Nile Shadows

PART ONE

— 1-

An Australian Hand Grenade

On a clear night in 1942 a hand grenade exploded in a Cairo slum, killing one man instantly.

The explosion shattered the mirror in the half-light of a poor Arab bar, a bare room where laborers went to sip arak into oblivion. The hand grenade had come flying in through a shabby curtain separating the bar from an alley, thrown from a group of Australian soldiers who were out drinking and brawling and victoriously celebrating life, recent survivors of the disastrous battle for Crete.

Other than the dead man, no one in the bar received more than superficial injuries. And in the confusion following the explosion, amidst the shouts and screams and drunken cries of bloody wogs, the young Australian soldiers had fled into the shadowy byways of Old Cairo and disappeared, never to be officially identified in life, some never to be identified in death as well.

Such violent incidents were far from uncommon in wartime Cairo. The fierce campaigns in the Western Desert still raged uncertainly, as Rommel's powerful Afrika Korps threatened to overrun Egypt and the Suez Canal. From there the Middle East and much more would be open to the invading Germans, so soldiers in the British forces were apt to play desperately with time and darkness before going into the desert to meet the advancing panzers.

In such a situation, one stray death in a Cairo slum could be of little significance, and an Egyptian policeman quickly concluded his routine investigation.

From documents found on the dead man he was identified as a minor criminal and morphine addict, a petty gunrunner sometimes known as Stern, a vagrant with no visible means of support who had moved erratically from one poor lodging to another in various Cairo slums over the last few years.

Stern's criminal record further stated that his name was to be found in the files of a number of police departments in the Middle East, and although he didn't appear to be of Egyptian origin, his dialect was said to be flawless. It was therefore assumed that he was probably a genuine Levantine by birth, whose sordid pursuits in the 1930s had caused him to spend at least as much time in Egypt as elsewhere.

The history of Stern's criminal activities was unimpressive. In the years leading up to the Second World War he had smuggled arms to many groups in the Middle East, with perhaps more emphasis on Palestine. Yet he had never been clever enough to make any money from these operations, for his record also showed that he had lived in unrelieved poverty. On several occasions he had been apprehended and sentenced to brief prison terms on secondary charges.

Stern, in short, had lived an obscure and meaningless life, a marginal existence that had come to nothing.

Only one brief entry in Stern's file tended to contradict this uneventful account, a daring escape he had made from a Damascus prison in the summer of 1939. From the nature of the escape it was apparent it had been unplanned, and what made it inexplicable was the fact that Stern had been due for release from the prison within twenty-four hours. But then a few weeks later Hitler's armored divisions had crossed the Polish border to begin the war, so the matter had soon been forgotten, a strange and isolated episode in Stern's otherwise purposeless career.

Stern's nationality was listed on the death certificate as Unknown, lost long ago in the maze of counterfeit documents he had used throughout his life. So numerous were the aliases in his record, in fact, there was no way to know whether Stern was the dead man's true name.

In addition, so contradictory were the disguises of his background, it could not even be determined whether he was a Moslem or a Christian or a Jew.

There were also no associates to question. Stern, or whoever he was, had not only worked obscurely but lived his life alone, without family or friends, without acquaintances or neighbors to remember him. To all appearances, without anyone at all. Yet when the time came to dispose of the body, done quickly in Cairo because of overcrowding among the dead, a shabbily dressed woman turned up at police headquarters saying she wished to make arrangements for a burial. The woman carried a Greek passport and the story she told seemed plausible.

She had first met the dead man about a year earlier, she said, in a small neighborhood restaurant where she sometimes took her evening meals. Subsequently they had fallen into the habit of eating there together on an irregular basis, never more than once a week and often no more than once every two or three weeks. It had been company of a sort for both of them. She had known the dead man only as Stern, and he had called her by her Christian name, Maud. Although she was an American by birth, she had lived in the Eastern Mediterranean for years.

Since Stern had never known more than a day in advance when he might be able to come to the restaurant, he had left notes there saying when he would show up. She had gone to the restaurant every day to check for these notes, even when she wasn't planning to eat there in the evening. She didn't know where he had lived or what he had done. It was wartime and people came and went. Explanations were pointless, reasons meaningless. She had assumed he held some kind of minor clerk's job, as she did.

Why do you say that? asked the policeman behind the desk.

Because of the way he dressed.

How was that?

Like me. Trying to make ends meet.

Did you speak Arabic together?

No, you can hear I don't speak it well. We spoke in Greek or in English.

French?

Sometimes.

The policeman switched to French, which he was studying in the evenings to promote his career.

Did he ever talk about the past? What he used to do?

The woman was trying hard to control herself. She looked down at her worn shoes and suddenly clenched her fists in despair.

No. I just assumed he was from somewhere and had done something once. Isn't everybody from somewhere? Hasn't everybody done something once? We never talked about the past. Can't you understand?

The woman broke down and quietly began to cry, and of course the policeman did understand. The Balkans had been overrun and Greece had fallen and there were refugees everywhere in Cairo, people who didn't want to remember what they had lost.

So he saw no need to go into the matter further. If this woman wanted to bear the expense of burying a man she had hardly known, out of whatever personal reasons might be involved, that was her affair.

Nothing would be served by telling her that Stern had been a petty criminal, a minor gunrunner and morphine addict. Obviously she wanted to bury someone, and it was no concern of his how she went about wasting the little money she had.

I'll just be a minute, he said, and went to make a telephone call to her office to prove that she was the person she claimed to be. The connection was made, to some obscure British department having to do with the Irrigation Works, and it took surprisingly little time. He returned and filled out the release papers, copying down the entries from her passport and marking her A friend of the deceased. He took the forms to be signed and told the woman where to obtain the body. She thanked him and left.

Whereupon the case was closed so far as the Egyptian authorities were concerned.

The policeman who had arrived at the Arab bar after the explosion had remained there for about half an hour, but most of that time he had spent helping himself to drinks. Another ten minutes or so had been spent by his superior at headquarters, the following morning, glancing through the dead man's file. And not much more time than that had been required for the interview with the woman that morning, to release what was left of the body.

In all, then, no more than twelve hours had passed since Stern had been killed at midnight. In just such a brief period of time were the formalities of his death concluded, his life forgotten. But there was one minor curiosity that seemed to have been overlooked.

How did it happen that this casual acquaintance of Stern, this shabbily dressed woman of American birth, had come to police headquarters in the first place?

Why had she turned up so suddenly when she was only accustomed to receiving notes from Stern once a week, or every two or three weeks, in a small neighborhood restaurant?

How, indeed, had she even known that Stern was dead?

For there had been no mention of the event in the newspapers, nor would there be. Such incidents occurred and it was generally known that they did. But the British censors still had no wish to see displayed in print the fact that Allied soldiers, drunk on occasion and facing possible death themselves, relieved their tensions by tossing hand grenades into Arab bars.

Yet these questions concerning the American woman, as it turned out, were of little importance.

Elsewhere, the real enigma behind the killing was already being studied by intelligence experts, and for them even the simplest facts involved in Stern's mysterious death, and his equally mysterious life, had begun to suggest a vastly disturbing puzzle that might decide the outcome of the entire war in the Middle East, and perhaps beyond.

— 2-

The Purple Seven Armenian

The names of four witnesses appeared in the brief report drawn up by the Cairo policeman who had investigated the hand-grenade incident, the other customers having fled the bar immediately after the explosion at midnight. Of the four, one was the Arab owner of the bar and two others were glassy-eyed Arab laborers who had heard nothing of the world since sundown, due to the effects of opium.

The fourth witness had produced a passport that showed he was a naturalized Lebanese citizen in transit, an itinerant dealer in Coptic artifacts. The name of this fourth witness was unmistakably Armenian. And although the policeman at the scene had carefully noted that the Armenian's status was in transit, he had failed to determine where the Armenian was in transit to, or from.

Teams of British enlisted men routinely checked every name that appeared in any Egyptian police report, no matter how insignificant the case might be. They checked these names against master lists, which gave no indication whether the name listed was that of a deserter or an alleged informer, a male or female prostitute suspected of infecting lost battalions of soldiers on leave, or belonged to any of the other categories of people that might be having an adverse effect on the war.

The Armenian's name appeared on such a list. The facts were duly forwarded to Special Branch, where a further check was made against names listed in various color codes. The Armenian's name was found under the highly sensitive Purple Code, which required that the information be sent at once to Military Intelligence.

There, the significance of the name was accurately defined by locating it on the select list known as Purple Seven, the briefest of all the lists and also the only one of the many secret color codes to merit the ultimate British classification for speedy handling in the Levant.

Most Most Urgent:

Here we go again, old boy.

Let's forego tea and keep

the Hun on the run.

At once, a goggled officer courier signed for the packet of information and climbed into the sidecar of a powerful dispatch motorcycle, driven by an expert heavy-diesel mechanic who was fluent in Malay, also goggled and armed with a Sten gun, two automatics, three throwing knives and a hidden derringer. The courier's destination was a drab building housing the Third Circle of the Irrigation Works, an obscure civilian department that happened to be under the direct control of the British commander-in-chief, Middle East Forces, seemingly due to the strategic value of water. But actually the drab Third Circle was the headquarters of a secret British intelligence unit colloquially referred to by specialists as the Waterboys.

And thus by noon that day a sickly-looking British agent, a Cairo pimp and blackmarketeer with a bad liver and a certain low-level reputation along the riverfront, was flashing his stained teeth as he strolled through a filthy slum of the city, his jaundiced grin meant to welcome anyone who might be in need of illicit services of any kind.

To fortify himself against the swindles ahead, the yellowish black-marketeer decided to stop off for a glass of cheap Arab cognac. And the café he chose, by chance, happened to be only a few doors away from the bar that had been damaged the previous night by a hand grenade.

Gently the pimp eased his swollen liver under a table. He rubbed his eyes and casually turned his attention to the next table, where the owner of the damaged Arab bar, a neighborhood celebrity for the moment, was dramatically recounting for the hundredth time his experiences from the previous night. The bar owner had been doing so since sunup, speaking breathlessly to anyone who would listen, but more especially to anyone who would buy him a drink in exchange for the whole truth about the war and the world and history.

***

By now the Arab bar owner was thoroughly drunk and his account had taken on the proportions of a major battle in the ongoing struggle for Egyptian independence. Like many of his countrymen, he viewed the British as colonial oppressors and was more than ready to welcome the Germans into Cairo as liberators.

In fact it was precisely because of his well-known patriotism, he said, that the cowardly British had sent an elite platoon of masked commandos to attack his bar under cover of darkness. But he had valiantly repulsed the assault and was to receive a medal from Rommel when the invincible panzers entered the city.

By the weekend, he said, his eyes glittering from the noontime rush of gin in his veins. By the weekend, according to the secret information he was privy to.

There was no need to boast, he went on, but there was also no need to hide the truth any longer. Not now, after the British had showed how much they feared him by mounting a regimental assault at night with their very best antitank weapons.

He lowered his voice and adopted the manner of a dedicated revolutionary. Awesome nationalist victories and the great personal sacrifices that led to them, he noted, deserved the deepest respect.

The whole truth? he whispered. The whole truth is that Rommel no longer writes to me through intermediaries. Now when he asks for my advice he does so in his very own hand, on Afrika Korps stationery.

Sighs and shrewd nods passed through his audience. At that moment his unemployed listeners undeniably had the hard knowing eyes of determined men. From the next table, the yellowish black-marketeer leaned sideways toward the bar owner.

How's his Arabic? he whispered.

Whose?

Rommel's.

Excellent, of course. The Germans aren't stupid like the British.

I never doubted it. But next weekend, you say? Rommel is going to be here as soon as that?

He told me so himself, answered the bar owner.

The blackmarketeer looked suddenly pained. He eased his fingers down over the right side of his abdomen and tried to prop up his liver.

Then I'm in trouble, he whispered. The Germans drink beer, strictly beer.

They do?

