The Mule on the Minaret (45 page)

A narrow path ran along the river. Immediately before the office, the bank shelved to a sheltered pool that served as a harbour for a small fleet of boats—bellum was the local word—that plied across the river. A boatman hailed him, but he shook his head. The mess and dormitories of the centre were in a large house that in Turkish days had been a Prince's mansion. A low wall ran round its gardens; he sat there, looking northwards.to the low skyline of the ancient city.

When he had first arrived, he had thought Baghdad the ugliest and the dirtiest place that he had ever seen. He had come by air from Cairo. Heat and glare had beaten up at him from a mud-caked road down whose centre ran a low hedge of oleanders; their drooping pale-pink blossoms were discoloured under a film of dust. On either side of it were drab one-storied villas. A large ceremonial arch, the entrance to a projected park, stood on the edge of a wilderness of small garden plots and discarded vehicles, symbols of abandoned enterprise. A cluster of dingy cafés were crowded with long-skirted Arabs, their heads wrapped in long black-and-white handkerchiefs. They were seated on rectangular wooden settees, sipping at their coffee while a radio deafeningly blared out either a scream of oratory or one of those cacophonous Oriental dance tunes that always seem about to reach a rhythm but never do. Everything was shabby; there was a complete absence of bright colours; and from the broad and sluggish Tigris had risen a cloying smell of drains.

The centre of the city was even more discouraging. Its central thoroughfare, Al Rashid Street, cut by the Germans for military purposes during the First War, through a labyrinth of narrow streets, ran from the north gate to the south; it was lined by a succession of one-roomed, one-windowed, tastelessly decorated shops, that was interrupted every twenty yards or so by a café or hotel, a cinema or an ampler store. The pavements were flanked by pillars, under a roof which imprisoned the air and rendered it more pungent. The roadway was thronged with all manner of decrepit vehicles. Along the pavement small boys were propelling laden donkeys. Old, bent men shuffled at a kind of trot under the
weight of brushwood and incongruous articles of furniture that they carried knotted upon their backs. Arabs in long-skirted robes moved with sedate tread, telling their yellow beads. Westernized government officials in ill-cut European clothes threaded their way gingerly to their offices. Voices were raised. Horns were honking. The thermometer stood, in the shade, at 110°.

Reid had wrinkled his nose. ‘Well, I have been warned,' he thought. He had gone on feeling like that for the first two weeks. But gradually he had come to feel a kinship with this city whose many changes of fortune had in part reflected the changing fortunes of the human race.

Normally, Iraq was a country that you saw in pastel shades, water-colours rather than oils, through a fine haze of dust. But today, in the fresh, spring air, the domes and minarets stood out in clear, sharp outline, across the river.

On that first evening in Beirut, Farrar had told him that he had made a practice of sitting in Arab cafés watching the stir of life around him, because it helped him to understand the problems that faced him in his files. He, in his turn now felt that sitting on this low wall, looking northwards at the crowded city, he was more likely to see his problems through Baghdadi eyes than he would back there in his office among his files.

He remembered that first talk of Cartwright's about taking a long view in the Middle East. Iraq had been one of Britain's problems for quarter of a century and it would continue to be long after the Nazis had been overthrown. Iraq with its oil, Iraq on the road to Suez, the gateway to the East, to India and Malaya, was the fountain of a great deal of Britain's wealth. First things first. Beat Hitler, then decide how to deal with such of the world as had survived him. That would be Farrar's argument, and Reid could recognize its validity. But the winning of the war would serve no purpose unless the world that mankind was to inhabit afterwards was stable. The prosperity of Iraq would always matter; and if that prosperity was to be protected, it was important to know how great was the opposition to the Hashimite régime.

This wireless set might be the clue to that opposition. They could discover who was the agent who joined the train at Mosul. They could keep track of his correspondence and his friends; they could discover who were the enemies of the régime. Some of these would be enemies because they would prefer to have the Germans win the war; but a large number would be pro-German because
they were against the Royal Family. To be able to make these discoveries would surely be of greater value than to operate a wireless on behalf of the ‘deception' programme.

