Imágenes de página
PDF
ePub

He hastily put down the receiver, seized the cord, and gave it so violent a jerk that one strand came away from its terminal screw. He smiled.

"Regrettable violence; but I'm not prepared to talk to the Regent yet. Rawlinson, will you get this defective instrument put right?"

I grinned, and scribbled a note to the office superintendent.

"Now for the cracking of this nut," His Excellency recommenced, and we began systematically to consider each possible alternative. What these were, and how some could be dismissed while others lingered, the reader of these pages can appreciate unaided. The common ground that emerged was (first) that the real King must be reinstated, but (second) that the extent to which T'other Boy had been accepted, and the character of the Regent, made such reinstatement extremely delicate.

Braithwaite was for solving the whole riddle before we produced the real Jasim at all, and certainly we were still moving in darkness the most profound when it came to explaining how one boy can turn into two. But however, and by whomever, this amazing trick had been worked, the first thing was to restore the essentially right position. How? We considered the obvious straightforward line, which was the open handing over of the right boy and simultaneous discrediting of the wrong. I

tabulated the objections to this as principally three.

1. Jasim's own strong objection to being handed.

2. Effect of such public ex

posure on the Regent, who-habitually infall

ible, impeccable—would be shown to have made a very bad and peculiarly embarrassing mistake.

3. That it would involve a volte-face on our part, since we the doctor, Mackenzie, Braithwaite, and now I myself in formal audience had accepted king No. 2.

His Excellency was disposed to take this last item seriously, and by no means made light of the other two. (I told him of Jasim's protests and tears; he was as fond of the child, nearly, as I and Nancy).

66

"It's not only that we must exactly reverse our attitude, sir," I said, 'an attitude which we took up in spite of our knowledge of the essential fact ; but won't the whole thing, desperately annoying for the Regent and seen through his peculiar vision and following on our recent coldness with him, look rather fishy? The British part, I mean

"You mean he'll think we engineered it?"

"Well, first you and he have a sharp difference of opinion about the King's upbringing. Then you go away, which annoys him. Then exactly while you're away-the King turns up mysteriously at my

house, and is there detained something. Anyhow, we can in secret. Then I congratulate easily put him out again."

[merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]

His Excellency acquiescing, and Braithwaite recrossing his legs with a loud puff, Mr Bottika was admitted. Hat in hand, he was short, slight, Semitically dressed, fair, suave, perfectly confident. After a first indifferent glance, I looked again, then stared, then doubted, then was almost certain. While he shook hands, was introduced, and sat down, I had him. With fairer hair, hat for fez, white teeth for gold, no dark glasses, this was my friend of the drugged soupplate!

an

66

Cutting the usual civilities to a minimum, His Excellency inquired what light he wished to throw upon the remarkable event of yesterday." With extraordinarily annoying simper, Ezra replied that he could throw a very great deal of light, "if it were made easy for him to do so." While he and His Excellency fenced, I scribbled on the back of his note, and handed it to His Excellency, via Braithwaite. "This is the man who tied me up last night." They were creditably unmoved. Ezra, who seemed unanxious to catch my eye, was becoming fluent.

"The events of yesterday, your Excellency, are definitely over,

are they not? His Majesty is safe (I refer, of course, to Mr Rawlinson's visitor at Turadah), and there has been no publicity. Personally, I am returning to England to-morrow

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

"Indeed. Well? "Yes. Now as a British subject, and one specially recommended to your Excellency "-he passed across an expensive envelope, presumably Charmouth's letter,-"I should be very sorry if those responsible for yesterday's incident turned out to be such as would embarrass you, or if, being such, they became too public. The house, of course, at which His Majesty was found, and where he is still concealed

Braithwaite puffed ominously. His Excellency was restive. "May I ask what you are suggesting?" he asked.

Ezra continued to smile. "I am suggesting that, in view of the very special mentality of the Regent, and the tendencies of the local press and other presses, and "-with a most unctuous significance and a look at me" any personal embarrassments there might be, it would be unfortunate if it became public that His Majesty was kidnapped by an Englishman and detained secretly at the house of the Chief Secretary."

"I think, Mr Bottika, that these subtleties belong to a later stage, and may be left to me.

What I must ask you now, since you have volunteered these remarks, is to state everything you know, fully and at once.'

[ocr errors]

No doubt," Braithwaite interposed, "it will agree with what we know."

Ezra was entirely at his ease. He accepted coffee from the

sphinx-like coffee-man, and lit an opulent cigarette.

"Naturally. My only wish was to emphasise the international aspect, but your Excellency does not need me to do that. As to the kidnapping of the King, I did it entirely myself."

This we received in stony silence. He deprecated the outburst which no one made.