Of course, and here I am with this left on my hands. I thought it was going to make my fortune, but now it's turned out to be useless.

Your liver? whispered the bar owner.

The blackmarketeer shook his head and reached down for the valise he had with him, opening it just enough for the bar owner to peek inside. What he saw was a new bottle of Irish whiskey, its seal unbroken. The valise was quickly snapped shut again.

Direct from Shepheard's Hotel, whispered the blackmarketeer. Stolen at great risk and at the cost of many bribes. But now I'm doomed by God's will.

How much? whispered the bar owner suspiciously.

Cheap. Absurdly so, in view of God's will and Rommel's arrival.

God speaks in mysterious ways, countered the bar owner.

Assuredly, He does. And only those who are deserving hear His voice. Now as one revolutionary patriot to another, I suggest we retire to your damaged premises to inspect this despicable destruction wrought by a division of cowardly British paratroopers hurtling down from the heavens under cover of darkness.

It was more like the whole Eighth Army, said the bar owner. Tanks, huge cannons, minefields, massive formations of lumbering bombers, everything.

I never doubted it.

And they were led by Churchill himself.

Who was probably raving drunk as usual. But you fought back with all your strength and Rommel will be personally toasting you this weekend. While in the meantime, a little privacy perhaps?

The bar owner rose and dismissed his audience with a haughty gesture, almost losing his balance as he did so. But the yellowish blackmarketeer was quickly by the bar owner's side, his sickly eyes darting to and fro as he tendered his support, and in another moment he had the bar owner in an upright position and was steering him down the alley, the two of them hand in hand with their bodies rubbing together in the traditional Levantine manner of wholehearted cooperation.

Early that evening, then, a British Major returned to the Irrigation Works after debriefing his agent, the unhealthy-looking pimp. The Major laid aside his pith helmet and went in to report to his Colonel, the man in charge of the Waterboys.

***

It's about the Purple Seven alert that came in this morning, said the Major. It took some time to look into because the bar owner needed sobering up.

The Colonel nodded. Let's call this Purple Seven the Armenian, he said. Go ahead.

He's described as a small dark man of European origin, closely clipped beard, deep lines around the eyes, probably a drinker. Thin, wiry, getting on toward forty. A reddish hue to his hair, or at least that was the impression in the poor lighting of the bar. Nothing particular about the way he dressed except that it was definitely on the shabby side. Collarless shirt, rumpled and none too clean. An old suit that might have been secondhand, rather too big for him as if he had lost some weight recently, or perhaps just seen better days in general. Shabby overall, but otherwise ordinary in appearance.

Or experienced, said the Colonel. Go on.

He entered the bar shortly after Stern did, sometime around ten maybe. The bar owner's pretty useless when it comes to time, he doesn't own a watch and there's no clock in the bar. Stern and the Armenian sat together at the counter. The two of them were speaking English and the bar owner only understands a little. They drank the local cheap brandy. Stern had a couple, the Armenian rather more. Stern did the ordering and also the looking about.

How?

They were sitting sideways facing one another, each with an elbow on the counter, Stern positioned so that he had a full view of most of the room and also the entrance, which he could see over the Armenian's shoulder without moving his head. A curtain hung in the open doorway, separating the room from the alley. They smoked cigarettes while they talked, Stern's cigarettes, a cheap Arab brand. It was a quiet conversation at first, low tones, some gesturing. The Armenian was doing most of the talking at that point.

But then Stern did some talking and the situation grew more heated, as if there were some kind of disagreement. The Armenian seemed to be the one who was disagreeing, while Stern's manner was more one of self-confidence or relief. But that might be a bit too strong. It's only based on an impression of an impression.

Relief over something he'd learned from the Armenian? Why that impression?

Stern began smiling at that point. Or smiling occasionally. We're on unsure ground here.

Go on.

The Armenian's reaction to Stern's relief or self-confidence or whatever it was, suggested puzzlement, not anger. He didn't seem to understand whatever it was Stern was feeling, or else he understood it but was reluctant to accept it. Something along those lines. It was at that point that the discussion became heated and the disagreement developed. Stern seemed to be trying to explain himself, or justify himself or whatever, and the Armenian was refusing to go along with it.

I see.

Stern would speak quietly, forcefully, for a minute or two while the Armenian listened, trying to understand what Stern was saying. Then the Armenian would shake his head no and gesture and argue again. Both men seemed tired, weary is a better word. Perhaps the disagreement was an old one, something they'd been through before. It went on like that until midnight and the explosion. Physically, Stern seemed exhausted, but also exhilarated. Again, that's only an impression of an impression. And that's all we have prior to the hand grenade.

The Colonel nodded. Let's stay with that for a moment, he said.

He rose and began pacing awkwardly back and forth, as if he wasn't quite used to walking on his false leg. There were no windows in the room. He filled his pipe and absentmindedly left it on a table.

Stern seemed exhausted but happy or relieved, said the Colonel. What about the Armenian? He'd be a good ten years younger than Stern, maybe more. Exhausted too, physically?

Impossible to say. Apparently he couldn't be read so easily.

Why not?

The way he moved or held himself. Tended to give less of himself away. More contained perhaps?

Unlikely. But experienced, I'd say, definitely. No one ever gave less of himself away than Stern, although one never had that impression of course. Quite the opposite. Naturally your man wouldn't have known that. Whom did you send?

Jameson.

Excellent taste, observed the Colonel. I'd tend to trust his impression of impressions, so yes, we do have a few things here.

The Colonel looked around for his pipe. The Major had his own questions to ask but the time for that would come later. He waited.

Let's go on to the hand grenade, said the Colonel. How did it start?

There were shouts outside in English and the sounds of scuffling getting louder, a brawl working its way down the alley. The owner was nervous and so were some of the others in the bar. The Armenian, whose back was to the curtain, turned around to look several times but Stern went on talking, appearing to take no notice. Of course he could see the curtain without moving his head, so he might have been taking an interest without showing it. In any case, Stern went on talking and the shouting grew louder.

Then the curtain flew back and something came lobbing into the room. The owner saw it all right but he didn't know what it was. Nobody knew what it was except Stern.

The Colonel frowned, looking down at the floor, a sad expression.

Yes, he said softly. I can imagine.

Stern hit the Armenian in the chest and sent him flying, continued the Major. The owner was standing near them at that moment, behind the counter, and he saw the Armenian's face when Stern hit him. The Armenian was astonished. Obviously he had no idea what was going on. At that point the owner went down, threw himself on the floor behind the counter. It was an instinctive reaction to Stern hitting the Armenian, a dive for cover. Not away from the grenade, which he didn't recognize, but away from Stern.

The roar went off and that's all we have from the owner until the glass stopped showering down.

Mirror behind the counter?

Yes.

The Colonel found his pipe. He went over and sat down on the sofa, using his hands to move his false leg into a straight position.

Stern?

The grenade must have been coming directly at him. He had time to hit the Armenian and knock him clear, and that was that. Full in the chest probably. Nothing much left above the waist.

The Colonel struck a match. Ever been close to that? he asked. Had it happen right next to you?

No.

It's the worst sound in the world. Does something to your brain. For an instant you're no longer human.

It's another existence, primeval, black. You see something inside yourself. Go on.

There was the roar and the shattering glass and smoke and confusion, said the Major. When the owner showed his face, men were screaming and pushing out the door. Bits and pieces everywhere, and blood.

The Armenian was still sprawled in the corner where Stern's blow had sent him. Besides the two Arabs who were unconscious from opium on the far side, the Armenian was the only other man left in the room.

He lay there on the floor in the smoke, staring up at the spot where lie and Stern had been sitting. Slowly he got to his feet, dreamlike, and just stood there staring. The owner was dazed and he did the same thing, just stood there staring. But the owner was watching the Armenian.

Yes, said the Colonel, the fascination is incredibly intense. You don't know whether you're alive or dead and you're not in your own body at all. In fact you have no body. It's strange. . a kind of sudden sense of pure consciousness. Your mind looks around and the first thing with any sign of life utterly captivates you. At that moment the merest flicker of an eye contains all the mystery of the universe. Go on.

The Armenian still didn't move, he just stood there staring. After a bit the owner came to his senses and began screaming himself. People shouted and stuck their heads in, and there was nothing really after that until the policeman arrived.

What kind of man?

Average, unfortunately. The confusion and damage got to him but not much else, except for one curiosity.

When he first came in, something about the Armenian struck him as peculiar. But only vaguely, he can't recall it exactly. It happened when he first glanced around the place and he might have only imagined it, or it could have been a trick of peripheral vision. Anyway, it was a sensation of something unusual, in the sense of inappropriate or out of place. At least that's my interpretation of it. The policeman isn't able to describe it with any degree of accuracy, apparently it only flashed through his mind. But what it amounts to is, he had the sensation the Armenian was smiling. Staring and smiling. And that's all we have on the incident itself.

The Colonel nodded.

But there's one other very curious fact, added the Major. The owner says the Armenian came to the bar yesterday morning, very early. There was nobody else there and he'd just started his cleanup when all of a sudden the Armenian came rushing in with a wild man.

A what?

That's how the owner describes him. A ghostlike figure in rags, an Arab, thin and small and caked with dust and dirt, hair matted and eyes bulging out of his head. According to the owner, he looked like a desert hermit who'd been off in a cave somewhere for years. He seemed deranged. He was clawing at the air and making strange sounds as if he couldn't breathe. The Armenian came rushing in with this wild man and ordered coffee and the two of them collapsed in a corner. Then the wild man began to sob and a moment later they were rushing out again, the Armenian in the lead, the wild man running after him.

Nothing more specific on this other man?

The owner kept mentioning his eyes, frantic bulging eyes. Frightening, wild. He was convinced the man was insane. That was the only time the owner has ever seen this other man, and it was the only other time he has ever seen the Armenian.

And lastly there's this, said the Major, placing a small length of worn curved metal in the Colonel's hand.

The bar owner found it on the floor after the policeman left. It was lying at the foot of the counter where Stern and the Armenian had been sitting. So far as I can see it's exactly what it appears to be, an old Morse-code key. From the last century, probably.

The Colonel turned the small piece of worn metal between his fingers. The key was highly polished from innumerable handlings.

Stern used to carry that, murmured the Colonel. It was a kind of good-luck charm. He was never without it.

The Colonel frowned. He took a bottle of whiskey from a cupboard and poured into two glasses. The Major sipped his whiskey, waiting. The room was in the heart of the building and few sounds reached it.

The Colonel worked on his pipe in silence. Finally he picked up the other glass.

Are you and Maud friendly these days?

Yes. Should I speak to her?

The Colonel shook his head.

No. You see, I think we've stumbled upon an operation that belongs to somebody else, and the reason we found out about it is because something went wrong in that bar. I'm sure the Armenian's name was never supposed to turn up in a police report. No, certainly not. As for Maud, it's not possible that she has anything to do with the operation, because if she did, I would have to have been told.

But she knew Stern had been killed, said the Major, and someone had to tell her. A Purple Seven alert comes directly to us. So we were the first to know of Stern's death, and we're still the only ones who do know. Unless, of course, you've already passed the information along.

I haven't, said the Colonel. I will tonight. But as for us being the first to know of Stern's death, that's not quite true, is it?

The first to know inside, I meant. The Armenian knew, of course.

Yes, our Purple Seven knew. Our man with the Armenian name who's conveniently in transit while dealing, in Coptic artifacts. Our small shabby European who wears a secondhand suit and likes to have his morning coffee in a Cairo slum with some wild Arab hermit from the desert, and who has all the signs of being an experienced professional. He knew.

And told Maud?

That's right, said the Colonel. But what I meant before is that she can't have anything to do with the operation itself, as such. It's obvious she must have a good deal to do with some of the people involved in it. From a personal point of view.

Wasn't her connection with Stern known from the beginning?

Oh yes. Stern was the one who recommended her to us, and he was right on target as usual. She's been a fine addition. But tell me, what do you know about Stern?

