In High Places

In time he had come to Massawa, port of coral and gateway from Ethiopia to the Red Sea.

It was in Massawa that retribution for stealing came close to overtaking him. Mingling in the crowd near a fishmonger's stall, he had purloined a fish, but the keen-eyed merchant had observed and given chase. Several others in the crowd, including a policeman, had joined in and within seconds Henri Duval was being pursued by what, to his youthful frightened ears, sounded like an angry mob. At a desperately fevered pace he had led them around Massawa's coral buildings and through tortuous back streets of the native quarter. Finally, having gained enough headway to reach the docks, he had hidden himself amid bales of ship's cargo awaiting loading. From a peephole he had watched his pursuers search, then eventually give up and go away.

But the experience had shaken him and he resolved to quit Ethiopia by any means he could. In front of his hiding place a freighter was moored and after nightfall he crept aboard, stowing in a dark locker which he stumbled into from a lower deck. The vessel sailed next morning. Two hours later he was discovered and brought before the captain.

The' ship was an antiquated Italian coal burner, plying leakily between the Gulf of Aden and the eastern Mediterranean.

The languid Italian captain boredly scraped dirt from beneath his fingernails as Henri Duval stood, trembling, before him.

After several minutes had passed the captain asked a sharp question in Italian. There was no response. He tried English, then French, but without result. Duval had long forgotten the little French he had learned from his mother and his speech was now a polyglot hodgepodge of Arabic, Somali, and Amharic, interspersed with stray words from Ethiopia's seventy languages and twice as many dialects.

Finding he could not communicate, the captain shrugged indifferently. Stowaways were no novelty on the ship and the captain, unhampered by tiresome scruples about maritime law, ordered Duval put to work. His intention was to dump the stowaway at the next port of call.

What the captain had not foreseen, however, was that Henri Duval, a man without a country, would be firmly rejected by immigration officials at every port of call, including Massawa, to which the ship returned several months later.

With the increasing time that Duval spent aboard, the captain's anger increased in ratio until, after ten months had gone by, he called his bosun into conference. Between them they devised a plan – which the bosun obligingly explained to Duval through an interpreter – whereby the stowaway's life was to be made so untenable that sooner or later he would be glad to jump ship. And eventually, after something like two months of overwork, beatings and semi-starvation, that was precisely what he did.

Duval recalled in sharp detail the night he had slipped silently down the gangway of the Italian ship. It was in Beirut, Lebanon – the tiny buffer state between Syria and Israel where, the legend says, St George once slew his dragon.

He had left as he had come, in darkness; and departure was easy because he had nothing to take and no possessions except the ragged clothes he wore. Once disembarked, he had at first scurried through the dockyard, intending to head for town. But the glimpse of a uniform in a lighted area ahead had unnerved him and sent him darting back, seeking shelter in the shadows. More reconnaissance showed that the dockyard was fenced and patrolled. He felt himself trembling; he was twenty-one, weak from hunger, incredibly alone, and desperately afraid.

As he moved, another shadow loomed. It was a ship.

At first he thought he had returned to the Italian freighter and his immediate impulse was to steal back on board. Better the misery he knew than the prison he envisaged waiting if police arrested him. Then he saw that the shadow was not the Italian ship but a larger one and he had scurried aboard it like a rat up a rope. It was the Vastervik, a fact he was to learn two days later and twenty miles at sea when starvation conquered fear and drove him, quaking, out of hiding.,

Captain Sigurd Jaabeck of the Vastervik was very different from his Italian counterpart. A slow-speaking, grey-haired Norwegian, he was a firm man, but just, who had respected both the precepts of his Bible and the laws of the sea. Captain Jaabeck explained sternly but carefully to Henri Duval that a stowaway was not compelled to work but could do so voluntarily, although without pay. In any case, whether working or not, he would receive the same rations as the ship's crew. Duval chose to work.

Like the Italian shipmaster. Captain Jaabeck fully intended to dispose of his stowaway at the first port of call. But unlike the Italian – after learning that there was to be no quick disposal of Duval – the thought of ill-treatment did not occur to him.

And so for twenty months Henri Duval remained aboard while the Vastervik mooched, cargo questing, over half the oceans of the world. They jogged with tramplike monotony through the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific. They touched North Africa, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, England, South America, the United States, and Canada. And everywhere the petition of Henri Duval to land and remain was met with an emphatic no. The reason, when port officials bothered to give it, was always the same – the stowaway had no papers, no identity, no country, and no rights.

And then, after a while, when the Vastervik had settled down to accepting Duval as a permanency, the young stowaway had become something of a ship's pet.

The Vastervik's crew was an international miscellany which included Poles, Scandinavians, Lascars, a Chinese, an Armenian, and several English seamen of whom Stubby Gates was the accepted leader. It was the latter group which had adopted Duval and made his life, if not pleasant, at least as tolerable as crowded conditions in the ship allowed. They had helped him in speaking English, and now, although his accent was thick and phrasing awkward, at least with patience on both sides he could make himself understood.

