The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [64]
‘When you say that, Major Scobie, how my heart beats.’ He pulled his shirt wider, as though to show the actual movement of the heart and little streams of soda water irrigated the black bush on his chest. ‘I am too fat,’ he said.
‘I would like to trust you, Yusef. Tell me the truth. Were the diamonds yours or Tallit’s?’
‘I always want to speak the truth to you, Major Scobie. I never told you the diamonds were Tallit’s.’
‘They were yours?’
‘Yes, Major Scobie.’
‘What a fool you have made of me, Yusef. If only I had a witness here, I’d run you in.’
‘I didn’t mean to make a fool of you, Major Scobie. I wanted Tallit sent away. It would be for the good of everybody if he was sent away. It is no good the Syrians being in two parties. If they were in one party you would be able to come to me and say, ‘Yusef, the Government wants the Syrians to do this or that,’ and I should be able to answer, “It shall be so.”’
‘And the diamond smuggling would be in one pair of hands.’
‘Oh, the diamonds, diamonds, diamonds,’ Yusef wearily complained. ‘I tell you, Major Scobie, that I make more money in one year from my smallest store than I would make in three years from diamonds. You cannot understand how many bribes are necessary.’
‘Well, Yusef, I’m taking no more information from you. This ends our relationship. Every month, of course, I shall send you the interest.’ He felt a strange unreality in his own words: the tangerine curtains hung there immovably. There are certain places one never leaves behind; the curtains and cushions of this room joined an attic bedroom, an ink-stained desk, a lacy altar in Haling - they would be there so long as consciousness lasted.
Yusef put his feet on the floor and sat bolt upright. He said, ‘Major Scobie, you have taken my little joke too much to heart.’
‘Good-bye, Yusef, you aren’t a bad chap, but good-bye.’
‘You are wrong, Major Scobie. I am a bad chap.’ He said earnestly, ‘My friendship for you is the only good thing in this black heart. I cannot give it up. We must stay friends always.’
‘I’m afraid not, Yusef.’
‘Listen, Major Scobie. I am not asking you to do anything for me except sometimes - after dark perhaps when nobody can see - to visit me and talk to me. Nothing else. Just that. I will tell you no more tales about Tallit. I will tell you nothing. We will sit here with the syphon and the whisky bottle ...’
‘I’m not a fool, Yusef. I know it would be of great use to you if people believed we were friends. I’m not giving you that help.’
Yusef put a finger in his ear and cleared it of soda water. He looked bleakly and brazenly across at Scobie. This must be how he looks, Scobie thought, at the store manager who has tried to deceive him about the figures he carries in his head. ‘Major Scobie, did you ever tell the Commissioner about our little business arrangement or was that an bluff?’
‘Ask him yourself.’
‘I think I will My heart feels rejected and bitter. It urges me to go to the Commissioner and tell him everything.’
‘Always obey your heart, Yusef.’
‘I will tell him you took my money and together we planned the arrest of Tallit. But you did not fulfil your bargain, so I have come to him in revenge. In revenge,’ Yusef repeated gloomily, his Roman head sunk on his fat chest.
‘Go. ahead. Do what you like, Yusef.’ But he couldn’t believe in any of this scene however hard he played it. It was like a lovers’ quarrel. He couldn’t believe in Yusef s threats and he had no belief in his own calmness: he did not even believe in this good-bye. What had happened in the mauve and orange room had been too important to become part of the enormous equal past. He was not surprised when Yusef, lifting his head, said, ‘Of course I shall not go. One day you will come back and want my friendship. And I shall welcome you.’
Shall I really be so desperate? Scobie wondered, as though in the Syrian’s voice he had heard the genuine accent of prophecy.
5
On his way