Only what comes through from the files, replied the Major. That he seemed to be able to find out almost anything.

Ever wonder why that was so?

Excellent contacts, I assume.

Yes, the best. The French and the Germans and the Italians, Turks and Greeks and Arabs and Jews — he had them all. And why was that, do you suppose?

Because he must have made it his business to have them, said the Major. Because that was what he did.

His life.

Yes, what he did. But I'm beginning to wonder about that. . what Stern really did. Stern gave information as well as took it, but the real reason people trusted him was because they always felt, deep down, that he was working just for them. In the end, just for them. We believed that, didn't we?

In answer, the Major frowned. In the short time he had worked for the Colonel, there had been some extremely sensitive operations set in motion almost entirely on the basis of information supplied by Stern.

And there must have been many other such operations in the past, so he found it difficult to follow what the Colonel now seemed to be suggesting about Stern.

That's not to say he wasn't working for us, continued the Colonel. It's just that ultimately. .

The Colonel broke off, trying to order his thoughts. For some reason he had suddenly recalled an obscure incident from before the war, Stern's escape from a Damascus prison in the summer of 1939.

The episode had never made any sense to the Colonel, because Stern had been due for release from the prison within twenty-four hours.

Yet Stern had risked his life to escape. Why?

Later he had talked about it with Stern and Stern had turned the whole affair into a joke, moving around in his chair in his awkward way and belittling any courage it might have shown on his part, claiming simply that he had felt more useless than usual and had decided on a sudden whim to try to prove his superiority over his Syrian guards. Stern had even showed the Colonel the scars left by the thumbnail he had ripped away during the escape, clawing his way through some masonry, deep ugly scars slashing up the back of his thumb. The Colonel remembered how painful they had looked at the time, but Stern had dismissed them with a shrug.

It's nothing, Stern had said, laughing. Really painful wounds never bother with the body, do they? They cut deeper and the scars they leave are elsewhere.

And then they had gone on to talk of other things. But now the incident in Damascus troubled the Colonel and he began hunting through Stern's file. He seemed to recall that Stern had said he had gone to Haifa after the prison escape, and had hidden in Haifa until the war had broken out a few weeks later, turning everyone's attention elsewhere.

The Colonel stopped at a page in the file. He had found the corroborating evidence taken from the reports of other contacts that Stern had been in Haifa in August 1939. But when the Colonel looked at the evidence now, he realized that all the scattered bits and pieces of information had been provided by contacts who were known or suspected Zionist activists, involved with illegal immigration into Palestine.

The Colonel turned more pages in the file. Stern's unlikely adventure had also brought Poland to mind.

Why the association? Simply because the German invasion of Poland had followed so soon after Stern's escape?

No. There was a connection and he found it. A short paragraph from an informer's report to the Turkish police in Istanbul. To the effect that the informer had seen Stern in Istanbul shortly after his escape from Damascus. That Stern had been carrying a forged Polish passport and had been frantically arranging a secret trip to Poland. To the Pyry forest near Warsaw, on a mysterious mission of great importance.

Or so the informer had speculated, offering a personal opinion without a trace of evidence to back up his claim.

Under normal circumstances the Colonel would have smiled at these cobwebs of conjecture. The Turkish police were wildly inaccurate about everything, and Istanbul was notorious for its legions of aspiring informers who would gladly claim anything in exchange for a minor official favor. And in this case not even the informer's identity had been included in the report. Even the fact that the informer had subsequently been found dead floating in the Bosporus meant nothing, given the situation in Istanbul in that last summer before the war.

Pure invention from some desperate refugee. Ridiculous rumors whispered across a café table and set adrift in the clouded brain of a Turkish policeman lazily puffing hashish, dimly trying to focus his eyes on the crotch of a serving-boy across the way.

And yet?

The Colonel closed the file. He frowned.

Perhaps he had made a serious mistake in accepting Stern's explanation of what he had been doing in those last few days before the war began. Perhaps Stern had actually made a secret trip to Poland without telling anyone about it.

Why? wondered the Colonel. What did it mean and what had he been hiding? Why had he lied and taken such care to make sure his lie had been covered?

Stern had been unusually experienced and clever. He had been dedicated to a cause that was probably too idealistic ever to be realized, but the cause had still been straightforward and comprehensible, as splendid in its simplicity as Stern's ideals had been.

Or rather, as they had appeared to be. For it was obvious now that someone else had stumbled upon Stern's Polish adventure and had decided to look into it more deeply, and in so doing had caught a glimpse of something unexpected. A suggestion of some enigma, some profound truth, that must have subsequently been uncovered by the Armenian.

Who had then told Stern what he had discovered. Just before a hand grenade had come flying in through the door of a dingy Arab bar in a Cairo slum, and Stern had been killed saving the Armenian's life.

***

Where were we? asked the Colonel, looking up.

I'm not sure, replied the Major. You were talking about the important work Stern did for us, and then you seemed to have some doubts about something.

Yes, well, it's just that the situation isn't as clear in my mind now as it was. Because that seems to be the very nature of this operation. Somewhere a doubt arose, as I see it, a doubt with very serious implications. So a man who knew Stern from somewhere, an outsider, was recruited to come in and find out what he could about Stern.

That would be our Purple Seven, said the Major.

Yes, the Armenian. A professional who might have been a friend of Stern's once, or who might have worked with him at some point in the past. Possibly in Stern's gunrunning activities, without knowing they were just a cover for his role in intelligence. Well the Armenian went about his business and my guess is he was successful. Either he discovered the truth about Stern or he came close enough for it not to make any difference.

The Colonel leaned back. There was admiration and even a touch of awe in his voice.

My God, you just can't appreciate the enormity of that task without having known Stern. The layers to the man, the subtleties. He grew up in these parts and knew every language and dialect, every nuance, every corner and what lay around it. There was simply no competing with him out here. He could go anywhere and be anyone, and at one time or another he did seem to go everywhere and be just about everyone. As he wanted, as it served his purposes. Describe a tiny corner of the desert and he knew it.

Mention a shop hidden away in a bazaar in any of ten dozen towns and he'd been there, knew the owner.

An extraordinary experience, dealing with a man like Stern. And he was modest. You didn't even begin to sense the depths to the man until he happened to mention some unexpected thing in an offhand way.

The Colonel grimaced. He reached down and moved his false leg.

Anyway, the Armenian must have done whatever he did and then gone to Stern with what he'd learned, which is strange in itself. You'd think he would have gone first to the people who'd hired him, but obviously he didn't. Because if he had, those same people would now know that Stern is dead, and they don't. Not yet, because I haven't told them.

So the Armenian went directly to Stern, continued the Colonel, and that was the meeting in the Arab bar.

The Armenian got in touch with Stern and set up a meeting, and then he sat down in that bar and told Stern what he'd discovered, and it was the full truth or close to it. Which was what caused Stern to begin smiling halfway through their conversation. Because at last, after all these years of subterfuge, someone had uncovered the truth about him.

Stern's reaction to that would be to smile? asked the Major. Why not just the opposite?

I have no idea. It might have to do with who the Armenian is. The Armenian confronted Stern with the facts, in any case, and Stern's reaction was to smile with relief. That was the expression you used.

Jameson used, corrected the Major.

Yes, Jameson, our alter ego in this case. So we have Stern smiling and the Armenian not liking it at all, and that's when the conversation grew heated. The Armenian didn't agree with what Stern was doing, couldn't agree, and he argued about it. But Stern was confident. He was convinced of his rightness and he went on to justify himself. Your words again, or Jameson's rather. And that was where matters stood when the grenade came sailing in the door and Stern saved the Armenian's life.

The Colonel paused.

Important, that. I don't know why, but it has to be. It was Stern's last act and there's a meaning to it.

Something to do with the discovery the Armenian had made, or perhaps going further back, to the whole relationship between the two of them. Which was profound, I'd say. Something quite special to both of them.

You know, concluded the Colonel, the curious part in all this is that we seem to have some of the answers without knowing the questions. More whiskey for you?

The Major poured for them both. A clock ticked on the wall. When it appeared the Colonel had nothing more to say, the Major decided to ask his own questions.

Whose operation do you think it is? The Monastery's?

Yes, no doubt. It's much too deep and roundabout to be anyone else's. And it's bizarre and wildly improbable, not what anyone would expect. All the characteristics of a Monastery operation.

What about the Armenian?

I've been thinking about him but no one comes to mind. Frankly, I haven't the least idea. Of course I know who originally used that Purple Seven identity, in fact I helped put it together for him. But that was three or four years ago, in Palestine in connection with the Arab revolt, and somehow it all seems irrelevant now.

Who was that? The man who used the identity then?

A fellow from the ranks. Sergeant O'Sullivan was his name.

Sergeant O'Sullivan, murmured the Major, a faraway look coming into his eyes. You're not referring to the Sergeant O'Sullivan?

Oh yes, the same. It rather slipped my mind how famous he used to be. I suppose you must have heard of him, even though you were very young at the time.

Yes, replied the Major, leaning back in his chair to reflect upon this astonishing piece of information from the past.

***

During the First World War, at least in the early part of the war, the exploits of Sergeant Columbkille O'Sullivan had been gloriously famous in every household in Britain, after he had been awarded two Victoria Crosses for extraordinary heroism in the gruesome slaughter known as the First Battle of Champagne, the only man of any rank to be so honored in the Great War. Then he had been referred to everywhere as the Sergeant O'Sullivan, or with even greater affection as simply Our Colly of Champagne.

But the celebrated little sergeant's reputation had mysteriously begun to deteriorate after his Irish compatriots raised their Easter Rebellion in 1916. By the summer of that year a rumor was rife in London that Our Colly was drinking to excess, and by the time autumn blew around it was generally known throughout England that Their Colly's reckless bravado in combat had always been due to drink and drink alone.

Further, while stationed in France and slyly acquiring Victoria Crosses through gross misrepresentation at the First Battle of Champagne, Their Colly, according to updated reports, had had the absurd arrogance to pretend that drinking anything less than vintage champagne was beneath him, even though when he was home again and on tour as a hero, he had reverted to his natural ways by gleefully swilling down anything alcoholic that passed through his trembling hands.

Thus the once renowned the Sergeant O'Sullivan had been entirely forgotten by the end of the Great War. The Major himself, in the course of his professional army career, could not recall ever having heard the famous name in any context, historical or otherwise. Yet to him, as to tens of thousands of British schoolboys, Our Colly of Champagne had been a unique folk hero when they were growing up.

***

My God, exclaimed the Major. Whatever did happen to Our Colly?

Oh he reenlisted again after the war, replied the Colonel.

He did? Our Colly?

Yes. And because of all that notoriety he'd received at such a young age, he wanted to get away from England, so he joined the Imperial Camel Corps out here. He even reenlisted under another name, just plain Private So-and-So. He'd developed an absolute passion for anonymity.

The Camel Corps? Our Colly on camelback?

Exactly. But before long he'd been promoted to sergeant again, and of course it was impossible for Colly's extraordinary talents to go unnoticed anywhere, even if he happened to be just loping around the deserts on a camel. So he was invited into this end of the business, and once with us Colly couldn't help but carry on with his usual flair. Anonymously, of course, undercover. In fact you could say it was just what he'd always been looking for. And all that talk in the last war about his drinking was utter nonsense.

Colly enjoyed a glass as much as the next man, but he was careful never to take a drink on duty. Drank only water when he was on assignment, made a point of it. Wouldn't even touch a cup of tea. And there are stories that anyone would find hard to believe. Some remarkable episodes in Abyssinia against the Italians, and then later in Palestine when we had to deal with the Arab revolt.

Palestine? murmured the Major. I was in and out of there during the Arab revolt. Where was Our Colly working then?

Up around Galilee. He was using several covers at the time. One was as the Armenian dealer in Coptic artifacts and another was as a captain in the King's Own Scottish Regiment. Every few weeks he'd slip into Haifa and transform himself. Something of a trickster, Colly was. He enjoyed that sort of thing.