After all, the difficulties of conducting such an operation were very great. Not only would they have to shanghai that agent and persuade him to transmit the news they wanted, but they would have to conceal from the Germans the fact that he had been shanghaied.

The operation might easily misfire. If the Germans were to discover that the British were operating that set, without the British realizing that they knew, how desperately would the latter prejudice their own security. The dangers might be greater than the rewards.

There was, of course, a third alternative: to catch the agent red-handed, to stage a public trial, to have an excuse for strengthening security precautions, to impress on dissidents the power and efficiency of British intelligence, to frighten the opposition. Arabs more than most races respected power. And it might well be that the agent under cross-examination would betray his accomplices. He would be cross-examined, by men whose fathers had been trained in a Turkish school. The successors of Abdul Hamid the Damned's experts had little to learn from the S.S.

There was, he felt, more to be said for that alternative than the deception campaign that Farrar would be sure to favour, but even so, he preferred his own solution.

The final decision lay with Cairo. Yet it was a Baghdad problem. Baghdad should have the louder say.

On his way back to his office, he put his head round the door of the clerks' office. He looked for the staff-sergeant, saw him by one of the filing cabinets, walked across to him. ‘I'm opening a new file, Staff. Operation Radio. Can you enter it?'

He took the folder back into his office. On his desk were a couple of letters from the U.K. which had arrived while he had been sitting on the wall. The top one was a blue airletter form from Rachel. The other a typewritten envelope that had come by surface mail. They could well wait. He spread out the new folder on his desk. He entered the letter from Istanbul, marked it No. 1. On the cover he inscribed: Operation Radio. Opened March 17, 1943. He passed his hand across it lovingly. Entry No. 1. How many and how varied would be its entries. He envisioned all the letters that would come from all those centres, from Beirut,
Jerusalem, Damascus, Cairo; with he himself at the core of the operation.

He could picture Diana in Cairo, eagerly opening one of his reports. ‘Ah, Baghdad. I wonder what they've got to say.' That was an exciting sideline to the issue. He had been brought back into her orbit. During his months here, she had seemed far away. He had had only routine matters to report. He had been grateful, in a way, to this new work that had forced her into the background of his routine. But his heart was beating fast at the knowledge that once again he was in touch with her; that every week, in some way or other, she would be reminded of him. ‘Now for the boss,' he thought.

His Colonel, Mallet, had his office on the first floor. When he wanted one of his officers, he would come out on to the balcony and shout his name, always a Christian name or nickname. He himself was approached through his secretary—an English woman, the wife of one of the Anglo-Iranian executives. Reid handed her the file. ‘This really is important. Could you show it to the boss right away,' he said.

The Adjutant's office was on the other side of the secretary's. Reid paused there on his way downstairs. ‘Thank you for marking that top urgent.'

‘Delighted. I'm here to help.' Johnson was nowadays in the best of good humour. He had got back his crown. He had not a great deal of work to do; and the little that he had was within his compass. He had an air of authority; of the man ‘on top of his job.' ‘That's one thing at least that's turned out right,' Reid thought.

Back in his office he picked up the two letters that had arrived while he was sitting on the wall. He opened the typewritten one first. It was a circular from M.C.C. about the matches that it was proposed to play at Lord's during the following summer. Cricket. Two years ago when he had been stationed in London he had played a few matches against schools. There was a local side here, The Casuals, run by one of the men in Anglo-Iranian. He supposed he would turn out for it. It was difficult on a cricket ground to realize that there was a war in progress.

He picked up Rachel's letter. He slit the flap. It was a short letter. It did not turn on to the second page. ‘My dear,' he read. ‘In novels women who write this kind of letter always start off by saying: “This is the most difficult letter I have ever had to write.” Do they in real life, I wonder? I know that this is the most easy
letter I have ever written. It is so straightforward. I have fallen in love. It is the real thing. I have no doubt about that. I want to marry him as soon as possible. There are no complications on his side. He is an American; a Colonel: four or five years younger than myself. He hasn't been married before. He is a lawyer. He belongs, he tells me, to what is called “seaboard society”. Do you know what that is? I don't know what is the divorce procedure for soldiers serving overseas. But there must be one. I leave all that to you. Good luck. Rachel.'

