The Harry Palmer Quartet

The road inland from Beirut winds up into the mountains; gritty little villages hold on tight to the olive trees. The red earth gives way to rock, and far below to the north lies St George’s Bay, where the dragon got his, way back, that was. Up here where the snow hangs around six months of the year the ground is dotted with little Alpine flowers and yellow broom, in some places wild liquorice grows. Once the heights are crossed the road drops suddenly and there is a route across the valley before the crossing of the next range – the Anti Lebanon, behind which lies 500 miles of nothing but sand till Persia. Much nearer than that, though, just along the road in fact, is Syria.

At many places the roadway cuts corners, and a shelf hangs almost over the road. A full grown man can, if he keeps very still, perch between two pieces of rock at one place I know. If while in this position he looks east he can see the road for over a hundred yards; if he looks towards Beirut he can see even farther – about three hundred yards, and what’s more, he can, through night glasses, watch the road crossing the mountain. If he has friends up the road in either direction and a small transreceiver he can talk to them. Although he shouldn’t do so indiscriminately in case the police radio accidentally monitors the call. Along about 3.30 A.M. a man in this position will have counted the stars, almost fallen off the rock easing his back-ache and be seeing double through the night glasses. The metal of the trans-receiver will be sending pains of cold through hand and ear, and he will have begun to compile a list of friends prepared to help him in the matter of finding some other type of employment, and I won’t blame him. It was 3.32 A.M. when I saw the headlights coming down the mountain road. Through the night glasses I could see it was wide and rolled like an American car. I switched in my set and saw the movement up the road as the radio man gave it to Dalby. ‘One motor, over a thousand yards. No traffic. Out.’ Dalby grunted.

I read off the ranges army style until finally the large grey Pontiac slid under me, headlights probing the soft sides of the road. The beams were way above Dalby’s head. I could imagine him, crouching there, perfectly still. In these sorts of situation Dalby sat back and let his subconscious take over; he didn’t have to think – he was a natural hooligan. The car had slowed as Dalby knew it must, and as it neared him he stood up and posed, like the statue of the discus thrower, aimed – then lobbed his parcel of trouble. It was a sticky bomb about as big as two cans of soup end to end; on impact its very small explosive charge spread a sort of napalm through tank visors. Burnt cars and contents don’t worry policemen the way blown-up shot-up ones do. The charge exploded. Dalby dropped almost flat, some flaming pieces of horror narrowly missed him, but mostly they hit radiator and tyre. The car hadn’t slackened speed, and now Dalby was on his feet and running behind it. We’d parked the old car from Beirut obliquely across the path; the man driving our target must have been dead from the first impact, for he made no attempt to collide side to side in sheer, but just ploughed into the old Simca carrying it about eight feet. By now Dalby was alongside. He had the door open and I heard pistol shots as he groped into the rear seat. My transreceiver made a click as someone switched in and said in a panicky voice, which forgot procedure, ‘What you doing, what you doing?’ For a fraction of a second I thought he was asking Dalby; then I saw it.

Below me on the road was another car. Maybe he had been following all the time with lights off, or perhaps he’d come down the other valley road from Baalbek and Homs. I looked down on this stretch of road which was as light as day now; the figures frozen like a photo in the intense light of the white hot flames. I could see Dalby’s radio man from the Embassy standing there in an anorak like a scoutmaster on holiday, his white horse-like face staring thunderstruck at me. Dalby’s feet were visible under the open door and I noticed that Simon was standing behind him instead of going around the other side of the car to help. In this second of time I so badly wanted it to be the duty of someone else to do it. Someone else for blaming when this little Nash turned round and roared away. But I had let it approach unseen, I had volunteered for the look-out so as not to do what Dalby was doing – lying on his belly over a red hot petrol tank among people with no reason to be friendly. So I did what I had to do. I did it quickly and I didn’t watch. I needn’t have used two sticky bombs; it had a flimsy roof.

Simon had got Dalby’s car out on to the roadway by the time I had scrambled down. In the back the radio man was sitting guarding our one captive – the smooth stockbroker whose picture both Fatso and I had carried. The man I had seen lying unconscious upon the gaming table. Dalby had gone to look at the Nash while I vomited as inconspicuously as possible. The heavy smell hung across the roadway and was worse than a brewed-up tank ever made. This smell was a special smell, an evil smell, and my lungs were heavy with it. The two burnt out cars still flickered and spat flames as something dripped on to the red glowing metal. We each of us had removed our overalls and thrown them into the flames. It was Simon’s job to make sure they burnt enough to be unrecognizable. I remember wondering if the zips would melt, but I said nothing.