Our Colly, murmured the Major. What was he doing at Galilee?

Oh he had several assignments going on at once, as he usually did, but probably the most important one then was helping the Jewish settlers organize their Special Night Squads, the first real mobile strike force they had. Colly was the man who trained those squads and set them up. He did that in his cover as the Scottish captain, and the methods he developed soon became one of the important operating principles of the Palmach.

The Colonel smiled.

The fellow had dash, damn it, it just came natural to him. I remember talking later to one of the young Haganah men Colly had taken on as a deputy, fellow by the name of Dayan, and he told me how astonished they all were the first time they met Colly. The Arab revolt was in full swing and Dayan and Allon and these others had gone up to defend a settlement near the Lebanese border. Well one moonlit night they were manning the pickets when up drove a taxi with its headlights off and its taillights on the front of the car to confuse the enemy, and out of the taxi stepped this lean small figure carrying two rifles and a Bible and a drum, an English-Hebrew dictionary and five gallons of New England rum.

Our Colly?

None other. His daring at coming up there alone at night, Dayan said, made a tremendous impression on everyone. They'd never met a military man like that before and it affected their thinking a good deal. The idea that warfare, irregular warfare at any rate, could be based on something other than parade-ground drill.

Amazing, murmured the Major.

Yes. Colly often worked for me in the most difficult of situations, and more than once I tried to convince him to accept a commission. But Colly always adamantly refused, saying he preferred to keep his standing as the Sergeant O'Sullivan. Even though his rating was secret of course, and no one knew he had any standing at all. He was quite a man, no question about it. And as for the role he played in the Spanish Civil War, that still has to be kept close to the chest.

Why's that? asked the Major, his head spinning with these revelations about the hero of his childhood.

Because Colly was fighting on the Republican side, don't you see. Officially he was on a leave of absence, and unofficially he was doing a number of things for us, but still, a regular army man and all. It just wouldn't do. Not then, not even now.

The Major was more astounded than ever.

Our Colly? he repeated dreamily, gazing down at the papers in his hand. Then something caught his eye and he laughed abruptly.

Did you choose this name, sir?

Which name?

The cover name for Colly's Purple Seven identity. A. O. Gulbenkian.

The Colonel smiled.

Oh no, that was Colly's doing. As a matter of fact, it was the name he used when he reenlisted and went into the Imperial Camel Corps after the last war. Says something about his sense of humor, I suppose.

He thought it would be amusing to skulk around the Middle East on a camel, using the last name of a famous Armenian oil millionaire.

Bizarre, murmured the Major. Gulbenkian does seem to be an odd name to come across here. But what were the initials A.O. supposed to stand for?

The Colonel laughed.

Alpha and Omega, probably. Colly's sense of humor again.

Our Colly of Champagne, murmured the Major. Extraordinary.

Yes, the same. And he was small and dark all right, and thin and wiry and every bit a professional. So I admit the description you brought back had me disturbed for a moment.

The Major was even more confused.

Why? Couldn't he be our Purple Seven, working out of the Monastery? You said the identity was issued to him originally.

It was, and it's also true that he was working out of the Monastery the last time around. But those Monks in the desert have been up to something since then. Do you recall the facts concerning the kidnapping of the German commandant of Crete?

Certainly. Did Our Colly have something to do with that?

His show from the beginning. Thought it up and worked out the details and then went along to see that it went smoothly. Well it did go smoothly, as an operation. They grabbed the commandant and walked him across the island to the south coast, and the submarine was where it was supposed to be on the night of the pickup. But that night Colly's luck ran out. He'd been defying the law of averages for just too long.

What happened?

He and his group crossed tracks with a German patrol. Colly made a racket and headed up into the mountains to lead the patrol off the scent. He was shot and wounded in the darkness but he managed to keep on going, until he had to look for a place to hide toward dawn. That section of the mountains is as bare as a lunar landscape, and the only place where he could get out of sight was inside one of the underground stone cisterns the Cretan goatherds use up there, to gather the runoff in the spring when the snow melts.

The Colonel scowled.

On their way by, the Germans left one of their men at the cistern because he was having an attack of dysentery and couldn't keep up, but Colly didn't know that. Colly waited long enough for the patrol to move on across the mountain, then stuck his head out of the cistern to take a look. Shivering, numb, barely able to move. He'd been standing up to his nose in the mountain-cold water of that cistern for an hour by then. And as chance would have it, the lone German happened to be squatting on a knoll right behind Colly.

The Colonel grimaced.

A freak accident really, I don't like to recall it. The startled German tossed a hand grenade and death was instantaneous for Colly. Decapitation.

What? Our Colly?

So the only way he could be part of these new events is if he'd been resurrected, which would certainly explain the enigmatic smile on the Armenian's face after the explosion in the bar. If O'Sullivan had been resurrected, he'd certainly be one to smile about it.

What?

No, he's dead all right. This Purple Seven isn't Colly. There's another Gulbenkian out there somewhere now.

The Major recovered and thought for a moment.

As I remember, there wasn't any mention of a British sergeant in connection with the kidnapping in Crete.

That's right, said the Colonel.

It was described by us as the work of some British officers.

There were a couple along, yes. And we broadcast that so the Germans would stop rounding up Cretan villagers and shooting them in retaliation. Since it was army to army, we said we'd shoot German POWs if they did that, and they stopped.

But why didn't they mention the fact that they'd killed O'Sullivan?

Because they didn't know who the dead man was, said the Colonel. Colly was disguised as a Cretan mountaineer and the Germans decided to keep us guessing about whether that mountaineer was alive or not, just in case he happened to be someone who was important to us. And also, so we could never be sure what he might have told them. Is telling them, for that matter.

The Major nodded. It was obvious to him that since the Colonel knew exactly how O'Sullivan had died, he must have a source in Crete who had reported the truth to him. Most likely a partisan, he thought, who had been following the German patrol and had witnessed the incident at the cistern from afar. But Crete was outside the Major's area of concern, so he said nothing more on the subject.

The Colonel, meanwhile, was pursuing a new chain of thought that struck him as curious. In fact he did have a special source in Crete who had reported the circumstances of O'Sullivan's death, as the Major suspected, but the agent was far more valuable than a partisan in the mountains. And it was in order to protect this agent's highly sensitive position as an apparent collaborator with the Germans, a dangerous role to attempt in a place like Crete, that the Colonel had decided not to reveal to anyone the fact that he knew for certain Sergeant O'Sullivan was dead.

Until now, when these nostalgic reminiscences concerning Our Colly had caused him to forget himself in front of the Major.

But before this moment he had told no one. Not even the elite intelligence unit for which O'Sullivan had been working when he went to Crete, the obscure command in the desert often referred to by the Colonel and others, in private and with some disdain, as the Monastery.

Thus a question had suddenly occurred to the Colonel.

How did the Monastery know O'Sullivan was dead?

For they certainly had to know. Otherwise they would never have assigned his Purple Seven identity to another man. And yet the Monastery was unaware of the Colonel's special source in Crete. Was there someone else, then, who could have been in touch with the Colonel's special source without the Colonel knowing about it? One of the agents, perhaps, who had been landed in Crete by submarine since the time of Colly's death?

The Colonel reached for another file, then stopped and nodded to himself. There was no need to look up any names. Who, after all, had provided the Colonel with this valuable source in Crete in the first place?

Who indeed? Stern, of course. Stern had recruited the woman soon after Crete had fallen to the Germans. She had been an acquaintance of Stern's from somewhere over the years, and it had been Stern who had gone to her and convinced her to undertake the role of a collaborator, with all the danger and humiliation that entailed. And then not long after Colly had disappeared in Crete, Stern had managed to get himself sent there on another assignment altogether. But obviously his real purpose in going had been to find out about Colly.

Stern must have known Colly, the Colonel now realized, from the time when Colly had been in Palestine.

Perhaps they had even become close friends then, for they were the kind of men who would have been naturally attracted to one another. Colly with his resourcefulness and his many idiosyncrasies, an eccentric dreamer who was more religious than rational, who was a firm believer in the Bible and who had become an ardent Zionist while working in Palestine fired with a mystical sense of the special mission of the Jews.

Yes. Colly would have appealed to Stern and they had probably become close friends, unknown to the Colonel and even to the Monastery. So when Colly hadn't returned from Crete, Stern had worked out a way to get himself sent there, to find out what had happened to his friend.

It fit, the Colonel was sure of it. It was exactly the kind of thing Stern would have done. And once in Crete, Stern must have left the safety of the mountains and taken the risk of going down into town, disguised as a Cretan mountaineer, and looked up the woman he had previously recruited for the Colonel, to learn for himself what Colly's fate had been. And later mentioned the fact of Colly's death to the Monastery, disguising his source.

It fit, and it troubled the Colonel. It was a little bit terrifying sometimes to think of the chances Stern had taken. This one, for example, strictly on his own. Thinking up a plausible assignment in Crete and getting himself sent there, simply to find out about a friend. To the Colonel, there was something disturbing about that. Something profoundly puzzling and suggestive of Stern's whole character.

But for the moment the Colonel put aside these intriguing considerations. Before he did anything else, he had to set matters straight in his own office.

***

I'm afraid I might have given you the wrong impression just now, he said, when I implied O'Sullivan had been killed. The truth is, we don't know whether he's dead or not. Our Colly might well be still alive in the mountains of Crete, which are extensive and rugged, after all.

I understand, answered the Major.

I'm sure you do. Undoubtedly you heard a lot about him as a boy, and you know there was no stopping him ever. Absolutely astonishing when you think of it. The Sergeant O'Sullivan. The noncommissioned officer of the Empire. I mean our very own, yours and mine and everyone's Our Colly of Champagne, right? So all we can say about it now, here, is that Colly can't be the Purple Seven who was in that Arab bar last night with Stern. And that's all we can say in respect to Colly.

I understand fully, said the Major.

The Colonel paused. Another thought had come to him. He went back to the report drawn up by the Egyptian policeman, to the information that had been copied down from the Armenian's passport after the explosion. The physical characteristics given for the Armenian were the same as Colly's had been.

The Monastery hadn't even bothered to change any of the entries in the passport, although they certainly would have, if there had been any reason to. Did that mean the Armenian not only resembled Colly, but resembled him exactly?

The Major must have already noticed this coincidence of physical details.

Did Our Colly have a brother? he asked.

The Colonel groaned.

Please. There's no way we can get into that.

Sir?

There were an enormous number of brothers, all of them older, as I recall. Colly used to claim the reason he had so many brothers was because his father ate so many potatoes. Some kind of local superstition where he grew up. Anyway, most of the brothers emigrated to America at an early age, to someplace called the Bronx, where they became roofers or drunkards or both.

Roofers?

Reaching for the stars in the New World, was the way Colly used to put it. And becoming drunkards, sadly, when the stars still proved to be out of reach, even over there. But no matter. It's an intriguing idea but it can't lead anywhere. The Bronx is simply too far away. Even Jameson couldn't penetrate such an exotic place.

The Colonel shook his head.

Stern, he muttered. The Armenian. That bar in a slum. One way or another, I don't think they're going to be very happy at the Monastery when I tell them about this.

One way or another? asked the Major.

Yes. If the hand grenade was their doing, it has to mean they intended to kill both of them. And if it really was a sordid accident, at the very least it tells them the Armenian went to Stern with what he'd learned, rather than to them. And now that Stern's gone, the Armenian's word is all the Monastery has about anything and everything concerning this operation of theirs against Stern. . No, I'm afraid there's no way out of it for the Armenian. Whatever the situation, he's in trouble.

Perhaps we could look into it further?

On our own, you mean. Yes, we could try to do that. But it's still the Monastery's operation, so I can't wait any longer to tell them about Stern's death and all the rest of it. Even a little thing like our sending Jameson over for a look is going to make them furious.

What about Maud? She might be able to pass on a message to her friend, the current Gulbenkian.

