The Baghdad Railway Club(57)

He meant a wound that would take him home. It was not the truth.

On the left, the dark, sleeping town of Samarrah came up. Three dim lights signalled the station, where we took on more water, and the commander of the garrison – a clever-looking major in thin wire spectacles – was roused from his bed to talk to Shepherd. By way of breaking the bad news, Shepherd showed the fellow Stevens’s body. It was agreed above all that he couldn’t be left lying on coal, so two privates were summoned to carry him down, and set him on the platform. The head of the garrison explained that one of his men had died the week before of malaria, and Stevens might as well be put to rest next to him, so Shepherd took Stevens’s papers out of his pockets. The major offered us a bed for the night, and Shepherd ran this offer past me. I did not believe that the quarters at Samarrah would be very comfortable, and I did not want the fag of relighting the fire in The Elephant. I indicated accordingly. ‘Then hot coffee and biscuits might be more the thing,’ said Shepherd, and these were brought before we pulled away from the garrison and the still-sleeping town.

At Baghdad station (and Shepherd had kept silence for almost the whole of the way there), a team of Royal Engineers waited to stable The Elephant. They’d been alerted by telegram from Samarrah, as had Jarvis, who was on the dark platform, looking through the window of the Salon de Thé, with hurricane lamp upraised.

‘I thought you meant to avoid that place,’ I said as, a few moments later, he, Shepherd and I walked towards the van. He made no audible reply – evidently in one of his glooms again.

‘Locked, was it?’ said Shepherd, sounding not very interested. Well, it was five o’clock in the morning and he hadn’t slept for nearly twenty-four hours.

‘It was, sir,’ said Jarvis.

‘Preserve the evidence, I suppose,’ said Shepherd.

Jarvis indicated the Ford van, waiting on the rubble beyond the station mouth with the dawn breaking strangely all around it, which is to say that the sky was attempting unnatural colours, leaving the van looking as though badly hand-tinted, like the film of Ali Baba. Jarvis started the engine – making a good deal of black smoke – and after we’d been going a minute, he said, ‘Did you put the other fellow off on the way, sir?’

‘Yes,’ said Shepherd grimly.

Well, Jarvis didn’t know Stevens as far as I was aware, and this wasn’t going to be one of his jolly days anyway, so I just said, ‘We came under fire from Arabs – he’s dead.’

Jarvis made no reaction, but as we crossed the bridge of boats, he said, ‘Two sepoys were killed here last night. We’re all warned off the bazaar – that’s where it happened. Stabbed in the back they were – only young lads.’

I thought: Jarvis is breaking down under the climate; he ought to be on sick leave. The light was rising fast over Baghdad; the call to prayer was going up at the same time, so that a newcomer might have taken this for a city of sun-worshippers.

As we came off the bridge, Jarvis swung down an unfamiliar street near the park. ‘I’m opposite to the cavalry barracks,’ Shepherd said. But it seemed to me that Jarvis did not need to be told where Shepherd lived. Well, perhaps he had given him a lift before. Shepherd’s place was in a garden compound much like my own, except that his had two storeys and a veranda.

‘You’ll forget about the office, Jim,’ he said, climbing down. ‘A good sleep is the order of the day.’

But at Rose Court, my room was filled with sunlight and flies – looked as though it had been abandoned this past hundred years.

Jarvis said, ‘The flytrap has stopped working, sir.’

‘Evidently. Where’s Ahmad?’

‘He’s gone—’

‘To join the insurgency?’

‘To the bazaar. I’ve asked him to get a new one.’

The marketing at the bazaar started a little after the dawn call to prayer – for those allowed to go there. I slung my pack on to the bed. As I moved, my boots grated on the floor. Everything was coated in a fine covering of sand.

‘A wind got up yesterday, sir,’ said Jarvis. ‘The whole city was covered in this sort of golden cloud. I walked to the hotel and back, and it was like the streets were full of bandits.’

‘Well, they are,’ I said, ‘we know that.’

‘I mean they looked like bandits. Every man had a keffiyah round his face: sepoys, Tommies, Arabs all alike. The worst of it is I think I’ve got some of it on my chest.’

I was rather tiring of Jarvis. I asked him, fairly shortly, to prepare some sweet tea, and this he went off to do. Whilst he was in the scullery, I opened the connecting door and looked into his quarters. Two ranks of beer bottles now stood by the bed. This room too fizzed with flies, and these, I saw, were concentrated on an earthenware bowl near the end of the bed. I walked towards it, and it was full of scraps of greyish meat. Was this some kind of makeshift flytrap? He had told me that milk and formaldehyde could be used, but not poisoned meat. I picked up a scrap of the meat, so making myself a focus for all the flies. I sniffed. There was no particular smell – it was not yet on the turn.