Jerusalem Commands

TWENTY-SEVEN

TO ALIEN EYES, says Prinz Lobkowitz, colours which to us speak of comfort, security and pleasure might for them represent death and threat. Thus we look upon Mars and find it desolate while the Martian looks on Earth and finds it foul.

I do not think I was unduly incautious in the way I conducted my life while out of the Pasha’s favour. Indeed, I had planned for some while to transfer accounts to Tangier and convert francs into other currencies through my British bank.

I did not want immediately to begin such movements of money, of course, until I was restored in the Pasha’s confidence. Otherwise he would construe my actions as a confirmation of any guilt he imagined me to feel. As principal shareholder in so many banks, he might easily decide to confiscate my money! Too often the failures of his own engineering schemes came about as a result of bribery and corruption, of bad materials being put in place of good, of unskilled people being employed at half the wages of the skilled. I knew that if he was investigating my factory, he would soon discover that I had conducted myself honourably in every aspect. I could not, of course, speak for individual workers or indeed for my native foremen, but I saw no way in which they could deceive me. I am not, after all, easily deceived. I would have lived for a while quietly until I found a means of slipping unnoticed from the city, preferably with Miss von Bek, and getting as quickly as possible to Rome and civilisation, where we would no longer be dependent upon the whims of a local tyrant. But then came Iago into my Moorish fantasy.

I had made her tell me of the secret rooms and what went on there. She showed me some oddly-placed bruises. It was curious what he had done to her and she gave me an insight into that alien point of view. This heady intimacy with an unknowing third partner is part of the terrible attraction of infidelity. It is why some women in particular can never fully escape from its temptations, its delightful and astonishing discoveries, its revelations of human complexity and, indeed, of human perfidy. For some, infidelity is the closest thing to a vocation they know. I am not among their number, but I suspect Rose von Bek was. She became the ever-available repository of extraordinary secrets, some of which she shared, some of which she nursed to herself, rationing the distribution of her knowledge and thus increasing her sense of power. Yet she was to learn that much of what she possessed was the illusory - or at best temporary - power of the whore. She was a woman, I once said, unworthy of her own base inclinations. Together we might, so to speak, have conquered Italy. At that time I could still see that potential in our partnership. I spoke of it. After all, I said, she had the ear of the Duce.

‘That was never the part of his anatomy I influenced,’ she said, and she remained uncommunicative, stroking the side of her jaw with her long fingers, staring speculatively at me with her strange, violet eyes while she considered my proposal. It was time, she agreed, that she got out. She had been a fool to play the game as long as she had. She had not backed, she said, all the winners. It was the story of her life. ‘But they say you’re a singularly fortunate gambler, Max.’

I could not think where she would have heard this. ‘I rarely gamble,’ I said. ‘Life, after all, is enough of a gamble.’

‘That’s what they say.’ She was climbing now with expert swiftness back into her camisole. We had found a useful cubicle at one end of the aeroplane factory. It had been intended to house a modern toilet and bath, but the Pasha’s whims had discarded Western plumbing at the last moment. Now the room contained some quilts and cushions and a few of the things we needed for our love-making. The wonderful shapes of my planes surrounded us in the semi-darkness like the creatures of an unearthly mythology, regarding us with friendly but puzzled concern. The place still stank of glue and resin and aeroplane dope, of the treated silk and the drums of petrol, the oil and the charcoal which the absent factory-workers used to prepare their food. Sometimes, when she had gone, I would light the lamps and stroll amongst my beautiful monsters, running my hand over their smooth bodies, longing for the moment when the powerful new engines nestled in their housings, ready to give violent life to the most advanced air fleet in the world! Even in America they would be startled when my birds came shimmering over their horizon! Hever would be powerless. How on Earth could his petty accusations make sense when I returned to Hollywood a hero, a leading figure in Mussolini’s wonderful Round Table of latter-day knights-errant, a famous inventor and explorer?

I must admit I came to miss the comradely pleasures of the Pasha’s dinners and found fresh European company only rarely now, usually in the cafes and hotel bars around the Djema al Fna’a. These people were not always of the best type, but were the kind of petty racketeers and drifters who accumulate wherever the law we revere is weak or non-existent. I had no time for them. Even in my loneliness, my yearning for civilised company, I disdained to have much to do with them.

Of my earlier acquaintances only my young fan, Monsieur Josef, found courage to break the rules sending me to Coventry. He advised me to return at once to the USA and in the meantime suggested I get in touch with the American Consul. It was atrocious, he said, that an actor of my stature should suffer such humiliation. Then he would grin and refer to some plot ploy from Buckaroo’s Gold and suggest I doubtless already had a daring plan up my sleeve. It was his ambition, he said, to emigrate, to visit the Wild West and emulate his hero. I said, soberly, that there were probably worse things he could do. In Europe, most of his kind joined the Communist Party. He intended to plead my case with the Pasha, he said. El Glaoui must surely realise the adverse publicity he would receive from insulting me so. I thanked the young Jew. I told him I had not yet descended to asking others for help. I hope he did not take my reply as a snub.