Oh that's not important. He doesn't need to be told where he stands. But I did intend to speak to her anyway, she's waiting now.

The Colonel looked down at the floor. He sighed.

The point is, you know as well as I do that when the Monastery's running an agent as a Purple Seven in this kind of case, against a man who was probably our most valuable agent and perhaps their most valuable agent as well, then that Purple Seven can't help but have a very short life expectancy, considering what must have been at stake. What is at stake? If he won he loses, if he lost he loses. And he's going to have to be a very wily Armenian now to live even a day or two with the Monks after him. I only hope he's half as clever as his predecessor in that identity was.

From what you've said about O'Sullivan, that seems unlikely.

I know it does. You just don't come across a man like O'Sullivan very often. You can't expect to and you don't.

Once more the Colonel shifted his false leg. The Major rose to leave.

Sir?

Hm.

I'll look into this as quietly as possible, but do you think you could give me any suggestions? There are so many names and dates and events in Stern's file, I could spend a year just trying to sort them out. Do you have any idea at all what the Armenian might have been looking for?

It's just a guess, said the Colonel, but my inclination would be to start with Poland.

The Major looked completely bewildered.

Poland? Here in Cairo?. . The war started with Poland, he added blankly.

And so it did, said the Colonel. Oddly enough, and so it did. But the war only ostensibly started there. Its origins have to lie more deeply in the past, as origins always do. By the time something becomes apparent, well, it's already traveled some distance, hasn't it? It's already been on its course for years and decades and it has a history to it. So although I'd start with Poland if I were you, I'd also keep in mind that's only a beginning. We have to go back, back, to find the Armenian. Because that's exactly what he did to find Stern. Does it sound complicated to you?

Frankly it does, said the Major.

But it's not really. It can't be. Stern was a man and the Armenian's a man and Poland's a place. And the Armenian managed to do it working alone, while we have enormous resources at our disposal.

Why do you say he was working alone? Surely he had the resources of the Monastery behind him?

No, I'm quite sure he didn't, not in any substantial way. The Monastery would never share anything of consequence with an outsider, that's not the way they operate. There's a reason why they have the name they have, as with most names in this world. So my guess is the Armenian was as alone before as he is now, and he's certainly alone now if the Monks are after him.

The Colonel gazed off into the distance. It must be an extremely important case, he mused.

Sir?

Just on the face of it, from what little we know. Stern and Colly's successor supposedly working against each other? Yet at the same time, not working against each other in some strange way? My God, if you had ever wanted two men to do something for you out here, it goes without saying you would have picked Stern and Colly.

And Colly's successor?

The Colonel shook his head.

Yes I know. It's a mystery, and a pity.

Sir?

Oh it's just that I always had such great affection for Colly, and I suppose I must be inadvertently transferring some of those feelings to his successor, this new Purple Seven.

The Colonel smiled, almost shyly.

Odd, how we do that. I haven't the least idea who this Purple Seven is. He's just a man without a name whom we call the Armenian for convenience. Yet I can't help but feel sad when I think about him. Where he is now and what he knows and what it's come down to for him, just all of it. Of course there's no rational explanation for my feelings, but all the same, a man who could uncover the truth about Stern. .

The Colonel sighed.

Well I guess we'll just have to see, that's all.

***

At a remote site in the desert, deep within an ancient fortresslike structure, a monk in a hooded cassock moved quickly down a narrow subterranean corridor lit at rare intervals by torches fixed to the walls. The corridor disappeared in the gloom and the only sound was the muffled swish of the monk's robes as he padded quietly down the worn stones in the half-light.

The monk was a powerful stocky man with an unkempt beard, which only partially covered the piece of his jaw that was missing. He stopped at a low iron door cut into the rock, pausing before he flung it open, a shattering noise in the underground stillness.

The monk was facing a tiny cell. At the far end a man with only one arm knelt in front of a plain wooden cross, his back to the door, heavy chains twisting away from his ankles to a rusty iron ring in the wall.

When the door slammed open the man's wasted body jerked forward, flinching away from the crashing noise. But he didn't turn around nor did he lower his hand, which remained in front of him in an attitude of supplication.

The man looked like a desert hermit. His hair was matted and his bare feet were black with dirt.

Apparently he had been praying in absolute darkness, for the cell lacked even a candle, only a little light reaching it now from the flickering torches in the corridor. The face of the hooded monk was invisible in the blackness.

For a time neither man moved in the shadowy silence, the two of them somber and stationary in the separate poses of their separate worlds, the powerful stocky monk framed in the low iron doorway, the shackled man facing the crumbling wall as he trembled, waiting. And then all at once the distant opening chords of Bach's Mass in B Minor could be heard booming forth from somewhere high above them in the ancient fortresslike structure.

The monk crossed himself and removed a coiled whip from under his cassock, a long thick scourge of braided leather. He let the whip unwind until it dangled down to the floor, an ugly many-tongued lash.

The shackled man jerked slightly, his head sinking lower. It was cold in the cell, yet drops of sweat had broken out around the lips of the monk. He licked the sweat away and spoke in a hard contemptuous voice.

The Armenian survived the hand grenade, he said.

The stark words rang in the stillness and a sudden spasm gripped the shackled man, an unmistakable shudder of eagerness, an almost sensual expression of loathing. Frantically he began clawing at the rags on his shoulders, stripping them back to reveal his wasted flesh, deathly white skin crossed with dark uneven scars. In another moment the kneeling man had bared himself to the waist and buried his face in his single hand, rigid again, waiting.

The monk stood with his feet wide apart. He whipped the scourge into the air and brought it down with all his strength on the pale back of the kneeling man. The ugly leather tongues hissed and whined against the flesh, snapping up again. After the third brutal lashing the monk tossed the bloodied scourge into a corner. He licked his lips and stared. The shackled man had been driven to the floor by the force of the blows, and it was only with a great effort that he managed to raise himself to his knees.

He was breathing heavily, fighting to keep from falling back on his face. Again he raised his one thin hand to the cross on the wall in an attitude of supplication, the palm of his open hand now wet with tears. His body shook violently as he tried to control himself.

The Armenian's a dead man, muttered the tortured figure. He's dead but he doesn't know it yet. Kill him.

But he has eluded us, murmured the monk with great deference. We don't know where he is, Your Grace.

In that case, whispered the shackled man, find him and then kill him.

Yes, Your Grace.

The monk lingered a few moments to see if there were to be any further instructions. But the shackled man in rags seemed oblivious to his presence now, so the monk backed slowly away into the corridor and closed the heavy iron door on the tiny cell, leaving his scourged superior alone once more in the blackness with his ripped flesh and his simple cross, alone and bleeding. . praying.

— 3-

Hopi Mesa Kiva

Some months before the obscure gunrunner Stern was killed in Cairo, a large black automobile sped silently down a remote secondary road deep in the arid wastelands of the American southwest.

In the rear of the automobile sat three distinguished gray-haired men, wearing rumpled white linen suits and broad Panama hats, their faces creased by the long journey from Washington in a military aircraft. In addition to having been youthful heroes for their respective nations in the First World War, the three shared reputations for unorthodox brilliance in their different professions. And now with a new war sweeping over the earth, they had become men of vast secret powers in innumerable corners of the world.

Of the three, only the Britisher was completely unknown to his countrymen at large. An old Etonian and a member of two London clubs, he was a professional military officer who had been a colonel in the Life Guards before being anonymously seconded, years earlier, to an anonymous post requiring strictly anonymous secret duties, in keeping with traditional British anonymity in matters of intelligence.

At the moment he was knitting.

The Canadian was small and slight with hooded eyes that watched everything. Originally famous as an air ace in a Sopwith Camel, then as the world lightweight boxing champion and the man who had perfected the method of sending photographs by radio, he had gone on to become a millionaire industrialist with worldwide business interests.

The Canadian was stirring a mixture over ice in a chemist's beaker.

While the large Irish-American contented himself with gazing out the window at the dwindling light of that late desert afternoon. A law-school classmate of the American president and the former commander of the famed New York regiment known as the Fighting Sixty-ninth, he was a self-made success who had become a Wall Street lawyer with international dealings.

The Britisher was known to the other two men as Ming, from the first syllable of his surname, which wasn't spelled that way at all. He was the first to break the silence in the backseat.

Let's see how this is for length, he said, the knitting needles in his hands running through a final flurry of clicks.

He raised the black knitted material from his lap, held the end of a tape measure to one of its corners and reached across the rear seat. The American took the other ends and pulled them taut, while the small Canadian in the middle, his view suddenly blocked by the screen of black material in front of him, slid down in his seat and peeked beneath the knitting in order to keep his beaker in view.

Still a little short? suggested the American.

Although commonly known as Wild Bill, the American was referred to as Big Bill on the various joint committees run by the subordinates of the three men, to distinguish him from the Canadian, who was half his size and had the same first name, and who was consequently known as Little Bill. The small Canadian, in his quiet intrepid way, being considered as wild as anyone.

Rumpled white linen suits and dented Panama hats eccentrically cocked at odd angles.

Big Bill. Little Bill. Ming.

And in Washington and Ottawa and London, mysterious identical memos in the hands of their staffs stating cryptically that the chief would be in the company of the other two chiefs for the next forty hours or so, strictly out of touch on a secret mission of great importance, destination and purpose unknown.

Apparently Ming agreed with Big Bill about the length of his knitted material. He nodded without expression and went back to work with his knitting needles. Little Bill removed a chilled long-stemmed glass from an ice bucket, gave a last stir to the contents of his beaker and poured. He added a twist of lemon peel, then sipped judiciously.

Delicious, he murmured, immediately taking a much deeper drink so that none of the martini would spill.

For some minutes the three men sat once more in silence as the automobile sped across the barren wastelands, the stillness inside touched only by the hum of the automobile engine and the rhythmic clicking of Ming's knitting needles. Again it was Ming who interrupted their musings. Briefly he laid aside his handiwork and fitted a Turkish cigarette of strong black tobacco into a cigarette holder. Without lighting the cigarette he sucked vigorously on the mouthpiece of the holder three or four times, then stuffed the still-new cigarette into an ashtray on his armrest. Sitting very erect, he looked out the window to his right and surveyed the empty lunar landscape. They were now not far from the secret destination that had caused so much speculation in their respective capitals, a tiny Indian pueblo, or village, where they would meet the chief medicine man of the Hopi tribe.

What really might make him do it? asked Ming, as much to himself as to anyone else. Surely not patriotism, our cause isn't his. And not these illegalities we have on him, they're not enough of an inducement. Why would a man leave this peace and quiet to go halfway around the world and face the possibility of being killed? The war seems so far away here, it's almost as if it didn't exist.

Adventure? murmured Little Bill, sipping from his glass. From what your people in Cairo imply, he seems to be the kind of man who might be finding life in these deserted parts a bit too quiet by now, a bit too peaceful. After all, it's been about seven years since he came out here.

There's that certainly, agreed Big Bill. As for his illegal status and the dealings he had when he first entered the country, you're right that they amount to nothing, not even an opening card. A man like that could disappear whenever he wanted, just about anyplace he wanted, and no one would be able to trace him. Those are commonplace skills to him. No, if he does agree to go, I think it will be out of curiosity.

But not over Rommel, said Ming. That kind of concern, I suspect, would have no meaning to him at all.

Is the file handy?

Here, said Little Bill, retrieving a folder from the stack of confidential reading material they had brought with them to pass the hours on the flight from Washington. On the tab of the file the real name of the Hopi medicine man was typed in purple letters.

O'SULLIVAN BEARE, J.E.C.K.K.B. (JUNIOR, BUT NEVER so KNOWN)

Little Bill opened the file on his lap. He sipped his martini and peered at the first page.

What was it you wanted to review?

Nothing in particular. Just run through some of the basic facts, if you would.

Little Bill began to read.

Joseph Enda Columbkille Kieran Kevin Brendan O'SULLIVAN BEARE.

