Ian St James Compendium - Volume 1 Page 5

  The mystery tour ended two hours later when we landed. Not that Ross or LeClerc said anything, but even late at night I recognised the place. Luqa Airport - still shared by civil airlines and the RAF. I had been there dozens of times though less often since Mintoff took to throwing disrespectful British reporters out of Malta. A black Mercedes met us on the apron, driven by a dog-faced Englishman called Smithers, who greeted Ross respectfully before frightening us half to death with his driving. Not that it took long, we were there before midnight local time, an hour ahead of GMT. Ross showed me straight to my room. "We'll be starting early in the morning," he explained. "Say around six. Get some sleep - we've a hell of a day tomorrow." So I did, and in the morning I got the grand tour.

  The Health Farm was really four large villas grouped around a central courtyard and strung into a single entity by a connecting corridor. One villa was exercise rooms, steam baths and saunas; another was rest areas, dining rooms and kitchens; and the third was administration. Ross and his people lived in the fourth. The whole enterprise was tucked away in a ridge in the hills high up above Delimara Point and hidden behind walls ten feet high and electronically-operated gates. In point of fact, there actually was a Joe Spitari and the place really could function as a health farm. It suffered local taxation, paid lip service to the principle of Maltese co-ownership, had a Negro masseur and possessed a security system to rival Fort Knox.

  "Why this place?" I asked Ross.

  We were in the first floor room which he used as office cum sitting room cum dining room. It was big enough: a vast expanse of marble floor, squashy black Italian sofas, a rosewood desk and matching conference table with eight chairs. One wall was built-in bookshelves and a bank of television sets, with a couple of Akai reel-to-reel recorders next to a wall map. The large window opposite revealed the swimming pool and beyond that, over the boundary wall, the parched brown hillside as it slipped down to the Mediterranean. When in residence Ross as good as lived in that room. He even took his meals there, served on a tray by an assistant called Elizabeth. Elizabeth, not Beth or Lizzy or Eliza. She was English too, which I found comforting, her vowel sounds adding a touch of reassuring normality to the place. I guessed her at about thirty, tall, good figure, fair hair bleached and golden skin bronzed by the Mediterranean sunshine; attractive rather than beautiful, but with compelling green eyes. Right at that moment she was distracting Ross by serving him his third orange juice of the morning.

  "Why a health farm?" I persisted.

  "Maybe it keeps me that way," he said mournfully. "A lot of people die in my business."

  "What is your business, Major Ross?"

  "Security."

  "My uncle was in security. Night watchman at Glaxo's until they installed a burglar alarm."

  "Machines are taking over everywhere." He looked sad to the point of tears, but he comforted himself by patting Elizabeth's bottom as she turned to fetch my coffee from the sideboard. The gesture was so absent-minded that I think only I noticed.

  "CIA?" I tried.

  He scowled. "Since Watergate? Are you kidding? Washington put their eyes out. Now they're like the three brass monkeys - blind, deaf and impotent. It's more democratic - only trouble is nobody told the KGB."

  In twelve hours of knowing him I had learned to expect that kind of remark. Ross was John Wayne in True Grit. Rough and tough and prepared to die for what he believed in - which in Ross's case was the infallibility of Western democracies and the sanctity of their institutions. Anyone who questioned any part of them was instantly labeled subversive and watched carefully. Whereas I was Henry Fonda in Twelve Angry Men - skeptical about almost everything and fumbling about in search of the truth. It is a condition induced by watching too many politicians and learning to distrust them. Even their language is full of weasel words with the meaning sucked out.

  Try listening to an East German explain about the democracy he lives in and you'll know what I mean.

  "This set-up's international," Ross waved a hand possessively at the room. "I think Schmidt and Callaghan were among the prime movers back in seventy-six. Terrorism was getting too organised, crossing too many frontiers. What with Gaddafi sending arms to the IRA and the Japanese Red Brigade linking up with Black September." He shrugged. "And the PLO opening more branches in Germany than Woolworth's. Something had to be done."

  "And you're doing it?"

