by Peter Leslie
Beneath the lamp, an archway led to a paved court with ha1f a dozen houses on each side. Faintly above the drumming of the rain they could hear an outdated rock-and-roll number warring with Moorish music.
Habib Tufik’s coffee shop was at the far end of the cul-de-sac. They pushed open a wrought-iron gate set in the crumbling wall, walked down a passageway and went in through a heavy, iron-studded door. Heat and light and noise enveloped them. The low-ceilinged, smoke-filled room was jammed with men of a dozen different nationalities, crouched over low tables around the walls, crowded around a bar, standing in gesticulating groups. Above the babble of voices, the rock-and-roll record blared from a gaudy jukebox in one corner.
The level of conversation dropped abruptly as Solo and Illya entered, but it had resumed its former pitch by the time they had pushed their way to the bar. From behind the handles of an Italian espresso machine labeled FUNZIONE SENZA VAPORE, a hard-faced man in his shirtsleeves looked at them inquiringly. Judging from the condition of a party of French sailors shouting be side them, the place served stronger drinks than coffee.
“Cognac,” Solo said brusquely, mopping his drenched hair with a handkerchief and shaking water from his raincoat. “Two large ones.”
“Bien, M’sieu.”
“The proprietor is here this evening?” Solo asked conversationally after they had surveyed the brawling crowd for a few minutes in silence. There appeared to be no waiters, the ugly-looking customers shouldering their way through the press and shouting their orders across the bar when they needed fresh supplies. And certainly there was nobody who looked as though he might be the owner.
“M’sieu?”
“Monsieur Tufik,” Solo said in French. “He is here tonight?”
The hard-faced barman regarded him levelly. “But of course. He is always here.”
“One would appreciate a few moments’ conversation with him.”
“That is impossible.”
“My friend and I have come a long way to see him. We have a message from a mutual friend.”
“No.”
A tall half-caste with a broken nose elbowed Solo aside. “Here, Gaston,” he growled. “Attend to your business; there’s clients waiting. Three marcs and a large glass of red—and make it quick. We’re thirsty.”
“If perhaps, one could allow monsieur the proprietor to decide for himself…” Solo began when the barman had filled the order.
“Look—I told you no. Nobody sees the boss without an appointment.” He moved away to the espresso machine and began preparing three cups of coffee.
“There would be a certain amount of money involved—for all concerned,” Solo called, mastering his temper.
“Keep your money. Tourists are not welcome here, especially American tourists!”
“We are not tourists. And I am not American,” Illya said suddenly, adding something in an Arabic dialect with which Solo was not familiar. He caught something about “the Indian journalist, Anand.”
The barman leaned his hands on the counter and thrust his face towards them. “How many times do I have to tell you,” he snarled, “that the answer is no? No, no, and again no. Now drink your drinks and shut up, or else get out of—”
He broke off as a high-pitched buzz from below the bar cut through the noise. Reaching down, he unhooked a house phone and held it to his ear. “Yes,” he said. “That’s right. Two. What, right away? You’re quite sure?…As you like, then.”
He slammed the instrument back on its hook and scowled at them. “He’ll see you,” he said curtly, jerking his head towards a bead curtain behind the bar. “This way.”
Draining their drinks, the two agents followed him through the curtain and along a dark passageway. They skirted a patio bordered by a grimy glass canopy rattling under the assault of the rain, pushed through another bead curtain, and found themselves in a softly lit anteroom. The contrast with the coffee shop was extreme. Subtly colored Persian rugs strewed the mosaic floor, and the room was dotted with low divans in the oriental style. There was only one other door to be seen: a sheet of beaten copper; gleaming dully in a vaulted stone arch. As they entered, a slim man in a waisted suit rose quickly to his feet, one hand hovering near the top button of his jacket. Beneath the tarboosh, his sallow, moustached face was watchful.
“For some reason he’s agreed to see these types, Ali,” the barman said sullenly. “You take over from here, eh?”
The slim man nodded, gesturing to the copper door. As the barman turned and went back through the curtain, he pressed a button concealed in the stonework and the door swung slowly open. Another corridor stretched ahead, stone-flagged and illuminated by wrought iron lamps on brackets.
“After you,” the slim man said evenly. Professionally, he kept some distance behind them as they walked past a number of closed doors. Apart from their own footsteps on the stone floor, not a sound disturbed the silence. When they had passed five doors, Ali called softly, “The next on the left. Knock four times.”
Illya rapped on the teak panels. There was a subdued buzz, terminating in a click—and again the door swung open.
Habib Tufik was a surprise. To begin with, the man was enormous, one of the biggest men Solo had ever seen. He must have weighed close to three hundred pounds, the great swell of his belly thrusting against a crumpled sharkskin suit, the fat shoulders merging into a bulging neck. A few strands of red hair were combed across his freckled scalp—and a pair of unexpectedly humorous blue eyes twinkled in among the rolls of pale flesh forming his face.
Secondly, he was sitting in a wheelchair. And thirdly, he greeted them in the broadest of County Cork accents.
“Well now, boys,” he called cheerfully, “and what can I be doing for you? Come in, come in, and sit you down—if you can find a place, that is. For it’s queer and cluttered it’s getting to be in here at all!”
