copper's cruise 13 bonus chapter

 

Chapter 13 six foot by three in Carthage part 4

 

“If I’m going to be solving who killed the wretched woman, I won’t be back on the boat for tonight,” said Alexander. “Now, I don’t want to spoil the fun of you ladies, if you want to go on.”

Alma and Ida exchanged a look.

“Neither of us wants to abandon you whilst you undertake an unpleasant duty which should not have been wished on you,” said Ida, speaking for both of them. Alexander always wondered at how two women who were close could manage, it seemed, to have a whole conversation in one shared look.

“Gladys won’t like leaving Campbell, either,” said Alma.

“And Campbell would never leave you,” said Ida. “Perhaps we can get a boat to Egypt, to catch up, missing the stop at Tobruk.”

“I can solve that dilemma,” said Major-General Mainwaring. “I’ll have you flown to Egypt when you are done here.”

“Can you, sir? That would be useful,” said Alexander.

“How do you think I got your wheelchair so quickly? I have access to a couple of Felixtowe F5 flying boats,” said Mainwaring. “We let the French use them for rapid movement of personnel and they don’t kick up a fuss.”

“Well, that relieves my mind,” said Alexander.

“I must see if I can photograph Carthage and other archaeological sites out of the window,” said Ida.

“If you’ll pay for the film, Miss Henderson, I think we can arrange for some photographs to be taken for you,” said Mainwaring. “Tony has used them.”

“Not the zeiss lens?” asked Alexander.

“Oh, I’m not going to be drawn on that,” said Mainwaring.

Alexander chuckled.

Having peacetime photographs of various ports would never come amiss.

 

“I need to talk to Percy,” said Alexander. “Can that be arranged without too much hassle and without any suspicion?”

“Yes, I can phone him and ask if he’d care to come to chat to someone else who is going up to Oxford at the same time,” said Tony. “I know the women’s colleges are separate, but we need not dwell on that.”

“Good,” said Alexander. “How sanguine would you be about putting him on ice if he’s not… well, if there’s a problem with him?”

“What, lock him in the attic like Bluebeard’s wife?” said Tony, startled. “I don’t think he’s your man, you know.”

“No; but I want to find out more from him. I want to chat to Edgar, too.”

“Well, they’re both more at a loose end, suppose I ask them both to stay because the women staying with us are nervous and want some more men about the place?” asked Tony.

“Admirable, and easier to chat to them than in a formal situation,” said Alexander.

“And Ambrose?”

“I’d rather talk to him later,” said Alexander. “You can have Alexei in as well. If I find I’m barking up the wrong tree, I’ll look closer at Mabel, but I won’t take her away from her menagerie for now.”

 

oOoOo

 

“I suppose they might not feel safe in the care of an old man who’s crippled,” said Percy, as he came into the vestibule. “Some people say that when people become unproductive, they ought to do the decent thing.”

“I wouldn’t say that to Miss Henderson, if I was you,” said Alex, from behind him. “Her brother, Basil, was a pilot, fighting for our freedom in the war, and he lost his legs.  Mind, he learned a new skill, and left her nearly fifty thousand from the sale of his paintings, but there are those who would have called him unproductive, especially their brother, who did not understand Basil’s paintings. You’re quick to judge, boy, and don’t bother to find out any facts.”

Percy went red to the ears.

“I suppose we owe some gratitude to those of you who were injured in the war,” he mumbled.

“Still jumping to conclusions,” said Alexander. “I was wounded in the line of duty. I was captured and tortured by a pair of youths, one your age, one a little younger, because I set myself up for it because I knew no jury would convict if they weren’t caught in the act.  Believed in Nietzsche, which I suspect is where some of your half-baked ideas come from, but like you, their belief was in an ill-understood reading of his works. They were after a tr-easure which was in my keeping, which had fallen to the possession of a petty crook whom I had nicked.  And his first thought when he found out he had legal title to it? To adopt a kid with infantile paralysis and give him a good life. In my book, that’s closer to man finding superman within him, than some puerile concept of being better than others.”

Percy went scarlet.

“I… yes it is,” he said. “So long as he didn’t teach criminal ways to the kid.”

“Oh, Mickey was a thief to maintain the lifestyle he wanted to keep, and he’ll go straight,” said Alexander.

“I thought police believed in the incorrigibility of the criminal classes,” said Percy.

“There’s no such thing as ‘criminal classes,’” said Alexander. “People of all class turn to crime for a variety of reasons; it’s usually greed. The lads I mentioned were nominally gentlemen. And I don’t say that either one would have been as bad without the other to egg him on, but they were nasty pieces of work.  I don’t say Mickey isn’t a bit workshy and feckless, though he works hard enough if he’s interested. Good with his hands, too; if he’d had the chance, he might have made a good carpenter. But his nerves are shot from the Somme. And don’t curl your lip, boy; not until you’ve gone four years of constant noise, day and night, dodging as the bombs fall, up to your ankles in mud and body fluids and body parts floating by, or sticking out of frozen mud. Tell me you’d be fine after diving into a shell hole to avoid a bomb and you land on a body which disintegrates and writhes with maggots and your choice is sitting on it or going up into a hail of machine gun bullets.”

Percy heaved.

“That’s disgusting.”

“That was daily life,” said Alexander. “War is disgusting. But those of us who cared for the freedom of the children like you growing up in England endured because we had to. Not because we were seeking glory. But because there was no choice, because someone had to.”