I had made a decision to live my life according to my usual routines, continuing to pray and visit the mosque as always, usually these days at the Katoubia, whose cool interior brought a particular peace to my soul. It was the mosque most favoured at that time by the intellectuals of the city. The Katoubia, all soft old stones and faded mosaic, is the landmark of Marrakech. It can be seen from afar by any rider approaching the city. It is a monument to the city’s great days as the artistic and literary capital of the Moorish world. Outside its walls the booksellers, who gave the mosque its name, set up their stalls here and there, selling all the old holy books, the Q’ran in elaborate editions printed with exquisite detail in golds, greens, reds and blues, bound in silk and the supple leather for which Morocco is famous. I had emerged from the mosque, one Sabbath, and was going through some miscellaneous scrolls, passing the time of day with the booksellers, who were all acquaintances, and glancing through half-used account books or the occasional French tome deemed respectable enough to mingle with the texts of the Faithful, for Marrakech, in the whole of Morocco, has an easy, devoted way with her religion which deems it poor taste to indulge in excessive piety. She was what was left of the brilliant glory of the Alhambra. As I reached towards a familiar copy of some orientalist effusion by a popular female novelist of the day, which held that Maghribis were the inheritors of every virtue and, interestingly, descendants of the Lost Race of Atlantis, Mr Mix appeared almost magically at my elbow, like a devil in a pantomime, and asked, without preliminary courtesies, ‘Would one of those planes of yours get to Tangier if it had the right engine?’

‘Easily.’ I turned puzzled eyes upon the brooding urgency of his handsome African features. ‘We should have to test the machine, I suppose. But the range will be greater than most available planes. Assuming we had a good-quality engine.’ Had they arrived at last from Casablanca?

‘Could you, say, modify a good car engine?’ he wanted to know.

I told him that it depended on the engine. But I had learned the arts of improvisation in Odessa and Constantinople. I believed I could make almost any engine do almost any job. The truth was that I had been hasty in using an unsuitably heavy engine for that particular plane. I had learned by my mistakes. ‘It will take a little time, however,’ I said, ‘to fit and test.’

‘Then you’d better start modifying as soon as you can,’ said my loyal darkie, ‘because I have a feeling your number’s about to come up with our mutual employer.’

I drew him away from the curious booksellers, though they could not understand a word of our English, and asked him what on Earth he meant. This, he said, was no time to play the innocent. There was now a possibility we would both be cooking in the same pot come Thursday noon. ‘I want the observer’s seat,’ he said, ‘when you go up. Until then I’ll stick with you. When you decide to run, I’ll run too.’

Again I was touched by his devotion to me. For all his experiences, the black man had lost none of his honest willingness, his good-natured, happy-go-lucky way of looking at the world. Though many of them meant nothing to me, I delighted in his colourful expressions. I had learned not to rise to everything he said, since his habit of droll irony frequently had meaning only to himself. I promised him that he would be the first passenger when I took the bird up. This did not satisfy him entirely and he was about to say something else when he changed his mind, glanced across the little square to the doorway of the mosque, and told me he would see me later. He vanished, leaving me feeling alarmed for no good reason. I decided to wander over to Djema al Fna’a and restore my spirits with a glass of coffee at the Atlas. It was not yet noon and I did not expect to see many of my cronies, but I felt the need to calm myself. Marrakech, so like Hollywood, is equally a city of illusion. There is commonplace work abounding, of course, or the illusion could not continue, but the hallucinatory nature of the light, the shimmering brilliance of the tiles and stucco, the hidden, peaceful fountains and courtyards one comes upon unexpectedly, the friendliness and general openness of the people, all make one city the model for the other. Hollywood is our finest example of the Moorish influence upon our civilisation. Without the Alhambra there would be no Hollywood style. Without the Moor there would be a very different Western lingo, for the cowboy borrowed it from the vaquero and the vaquero from the Arab. Go down to Mexico. Go to Guadalajara - Wadi-el-Jar means the same in Arabic as it does in Mayan. The Spaniards carried Carthage to South America. The result is self-evident. Today we see only the romantic aspects of Carthage and we borrow them for our fantasies. But the reality, as I think I have shown, is very different. We live in an age of illusions. The art of illusion has become the principal industry of the 20th century. Even our wealth is shown to be illusory. It can be taken away at any moment. The Muslim is prepared for this. We Christians are horrified. We believe in progress. The Muslim believes more thoroughly than the Westerner, whom he first instructed in astronomy, that the clear message of the spheres is that we should live within the natural order. What right, says the Muslim, have we to change God’s world so radically? But I believe it is our destiny to be agents of change. There is much that requires improving. Their illusion is no more or less valuable than ours. It is simply a matter of temperamental preference. I have been to the Land of Death and Anubis was my friend. I have seen clearly into the black soul of the world. I have been afraid. I returned to the Land of Life and my message was the message I had learned from the gods. We must redeem ourselves. We must grow strong. We must forge our humanity into something positive and enduring. We must march again under the banner of Christ. But first we must know ourselves. First we must take control of our own destinies. Now I understand that. Is this God’s punishment upon me? To show the truth just before I die? To reveal that one fragment of truth I have sought all my life. They put metal in my stomach. That shtetl was no dream. I can still smell it. There was too much fear. I found it unbearable. There should not be so much fear in the world. I have missed some small point, I sometimes think; that would explain all that.

