The Sons of Adam Read online

  After queuing for three hours, he arrived at the head of the line. A door banged open in front of him and an official gestured him forwards. He entered a small room, decorated with an American flag and a poster advertising the Keystone Kops. Two uniformed men sat behind a simple wooden desk, with a mound of forms in front of them, half blank, half already filled.

  ‘Card, please.’

  Tom presented his card.

  ‘D’you speak English?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I am English.’

  ‘Huh.’ One of the officials grunted, as though Tom had been impertinent, but pens marked boxes on the relevant forms. A tattered leather Bible sat like a paperweight on a stack of blank forms. The official who’d opened the door to Tom, and who seemed to be acting like the master of ceremonies, shoved the book into his hand.

  ‘Can you tell me what this is?’

  ‘It’s the Holy Bible, sir.’

  ‘Please take the Bible in your left hand, raise your right hand, and do you swear to answer all questions truthfully?’

  Tom did as he was told. ‘I swear to tell the truth.’

  Then the interview began, questions like rifle-fire, pens scratching down answers like some mad dance of the bureaucrats. Tom resented the brusqueness of his interviewers – he disliked any situation where he was in another man’s power – but he kept his face and voice calm as he replied.

  ‘Nationality?’

  ‘Date of birth?’

  ‘Country and town of birth?’

  ‘Vessel of disembarkation?’

  ‘Do you have any money in your possession?’

  ‘Any gold, jewellery or other valuables?’

  ‘Please lay your money on the table.’

  ‘Please count it for us.’

  ‘Forty-eight dollars. That’s fine, you may pick it up.’

  ‘Can you read English or any other language or dialect?’

  ‘You can? Then please read the text set down on the printed card.’ The card contained the first few lines of the American Declaration of Independence and Tom spoke the lines with a ringing forcefulness, giving particular emphasis to the line saying ‘that all men were created equal’.

  ‘Do you have an address to go to in New York or elsewhere in the United States?’

  ‘Please state the address and your relationship to the resident.’

  Luckily Tom was prepared for this question, and was able to give the name and address of a former shipmate whose wife ran a boarding house up in Connecticut.

  ‘Do you have a promise of employment in the United States?’

  Tom hesitated.

  ‘I asked if you had a promise of employment? A job?’

  Tom continued to hesitate.

  ‘You have any way of making money or you gonna live on the bum?’

  Finally, Tom shook his head. ‘No, sir. I’m going to pay my way all right.’

  ‘Uh-huh. And how d’you plan to do that?’ The official spoke to Tom as though he was dangerously close to becoming an idiot, imbecile or feeble-minded person.

  A smile ghosted over Tom’s face. ‘I’m an oilman,’ he said firmly. ‘I’ve come here to drill for oil.’

  The officials smirked at each other. ‘Right. You got forty-eight bucks in your pocket. I reckon you should get an oil well for that. Maybe something nice down in Texas.’

  The other official grinned and nodded and nodded and grinned like it was the best joke he’d heard since President McKinley’s assassination. ‘Or Pennsylvania,’ he said. ‘Think about it. Should get plenty of oil well up in Pennsylvania. Ha! Forty-eight bucks!’

  Tom became instantly angry at their jocularity.

  ‘I’ll earn what I need, then drill,’ he said.

  ‘Right. Which was what I was asking. D’you have a promise of employment?’

  Tom gritted his teeth. He did have a promise of employment, as it happened. He had done well on his cattle ships, had been promoted once already and had been invited to continue with the trade as soon as he’d obtained his papers. He gave the bureaucrats the information they needed, which they wrote down with plenty of little nudges, winks, exclamations and puffs of laughter – ‘An oilman!’, ‘Hoo!’, ‘Forty-eight bucks!’ – that infuriated Tom. Then the interrogation continued.

  ‘Are you willing to abide by the laws and Constitution of the United States?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Have you ever been convicted of any crime involving moral turpitude?’

  ‘Are you a polygamist or do you believe in or advocate the practice of polygamy?’

