The Levanter (26 page)

“And where will we be on the
Amalia?
Which of these windows will we see from?”

“I’m afraid there’s no regular passenger accommodation on any of our ships, but there’s a saloon, where the officers mess, Just there. The
Amalia’s
saloon has portholes. She’s not quite the same.” I made another attempt to steer the conversation into a more useful path. “I daresay Captain Touzani will try to make your party comfortable.”

“Touzani? Is he Italian?”

“Tunisian.”

“Oh.” That did not please him. Tunisia tends to be lukewarm in the Palestinian cause.

“Is he loyal, this Captain Touzani?”

“If you mean will he obey orders, yes, I think he will. Providing, of course, that they do not endanger the ship.” This was more like it, I thought. “And, naturally, providing that the orders he gets from me are clear and practical.”

“You will give him the orders personally?”

“Oh yes, Comrade Salah. When I have them.” I tried to pursue the advantage. “There is additional information that I will also have to have very soon.”

“Have
to have?”

“I shall want the names of the passengers to be carried. By law these must be entered on the ship’s muster roll That is the list of all on board when she sails.”

He decided to make a joke of it. “I can tell you one name - Salah Yassin.”

I smiled dutifully. “And no doubt Ahmad and Musa will be on the list, too?”

“Those old men! No. They are good fighters and loyal certainly. For guard duties there are none better. But on operations we must have the younger men, the front-fighters. Why is it that this ship has two propellers and the others, not much smaller, have only one each?”

We were back to the models again. It was with difficulty that I persuaded him downstairs to dinner, and even then he kept on about ships. The different ways of measuring tonnage had to be explained. Teresa helped by asking sillier questions than his, but the going was heavy. He drank brandy.

The backgammon later was torture.

He played a reckless “Arabian” game and nothing else. He was out to slaughter me every time or die in the attempt. Mostly, he died. Backgammon is a very difficult game to lose intentionally without letting your opponent know that you are trying to lose. He sees the dice you throw. You can’t keep on making gross errors. With an all-or-nothing player like Ghaled you don’t have to play even reasonably well to defeat him. You just make the conventional, flat-footed “back” moves and nine times out of ten he defeats himself. That was what Ghaled did, though naturally he couldn’t see it. It was the fault of the dice, then of my good luck, and, finally and inevitably, of my lack of imagination, of dash.

“You are too cautious. You play like a businessman.”

“You force me onto the defensive, Comrade Salah.”

“You must not allow yourself to be forced. You must hit out, reply in kind.”

Play his game, in fact, and lose.

“Yes, Comrade Salah.”

By playing so wildly that he was obliged for once to do the obvious, I managed to lose two games in a row, but even that didn’t please him.

“If you were a front-fighter,” he nagged, “you would soon learn when to attack and when to hold your fire, when to assault and when to ambush.”

He had had quite a lot to drink by then, much more, probably, than he was used to in one evening, and the effects were showing.

I gave some noncommittal reply and he glared at me. The suspicion that I had let him win those last two games was beginning to surface now. Someone had to be punished. He used Teresa to start with.

“You do not comment,
Miss
Malandra.” The “Miss” was a sneer. “Would you not like, perhaps, to be a front-fighter, as some of the Zionist women are? Do you have no ambition to imitate them?”

Teresa replied coolly. “I have no particular wish to imitate anyone, Comrade Salah.”

“Then-perhaps we can change your mind. Perhaps when you see what the Zionist women can do you will think differently.”

He had reached for his briefcase and was plucking clumsily at the zipper. My guess that he carried a gun there had been right, but it was not the only thing in the briefcase. When at last he got it open I saw that it contained papers and a leather wallet as well - it was the wallet he thrust at Teresa.

“Look and see for yourself. You, too, Comrade Michael. See what the Zionist women can do.”

From what I saw during the next few minutes, and from later reading of Lewis Prescott’s description, I am fairly certain that the photographs Ghaled showed us were the ones he produced at the Prescott interview. In other words, the same photographs shown to Mr. Prescott as evidence of Druse commando atrocities were shown to Teresa and me as evidence of atrocities committed by Israeli women.