The sky had begun to lighten in the east, and the silence had turned brittle in the way it does when night gives way to dawn. The hills had grown lighter, too, and I thought I could discern a goat here and there. Soon the villages would be awake in the land that St Paul walked, and men would be milking by day where we had been killing by night.

Dalby came back out of earshot and said, ‘Nobody likes it.’

I said, ‘At first.’

‘Not ever, if they work with me.’

Dalby got into the rear seat next to Raven, and the radio man sat watching them with his pistol cocked.

I heard Dalby say, ‘I’m very sorry, sir,’ in a firm flat voice, and then he produced one of those tiny toothpaste tubes with the needle that were in wartime first-aid kits. Drawing back the man’s sleeve Dalby stabbed it into him. He made no attempt to say or do anything. He sat there in a state of shock. Dalby put the used morphia syrette tube into a matchbox, and the car pulled away, past the whitened twisted wrecks of the three cars; the melted rubber was dribbling and flaring in the road. We turned off the Beirut road at Shtora and headed north up the valley through Baalbek. The pagan and Roman ruins were strategically placed to guard the valley. The six gigantic pillars of the Great Temple were visible through the poplar trees in the streaky dawn light, as they had stood each dawn since the standards of Imperial Rome stood alongside them. I felt Dalby lean forward across my seat-back; he was passing me a rose-tinted pair of spectacles. ‘They came from the Nash.’ I saw that one pane was cracked. I turned them over in my hand. If there’s anything more pathetic than a dead man’s dog, it’s a dead man’s spectacles. Every bend and shine belonged to its wearer and to no one else, nor would ever.

Dalby said, ‘ONI.1 Both of them. US Embassy car; probably there to do what we did. Serve the nosy – right. They should tell us what they are doing.’ He caught my glance at Raven. ‘Oh, don’t worry about him, he’s way out.’

I remembered the US Navy’s white S2F-3 ‘Tracker’ at Rome, and another at Beirut that was the same one.

1 ONI – Office of Naval Intelligence US Navy.

7

I saw Dalby butting his head back, his long fair hair flashing in the hot sunshine. He shouted something I couldn’t hear, and disappeared behind one of the gigantic smooth-sided Corinthian columns. In scale with him the ruins of Baalbek’s temple were vast against the clear desert sky. I jumped down the broken steps and a couple of lizards twinkled out of sight. Dalby had caught the sun this morning and I could feel the tightening of my skin across my nose and forehead. A little scatter of sand blew across my feet as a draught of wind flicked a finger along the valley floor. As Dalby came nearer I saw that he’d found a piece of tile that had cleverly eluded two millennia of tourists. On the far side of the site beyond the little round temple of Venus a group of American girls in red blazers were standing in a semicircle listening to an old white-bearded Arab. I could tell that he’d got to the bit about the sex orgies and the Rites of the God Moloch even though the wind carried his voice away. Dalby had caught up to me now.

‘OK for lunch?’ he asked, and in his proprietorial manner led the way towards it without waiting for a reply.

We had all slept late that morning in the rather grand villa out there on the Baalbek road. Simon was a Lt-Col in the RAMC and some sort of specialist. He had never been involved in a stunt like last night’s before. I felt a little guilty at my unspoken criticism. He was back there now, keeping an eye on the man who had held centre stage last night. The villa was discreetly situated and under the quiet control of an elderly Armenian couple who accepted our arrival last night without surprise. The house stood in the middle of a vast acreage of terraced garden. Azaleas, cyclamen and olive trees all but hid the building which was ‘U’ shaped in plan. Behind the house across the open end, an irregular-shaped pool was cut into the natural rock. Under the clear blue water at one end a Roman statue was transfixed in athletic pose, and there were no changing-rooms, beach-chairs, parasols or diving-boards to mar the pool’s natural appearance. The walls of the house facing inwards were glass from floor to ceiling, with bright plain curtains which moved on electrically propelled runners. At night when the lights were on throughout the house and the curtains fully open, and when the coloured lights illuminated the Roman statue, the paved central loggia made a perfect helicopter landing space, while the double-glazed windows kept the worst of the sound out.

Here at the temple the air was clear and clean and soft and because morning gives a dimension of magic to any place it was soft and sharp at the same time. The fluted columns had been burnished by the centuries of wind but under the hand the surface was as rough as pumice and as pitted as a honeycomb. A dirty child with torn trousers and a pair of American canvas shoes drove three goats clanking along the road to the north. ‘Cigarette,’ he called to Dalby, and Dalby gave him two.

Dalby was especially relaxed and expansive; it seemed a good chance to find out more about the opposition that we had just outwitted. I asked him about Jay – ‘But what’s his cover story – what’s his angle, his business?’

‘He runs, or more accurately he pays someone to run a research unit in Aargau.’ He stopped, and I nodded. ‘You know where it is?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Where?’ asked Dalby.

‘Forgive me if my lack of ignorance is an embarrassment to you. The Canton of Aargau is in the north of Switzerland, the river Aar joins the Rhine there.’

‘Oh, yes, forgive me, the finance king is bound to know Switzerland.’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Now let’s take it from there – what sort of research unit?’

‘Well they have sociologists and psychiatrists and statistics people and they have money from various industrial foundations to investigate what they call “synthesized environment”.’

I said, ‘You’ve lost me now – without trying.’

‘Not surprisingly, for they hardly know what they are doing themselves, but the idea is this. Take German industry for an example. German industry has been short of labour for ages and they have imported workmen from almost every European country – with excellent results. That is to say – put an unskilled labourer from one of the Greek islands, who has never seen a machine before, in the German factory, he learns how to operate it just as quickly as a worker from Düsseldorf.’ Dalby looked up. ‘You are receiving me?’

‘Loud and clear,’ I said. ‘So what’s the problem – peachy for the West Germans.’

‘In that sort of situation – no problems, but if a West German builds a factory in Greece and employs local labour they can’t even teach them to switch on the lights in some cases.

‘Therefore, these boffins in Aargau feel that to be in an environment where everyone knows what they are doing, and attach no difficulty to doing it, means that the new arrival will adopt the same attitude. If on the other hand the individual finds himself among people lacking confidence, he will raise barriers to ever mastering his job – and so will the others. This is what “synthesized environment” means. It could be very important to industry, especially to industries being formed in countries with a rural population.’

‘It could be important from our point of view, too.’

‘We have a file on it,’ said Dalby dryly.

That’s about all that Dalby volunteered on the subject of Jay, but I had lots of other chatty topics of discussion ready as we walked back to the villa. I asked him about his new IBM machine, about the Chester Committee Report on the Intelligence Services, and how it was likely to affect us, and about my arrears of pay (now approaching four months) and whether I couldn’t have the whole of my expenses available to me in cash against petty cash vouchers instead of submitting accounts and settling down to a long wait as I did now.

It was Dalby’s day for proving that he could be one of the boys. He wore his short-sleeved shirt outside his denim trousers and an old pair of suède shoes, against which he kicked every small movable object we encountered. I asked him about Mr Adem, our host, and about him he was more forthcoming than he had ever been about pay and expenses.

Dalby had got him from Ross, who had got him from the US Anti-Narcotics Bureau (Mediterranean Div). He had run Indian hemp* across the Syrian border as a section of a chain to New York. The Americans had done a deal with him in 1951 and, although the pay wasn’t up to drug traffic rates, he had been happy to avoid a spell up the river. In the NATO Intelligence Service regroupings of ’53 Adem had come into British service. He was about in his mid-sixties; gentle and humorous with a face like an apple that’s been stored through the winter. He was a fine judge of horses, wines and heroin, and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of an area stretching from Northern Turkey to Jerusalem. If you trod on a beetle for miles around you’d find he had it under contract. His role was a giver of information and understanding this, he had, or showed, no curiosity about the affairs of his employers. His salary was virtually unlimited, with one proviso – no cash. As Dalby put it, ‘We pay any reasonable bill he runs up, but he never handles a pound himself.’

‘It’s going to be difficult for him to retire,’ I said.

‘It will be damn well impossible if I have anything to do with it,’ said Dalby. ‘He’s hooked, we need him.’

‘You mean he never tries to re-channel some of his debts into cash?’ I asked, just to be provocative.

Dalby’s face cracked open in one of those big boyish laughs he gave out when he felt proud of his even teeth. ‘He does!

‘When we first gave him the Sud Aviation Jet helicopter,’ Dalby went on, ‘I told him to jazz it around somewhat. “Live it up and be proud of it,” I said. “Give a few of the big Government boys a ride around.” I wanted him to be seen up and down the shore line, occasionally riding out to sea. With a Lebanese big-wig aboard, inquiries were not going to be encouraged.’

We’d reached the sloping driveway, and beyond the lemon trees I could just see the light green Cadillac in which Adem had met us a few kilometres along the road in the small hours.

‘So?’ I said. ‘It worked?’

‘Worked?’ Dalby tilted his head, pulled his earlobe and smiled in admiration as he thought about it. ‘He brought twenty kilos of heroin across from Syria within seven days of getting his licence. Twenty kilos,’ Dalby said, his thin lips forming the words yet again in tacit joy at the sheer ambition of the old man.

‘At five shillings a dose that’s a lot of green,’ I agreed.

‘It was a big improvement on Indian hemp. The sort of ruffians he knows can get 100,000 doses from a kilo, and five shillings is the Beirut price, in London it’s going to be more like ten. A couple of runs like that and he could buy Cyprus as a weekend place. It gave me a problem, but I told him I’d break his head if he did it again, and in the long run it was beneficial. When the news of the shipment leaked out – it’s bound to in a place like this – well, people never trust a completely honest individual.’

The smell of Dgaj Muhshy (chicken stuffed with nutmeg, thyme, pine nuts, lamb and rice, and cooked with celery) taunted the nostrils. The old man was dressed in a shirt of bright yellow locally-made silk and was poking away among his vegetable garden as we got to the front door.

‘Hello,’ muttered Dalby. ‘The old swine is probably growing his own.’

The soft wind blew across the high-ceilinged dining-room. The décor, except for two beautiful gold thread brocades of very old Persian design, reflected Adem’s peasant origin more than his present-day affluence. The scrubbed woodwork, the small-patterned cloths, an enormous dresser, crowded with plates, saucers, jugs and cups. The rugs on the wall of simple dark-toned peasant weaves. All this provided a background against which a food opera was played out. First sambousiks (small pastries containing curried meat served freshly baked) were served. I looked at old Adem as he stood at the end of the table; under his bulbous nose hung an enormous grey moustache which, because of his thinning hair, gave one the curious feeling that his face was upside down. His skin was hard and tanned in such a way that when his face was relaxed and serious, the wrinkles around the mouth and eyes were white; but he was seldom serious.

He divided up the huge joint of lamb with a well-worn horn-sided folding knife that came from his pocket and was used in every operation from vegetable gardening to changing a tyre. I had watched him do both with the same smooth enjoyable efficiency. His mouth contorted with the effort of his hands, and each slice was delivered with a great flashing smile of his brown uneven teeth.

‘It’s good?’ he asked me.

I told him to be careful or he’d have a guest for life. It was the right thing to say. He was a born host and, as Dalby said, I am a born guest.

That afternoon as the sun reached its apogee Adem and I sat talking and drinking under the trees. Adem did the talking, I did the drinking. He told me of his uncle who had killed a lion single-handed with only a spear in 1928. ‘A challenge. He went to this lion in challenge. In his right hand he had a spear.’ Adem raised his right hand, fingers clenched. ‘This arm,’ he raised his left arm, ‘is tied with clothes and bandage for guarding.’ Adem demonstrated guarding. ‘After this lion die he is called “Hamid the lion-killer”; he never work again.’

‘Never works again?’

‘Never. A man who kills a lion, everyone gives him money and food, everything; never work again.’

‘I can see the attraction,’ I said. ‘Are there lions about here now?’

‘Not here. To the north perhaps; many times I go. Many animal; many gazelle, many leopard, ibex … bears. But they become less each year. Many people hunt.’

‘Like your Uncle Hamid.’

Adem looked serious, then he laughed a big laugh. ‘Not like him. People with guns. I do not like this.’

‘You go north hunting?’ Now I was doing it.

‘Not the hunt. I go to look. I stay very still, very, very still, near water, and I watch them come.’

‘You never photograph them?’

‘No, I watch. It is just for me, not for pictures. Just for me and the animal.’

I imagined Adem holed up overnight in the bleak brown area to the north watching and sniffing the night air and never taking a film or a bullet. I told him of Xenophon’s men who chased the ostrich and wild ass. He liked that part of the story but found the effort of imagining a greater period of time than two generations very difficult. As far as Adem was concerned, Xenophon was a contempary of A. W. Kinglake. Adem told me of the attempts to conserve the wild life farther north, and of the money they needed. When I told Dalby he said that the old man would do anything to get his hands on cash, but I’m simple enough to believe the old man.

Soon only the higher parts of the landscape were catching the horizontal sunlight and a lone blackcap had sung his song from all the little lemon trees. From inside the house the crick-crack of freshly ignited fruit-tree wood proclaimed the approach of dinner-time.

Totem poles of lamb, aubergine, onion and green pepper were being skewered, seasoned and readied on the big open hearth. As Adem finished speaking a radio somewhere within the house pierced the grey velvet twilight with a needle of sound.

The polished opening notes of the second movement of the Jupiter. It seemed that every living thing across the vast desert spaces heard the disturbing, chilling sound. For those few minutes of time as the wire edge modulated to a minor key and as the rhythm and syncopation caught, slipped and re-engaged like a trio on a trapeze, there was only me and Adem and Mozart alive in that cruel, dead, lonely place.

We were three days with the old man of the mountains, then John reappeared from Beirut with a vast radio set. It took him nearly three hours, but finally he made contact with a Battle-class RN destroyer that was NATOing down the Lebanese coastline.

Simon, the army quack, whose name was Painter, as far as anyone’s name is anything in this business, seldom came out of the upstairs room. But when they had fixed a rendezous time with the destroyer, Painter decided that the captive could eat dinner with us. Raven. He was well code-named this captive Raven. He was thinner and weaker than he’d looked even two days previously when Dalby had dragged him out of the Pontiac, but he was good-humoured in a different sort of way. His white shirt had grown a little dirty, and in his baggy pin-stripe trousers and a new dark linen jacket he looked like the manager of a Bingo saloon. His eyeballs, deep and darkly sunken, moved quickly and nervously, and I noticed that he repeatedly glanced towards Painter. As they reached the bottom of the stairs our guest paused. He seemed to sense our curiosity and interest in the role he played. Our chatter ceased, and the only sound came from an upstairs radio tuned to the ‘Voice of the Arab’; its strange polyphonic discord set the eerie background to the curious scene. His voice was the clear, carefully articulated tones of English management.

‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ he said flatly. ‘Good evening and er, thank you.’ He came through like a whisky ad. Dalby strode across to him in a paternal way, and led him to the table like guest night at Boodles. ‘Most kind, Dalby, most kind,’ he said.

All through the meal little was said that didn’t touch on the weather or the garden or horses, mostly horses, and old Adem finished quickly and went up to catch the forecast. The destroyer was making good time down the coast in the gathering twilight; visual contact wouldn’t be the simplest thing, although with fuel for over three hundred miles the helicopter had a safe enough margin of search.

They sat inside the big plexiglass dome of the SE-3130 Alouette 2 like goldfish expecting food. Simon Painter sat on one side of the azoic Raven on the folding seats in the rear. Dalby sat in the front left side observer’s seat as he received the final few words of Adem’s short lecture on the use of the Decca navigation equipment. Adem’s face was more serious now as he fingered the joystick-like cyclic pitch control, and worried about how to bring this Alouette down on the temporary landing platform that wouldn’t be much bigger than the forward gun turret upon which it was being erected at that minute. On the bodywork I could read the notices: ‘Danger Rotors’ and a serial number, and inside the cabin a small plastic panel and engraved upon it the procedure in case of fire. The words shuddered as the motor started. Like a back-fire in Trafalgar Square it was followed by the sound of a thousand wings beating the air, clattering across the valley and echoing back to us again. The 400-horse-power Turbomeca power unit was alive, and above my head the thirty-foot rotor-blades shaved the face of the night. The controls reflected little pimples of yellow light into Adem’s spectacles, and our distinguished visitor waved a limp hand airily towards us in kingly fashion. ‘Farewell troublesome Raven,’ I thought.