Davidson A Long Way to Shiloh

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-32994-6
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

Casper Laing, the young, fiery and brilliant Professor of Semitic Languages, is asked to decipher an ancient parchment found in Israel. Piecing together its mysterious fragments, his translation soon reveals directions to a shrouded location. Believed to be the secret hiding place of the True Menorah, an ancient and priceless Jewish candelabrum, the Jordanians and Israelis begin a frantic race to claim the prize. Surrounded by violent and treacherous rivals, Casper is enjoined on a deadly adventure deep into the burning Negev desert. A Long Way to Shiloh (1966), Lionel Davidson's third novel, was a Book Society Choice and won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award as well as the Crime Critics' Award for Best Thriller of the Year. Published in the USA as The Menorah Men, it was a no. 1 bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. It further cemented his reputation as one of the pre-eminent genre writers of his generation, and was described by the Guardian as 'first-rate' and by the New York Times as 'a supple delight in which learning, wit and style are beautifully integrated.'

Lionel Davidson was born in 1922 in Hull, Yorkshire. He left school early and worked as a reporter before serving in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. His first novel, The Night of Wenceslas, was published in 1960 to great critical acclaim and drew comparisons to Graham Greene and John le Carré. It was followed by The Rose of Tibet (1962), A Long Way to Shiloh (1966), The Chelsea Murders (1978) and Kolymsky Heights (1994). He was thrice the recipient of the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award and, in 2001, was awarded the CWA's Cartier Diamond Dagger lifetime achievement award. He died in 2009.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Davidson, Lionel

Leseproben

1

Altogether Brutish and Foolish

The stock is a doctrine of vanities.

Jeremiah 10:8

1

There was nobody there when I arrived, nobody except Birkett and his wife, that is, which was a special penance. He was eating raisins and a stick of celery, and he didn’t stop when he saw me, just nodded and continued masticating his mouthful, very slowly and thoughtfully. He was wearing his black rolltop sweater in some thin, probably nylon, material, which, together with his eyes, set rather too close together, one a little larger than the other, and his high daemonic cheekbones, gave him the appearance of a mad elderly ballet dancer.

His wife had been engaged with a similar plate at the same small oak table, but she picked hers up and said, ‘Excuse me a moment,’ and went out with it. He continued chewing, nodding to show it would soon be over, and then finished. He didn’t finish his meal; he just finished the mouthful, and seemed to go into neutral.

I said, ‘I’m afraid I’ve come too early.’

He didn’t say I hadn’t. He just looked at me in his earnest deranged way and said, ‘It will give us an opportunity to talk.’

‘We have to congratulate you,’ his wife said, returning with her thin grim smile.

‘Naturally,’ Birkett said, sincerely. ‘I’ve been wanting to for some time.’

‘Dr Laing is a difficult young man to get hold of. Finish your meal, dear. You’ll have a drink, Dr Laing.’

It was a statement rather than a question, and seemed to imply, in her curiously insinuating way, knowledge of some special range of characteristics of mine, such as dissoluteness, greed, opportunism.

I leaned back, already enervated. I’d caught her looking at my boots. The suede boots had seemed about right for the way-out lot to be expected here tonight. I’d put on a woollen checked shirt and an old tweed jacket, too; no-nonsense Laing. The effect couldn’t, I saw, have been farther out if I’d appeared in a top hat and tails. Their own brand of no-nonsense was grotesque to such a degree that any other, any other involving suede boots, looked like racy affectation. Below the table I could see Birkett’s small neat feet planted side by side in some no doubt relaxed yoga position, in black plimsolls. Above them his legs were in a pair of bleached jeans. His wife wore a gym slip with brown stockings and sandals. The enormous creature quartered the room in this get-up, getting me a drink, and managing to imply at the same time some medical-type urgency for one who couldn’t do without the stuff.

She gave me a glass with about a quarter of a pint of whisky in it, no water or soda, just the bare commodity; she really was a rather loathsome woman.

‘I hope this is the way you like it.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I think I remember that you smoke, too. The cigarettes may be rather stale. We have no use for them.’ She’d sprung back from a cupboard with a china box.

‘They’ll have a bit of go in them, then.’

‘A bit of go,’ she said, and sat down, smiling grimly and obscurely, feeling the joke all over for spring traps and double meanings. I lit the cigarette and decided not to make any more. It was dangerous to make jokes here. It was dangerous to say anything. I took a sip of whisky and felt my teeth go on edge again; head still booming faintly from the morning’s hangover.

‘You’re having a very busy time, Dr Laing.’

‘Well. People are being amiable.’

