A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (7 page)

‘In a place called Kalyan.’

‘Oh, then you are on Zipper. Nearly all the military people who come here nowadays are on Zipper.’

He thought it wiser to let this pass.

He said, ‘It’s very kind of you to invite me to stay and I do have an evening off duty. But if I’m too early shall I come back later?’

‘Oh, no. Other people will be here in a minute. If not ask Aneila to entertain you. Ask her to play the gramophone, and then you can dance. She is a very good dancer but needs practice with men. She loves it when I bring her to Bombay. Her mother is so strict with her. Her mother is my sister, the one who married that business man and has become very serious as a result. Before you go would you be so kind as to ring the bell?’

Perron stood up, touched the button on the wall which she had indicated, murmured his thanks and took his leave. On his way out he had an urge to turn back and explain who he was and why he was there. He had never enjoyed the part of his job which involved deceiving people and tonight deception seemed irrational. He believed that if he confessed his true identity and purpose to the Maharanee she would probably be amused, for the few seconds it took her to forget and concentrate again on her own affairs. But, leaving the room, closing the door and facing the long cluttered passage of
more closed doorways he re-accommodated himself to the masquerade because Aneila was in the act of greeting more guests, let in this time by a servant. Again there had been no sound of a bell. A woman servant was hastening down the corridor to the Maharanee’s room. Perron wondered whether he was going deaf or whether the bells rang on a note that only members of the household had learned to detect; but before he could become more than passingly interested in the subject his attention was taken by something of potentially more serious consequence.

Among the new arrivals – the only one he automatically took notice of – was a girl, an English girl; but not just an English girl,
the
English girl; the one to whom he had had to apologize for Purvis’s discourteous behaviour at the entrance to the block of flats on the Oval. Remembering the penetrating glance she had given him he could scarcely doubt that she would recognize him when they came face to face. The question was whether she would notice his miraculous change of employment or whether the fact that he was in off-duty khaki drill and not in jungle green would be sufficient to distract her from any previous impression she had gained that education was not at all his line. The other question, of course, was whether if she recognized that a transformation had taken place she would thoughtlessly comment on it to him in the hearing of others, or sensibly put two and two together and keep mum.

There was only ten yards distance between them and no way of lengthening it. In fact it was already shortening because Aneila had waved the men in the party towards the living-room and was now bringing the girl to a room in which presumably women-guests could make themselves comfortable. This room turned out to be the one against whose door Perron was standing. No confrontation could have been more direct.

He stepped aside, smiled at Aneila and then at the girl. He thought it best to take the initiative. ‘Good evening. We meet again.’

‘Oh,’ Aneila said. ‘Do you know each other? I’m awfully glad because if not I would have to introduce you and I’m so bad at remembering names.’

‘Perron,’ Perron said, to both of them.

‘Sarah Layton,’ the girl said. Rather shrewdly, he thought, she said it to Aneila.

‘Please join the guests in the living-room, Mr Perrer. Auntie says men can always introduce themselves if there is no one around to do it and I must show Miss –’

‘Layton.’

‘– Miss Layton where to powder her nose.’ She opened the door. Sarah Layton nodded and started to go through. He caught the moment of hesitation, the slight frown, that followed the brief fall of her glance upon his left shoulder tab. Expecting the glance then to be redirected upwards to meet his he prepared to meet it as frankly as possible, but she followed Aneila into the room without looking at him again.

He continued along the passage and re-entered the living-room where a bearer was presiding over the cocktail cabinet and where he had another and rather more devastating shock.

*

Perron had been stationed in the Bombay Presidency for nearly three months but before becoming involved in operation Zipper he had visited the city only once. The reason for that visit, made in the company of his officer, had been the arrival of a ship that had sailed from Bordeaux in June bringing several hundred Indian soldiers, ex-prisoners of war captured in North Africa, who had succumbed to the temptation to secure their release from prison-camp by joining a Free India Force which its leader, the revolutionary ex-Congressman, Subhas Chandra Bose, at that time in Berlin after escaping police surveillance in India, had hoped to put into the field to fight alongside the Germans.

In England, Perron had learnt quite a lot about this embryo army and its failure to cohere into a fighting force. Details of it had been among items of classified information it had been his job to study but say nothing about. Because of the tremendous pride the British had always taken in the loyalty of their Indian soldiers, and in the Indian Army’s apolitical nature, this evidence of a flaw in its structure had interested him, both then and later when he heard of the numerically far
greater and infinitely more serious defection among Indian soldiers taken prisoner by the Japanese. They, it seemed, had formed themselves into operational fighting formations, at first under an Indian King’s commissioned officer and then under Subhas Chandra Bose (translated by submarine from Berlin to Tokyo) and had accompanied the Japanese in their attempt in 1944 to invade the sub-continent through Manipur. Some of these, recaptured in the recent successful British campaign in Burma, had, he understood, already arrived in India and were being held in special camps where presumably the contingent from Europe would join them. Many more would follow after the end of the war in Malaya and the Far East.

His duties in regard to the boat load of disgraced Indian officers,
NCOS
and sepoys from Bordeaux had not been exacting. Neither he nor his officer was sure where their responsibility began or ended. So far as they could tell their main job was to keep an ear to the ground and report to the military and civil authorities anything that might give cause for suspicion that a popular movement was afoot in Bombay to storm the docks and whisk the prisoners from under the noses of those in charge of them off into the bazaars or into the hills where in the past many a band of irregular Mahratta horsemen had melted away to live on and fight again. But of this there had been no sign at all. Bombay went about its business and the military quietly got on with the job of transferring the boatload by trainloads to a destination Perron understood to be in the vicinity of Delhi and the Red Fort.