Djema al Fna’a before noon resembles nothing so much as a deserted fairground, with a few stalls open, a little desultory business going on, a couple of fortunes being told, the occasional troupe of boys practising to be acrobats. The souks which run off the square are doing some lazy trade, but mostly men stand around and talk and smoke and watch whatever attracts their attention. On this day there was a string of fine young camels crossing, on their way to the Friday market and a large red touring car entering the square from near the Hotel Transatlantique. It drove ostentatiously towards Brown et Richards garage, honking for essence. Over at the tables outside the Atlas one of El Glaoui’s Jews saw me and drank his tea hurriedly. I did not approach until he had risen. At the Pasha’s court, one learned not to embarrass one’s fellows lest one day they embarrass us. It was a turning world, as Hadj Idder was fond of telling us.

I let the last of the pretty little camels cross my path, and glanced towards the souk immediately across from me. I saw Brodmann. He was unmistakable in a crumpled linen suit and stained panama. To cool himself he carried a small child’s raffia fan in his hand, of the kind the Berber women sell to tourists. When he realised I had seen him he shaded his face and looked away immediately, stepping to the darkness of a spice-seller’s awning. I did not know whether to confront him or ignore him. I tried to think what damage he could do me in Marrakech and decided he must wield no power here. But I was still nervous. I called a cab immediately, telling the driver to whip the horses to a trot. I was in a hurry.

From that moment on I took serious note of Mr Mix’s warnings. The next day, when I went out to my factory, largely to get rid of any evidence of my liaison, I found that a car had been delivered. It was, in fact, the Pasha’s damaged Rolls Royce. A small gesture of peace, perhaps? Or had Mr Mix found a way to get me my engine? The engine, I saw immediately, was completely untouched and could easily be modified for El Nahla, my Bee. (Since the disaster, I had changed the names in the catalogue to those of insects. You can imagine my surprise when I arrived in England to hear them announce they had suddenly invented a Mosquito! I keep my own counsel these days. The truth of my achievement is known to myself and to God and that is all that matters.) With no help on that first day I was able to free the engine from its housing and by the second day I had it in a cradle poised over the yellow and black body of my Bee. By the third day I insisted that Miss von Bek give up more time and help me ease the engine into the modified housing while I demonstrated my ingenious belt-drive to turn the propeller, delivering more than enough power for the delicate little plane which I still considered our best Schneider chance. Miss von Bek warned me that by spending as much time as she was on the engine, she was endangering herself and others. ‘If I am the others,’ I said, ‘do not worry about me. We now have our means of escape! If necessary we shall leave by the same way we arrived in Morocco. What happened to the balloon, by the way?’

He had told her he had put it away for safety. She now believed he kept some kind of trophy museum. She was unusually agitated, even after our love-making, where earlier she frequently became icy and distant. Now when she spoke of El Glaoui’s pleasures her eyes no longer filled with unguessable lusts but with tears. ‘He is a Bluebeard, of sorts,’ she said. ‘Murder is merely one of his more radical instruments of policy. We should not have accepted his hospitality, Max.’

I was too much of a gentleman to remark how readily she had accepted all he had to offer, almost from the moment we left our basket. She had communicated some of her terror to me and I was sympathetic. Hers was not like my fear of Brodmann, awful as that was. Hers was more like my fear of the Egyptian God, hopeless and wretched, allowed to choose only between a lifetime of utter humiliation or painful death. And so, from my position of relative freedom, I was able to comfort her. I did not have to decide between her and Mr Mix. My natural chivalry put me at the service of the woman.

Somehow we still found time for our sexual liaison but I performed now from habit, not from lust.

