The worst danger was on me now. Lest the tally should be wrong, I had to surrender two landing-cards while appearing to surrender only one. I am no conjurer; the simplest card trick defeats me if it demands sleight of hand. This confounded business worried me far more than the job of throwing Muller overboard. I loitered near the head of the gangway, hoping there would be a rush of passengers descending to the tender. There never was. Most had already left the ship. The rest came one by one.
I dashed into the smoking-room and stuck the two landing-cards lightly together with the gum from a penny stamp; they were of thin cardboard, and I hoped that the Assistant Purser who was collecting them wouldn’t notice that I had shoved two into his hand. If he did notice, I proposed to say that Muller was already on the tender and that he must have gone down the gangway without surrendering his card. If someone then had a look at the tender and found he wasn’t there, I could only show amazement and pray that I didn’t find myself in the dock on a capital charge.
I went through the entire murder trial while I stuck these two cards together: the black and incontrovertible evidence that I had concealed Muller’s absence, the discovery of my identity, and so on. My fantasy had developed as far as shooting my way out of the magistrate’s court when I walked down the gangway and the Assistant Purser received my two cards without a glance. Ten minutes later I was on the Tangier mole, surrounded by a yelling mob of coffee-coloured porters draped in burnouses of sacking.
Passing through customs, I had my entry carefully noted. I took pains to see that the French immigration official wrote down the company director’s name correctly spelled. From then on there could be no shadow of doubt that Major Quive-Smith had duly entered Tangier, and alone.
As for Muller, his late employers’ discreet enquiries at the offices of the line would be duly passed on to the ship. The stewards would remember that Muller had not been seen for twenty-four hours. The Assistant Purser would remember that when he checked the landing-cards he found two suspiciously stuck together. The engineers’ department—if the steward remembered my remark—would say they had never heard of Muller. And it would be reported back to Liverpool that there was indeed grave reason to fear that something had happened to Mr Muller. Whoever had put the enquiry on foot, having found out what he wanted to know, would then laugh at the serious faces of the directors, and explain that Mr Muller was perfectly safe and sound, and that—well, any yarn would do! Mr Muller, for example, had feared to be cited as co-respondent and had taken steps to conceal his movements.
I drove to a hotel, deposited my baggage, and booked a room for a week, telling the proprietor that I had a little friend in Tangier, and that, if I didn’t turn up for two or three nights, he was not to be surprised. I had an enormous meal at his excellent restaurant. Then I put a razor, a bottle of hair-dye and another of stain into my pocket, and walked off into the deserted hills. Besides money, the only thing I carried out of my past life was this confession, for I began to see in what manner it might be useful.
I do not think that in all my life I have known such relief and certainty as in a valley between those sun-dried hills, where the water trickled down the irrigation channels from one hand-dug, well-loved terrace to another, and no light showed but the blazing stars. My escape was over; my purpose decided, my conscience limpid. I was at war—and no one is so aware of the tranquillity of nature as a soldier resting between one action and the next.
I buried that company director’s passport and my own, with which I have probably finished for ever. I shaved off my moustache, stained my face and body, and dyed my hair. Then I slept till dawn, my face in the short grass by the water’s edge, my body drawing strength from that warm and ancient earth.
In the morning I strolled to the upper town, where I had not been the night before, and completed my change of identity. I bought a thoroughly Latin suit, spats, and some beastly pointed shoes, posting my other clothes in a parcel addressed to the Public Assistance Committee, Rangoon. I trust there is such a committee. I went to a barber, who duly doused me with eau-de-cologne and brushed my luscious black hair straight back from my forehead. When this was over, my resemblance to the photograph on Quive-Smith’s Latin passport was a lot closer than my resemblance to the company director.
The regular packet was leaving that day for Marseilles. I got a French visa on my passport (my fatherland is as awkward as all other American countries—I can travel nowhere without a visa) and bought a ticket in my new name. Since I had no baggage, it was easy to bluff my way on to the ship without passing the control. Thus there was no record for inquisitive eyes that this courteous and scented gentleman had either entered or left Tangier, and no means of connecting him with Quive-Smith. I think they will be looking for their vanished agent between Atlas and the Niger.
EXTRACT FROM THE LETTER WHICH
ACCOMPANIED THIS MANUSCRIPT
My Dear Saul,
I write this from a pleasant inn where I am accustoming myself to a new avatar. I must not, of course, give you any clue to it; nor would the trail of the gentleman I describe as Latin—even assuming it could be followed—lead to where or what I am.
I want these papers published. If necessary, have them brushed up by some competent hack and marketed under his name. You won’t, of course, mention mine, nor the name of the country to which I went from Poland and to which I am about to return. Let the public take its choice!
My reason for publishing is twofold. First, I have committed two murders, and the facts must be placed on record in case the police ever got hold of the wrong man. Second, if I am caught, there can never again be any possible question of the complicity of H.M. Government. Every statement of mine can, at need, be checked, amplified, and documented. The three parts of the journal (two written accidentally and the last deliberately) form an absolute answer to any accusation from any quarter that I have involved my own nation.
Forgive me for never telling you of my engagement nor of the happy weeks we lived in Dorset. I first met her in Spain a couple of years ago. We hadn’t reached the point of an announcement in The Times, and we didn’t give a damn about it anyway.
The ethics of revenge? The same as the ethics of war, old boy! Unless you are a conscientious objector, you cannot condemn me. Unsporting? Not at all. It is one of the two or three most difficult shots in the world.
I begin to see where I went wrong the first time. It was a mistake to make use of my skill over the sort of country I understood. One should always hunt an animal in its natural habitat; and the natural habitat of man is—in these days—a town. Chimney-pots should be the cover, and the method, snapshots at two hundred yards. My plans are far advanced. I shall not get away alive, but I shall not miss; and that is really all that matters to me any longer.
modemport's original commercial release April 02 2011
This is a New York Review Book
Published by The New York Review of Books
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Cover image: Georg Baselitz, Canalettos Hund; © Georg Baselitz; photograph by Jochan Littkeman, Berlin; cover design: Katy Homans
Copyright © 1939 by Geoffrey Household