  ‘Are you an anarchist, a bolshevist, or a member of any organisation advocating the overthrow of the US government?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I’m a Red Army colonel with three wives and a taste for choirboys’ – or so Tom almost said. In fact, he bit his tongue and answered, ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever been arrested?’

  Tom paused. The two pens quivered and halted. Two pairs of eyes settled on his face. Tom felt a flash of annoyance. Why in hell should he reveal anything to anyone about the time he’d slipped from his column of fellow prisoners on the way back to prison camp? What the hell would this brace of pale-faced paper-pushers understand about months of starvation, the crushing load of captivity? About the good-hearted American whose last words were ‘Freedom! Freedom!’ before the German bullets dragged him down, or about Tom’s leaden-footed surrender and rearrest?

  ‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘I was taken prisoner in the war in Europe, that’s all.’

  The two pens hesitated another moment. It wasn’t quite a clean answer. The pile of nice blank forms preferred nice clean answers.

  ‘You fighting with the Brits?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Right alongside some very fine American units, if I may say so. Very fine indeed.’

  It was a good answer, no matter that Tom had been taken prisoner a full seven months before the Americans had entered the war. ‘Wait for Uncle Sam to bail you out, huh?’ The senior of the two officials shook his head, and checked the ‘No arrest’ box on his form. His junior twin did likewise.

  There then followed a handful of questions presumably intended to check whether Tom was an idiot, imbecile or a feeble-minded person. ‘You have fifteen oranges. You give five of them away. How many d’you have left? You give away another five. How many then? Apples cost ten cents, oranges cost twenty-five. Which is worth more, six apples or six oranges?’

  Tom passed the exam with flying colours.

  The master of ceremonies took a nod from the senior desk official and handed Tom a card, marked ‘Admitted’. In a slurred impatient voice, he said ‘WelcometotheUnitedStatesnextinlinetheremoveitonplease!’

  Tom took the card with a surge of relief so strong, he hadn’t realised how nervous he must have been. The past began to slip from his shoulders. In America, if he committed no crime for five years, he could and would become an American citizen. He was dazed. How simple it had become. The whole tangled confusion of names, birth, breeding, inheritance, and all that Alan-and-Guy versus Alan-and-Tom competition had just dropped away. Tom had just emigrated to a country where no one even gave a damn. It was so simple, it seemed impossible.

  He took his precious card – ‘Admitted’ – to a final line leading to the immigration booth. The immigration officer took the card, then a long drag on his cigarette.

  ‘Eight bucks, please. Head tax.’

  Tom handed over eight dollars.

  ‘Full name?’

  ‘Thomas Albert Cree –’ Tom halted.

  ‘Just plain Thomas Albert? Or Thomas Albert Somebody? Which? Jeez!’ Another drag on the cigarette. The ash scattered on to the papers lying beneath. The man’s shirt cuff was grey from wiping over tobacco ash all day long.

  This was it. The moment to drop the last unwanted stone in the cleansing ocean. The name Creeley was inextricably tied up with the name Montague. Right now, Tom wanted nothing of either. The cattle ship he’d worked on for six months, the SS Calloway, was a na
me he liked as well as any other – and one close enough to Creeley that he wouldn’t be dishonouring either his father or himself. With a firm voice, Tom spoke his decision. ‘My name is Thomas Albert Calloway, sir.’

  ‘Tom Calloway, welcome to the United States.’

  53

  ‘Tie up the horses and pack the bags. No, not the tents, the rock-tools. Do it now!’

  Alan’s tone of command was as unmistakable in Persian as it had been in English. His experience of war had given him a cool-headedness, a speed of resolve that nothing else could have taught him. He was just twenty-six years old, but spoke with the confidence of a field marshal. His team of horse-drivers responded instantly.

  ‘Tether the horses. Make them fast. There. That bush will do.’

  As he spoke, Alan took care to remain visibly calm and unflustered. He knew perfectly well that nothing panicked men like any sign of panic in their commander. He walked among his men, giving brief orders, supervising the packing of his geology equipment (‘rock-tools’ as he’d dubbed them in Persian). When the packing was underway to his satisfaction, he strolled casually to his saddlebags, drew out his army-issue revolver and buckled the holster to his belt.

