The Mandelbaum Gate
He was in his room. He was scribbling with his pocket pen on a piece of paper. He had in fact just finished decoding the message which he had copied from the note he had replaced in the tree-bark; the code had been fairly simple, but he was pleased with himself, brisk and expert at cracking a code as he had been on H.M.S. Achilles in the war, when he had cracked many a tough code-signal. He was making a final, brief note of the formula, now, committing it to memory with the message it revealed, before destroying the record according to the old routine.
Suzi had entered without knocking. She said, ‘What are you writing?’
‘A poem,’ Freddy said.
‘Let me see.’ She reached for it and tried hard to snatch it from his hand. He caught her arm playfully, and her gold bracelet became unclasped and fell to the floor. Freddy got it first, and made game with it, holding it out to her, then snatching it away and holding it behind his back, in an effort to distract her attention from the piece of paper in his left hand.
Suzi sat on the bed. ‘Let me see the poem and you can keep the bracelet,’ she said, holding out her hand for it.
‘I’ll read you the poem,’ he said. He sat down some distance away from her, near a table-lamp which he adjusted to gain the small moment for thought under a good reading light; the necessity of the occasion forced him to act neatly. The poem is for you,’ he said, ‘naturally.’ He peered at the paper. He said, ‘It’s crumpled and —’ Then smoothing the crumpled sheet, he read:
Now is the time for secret pleasantries
With a girl-friend lurking in her corner ambush,
The time to steal a token from
Her arm or unprotesting finger.
‘Go on,’ Suzi said. Freddy was aware that she had an impression of the quantity of writing on the page he held. He said, ‘Well, that’s the last verse, in fact. I haven’t really worked over the others. I usually finish the last first. Do you like it?’
‘I’ve read something like it before, I seem to think,’ said Suzi. ‘But not so good, and not quite like written for me. But I remember a poem I read like it.’
Freddy laughed with quite genuine amusement. ‘You cunning little thing,’ he said. ‘Of course you know it’s a translation from Horace. I have the Latin here, too. Listen —’
nunc et latentis proditor intimo
gratus puella rasus ab angulo
pignusque dereptum lacertis
aut digito male pertinaci.
She came towards him for the paper. ‘Let me see.’ But he raised it high, and getting out his lighter, made a flame, as he had done when burning the Harrogate letters in order to send them easier down the lavatory drain. He said, as she caught his right arm, ‘I’m going to follow a custom that we practised at Cambridge University, my dear, when I was young at Cambridge. When we wrote a poem to a beautiful lady we read it to her and burned it.’ He set the paper alight and Suzi drew her hand away from the quick flame. As it consumed the page, Freddy moved only enough to drop it on the tiled floor between the rugs where it lay in black, furled ash. ‘We burned the poem,’ said Freddy, treading the charred flimsy furl to powder, ‘as a symbol of consummation of our love for the lady. Even a translation — I offer it to you — it’s something better than I could compose myself.’ She was looking at the black powder on the floor mingled with tiny remaining shreds of white, unconsumed paper which could reveal nothing of that message, insignificant in itself, but really very important for Freddy’s purpose; a mere report of some pipe-lines on the side of the road in Israel, measuring 185 inches. Quite a size; they had probably been planted there. However, that wasn’t his business, the point was that this house was undoubtedly, undoubtedly, that one place in the whole vast area of possibility through which far more serious stuff from the office had been leaking to Cairo and beyond. It was Nasser’s Post Office and Gardnor was the man.
It was only within a few days that Freddy would be sitting in his hotel, forgetful of this moment, wearily listening to Rupert Gardnor’s long, insufferable story about the Israeli pipe-line. Those fake pipe-lines, you see … I think they were something like 195 inches in diameter, at least —’
The size of those fake water-pipes is 185 inches, not 195.’
‘How do you know?’ Yes, how did he know? Gardnor made much of the need for an Intelligence investigation of Freddy during the two weeks that followed this conversation, and as it came out later, used that time to cover up or destroy most of the evidence against himself. But not all. Ruth Gardnor got away to Cairo. Gardnor alone stood trial in the winter to come.
