Barry Unsworth: Pascali's Island

He smoked reflectively for a minute or two, while I waited, my head swimming slightly, my vision not clear. 'My name,' he said, 'must not be…'

'Involved?'

'Involved, ja. There are interests here, big interests. You must conduct with care. Es ist eine lokale Sache, Pascali. You understand?'

'Yes,' I said.

'Fifty liras. I can give you fifty liras.'

'When?' I said. 'Now?'

He laughed a little. 'No, not now,' he said. 'When it is done. You come to me when it is done.'

'Very well,' I said. It did not matter to me, Excellency. The money, I mean. Except, as I have said, to provide a motive. All the same, I thought it probable that he would pay. 'Fifty liras is not much,' I said, out of a long habit of bargaining.

'Bah!' he said. 'Listen to me, the Englishman has no right there, the lease is not in order. In the courts it cannot stand up.'

'Yet they allow him to remain there,' I said.

'That it is that I do not understand,' He shrugged his thick shoulders. 'But who can understand these people?' he said.

I struggled to my feet. 'Don't worry,' I said, 'the site will be free by this time tomorrow.'

'Good, good,' Herr Gesing said. His pale fleshy face creased suddenly, revealing a shallow dimple in the left cheek. He held out his hand. 'Now we are allies,' he said. 'Allies, Pascali.'

'Yes,' I said. I shook his hand. 'Commerce and National State advancing hand in hand,' I said.

He chuckled. 'You remember, eh?' he said. 'The future is with us. Wir haben die Wille.'

I pictured us as Mister Punch might have depicted us: me as feminine Commerce in helmet and clinging gown, Herr Gesing as National State in a top hat, sausages cascading from below his frock coat. Like the strings of pink sheep guts the Turks carried away after the Sacrifice, for their evening chorba. Suddenly it seemed to me that I could smell it again, here in this close room, the stink of blood and sheep pelt that had hung over the whole island. I felt faint, my vision blurred. Then the world cleared again, and Herr Gesing was smiling the same smile.

'A noble ideal,' I said.

'Not ideal, no. Ideals is nostalgia. Like your Mister Bowles, he has ideals. Pah!' Herr Gesing tightened his small mouth in disgust. 'No, ideals we do not have – wir haben Ziele, Pascali. Ziele.'

'Goals,' I said.

'Goals, ja. The Baghdad Railway, which we Germans have built, that was not an ideal.'

'No,' I said, moving towards the door. 'I suppose not.'

I said goodbye to him quickly. Too much to expect that I would linger there with him, talking about Darwinism as applied to national states. Darwin never meant it to be. Besides, I preferred Mister Bowles's perverted idealism to this dirty future of Herr Gesing's, built on one crooked deal after another.

From there I went to Izzet. It did not take long to explain things to him. I did not, of course, tell the whole story. He would have thought me mad. They knew about the statue already – Mister Bowles had been watched. But Izzet was not worried about that. It had not occurred to him that the Englishman would be mad enough to try and remove it; and while he was engaged thus they had felt more secure, since he was neglecting the smaller, more obviously valuable things on the site.

This security I proceeded to destroy. It was not a question of the statue, I said, but of other things. 'Other things?' he said.

'Other things he has found there. Don't you see, Izzet, the statue is only a trick. He has used it to cover up his other activities.'

'Why are you telling me this?'

'When I discovered the truth, the kind of man he really is I had no choice. My loyalty to the Vali… And then, think of my position, I had helped him, you see. You would not have believed me…'

'Yes,' he said. 'Yes, I see.' He was already trembling, Excellency. Izzet, as I have said, is very emotional about money. He was far too disturbed to examine my motives thoroughly. 'The pig,' he said. 'What treachery.'

'Yes,' I said. 'He will have a full moon, tonight. They will use the American's boat. They are all in it together.'

Touch by touch I inflamed his rage and greed. 'I will report this at once to the Vali,' he said. 'You will return to your house, and remain there. You will not leave your house, Pascali.'

I obeyed him, Excellency, to the letter. Here I am. It must be somewhere between eleven and midnight. I have heard nothing. Supposing after all that I am wrong. I review the evidence in my mind: the involvement with Lydia; his meeting with Mister Smith; his talk of the day after tomorrow; full moon – he would not dare show lights; the finality of that handshake, and then the envelope under the door. No, I cannot be mistaken. Above all, there is my knowledge of him. He would never give the statue up…

Excellency, I hear sounds now, on the terrace outside, voices. They have come for me. What I have been dreading so much I could not speak of it… They will ask me to guide them… They are knocking now, calling my name.

Everything is finished, Excellency. I am outside the frame now. He is dead. Lydia too is dead. It is more than a week since I have been able to write. I go on living here in my house. No one has made a move against me; I am left alone. It is only with the greatest effort that I take up my pen again. All desire to write has left me, all that racing to keep abreast of things, that passion for recording, that has kept me writing so furiously ever since he arrived: all ended now, all stilled. The shots that killed them ended my report. What is left is epilogue; or perhaps, roughly speaking, coda.

They would not have died at all, or at least they could have been given a chance of life, if it had not been for the discovery of the murdered soldiers. I never intended his death, only his defeat, I wanted to make my failure his too, preserve the intimate connexion between us. Zusammen verbunden, as Herr Gesing said, that evening at dinner, linking his hands together. All the time, obscurely, I was worried about those soldiers. He did not seem to mind their presence there, once they were off the site itself, away from a direct view of his activities. Did he know what was going to happen to them?

They came for me, Mahmoud Pasha himself and Izzet at his heels. Appropriate of course that I should lead them to him, perform the kiss. Twelve troops. We went in two boats across the bay, keeping near to the shore to be in the moon's shadow as far as possible. They had muffled the oars. We made no noise as we crawled along the rim of the bright sea, the shadowed hills to our right. No one spoke. We beached beyond the headland in the little cove. Their ship's boat was already there, on rollers, near the water. The caique lay farther out, beyond the line of the jetty, no lights showing. If any of the crew had been left on board, they would certainly have seen us, but there was no sound, no challenge. The boat waiting there on the beach, the deserted caique, this was all the evidence that was needed. I had been right. They were up there already.

On the beach the soldiers tied cloth round their boots. I too was made to muffle my steps. I had decided to lead them by way of the stream bed, since this was the only way Mister Bowles could come down, and we would thus be able to intercept him if he finished the work earlier than expected.

We proceeded in double file, with myself and Mahmoud in the lead. Mahmoud wheezed with the exertion of the climb, but displayed a dreadful lightness of foot-I was hard put to keep up with him. The smooth stones of the stream bed led up before us white in the moonlight, glinting with mica. We made no noise, trudging steadily, eyes on the path before us, careful of the loose stones. In spite of my anguish, or perhaps because of it, because my mind clamoured for respite, a sense of unreality descended on me, I fell into a dream-like state as we went on, a condition almost of trance. There was the white defile before us, the slow climb, the need to set one foot after the other: all this precluded any sense of an issue, as if this ascent could have gone on for ever.