Sexuality for her had become almost her entire channel of escape; it was a kind of madness in her. She was like one of those people in the ‘difficult’ ward at the New Bethlehem who perform the same few functions over and over again, perhaps locked into some moment when they felt free or safe or alive. Their catharsis, when it comes, is always hideously violent. And, for all that, I could not break the ties of love and fascination with which she had entranced me. I felt that our destinies would be forever entwined.

It had become her compulsion, even as we worked on (he engine, to tell me El Glaoui’s secrets, though I had no further interest in them. Every aspect of Eastern sexual diversion was more than familiar to me and to be told of the different pleasures claimed from circumcised and uncircumcised girls, from neutered boys and so on, was distasteful to me. The Pasha preferred his women uncircumcised in the main, she said, which is why there were so many Europeans in his harem. It was no wonder, I said, that these potentates liked to keep their concubines from public view. The amount of maiming and beating involved gave me the impression that any member of the harem at any one time resembled a boxer after a particularly dirty match. Another reason to retain the veil, I suppose.

He was taking a delight, she said, in revealing more and more to her as she became increasingly ensnared but decreasingly interested in him. She remained, he told her, a guest; her involvement must always be voluntary. That was his special pleasure, she believed. ‘But he has already demonstrated the fate of those who upset him,’ she said. ‘He has never been the same since he saw my Italian passport.’ There had been some sort of execution, I gathered, in one of the cells at Tafouelt and she had been a privileged witness.

I had a clear idea of her position. It would be inhuman to take Mrs Cornelius’s view. What possible motive could Miss von Bek have for blackening the Pasha? I am not the only one to have been told such tales. In France there is a whole literature of it. Mrs Cornelius passed me on a book by a woman who was El Hadj T’hami’s mistress and who worked for the French Secret Service. She was not the only adventuress - or adventurer - attracted to the Pasha’s strange court, to the lure of subtle intrigue, dangerous gossip and thrilling revelations. Of the children hanging in irons, she said nothing.

After 1956 the Glaoui family became professional people and businessmen and adapted almost with relief to the life of the average middle-class Westerner. We have a habit of forgiving tyrants their crimes while alive and forgetting them entirely once they are dead. Do we have so little respect for human suffering? Are we all no more than cattle grazing in some leisurely progress to the slaughterhouse? It was the same in the camps. I could have gone that way, but I applied myself pragmatically to my problem. I made the most of what was available to me. I refused to become a Musselman. I am an engineer. I am a citizen of the 20th century. It is not right that I should be brought low by brutes. I carry within me the great spiritual tradition of Rome and Byzantium. The musselman has neither ambition nor understanding. He rejects all analysis. I am a scientist. I examine and I originate. I take control of my destiny. God helps those that help themselves. This was the Anglo-Saxons’ secret pact with their creator - not to waste His time. If His help were not immediately forthcoming they got on with the job themselves. Sometimes they had enough energy left over to offer God a hand whenever He seemed to be flagging. The Anglo-Saxon is the miracle-worker of the great Christian alliance. The Slav is its soul.

Rosie von Bek, in spite of all anxieties, continued to romanticise me, to make a melodrama of our liaisons. This, too, terrified me. ‘You are truly a Hawk,’ she would say to me as I lay gasping on the piled quilts. ‘You are like one of Si Hammou’s hunting birds. There is a strong case for your being hooded and traced for the rest of your life. You are no longer suited for freedom. You were neither bred nor trained for it. Whoever freed you made a serious mistake. But, of course, it was the Revolution, I suppose. You’d probably be renting out bicycles on the Odessa sea-front now and more or less content, if it hadn’t been for the Bolsheviks.’

I told her mildly that my ambitions were somewhat larger than that.

‘So many of you released into the world,’ she said. ‘The nineteenth century engulfed the twentieth. So many mad birds flying out of Russia to prey upon the fat and unsuspecting pigeons of the West.’ She was joking, I suppose, for she smiled and laughed the whole time. It was she, I thought, who was insane, not I. She had taken a liking to my Georgian pistols, which I had carried all the way from Ukraine when I had ridden with the Cossacks. She was not the first woman who had enjoyed speculating as to their employment, especially on the Jews. I said that all she need know is that I had never fired them at a living soul. ‘They are antiques,’ I told her. ‘They are my birthright.’ I refused to use the pistols in the way she suggested.