Subject was born in the Aran Islands and is commonly known as Joe. No formal education. His Christian names all represent saints who were originally from his island, which is tiny and windswept and rainy and has produced more saints and drunkards, per capita, than any other area in Christendom.

Subject grew up speaking Gaelic and worked as a boy on his father's fishing boat. He is the youngest of a large brood of brothers, only one of whom is ever known to have distinguished himself, the next to the last and the closest in age to the Subject. This brother dropped the appendage Beare and was known simply as Columbkille O'Sullivan, or occasionally as Their Colly in the vulgar press, where he attained a brief notoriety as a loutish drunken layabout during the First Battle of Champagne, the Great War, 1914–1918.

Now there's a name from our salad days, mused Little Bill. Although in my unit, we always called him Our Colly then.

And in mine, added Big Bill. Your archivist, he said to Ming, would seem to have some kind of historical bent.

Ming said nothing, his knitting needles clicking methodically. Little Bill smiled and read on.

Subject joined the Easter Rebellion in 1916, at the age of sixteen, and managed to escape from the Dublin post office when it fell. Went into hiding and fought alone until trapped, when he managed to escape again, this time disguised as a Poor Clare nun on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. In Jerusalem, through a ruse and another disguise, the Subject took up residence in the Home for Crimean War Heroes, a local British charity. There, on behalf of a grateful nation, he was awarded the standard prize of honor for all heroes who survived the Crimean War — a used khaki blanket. The Subject has carried this blanket with him ever since as a kind of memento.

Little Bill smiled.

A kind of memento? he murmured.

Big Bill cleared his throat as Ming's knitting needles clicked quietly. Little Bill sipped from his glass and read on.

Soon after arriving in Jerusalem, the Subject met Stern and went to work for him, running guns into Palestine.

Another initial acquaintance in Jerusalem was an American woman, Maud. The Subject lived with her for some months and a son was bom of the union in Jericho, while the Subject was away on one of his frequent trips for Stern. The American woman subsequently left Palestine with the baby, abandoning the Subject, who broke with Stern thereafter, blaming Stern for what had happened.

The Subject then took part in founding what came to be known as the Great Jerusalem Poker Game, a blasphemous game of chance that lasted for a full twelve years, or until 1933, when President Roosevelt announced a New Deal for the common man in the United States. The Subject then left Jerusalem and the Middle East but not before there was a complete reconciliation with Stern, initiated by Stern and welcomed by the Subject.

Since that time the Subject is known to have kept in touch with Stern, at least on an irregular basis. There is also evidence that he has sent money to Stern over the years, probably an arrangement whereby the Subject could provide funds to the American woman, Maud, without her being aware of their true source.

In 1934, the Subject crossed into the United States from Canada, in disguise once again, using forged papers. After spending a brief period of time in Brooklyn, organizing an illegal business, he traveled west and ended up on the Hopi reservation, where he became chief medicine man of the tribe. When entranced by firelight he is said to mutter in Gaelic, which his untutored parishioners take to be some mysterious tongue of the Great Spirit.

What kind of illegal business in Brooklyn? asked Ming.

Garbage, replied Little Bill. At least that's what it says here, but what's it supposed to mean?

Sometimes, explained Big Bill, the garbage or carting businesses in New York are controlled by mobsters.

Ming looked mystified.

You mean to say there's money in garbage in Brooklyn?

It's possible.

Money in dustbins, mused Ming. How very odd indeed. Even though you Americans are our cousins, it does seem you've been strangely affected by these wild dreams of the promise to be found in the New World.

***

Well that brings us up to date, said Big Bill. What do you think?

Good man to have in a scrape, commented Little Bill. Resourceful, independent, capable of thinking on his feet. And above all, experienced. The disguises and so forth. I like that.

Knows his own mind, added Ming. But with no use for politics, left that behind long ago. Twelve years playing poker in Jerusalem, only to give it all up because Roosevelt happens to announce a New Deal on the other side of the world? A romantic, an idealist. Yet right after that there's this dustbin episode in Brooklyn. Mobsters, you say. So a romantic with a twist, an idealist with a touch of cynicism. There are contradictions here, conflicts in the man's makeup. And then after that we have seven years out in this desert as a recluse, a hermit totally cut off from his own kind. But what is his own kind? That's the point.

On the face of it, there's no way to know.

Strictly his own man though, concluded Ming, and I like that. I'm just not sure how we can appeal to him.

Nor am I, said Big Bill. But I do think our important card, perhaps our only card, is his feeling for this man Stern. The curiosity he may have about Stern, what has happened to Stern and why. It's not that Stern might be secretly working for the Germans when he appears to be working for us. We know Stern deals with everybody, that's his value. And our Hopi medicine man may no longer care about our side and their side, but I think he may care about Stern's dozen sides. Why Stern is doing whatever it is he's really doing. I suspect an unusual bond still exists between the two of them, a unique bond even, despite the years that have passed since they've seen one another. And that might cause him to go, for his own reasons. We'll just have to explore it when we sit down with him. Get him to talk about Stern and see where it leads.

And let's not forget the American woman, added Little Bill. I've found it's best never to overlook the woman in a case.

Big Bill tipped his head.

Is that so?

Little Bill smiled.

Quite. Now let's just peruse the facts. Our man on the Hopi mesa that lies ahead was quite a remarkable revolutionary once, and although the romanticism may have worn a bit thin since then, or become a mite twisted as you call it, we have to consider what the Middle East must have meant to him once. A young Irish lad suddenly cast into the Holy Land and living in mythical places with names like Jericho and Jerusalem? It must have been pure magic for him after growing up on a deathly poor little rainy island in the Atlantic. The sun and the desert and Maud? Love in the Holy City? A son born in Jericho? Dreams come from the likes of that.

Ming, intent on his knitting, glanced sideways at the ice-cold martini perched on his friend's knee, the delicate stem of the glass lightly held between Little Bill's thumb and forefinger.

You're a romantic yourself, he said dryly. With a twist, of course.

Of course, agreed Little Bill, smiling. Then too, there's the fact that our Joe is still in the desert. Or once more in the desert, which should tell us something.

But what? murmured Ming, as much to himself as to anyone else.

So when you put it all together, continued Little Bill, it wouldn't surprise me if our Hopi medicine man turned out to be willing to leave the safety of his kiva for a journey halfway around the world. There's Maud and there's also his mysterious friend, the enigmatic Stern. . A journey into his own past, perhaps?

He was a mere youth when he gave up on war and revolution, said Ming. That was twenty years ago and it's been almost that long since he's seen the woman. Men change their ways with time.

Or grow in their ways? said Little Bill. Just possibly his romanticism is incurable, despite two decades of this or that. Who's to know what to expect from an Irish-Hopi?

Ming nodded and held up his knitting. The three men stretched the black shawl across the rear seat. Big Bill read the tape measure.

Just right, he said. I'm told the Hopi take ceremonies very seriously.

Ming put his knitting needles away and Little Bill busied himself clipping the loose ends off the shawl with a small pair of scissors. On the horizon ahead several puffs of smoke had appeared. Ming pointed.

The Hopi signal corps announcing our arrival?

He fitted another strong Turkish cigarette into his holder and inhaled deeply three or four times, then crushed the unlit cigarette in the ashtray that was already full.

But this is preposterous, he suddenly roared. An utterly absurd situation. Leaving our three services to dither among themselves while we fly all the way out here for this?

Big Bill laughed.

Mostly it was an excuse to get you away and give you a feeling for the size and scope of our continent, your new ally.

Large, muttered Ming. But all the same, you two should be much too busy for this sort of thing.

We are, replied Big Bill. Still, it seemed only appropriate that the three of us, just once, should have the opportunity to recruit an agent together. Just once, as a matter of ritual.

A unique moment in the history of the great democracies, murmured Little Bill. If the Germans should win, it will all be over, all of it, because there's a streak in man that simply can't abide what freedom requires. So it does seem appropriate for the three of us to mark the moment in our little way. . And to hope.

Ming turned and gazed at the two of them.

All of that's true, I daresay, and I'd be the last man to say there's no meaning in rituals. But what could anyone make of this, when you look at it? The chiefs of our three secret intelligence services, at a moment like this in the history of the West, contemplating Hopi smoke signals at sundown? It's a ritual all right, but it's also a piece of secret intelligence I don't intend to report to anyone at home, and certainly not to Winston.

Little Bill smiled.

Then I will, he said at once. He'd love it.

Ming looked out the window and lapsed into silence.

Yes, he murmured after a time, that's true, Winston would love it. And that may be one of the quieter differences between our side and theirs.

***

Darkness was rising from the wastelands by the time the automobile left the road and slowly began to climb a stretch of hard-baked desert, heading now toward a huge lone mesa that soared above them in the twilight, the pink and purple hues of its lower reaches giving way to sheer golden cliffs in the sky. At last the automobile glided to a stop and the driver switched the headlights off and on three times. The three men stepped outside and gazed up at the awesome cliffs of gold.

Sunset and the myth of the Seven Lost Cities of Cibola, murmured Little Bill. The conquistadores must have kept their eyes on the ground. No wonder they were never able to sort out the dreams and realities of the New World.

Big Bill cleared his throat. No more than ten yards away a silent Indian was standing on one leg, his other leg drawn up beneath him in the timeless pose of a watchman in the wilds, his somber presence as immutable as the vast monoliths soaring majestically above the wastes. The Indian showed no sign of recognition, no sign of even being aware of their presence. He seemed to be as alone out there as he had always been, mysteriously rooted to some secret spot of sand and stone assigned to him at the very dawn of creation. He stood like that for some moments and then his eyes abruptly flickered and he raised his head toward the mesa, as if hearing a whisper descending from the massive walls of gold. The three men followed his gaze upward but heard nothing, not even a touch of wind that might have been caressing the towering dream above them.

The Indian turned and walked away. They followed him a short distance and came upon three burros standing behind a boulder, the creatures as immobile in their solitude as the Indian had been before them.

Preposterous, muttered Ming.

The three of them mounted the burros and the ascent began up a path cut into the face of the cliff, led by the Indian on foot. Higher and higher they climbed, the twisting ledge often no more than a few feet wide, the drop to the side falling off hundreds of feet to the desert below. As they worked their way upward the golden sheen of the rocks receded and the dark vistas beneath them spread out with ever greater mystery, until by the time they reached the summit of the mesa the faint glow on the horizon, the last of the dying sun, had left but a shadowy dimness to the air.

They slid to the ground amidst low adobe shapes built one on top of another, in what appeared to be the central courtyard of the pueblo. While they were dusting themselves off and straightening their clothes, their Indian guide drifted away with the burros. There was no sign of life anywhere in the village.

Not exactly what you'd call being piped aboard, whispered Ming. Is it possible we've come several hundred years too late?

They may all be at vespers, whispered Little Bill. In a setting such as this, a huggermugger at sundown would definitely seem to be in order.

But why are we all whispering? whispered Big Bill.

He squinted through the darkness and pointed.

Isn't that the kiva over there?

In the center of the courtyard a mound of fitted stones rose four or five feet above the surface of the ground, what appeared to be the roof of an underground chamber. Protruding from an opening in the top of the mound was the end of a ladder. They climbed up to the ladder and lowered themselves, one by one, down through the opening into the interior of the mound.

The underground vault they had entered was round and spacious with smooth walls of stone. In the middle of the chamber stood a low unadorned altar, and in front of the altar a lone Indian sat crosslegged on the ground, cloaked in a blanket. The chamber was roughly divided in half, the semicircle where the Indian sat having a lower floor level than the side where they had descended and now found themselves standing awkwardly, their disheveled linen suits filthy from the climb up the face of the cliff, their Panama hats bashed and askew. Here and there torches hissed on the walls, casting uneasy shadows.

The Indian watched them impassively, his dark skin deeply etched with lines. His hair was long and greasy, what little of it showed beneath a thick wool hat squashed down to his ears, a hat that might have been bright red once but was now badly faded by time and the elements. Although crudely woven by hand, the hat didn't seem to be of local manufacture. Instead it gave every appearance of being the product of some hovel-industry in the Old World, the meager handiwork of an aging peasant laboring in perpetual rain and twilight. In Ireland, perhaps.