‘They are always amiable to success.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ I said. It was as well to be sure of that round here.

‘A most richly deserved one,’ she said strongly. ‘That goes without saying. It’s a surprising thing, all the same, for a man of your age to be given his chair.’

‘It’s a narrow field.’

‘Perhaps,’ she said carefully. ‘And perhaps one that is also enjoying a certain fashionable interest at the moment, together with apparently almost unlimited funds. To say all this doesn’t detract from the achievement, of course.’

It did, of course. She’d seen where my guard had wavered and had come through in a flash; a skilled and experienced performer. She was good, this cow. The mindless euphoria of weeks dispersed in a moment. I took another sip of whisky and felt it go.

She sat smiling, hands in her lap, well limbered up now. She tried for another round.

‘I expect it’ll be a bit of a wrench, all the same.’

‘Well. After three years.’

‘Leaving the accepted disciplines of an old university for something quite – new?’

‘Oh, of course. Certainly.’

Nothing doing there, and she saw it. She moved on hungrily. ‘We have at last read a copy of your paper in support of Professor Gordon of Brandeis.’

‘The Eteo-Cretans, you mean.’

‘Most brilliantly argued and individual.’ (Flashy, rabble-fodder.) ‘As I understand it, you take the position that the Cretan and Hellenic cultures share a common stock with that of the Northern Semites.’

‘Well, Gordon does. I was just able to wing in with a few thoughts on my chosen people.’

‘Your chosen people?’

‘The Northern Semites.’

‘Ah, yes. They are Jews, are they?’

‘Jews, pre-Jews, Syrians, Phoenicians. That lot.’

She said, ‘That lot,’ smile well-diluted. ‘Yes. I must say I was much more able to understand your racy and amusing exposition’ – (Clown. Populariser!) – ‘than Professor Gordon’s more taxing work. Although as I understand it, the position is not generally accepted.’

‘No. Well. The readings are all fairly tentative. The daftness has to come out early, you know. Apprentices like me are expected to fly about and make wild suppositions. Every now and again one of them might turn out to be right.’

This modesty was both pleasing and aggravating to her in roughly equal proportions. Her hands moved restlessly in her lap. She was ready for a workout and all I was showing her was the shoulder, a small target, kept well in, moving fast.

She said, ‘Perhaps we’d better not discuss it now. I know Birkett wants to talk to you about it.’

Birkett wasn’t talking to anybody at the moment; unless, possibly, himself. I’d been watching with fascination a certain rabbity movement of his upper lip, not quite in phase with his chewing, that could have been a few obligatory sutras of the Bhagavad Gita or simply some metabolism-controlling procedure. If he’d heard anything of the preceeding rigmarole, which was doubtful, its essential malice had certainly escaped him. An odd bird, paralysingly barmy, with his own unique facial blend reminiscent of an overwrought John Stuart Mill and a deathbed Picasso; a man courteous, mild and modest in all but his opinions, by which of course he had to make a living. He hadn’t yet made the Chair in English Literature his wife lusted after. He wasn’t ever likely to. A decidedly odd bird, and with a decidedly odd-bird coterie; for whom my boots, shirt and jacket tonight.

He finished eating and drank a glass of water and went out, gravely clearing his throat, and began to have a piddle next door. He had it apparently immediately behind my chair, apparently in the very centre of the bowl, at immoderate length. We sat and listened, no trace of expression crossing his wife’s face, all evidently in good and wholesome order.

‘And what exactly’, she asked at length, ‘are you supposed to be doing now?’

I told her what I was supposed to be doing.

‘Oh, yes. I’d heard you’d run into difficulties.’

‘Expected ones. A lot of the stuff is out of print and I have to find it.’

The uproar behind me continued unabated. I began to worry that the amazing little devil might through sheer absence of mind be piddling himself away entirely.

‘When is it you take up residence at Beds?’

‘At the end of January.’

‘But that’s – what? – two months’ time.’

‘Yes. I shan’t be here all the time. I’m having a little jaunt around the private libraries.’

Behind me, to my relief, Birkett came to a tentative melodic conclusion, and a few moments later, a final one.

‘That will be your last little jaunt for some time, I suppose?’

‘I suppose it will.’

‘I imagine in one sense you will regret that. A man of your temperament likes to be out in the field.’

‘Well. You can’t do everything.’

‘Certainly not. Not without making a botch, and you mustn’t risk that. I imagine you’ll want to give yourself three or four years to get the department established.’

‘That kind of period.’

‘I’m sure your flair will survive it,’ she said.

You couldn’t really keep her off. A...