Authors: Geoffrey Household
“I didn’t pass him,” he replied, without looking round.
“Have you the foggiest notion what you passed, bo?”
“Nothing at all but a lorry. I hope there are thorns in the soft underbelly.”
“There are, damn you! Then he’s turned off up the track to the old camp.”
“All right. I’ll get Abu Tisein. Let’s meet at that patch of eucalyptus just over the crest. There’s still plenty of light, and we should be able to see down into the
camp from there.”
Laurence put his pipe in his pocket, jumped on the kick start and vanished over the hill to Safad.
Dion Prayle had to walk. The section truck, which had dropped him near his present post, was five miles away at a road junction to the south. His route demanded careful planning, for a solitary
British soldier on foot was a rare sight outside the camps and towns; if anyone but himself were on the watch, his sudden appearance on road or hillside might arouse suspicion. He waited for the
dust of a passing truck to conceal his movement, then slipped across the road at the next bend and over the embankment at the farther side. From there he could reach the crest, unseen by any but
the Arab fellahin far beneath him, working their little fields in Lower Galilee.
When he reached the grove of eucalyptus, Fairfather and David Nachmias were already there. Abu Tisein had left his car in Safad and travelled the short distance, over a rocky track, on the
pillion of the motorcycle. He was smiling as if he had enjoyed it.
“Commended for gallantry,” said Prayle. “At risk of death or permanent injury etcetera.”
“I do not mind a new experience,” replied Abu Tisein, “though I would prefer a horse. So much of my life is spent …” He made a slow, pacific gesture which seemed to
imply long, patient hours of sitting in Arab tents and café s, of waiting upon government officials and Agency politicians in leisurely Jerusalem. “I enjoy a day in the
country.”
Prayle knew instantly what he meant. It was the sort of phrase he would have used himself. A day in the country covered those dangerous journeys beyond the frontiers of neutral Turkey, or the
first night in a new settlement when the joyous, singing colonists put up their tents on a patch of sand that would soon be a tidy village among its orange groves, or all the pleasures of active
intrigue in the open air between Bagdad and Damascus.
“Shall we start?” asked Abu Tisein. “I think, if I may advise, that the edge of the grove is better avoided. The trees are thin and movement could be seen against the going
down of the sun. Let us follow that stone wall. We can stand among the thorn at the end, and our heads will be hidden.”
Prayle and Fairfather glanced at each other. Laurence indicated by an admiring and humorous lift of his eyebrow that he was perfectly willing to accept Abu Tisein’s efficient
leadership—it was the very gesture that Prayle had often seen pass between two men in the ranks when they were convinced that their officer was talking sense.
Without any sort of insistence David Nachias quietly assumed command. Prayle was certain that if either of them had shown the minutest sign of questioning his right he would, as quietly and
imperceptibly, have relinquished it. Abu Tisein’s judgment of the ground was correct; from the wall, screened by bushes, they could see into the deserted camp. There were a few huts, all but
one open to wind and weather. A civilian truck—that which had raised the dust for Prayle’s crossing of the road—was parked on a strip of cracked asphalt. Makrisi’s donkey,
forelegs hobbled, browsed on a miniature forest of cabbage and carrot which had gone wild in the former mess garden.
“Are they likely to have put out sentries, David?” Fairfather asked.
“At the way in from the road. Not here. If we go quietly we shall reach the hut. What action do you propose then?”
“I just want Montagne.”
“It may be dangerous.”
“No. They won’t make trouble with British troops.”
“What makes you think that, Captain Fairfather?” asked Abu Tisein, the hard, golden flash of the desert in his brown eyes.
Fairfather looked at him in astonishment, and then smiled.
“My dear David, surely you don’t think I doubt Jewish courage in this day and age? I simply meant that, however much we disagree, we are still comrades-in-arms.”
“Still,” Abu Tisein repeated. “Still. Yes, I think so. But the bond is weak. I will go alone and I will get Montagne for you.”
“I can’t do that, David.”
“I am not altogether a civilian, you know.”
“I should say not! You’ve risked your life more often than any of us. But I could never face Josh if I let you go alone and there was an incident.”
“Yes, I understand. Then we must all go together.”
“Orders, bo?” Prayle asked his senior, tapping the service .45 at his hip.
“Remember King’s Regulations, Dion. I forget the precise and beautiful wording of the War Office, but, roughly speaking, if you plug a civilian before he plugs you, it’s
murder. And you won’t be plugged. Am I right, David?”
“Yes,” answered Abu Tisein. “But I am not sure that you will get Montagne.”
“Why not?”
“You could never have followed him to this meeting unless you had known all his movements from the start.”
“We certainly couldn’t!”
“Then what,” asked Abu Tisein, throwing open his arms as far as the surrounding thorn permitted, “will they think of Montagne?”
“I see. Then we’ll have to make the interview snappy,” said Fairfather. “Dion, it might—it might just be necessary to cover them to get Montagne away. But
we’ll go in peaceably.”
Abu Tisein led them along the angle of two walls, bending low behind the roughly piled stones; they came out on a slope of sunburned, tussocky grass which led directly down into the camp, and
gave silent and easy access to the closed hut on its windowless southern side.
Dion Prayle felt more and more dislike for the whole business; it was too full of psychological intangibles. To surprise a bunch of potential assassins, in blind confidence that they meant, as
yet, to avoid trouble with the army, was hazarding too much on being able to fix one’s exact position in the everchanging fog of Jewish politics. This expedition of three was all wrong. They
should either have called in a carload of police prepared to overwhelm all resistance—though in that case there would have been nobody to resist, for the police always managed to give ample
warning of their coming—or else they should have left the job to Abu Tisein. And that, though logical, was, by any standard of behaviour, impossible.
They reached the door of the hut unseen and unchallenged. Laurence flung it open and went in. There were four men seated at a table talking to Montagne. They were dressed as Arab soldiers of the
British Army. All had their Arab headcloth drawn lightly across the lower part of the face. On the table was a small, open attaché case stuffed with bank notes, Egyptian and Palestinian.
During the first two seconds of amazement and a third while hands moved down to pockets and up again with pistols, Abu Tisein was speaking quietly in Hebrew.
A man wearing a red and white checked headcloth, who sat next to Montagne, said in English:
“Put your arms on the table.”
Facing four pistols at a range of two yards, there was no option. The leader unloaded the two service revolvers and handed them back again. Another man ran his hands over the three of them,
looking for additional arms. Prayle’s still neutral opinion of David Nachmias changed to admiration on seeing that he carried no weapon at all.
“What do you want here?”
The leader spoke a cultured English with some trace of a Slav accent.
“Not you,” Fairfather answered in a friendly tone. “I’m not a policeman. I don’t know who you are and I don’t want to know. My business is with Mr.
Makrisi.”
“A rescue party. No, Captain Fairfather.”
“You know me then?”
“By sight and reputation. They say you are fond of justice.”
“I hope so.”
“Watch it!”
Mr. Makrisi was seated at his side, silent and uncaring. With a smooth, efficient, horribly merciful flow of hand and arm, the leader shot him through the back of the skull.
Dion Prayle felt his knees trembling and tried to control them. He was no more afraid than one who sees a deadly accident in the street, but the shock of this coldblooded execution surpassed
anything his emotions could endure without some physical reaction. Montague, so vividly alive, for the madder the man, the more alive, was sliding off his chair on to the floor and kicking when he
got there. Kick. Twitch. Kick. Twitch. Impersonal as a clock. Prayle pulled himself together with deliberate thoughts of half-dead matter that he had seen and trodden in around Dunkirk. None of it
had the horror of this clean bullet. Germans, Russians—they did this sort of thing. God knew, perhaps everybody in occupied Europe was doing it! Where could they find the men to do it? And
how? How?
“That is what will happen to your agents,” said the man in the red and white checks.
His voice carried no threat. It was a tone of regret, as if asking why they did not accept the inevitable.
“He was nobody’s agent but yours,” Prayle retorted fiercely.
“No? Not in Egypt?”
“Didn’t even know he was suspected! Isn’t that proof of it?” asked Prayle, pointing to the money on the table.
“It is proof of nothing.”
Abu Tisein let loose a flood of Hebrew, through which his sultry anger rumbled, courteous and incalculably dangerous. He stood square to the table, not tense as a European, but with all the
muscles of his powerful body relaxed in the contempt of the stronger for the weaker.
“I am sorry,” he said, turning to Prayle and Fairfather from the table he had so completely dominated. “I was telling them merely that they are unworthy to be Jews.”
One of the four men called him some insulting name; the voice was shrill and unsure, and Prayle gained the impression that the speaker was very young. It was hard to tell his age from the
burning black eyes above the headcloth, but the slight figure, the clear, ivory forehead, suggested a boy of not more than fifteen. He was playing with his pistol. Prayle hated carelessness with
arms.
“I wish you’d tell that boy to leave his gun alone,” he said.
“Afraid Englishman?”
“Of course I am,” answered Prayle testily. “So would you be if you had any sense. He’s pointing it at you now.”
“Lunatics who fight with children!” scoffed Abu Tisein.
“Rak Ivrit!”
ordered the leader.
“No! To you I will not speak Hebrew.”
“Ashamed, you spy?”
“Yes. Ashamed. I and my father and our fathers before us, they spoke Hebrew while you gargled in your Yiddish like—like sick sheep. I speak the language of these officers because
they are guests in my country.”
“And because you take their money,” the man sneered.
“David Nachmias,” said Fairfather firmly, “has no more taken our money than you did—if any of you are really in the army.”
“I have no quarrel with you. I know that you do not wish to be here,” the leader declared, as if repeating a slogan of faith. “You would rather be at home.”
“As a matter of fact,” Fairfather replied, “I would rather be here than anywhere else. But I suppose that is hardly a shooting matter?”
The man seemed disconcerted by this reasonable reply.
“So long as you go when we require it,” he answered.
“Good God, bo!” Prayle exclaimed. “Can’t you see that attitude will bring more of us?”
“The worse for them!”
“And for you!”
“We accept that,” answered the man in the red checks proudly. “For us, in our fight for freedom, death is nothing.”
“Hell!” said Dion, exasperated. “So I see! But does it do any good?”
“Be quiet! I have not finished with your other spy yet.”
Prayle gave Abu Tisein a half smile, involuntarily expressing his sense of the absurdity of the charge. Spy David Nachmias had certainly been, except on his own people; but the word when applied
to that bold, quadrangular figure was so small, so emptily dramatic.
The leader again attacked in bitter Hebrew. David Nachmias calmly heard him out.
“Crawl to them?” he said reflectively. “Crawl to them? Is it crawling to speak a language that all can understand? Because our manners were too gracious when we were slaves, as
you call us, is it a reason for having none in our own country?”
He was silent for a moment, then began to defend his courage, boastful yet dignified as an old Emir justifying his leadership to his followers.
“I, Abu Tisein as they name me, I have gone out to my death too often to believe I am a coward. I have dealt with the Gestapo face to face. Sometimes they knew I was a Jew, but I brought
money. Sometimes they thought I was an Arab, and gave me money. I served the British, and I led out those of our people whom I could save.
“I have founded colonies. I have filled Eretz Israel with men and women, and arms for their defence. I have fought all my life against Turks, against Arabs, against British. And all of
them were my friends. You—you have stolen our sword and refused our wisdom. You hide there in those British uniforms, and who taught you? I did! But I never put a man in their uniform to make
war on them. When we fight, it shall be under our own flag and in our own uniform. And never—I tell you, never—whatever threats may be made, whatever words may fly in anger, never will
we murder the British. What do you gain by your childishness? That man who lies there, whom you shot, I killed him long ago. I killed him by making a mistake. His blood is on my head, but what
leader of men cannot say the same? It was only a crime against my brother. But also, for the sake of my people, I did not bear witness when I could have done so. And that is a crime against
God.”
Abu Tisein grimly regarded Montagne’s body, now only a shapeless mass on the floor of the darkening hut.
“Without law! Without law!” he cried, as if in a lament. Then with the first gesture of his whole speech he stabbed a finger towards the table.
It was clear that only the leader and the youth understood his slow English—understood so keenly that they listened. Of the other two, one leaned forward puzzling out the alien speech, and
the fourth, probably a newcomer to Palestine, sat dully awaiting orders and scratching the sand-fly bites on his arms.