‘Are you sure you’ve got Gardnor?’ Freddy said on that day when his memory returned like a high tide, with an undercurrent ebb and flow of details.
‘Yes, we’ve got Gardnor.’
‘Got a statement?’
‘He’s giving it now. Another day or two, and he’d have got away to Cairo.’
‘Did they find the house at Jericho all right?’
‘Of course. You’re not to worry, Freddy. Take a’ rest and give us any more details when you’re O.K. Just as and when. We’ve got all we need. The Jordan authorities have cooperated.’
‘Did you find anything at Jericho?’
‘Oh, a transmitter, you know, and cameras, the usual stuff in the usual places — the cellar, the wardrobe. We haven’t got his wife, she’s hiding somewhere. The Jordan authorities are having a good search. They’ve been very helpful. Very efficient.’
‘I wouldn’t count on them getting her,’ said Freddy. They didn’t get Barbara Vaughan.’
‘Well, we’ve got Gardnor. That’s the —’
‘That’s the main thing,’ said Freddy, looking at the unbelievable telegrams and memoranda of telephone calls between the office in Israel and Harrogate. He clung to what was believable in those first hours of remembrance. Gardnor was under arrest.
‘So you see,’ he said to Suzi when he had burned the paper to fragments, ‘the love poem is yours for ever.’ He genuinely felt it to be so at that moment, as she looked at his triumph in black ash on the floor, with a half-smile and a half-frown, as if puzzled, hesitating to take his word, and yet pleased with his gesture, and in any case, respecting his victory. Freddy thought she was adorable in her sudden loss of confidence after being so sure of herself all day, and he was delighted with his own accomplishment. He decided that the next urgent move was to get her to bed, then tomorrow he might compose for her some verses of his own, in chant royal perhaps, or haiku, why not?
He said, ‘It’s bed-time, isn’t it?’
She sifted the powdered ruins of the paper with the toe of her shoe and looked at him with becoming admiration. ‘You telling me,’ she said. ‘It’s been a busy day, Freddy, more or less. ‘Where is that bracelet that you laid plots with your poem to steal? Did you have busy days at Cambridge University?’ They found the bracelet.
As it turned out, it was she, not Freddy, who was uneasy in love-making, for she had the distracting suspicion that his very confidence in bed with her might derive from some secret success in counter-espionage. She wanted very much to believe in the poem that had been deftly and symbolically burnt for her, but an accurate translation of her Arabic thoughts in reserve would have been that it was damned unlikely. So she missed half the fun of sleeping with Freddy in his access of goodwill and ardour, and enjoyed only the other half.
At about three o’clock, when they had just fallen asleep, Suzi woke quickly from a sound in the stillness beyond the house and started up, waking Freddy. The sound became more specific, a car approaching.
‘Listen,’ she said.
Freddy was less sensitive to the approach of motor-cars outside his accustomed places of sleep. He said, “What is it?’
Then, from the direction of Jericho the first of the three-o’clock cries arose, followed by another high call from another mosque Freddy said, ‘It sounds very beautiful,’ and moved closer to her.
She said, ‘It’s a car coming to the house.’ It was now an unmistakab
le sound. The car pulled up outside, near the front of the house. Suzi was out of bed, listening at the window. The night air was flooded with the distant chanting from many mosques, and presently overflowed with a louder voice from the courtyard, then the sound of a woman’s grateful tones a shuffle and arrangement of footsteps outside and the banging of the car door. ‘Latifa!’ shouted the man’s voice. ‘Latifa!’
‘My father,’ Suzi said. ‘He’s brought someone and he’s shouting to be let in.’
‘Do you mean that I am to share this room with you?’ said Miss Rickward.
‘Of course,’ said Joe Ramdez. ‘Or it is better to say I share it with you, since you are my honoured guest and I have made you this room at your disposal. It is yours, I share with you.’
‘But where will you sleep?’
‘With you, in the bed, my fruitful vine.’
It seemed to her that she had always known that this was how it was done. Ricky felt rescued, she felt vindicated, and she longed more than ever to crush Barbara Vaughan.
