They Came to Baghdad

‘But how did you arrange it?’ she said. ‘You must be very powerful. You must be quite different from what you pretend to be. You’re – it’s like you said the other day – you’re a King of Babylon.’

She saw the pride that lit up his face. She saw the power and strength and beauty and cruelty that had been disguised behind a facёade of a modest likeable young man.

‘And I’m only a Christian Slave,’ thought Victoria. She said quickly and anxiously, as a final artistic touch (and what its cost was to her pride no one will ever know), ‘But you do love me, don’t you?’

His scorn was hardly to be hidden now. This little fool – all these fools of women! So easy to make them think you loved them and that was all they cared about! They had no conception of greatness of construction, of a new world, they just whined for love! They were slaves and you used them as slaves to further your ends.

‘Of course I love you,’ he said.

‘But what is it all about? Tell me, Edward? Make me understand.’

‘It’s a new world, Victoria. A new world that will rise out of the muck and ashes of the old.’

‘Tell me.’

He told her and in spite of herself she was almost carried away, carried into the dream. The old bad things must destroy each other. The fat old men grasping at their profits, impeding progress. The bigoted stupid Communists, trying to establish their Marxian heaven. There must be total war – total destruction. And then – the new Heaven and the new Earth. The small chosen band of higher beings, the scientists, the agricultural experts, the administrators– the young men like Edward – the young Siegfrieds of the New World. All young, all believing in their destiny as Supermen. When destruction had run its course, they would step in and take over.

It was madness – but it was constructive madness. It was the sort of thing that in a world, shattered and disintegrating, could happen.

‘But think,’ said Victoria, ‘of all the people who will be killed first.’

‘You don’t understand,’ said Edward. ‘That doesn’t matter.’

It doesn’t matter – that was Edward’s creed. And suddenly for no reason, a remembrance of that three thousand years old coarse pottery bowl mended with bitumen flashed across Victoria ’s mind. Surely those were the things that mattered – the little everyday things, the family to be cooked for, the four walls that enclosed the home, the one or two cherished possessions. All the thousands of ordinary people on the earth, minding their own business, and tilling the earth, and making pots and bringing up families and laughing and crying, and getting up in the morning and going to bed at night. They were the people who mattered, not these Angels with wicked faces who wanted to make a new world and who didn’t care whom they hurt to do it.

And carefully, feeling her way, for here in Devonshire she knew that death might be very near, she said:

‘You are wonderful, Edward. But what about me? What can I do?’

‘You want to – help? You believe in it?’

But she was prudent. Not sudden conversion. That would be too much.

‘I think I just believe in you!’ she said. ‘Anything you tell me to do, Edward, I’ll do.’

‘Good girl,’ he said.

‘Why did you arrange for me to come out here to begin with? There must have been some reason?’

‘Of course there was. Do you remember I took a snap of you that day?’

‘I remember,’ said Victoria.

(You fool, how flattered you were, how you simpered! she thought to herself.)

‘I’d been struck by your profile – by your resemblance to someone. I took that snap to make sure.’

‘Whom do I resemble?’

‘A woman who’s been causing us a good deal of trouble – Anna Scheele.’

‘Anna Scheele.’ Victoria stared at him in blank surprise. Whatever she had expected, it was not this. ‘You mean – she looks like me?’

‘Quite remarkably so side view. The features in profile are almost exactly the same. And there’s one most extraordinary thing, you’ve got a tiny mark of a scar on your upper lip, left side –’

‘I know. It’s where I fell on a tin horse when I was a child. It had a sharp ear sticking up and it cut quite deep in. It doesn’t show much – not with powder on.’

‘Anna Scheele has a mark in just the same place. That was a most valuable point. You’re alike in height and build – she’s about four or five years older than you. The real difference is the hair, you’re a brunette and she’s a blonde. And your style of hairdressing is quite different. Your eyes are a darker blue, but that wouldn’t matter with tinted glasses.’

‘And that’s why you wanted me to come to Baghdad? Because I looked like her.’

‘Yes, I thought the resemblance might – come in useful.’

‘So you arranged the whole thing…The Clipps – who are the Clipps?’

‘They’re not important – they just do as they’re told.’

Something in Edward’s tone sent a faint shiver down Victoria ’s spine. It was as though he had said with inhuman detachment, ‘They are under Obedience.’

There was a religious flavour about this mad project. ‘Edward,’ she thought, ‘is his own God. That’s what’s so frightening.’

Aloud she said:

‘You told me that Anna Scheele was the boss, the Queen Bee, in your show?’

‘I had to tell you something to put you off the scent. You had already learnt too much.’

‘And if I hadn’t happened to look like Anna Scheele that would have been the end of me,’ thought Victoria.

She said:

‘Who is she really?’

‘She’s confidential secretary to Otto Morganthal, the American and international banker. But that isn’t all she is. She has the most remarkable financial brain. We’ve reason to believe she’s traced out a lot of our financial operations. Three people have been dangerous to us – Rupert Crofton Lee, Carmichael – well they’re both wiped out. There remains Anna Scheele. She’s due in Baghdad in three days’ time. In the meantime, she’s disappeared.’

‘Disappeared? Where?’

‘In London. Vanished, apparently, off the face of the earth.’

‘And does no one know where she is?’

‘Dakin may know.’

But Dakin didn’t know. Victoria knew that, though Edward didn’t – so where was Anna Scheele?

She asked:

‘You really haven’t the least idea?’

‘We’ve an idea,’ said Edward slowly.

‘Well?’

‘It’s vital that Anna Scheele should be here in Baghdad for the Conference. That, as you know, is in five days’ time.’

‘As soon as that? I’d no idea.’

‘We’ve got every entry into this country taped. She’s certainly not coming here under her own name. And she’s not coming in on a Government service plane. We’ve our means of checking that. So we’ve investigated all the private bookings. There’s a passage booked by BOAC in the name of Grete Harden. We’ve traced Grete Harden back and there’s no such person. It’s an assumed name. The address given is a phony one. It’s our idea that Grete Harden is Anna Scheele.’

He added:

‘Her plane will touch down at Damascus the day after tomorrow.’