The hashish I was eating in larger and larger quantities, to calm my nerves, had begun to affect me. I pulled the pistols from her hands and put them back in their case, back in my bag. That bag had gone with me everywhere. Filthy and patched, it was my only link with the past, the only proof of my achievements. At twenty-nine I was a successful scientist and inventor, star and designer of a score of top-quality Hollywood movies; I had fought a last-ditch action against the Reds in my nation’s Civil War; I had made my mark on American politics and the world of finance. I had achieved far more than any ordinary mortal might expect yet still I was not satisfied. What was more I was increasingly tormented by the inescapable knowledge that somewhere, on the dirty, flickering bedsheets of the world’s walls, in hazy black and white, I performed the rape scene over and over again. I had only a poor memory of what was on all the other Egyptian reels, but I know my face was not always masked. Do my agonised eyes still stare out at masturbating businessmen in Athens and Frankfurt and seem for them to crease in ecstasy? Is this my only immortality? Am I the illusion of truth, confirming an uncomfortable lie? Am I to be remembered by posterity as a mere fake? I try to buy these films, but they are never the right ones. After watching them I can only pray that one pumping bottom is much the same as another to the cognoscenti. It has always struck me as odd, however, that those films, no matter what they show, always stop far short of the miserable actuality. But I hear there are more realistic pictures available in America now.

Increasingly I had begun to long for California again and the life I had made for myself there. Once I had restored my fortunes and reputation in Rome, I would return in style. Meanwhile I consoled myself with the loveliness of Marrakech. I had previously thought California the most intensely vivid place in the world, with her flowering shrubs and great palms, her ocean sunsets and desert sunrises, but first Egypt and then Morocco had surpassed her in everything save civilisation. Here in this barbaric paradise I continued to feel oddly at home, as if I were indeed in the very cradle of our history. All our ancestors swept westwards from the steppe and the desert once, so perhaps that is what my blood recollected. To say that my soul was confused would be closer to the truth, yet the experience was not entirely unpleasant. What great culture had once existed here before those wild tribesmen carried their cruel religion across the deserts from Mecca to the Atlantic and thence to Europe as far as Lyons and Vienna! What had they destroyed? Did my blood recall some Paradise before Islam? Again I saw the ghosts of great cities rising out of the plains. I saw lovely terraced gardens spread across the foothills of the Atlas. I almost heard the murmur of courteous conversation from that savagely demolished past of which scarcely more than a whisper remains. Did Arabia trample the last life from Atlantis?

Only in the Jewish quarter did I feel any real discomfort. Under El Hadj T’hami, Lion of the Atlas, the Black Panther, the Jews were flourishing. Never had the mellah been so merry. Never did the Jews so blatantly flourish their gaudy prosperity, their new security and power, for their relatives were the Pasha’s closest advisers and this put all Jews under his benign protection. There has always been a peculiar touch of philosemitism in the Moorish character, but it is unusual to find it in a Berber warrior. One might as well expect a Cossack hetman to help build a synagogue, brick by brick, with his own hands. These people respect one another as old rivals. It takes more than a change of flag to reconcile them. Not that these mellahim had the pathetic posture and half-starved stare of the shtetl Hassidim. These were good-looking Jews with broad, well-proportioned faces and beautiful deep-set eyes. The women were notoriously handsome and, when they came on the market, were always sought after by men of the world. These were the Jews one might have seen following Moses into the desert, like those who followed Charlton Heston, self-respecting and clean. Even Goering distinguished between this type and the other, but in the end his arguments went unheard. They thought him too much of a sentimentalist, I suppose. I, too, am used to being ignored for that reason. It was Goering who reminded me of the joke about never trusting the well-fed Jew, he was always the one who was cheating you most successfully. Not that I ever felt short-changed by Charlton Heston. It was Cecil B. De Mille, after all, who sought to establish Hollywood as the spiritual capital of out faith. At present, of course, Zion rules there. But not in 1929, a year in which while I dreamed in Oriental luxury the Western world changed dramatically. I spent that year with most of my senses focused on my affaire d’amour, so it was not until months after the event that I heard of my California bank’s collapse. Banks were falling like bowling-pins all over the world, from Shanghai to Stockholm, and it seemed that Western civilisation was in collapse, that the predicted Chaos was at last upon us. Here was the signal for the final clash of armies where, for a while, it seemed the forces of good were in the ascendant. But all these opportunities have been thrown away. I do not absolve Hitler and Mussolini and the rest. They also turned their backs on salvation.

With the dawning understanding of the world’s disorders, I began to count myself lucky that I enjoyed the security of El Glaoui’s court and that my proposed destination would be Rome, now clearly the strongest capital in Europe. Here was sure proof of everything Mussolini had warned against. From this time on, this evidence gave authority to Hitler’s claims. Bolshevism and Big Business between them were discredited. The Age of the Dictators was not an aberration, it was an attempt to cure the disease. We all willed that Age into existence. But the disease at last triumphed. Now the giants stride hand in hand, brothers in financial intercourse, the triumph not of Capitalism or Communism but of Centralised Monopolism. This is exactly what Mr Weeks had warned me about when we were still on speaking terms. This was the bleak future he predicted and now I am living in it. And nobody but me seems to care.