From the balcony above, a firm, masculine voice shouted, ‘Prof.' He put the back of his hand against his forehead. ‘She should have died hereafter.' He hurried up the stairs. ‘Sit down, Prof.,' the Colonel said. ‘This is going to take a little time.' His Colonel, a regular soldier, in the 60th, was a few years younger than himself. After a decade of regimental soldiering, he had specialized; taking language courses. He had worked in intelligence and liaison: much of his service had been spent in the Middle East. He had never married. Reid had been told that he was homosexual; which was why he had never been given command of his regiment, and had been always employed on extra-curricular appointments. Reid liked his Colonel well enough; he was a good man to work for, but there was always a slight barrier between them.

‘Now tell me how you feel about all this?' Mallet said.

Mallet sat forward in his chair, his elbows rested on the table. He nodded his head from time to time. ‘Yes, yes,' he would interpolate, ‘yes, yes. I see.'

‘Don't you consider that it would be dangerous to have an enemy wireless operating here in Baghdad?' he said at length.

‘If our defensive security is sound, and we must presume that it is sound, a spy should not be able to find out much. And it would be interesting to learn how much a spy is able to find out.'

‘You are assuming that we shall be able to discover the wavelength he is using. That's a big assumption. I think you will have to accept that as a risk and explain when you make out your case, why you think that risk worth running.'

‘You'd like me to argue the case that way, sir.'

‘Why, yes, Prof., certainly. This is your show.'

‘But it's you who'll have to sign the letter.'

‘A C.O.'s always responsible for what his men do, isn't he? Let's run over the thing again and see that we've got all the points.'

Reid repeated the main headings of his argument. Sometimes
at Winchborough when he had been delivering a familiar lecture, he had had the sense of being outside his role as a professor, following his own thoughts, while the lecture continued like a record he had put on a gramophone. He had that sensation now. His mind was on that airgraph.

‘How should I have felt.' he asked himself, ‘if this had happened nine months ago, when my love for Diana was at its peak, when I believed she was in love with me? Wouldn't I have welcomed this news as the door to freedom.' He could picture himself telling Diana at a carefully chosen moment, at dinner or at lunch at Sa'ad's; at the high crest of intimacy. ‘Dear one, I've never talked about my home.'

‘I know. I'm grateful that you never have. I don't want to hear.'

‘But now you've got to. My marriage is over. It was never a happy one, or rather, it was never right. The chief thing was missing. But it's over now. She's asked for a divorce. I can start again. We can start again.' He could hear the duologue. How else could he have reacted? The temptation would have been overpowering. Thank heavens he hadn't had this news nine months ago!

‘Yes, that's fine, Prof. I think you've made every point.' The Colonel was concluding. ‘And don't try to minimize the risk of having a wireless set transmitting information that we can't control, or may not be able to control. It's the point that some of those security-minded boys will jump on. Call it a calculated risk. And let's get this appreciation off as soon as possible. Let's get our punch in first: before young Farrar's plea for his deception programme.'

‘I'd better mention the two alternatives, hadn't I?'

‘Briefly, yes, to show that you're aware of their existence. But concentrate on your solution. Let them argue their case for themselves.' He handed the file back to Reid. It was quarter to twelve. The office closed for lunch at one. In seventy-five minutes he should be able to sketch out a rough draft; provided he could concentrate upon it. Could he though?

He stood outside his office watching an Iraqi orderly trying to fix the heating. It was a curious contrivance, a low brick coffin roofed with tin with a round hole the size of a billiard ball at the top. In front was a narrow aperture the width of a man's hand. Through a narrow tube, oil dripped into the hole. Inside the tin was a bizarre contraption for regulating the flow of oil. On the floor of the coffin a small saucer was set to catch the flow. Once
lit the oil was supposed to heat the tin covering the coffin and keep the room reasonably warm.