The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life Read online

  In 2002, Peter died in France. An elegant obituary headed ‘Journalist, Adventurer, Spy & Friend’, written by David Greenway – I lifted his cry of Supah! from it – rightly describes him as the model of Jerry Westerby in The Honourable Schoolboy. But my Westerby was there ahead of Peter Simms. What Peter did, incurable romantic, generous to the last, was seize hold of Jerry with both enormous hands, and make him boisterously his own.

  12

  Lonely in Vientiane

  We lay side by side in an upstairs opium den in Vientiane, on rush beach mats and wooden neck pillows that made you look straight up at the ceiling. A wizened coolie in a Hakka hat crouched between us in the half-darkness, replenishing our pipes or, in my case, rather irritably relighting it when it went out. If a movie script had read, INTERIOR. OPIUM DEN. LAOS. LATE SEVENTIES. NIGHT., this was the scene the set designer would have come up with, and we smokers were exactly the mix that the time and place would have required: an old French colonial planter called Monsieur Edouard, now dispossessed by the secret war that was raging away in the north, a brace of Air America pilots, a quartet of war correspondents, a Lebanese arms trader and his lady companion, and the reluctant war tourist who was myself. And Sam, my recumbent neighbour, who had kept up a soporific monologue ever since I had lain down beside him. The fumerie had a certain prickly nervousness about it because the Laotian authorities officially disapproved of opium, and we had been warned by an over-earnest correspondent that at any moment we might be required to find our way over the rooftops, down a ladder, into a side street. But Sam who lay beside me said don’t give it a second thought, it’s all bullshit. Who Sam was or is, I’ll never know. My guess would be, he was some kind of English remittance man who had come East to find his soul and, after five years of kicking around the war fronts of Cambodia and Vietnam and now Laos, was still searching for it. That at least was what his amiable stream-of-consciousness seemed to be telling me.

  I hadn’t smoked opium before and haven’t afterwards, but ever since that night I have cherished the irresponsible belief that opium is one of those proscribed drugs with a dire reputation that, smoked by sensible people in sensible proportions, does you nothing but good. You stretch out on the rush mat, you feel apprehensive and a bit of a fool. It’s your first time. You take a puff under instruction, mess it up, the coolie shakes his head and you feel an even bigger fool. But once you’ve got the hang of it, which is about breathing in, long and slow, and at the right moment, your benign self takes over, you’re not drunk or silly or aggressive, and you’re not impelled by sudden sexual urges. You’re just the contented, free-associating fellow you always knew you were. And best of all, come morning, there’s no hangover, no remorse, no anguished coming-down, just a good night’s sleep behind you and welcome to the day. Or so Sam assured me when he discovered I was a novice, and so I have believed ever since.

  Sam’s early life, I gathered from his meanderings, had run a pretty conventional course – nice English country house, boarding schools, Oxbridge, marriage, children: until the balloon went up. What or whose balloon, I never fathomed. Either Sam expected me to know, or he preferred I didn’t, and I wasn’t going to be so ill-mannered as to ask. It went up. And it must have been a pretty drastic balloon because Sam shook the dust of England from his feet that same day and, vowing never to return, went to ground in Paris, which he loved until he lost his heart to a French woman who refused him. So up went the balloon again.

  Sam’s first thought is to join the Foreign Legion, but either they’re not recruiting that day or he sleeps late or goes to the wrong address, because by now I’m beginning to suspect that what’s easy for most of us isn’t necessarily easy for Sam. There’s a disconnect about him that makes you wary of assuming that one thing will follow naturally on another. So instead of the Foreign Legion, he signs up with a French-based South-east Asia news agency. They don’t pay your travel or expenses or anything like that, Sam explains, but if you happen to file anything faintly useful they pay you a pittance. And since Sam still has this little bit of his own, as he puts it, he reckons this is a pretty fair deal.