The plane almost ready, I resumed my petition at El Glaoui’s court. Hadj Idder seemed surprised to see me. He asked me how the work progressed. I thought this a good sign. I told him very well. We were nearing completion.

‘It will be as new?’ he enquired a little cryptically. I thought this was an Arab expression and he meant that we would go back to square one, as the Americans say. I shared his humour. ‘As good as new,’ I agreed. He took my letter and my money then crossed to where Mr Mix sat rather moodily on his bench and, after sharing a friendly word, accepted his envelope.

But when he had gone away, Mix shouldered through the crowd of pleading petitioners whose envelopes had not been accepted and spoke to me rapidly. ‘I wasn’t kidding about what I told you. Wise up, Max, you’re in deep shit! Meet me here at eight tonight. Wear a disguise if you can.’ He handed me a note.

I was growing as impatient with Mr Mix’s cloak-and-dagger dramatics as I was with Miss von Bek’s French farce. I longed for the oblivion of my own particular Oriental romance. But Brodmann had seen to it that even this small comfort was to be removed. I slipped away that evening into the mellah, near the Bab Barrima, just below the French Post Office and behind the Prison. The address was familiar. It belonged to one of the Pasha’s own Jews, the young man who had remained my supporter, whose greatest hero was the Masked Buckaroo, Monsieur Josef. I hated visiting those whispering alleys especially at night. What could I want that they had to sell? I consoled myself. At least they did not offer me mortal danger. I was relieved to reach the Jew’s house. M. Josef was one of El Glaoui’s less illustrious advisers, but he affected European clothing and manners and had ambitions beyond the confines of the mellah, beyond Morocco itself. Because he continued an enthusiast for my films this made me trust his friendship a little. Mr Mix had known him for some while and had often visited him. I arrived dripping with sweat in a heavy winter hooded djellabah, the weather having turned suddenly mild, to be greeted by a less than light-hearted Monsieur Josef. He had lost a great deal of his European savoir-faire and wore the hunted look of the typical Ukrainian Jew. Suddenly I began to put two and two together. This development almost certainly involved Brodmann. Where had he been lying low? Here, in the mellah, or perhaps as a guest of the Pasha? I was drawn by Monsieur Josef through dark corridors and across silent courtyards, deeper and deeper into that alien enclave, until at last we came to a small, windowless room where Mr Mix was waiting for me, his huge body flinging the cell into heavy shadow as he rose to block the light from the lamp-shelf behind him. ‘I’m glad you made it,’ he said soberly. ‘I don’t know how you get away with it, Max, but that ain’t the only thing I don’t know. Listen, the Pasha’s wise to all of us. He’s known about you and Rosie for months but he was waiting to see how useful you’d be to him. Did you fix his car?’

‘I’m not a mechanic,’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’

‘He sent you his Rolls to repair. The one you damaged. I think he is giving you a small chance to redeem yourself. Can you do it?’

Now Hadj Idder’s remark was no longer mysterious. Inadvertently I had cannibalised the car I had assured him only that morning was now as good as new. I had not even taken especially good care of the remaining bodywork. This news stunned me for a moment and I asked Mix to repeat certain information so that I could be sure I had heard him correctly. It became quickly clear that my only hope now was to demonstrate the efficiency of my plane. That alone would fully restore me to favour.

‘What do you want to do?’ said Mr Mix. ‘Monsieur Josef says the Pasha is out for blood. We have another friend who can arrange passage on the French military train. Or we can take the bus, but my dough’s on the train. You get French protection that way. From Casablanca it’s a step to Tangier, a free port.’

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that the plane was as good as ready but then I thought better of it. It would be a disappointment to him to know I had chosen Miss von Bek over him, though I think he was man enough to accept the news soberly. He had, anyway, his own escape route worked out. The Jew would get him away. Perhaps we could all meet up in Rome and share an amusing anecdote or two about our escapades.

I agreed that the train seemed the best idea. He told me to lie as low as I could for the next day or two and he would arrange when and where to meet. There were agricultural transporters going down to the coast in a couple of days, he said, and they often had passenger accommodation. I asked him who our other friend was. He whispered that it was Fromental, just returned from the ‘front’. Doubtless he would be glad to see the back of me. My going would, he knew, effectively bring an end to the Pasha’s dreams of air-power. I still did not quite trust the Jew. I asked him why he was risking so much. ‘Because I admire you,’ was all he would say. ‘Because one day I too will smell the sweet free air of the prairie.’ I was never to discover his real reasons.

The railway station, Monsieur Josef reminded us, was a good distance away on the far side of town, beyond the Nkob gate. He would arrange a car for us.