  "We've rolled a dozen up already," he said with some satisfaction. "We get a lot of help of course - CIA, Secret Intelligence Service and the German GSG9 squad—"

  "No Israelis?"

  "No one from Moscow Centre either." He gave me a sharp look. "Mossad cooperates, but doesn't participate directly. You know what they're like."

  I didn't, but telling him wouldn't help. "Why Malta?"

  "Good access to the Middle East. The Sixth Fleet in the Med. Help from the British base. And we're halfway between Italy and Libya."

  "And that's important'"

  "Sure," he seemed surprised. "The Italian Red Brigades are the most active in Europe, and Gaddafi sends them arms like care packages."

  "So you're stopping the gun-runners?"

  "Trying to," he smiled. He looked tired, despite the vitamin C soaked up in a gallon of orange juice.

  The white telephone buzzed and Elizabeth walked to the desk, swaying her hips in a way which explained why Ross looked tired after an early night. "The doctor is ready for you." She replaced the handset and looked at me. Mention of the doctor turned my stomach. The doctor and the studio downstairs. LeClerc had explained it earlier. The subject - me in this case - sat in a chair and talked into a microphone. Not that the microphone could be seen, but it was there - several probably, set into the walls or the ceiling - safe from interference and automatically controlled. The doctor would lead the conversation, prompting where necessary and encouraging a tired memory to recall incidents long forgotten. Difficult names should be spelled when used for the first time - letter by letter - so that the computer linked to the tape machines could hunt for cross references. If Suzy had been in London on a wet afternoon in June, who else had been in town that day? Carlos perhaps? Richard Nixon? The Rolling Stones? Don't worry about it - the computer would know. I sipped my coffee and struggled toward a decision.

  "There's no lie detector," Ross encouraged. "No Pentothal. No bright lights or electric shocks. Just a quiet room and a well-stocked bar. And LeClerc and the doctor."

  "The deal we made," I reminded him for the tenth time. "I cooperate and I get to Suzy first, right?"

  He sighed, as if I was trying his patience. "Right, Harry. Like I said, we just want the whole situation deactivated quietly, understand?"

  Ever since we left London I had been weighing the chances of him keeping his word. That, and asking myself what alternative I had.

  "Harry, she's being used," he said persuasively. "We know she's selling the Palestinian ticket but the mainstream movement - Ararat and his boys - are playing it cool right now. They need this like a hole in the head. Why should they? Half the governments in the world are beginning to recognise the PLO as a political force. And with the oil weapon forcing the States and Europe to re-think the Middle East, Arafat's getting a better press than Israel. Where's the percentage?"

  "Perhaps someone's patience ran out?"

  "I don't buy it," he shook his head. "But I think your girl did. She thinks she's helping the Palestinians, but she's wrong Harry - wrong by a goddamned mile. And Israel's sitting on a stock of atom bombs into two figures. Are you prepared to risk setting them off?"

  Funny the way Ross made everything my fault. I finished my coffee and rose to leave, watching Elizabeth dimple a reassuring smile in my direction. The door opened and the doctor stood framed in the entrance, wearing enough black mohair and crisp linen to do justice to Harley Street. He smiled, myopic behind pebble glasses, grey-haired and stooped from bending over too many bedsides. I had a feeling that I wasn't going to like the doctor. But then, as I wondered where I
would begin my betrayal of Suzy Katoul, I had a feeling I wasn't going to like myself too much either. We went downstairs and I began at the very beginning - just as the doctor ordered.

  It was October 1947 when I first went to Jerusalem. Young, curious, and on the day I arrived racked by a toothache which threatened to split my jaw open. The tooth had been acting up before I left and I would have fixed it in London, but for allowing my sense of duty to be exploited by an editor's sense of urgency. He wanted me on the first flight to Palestine, so I left him in Fleet Street and took my tooth with me, though by the time I booked into the Imperial I wished I had done it the other way round.

  Funny sort of place the Imperial. Part hotel, part officers' mess, part gentlemen's club. Still, I guessed it would make interviewing easier, just prop up the bar and get to know the entire British administration in no time flat. But that first evening I planned differently. More than a couple of whiskies were needed to deaden the pain in my jaw, so I went in search of a dentist.

  "It's turned six old boy," a young subaltern complained, as if King's Regulations stipulated set times for toothache. "You won't get any of our chaps now - not until morning."

  "But there must be someone?"

  "Maybe the civilian sector?" He sounded like a Harrods floorwalker recommending a visit to Woolworth's.

  I inquired at the desk and did some market research in the lobby before accepting defeat and adjourning to the bar. Whiskey was going to have to get me through the night, and I was on the point of ordering my third when she arrived. I jumped, startled to hear my name in a place where I was a stranger.

  "Mr. Brand?"

  She was wearing a green two-piece suit, linen I think, with a lemon silk scarf at her throat. "You are suffering from toothache?"

  I nodded ruefully, thinking it a childish ailment to admit to, especially to someone as attractive as she was.

  "My father is a dentist." Perfect teeth spoke volumes for the family business. "I'll take you to him if you wish?"

  I should have accepted immediately but didn't, influenced no doubt by the lieutenant's deprecating manner.

  "He's a very good dentist." She added another quick smile as if reading my mind. "As a matter of fact he qualified in London."

  The flicker of amusement in her eyes had me blushing the shade of an over-ripe beet, but I finally recovered enough confidence to take her arm and we left.

  Her name was Haleem. Haleem Katoul. Dark, vivacious and Arab. And a lot more than I bargained for. For a start she was much more emancipated ("liberated" was a word with different connotations in those days) than I expected. Not only did she drive the car we journeyed in, but owned it as well. And she worked for the British at the King David Hotel, largely taken over for administration. "Clerk B2," she announced with a wry smile, as if surprised by the realisation that the job was important to her. She talked in the same easy manner as she drove, balancing small disclosures about her own life with casual enquiries about mine, so that by the time we reached "home" I felt I knew her quite well. And home in Katamon turned out to be as comfortably middle-class as my parents' house in Guildford.

  She was certainly right about Nadi Katoul. He was a good dentist. Fifteen minutes later the tooth had gone, taking the pain with it and leaving behind a vacuum which barely ached. Nadi took me off to the sitting room where Haleem served thick black coffee and joined in her father's invitation to stay for dinner. I declined as graciously as my anaesthetised face permitted, feeling that I had intruded enough for one evening, and Haleem drove me back to the hotel and then disappeared back into the gloom of the night.

  Jerusalem in 1947 took some getting used to. Like an explosives factory with everyone chain-smoking for fear that the whole place would blow up at any minute. Superficially it was normal enough; the market places were crowded and the shop windows were stuffed full of Persian rugs and Yemenite silver and Hollywood records. Delicatessens stocked Rhison wine and Tnuvah cheese and florists blazed gold with the roses of Sharon. But there was a tension running through the place which fairly crackled.

  Most of the press corps collected neat gins and embellished stories from the same place - the bar at the Imperial or sometimes the Royal for a change of scenery. I joined them occasionally but not often, distrusting officials even then and preferring to search out my own explanations for what was happening. Which was far from easy. For a start I was English and if that wasn't handicap enough I was as near being an atheist as makes no difference. Not the aggressive argumentative kind, just someone whose natural skepticism left little room for anything mystical. Whether that made understanding harder or easier is difficult to say, but to my twenty-three year old eyes Jerusalem was cursed not by a lack of faith, but by an abundance of it. Judaism, Christianity, Islam; the city was held sacred by all three and everyone from David and Pharaoh to the Crusaders had fought and burned and pillaged inside its walls. And all in the name of religion. And as for being English, the British were the occupying power - even if they did so like sullen-faced men who remain seated while standing matrons glare at them. The truth was that most of the city - most of the country come to that - wanted the British out. And the sooner the better.

  There were exceptions. The Katoul's for instance, or so it seemed at the time. The British had ruled Palestine for thirty years - more summers than Haleem's lifetime. Her worry was not what would happen if the British stayed, that was as predictable as the British themselves, but what might happen if the British left, if they left, never when, for like many Arabs Haleem believed the British would stay forever - despite the wireless broadcasts and the newspaper gossips - despite the snatches of conversation overheard at the King David.

  I saw a lot of the Katoul's to begin with. Nadi was an Anglophile who liked nothing better than to yarn about his years in London, and Haleem was lively and good-looking so it was no hardship. She became my guide, first to Jerusalem and then the villages beyond. Through her I met Jew and Arab alike, for she had friends everywhere and saw nothing odd in it. "We're all Jerusalemites," she laughed when I asked her about it, shrugging her shoulders in a mild parody of her Jewish friends. And she was always with them. On Friday evenings she would let herself into their houses to kindle the oil lamps which Jews were forbidden to light themselves on the Sabbath, and once I saw her going from house to house in the Jewish quarter laden with trays of bread and honey to welcome her friends at the end of Passover.

  But not all were as gentle. Jerusalem had its darker spirits. Men who maimed and killed from the gloom of alleyways or the escape route of rooftops. Men who, as October slipped into November, stepped up their activities with the steadily increasing rhythm of war drums.

  I suppose it's true that the British made a mess of Palestine. The 1947 tragedy was that the world was about to make it even worse. In a sense it was all a hangover from the First World War, when Britain grabbed Palestine to secure the northern approaches to Suez and to edge closer to the new buried treasure of oil in Iraq. After the war, British rule was formalised by a League of Nations mandate. The British promised to succour the wandering Jew, promised to tutor the native and to rule with Christian enlightenment. Promises were the root of the problem I suppose, there were too many of them. First the Balfour Declaration: "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." And then, separately and at a different time, a promise to the Arabs to support their claims to a vast independent state. And finally - as if enough wasn't enough - the French were promised a "sphere of influence" in much of that area already pledged to the Arabs, and to the Jews come to that. So at the end of World War Two, Britain found herself at the church with three bridegrooms - all of them furious. The United Nations weren't too happy either, but somebody had to decide what the hell to do with Palestine. And while the General Assembly debated the matter, a hundred thousand British troops struggled to maintain a crumbling semblance of law and order in the place the world still called "the Holy Land.
"

  With all that happening Haleem was either mad or braver than Joan of Arc just to be seen on the streets with me. But she was always there when I needed her, though when I realised the risks she took I found ways of making my own contacts and of finding my own way to meetings. Which was just as well considering that half of them preached open rebellion and all countenanced sedition as a way of life. But they gave me what I was looking for, stories about what was really happening in Palestine. Which was how I ran into my first spot of bother.

  I filed a story about the clandestine build-up of aims, a few column inches which won me headlines in London and a place on the mat in Jerusalem - the mat belonging to the Chief of Police. The argument was new to me then - now it's as old as the hills around Jerusalem. Reveal my sources of information, or else. The "or else" fluctuated between threats of deportation and promises of imprisonment. I said nothing a dozen times over and spent a week in the cells before being confined to my hotel for another seven days. Irksome and uncomfortable for the first week, but Haleem was allowed to visit me despite the raised eyebrows at Police headquarters. And my spot of bother did me a favour in a way. News of my refusal to "name names" leaked out, no doubt by the Jewish Intelligence Agency, the Shai, and afterwards I was less widely regarded as a police spy, so a few doors opened to me which otherwise might have remained closed.

  One such door led to a simple stone house in the new Jewish quarter. I spent hours at that house, drinking endless cups of coffee in the smoke-filled kitchen, listening to excited people laugh and curse and live their dreams aloud - all presided over by the most famous hostess in Jerusalem. More approachable than Ben Gurion, more likeable than the extremists, Golda Meir was the best public relations officer the Zionists ever had. I never doubted the kind of conversations which took place during my absences, never once fooled myself that "all had been revealed," but equally I never left that house without being impressed by the driving urgency of the people I met there, nor doubting their determination to build a brave new world.