When Barbara first came to the fact, beyond all reckoning, the amazing fact, that Ricky was having a romantic love-affair with Joe Ramdez, a serious relationship and no mere spinster’s holiday fling, she began to work backwards from that point to see where she had begun to miscalculate Ricky. Even doctors, she thought, sometimes do not know why a person does not die. But there was no telling at what point, over the six years she had known Ricky, she had failed to discover a dormant capacity for going to bed with a latent Joe Ramdez. It then occurred to Barbara, and recurred more strongly after she had learned of Ricky’s marriage and her sale of the school in England, her eager embrace of Islam, and the total handing over of her lot to Joe Ramdez, that there had been no secret state of mind in Ricky. What had been overlooked was perfectly obvious, and it was, after all, precisely a woman of virile ways and blunt intellect, and yet of unfathomable emotions, who would respond and ramify most sensuously towards a muscular ageing Arab of lordly disposition, should that one chance occur, as it had done. Joe Ramdez was in fact the only type of man that Ricky could understand, and Barbara reflected that, most probably, Ricky imagined all love-affairs started and proceeded as directly as hers did, and that all women who go to bed with a man go to bed with a type of Joe Ramdez.
It was the only way she could explain the fact that Ricky, even after her meeting with Joe Ramdez, pursued the purpose for which she had followed Barbara to the Holy Land, which was to prevent her marriage to Harry Clegg. She had brought with her, of all things, a copy of the records of Harry’s birth and baptism, which in desperate zeal she had managed to dig up, where Harry and his lawyers in their methodical defeatism had failed. Ricky’s wild intention in doing so had been to prove to Barbara that the man she wanted to marry was illegitimate, a fact that Barbara knew already. And it turned out that the document Ricky produced for Barbara’s inspection made it perfectly easy for Harry’s previous marriage to be annulled by the Church, and for her to marry him within its communion. This business of the birth record was the joke of their lives.
But what neither Barbara, Harry, nor the Church knew, and were mercifully never to know, was that Ricky, shortly after her meeting with Joe, destroyed the first paper she had brought so carefully with her, substituting a second one, misguidedly devised, though brilliantly forged. This was done at the instigation of Ramdez in his eagerness to avenge Ricky against Barbara Vaughan, her treacherous friend who had grieved her, and his own enemy, the Jewess who passed as it were through his fingers and escaped the country.
‘We were told,’ said Ricky at that future date when she discovered that something had gone wrong with the scheme, ‘… we were assured, that a certificate which proves Clegg to be a baptized Catholic would prevent him from ever getting an annulment of his previous marriage, since Catholics do not recognize divorce. I simply cannot understand it.’
She was then talking to a Catholic priest. He seemed aware of vexation in her tone, and looked at her, puzzled. ‘Well, it’s better, this way, isn’t it?’ he said. “What a good thing for the couple that you found this certificate.’
Ricky, terrified of having aroused suspicion, agreed that it was. The priest said that it was a common mistake, of course, to assume that a Catholic could not obtain an annulment of a previous marriage, since in fact if the Catholic had been first married outside the Church, as in the case of Harry Clegg, the Church did not recognize the marriage. But where a non-Catholic applied for annulment in such a case, difficulties arose, since this was outside the province of the Church. It was all perfectly logical, really…. If only, Ricky thought, I had given them the paper I brought over, that first paper … Born to Amelia Clegg … Father unknown … Christened at Tate Street Methodist Chapel …
Ramdez laid yet another curse upon his son Abdul for providing the false information about Catholic divorces. Abdul had claimed, when he was in hospital in Beirut, to have gone over to the Catholic Church. Ramdez did not know whether to believe him, but he cursed him then, even although Abdul explained that he was still a Moslem as well. Abdul had done that, if he had done it at all, to offend and shame his father. And now, when appealed to for the information that surely he, having received the Catholic teaching, was in a position to know, Abdul had answered falsely to ‘spite his father’s new, fine, substantial wife, who had come freely to him with all her confidence, her trouble, and her riches. Joe Ramdez laid a father’s curse on Abdul again and yet again.