I remained for as long as seemed politic and then said I had affairs to attend to and must leave. I met my driver where I had left him in the Djema al Fna’a and made him take me at once to the factory where I packed my bag of plans, my pistols and my remaining supplies of cocaine, together with a few of my prospectuses. I stowed my new American passport with the bag then secured it firmly under the pilot’s seat, the remainder of my cocaine supplies and my Spanish passport in the usual places on my person. I had now taken the basic precautions. My next step must be to warn Rosie von Bek of her danger. If I could not myself enter the Maison El Glaoui, where she was now effectively incarcerated, I could send a note to her through one of the several intermediaries we had used over the months. Then I began to suspect that those servants might already be in the confidence of the Pasha, sworn to tell him our every move. There was no reason not to suspect this and it would therefore be wise to wait until the next day and hope that the Pasha was still waiting to judge my work on his car. Happily I had used only the most fanciful of phrases in my deputation to the Glaoui that morning. Thinking back, I believed I had probably reassured him. Unless he decided to come to see the work for himself, I had at least twenty-four hours’ respite. Very shortly my twin soul and I would be winging our way to Tangier.

There is a white road down which I ride and the road ends at a green cliff, a blue sea, and when I reach the end of the road I lift easily into the air and fly towards Byzantium to be reunited with God. I still see her vivid violet eyes in her tawny Albanian skin. She shared my dream of flying. I had made flight what it should be - ethereal, beautiful, as it is in nature. I was not one of those who reduced it to a lumbering metal tube carting its human baggage from city to city like so many sacks of grain. What misery Big Business makes of our dreams and visions! They should not be allowed so much power. Who should the brave boys die for? Their fatherland? Their family? Their bank?

I recognised Brodmann again. Ihteres! Ihteres! He had followed me into the souk and gone ahead of me. I first saw his back as he paused to study some piece of inferior tinsmithery. He turned towards me, his hand reaching for an ornamental dagger of the kind popular with certain tribes now forbidden to carry weapons. I think he had it in mind to use the dagger, but I darted away from him, down another alley into the shadowy maze of shops and stalls, roofed with canvas and palm leaves and lengths of old cotton, through which the sun occasionally blinded you as you moved from deep shadow into sudden rays. I avoided the open sewers and the muddy earth, keeping to the cobbles of the main streets, making my way back into Djema al Fna’a to where my driver waited. He took me out to the aeroplane factory. I told him to come back for me in two hours. A little later, through the winter drizzle, Rosie arrived in a galloping kalash and, as it drew up, flung herself out to come running across the makeshift tarmac towards me. ‘He knows everything!’ She was horribly distraught. ‘He knows I’ve come here. You can’t imagine what he’ll do!’ She let me pay and dismiss the cab. Agitatedly she told me that he was openly contemptuous of our affair, mocking her and insulting her about it. She was determined to suffer no more from him. ‘Obviously he doesn’t believe we can get clear. Is the plane ready?’

Together we fitted the propeller to El Nahla. The little machine stood solidly on her large undercarriage, her black and yellow striped fuselage glittering when we wheeled her into the sunshine. I tightened the last nut. Rose got into the cockpit and started the engine. The Rolls Royce dashboard looked especially elegant in the plane, although we had had to make adjustments to one or two of the instruments. The engine started perfectly and the propeller turned very slowly. Then, inch by quivering inch, my Bee began to move forward. She strained to be free of the ground. She demanded to fly!

Delighted, Rosie switched off the engine, jumped over the side and embraced me. In my soul was a deep sense of fulfilment. I knew that I had created a superb original. I looked at the machine with new eyes and saw my future restored! Once I had demonstrated to El Glaoui that El Nahla could fly, I would be redeemed. He would be apologetic, he would beg me to tell him what he could do to make up for doubting me and I would name my films. He would press them upon me. Thus equipped, I would say my farewells to my business partner and set off for Rome, for fame and fortune! I cursed myself for an idiot. I should never have allowed myself to be panicked by Mr Mix. The Pasha would certainly decide to forget my indiscretions. This was the way of the Oriental court. But when I suggested to Rose von Bek that we now had only to wait to be reinstated in the Pasha’s good offices, she looked at me with such blind animal panic that I was immediately forced to assure her we would leave as soon as possible. I was prepared to make any sacrifice for her, I said. Calming herself, she told me that she appreciated my friendship. There was an instant, as we held hands, of deep platonic comradeship. Around us the great Atlas mountains, cruel and beautiful as Marrakech herself, proud as the Berber clans she sheltered, challenged with their snowy crags the pale blue certainty of the sky.

The emerald palms waved in a faint wind from the south.

In the distant city, the muezzin began his long cry to the glory of God.

I released her hand.

‘Thank you.’ She was almost pathetically sincere.

I have never forgotten that moment.

‘I trust you,’ she said. ‘I have truly found my Lohengrin.’

