

'I resign,' Brown said, abstractedly. 'And the government wanted a count of soldiers down here,' he persisted to Jay. 'That's about the sum of it. The dispositions of the Moroccan army were all we were curious to discover. But we seem to have got involved with one of the communist undercovers. Who was clearly out to get us.'

'Remember to knock one soldier off your final figures,' Jay said eventually.

'If he was that.'

'How do you mean?'

'It was you who said you'd seen him touting round the Socco,' Brown said.

Jay looked again at Achmed. And for the first time the boy was moving. He had taken up, and uncorked the two water flasks, as if to compare their contents. Then he pitched them, spilling, far behind into the dusty road. It was a pathetic gesture. The mountains were safely in sight. Once more Achmed settled, darkly unresponsive within himself.

'Yes, it's great to have disposed of one communist,' Jay said. 'That's an achievement.'

  *  *  *  *  *

Time lost meaning in the heat. It could have been an hour later when Brown's whole body convulsed inexplicably, and he collapsed. No one had moved or spoken. The Land Rover had careered onwards, a steel hell enclosing passengers as unthinking as rag dolls.

'That would be right,' Brown said.

Jay bent over him. 'Right . . .?'

'Yes. Jay, you must have them.'

'
What
?'

'What we were saying . . . Those tapes . . .'

'Simon, for
fucks' sake
!'

'Heat-stroke helped by whisky,' Caroline said. She didn't slacken speed.

'I've tapes in England too . . .' There was an uneasy parody of insanity on Brown's drained, swaying face. He laughed horribly; greedily, yet somehow unconsciously, sucked back white froth welling suddenly from his mouth. 'There must be two million words of tapes . . . and cracker jokes. I'm frightened,' he moaned, some new fear gripping him. 'Because the seasons are strange . . . Expatriate wrench. Still, after ten years . . . You can't taste anything here. Is it autumn soon? . . . There isn't one . . .' His eyes were searching without seeing. Thick foam was on his chin again. This time his fingers pushed the moisture towards his mouth, while his mind was far away. 'And it was dignity brought me here,' he said. 'Nothing more . . . I wanted to be strong, I suppose . . . Stupidly, Brown was grinning.