It was one of the few genuine kindnesses that Henri Duval had ever experienced, and he responded much as an eager puppy dog responds to approval from its master. Nowadays he did personal jobs for the crew, helped the officers' steward, and ran shipboard errands. In return the men brought gifts of cigarettes and sweets from their trips ashore and occasionally Captain Jaabeck provided small sums of money which other seamen spent on Duval's behalf. But with it all, the stowaway was still a captive and the Vastervik, once a refuge, had become his prison.

Thus Henri Duval, whose only home was the sea, had come to the gates of Canada on the eve of Christmas.

Chapter 6

The interrogation had taken almost two hours. Partway through, Dan Orliffe had repeated some of his earlier questions in different terms, seeking to trip the young stowaway into an admission or inconsistency. But the ruse failed. Except for misunderstandings of language, which were cleared up as they went along, the basic story stayed the same.

Near the end, after a leading question phrased with deliberate inaccuracy, Duval had not answered. Instead he had turned his dark eyes upon his interrogator.

'You trick me. You think I lie,' the stowaway said, and again the newspaperman was aware of the same unconscious dignity he had noted earlier.

Ashamed at having his own trickery exposed, Dan Orliffe had said, 'I was just checking. I won't do it again.' And they had gone on to something else.

Now, back at his beat-up desk in the cramped, cluttered newsroom of the Vancouver Post Dan spread out his notes and reached for a sheaf of copy paper. Shuffling in carbons, he called across to the night city editor, Ed Benedict, at the city desk.

'Ed, it's a good story. How many words can you handle?'

The night city editor considered. Then he called back. 'Hold it down to a thousand.'

Pulling his chair closer to the typewriter, Dan nodded. It would do. He would have liked more but, assembled tautly, a thousand words could say a great deal.

He began to type.

Part 4 Ottawa, Christmas Eve

Chapter 1

At 6.15 AM on Christmas Eve Milly Freedeman was awakened by the telephone's insistent ringing in her apartment in the fashionable Tiffany Building on Ottawa Driveway. Slipping a robe of faded yellow terrycloth over silk pyjamas, she groped with her feet for the old, heel-trodden moccasins she.had kicked off the night before. Unable to locate them, the Prime Minister's personal secretary padded barefoot into the adjoining room and snapped on a light.

Even this early, and viewed through sleepy eyes, the room which the light revealed seemed as inviting and comfortable as always. It was a far cry, Milly knew, from the chic bachelor-girl apartments so often featured in the glossy magazines. But it was a place she loved to come home to every evening, usually tired, and sinking at first into the down cushions of the big overstuffed chesterfield – the one which had given the movers so much trouble when she had brought it here from her parents' home in Toronto.

The old chesterfield had been recovered since then, in Milly's favourite shade of green, and was flanked now by the two armchairs she had bought at an auction sale outside Ottawa – a little threadbare, but wonderfully comfortable. She kept deciding that some day soon she must have autumn-coloured chintz covers made for the chairs. The covers would go well with the apartment's walls and woodwork, painted in a warm mushroom shade. She had done the painting herself one weekend, inviting a couple of friends in for a scratch dinner, then cajoling them into helping her finish.

On the far side of the living-room was an old rocking chair, one that she was absurdly sentimental about because she had rocked in it, daydreaming, as a child. And beside the rocking chair, on a tooled-leather coffee table for which she had paid an outrageously high price, was the telephone.

Settling into the chair with a preliminary rock, Milly lifted the receiver. The caller was James Howden.

'Morning, Milly,' the Prime Minister said briskly. 'I'd like a cabinet Defence Committee meeting at eleven o'clock.' He made no reference to the earliness of the call, nor did Milly expect it. She had long ago grown used to her employer's addiction to early rising.

'Eleven this morning?' With her free hand Milly hugged the robe around her. It was cold in the apartment from a window she had left slightly open the night before.

'That's right,' Howden said.

'There'll be some complaining,' Milly pointed out. 'It's Christmas Eve.'

'I hadn't forgotten. But this is too important to stand over.'

When she had hung up she checked the time from the tiny leather travelling clock which stood beside the telephone and resisted a temptation to return to bed. Instead she closed the open window, then crossed to the tiny kitchenette and put on coffee. After that, returning to the living-room, she switched on a portable radio. The coffee was beginning to perk when the 6.30 radio news carried the official announcement of the Prime Minister's forthcoming talks in Washington.

Half an hour later, still in pyjamas, but this time with the old moccasins on her feet, she began to call the five committee members at their homes.

The Minister of External Affairs was first. Arthur Lexington responded cheerfully, 'Sure thing, Milly. I've been at meetings all night, what's another more or less? By the way, did you hear the announcement?'

'Yes,' Milly said. 'It was just on the radio.'

'Fancy a trip to Washington?'

'All I ever get to see on trips,' Milly said, 'is the keyboard of a typewriter.'

'You must come on one of mine,' Lexington said. 'Never need a typewriter. All my speeches are on the backs of cigarette packets.'