She hid in the cubicle when my driver returned. She would find her own way home. I was, she reassured me, not to be concerned for her.

When I got back to my quarters I found every door wide open and the servants fled. The place had been stripped. Everything, including all my personal documents and every stick of furniture, was gone. No doubt the Pasha now knew what had happened to his car.

I rushed outside but the driver had already left. I had little choice but to begin the walk back into Marrakech. In his present mood the Pasha would not be reasoned with. My only hope was to reach the mellah and lie low until I could get out to the airfield the next morning. I saw the hand of Brodmann in everything. Surely he must be directing this particular scenario? I began to understand the nature of the Pasha’s games with Miss von Bek and why she was so anxious to escape.

While I hurried along the darkening road towards the city gate, the avenues of palm trees became sinister enemies, threatening a dozen different dangers, and sometimes I broke into a run. When I stopped to catch my breath, I realised my whole body was shaking. Another Westerner, without experience of a tyrant’s omnipotence, might not have begun to know such nervousness until much later. But my experience was already extensive. I could easily imagine what El Glaoui intended for me. I knew what torture could make me do. I remembered how I had longed for death and yet had done anything to remain alive. I was determined not to suffer such humiliation again.

There was still also the possibility that the Pasha was enjoying some complicated practical joke at my expense, teaching me a lesson, perhaps, so that I would be a more loyal servant in future. It was all I could pray for. A miracle might save me, but nothing else. As I slipped through the narrow gate into the medina and began to pad through the dark serpentine streets leading to the mellah I wondered if I were not foolish in seeking out the Jew. Perhaps he was already dead? But I had no other hope. I scuttled like a doomed doodle-bug on a burning log, with every chance of escape an illusion. I could barely think for the tightness in my chest, the churning of my bowels and stomach, the thumping of my unhappy heart. I shall always regret not going straight to the Pasha’s palace and throwing myself on his mercy. I had proof of his trust in me. I could have saved myself the agony of being admitted to the Jew’s house, of being led through corridors and cloisters, across little cobbled streets, through doorways, down steps and into a dank, stinking warren of cubicles, each with a door from behind which came a dreadful, significant silence and I knew as the door closed behind me and the head of Monsieur Josef rose upon the Pasha’s jocular scimitar to confront me face to face that I had allowed myself to run like a panicked dog into El Glaoui’s own dungeons.

‘Good evening, Mr Beters.’

The little man reached past me with the head still on the end of his sword and used it to push open a door. Mr Mix looked out at me and shrugged. ‘He was on to us from the start, I guess. Just characters in his damned melodrama. He’s better at this than we are.’ He used English which was mere babble to the Pasha. Our captor was no more irritated by it than by the chatter of monkeys. He was incapable of the imaginative notion that we could actually be communicating!

The Pasha was chuckling as our jackets were ripped from our bodies. He looked at us with a kind of familiar affection so reminiscent of a lusting lover’s that I began to tremble and knew I must soon lose control of my bowels. I began to plead with him in the name of God to listen to me, to believe that I was his true and loyal servant, that others had encouraged me to betray him. Though a prince in my own country, I had served him loyally and celebrated his glory. My halting Arabic was responded to in haughty childish French. I had dishonoured him in every possible loathsome way. I had lied to him with infinite treachery. Worse - I had posed as a Moslem, when I was in fact a dirty little Jew from Odessa. I found this last the most wounding insult of all. He had made something up from Brodmann’s innuendo. I told him that these things were lies, I was already familiar with them. I knew who had told them to him and why. I mustered my dignity. I said that Brodmann had always been my enemy. He was a known fraud. A Bolshevik agent.

El Glaoui frowned and clapped his hands to silence me. He laughed at me. ‘The famous Russian film star becomes another whining dog of a Jew. Do you subbose I allow Mademoiselle Rosie to have any secrets from me? You will be tortured for a few weeks and then you will be blaced in the basket of your Italian master’s balloon, which will be set on fire just as you are released into the atmosphere. You will be heroes in the Western Bress. Thus all, with God’s help, shall be broberly concluded.’ He spoke with the satisfaction of a theatrical producer putting the finishing touches to his plot. He almost waited for our applause. He told me to join Mr Mix in the cell. ‘I have to go to Tafouelt to deal with some rebels. They are duty. But I will have you taught a few tricks while I am away.’ He clapped again, this time for slaves who appeared carrying first Mr Mix’s heavy Pathé camera and then the bag I had stowed under the seat of my Bee. These were placed at our feet. Now El Glaoui purred. ‘Mademoiselle Rosie left these for you.’ He did not bother to watch as we were chained to the wall, but as an afterthought he had the Jew’s head placed on top of my bag where it stared at me, rather resignedly, until at last it was dragged away by the rats.