On only one occasion had he had the opportunity to observe the process, and this was at dead of night when he found himself standing with a group of military police on the dockside at a point where a file of the men in question straggled past, in oddly assorted uniforms, in the imperfect lighting of well-spaced and high-pitched arc-lights which left him with no more than an impression of the vacuity that falls upon the human face when a peak of incomprehension has been reached. That they were home at last they could not doubt. The smell of home must have been unmistakable. But what this might mean to them they obviously could not judge. After the last man in the batch had gone by and the
cordon of armed military police had closed in and hidden them from view, Perron had found it difficult to assess the significance of what he had just seen. There was, on this scale, surely no parallel to the situation in the whole of Anglo-Indian history? No such gathering of Indian soldiers (and the present one represented no more than the tip of the iceberg) had surely ever gone abroad across the black water to fight in the Sahibs’ wars and come back as the Sahibs’ prisoners?

He was still testing the situation to find a weakness in his estimate of it as one that was historically unique when his officer sent a message calling him over to the shed from which the security side of the operation was being conducted and there introduced him to a British officer, a major in the Punjab Regiment whose face had been burnt badly, on the left side. The left arm had been damaged too, although it had taken Perron rather longer to realize this and to appreciate that the glove hid an artificial hand. Several ribbons decorated the officer’s chest, the foremost that of the
DSO.

Perron was introduced by his own officer as ‘the sergeant I was telling you about’.

‘You’ll appreciate this, sergeant,’ he said and began a story he said he’d heard earlier that evening. Perron assumed he’d already told it to the Punjab officer because the man glanced at a wrist-watch which he wore with the face on the inner side of his right wrist and then turned his attention to a wall-map of the dock area. The story was about the boatload of prisoners. In Bordeaux, hearing that they were to be shipped
en masse
back to India in a boat reserved exclusively for them, they decided it was the British intention to take them out to sea, disembark the crew and scuttle the ship. They refused to go until a sufficient complement of British soldiers had been taken on board to insure against the execution of such a diabolical plan.

‘Don’t you think that’s rich? I mean you have to give them full marks for an undiminished sense of self-preservation, don’t you?’

The Punjab officer broke in.

‘I’m told you speak fluent Urdu, Perron. Will you be able to follow a brief interrogation in that language?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good. I have a few questions to ask one of the prisoners, none of special importance but I prefer to have independent witnesses in case the man says anything I consider valuable. If he does I shall tell you what it was and you will then treat it as restricted and highly confidential information.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Whatever he pretends, this man will be very apprehensive at being singled out for immediate questioning. The
MPS
who’ll bring him will remain in the room but they’re British and won’t understand what is said. I want you to place yourself behind my chair and keep your eyes fixed on him, for the psychological effect. It would help if you could manage to look not in the least sympathetic.’ He turned to Perron’s officer. ‘I should like you to sit at the table with me. Have you a file you could be looking at?’

‘A file?’

‘Or an official-looking book. It’s always helpful if the man sitting next to the one asking the questions appears to be absorbed in some task of his own which the prisoner finds it difficult to connect with the proceedings.’

Perron’s officer laughed nervously. ‘I could always play patience.’

‘A file or a book preferably.’

‘Why is it helpful?’

‘It increases the prisoner’s sense of isolation and weakens whatever resolve he may have to withhold information from the one man in the room who is speaking to him. He should be here any moment. Shall we take up positions?’

They did so. The table at which the two officers sat was the ordinary trestle type, covered by an ink-stained army blanket. It had been cleared of the papers and trays that were on it when Perron visited the hut earlier. A briefcase, a spare glove, a swagger cane, marked the Punjab officer’s place. One-handed he opened the case and withdrew a file of papers and a fountain-pen. Perron’s officer, having rummaged about on another table, now joined him, bringing with him a notebook and a thick folder of assorted cyclostyled memoranda.

The room was the inner one of the two into which the hut was divided. It was poorly lit by a single electric bulb. The trestle table faced the connecting door through which the
prisoner would have to come after passing through the outer room which was used by
MPS
and dock police but at this hour of the night, morning rather, occupied by just one sleepy corporal. It was this corporal who presently knocked on the door, looked in and announced the arrival of prisoner and escort.

They came in in file. The MP in front, a burly sergeant, halted about three paces from the desk, saluted, put a folded note on the desk, took a pace to his right and one to the rear, while the MP at the back took one to his left and then a pace forward, a manoeuvre that revealed the man they guarded; a thin, stoop-shouldered Indian in denim fatigue trousers the bottoms of which flopped over ill-fitting looking boots, a long-sleeved khaki pullover and, beneath it, a khaki shirt whose shoulder tabs were thrust through the slots made for them in the pullover. The man wore no belt. On his head there was a forage cap without a badge. The taller of the two
MPS
removed this roughly enough to jerk the prisoner’s head to one side. There was nothing on his sleeve to denote rank. The clothes had obviously been issued in Europe, perhaps in Bordeaux. He appeared not to have shaved for a couple of days. His thick black hair was over-long. A strand of it lay across his forehead. He stared from one officer to the other and finally at Perron who had been shocked to see that the prisoner’s hands were manacled. It was as if everything had been done to make him look and feel unworthy of any uniform whatsoever.

The Punjab officer asked the escort to remain in the room but to retire to the door. So far he did not seem to have looked at the prisoner but when he spoke to the
MPS
the man looked at him with close attention and took no notice when the two policemen moved. The Punjab officer (again so far as Perron could tell, having his eyes more or less dutifully fixed on the prisoner) still did not look up. After a while, perhaps as long as ten seconds, the prisoner glanced at Perron’s officer who was uselessly busy with pencil, note-book and the folder of papers, but almost immediately had his attention taken again by something the Punjab major was doing.