The impression given by the hat was vaguely disquieting to the three visitors. Peaked front and back and pulled down over the Indian's head at a raffish angle, it suggested nothing so much as the shoddy costume of an itinerant frontier trickster eager to unload worthless bottles of some all-purpose health tonic, fortified with gin and laudanum, in exchange for valuable furs.

As for the Indian's outer garment, the threadbare khaki blanket covering him from neck to ankle, it was so worn and tattered it looked like a campaign relic from another century, and indeed, a legend stamped on its edge stated that it had originally been issued for use among Her Majesty's forces in the Crimea, 1854. Of course the blanket was immediately recognizable to the three men, having been prominently mentioned in their intelligence files as a souvenir from the Home for Crimean War Heroes in Jerusalem.

As soon as they were off the ladder and standing together, the Indian made a gesture commanding silence. Another gesture and the three of them were sitting in a row facing him and the altar, higher than he was both because he was such a small man and because of the lower level of the floor on his side of the chamber. They watched him as he reached under his blanket and brought out something in a closed fist. Solemnly the Indian thrust his fist in the air and muttered a guttural incantation, then dropped his fist and moved it sideways with a tossing motion.

From up to down. From left to right. The Indian was throwing cornmeal at them, sprinkling them with cornmeal. And as he did so, strangely, he seemed to be making the sign of the cross in the air.

His face still stern, the Indian reached under his blanket again and this time brought out a flat papery corn husk, together with a handful of rough homegrown tobacco. Deftly he rolled a thick cigarette, struck a wooden match on the sole of his bare foot and put the flame to the end of the cigarette, which flared briefly. The Indian puffed several times and handed the loose cigarette over to his three visitors, who drew on it in turn, coughing and sputtering. The Indian nodded and took the cigarette back. Abruptly he smiled, speaking in a soft Irish voice.

. . takes getting used to, I guess, like life and a lot of things. And that business you've probably heard about Indians using peacepipes by way of welcome, well, it's strictly that. The business. The Hopi have always smoked their tobacco in what we'd call cigarettes. And speaking of myths, the Hopi view of creation is that the first thing ever said by anyone in the universe was simply this. Why am I here?

The Indian laughed.

. . makes sense, you say? Well you're right about that, questions generally do. They have just a lovely way of being straightforward and to the point, I know it. It's only when we try to come up with answers that we lose our way and wander, like the stars overhead. For the stars do that, don't they? Forgetting what we've been told, I mean, isn't that surely the way the heavens look? Astray and incomprehensible?

***

. . astray, muttered the Indian, and that's the truth of it. Well according to the Hopi myth of creation, those were the very first words ever spoken in the universe. Why am I here? And just maybe the longer we live, the more we feel the sense of them.

Nor do I need to tell you that this first and most basic query was spoken by a woman, the ancestress, don't you know. For the Hopi believe the first life in the void was a woman's, which also makes sense.

No strutting males for them in the beginning, because no life ever comes from us, only the living and the observing of it. Descent among the Hopi remains traditional and matrilineal, as I'm told it does in some other old societies.

Whereas my bare feet aren't poking out this way because I'm a savage, but only to show humility. The same reason I'm expected to sit in the lower half of the circle of life down here in the kiva. Among the Hopi, the more powerful you are the more humble. But I guess that's always the true way anywhere.

So to bring you rapidly up to date then, still following the Hopi view of the matter, this ancestress went on to create twins as the next step, males this time for balance, and what do you suppose were the very first words that popped into the heads of those two fellows?

That's right, just what you'd expect, the same as hers but with that added yearning for identity so common to our sex. Why are we here, certainly, but quickly right on top of that the other card in the main male riddle, the question that's always there worrying us to the grave, Who are we anyway?

So the basic human enigmas seem to dip well back in time and a sound answer on the spot has always been tricky stuff, which brings me around to us. That advance party of yours that climbed up here a couple of weeks ago didn't really say much about who you'd be when you turned up, and moreover, why you'd be turning up in the first place. So I wonder if one of you might have some thoughts on the matter?

Why we're here together, I mean?

The Indian reached under his blanket and scratched himself.

Feel free to consult among yourselves, he said. I'll just retire inside my head and you can give me a whoop whenever you're ready.

The Indian closed his eyes and began to snore. His three visitors exchanged glances and one of them cleared his throat. Instantly the Indian's eyes flew open.

How's that? What did you say?

We weren't sure how to address you, answered one of the men.

Oh is that all. Well as the wind carries you, is the answer. The Hopi are great believers in echoes. The way they hear it, everything in the universe is a sound coursing through everything else. So much so that most of my job as the resident shaman here is listening, no more. Straining to hear those echoes, don't you know. But as for me, well. . why don't you call me Joe?

Fine, said one of the men.

The Indian nodded, smiling.

Yes, simple but fine. And you needn't bother to run out those cover names you must have packed along for yourselves, Gaspar and Balthazar and Melchior, or whatever strange ring the exotic names may have.

Since we're way out here in a desert of the West, I'll just put you down as the Three Wise Men from the East, traditional figures that a man can comprehend and sense, if not know. So tell me, have you turned up bearing those merry gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh, as you are said to do in the traditional tales?

We can provide gold, answered one of the men.

And I'm sure that's so, but unfortunately I don't have any use for it. What a medicine man needs is medicine, the kind that helps the soul. Now then, with everybody's credentials established, suppose we get down to the particulars of this era. You've made a long journey way out here because you must want me to do something for you. Where, I wonder?

In the Middle East.

Ah yes, I've heard of it. Said to be as dry as here but better-known to history. Where in the Middle East, I wonder?

Cairo.

Ah yes, I've heard of that too. It's in the ancient land of the pharaohs, said to be a place for pyramids and mummies and lost secrets in general. Known far and wide for its great river of life, and also for those steamy fleshpots that always seem to pop up along any river of life. But I don't know Cairo at all. I've never even been there. And that has to mean you need an outsider to poke around and look for something, either in the fleshpots or in a pyramid or two. But look for what, I wonder? A lost secret perhaps? A wandering pharaoh? A mummy who refuses to take you to his leader?. . Just what might it be you want me to find, directly?

A person. A man.

Joe reached under his blanket and scratched. His face was thoughtful.

The one of you is American, another British, and the third speaks somewhere in between. Canadian?

Yes.

Then it's pretty much of a high-level international delegation I'm facing, which isn't my level at all, and that means one of two things. Either I know this man and you don't, or you know him and I don't. Which is it?

You know him. We're only acquainted with him through the files, and through others.

Joe stroked his chin.

I could grow a beard again. Indians don't do with beards and it hurts to pluck out your whiskers one at a time. But there's another angle. Did any of you know that Hopi means peace? Well it does, and although there aren't many of us left, that's what we are, the people of Peace. Our religion forbids us to harm anyone, to molest anyone, to kill anyone. We just can't do it and that's the shape of our sky, and also why we're so few. The Navajo are fierce and all around us and they've been plucking us off for years. So what do you say to that?

We wouldn't ask you to do anything that's against your beliefs, said one of the men.

I know it, no one ever does. It's just that others have a way of shifting your beliefs around a bit to make themselves more comfortable with them.

Joe pushed a forefinger into the earth at his feet.

Well I think it's time we had a name here. Who is it you're looking for?

Stern.

Joe's face grew serious. For several long minutes he gazed at his finger in the earth and said nothing.

When he finally looked up there was a deep sadness in his eyes.

I knew that would be it. The moment those men arrived here a couple of weeks ago, all secrecy and mystery, I knew it was the beginning of something that would lead to Stern. All they said was that I was going to have some important government visitors, but I knew. He's not missing, though, is he? That isn't what you meant by finding him?

No.

No, I didn't think so. Your problem is that Stern knows a thing or two, and you're not sure what.

Something like that.

Well what exactly? He's working for you, I'd imagine, and he's also working for the other side. But you always thought he was really working for you in the end, and now all at once you're not so sure. Is that it?

Yes.

And naturally it's important that you know. How important?

Very. It's crucial.

Crucial? Stern? You're not exaggerating?

No, not at all. We can't emphasize it strongly enough.

Joe looked from one face to another and the three men somberly returned his gaze.

I see, said Joe. Crucial, then. And yet Stern used to be known as a petty gunrunner with a morphine habit, so how could it be that such a nobody as him is suddenly upsetting the war in the Middle East? Or should I remind myself that almost everyone who has ever been important in history was nobody to begin with, and that maybe the most important ones of all always stay that way?. . Invisible, don't you know.

Like a voice speaking the truth.

Joe's gaze drifted off into the distance. He stirred, scratched the side of his face.

Of course anyone who knows Stern at all would never think of him as a petty gunrunner with a morphine habit. That's just the way he might appear from a distance. Up close there's a whole secret world to Stern and one way or another he's always been in my life, just there, a big shambling bear of a man with a mysterious smile and an awkward way of moving sometimes, a bit of clumsiness about him from all the batterings through the years, and maybe even no shape to him you might say. . or all shapes to him.

That's another way to put it. But just substantial and bulky and there with his soft voice and his kind touch and that gentle way he has with people. Helping them, that's what he does. Stern has this quiet way of helping people when they don't even know it, when they don't even suspect what he's doing, and he never says a word about it himself. Years can go by and maybe just by chance you happen to come across something he did once. Changed a life. Saved someone's life. Sure. . And as often as not a stranger's.

I remember an incident like that from years ago. Somebody else told me about it, not him of course, not the woman involved either. It was a dreadful rainy afternoon by the Bosporus and the light was dying and a desperate woman was standing by a railing getting ready to die herself, to throw herself in the water, and along came this big awkward man shuffling out of the rain, a stranger, Stern, and he went up and stood beside the woman at the railing and gazed down at the dark swirling currents with her, and he began to talk in that honest halting way he has, just nothing but the truth, and some time went by and pretty soon he'd talked her right back into life. . One little incident a long time ago. Just one that I happen to know about.

Yes. And I know there's no knowledge without memory, and certainly I remember every twist and turn of my times with Stern as clearly now as when they happened. It was right after the First World War when we met, in Jerusalem naturally, Stern's beloved myth of a Jerusalem. And I didn't know much of anything then, and Stern took me in and taught me things and I loved him dearly in the beginning, loved him with all my heart. . He can have that effect on you easily enough. His ideals, don't you know.

And then some things happened and I came to hate him with all the passion of a young man who feels betrayed. Because he can have that effect on you too. Those impossible ideals of his again. They can cut you to the heart and shame you maybe.

Stern's ideals. No wonder you're not sure whether he's working for you or not, in the end. Complex, that's what they are. . Unravel them and you just might learn a very great deal.

Well, so some more time passed and my feelings for him changed again as feelings can do with time, as the years and the loss of them weather a man's heart in the same way as the wind and the sun weather his face. And I understood it better by then. The trouble I'd always had with Stern was the trouble I'd always had with myself, and it's just awful how we do that. We're a damnably self-centered bunch, the curse of the race, it is. It's just so hard to learn to feel others even a little bit. To let them stand there in front of you and see them as themselves, rather than as some part of you that you happen to be liking or disliking at the moment. . It was with Stern and through Stern, you see, that I was first exposed to the truly harsh and pitiless winds of life. With him that I first heard the roaring oblivion of the universe in all its terrifying silence.

Joe poked at the earth.

Yes. So what it comes down to is, I've never been able to get Stern out of my life. I've spent years trying to forget him, and I even came halfway around the world to this little corner of peace and nowhere, thinking I was getting away from Stern and all the rest of it. But no matter, no matter at all. He's still right there in front of me as much as he ever was, a shuffling wreck of humanity who's never done anything but lose, just lose is all, one thing after another year after year. . Has none of you ever met him?

No, none of us has.

