Enderby Outside

"I don't like anything any more," Enderby said. "I just want to get on with the job."

"Right, too. Ah, here comes the old jalooty." A sly black man came in. He gri

"Never had it," said Enderby.

"The best one of Ricker Sugden's," said Easy Walker, as they walked among baskets and moonfruit in the reek of lights, "is The Song of the Du

"What," asked Enderby, "is a du

"A du

"Gasping in the du

I dream of my boola-bush, su

And the scriking of the ballbird and Mitcham's lark,

And bags of the sugarwasp, sweet in my mouth."

"That's not bad," said Enderby. "Not much meaning, though." Meaning? Too much meaning in your poetry, Enderby. Arch-devil of the maceration of good art for pop-art. Kill, kill, kill. He could be calm at soul, whatever justice said.

"For here in the city is the dalth of coves,

Their stuff and their slart and the fell of sin,

The beerlout's spew where the nightmort roves

And the festered craw of the filth within."

A moustached man, the veins of his head visible under a dark nap, called hoarsely at Enderby and, with flapping hands, showed small boys in little shirts lined up behind the lamp in his shop-front. A woman squatted on a step and scooped with a wooden spatula the scum from a seething pot on a pungent wood-fire.

"That drink," belched Enderby, "whatever it was, was not a good idea."

"Feel like a sack of tabbies when you've gooled up a pompey of couscous." Graaarch, went Enderby. Perfwhitt.

"God's own grass for this porrow in my pail,

Surrawa's lake for this puke and niff,

Prettytit's chirp for the plonky's nipper's wail,

And the rawgreen growler under Bellamy's Cliff."

"Rawcliffe," growled green Enderby. "It won't (errrrgh) be long now."

Easy Walker stopped in his tracks. A beggar clawed at him and he cleaned the beggar off his shirt like tobacco ash. "You say Rawcliffe, brad? Rawcliffe the jarvey you bid to chop?"

"Plagiarist, traitor (orrrph), enemy."

"Runs a little beacho. Called the Acantilado something-or-the-

next-thing. Not far from the Rif. Not there now, though. Very crookidy. Quacks pawing him all over on the Rock."

"In Gibraltar? Rawcliffe? Ill?"

"Crookidy dock. He'll be back, though. Says if he's going to snuff he'll snuff in his own dung."

"Rawcliffe," said Enderby, "is (orrrfff) for me."

"We're there," said Easy Walker. "Up that rickety ladder. Niff that juicy couscous. Yummiyum. Then we hit it. Moon's up, shufti." Enderby saw it with bitterness. Miss Boland seemed to rage down from it.

"This jarvey Rawcliffe," said Easy Walker, leading the way up the ladder, "is some kind of a big jarvey. Big in films and that. You sure you know what you're on, brad?"

"I (arrrrp) know," said Enderby, following him up. A fresh beggar, wall-eyed, embraced his left leg passionately, shrieking for alms. Enderby kicked him off.

Part III

Chapter 1

One

Ali Fathi sat on the other bed and pared his foot-soles with a table-knife honed to lethal sharpness on the window-sill. He was on the run from Alexandria, which he called Iskindiriyya, and was scornful of the Moors, whose language he considered debased. He himself spoke a sort of radio a

"Mumtaaz." He was learning, though not very quickly. It was hardly worth while to learn anything new. Soon, he saw, he must give up giving money to Wahab to buy the English newspapers that were sold on the Boulevard Pasteur. They were a terrible price, and money was fast ru

"Khanziir." That was not right, Ali Fathi being a Muslim, but Enderby himself would not have minded a nice plate of crisply grilled ham. His diet, and that of Ali Fathi and the other two men, Wahab and Souris, was very monotonous: soup of kitchen scraps and rice, boiled up by fat Napo in the snack-bar below, the odd platter of fried sardines, bread of the day before yesterday. Enderby was now sorry that he had exchanged his passport for a mere jolting trip from Marrakesh to Tangier. He had discovered that British passports fetched a very high price on the international market. Why, this Ali Fathi here had looked at Enderby as if he were mad when he had been told, in French, what small and uncomfortable (as well as to him hazardous) service in lieu of money Enderby had been willing to take in exchange for a valuable document. If he, Ali Fathi, had it he would not be here now. He would be in Marseilles, pretending to be an Arabic-speaking Englishman.

"Beed maghli." He was back on eggs again. Well, that valuable document, with its old identity razor-bladed and bleached out and new substituted, was now at its charitable work in the world of crime and shadiness. It was saving somebody from what was called justice. It could not, nor could its former guardian (Her Majesty's Government being the avowed owner, though it had not paid for it) ask better than that. Enderby nodded several times. Encouraged, Ali Fathi said: