The Gabriel Hounds (32 page)

I’d been meaning to stub my cigarette out in the saucer, but the saucer was too far away, and the effort was too much. The stub fell through my fingers to the floor. It seemed to fall in slow motion, and I made no attempt to retrieve it, but just sat there, looking down at my own hand, which seemed a long way away and not attached to my body at all.

‘… And that’s just what we had, till you came. The room next to the storeroom where we put you, that’s our lab. We’ve been working like slaves putting the stuff through since the last lot came down. Oh, we’d have had to pack it in this year, no doubt of that, and move our base – those bastards at the Narcotics Division of the
UN have been putting the screws on, and the National Assembly’s promising to make it hotter than ever in this country next year … and of course since the old lady went Dar Ibrahim was due to shut down anyway. Phased withdrawal, don’t they call it? The caravan comes through tonight …’ His voice trailed off, and I heard him laugh again. He stooped and picked up the stub, and dropped it in the saucer. His face swam near mine. ‘Feeling a bit far away, are you? Not exactly fit to cope? That was a reefer you had in the car, and you’ve just smoked two more, my pretty, and now you’re going back to your nice little room to sleep them off … Till tonight’s over.’

I wished I could care. I ought to care. Fragments of pictures were there in smoky darkness, like dreams edged with light. John Lethman’s slack body and defeated young face with the sunken grey eyes. The Arab girl watching him fiercely. The patch of hemp with the label of the racing dog. The crates in the cellar. But they dislimned and the light beat in a steady echoing rhythm that was somehow my own heart beating, and someone’s voice was coming and going in the throbbing air like the pulse of a drum, and I was out of it all, safe and high and floating as scatheless and beautiful and powerful as an angel among the cobwebs on the ceiling, while down there below in the dimming room sat a girl in a red lacquer chair, her body slack and drowsy in its plain expensive frock, her face pale, the cheekbones highlighted with a film of damp, her mouth vaguely smiling. Her hair was dark and smooth and fashionably cut. Her arms were sunburned, the
hands long and slender, one wrist weighted down with a gold bracelet that had cost all of eighty pounds … A spoiled silly bitch, he had called her. She was blinking at him now. She had very big eyes, dark-fringed, made bigger by the make-up she affected, and now by the drug … Poor silly bitch, she was in danger, and I couldn’t do a thing for her, not that I cared. And she didn’t even look afraid …

Not even when John Lethman came quietly in, floating like another shadow in slow motion across the dim floor, to stand over her and ask of Henry Grafton, as if it hardly mattered.

‘She’s out, is she?’

‘Two cigarettes. Well taken care of. And the boy?’

‘Blocked. Cell blue with smoke and himself out cold. No trouble there.’

Henry Grafton laughed. ‘No trouble anywhere. Safe under our hands till it’s over. And you, young John, will stick to your ration and stay with it. You’ve just had your fix, by the look of you? Well, that’s the last you’ll get. Oh, you can smoke if you want to, but don’t come asking me for more of the hard stuff because you won’t get it till that cargo’s safely through Beirut. D’you hear me? Right. Take her back.’

The younger man stooped over the chair. The girl moved her head dreamily and smiled at him, eyes misty. She seemed to be trying to speak, but couldn’t manage it. Her head lolled back.

‘I must say,’ said John Lethman, ‘I like her better this way.’

‘Meaning she’s too pretty to have a tongue like a
wasp’s backside? I agree. My God, what a family! She reminds me of the old lady on her bad days. Well, she’s asked for all she’s getting. Take her away. I’m afraid you’ll have to carry her.’

Lethman leaned over the lacquer chair. At his touch, some of the fumes of the drug must have lifted for a second. I came down from where I had been floating, into the body of the chair, as he pulled me forward to slide an arm round me and lift me. I managed to say slowly and with what I thought was immense dignity: ‘Can manage qui’ well, thank you.’

He said with impatience: ‘Of course you can’t. Come along, I won’t hurt you. Don’t be afraid.’

‘Of you?’ I said. ‘Don’t make me laugh.’

He bit his lip, yanked me out of the chair, and heaved me over his shoulder in the he-man lift. I’m ashamed to say I spoiled the heroic scene by laughing like an idiot upside down all the way back to my dungeon.

‘Truly we have been at cost, yet we are forbidden harvest.’

The Koran: Sura LVI

An empire I had called it, and I hadn’t been far wrong. Heaven knows the clues had been there if I had only had the knowledge to work from; and heaven knows I had all the pieces now.

It was hours later. My watch said eleven, within a minute or two. The time had gone like a dream, literally like a dream, passed like smoke from the cigarettes that had sent me floating. I felt firmly enough based now – too firmly. I was back on the bed in my prison, sitting on top of the tumbled blankets holding an aching head, no longer the slack-boned, don’t-careish girl hopped up with
bhang
, but a young woman with a crashing hangover, still in reasonably full possession of her five wits, and every one of them scared, with all the evidence literally under her eyes.

They had left me a light this time. Up in its niche the three-branched lamp held up its buds of flame. Beside the bed was a jug of water and a glass. I drank, and my mouth felt a little less as if someone had been cleaning
it out with an abrasive cleaner. I tried putting my legs down, and my feet to the floor. I could feel the floor, which was probably something. I didn’t try anything violent, like standing up, but sat there, holding my head on to my body, and gently, as gently as possible, allowing my eyes to look here and there in the swimming light …

The room was far bigger than I had thought, stretching away back into the shadow. Behind the clutter of broken-down furniture and the piled rugs and harness that would be all one could see from the corridor, I now saw that the place was stacked, literally stacked with wooden boxes and cardboard cartons and small tins. Some of them, I thought, would probably be ‘blinds’ – genuine consignments of whatever article (like the cooking oil) was used to disguise the drugs – but if even a fraction of these held hashish or the opium derivatives, the room would have bought up Aladdin’s cave four times over. I thought of Hamid’s sheeps’ droppings, but somehow it wasn’t funny any more.

On the cartons nearest me the device of the running dog stood out clear and damning, with the grotesque warning carefully stencilled below: ‘
Best quality, beware immitations
.’ It shook the last piece into place, and Henry Grafton’s sketchy story, with all its gaps and evasions, became, with this gloss added, very clear indeed. The hashish, grown copiously in the high hills; John Lethman crop-watching, or bargaining with the growers, or arranging for the piecemeal ferrying of the stuff down by the peasants – perhaps one of them the very man whom Charles and I had seen approaching
the back gate of the palace. Dar Ibrahim must have been used as the centre of the filthy trade for some time, might even have been so used long before the old lady moved in. It was the perfect clearing house, and also the perfect retreat for anyone in Henry Grafton’s situation – the lonely hilltop fortress kept by the strong-minded old woman who refused to receive visitors, and who had (like her prototype Lady Hester) once or twice defied the law and would presumably defy it again on a friend’s behalf. I couldn’t believe that my great-aunt would have concealed Henry Grafton had she known what trade he was engaged in, but no doubt his story had been plausible enough, and equally plausible the account of whatever ‘experiments’ he and John Lethman were conducting in the underground storeroom. And John Lethman’s own role in the business became pathetically clear. He had probably started innocently enough, being persuaded by the unscrupulous Grafton that the occasional ‘smoke’ would do him no harm; then quietly, inevitably, hooked on the hard drugs that would ensure his dependence and continued help. It was not my Great-Aunt Harriet who was the victim of this affair – for every reason I was now convinced that Grafton would never have wished her out of the way – but John Lethman.

And I was very much afraid that there were going to be two more victims. Henry Grafton might keep insisting that he meant me and my cousin no real harm, but people have been murdered for a lot less than a fortune in drugs and a possible death sentence (since
Grafton was a Turkish national) if they went astray. He could hardly imagine that Charles or I would fail to report all we knew the moment we were able to, yet I – and probably my cousin as well – had been handed both information and evidence with a carelessness that terrified me. Whether he had got round to realising it yet or not, he would have to kill us both if he wanted to save his skin.

The door must have been very thick. I had heard no movement out in the passageway, but the door swung open suddenly to reveal Halide standing there with – as ever – a tray in her hands. There was nobody with her, and she managed the tray one-handed while she opened the door, so I supposed that my captors knew the condition their drugs would reduce me to. She now stood propping the door open with one shoulder, and eyeing me with her usual contempt and hostility.

‘So, you are awake. Here is your food. And do not think that you can push past me and get away because the one way is only to the back gate, which is locked this time, and the key out of it and Jassim is in the outer court, and the men are in the Lady’s room.’

I eyed her sourly, ‘If you knew how funny that sounds in English.’

‘
Quoi?
’

‘Never mind.’ Confronted with her shimmering grace – it was the green silk again – I felt terrible. And I didn’t think the bathroom gambit would work again. I made no attempt to get to my feet, but watched her as she came gracefully away from the door and set
the tray down on a box with a rap which made the crockery rattle.

‘Halide—’

‘Yes?’

‘I suppose you know what they – the men – are doing, why they have locked me up, me and my cousin?’

‘Oh, yes, John—’ – she brought the name out with a kind of flourish – ‘tells me everything.’

‘You lucky girl. Did he tell you what the penalties were for running drugs in this neck of the woods?’

‘
Quoi?
’

‘Even in this dirty corner of the dirty world? Even in Beirut? Didn’t John warn you what the police would do, to you and your brother as well, if they discovered what was happening here at Dar Ibrahim?’

‘Oh, yes.’ She smiled. ‘Everybody knows this. Everybody does it, here in the Lebanon. For many years before the doctor came here, my brother used to bring the hashish down from the hills. It is only the brave men who are the carriers from the hills to the sea.’

I supposed it was too much to hope that the primitive mind would see it as anything other than a sort of Robin Hood gesture of bravery. To the peasant, the hashish brought pleasure, and money. If an unreasonable Government chose to forbid its growth for private purposes, why then the Government must be fooled. It was as simple as that. It was the same mentality which, in more sophisticated societies, assumes that the tax and speed laws are made to be broken.

‘You need not be so afraid,’ said Halide to me, with contempt, ‘I think they do not mean to kill you.’

‘I’m not afraid.’ I met her derisive look as steadily as I could. ‘But I think you had better be, Halide. No, listen, I don’t think you quite realise what is happening here, and I’m not quite sure if John knows, either, just what he’s got himself into. It isn’t just a case of you and your friends having a quiet smoke now and then and your brother shooting it out with a few local police on his way to the sea. Not any more. It’s big business, and the Governments of every responsible country are wild keen to stop it. Are you hoping to clear out with your John when this lot’s been shifted and he’s got his share of the money? Where d’you think you can go? Not into Syria – they’d catch you up in no time. Not into Turkey – there’s a death penalty there. The same applies to Iran, Egypt, where you like. Believe me, Halide, there’s no future in this for you or for John. Don’t think he can take you to England, either, because you’ll be picked up there as soon as I or my cousin open our mouths.’

‘Perhaps you will not get out of here for a long time.’

‘That’s silly talk,’ I said. ‘You know as well as I do that any minute now the Damascus police will start looking for us, and where would the trail lead them first if not to Dar Ibrahim? Dr Grafton’ll be lucky if he gets the stuff away at all.’

‘He will get it away. I think you do not realise what time it is, or what day? It is nearly midnight, Wednesday. The caravan is already on its way here. The palace will be empty by daylight.’

‘I … suppose it will,’ I said slowly. I had lost count of time. I put a hand to my forehead, pressing the heel of it against my temple as if that would clear my thoughts. At least the headache had gone. ‘Listen, Halide, listen to what I have to say. And take that look off your face, I’m not pleading for anything, I’m offering you something, you and John Lethman, because he’s nothing much worse than weak and stupid, and you’ve no chance to know better. My family – my cousin’s family – we’re wealthy, what you’d call important people. I obviously can’t offer you the kind of money you’ll get by helping Grafton with this operation, but I can offer you some help which believe me you’re going to need, and badly. I don’t know your laws, but if you let me and my cousin go now, and if you and your John were to give evidence against Dr Grafton, and the police stopped the cargo of drugs, I think you’d find they wouldn’t prosecute you or your brother, or even Lethman.’

I had been watching her as I spoke, but her face was turned away from the lamplight and I couldn’t see if my words were having any effect. I hesitated. It would certainly be no use beginning to talk about rights and wrongs, or why I should have any interest not strictly personal in stopping the cargo from reaching the sea. I added, flatly: ‘I don’t know whether or not your Government would give a reward for information, but in any case I’d see that my family gave you money.’