Barbara, in her relief, kept saying to Harry, ‘I was going to marry you anyway.’
He said, ‘I know. I’m not forgetting it.’ The Congregation of the Rota had turned down his application for an annulment only a week before the new evidence, Ricky’s bright information, turned up to make everything easy. He said, ‘My aunts never told me my mother was a Catholic. Anyway, they were not really my aunts. Perhaps my father was a Catholic, too. An Irish couple, I expect, whoever they were. I know more about the Etruscans than I do about my own parents, and in fact I’ve got no curiosity about them at all, whereas the Etruscans —’
‘It’s so funny, Ricky thinking this was going to mess us up.’
‘Yes, I know, silly old bitch.’
She said, ‘I would have married you, anyway. But it would have taken courage to continue being out of the Church. It’s the keeping it up I was afraid of.’
‘From the way those clerics spoke,’ he said, ‘I was sure it would be impossible. Well, now it’s possible.’
‘With God, everything is possible,’ said Barbara.
From time to time for years afterwards, and far into her long widowhood, Ricky would inquire of Catholic priests, as a matter of theoretical interest, what was the position of a Catholic marriage based on evidence which both parties believed to be true, but which, in reality, was faked.
They would all look puzzled, at first, and ask Ricky if she had ever heard of such a case. ‘No, no,’ Ricky always said. ‘Only I read of it in a novel.’ The priests all said in effect, ‘Well, if both parties remain in ignorance and the Church is satisfied, then it’s a valid marriage.’
‘According to the logic of the Catholics, that seems impossible.’ No, they mostly said, it was quite logical if one started from the right premise. Others said, well, logic or no logic, that was the case. One of them replied, ‘With God, everything is possible.’ Another went into the question of the validity of the blessing Jacob received in place of Esau, even under conscious falsity.
If Ricky had been anywhere close to Barbara during those years after Joe Ramdez’s death in 1963, she might, sooner or later, have been unable to prevent herself confessing to the forgery, at whatever risk. But she was nowhere near Barbara. She had started a private school for the children of English and American residents and wealthy Jordanians. She was not tempted to commit herself in any letter to Barbara.
All this was yet to be. The first night in the house at Jericho, Barbara on her drowsy bed heard a man’s voice in the darkness. She felt cooler,
and touched her forehead to make sure she actually was cooler, and the fever had gone. She did not care about the man’s voice but let fate blow over her and presently fell asleep.
Suzi had said to Freddy before she rushed from his room, ‘You are my tourist. Tomorrow we go to Jerash and see the ruins. My father must see I take this trouble over you as you are a British Government man.’ She had gone to her own room, where she opened the window and called out in a sleepy voice, inquiring what was the matter. She could not see her father from the window, but her, voice was answered by her father’s from the front of the house. She had gone to the door and let him in. Latifa was just coming out of her room, and Suzi could hear her slopping along from the wing she occupied.
Her father had brought a visitor, a woman whom Suzi recognized as the tourist who had approached her that morning when she was with Barbara in the Holy Sepulchre. As they entered, Suzi stood well in the light so that the woman, Barbara’s pursuer, could see her; and so she satisfied herself, then and there, that Miss Rickward did not recognize her. Suzi thought, she is a real enemy; and was partly resentful at not being recognized from their short encounter.
Miss Rickward showed herself eager to please Joe Ramdez’s daughter. Latifa was not introduced to her but stood by as part of the reception machinery. In Arabic, Suzi explained to her father that a new girl had been sent that day and had immediately gone down with scarlet fever. She had the girl in isolation in the western section of the house, and warned her father not to go near it. The girl was not gravely ill, but highly infectious.
‘See that the authorities don’t get to hear of it,’ Joe said, ‘and start pushing their noses into our affairs here. Why have these thieves and whoremongers sent me a girl with disease?’
‘It’s Allah’s blame,’ Suzi said.
‘Quiet, blasphemous slut!’
He then returned to the English tongue and Miss Rickward, enchanted as she was with everything.