As a former war correspondent, Lewis Prescott may, as he says, have found it necessary to become used to horrors. I am glad that he also found it possible. I had not, at that stage, found it necessary, with the result that I was not only completely unprepared for what I saw, but also when my nose was rubbed in it, quite unable to cope. I don’t know, or care, who was really responsible for the things shown in those photographs. I thought at the time, insofar as I was able to think, that the “Zionist women” claim had to be false, and Mr. Prescott’s account suggests that I was right. Obviously Ghaled would change his story about the photographs to suit his audience.

But changing the story didn’t change the photographs. I wished I could have done what Teresa did. After one glance she just got up and moved right away, saying that she would get more coffee. She stayed away, and Ghaled took no more notice of her. But he made me sit there and look at the lot, not just once, but three times with no skipping, and all the time he watched my face.

The only defence I could think of was to take my glasses off as if to see better; he could not know that without my glasses everything blurred a bit But I had left it too late, because, having once seem what was there, I could not blur what was already clear in my mind’s eye.

“Front-fighting, Comrade Michael, front-fighting.”

He kept intoning the words as if they were an incantation. In the end I managed to break the spell I did that by straightening up suddenly, putting my glasses on, handing him back the wallet with one hand, and reaching with the other for the brandy bottle.

“Very instructive, Comrade Salah," I said as briskly as I could, and refilled his glass.

He smiled as he took the wallet I hadn’t deceived him; he knew all right that he’d shaken me.

“Let us say inspirational, Comrade Michael,” he corrected me. “You know now the kind of thing we, and you with us, have to avenge.” He dropped the wallet back into the briefcase and took something eke out. “You were asking about your orders. Clear and practical you said they must be.” He shoved a wad of paper at me. “Are those orders clear and practical enough for you?”

What he gave me was a copy of the standard British Admiralty chart number 2834. That number covers the eastern Mediterranean seacoast from Sour in the north down to El Arîsh. Tel Aviv-Yafo is about half-way up.

The cartridge paper on which it was printed was limp and grubby from much handling and it had been folded and refolded too often, but it was still readable. On it, someone had plotted, in purple ink, a course for a southbound vessel.

As far south as the Caesarea parallel the course was normal enough, about twenty miles offshore on a heading of 195 degrees in deep water. Then there was a twenty-degree swing to the east which continued as far as the hundred-fathom line. At that point the course changed again, running parallel to the coast on a 190-degree heading for about twelve miles. Just south of Tel Aviv it turned west again, rejoining the original open-sea course somewhere off Ashdod.

In the blank space above the compass rose, the plotter of the course had written out in Arabic a precise description of the change sequence and the timing of it. The description ended with this Instruction:
On
190°
south heading from 21.15 hrs. until 23.00 hrs. ship’s speed is on no account to exceed 6 knots.

I didn’t take all this in at once, of course, but I didn’t want to display too keen an interest. After a brief glance I refolded the chart.

“Well?” he asked.

“No difficulty, I think, Comrade Salah. The instructions seem perfectly clear to me. I am not a seaman myself but this looks like the work of a trained navigator.”

“It is.”

“If the captain has any questions, answers can be obtained, I imagine.”

“There should be no questions. Just see that the captain understands that he is to obey those orders strictly.”

“Yes, Comrade Salah. The captain will have to choose his own sailing time, however. Otherwise he cannot be in the correct position on the evening of the third. In the port of Latakia all movement of shipping is prohibited between sunset and sunrise. Embarkation should probably take place, I think, before sunset on the second of July so that departure can be very early on the third. But the captain must be consulted on these points.”

“Very
well, consult him and submit your proposals. But understand this. The timings of the course changes must be strictly adhered to.”

“I understand.”

“Then I will thank you for your hospitality and ask you to drive me back. Before I cam sleep there is work to be done.”

