Land of Marvels (13 page)

In fact he had never been in any doubt of the issue. He had found it diverting to seem eager to secure the Ambassador’s agreement, to argue the matter with him, when both of them knew he had no choice. Rampling had sources of information at the embassy in Constantinople, and he knew of the recent memorandum, sent under the personal seal of the Foreign Secretary, to all diplomatic and consular officials in the Near East, instructing them diligently to obtain and promptly to forward any information regarding possible sources of mineral oil, a commodity of vital importance for Britain’s present and future needs. So sure had he been that his design would succeed that the terms of Elliott’s engagement—fee, expenses, indemnities—had all been agreed in London before he left. An excellent man, Elliott, a man after his own heart, qualified, dedicated, possessed with a crusading faith in the future of the petroleum industry.

After the departure of his guests, who had left together for Galata to have a good old chat, as the Ambassador put it, at the embassy, Rampling slept for half an hour. He had a faculty for dropping into sleep for a brief while at any time of day. On waking, he summoned his boatman and told him to get the launch up to the jetty. Byron, his Greek valet, who traveled everywhere with him, as did his private secretary, Thomas, and his bodyguard, an ex-wrestler of frightening aspect named Dikmen, laid out his clothes and helped him to dress. Byron knew his taste; he could be relied upon completely.

He dressed with his usual care: a pale green linen suit and a lavender-colored silk shirt very high in the neck. Tan shoes, a panama hat with a dark blue band, and an ebony cane completed the effect; he had a collection of canes and this time chose one with a silver handle in the shape of a wolf’s head.

The launch took him down to the Galata quay in twenty minutes. Here, with Dikmen before him to ward off beggars and hotel agents, he found a cab to take him across the Golden Horn by the Pont Neuf, bargaining first with the driver, a process he always enjoyed; on this occasion he got the man down to fifteen piastres for the journey, the waiting, and the return.

The afternoon was mild; he was a little early. It was his usual practice to arrive some minutes late for appointments of this kind, so instead of proceeding directly to the street behind the Ministry of Commerce, where the Lynch Brothers had their Constantinople agency, he descended from the cab at the ministry building and made his way into the courtyard of the nearby Nuri Osmaniye Mosque, where he lingered for a while, Dikmen in close attendance.

The elm trees in the courtyard were in first leaf, and the pale buds glistened softly in the sunshine. Some men were crouching at the fountain, washing face and hands and feet before entering the mosque. But what took his eye and held it were the hundreds, perhaps thousands of strutting, gobbling pigeons in the paved area on his right. Against the slate-colored pavement their breasts looked vivid, blue almost. There was an old blind woman sitting on the edge of the curb with on her knees a tray piled with grain, which she gathered deftly and made into little packets and offered to passersby who might feel an impulse to feed the pigeons. Her fingers ruffled continuously in the grain; she buried her thin hands to the wrists in it, took it up in handfuls, poured it back in trickles into the tray, heaped it up in mounds, smoothed it down again. Rampling grew absorbed, watching her. As if she were counting gold, he thought, and indeed the grain was dark gold in color. No, not counting it, just caressing it, loving it—like a miser. Every so often she would pause to throw a handful into the mass or dislodge with a sweep of the arm any bird bold enough to settle on the edge of her tray.

He watched her for several minutes, and in this time her hands were never at rest. But it was the behavior of the pigeons that struck him most in the end because they seemed in a certain way to epitomize what he felt human societies might be capable of if totally subjected to the beneficial stimulus of having to compete for limited resources: They did not quarrel, that was the remarkable thing; any handful of grain that was thrown into the mass caused a local flurry of hopping and fluttering, but this lasted for seconds only. The birds were united; no discord, no dispute were allowed to get in the way—there was simply no time for it; in all that pullulation of creatures not a single second was wasted on acts of aggression; all was harmony and order—no wars, no territorial encroachments, just a never-ending scramble for life. Utopian really. Supplies would have to be strictly controlled, of course; that would be done by the people who made up the packets . . . The woman’s eyes were blank and terrible; there was a discharge from them, as if white pebbles could weep. He gave Dikmen a five-piastre piece to put into the woman’s hand and heard her mumbled blessing.

