Once on the east bank, I entered the labyrinth, and – walking beneath the roof sleepers – became lost for a while, and lost in thought. If any report should put me in the vicinity of the murdered man, and I came clean about the mission I was on, would Manners back me up? I might say I’d been in the station to look at the trains. I was a corresponding member of the Railway Club, after all. ‘But there are no trains,’ the answer would come. ‘I know that now,’ I would say. It was certain that I would now have to communicate with Manners anyway – and by the ridiculous method he had instructed me in.
I regained the Hotel by skirting the river until I came to the place where Mantis had docked. The lobby was nearly empty. All the cloths on which were written the names of the political departments had been rolled up scroll-wise and placed on the table tops. One new cloth was unfolded, however: it read ‘Boiled Water’, and there were glasses and jugs. I poured one out, and drank it off, then took another two. It had been only lately boiled, but I didn’t mind a bit.
From my room a minute later, I looked down into the square, and watched, in the half-light, an Arab going along one of the alleyways over opposite. At first I thought he was riding a slow and wobbly bicycle, but then he went under a giant gas lamp in which a tiny blue flame burned – just enough to see that he rode a donkey, his bare feet almost touching the ground on either side. I knew I felt better, for I wanted a bottle of beer and a sandwich, and the fact that I was on the mend outweighed the thought of Boyd, I must admit. Sluicing down in the bathroom, I wondered whether half the corps would be sleeping on top of the hotel roof. No, I thought, letting down the mosquito net that hung over my bed . . . because the roof consisted of domes. The people would slide off.
And I believe I was asleep at the moment I lay down.
Chapter Five
I had forgotten to close the shutters after looking at the square, and the splitting sun woke me at six – or perhaps it was the closing of the door. A breakfast of coffee, flatbread, yoghurt and honey was on the table by my bed, and the coffee was hot. Jarvis had also left a neat map – drawn, I supposed, by himself – giving directions to my living quarters: Rose Court, off Park Street. It sounded a pretty enough spot‚ if not very Arabic. Jarvis would be waiting for me there at six o’clock in the evening with my kit.
I dressed, and walked downstairs to work. Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd’s room was 226. On the door was a notice: ‘Railways (Strategy)’. I knocked – no answer. I pushed open the door. The room was dark – sun shutters closed – and Shepherd was not in it. His empire also extended to room 227, however, and here I found a bluff, blond fellow, a Captain Mike Stevens of the Hampshire Regiment who, it appeared, was a second assistant to Shepherd. He walked out the instant I entered, saying he was going to fetch tea. The bed had been removed from room 227, and two cabinets and two desks put in; otherwise, it was similar to the room in which I’d passed the night: Persian rugs on a wooden floor, views of Baghdad on the walls, shutters with the same mosque-shaped holes cut in them. In the square, a team of Royal Engineers was working on the telegraph wires, with long ladders running up the poles. I was glad my office faced this way. A sight of the river would have reminded me of the other side of it, of the station, and Captain Boyd decaying in the Salon de Thé.
Stevens returned, and set out the tea things on his desk. He had a touch of the West Country in his accent and his face, which was wide and pink, and offset by straw-coloured hair. He wore shorts, and round wire glasses.
‘So you’re the railwayac?’ he said, a ‘railwayac’ being a railway maniac. But he said it in an offhand way; it did not promise to become a theme of his. He asked, ‘Do you understand book routine?’ but didn’t seem the least bit interested in my answer. Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd, he continued – still offhand – was not in room 226, but would be there from about lunchtime. He suggested I might like to ‘make a fair copy’ of a map showing the railway line running north from Baghdad up to Samarrah. This would involve combining the details from two separate maps, and after handing me a small glass of tea with sugar lumps in the saucer – the whole arrangement looked tiny in his hands – he went over to one of the cabinets, and produced these maps. He directed me to some pencils and coloured inks in the second cabinet, and sat back at his own desk as I contemplated the maps. On the bottom of both was written, ‘Prepared in the historical section of the Committee of Imperial Defence’. One map left the ‘h’ off ‘Samarrah’. Both maps petered out a little way beyond there, although one had an arrow pointing north and reading ‘To Tikrit’. Well, the Turks were up that way.