The Baghdad Railway Club(27)

Both maps were hard to read, for a variety of reasons. In one, the names of the stations kept running into the blue-shaded River Tigris. According to the scale of this map, Samarrah lay about sixty miles north of Baghdad, whereas according to the scale on the other it was more like eighty.

I regarded Stevens, whose desk was directly opposite to mine. He was writing letters, from what I could see, and kept looking for addresses in a directory he kept at his elbow. Every so often, he’d jerk his shoulders about in a peculiar manner.

‘The scale on these maps—’ I said, but he cut me off.

‘Just split the difference,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry too much about scale or anything, but it’s for Cox himself, so you might, you know . . . make it look pretty.’

I had already determined on that. I didn’t want to make ‘a bad start’ or do anything to convince Shepherd that I was here for any reason but to help him with railway work – and that went double if he was a killer as well as a traitor.

Stevens’s glasses made him look rather schoolboyish. Well, only at first. Throughout the morning, he seemed to expand, filling out his thin cotton shirt, and when he stood and walked over to one of the cabinets, at about ten o’clock sort of time, I saw that he had the legs of a circus strongman.

Seeing me eyeing him, he seemed rather put out, so I made a start in earnest on the maps. The line to Samarrah ran in parallel with – and to the west of – what I had decided to call ‘R. Tigris’, since that seemed more correct than just ‘Tigris’. ‘River Tigris’ might have been better still, but I wouldn’t have been able to fit those two words into any of the innumerable bends in the river, of which I was taking an average from the two maps, and which I was tracing in a turquoise ink very far from the actual colour of the river. Towards Samarrah, I lost patience with all the bends of the river, so it tended to get a bit straighter up there. Also, drops of sweat kept falling from my brow, and threatening to smudge the river. I broke off to wipe my face with my handkerchief.

Stevens did not seem to sweat – an odd circumstance, in the case of such a big fellow. He must be in A1 condition. He was really frowning over his work, and kept reaching for the directory.

‘What a rigmarole this is,’ he said, more or less to himself.

‘What are you about?’ I said. ‘If you don’t mind my asking.’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘ordering track from the Indian government. Like getting blood out of a stone it is.’

Here, then, was proof of the story I’d heard all the way up the Tigris: that the British and the British in India were at loggerheads over Mesopotamian policy.

‘They’ll send it,’ said Stevens, ‘but they’ll send it slowly. They make out they’re having to tear up their own lines to do it, which I don’t believe for a minute.’

‘They think we’re building a railway for the Arabs at their expense,’ I said.

He eyed me steadily for a moment.

‘Just so,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think the camel jockeys are quite up to running their own railway, do you?’

This might have been just another offhand remark, but I thought it unlikely that any Arabist would have said that, even casually. Was Stevens, in this respect, falling in with his governor, Shepherd? If you were anti-Arab, did that make you pro-Turk? Turcophile? If you wanted to let the Turks in again through the back door, you certainly wouldn’t want the formation of an Arab state.

Stevens stood up and walked over to the window.

‘It’s going to be hot,’ he said, and I don’t believe it was a joke. He turned side on, and the thought broke in on me: He’s a boxer; a heavyweight. His nose, in profile, didn’t go as far out as it should have done. And there was no fat on him, for all his bulk. He walked over to my desk, and looked down at the map.

‘We might be riding over that very line – on Monday.’

I frowned at him, thinking of the bruises on the face of Boyd.

‘Who’s “we”?’

‘You, me and The Shepherd.’

‘What for?’ I asked, and he gave a shrug. ‘Can’t remember the word. Oh yes: reconnaissance.’

‘What’ll we use for a locomotive?’

‘The Shepherd has one lined up.’

I thought of the broken-winded engine I’d seen: Elefant. It couldn’t be that one.

‘But . . . who’ll crew it?’ I said.

‘You fire and I’ll drive,’ he said. ‘Or the other way round, I’m easy.’

‘You can drive an engine?’

‘After a fashion.’