Hammond Innes - The Strange Land

‘All right,’ I said, and I got Kavan out to the taxi and bundled him in. The Arab moved towards us from the opposite corner of the street. ‘Le Consulat Britannique,’ I ordered the driver. ‘Vite, vite!’

Kavan caught hold of my arm as the taxi drove off. ‘It’s no good,’ he cried. ‘I won’t go to the Consulate. I won’t go, I tell you.’ He was wrought up to a point of hysteria. ‘Tell him to stop.’ He leaned quickly forward to tap on the glass partition.

But I pulled him back, struggling with him. ‘Don’t be a fool!’ I shouted at him. ‘You wanted to call yourself Wade. Well, now you’ve got to be Wade until we’re out of Tangier. And you won’t get out till we’ve recovered that passport.’

‘There must be some other way. I could slip across the frontier….’ He reached forward to the partition again, but I flung him back into his seat. ‘What are you scared of?’ I demanded, shaking him. I was suddenly furiously angry, fed up with the whole wretched business. ‘Why are you frightened of the Consul? What is it you’ve done?’

‘Nothing. I told you before. I’ve done nothing. Absolutely nothing.’ His voice was trembling. He seemed on the verge of tears he was so wrought up. ‘I promise you. Please. Tell the driver to stop.’

‘No,’ I said, holding him down. ‘I’ve had enough of this.’ My voice sounded hard. ‘We’re going to see the Consul. Either that or you tell me why you’re scared to go there. Did you kill Wade?’

‘No.’ He stared at me, his body shocked rigid. ‘It happened just as I said.’

‘Then what the devil is it you’re scared of? Why did you insist on taking his name? Come on now,’ I added, gripping hold of his arm. ‘If you want any more help from me, you’d better give me the whole story.’

He stared at me, his white, frightened face outlined against the dark leather of the cab. ‘All right,’ he whispered, and his body relaxed under my hand as though a weight had been lifted from him. ‘All right, I’ll tell you.’ He leaned back in his seat as though exhausted. ‘I have told you I am a scientist.’ I nodded. ‘Have you lived here so long in North Africa that you don’t know what that means?’ He leaned quickly forward, his face becoming excited again. ‘It means you have something here — ‘ He tapped his forehead. ‘And because of that your life is not your own any more. It belongs to the State. I am a Czech. If you take me to the Consulate, then I shall be sent back to England, and sooner or later they will get me. Or else life will become so insupportable …’

‘Who will get you?’ I asked.

‘Who? The Communists, of course. The Czech Communists.’

‘But for heaven’s sake!’ I exclaimed. ‘You’re a refugee. You’ve been given political asylum. You were perfectly safe in England.’

‘Safe?’ He laughed. ‘You say that because you are English, because you have never been a refugee! Listen. When I fled to England in 1949, everything was all right. But then, after the Fuchs business, there was a new screening and it was discovered I had been a Communist.’

‘But if you were a Communist — ‘

‘I was not a Communist,’ he declared violently. ‘I have never been a Communist — not in the sense of the word as it is used now. But I joined the Party in 1938, after Munich. A great many of us joined then. It seemed our only hope. And afterwards, when the war was over, I forgot all about it. I didn’t think it mattered after I had fled from Czechoslovakia. I had left my wife to escape the Communists. I thought that was sufficient.’

‘I still don’t see what you’re frightened of,’ I said. ‘Are you trying to tell me that our.people were going to send you back to Czechoslovakia?’

‘No, no, of course not. Oh, God! I knew you wouldn’t understand. The British refused to let me leave the country. That’s why I had to come with Wade in a boat. It isn’t the British I am afraid of. But if I go back there … Listen, please. When I ignored the offers from Prague, they began sending me Party literature as though I were a member, they stopped me in the street, phoned me at the office, sent anonymous letters to the authorities denouncing me as a paid Communist agent. They even sent me letters in code from Prague. Finally they began to threaten. They were going to arrest Karen and my father. They would have been sent to the uranium mines or, worse still, into Russia, to Siberia.’

‘But your wife’s here now,’ I said.

‘I know, I know. But how do I know she is here of her own free will?’ He caught hold of my arm, shaking it excitedly. ‘Please, please, try to understand. If I am sent back to England, it will start all over again. I couldn’t stand it. No man’s nerves could stand it. But here … Wade will disappear and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to connect an obscure doctor at a Mission in the Atlas Mountains with the scientist who is missing in England.’ He was sweating and his face was all puckered up with the urgency of what he was trying to convey. ‘Please. You must help me. There must be some way out of Tangier. There must be some way.’

The taxi was just turning into the rue d’Angleterre. I could see the arched entrance to the Consulate. ‘Maybe there is,’ I said and leaned forward and slid back the glass partition. ‘Drive down to the Zocco Grande,’ I told the driver. I couldn’t very well do anything else. Half of his fears were probably imaginary, but they were real enough to him. The taxi turned the corner by the entrance to the Consulate and drove on down the hill, and he was suddenly crying. Tears of relief were welling out of his eyes. ‘Thank you,’ he breathed. ‘Thank you.’

Poor devil! I leaned back in my seat, thinking back over the events of the past twenty-four hours. If I hadn’t pulled him out of the sea … But I had and now he was my responsibility. Somehow I’d got to get him out of the International Zone and into Morocco. It was a problem — the sort of problem that required inside knowledge of the working of Tangier. There had been a time …

I glanced at my watch. It was ten past three. Unless they had altered the flight schedules, we could still be at the airport in time to meet the Paris-Casablanca plane. I hesitated, wondering whether Vareau was still a clerk at the airport. Once, a long time back, I had got a man out that way, and his papers had lacked the necessary entry stamp. It was worth trying. ‘We’ll get another taxi in the Zocco Grande,’ I said, more to myself than to him. ‘And we’ll have to hurry. We’ve got to buy you a new suit and be out at the airport before four.’

He gripped my hand. ‘I shall never be able to thank you,’ he said.

‘You haven’t thanked me yet for saving your life,’ I said harshly. ‘Better leave thanksgiving until we’re both of us safely out of Tangier.’

We left Tangier by the rue de Fez, along a dirt-edged road where strings of asses trotted through the dust kicked up by battered French trucks driven fast. Out on the outskirts of the Mountain it was all rickety, new-grown development — an ugly pattern of telegraph poles and tin shacks and brand-new concrete factories. And the old ran side-by-side with the new; the overburdened asses, the bare-legged, turbaned men driving wooden ploughs through hard, dry ground, and the women, shrouded and veiled so that they looked like perambulating bundles of old clothes.

Beyond the development area, a ridge of grey-brown hills covered with stones and scrub ran out to Cap Spartel and the Atlantic. We passed a gang of convicts picking desultorily at the road and there were herds of black goats and drifts of white that were flocks of the stork-like birds that the French call pique-boeuf. It was all just as I remembered it, even to the nervous void in my stomach and Kavan sitting tense and rigid beside me as that other man had done.