“It… it wasn’t to build a capitalist paradise?” asked Percy.

“Hell, no; and I am not sure I’d know what a capitalist paradise was,” said Alexander. “Am I wealthy? Yes. My ancestors worked bloody hard to build that up, generation on generation. And would you like your work shared out and distributed to the masses? I bet not. And at the western front, we had the equality of all being in equal danger. The bullets and shells weren’t discriminating in whether they found officers or enlisted men, I assure you. I have more fellow feeling for Mickey, born without a father to a drunkard of a mother, living in a two-up, two-down terrace house, struggling to make ends meet, than I do for those of my own class who ducked the war, and found desk jobs. But that doesn’t mean I believe in the false promise of a worker’s paradise.  Come, Percy! Have you ever read the Scarlet Pimpernel books?”

“Yes, they’re good yarns,” said Percy.

“Well, just consider this,” said Alexander. “The Baroness Orczy might have exaggerated at times, but the instincts of the uprising masses was not to rise to make every man a superman, nor to aspire to gentility as a whole, but to drag down everyone into the gutter, and make the children of aristos into whores and coalheavers.  Society should be striving to educate everyone so that anyone can rise to be whatever he or she wishes to be, rather than levelling out by rattling them down into the gutter.”

“The French have recovered….”

“And did they do so through democracy? No. They got an emperor back first. Did the aristos deserve overthrowing? Actually, yes, they did, but the Terror was never a good answer.  I take it that Ambrose is eloquent in spreading his half-baked ideas?”

“He makes it all sound so reasonable.”

“And so did Madame Zeleika make her fortune-telling sound quite reasonable,” said Alexander. “Charlatans are usually plausible, and prey on the gullible.”

Percy went pink.

“Are you calling me gullible?”

“Aren’t you? You are soon to go to Oxford. You will be away from family but as a young gentleman, you will be responsible for yourself, not dependent on being told where to be by masters at a boarding school. Your behaviour is on your own recognizances. It’s a big, slightly scary world of adulthood which you are about to enter, and you are flattered by the attentions of a charismatic older man like Ambrose… Sawyer, wasn’t his surname? And that he should spend time with you, and talk about his beliefs, and how he has picked you to help him build a better world on the ruins of the one made by the war-mongers and capitalists.”

“How do you know what he said, sir?”

“Like Madam Zeleika, I know the script of these frauds,” said Alexander. “It’s a trick, and before long, you find yourself passing on information, and if you get a job somewhere like the home office, following in your father’s footsteps, that information is sensitive, but oh! There will be good reasons why it should be shared, to be used by rational men. And at that point, there’s a rather nasty word for it.”

“What’s that, sir?”

“Treason,” said Alexander, grimly. “What have your parents said about your beliefs?”

“The pater said I was speaking arrant nonsense about things I did not understand and told me to get over it,” said Percy.

“Maybe he should have shared more home truths with you,” said Alexander. “But I’ll tell you one thing; nine out of ten of the workers in Britain would hate to be under the Bolsheviks, and organised along the lines of Plato’s ‘Republic.’ What the working man wants is a place to call his own, a wife he can tell his woes to, who can make him shepherd’s pie, steak and kidney pudding, apple crumble, and cake of various kinds, enough pay to go see the dogs or horses once a week for a flutter, or the pools with his workmates, and any small win is a bonus, but not why he does it. He expects no windfall, but does it for fun. He wants enough for a pint after work on his way home and a natter with the lads, darts in the bar on a Friday, and an outing in a charabanc once a year to the seaside. His needs and wants are very simple; and the ones who stop him are the so-called moralists who come from classes with enough leisure that it is disgusting that they try to stop the meagre leisure of the working man. And yes, they are the same as Bolshevists, in a way, because they are trying to impose their own ideals, their own beliefs, on people who don’t want them. Academic belief in ‘to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability’ is all very well, but then, what of the men who buck the system and pretend no ability and more needs? what of those taken from a job they can do well, and that they don’t dislike, because there is more need for someone in a different job? For a cash incentive, a man might consider changing jobs. Being told to do so, it’s a different matter.”

“Shouldn’t he be glad to serve the economy?”

“What degree are you studying?”

“Economics, sir.”

“And suppose I came along and told you that there aren’t enough painters of propaganda pictures, and so you will be shifting to a course in fine art? Or moving out of university and learning to be a bricklayer?”

“I… I take your point, sir,” said Percy, chastened.

“By all means, care about the poor and huddled masses, it does you credit to have compassion,” said Alexander. “But if you must dabble in the dirt of politics, find out what they want before telling them what they need.”

“Yessir,” said Percy.  “Do you really want men to guard the women? Or was it an excuse?”

“No, I wanted to have this pointed conversation with you, and another with Edgar, and another with Alexei, to find out who strangled Madam Zeleika when she left the soirée,” said Alexander. “And I suspect it was your friend, Ambrose, for showing her Russian origins, and being caught out in her lies. But he’s not the only suspect, as both the others have cause to get rid of a Bolshevik agent like her. So, keep it to yourself; and now, you’re staying here for your own protection, as if Ambrose is chummy, and thinks you are thinking for yourself, it might be you ending up with a face blackened and tongue stuck out from a ligature around the neck.”

Percy paled.

“I… well, Ambrose says that men should be ready to die or kill for their ideals,” he said.

“And I wager, in his book, it’s others who should do the dying for his ideals,” said Alexander.