Makes sense of course, no reason why you should have. You're successful and powerful and it's never been that way for Stern, nor will it be, not like that. But I can tell you your files don't begin to catch the feeling of the man, especially that gentleness of his. I used to think he was out of place in what he was doing, but maybe not and who's to say where people belong. As Stern himself used to put it, our souls are always our own to make of what we will. . What's that?

Excuse me? said one of the men.

No, pay no mind. It's someone back in the pueblo, I'll see to it later.

Joe shook his head.

So it's Stern again, is it? Twenty years later and here I am still looking into the mirror and trying to make out the shadows, trying to decipher those whispers in the wind. Trying, something with a little clarity to it, something at least. . Stern. Sure.

Once more there was silence in the kiva as Joe gazed at the earth, lost in thought. His three visitors waited. Before he spoke again he reached under his blanket and scattered cornmeal in front of them.

The last time I saw him was just before I left Jerusalem, right at the end of my twelve years of poker.

Winter it was and snowing, and Stern was wearing those dreadful old shoes of his that I've never been able to forget, the ones he had on in Smyrna when we were there during the massacres in '22. How many hundreds of miles had he walked in those shoes to get to that hell of fires and screams and death in Smyrna? How many years and how many stumblings to get to that, God help us?

Well it was more than a decade later when I saw him the last time, and it was in Jerusalem. He got in touch with me and we met in a filthy Arab coffee house where we used to go in the old days, in the Old City it was. A cold and empty place, bare and cheerless, a barren little cave where the two of us used to huddle over a candle late at night, talking and drinking wretched Arab cognac. And it was snowing when he came shuffling in that night', a stumbling ruin of a man even worse off than I'd remembered. And he smiled that mysterious smile of his and said how good it was to see me again, and I took one look at him and I wanted to scream, that's all, just scream those questions that have the sad sad answers. . How does it happen, Stern? How does a man get to look like you? What kind of a hell does he live in? And for what? What?

But I didn't scream, not then I didn't. Instead I pulled out a roll of money because I happened to have money then, and I put it down on the table next to his hand. That's always the easiest way to deal with people. I mean there he was in front of me after all those years when I hadn't seen him, since Smyrna really, just there in his shuffling beaten way with all he owned on his back, still wearing those same Godawful shoes, a lifetime of devotion with nothing to show for it but still trying to smile in a way that would break your heart, poor as the night is long and still trying, and with what going for him, I ask you?

What, for God's sake?

The same as always. Dreams is all. He still had those and I suppose we all did once. I know I did.

But the thing about Stern was, you always knew he'd never stop dreaming. No matter how futile it was, no matter how it destroyed him, he'd go right on with his hopeless dreams. Just hopeless, there was no reasoning with him at all.

A great peaceful new nation in the Middle East? Moslems and Christians and Jews all living together in a great new nation with Jerusalem as its capital? All these pathetic specimens of a mad race living in peace in Stern's beloved myth of a Jerusalem? Everybody's Holy City?

No hope in that. No hope ever. No hope in Jerusalem for Stern's dream, no hope there or anywhere under the sun. But Stern went on believing despite what people are, and he knows what they are, more than most of us, he knows. Yet he insists on staggering along, shooting a little morphine into his blood at dawn to get himself through another coming of the light, as he used to call it.

So yes, we had times together, Stern and I did, and they were some of the best and the worst I've ever known. Because when you dream the way Stern does, when you look that high, it also means you have to look the other way, right down into the blackest of the black. And sometimes you slip, it has to happen sometimes. And when you begin to fall it's as deep as forever and there's no end to the darkness at all, by God. .

Joe broke off. He pointed to a small shallow pit in the earth beside the altar.

See that? Here in the kiva it represents the exit from the previous world the Hopi lived in. And the ladder-opening up there represents the entrance to the world yet to come. For the Hopi, there's only one entrance and one exit in this sacred chamber they call a kiva, which is to say in life. Or as they put it in one of their sayings, there's light in the world because the sun completes its circular journey at night, traveling from west to east through the underworld.

Joe frowned.

It's sad to say, but it seems we can't have light without darkness. It seems we can't stretch our souls in the sun without first being lost in the night and knowing terrible anguish. And I suppose it may have to do with that circular journey of the sun and with the nature of the sun wheel, which has always been our symbol for life and hope, the most ancient one of all. And a good symbol it is and a true one, but a wheel does go round and it does have spokes, and spokes on a sun wheel make crosses. And what with sun wheels today in their ancient form as swastikas, that cross spinning in the deep becomes as complex and contradictory as man himself. Death and life in the very same symbol, and one no less real than the other.

Joe rubbed the earth in front of him, feeling it, stroking it.

Will you do it, then? asked one of the men.

Do what?

Go to Cairo. Accept the Stern assignment.

Joe looked up. He smiled.

I would prefer not to, as a scribbling man once said.

Abruptly, then, Joe's smile was gone and his mood changed. A haunting somberness came over him and his voice was suddenly very quiet, very soft in the stillness.

Ah, but is that all you're asking? Just for a moment sitting up here in the sky as we are, underground as we are, I thought you might have had something difficult in mind. But now I see all you want is the truth about Stern and his strange doings in the bazaars and deserts of that mythical place he calls his home, that sandy stretch of crossroads and history where man has been dreaming and killing himself since ever he was around. . Just there in the desert sea is all, the truth about Stern and the tides.

A shudder passed through Joe's thin shoulders and he wrapped his arms around himself, under the blanket, trying to control it.

But Stern sits inside the Sphinx, he whispered, didn't you know that? His life is made up of the ancient enigmas of those ancient places, and he peers out from the Sphinx across the nighttide deserts of life, and what he sees is what the rest of us don't want to see. So you have to be careful when you look into Stern's eyes. You have to be careful because there are fearful things to be seen there. . the world and yourself and a kind of madness, a kind of utterly futile hope without end.

Joe stared at the earth in front of him.

Stern, you say. A man as unjustified and lonely as other men, a man who has never known the secret adventures of order. And all you want is for me to look into his eyes and tell you what's there.

Sadly, Joe smiled.

Fancy. . Only that.

***

Another evening, another sunset, and Joe sat alone at the edge of a cliff on top of the mesa, watching the light die. He had spent the last days visiting each of the homes in the pueblo, and that night there was to be a special ceremony in the underground kiva, a solemn gathering of the elders of the various clans to honor his departure.

Of course I don't have to go, he thought, and as scared as I am, why should I? The New World's big and I could just go anywhere and nobody would ever have to know.

And who wants the eternal grief that's over there anyway? Who wants that desert? They dream and they make up our religions and they spin our tales of a Thousand and One Nights, and that's all just fine and lovely so long as you keep your distance from the madness and don't walk in those dreams and live in those tales and get yourself lost forever.

Oh the three of them were clever all right, passing themselves off as the Three Fates and getting me to go on and on about Stern, trying to get me to persuade myself I ought to go back there. And Maudie even, hinting at that too. The Three Fates just coming to call as clever as could be.

But I know what I'd run into over there. They've always been at each other's throats and always will be.

Bloody Greeks and Persians and Jews and Arabs and Turks and Crusaders, there's no end to it. And the odd bloated Mameluke floating down the Nile and the odd mad Mongolian whipping his horse into a frenzy, barbarians on their way in as usual to mix it up with assorted Assyrian charioteers and crazed Babylonians intent on the stars, while all the while the Chaldeans are sweeping in on the flanks and the Medes are sweeping out, and the Phoenicians are counting their money and the Egyptians are counting their gods, maybe the high priests of both of them getting together every millennium or so, to compare notes and see if either of them has come up with more of one than the other.

Talk about echoes. Talk about confusion and chaos. If there have been forty thousand prophets since the beginning of time, as rumored, surely most of them have spent their lives careening through those very wastes, shaking their fists and screeching their truths and clamoring on to their very last breaths right there.

Here it is, they shout. The one true God and the one true path at last, and just by chance that one true path happens to be the path where I've always been walking. So just listen to me, for God's sake. Me.

Listen.

Oh help. Why bother with it at all? Confusion and chaos raising a Tower of Babel, that's what He spotted over there a long time ago. The tower to me, not to anybody else. The tower everybody's always been trying to raise, everybody who's a man anyway. Dreadfully proud of our erections, we are.

Mythical spot all right. The birthplace of religions and man's first heavenly erections, and an eternal torment to the rest of us. Must have a lot to do with the desert, I suppose. Nothing like forty days or forty years tramping around in a desert sun to jumble your brains. Water hard to come by and feverish chills shaking you all night, and nothing to eat in the morning but a handful of locusts left over from last night's supper. Do that for a while and how can you help but begin to see things and hear things?

War again over there, I'm told? Most amazing piece of news since the last report that barbarians were scaling the heights of Jerusalem.

War in the beautiful wilderness?

Astonishing news, that's what. Or as Stern used to say, Good morning.

Joe tugged his faded red wool hat down Over his ears and pulled his new black shawl, a gift from his three visitors, more tightly around his thin shoulders. It was cold with the sun setting, cold with the coming of the night in the desert.

A small girl was standing some yards away, watching him. Joe made a sign and she came over and stood beside him, so young she had never known another medicine man in the pueblo. He wrapped his shawl around her against the cold and took her tiny hand and held it.

The little girl said nothing and neither did Joe. When the sun had sunk below the horizon she slipped away, still wearing the shawl, a gift he had made to her. Joe gazed after her as she disappeared in the shadows. He didn't think she had seen them but there were tears in his eyes. He didn't know why.

Ah well, he thought, we do what we can. It makes little difference but we have to do it anyway.

Stern's words, he suddenly realized. Stern's very own words spoken to him long ago, whispered now in the shadows in another time and place altogether.

Strange, he thought. Time is.

***

. . and just as suddenly he was with Stern and it was a night twenty years ago in a city once called Smyrna, once long ago in the century before the age of genocide, before the monstrous massacres had come swirling out of Asia Minor to descend on Symrna while Stern and Joe were there. . the massacres ignored then by most of the world but not by everyone, and not by Hitler, who had triumphantly recalled them only days before his armies invaded Poland to begin the Second World War.

. Who after all speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians? The world believes in success alone.

. . a night, once, in a hell of smoke and fires and screams, Joe lying wounded on a quay and Stern standing over him and everywhere the dead and the dying huddling together, heaped near the sea while the city burned. . while beside Joe, moaning softly, an abandoned little Armenian girl lay ripped and torn and dying in unspeakable pain.

. . Joe unable to touch the knife by his hand and shrieking at Stern in his anger, his pain. . yelling that Stern just wasn't as much in charge as he wanted people to believe, that he could do his own butchering if he wanted to play the great visionary who knew all the answers, the great hero dedicated to a cause of a kingdom come.

. . Stern staring down with eyes that burned in blackness, Stern wild with anguish and violently shaking as he clutched the knife and buried his hand in the little girl's hair and pulled back her head, the tiny throat so white and bare.

. . the wet knife clattering on the cobblestones and Joe not daring to look up then, not wanting to see Stern's eyes then. . a night twenty years ago and forever and but a prelude to the century, but a shadow of the far deeper descent into darkness that was yet to come.

***

Joe shuddered. He passed his hand in front of his eyes.

And who will be Stern's witness now? he asked himself. . Who will do that for him, who will look into his eyes? A man with a dream that was just hopeless from the very beginning. A good dream and hopeless, with nothing coming from it ever. .

Joe got to his feet. Of course he already knew how it would end over there, how it would have to end for Stern. And he wasn't going because he felt he owed Stern something, because he didn't feel that way.

But after all these years of Stern trying and failing, someone somewhere did. And now when Stern was going to die, the gift had to be repaid.

Silently the greatly revered shaman of the Hopi walked up the path to the pueblo on top of the mesa, to the underground vault where the elders of the tiny nation sat repeating their guttural chants and birdlike whispers, those mysterious sounds of life and death they had heard since the beginning of time, echoing through all things in the universe.