The office was on the third floor, and there was no lift. Rampling took the stairs slowly, Dikmen’s hand at his elbow. Conservation of energy, he thought, as he felt his heartbeat quicken. Like the pigeons.

He left Dikmen in the outer office, where his massive build, shaven head, and drooping mustache caused visible perturbation to a thin clerk in a fez seated there behind the typewriter. Two men were waiting for him in a smaller room adjoining. One he knew already, the commercial agent Balakian, whose office this was and who greeted him with a low bow; the other was a representative of the Lynch Brothers, the nephew of a senior member of the firm, introduced to him now as Mr. John Saunders, who had come from Baghdad for this meeting.

An office boy appeared as if by magic, and he was sent down for coffee from the nearby bar with instructions from Balakian to lose no time on the way if he knew what was good for him, a severity that did nothing to disturb the boy’s composure or quicken his movements, as he knew it to be merely assumed by his employer as a mark of respect to the visitor.

Little was said until the coffee arrived; by time-honored custom all semblance of haste in the broaching of business had to be avoided. Rampling was amused to see that portraits of King George and Lord Salisbury—the latter, bearded and heavy-lidded, looking directly down at him—had been hung on the office wall. He noticed also a loosely furled Union Jack on a short pole propped up behind the desk. Balakian did business with a wide variety of people, and he had a collection of portraits and flags, which he changed in accordance with the nationality and allegiance of his visitor.

Rampling was content to say little as they waited; it gave him an opportunity to rehearse in his mind the things he intended to say. He had a financial holding in the firm, a weekly steamer service operating between Baghdad and the port of Basra on the Shatt al Arab, under the name of the Euphrates and Tigris Steam Navigation Company. He knew, as did the directors of the company, whose sources of information were excellent—a member of the Lynch family sat in the House of Commons—that it was now the aim of the Turkish government and the German railway company to divert the line from the Tigris to the Euphrates and take it beyond Baghdad, down the valley to Basra, thus increasing the threat to river traffic. It was a matter primarily of giving assurances to the Lynch Brothers of his continued support while at the same time committing himself as little as possible. It was the need for discretion that had made him choose Balakian’s office, which was frequented by all manner of people, rather than his own house, for this meeting. The same need had made him prefer verbal to written assurances.

He had known that it would not be easy, and so it proved when the time for talking came. The firm had suffered something in the nature of a traumatic shock in 1903, when Sultan Abdul Hamid had granted the newly formed Baghdad Railway Company the right to construct modern port facilities at Baghdad, with the further prospect of extending the line to Basra and thence to a terminus on the Persian Gulf. In the eleven years that had elapsed since, the fear and rage aroused by this threat to the firm’s fifty-year-old monopoly of the river trade from Baghdad to the Gulf had scarcely abated.

Rampling explained the terms of agreement that had been reached in the Anglo-German negotiations the previous month in London. They would know them already, but the positive aspects needed stressing.

“A contract was made with the railway company,” he said. “It was signed by me as director of the British and Mesopotamian Navigation Company and witnessed by Herr von Kuhlmann of the German Embassy and Sir Eyre Crowe of the Foreign Office. In it were confirmed the exclusive rights of navigation by steamers and barges on the Tigris, Euphrates, and Shatt al Arab already granted to a new company to be formed by me, the Ottoman River Navigation Company, in which Mr. John Lynch will be one of the directors. It is true that Turkish capital has been offered, and has accepted, a fifty percent participation, but this is entirely without prejudice to the rights of the Lynch Brothers. In fact the firm has been granted the privilege of adding another steamer to their fleet with the sole proviso that it should fly the Turkish flag. Also, the firm and I in partnership together will be assigned by the railway company a forty percent participation in the proposed Ottoman Ports Company, with responsibilities for the construction of port and terminal facilities.”

It was not a compelling argument, he knew; he himself had gained considerably from the recent convention, but there was no way of disguising the fact that the sun was setting on the firm of Lynch Brothers, that the railway would take away their time-honored privileges, reduce them to smaller fish in a pond that was getting bigger all the time.

“They will go back on it,” Saunders said. “There will be further meetings, further agreements, further amendments to existing agreements. All this foreign capital coming in. You can’t trust these people to keep their word.”

“Turkish capital is foreign then?” Rampling’s snarling smile came briefly. “Ours isn’t, of course.”

It was clear that Saunders found this not worth answering. “Those contracts are not worth the paper they are written on,” he said. He was a tall, gaunt man with a waxed mustache and eyes that slanted downward slightly, giving his face a doglike look, faithful and sad.

Rampling was capable of a good deal of patience when his own interests were involved, but he felt a certain irritation rising in him now. “Let us be frank,” he said. “You’ll find they are worth something if you try to contravene them. That you are in danger from competition is true, but to a great extent it is your own fault. Your firm was founded back in the 1850s, you have had a virtual monopoly for more than half a century. It was a different world then, life was more leisurely; people were not in such a hurry. Things have quickened up, Mr. Saunders. In today’s terms the service you are offering is inadequate, and that is to express it mildly. I have had recent reports on the matter. It is not uncommon for goods to stand for months on the wharfs of Baghdad and Basra waiting to be shipped. And the charges are unbelievably high. It costs more to send freight down the Shatt al Arab than it does from Baghdad to London. You know these things as well as I do.”

“With all due respect, Lord Rampling, these questions of costs and delays are largely irrelevant.”

“Irrelevant?” Rampling’s unruly eyebrows rose in an expression that seemed one of genuine astonishment. He looked across at Balakian, whose soft brown eyes had noticeably widened.

“Or at least they are of minor importance. The exclusive privilege enjoyed by our company in the river trade is highly important to British commerce; that goes without saying, but it is of equal, and perhaps greater, importance to British prestige throughout the whole region. We
are
the river trade. We regard the custody of this privilege as our patriotic duty. The principal partners in the firm will not surrender it to a foreign power under any circumstances, and in this we have the backing of the government at home.” Saunders’s speech had quickened with the emotion of these words, but his face still kept its look of sad fidelity. “Over our dead bodies, sir,” he said, “over our dead bodies.”

Rampling took a deep breath, faintly rasping, clearly audible. It was not often that he was presented with the idea that exorbitant charges and unconscionable delays were elements adding to national prestige. But he knew better than to argue the matter; accusations of mismanagement and incompetence brought out a strain of patriotism in his fellow countrymen like almost nothing else. “Well,” he said, “let us hope it won’t come to that.” There would be a large number of dead bodies in Mesopotamia before long; those of the senior partners in the firm of Lynch Brothers would not affect the balance much.

He paused for some moments longer to let the atmosphere of heroic sacrifice clear a little; then he said, “Let us look at the facts in an objective manner, Mr. Saunders. The Tigris is a very shallow river, and it winds about a great deal. Its course is subject to constant changes owing to floods and the formation of sandbanks and shoals and so on. Nothing new about this; it has always been so, but it is not ideally suited to boat traffic, as I am sure you will agree. It takes five days for a steamer to travel from Baghdad to Basra—and that is in favorable weather. The distance can be covered by rail in a single day, whatever the weather. Now there is a logic here, sir, and wrapping ourselves up in the Union Jack will not protect us from it.”

“As I have said, sir, we have the backing of the government.” Saunders’s face had stiffened, and the line of his jaw had become more prominent. “Lord Curzon has denounced the railway as a threat to our empire in India, and he carries the majority of the House with him.”

Rampling turned to the agent, who had taken no part in the discussion but gave every appearance of listening intently. Balakian represented various commercial enterprises, some known, some not, and in either case not necessarily friendly to the British cause. “Mr. Balakian,” he said, “would you leave us in private for a few minutes? You understand, there are matters here that are not yet in the sphere of—”