  So for the last five years he has been trailing round the war zones, and here and there he’s got lucky and even earned himself a byline or two in the big French rags, either because he’s had a tip-off from one of the real journalists, or because he’s made the stuff up. He’s always rather fancied his chances at fiction, what with the life he’s led, and he’d like to make a thing of it: short stories, the novel, the whole bit. It’s just the loneliness that holds him back, he explains: the thought of sitting down at a desk in the jungle and bashing away for days on end, with no editor to chivvy you and no deadline.

  But he’s getting there. And looking over his output recently, there’s absolutely no question in his mind that the stories he’s made up out of thin air for his French-based news agency are streets better than anything that’s strictly what you’d call fact-based. And come a day not too far off, he’s going to sit down at that desk in the jungle and, regardless of the loneliness involved and the absence of a deadline or an editor to chivvy him, he’s going to let rip, believe him. It’s just the loneliness that puts him off, he repeats, in case I haven’t got his point by now. It eats into him, especially in Vientiane where there’s nothing to do but smoke, get laid and listen to drunk Mexican Air America pilots boasting about their kills while they get a blow-job at the White Rose.

  Then he tells me how he deals with this loneliness, which is no longer strictly related to his writing ambitions, he confesses, but embraces his entire lifestyle. What he misses most in the world is Paris. Ever since his great love turned him down and the balloon went up again, Paris has been a no-go area for him, and it always will be. He’ll never go back there, not after the girl, he couldn’t. Every street, every building, every bend in the river shouts of her, he explains earnestly in a rare, if somnolent, literary flourish. Or is he remembering a song by Maurice Chevalier? All the same, Paris is where his soul is. His heart too, he adds after due consideration. Hear me? I hear you, Sam.

  So what he likes to do when he’s had a pipe or two, he goes on – deciding to admit me to his great secret because I’m by now his closest friend and the only person in the world who gives a fuck about him, as he adds in parenthesis – what he’s going to do just as soon as he feels the need on him, which could be any minute now that he’s got his head straight, he’s going to go down to the White Rose where they know him, and he’s going to slip Madame Lulu a twenty-dollar bill and have himself a three-minute phone call to the Café de Flore in Paris. And when the waiter at the Flore picks up the phone, he’s going to ask to speak to Mademoiselle Julie Delassus, which is a made-up name so far as he knows, not one he’s used before. Then he’s going to listen to them yelling for her all across the tables and out on to the boulevard: Mademoiselle Delassus . . . Mademoiselle Julie Delassus . . . au téléphone s’il vous plaît!

  And while they call her name, over and over till it fades into the ether, or his time is up, whichever is the later, he’ll be listening to twenty dollars’ worth of Paris.

  13

  Theatre of the Real: dances with Arafat

  This is the first of four joined-up stories about my journeyings for The Little Drummer Girl, between 1981 and 1983. My subject was the Palestine–Israel conflict. The drummer girl in question was Charlie, a character inspired by my half-sister Charlotte Cornwell, who is fourteen years my junior. ‘Drummer’ because in my story Charlie roused the combative emotions of protagonists on both sides to the conflict. At the time of writing, Charlotte was a well-known stage and television actress (the Royal Shakespeare Company, the TV series Rock Follies), but also a militant advocate of the political far left.

  In my novel, Charlie, also an actress, is recruited by a charismatic Israeli counter-terrorist agent named Joseph to play the leading role in what he calls the Theatre of the Real. By representing herself as the
radical freedom fighter she has so far imagined herself to be – thus Joseph – by playing herself for real, in other words, and raising her acting skills to new heights under Joseph’s direction, she will make herself attractive to a nest of Palestinian and West German terrorists, and by so doing, save real, innocent lives. Torn between her compassion for the plight of the Palestinians that she has been sent to betray, her recognition of the Jewish right to a homeland, not to mention her attraction to Joseph, Charlie becomes the twice-promised woman in the twice-promised land.

  The task I set myself was to share the journey with her; to be swayed, as Charlie is swayed, by the arguments hurled at her by each side, and to undergo, as best I could, her contradictory surges of loyalty, hope and despair. And that was how, on New Year’s Eve 1982, at a mountainside school for the orphans of those who had died in the struggle for Palestinian liberation, otherwise called the martyrs, I came to be dancing the dabke with Yasser Arafat and his high command.