"May I begin at the beginning? After two months in this country, which I haven't visited since childhood, I gained the impression that its standards were so low, so far below the enterprise and intelligence of Europe, that one could do almost anything with impunity. (I still think so.) Nothing, except a settled opinion to be taken back to Europe, would have come of this but for three things. The first was that while visiting my family's lands in the Bani Zaid district I noticed a young peasant boy (who happened to be deaf and dumb) with a most extraordinary resemblance to the young King Jasim. Living in a rustic tribal settlement, nobody had noticed it, until I-who had been several times at the palace, and had even given the King a pony-saw it and was amazed. Later events proved that the likeness was not less than I had thought. Secondly, I had been reading-as an antidote to rural life in Nahrain-a lot of the sort of literature which deals with absurd but not quite impossible enterprises; and some of these, and especially

one describing a fantastic but just possible impersonation in royal circles, had rather gone to my head. Thirdly, for special reasons, I wanted (and still want) a lot of money quickly, from some source other than my father.

"The thing was easier than I imagined, once the idea and the chance had come. I brought the deaf and dumb boy to Nukhailah, pretending that his affliction was curable in hospital, kept him concealed while improving his resemblance to the King, watched the King's daily movements, and-far the hardest part-got three reliable assistants. Everything I planned worked to perfection. I disguised myself as a local effendi, and as such collared the King with the greatest ease while he played in the palace garden, gave him chloroform and a bromide, and transferred his clothes to the other boy. We deposited him for the moment in the car waiting ready, and covered him up. Then we unostentatiously left the garden for the road outside with the deaf boy, who was now the King complete to the last detail, wrapped in a big 'abah concealing him and his clothes. A herd of waterbuffaloes

[ocr errors]

"We know the rest," I said. "So that's how the King got into my car? "

"Yes; yours and mine were identical, and they put him in the wrong one. So we lost the whole game by that one slip."

"How did you know," asked Braithwaite, "that the herd would not trample your boy to death?"

"He's been with buffaloes all his life. And anyhow, I did want him knocked down, though preferably not killed. We arranged the mud and bruises and a little blood before they came along. The stampeding was very well done."

A few details apart, the story quickly fell into shape. Ezra answered everything we asked, which didn't need to be much. It was not hard to appreciate his horror at the discovery of the wrong car, his rapid inquiries, his sprint to Turadah ; his loitering outside my house, having arranged the cutting of the palace telephone wires, and his interception of the report sent me from the palace; his agonies of uncertainty as to when the King's presence would become known (which was, in fact, later than he dared to hope); his improvised plan to hold up my car in the afternoon, confident that I should have His Majesty on board en route for home. I had had His Majesty and an escort, he could not have touched us.) The whole affair of my abduction was arranged on the spur of the moment, to prevent publicity and to facilitate getting the King from my house, and the forged letter from Najib Beg the same. But unfortunately, when it came to running the gauntlet of the armed house-guard, he retired baffled. Indeed, from the mo

(If

[ocr errors]

ment when the King was put in the wrong car, his hopes of success were sight. To hear this little perfectly Anglicised Jew calmly discuss his hopes and fears, his plans and tactics, a few hours after tying me up very painfully for a night on a refuse heap (for which he apologised), was an experience as strange as any in the whole episode. As nasty a little piece of work as ever breathed," was Braithwaite's summing-up of Mr Ezra, and I never heard another. The mainspring of everything he did, I thought then and think now, was his contempt for the whole local world of Nahrain, which he felt he could without effort and without danger, which he disliked, easily outwit and exploit.

When pumped dry-and he spoke without any reserve whatever, entirely confident in his British citizenship and in the way he had involved me,-he was escorted outside by Braithwaite, whose sotto voce conversation with His Excellency concerned his detention in the Residency. The Charmouth letter lay unopened.

Ezra's main conception-to get a bogus king accepted at the palace was the real subtlety. It showed how exactly he appreciated and played up to the weak point in the Regent, the impossibility of his ever being mistaken, his rigid obstinacy and dread of ridicule. If the palace, he argued, had once accepted and acclaimed the substituted child, they would stick to him for ever as

far as the outside world went. Therefore, they couldn't stand the public reappearance of the real one; therefore, the resubstitution must be secret and tactful; therefore, it might hope to be abundantly lucrative. There was no flaw in Ezra's scheme, and he was quite able enough to have carried it out in full. Moreover, whatever went wrong at any stage, he felt perfectly safe. He had merely to come to His Excellency, show himself a British subject, and say, What about it ? "

Now, unfortunately, instead of himself in secret triumph bargaining with the Regent through suitable obscure channels for the discreet restoration of Jasim, we had the duty instead. And, of course, he had exactly indicated our chief difficulty, as the next hour's painful discussion established; no power on earth would ever persuade His Highness that the whole thing had not been engineered by us. The nationality of the real author, the position of the receiver (myself!), the well-timed absence of His Excellency, the recent coldness (largely about the King himself and his education), the attitude of British officials since the accident-in the face of all this, it was quite certain that the freakish truth would never, never prevail. We could only be thankful that, as His Majesty had once been dumped on me, I had kept him and kept him quiet. I now telephoned the Turadah police to

« AnteriorContinuar »