The Age of Exodus Read online

  “But are the Jews foreigners?” said Loppersum. “Aren’t they the original children of Israel?”

  “Israel has not existed as a nation since the Romans forced the Jews to leave,” said the sheikh gently. “The Arabs have had Palestine to themselves for longer than most of your ancestors have lived in Britain or France or the Netherlands.”

  Forrester said nothing, because the sheikh’s remarks were perfectly correct: many of the peoples of Western Europe had arrived there only with the barbarian invasions.

  “But look at what the Jews have suffered,” said Loppersum. “Six million of them murdered by Hitler. Don’t they deserve a break?”

  “Certainly – but why should it be at our expense?” said Hassan. “We did not build the gas chambers.” No one had any reply to this, and he went on. “I could talk about the promises Britain made to us when we fought alongside Colonel Lawrence and helped bring down the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. I think those promises should be honoured. But that is not my main argument. What I chiefly want to impress on you is this – taking great areas of Palestine from the Arabs and giving them to the Jews will cause great suffering, and that suffering will generate great anger. Why should those Arabs who have lost their lands ever forgive and forget? Will they not strive to recover what they have lost? And never cease to strive? Will the Jews not have to live with that anger forever? Is that a good basis for creating a new state?” He glanced towards the podium, where something was clearly happening. “And now I think Mr. Bevin is about to speak, and I must rejoin my compatriots. Let us hope the decisions made here today are wise ones – for both Jews and Arabs.”

  As the man left, Forrester glanced at Loppersum.

  “Did he change your mind?” asked Forrester.

  “He made me reflect,” said Loppersum. “But I still think the Jews deserve a home of their own.”

  “At the expense of the Arabs?”

  “If there’s no other solution. Perhaps your Mr. Bevin will have one.”

  And now the short, square figure of the British Foreign Secretary was walking with his rolling sailor’s gait towards the lectern, and the buzz of talk in the room died down to a tense silence. Within minutes it was clear Bevin had decided to dispense with diplomatic niceties.

  “The Jewish Agency is demanding unlimited Jewish immigration into Palestine,” said Bevin. “The problem Great Britain faces, as the nation tasked with keeping the peace there, is that there are four hundred thousand Arabs already in residence. If we turn their country into a Jewish homeland, as we’re being asked to, we would be subordinating those four hundred thousand Arabs to Jewish rule. Where’s the justice in that?” As the murmuring of dissent in the hall grew, it became clear why Bevin was being so blunt. He held up a piece of news agency wire copy, clearly fresh off the tickertape, and waved it angrily.

  “I’ve just had news of the deaths, at the hands of Jewish terrorists, of three more British soldiers, gunned down in cold blood on the road to Jerusalem. And this is just the latest outrage. Those committed to the Jewish cause have reinforced their demands by shooting, bombing and even hanging, yes, hanging kidnapped Tommies who are there trying to maintain order. Soldiers who fought Hitler and liberated the concentration camps. Meanwhile other Jews are trying to smuggle boatloads of their fellow religionists across the Mediterranean and sneak past the British Navy into Palestine. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by the war and need to be resettled, but the Jews seem determined to jump the queue, and so far it has been Britain’s onerous task to try to stop them.”

  By now the room was buzzing with barely muted talk, and the Arabs were smiling and nodding to each other. Forrester glanced at Aubrey Eban: he was white with anger.

  “I have to tell the Assembly,” said Bevin, “that Britain has come to the end of its tether in Palestine. We are tired of trying to keep the peace and receiving nothing but criticism. My government has therefore come to a decision. We have decided that in 1948 we will hand the Palestinian mandate to this United Nations Organisation.”

  Now there was uproar in the room: delegates were rising to their feet, shouting at Bevin and at one another. It was some minutes before Trygve Lie was able to use the room’s powerful PA system to bring it to order, and Bevin could resume.

  “I see satisfaction on the faces of some of the representatives of the Zionists here today,” he said. “But I suspect those of their people already in Palestine will rue the day they provoked us into leaving. We have been protecting them, at great cost, from the wrath of the Arabs, but when we finally give up the mandate it will be up to the United Nations to protect them. And I assure you it will prove to be no easy task.”

  He put away his notes and returned to his seat. As he did so Warren Austin, the American ambassador to the UN, strode up to the lectern. From his unsurprised manner, it was clear Britain had given its closest ally ample warning of what it was about to do.

  “If the United Nations were to be given control of Palestine,” he said, “and the two groups living there cannot, as the British Foreign Secretary has testified, agree to live in harmony, we believe Palestine would have to be partitioned, with one area given to the Arabs and the other to the Jews.”

  Forrester heard murmurs around him:

  “The Brits are never going to leave, and Washington doesn’t want them to,” said someone.

  “It’s a put-up job,” said someone else. “Nothing will change.”

  The uproar increased, and Warren Austin had to raise his voice to be heard.

  “The problem is,” he said, “that the partition of Palestine is adamantly opposed by the Soviet Union, which as you know has a veto in the Security Council. In view of this impasse, we would urge Great Britain not to abandon her responsibilities in the region at this time.”

  Suddenly, it seemed, everyone was shouting.