  They had been camped up on a scrubby little plateau overlooking a shallow lake. The lake provided water and enough thorn-bushes for cooking and a fire in the evening. They had been there two days and had met nobody. Even the shepherds who came up there in summer had driven their flocks down to lower ground for the winter. But then one of the men had come hurtling into camp, terrified. ‘The Qashqai are coming. Forty men. A war party.’

  The other drivers had begun to saddle the horses ready for immediate flight, but Alan had roared them into silence. A raiding party of forty men could easily ride down a procession of eight tired baggage-ponies. Running away would only induce a chase that could easily lead to tragedy.

  ‘Coffee, Ahmed. Put the water on.’

  ‘Coffee, aqa?’ ‘Aqa’ was Persian for ‘sir’, and was how Alan was invariably addressed by his men. The poor boy was obviously bewildered by Alan’s sudden need for hot refreshment.

  ‘Coffee, Ahmed, coffee, coffee, coffee. Husain, why are you standing there? The fire is going out. Lend a hand.’

  Baffled but obedient, the men began to boil water and the Persian adoration of coffee quickly overcame any remaining terror. By the time the hoofbeats of the approaching party were audible, the water had boiled and the coffee was brewing. Husain, the most intelligent and courageous of the horse-drivers, drew close to Alan.

  ‘I am ready, aqa,’ he said in a whisper.

  Alan glanced down and noticed that Husain had brought the tin ammunition box out of its wrappings in one of the saddlebags. Husain had taken the party’s second revolver out and was proposing to lie next to Alan and fight it out.

  ‘Give me that bloody gun,’ snapped Alan in English, adding the same thing a little more gently in Persian. ‘We’re not going to fight.’

  Husain looked crestfallen, but there was no time to debate. The mounted tribesmen broke like a tide over the brow of the hill and swept into and round Alan’s encampment in an instant. There weren’t anything like forty of them – fifteen would have been nearer the mark – but every one was armed with a rifle, and their horses were of a different class to Alan’s little team.

  ‘Salaam,’ said Alan, greeting the new arrivals with a polite but measured bow. ‘You see I have your coffee already prepared.’

  The tribesmen milled around. They circled the little camp, laughing amongst themselves and talking. They spoke in a thick tribal dialect that Alan was unable to understand. Most of the men carried knives, either in their belts or their headgear, and none of them looked shy about using them. For all his exterior calmness, Alan realised that his life lay in the hands of these men, who knew no law beyond raiding, theft and blood-feud.

  Alan spoke to Husain in an undertone. Pour them some coffee. Act as if we’ve invited them.’ Husain began to pour the coffee, swearing and punching Ali, the youngest in their team, for not having wiped the cups properly.

  ‘I have eight cups only. But I invite seven of you to drink with me.’

  Alan sat down. He allowed his revolver to be completely visible to the tribesmen, but Alan himself ignored it completely. There was more movement, more laughter among the horseback men. Then at last, one of them trotted forwards, leaped off his horse – a magnificent beast – and tossed his reins to one of the others to look after. He was very tall and erect, with an untrimmed beard and the hooded eyes of a man who spent most of his time on saddleback in the high altitude sun.

  ‘I am Muhammad Ameri,’ he said with a bow. ‘These are my men.’

  Ameri and a couple of his lieutenants sat and drank coffee. Alan called for noql – the sugar-coated almond sweets that the local Persians couldn’t get enough of – and the mood began to improve. Even so, all the time the other men remained on horseback, fingering their weapons, except for a half-dozen or so, who dismounted and began going systematically through Alan’s belongings. Alan’s men sat together and shot dirty looks at the newcomers. Once, when one of the tribesmen began going through the saddlebag containing Alan’s bedroll, shaving tackle and personal papers, the fourteen-year-old Ali leaped up and with a shrill yell began to attack the man, jumping on his back and beating him with his fists. The tribesman shook the boy to the ground and scuffed him away with a boot. There was a moment’s dangerous tension, then the tribesman laughed and moved on to a different bag.