As he spoke he leaned forward with his hand outstretched. The briefcase was still open and for a moment I thought that he wanted to take the chart back. Then I realized that he was simply reaching for his brandy glass; but the movement had made me nervous.

“If you will excuse me,” I said, “I will put these orders in my private safe.”

He shrugged. “Very well.”

I was gone several minutes because, before putting the chart in the safe, I scribbled out a copy of the sailing instructions written on it. I was afraid, you see, that he might suddenly change his mind about letting me hold on to it. The fact that I took this unnecessary precaution is a good indication of my own state of mind at the time - edgy, overanxious, reacting instead of thinking calmly, and all set to make crass errors of judgment.

They were already in the car when I went down, Teresa in the driver’s seat, Ghaled in the back. He had his door still open as if expecting me to get in beside him, so I did so.

For a time he spoke only to Teresa. He was the worst sort of back-seat driver; he told her not only which way to go; even though she obviously knew the way, but how. “Slow, this corner is dangerous. Turn here, turn here! Keep right. Now you can go faster. Are your headlights on?” Teresa kept her temper very well. Of course, she had had him earlier in the evening and so knew what to expect. Even so, her “Yes, Comrade Salahs” became quite curt. It was a relief when, on our reaching the Der’a road, he turned his attention to me.

“What experience have you with diesel engines?” he asked.

The question was so unexpected that I was off balance for a moment.

“Of using them, Comrade Salah?”

“Of maintaining and repairing them.”

And then the penny dropped, or seemed to. I remembered what Abouti had said about the little cockroach who drove a Mercedes diesel truck. They must be having trouble with the thing. It was a natural enough conclusion to jump to. How was I to know that it was the wrong conclusion and that I had jumped too hastily?

“My only experience with diesel engines,” I said, “is of what you must not do. That is to allow any untrained person, however resourceful he may be, to lay a finger on them. Diesel engines do not respond to semiskilled tinkering.”

“If it were a question of repairing a fuel injection pump?”

“Don’t try to repair it Have it replaced, and have the work done by the maker’s agent.”

“And if this is not possible?”

That puzzled me, because I was reasonably certain that there was a Mercedes agent in Damascus. Then, I thought I saw what the trouble was. The truck didn’t belong to Ghaled, he was only “borrowing” it. Even if he had the owner’s willing consent, direct dealing with the Mercedes agent might present a problem.

“You could order the replacement pump from Beirut and employ a local diesel fitter to do the work.”

This answer obviously didn’t satisfy him. “Why shouldn’t the pump be repaired?”

I tried to explain that they were tricky things and that it was better to replace when they gave trouble. Thinking that it could be the expense that was bothering him, I suggested that it might be possible to exchange the old pump for a factory-reconditioned one. He listened, but obviously didn’t care for what he heard. If I had been functioning properly and had been more perceptive, I would probably have suspected after a while that the wires had become crossed and that what I was telling him was, though true, for some reason irrelevant.

But I didn’t suspect, and so failed to ask him the questions that should have been asked. As we neared the battery works he dropped the subject of diesel engines and returned to back-seat driving.

To me he said as we pulled up at the works gate: “You asked for a list of the special ship’s passengers.”

“Yes, Comrade Salah.”

“Then you had better report tomorrow night at eight thirty. I will give you the names then.”

“Yes, Comrade Salah.” I got out and opened the door for him.

Ahmad and Musa were already at the postern, waiting for him. They had the overhead lights on.

Once out of the car, he straightened up, tucked his briefcase under his left arm, and marched briskly to the gate, where he received and returned salutes. He had said nothing more to us and he did not look back. Presumably, we could go.

I shut the rear doors and got into the car beside Teresa. Abouti’s men and machines had made a mess of the surface there and she had to be careful turning. We did not speak until we were on the main road again.

“Is everything you wanted on that chart?” she asked then.

“I think it’s all there. I hope it is.”

“Were those pictures very nasty?”

“Very.”

“I thought so. You looked as if you were going to be sick.”