  “I told you,” said a voice close to Forrester. “It’s all going to stay the same.”

  By now the din was deafening as Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko, the youthful Soviet ambassador, replaced Austin at the lectern. His gaze ranged over the hall as he waited for silence – and then he dropped his bombshell.

  “The American ambassador is misinformed about the intentions of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” he said. “Contrary to his statement, the USSR does not oppose the partition of Palestine. We believe that Great Britain should indeed give up the mandate and let the United Nations take responsibility.” He paused, as if savouring the fact that the entire assembly was hanging on his every word. “In short, the USSR believes, in view of their sufferings, it would be unjust to deny the right of the Jewish people to establish their own state.”

  This time the astonishment was total, and Forrester saw the shock on the faces of many of Bevin’s Foreign Office retinue. It was obvious too that Aubrey Eban and the rest of the Jewish Agency could hardly believe their ears. Up till now the Soviets had opposed the idea of a Jewish homeland; now, for reasons unknown, they had decided to back it.

  It was a game-changer, and as Forrester glanced at the Arab delegation, he saw Sheikh Hassan’s face was stiff with anger. As one, the Arab delegates rose to their feet and marched out, just as Trygve Lie declared that the time had come for a recess.

  If ever a recess was needed, thought Forrester, it was now.

  * * *

  That afternoon events moved even more swiftly. As soon as the General Assembly reconvened the Secretary General rose to make an announcement. If the British were indeed going to give up the mandate for Palestine, possibly as soon as next year, then it was clearly the responsibility of the United Nations to decide what would happen afterwards. Would UNO simply take over the mandate and try to maintain the status quo? If not, would Palestine become an Arab state or a Jewish one? Or should it be divided into two states, one for the Arabs and one for the Jews? And if that was the case how should it be divided, and where should the boundaries fall? These questions, Secretary General Lie asserted, w
ere too complex for as large a body as the General Assembly to decide without much preliminary work.

  It had therefore been decided, with the agreement of the Security Council, to set up a United Nations Special Committee on Palestine to recommend what should happen after the British left. The committee, to be known by the acronym UNSCOP, would be composed of representatives of countries not directly involved in the dispute which reflected the diversity of the international system in both geographical and ideological terms. Both the Jews and the Arabs would be invited to provide liaison officers to UNSCOP to ensure each side’s case was heard.

  At which point the Arab delegation announced that they would have nothing to do with UNSCOP or any other body which threatened to rob Palestinian Arabs of their homeland in order to give one to the Jews, and walked out. Forrester caught Sheikh Hassan’s eye as he left, and was certain he would have preferred to stay and fight, but such was the outrage among the Arabs at the sudden reversal of their fortunes that reasonable discussion was off the table.

  The representatives of the Jewish Agency, by contrast, realising that participating in the investigation gave them a legitimacy they had not previously enjoyed, offered their enthusiastic co-operation.

  By the end of the day Aubrey Eban had been nominated as the Agency’s official liaison officer to UNSCOP and Forrester went to congratulate him. But his colleagues said he had last been seen walking away from the building into the surrounding park with Jan Loppersum from the Dutch delegation. Without giving the matter much thought, and eager for some fresh air after the stuffiness of the General Assembly, Forrester strolled in the direction they had gone. Before long he found himself looking up at a grassy knoll at the top of which was a dilapidated temple-like building clearly scheduled for demolition. The doors and windows were boarded up and its walls were stained and crumbling. Crumbling, in fact, to such a degree that someone had been able to make a hole in them.

  Suddenly Forrester remembered Loppersum’s casual reference to his belief that the Westinghouse robot was still housed somewhere in the grounds, and wondered if this was possibly the building in which it was stored.

  Motivated as much by curiosity as anything else, Forrester enlarged the hole and climbed in himself. The tall, circular room was dark and musty, but there was enough light coming in through the hole to see that on the dusty floor someone had drawn an image of Narak, Lord of the Seals.

  But the drawing occupied Forrester’s attention only for a moment. What he found himself staring at was a circular platform in the middle of the room.

  On the platform, just as Loppersum had predicted, was the Westinghouse robot from the 1939 World’s Fair, immobile now, its metallic gleam dulled by time, but still huge and forbidding, holding its massive arms straight out in front of it.

  And lying in the robot’s arms, like a sacrificial victim offered to some ancient deity, was Jan Loppersum, his throat sliced open from ear to ear.

  14

  THE LISTENER IN THE CORNER

  Forrester had not taken the New York tabloid press into account when he reported his discovery to the United Nations police sub-station. He had assumed the plainclothes man sitting in a corner of the room making notes was a detective and, perhaps as a result of his own state of shock, had not thought to ask himself why the sergeant was interviewing him instead of the detective. It was only when later that night he saw the latest editions of the New York papers that he realised with a sickening lurch that the non-uniformed man must have been one of those journalists who make it their business to make friends with whatever police precinct they are assigned to.

  Because it was obvious that everything Forrester had told the police had been taken down in rapid, accurate shorthand, including his official reason for being in New York – the archaeology conference at Columbia.

  Once that link had been established it was inevitable someone would connect both Forrester and the scrawled image of Narak on the floor of the Westinghouse building with the disappearance of the Sumerian demon from Columbia the day before. By the time the late editions of the tabloids appeared there was wild speculation that the demon that had vanished so spectacularly from New York’s most famous university was in some way responsible for Loppersum’s death.

  The visual trope was irresistible, and the next day nearly every paper accompanied the story of Loppersum’s murder with twin pictures of the Sumerian effigy and the Westinghouse Moto-Man. One or two of them had delved into Forrester’s own background and began referring to him as “a former member of the elite British Special Operations Executive, specialists in swift, silent murder”.

  Which inevitably led to references to the British murder which was already associated with a Sumerian demon, so that journalists began demanding interviews with the witness who somehow linked the two “demon killings”. That morning, as he had gone for a walk, a photographer had tried to take a snap of him, and he’d only avoided him by retreating into a department store and emerging from another entrance.

  “We have to get you out of here,” said Toby Lanchester, “before they say you came here with Ernie Bevin. The last thing we want to do is have his name mixed up in this sort of nonsense.” But by that stage Forrester was the least of Lanchester’s worries. If Bevin’s blunt criticism of the Jews in his speech in the General Assembly had caused an uproar in the hall, reports of it in the American press set off a firestorm of fury. There were passionate editorials condemning him as anti-Semitic, there were angry demonstrations outside the Waldorf Astoria and the longshoremen’s union said they would refuse to handle his baggage if he tried to board the Queen Mary to return to England.

  “We shouldn’t be surprised, really,” said Lanchester. “There are a lot more Jews in America than there are in Palestine. Every politician in the country’s frightened of offending them.” As a result, Bevin’s visit was being cut short and he was flying back to England, despite his heart condition.

  Forrester’s presence, therefore, was no longer required.

  Forrester had to admit he was not too unhappy about that. He’d never really seen himself as part of a security detail, and had always felt he was here on a powerful politician’s whim rather than because he could really do anything useful. He’d managed to make the announcement about the Minoan stele at the Columbia Archaeology Conference and once the demon “connection” was publicised he knew he couldn’t really return to the United Nations Assembly without causing a sensation.

  “I quite understand,” he told Lanchester. “Look, before I go I wanted to let you know I’d had one other thought about this. Remember Edward St. John Townsend, the chap whose translations were used for those curses? It turns out he was also there when this Sumerian demon was first discovered, and I’m wondering if he himself is actually involved in this thing in some way. I’d heard he’d been in Saudi Arabia, selling oil concessions to the Americans. Does the FO keep tabs on him? Does he have any diplomatic status?”

  Lanchester looked at him with mild reproof. “I hate to be rude, Forrester, and I understand your interest as an archaeologist, but this is massively irrelevant. My main, indeed only, concern right now is getting the Foreign Secretary out of here in one piece.”

  “Of course,” said Forrester. “I quite understand. I’ll make a few enquiries myself.”

  But as he walked away from Lanchester’s room it was personal matters that occupied him. His early return to Oxford would mean parting from Gillian, and about this he was in two minds. He knew that the longer he stayed in New York the closer they would become, and the truth was that being with her was becoming addictive. But he also knew he wasn’t prepared for it. The loss of Sophie was still a raw wound and the ghost of Barbara had not yet been exorcised. If Gillian fell in love with him now – and then he stopped himself: he knew perfectly well she’d fallen in love with him long ago, and all that was really changing was that he was falling in love with her.

  And he wasn’t ready.

  Dammit, he didn’t know if h
e’d ever be ready. And in the meantime he could only cause her pain.

  On the other hand, he couldn’t just slink away; he had to talk to her before he left, and exhilarating though New York was, he didn’t feel like having such a conversation in the middle of Downtown Manhattan. Nor, frankly, did he want to revisit Flushing Meadows. He took advice from the hotel concierge and left a message with Gillian arranging a rendezvous.

  Then he went through the yellow pages of the New York telephone directory searching for entries on occult bookshops.

  He had put six names down on a piece of hotel writing paper when there was a knock at the door, and he opened it to find Detective O’Connell looking at him with angry eyes. Hiding his dismay, Forrester invited him in, sat him down and offered him a drink, which was refused.

  “You didn’t tell me when we met on the Queen Mary that you were a dashing world war hero skilled in silent killing,” said the detective.

  “Well, we weren’t talking about my war record when we met on the Queen Mary,” said Forrester.

  “No,” said O’Connell. “We were talking about the death of an Australian delegate to the United Nations Organisation. During the interview I noted that you had been injured, and I also noted that the story you gave me to explain that sounded as phoney as a three-dollar bill. I might have let all that go, but for the fact that the other subject we chatted about was a murderous Sumerian demon. And glory be, I suddenly come across your name against a newspaper account of another murder, of another United Nations diplomat, also involving a Sumerian demon. Care to comment?”

  “The only reason my name came up,” said Forrester, “is that I was the one reporting the murder to the police. If I hadn’t found it and reported it, Loppersum’s body might not have been discovered for days. And apart from the drawing on the floor, no Sumerian demon had anything to do with it.”