  The coffee was finished and Alan called for food. Usually, his little team led a fairly spartan life: living off rice and bread, varied by eggs, tomatoes, melons, goat’s cheese and almonds purchased from villagers that they passed. Luckily, though, this day they happened to have with them a couple of plump young chickens, ready for eating. Grumpily, because he’d been spoiling to play the hero, Husain ordered the others around and took charge of producing the best meal that their little camp could supply.

  To begin with, Muhammad Ameri’s conversation was completely centred on a few things: rifles, horses, war, blood-feuds, the superiority of the Qashqai to anyone and everyone else. Alan nodded, agreed, and played his part of polite host to perfection. He still had no idea what Ameri intended, but he assumed that the major options under review were armed robbery on the one hand, and armed robbery with violence on the other.

  The chicken and rice arrived, seasoned with whatever sultanas, yoghurt, and saffron was available. The tribesmen ate greedily, leaving a ring of rice around their plates, in the true polite Persian fashion. Eventually Ameri’s curiosity grew too great.

  ‘Farangi?’ he asked.

  Strictly speaking, the word meant French, but to Persians it had come to mean anyone from Europe. Alan nodded. ‘I’m English,’ he explained.

  ‘Ah yes …’ Ameri’s attention had been caught by Alan’s surveying equipment, which hadn’t been fully packed away. ‘English … You are building a railway?’

  Alan laughed. It was strange the associations that his nationality brought up. ‘No.’

  ‘A road?’

  ‘No.’

  Ameri paused, curiosity and suspicion competing in his face. ‘You are making maps? You are a tax collector?’

  ‘No, no, no. None of those things.’

  Ameri paused, picking bits of chicken from his teeth and spitting them onto the embers of the fire. ‘You have come to buy carpets,’ he pronounced finally, sure of having found the right answer at last.

  ‘No. Oil. I’m looking for oil.’

  Ameri nodded gravely, then turned to his lieutenants and the three of them began speaking very rapidly amongst themselves, apparently trying to work out what Alan meant and whether he was telling the truth. Eventually, Ameri called over to one of his men to bring something. The man dug round in a saddlebag and came over with a very old kerosene lamp (stamped ‘Armitage & Co Ltd, Leeds’ on its rusted side). The fuel vase was empty, but the smell remained.

  ‘Oil?�
� Ameri said. ‘Oil for lamps?’

  ‘Yes. You’ve heard of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, working up at Masjid-i-Suleiman and Abadan?’

  Ameri nodded, but Alan suspected that the nod concealed almost total ignorance.

  ‘I think there may be oil in the Zagros and I’m here to look for it. If I find it, it will make everyone here rich, very rich indeed.’

  ‘You have found it yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you have found some … some signs of oil, no?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  Alan opened his hands in the expressive Persian gesture that signified nothing. ‘Nothing at all.’

  And he spoke the truth. Since leaving England and Lottie, Alan had spent months in the Zagros, traversing the high mountains and deep valleys, building an unrivalled picture of the geology of the area. It was a monumental work that had many months yet to run. But so far, for all his labour, he’d found nothing – not even a clue that there might be something. So far, all his work had simply proved that he was wasting his time.

  Another long conversation followed amongst the tribesmen.

  Alan was growing used enough to their thick dialect to understand a little even when they spoke fast. It was clear that they had heard rumours of the great industrial enterprise taking shape to the north, but that all of them had tended to dismiss the rumour as fantasy. Then the voices sank. The three Qashqai leaders were discussing something and were careful to exclude Alan from their deliberations. Bizarrely, Alan was suddenly reminded of Egham Dunlop, and the way he too had sized up Alan’s money, power and prospects. He felt a desperate longing to be with Lottie again, and a moment of violent loneliness. First Tom, then Lottie …

  At last, the tribesmen came to a conclusion. Ameri rose. He was tall and held himself very upright. ‘Come.’