  My journey to Arafat had been frustrating, but he was at that time a man so luridly portrayed as the elusive, wily, terrorist-turned-statesman that anything more comfortable would have been a disappointment. My first stop was the late Patrick Seale, the Belfast-born, Oxford-educated British journalist, Arabist and alleged British spy who had succeeded Kim Philby as the Observer newspaper’s correspondent in Beirut. My second stop, on Seale’s advice, was a Palestinian military commander loyal to Arafat named Salah Tamari, whom I first met on one of his regular visits to Britain. In Odin’s restaurant in Devonshire Street, while Palestinian waiters gazed on him in breathless awe, Salah confirmed to me what I had been told by everyone I consulted: if you want to go deep among the Palestinians, you have to have the Chairman’s blessing.

  Tamari said he would put in a word for me, but I must go through official channels. I was trying to. Equipped with introductions from both Tamari and Seale, I had twice made an appointment to see the Representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization at the League of Arab States office in Green Street in Mayfair, twice endured the scrutiny of dark-suited men on the pavement, twice stood in a glass coffin in the doorway while I was scanned for secret weapons, and twice been politely turned away for reasons beyond the Representative’s control. And the reasons very probably were beyond his control. A month earlier his predecessor had been shot dead in Belgium.

  In the end I flew to Beirut anyway, and booked myself into the Commodore Hotel because it was owned by Palestinians, and because it was known for its indulgence towards journalists, spies and similar fauna. Until now, my researches had been confined to Israel. I had spent days with Israeli Special Forces, sat in nice offices and talked to present and past chiefs of Israeli Intelligence. But the Palestine Liberation Organization’s public relations office in Beirut lay in a devastated street behind a ring of corrugated-iron barrels filled with cement. Armed men with forefingers on their trigger guards scowled at my approach. In the half-darkness of the waiting room you were greeted by yellowing propaganda magazines printed in Russian and, in cracked glass cases, displays of shrapnel and unexploded antipersonnel bomblets recovered from Palestinian refugee camps. Curling photographs of slaughtered women and children were drawing-pinned to the weeping walls.

  The private sanctum of Mr Lapadi, the Representative, is no more cheerful. Seated behind a desk with a pistol at his left hand and a Kalashnikov at his side, he has a pallid, exhausted glower.

  ‘You write for newspaper?’

  Partly. Partly I’m writing a book.

  ‘You are human zoologist?’

  I’m a novelist.

  ‘You are here to make profit from us?’

  To understand your cause at first hand.

  ‘You will wait.’

  And keep waiting, day after day, night after night. I lie in my hotel room counting bullet holes in the curtains as the morning light comes up. I crouch in the Commodore’s cellar bar in the small hours, listening to the musings of the exhausted war correspondents who have forgotten how to sleep. A night comes when I am eating a ten-inch-long spring roll in the Commodore’s cavernous, airless dining room. A waiter whispers excitedly in my ear:

  ‘Our Chairman will see you now.’

  My first thought is chairman of the hotel group. He is going to throw me out, I haven’t paid my bill, I have insulted someone in the bar or he wants me to sign a book. Then slowly the penny drops. I follow the waiter to the lobby and step into pouring rain. Armed fighters in jeans hover around a sand-coloured Volvo estate car with its rear door open. Nobody speaks, so I don’t. I climb into the back of the Volvo, fighters leap in either side of me, another sits himself in the front seat next to the driver.

