The Colonel frowned.
Why did Liffy do that?
Because Joe knew Stern so well and Liffy felt Stern's life was. . . what shall I say? Of great importance somehow. More important to him, to Liffy, than anything else. Even more important than his own life.
Is that true?
Yes.
And Ahmad and young Cohen? Why were they killed?
Because they'd talked to Joe about something, or at least the Monastery thought they had.
The Colonel frowned deeply and poked at his pipe, his mouth working. The Major had no idea what connections with the past he was making, and he knew it was useless to ask. Finally the Colonel heaved himself forward and planted both elbows on the table.
So Liffy sacrificed himself in order to save Joe, is that it?
Yes.
But why? What's it got to do with Stern? I don't understand what you're trying to tell me.
Well I don't have it too clearly in my own mind yet. But it seems that above and beyond whatever Joe was trying to find out about Stern, above and beyond all that, it seems Liffy felt that Stern, Stern's life . . .
Well it's hard to describe without sounding mystical.
The Colonel's tone was suddenly curt, impatient.
Never mind how it sounds, Harry. Just say it.
Well it seems Liffy felt there was some kind of special significance to Stern's life. In his peculiar background and his sufferings and his failures, in the ambiguities and paradoxes of the man. That just all of it, everything having to do with Stern, added up to a different kind of life. Something more than . . .
The Major gazed into his teacup.
. . . It's almost as if to them, to Joe and Liffy and the other people Joe spoke of . . . almost as if Stern's life is a kind of tale of all our hopes and failures. Living and trying as he did, failing and dying as he did.
Ideals that may lead to disaster and yet still contain within them . . . Oh I don't know what.
A clock clicked in the stillness. The Colonel reached out and touched the Major's arm, a kindly gesture.
Never be afraid how anything sounds, Harry. A good deal of what's in these books of mine could be called mystical, or could have been once. It's just another word we use for things we don't understand very well, things we don't understand. To somebody else those same things might be commonplace, as routine as the most routine matters are to us. People have different realities, as Stern used to say, and there are many of them going on simultaneously for all of us, and the fact that one is true doesn't make any of the others less true. . . . As for Stern, he was a man who had a powerful effect on anyone who knew him. You instinctively felt great affection for him, even love, you couldn't help it. Yet at the same time there was a kind of indefinable fear you knew when you were with him, a fear that seemed to come from being in the presence of emotions so profoundly contradictory they could never be resolved.
Something suggestive of the eternal conflicts in man, the mixture of the divine and the profane, holiness crossed with our dark natures and all of it pushed, pushed . . . because that's the man Stern was. . . .
The Colonel nodded. He leaned back and went to work on his pipe.
You were saying, Harry?
Well that's all, really. Liffy felt Joe had to live on as a witness to Stern's life. As Liffy himself expressed it to Joe, so that one man at least would know, no matter what the war brings . . .
A witness, murmured the Colonel. Yes, I see. And of course at the time Liffy said that, Joe didn't realize what Liffy was telling him? What Liffy intended to do?
No, not at all. He can hardly mention Liffy's name now without breaking down. He just goes to pieces and I'm sure that's not like him. Obviously he's a man of great discipline.
Yes yes, I understand, said the Colonel. It's a terrible burden for Joe and he knows it full well and he knows it will always be that way. But how strange this all is. . . . Stern, Joe, Liffy. . . . The three of them coming from their various corners of the world to have their fates crossed here, in front of us. Yes. . . .
The clock clicked. A match was struck in the stillness. The Major smelled pipe smoke and looked up from his teacup.
Well, what do you think?
The Colonel puffed.
I think I'd like to hear it all from the beginning, everything that happened out there at the Sphinx tonight.
So I'll know where I stand when I speak to Bletchley. But also, frankly, for my own reasons.
***
The grayness of dawn had come to the windows by the time the Major finished his account. Both men looked exhausted as they faced each other across the kitchen table, but in fact neither one of them felt tired at all. Suddenly, the Colonel slammed his fist down on the table.
Whatley, he exclaimed, referring to the officer who was chief of operations at the Monastery, Bletchley's second in command.
Whatley, he repeated angrily. It's his doing, I'm sure of it. Bletchley must have turned the case over to him and gone on to other things, and Whatley's had his gunmen out running around pushing people off roofs and pushing them in front of lorries and shooting up houseboats. Damn Whatley. Damnable little snit. Bletchley has always spent most of his time in the field trying to know his agents, almost compulsively conscientious about it, and what does Whatley do out there at the Monastery when he's left in charge? What does he do, I ask you?
The Major lowered his eyes. He had heard others speak of Whatley with disgust, but never the Colonel.
Normally the Colonel was much too circumspect to speak openly of the defects of a fellow field grade officer.
Dress-ups, hissed the Colonel. That's Whatley's infernal game. Leave him alone for a minute out there in the desert and he slips into a cowl and habit and ties an old piece of rope around his waist and pretends he's a militant monk from the Dark Ages, or worse, some sort of fourth-century abbot doing battle over doctrinal disputes in the early days of Christianity. Pretends he's plotting his way through the intricacies of the Arian controversy, or some such nonsense. Actually keeps a map on the wall showing which parts of Europe and North Africa are on the side of the angels, his side, and which parts are on the side of Arius and the devil. Lucifer and the heresiarchs in one camp, the true defenders of the faith in the other.
Arianism and the Arian heresy today? God and His Son are the same substance? Are not the same substance? What rubbish. Go back far enough and we're all the same substance, just so much cheese.
And how did Whatley ever arrive at these grandiose delusions in the first place? Simply because Arian sounds the same as Aryan? I thought only schizophrenics and poets were supposed to be afflicted with sound-alike fantasies?
Malicious nonsense, muttered the Colonel, all of it. Whatley and his incense and his censers and candles and his organs booming out Bach's Mass in B Minor, and acolytes and terrified novices tiptoeing back and forth and aides passing themselves off as monks-in-waiting. Standing directives from faceless bishops and indulgences handed out in the form of overnight passes to the fleshpots of Cairo, staff rooms disguished as gloomy chapels and orders from the desert to kill. Real orders to kill from the heart of the wasteland, blandly referred to as excommunication with extreme prejudice.
Extreme what? Madness is more like it, the vicious madness of dress-ups. What is it about men that makes them do that in wartime, or any time? Weren't they able to get enough of it as children, this strutting and skulking and prancing around in costumes? Make-believe is horrible. War isn't a little boy's dress-up dreams come true. It isn't meant to give grown men the chance to be little boys running riot in the nursery.