  We are racing through a smashed city in pouring rain with a chase Jeep on our tail. We are changing lanes. We are changing cars, we are darting down side streets, bumping over the central reservation of a busy dual carriageway. Oncoming traffic is scurrying for the kerb. We are switching cars again. I am being patted down for the fourth or sixth time. I am standing on a rain-swept pavement somewhere in Beirut, surrounded by armed men in streaming capes. Our cars have vanished. A street door opens, a man beckons us into a bullet-pocked apartment house with empty windows and no lights. He gestures us up a tiled staircase lined by ghostly armed men. After two flights we reach a carpeted landing and are ushered into an open lift that stinks of disinfectant. It jerks upwards and stops with a huge jolt. We have arrived in an L-shaped living room. Fighters of both sexes are propped against the walls. Surprisingly, no one is smoking. I remember that Arafat doesn’t like cigarette smoke. A fighter starts to pat me down for the umpteenth time. The unreason of fear overtakes me.

  ‘Please. I’ve been searched enough.’

  Opening his hands as if to show there’s nothing in them, he smiles and backs away.

  At a desk in the smaller part of the L sits Chairman Arafat, waiting to be discovered. He wears a white keffiyeh and khaki shirt with crisp box-creases, and totes a silver pistol in a holster of plaited brown plastic. He doesn’t look up at his guest. He’s too busy signing papers. Even when I am led to a carved-wood throne at his left side, he’s too busy to notice me. Eventually his head lifts. He smiles ahead of him as if remembering something happy. He turns to me and at the same time leaps to his feet in surprised delight. I leap to mine. Like complicit actors we’re gazing into each other’s eyes. Arafat is always on stage, I’ve been warned. And I’m telling myself that I’m on stage too. I’m a fellow performer, and we have a live audience out there, maybe thirty strong. He leans back and reaches out both hands to me in greeting. I take hold of them and they’re soft as a child’s. His bulging brown eyes are fervent and imploring.

  ‘Mr David!’ he cries. ‘Why have you come to see me?’

  ‘Mr Chairman,’ I reply in the same high tone. ‘I have come to put my hand on the Palestinian heart!’

  Have we been rehearsing this stuff? He is already guiding my right hand to the left breast of his khaki shirt. It has a button-down pocket, perfectly ironed.

  ‘Mr David, it is here!’ he cries fervently. ‘It is here!’ he repeats for the benefit of our audience.

  The house is on its feet. We’re an instant hit. We enter an Arab embrace, left, right, left. The beard is not bristle, it’s silky fluff. It smells of Johnson’s Baby Powder. Releasing me, he keeps a hand possessively on my shoulder as he addresses our audience. I may walk freely among his Palestinians, he declaims – he who never sleeps in the same bed twice, handles his own security and insists he is married to nobody but Palestine. I may see and hear whatever I wish to see and hear. He asks me only that I write and speak the truth, because only the truth will set Palestine free. He will entrust me to the same chief of fighters that I met in London – Salah Tamari. Salah will provide me with a hand-picked bodyguard of young fighters. Salah will take me to South Lebanon, Salah will instruct me in the great struggle against the Zionists, he will introduce me to
his commanders and their troops. All Palestinians I encounter will speak to me with total frankness. He asks me to be photographed with him. I decline. He asks me why. His expression is so radiant and teasing that I risk a truthful answer:

  ‘Because I expect to be in Jerusalem a little before you are, Mr Chairman.’

  He laughs heartily, so our audience laughs too. But it’s a truth too far, and I’m already regretting it.

  After Arafat, anything else feels normal. All the young fighters of Fatah were under Salah’s military command, and I had eight of them as my personal bodyguard. Their average age was seventeen at most, and they slept or didn’t sleep in a ring round my bed on the top floor with orders to keep watch from my window for the first sign of enemy attack from land, air or sea. When boredom overcame them, which it easily did, they would take a pot shot with their pistols at any passing cat lurking in the bushes. But most of the time they spent murmuring among themselves in Arabic, or practising their English on me whenever I was about to fall asleep. At the age of eight they had joined the Palestinian boy scouts, the Ashbal. At fourteen they were reckoned fully fledged fighting men. According to Salah, there was no one to touch them when it came to aiming a hand-held rocket down the barrel of an Israeli tank. And my poor Charlie, star actress in the Theatre of the Real, will love them all, I am thinking, as I scribble down her thoughts in my battered notebook.