He waved a fat hand around the windowless room. It was indeed difficult to find a seat, for the whole area, which was about thirty feet square, seemed at first to be swamped in a great tide of paper. There were a few piles of reference books, matched by corresponding spaces in the bookshelves filling one entire wall, but most of the litter comprised an apparently endless variety of newspapers, magazines and journals from all over the world, which strewed the vast table, overflowed onto chairs and divans, and dotted the floor in untidy heaps. Most of them, Solo saw, contained passages paneled off in marker pencil, with underlinings and annotations in various colors. And in among them lay dozens of sheets of writing paper covered with scribbled notes, sheaves of clippings, and rolls of teleprinter paper bearing agency messages from Reuter, Havas, Associated Press and Tass, the Russian newsagency. Steel filing cabinets along one wall flanked a modernistic console which looked like the control panel of a recording studio. The remaining two walls—one containing the door through which they had entered, the other pierced by an archway masked by the inevitable bead curtain—were hung with oriental rugs.
The room was airless and hot. The two agents stripped off their soaking raincoats and dropped them by a pile of month-old Herald Tribunes. Illya perched on the corner of an ottoman covered in purple silk, and Solo removed copies of Paris-Match, Stern, Oggia and Izvestia from a low armchair and sank into it with a sigh of relief.
“’Tis a foul night out there, they tell me,” the fat man continued, “and you’ll be needing a spot of refreshment.” He clapped his hands three times and then turned to, the man in the tarboosh. “That’s all right, Ali, thank you,” he said. “I’ll let you know when these gentlemen are leaving.”
The thin man bowed and withdrew, closing the heavy door after him. A moment later, with a rattle of beads, a veiled Arab girl of about thirteen with enormous black eyes pushed through the curtain. She was carrying a large brass tray containing tiny cups and saucers, a copper pan full of fragrant coffee, a stone flask, glasses, and a squat bottle half full of pale yellow liquor. She cleared a space on the table and set down the tray, then slipped qui
etly out through the curtain.
Habib Tufik smiled widely as he waved at the tray. “Turkish coffee, now? With a drop of rosewater to settle the grounds? And you’ll take a spot of the hard stuff? It’s Izzara, the finest liqueur...I have the sweet tooth, as you see!”
Pouring the drinks, he spun the wheelchair with dexterity and propelled himself rapidly to each of them in turn. The eggshell-shaped glasses, Solo saw as he sipped the aromatic liqueur, were held in a fine filigree cage black with the patina of age.
“You have a most—unusual establishment here, Monsieur Tufik,” he said.
“I suppose I have. Though if it’s the girls you mean…
“I didn’t only mean the girls. There’s something of a contrast, you’ll admit, between the—er—coffee shop and this room. And then there’s the electrically controlled doors, the professional gunman outside, the fact that you knew we were here and invited us in just as your barman was about to turn us away…”
“Ah, you have to keep a finger on the pulse, boy, in my business—and you have to take precautions, too, you know.
“And just what is your business, Monsieur Tufik?” Illya asked.
“Well now, that’d be a question I should rightly ask you. You’re the ones who asked to see me. What d’you want?” The blue eyes were suddenly shrewd and calculating.
Solo decided on the direct approach. “We were given to understand by a friend—a late friend—that you might be able to provide us with some information,” he said. “His name was Devananda Anand.”
The fat man chuckled delightedly, the rolls of flesh around his neck wobbling uncontrollably as he sucked in coffee through pursed lips. Sure there’s a splendid coincidence,” he said. “You’ve come to the right man, then—for information is my business! I’m a merchant of information, to be sure: wholesale or retail, in gross or single items—you name it, I’ll get it! And let’s be quite clear on one point: I’m precisely that, a seller of information. I play no favorites, I take no sides, I offer no loyalty, no allegiance. If a man comes to me and pays for information, I give it to him. I don’t care who he is. The customer is always right, gentlemen—and my customers come from all over. Police, private detectives, lawyers, intelligence men from here to hell-and-gone—they all come to Habib Tufik.”
“That’s a fine old Irish name,” Solo said.
“And it’s my own, I’ll have you know, boy. Me mother was Irish, God rest her poor soul and indeed I was brought up there. But me father was a Casablanca man, born and bred—though you’d not think it to look at me, now would yer?”
“I would not. But I understand you’ve been here a great number of years, just the same.”
“I have and all. The kind of setup I have here doesn’t grow in a day, you know. It’s taken a long time to build up. You wouldn’t believe how many hundred dollars a week it costs me in wire services and papers alone.” He gestured at the mass of periodicals around the room. “And then of course there’s the informers, the hotel porters, the airport people, the travel agency men and I don’t know what-all.”
“I would imagine you had a formidable knowledge of current events over the world just from reading these,” Illya said with a smile.
“Well, you know how it is: you never know when it’ll come in useful knowing who’s knocking around with whom. The gossip columns—when you add two and two together from different ends of the world—can tell a man a great deal. Then, of course, there’s the diplomatic and the political pieces. There’s much to read in between the lines there.”
“And the coffee shop?”
“Perhaps that’s the most useful of all. You know the way they used to say, in the big houses like, that if you wanted to know what went on, then you’d ask in the servants’ hall? Well, my coffee shop’s a bit like the old servants’ hall. We get seamen there—from the boats, waiters from the embassies, layabouts, porters. All kinds. Sure I’m like a recording machine in here, preserving everything that comes in—and the coffee shop’s one of my main microphones, as it were…”
“As I said before,” Solo remarked, “we were impressed with the way you knew about our inquiry.”
“And isn’t that the simplest thing, though? Wait’ll I show you.” Tufik wheeled himself across to the console and flicked a switch. A pilot light glowed red on a wide indicator board. “What’ll you have?” he asked. “The bar? Second table from the left? The far end where the tough boys stand?”
He thumbed a series of buttons ranged across the board. As each one was depressed a colored light glowed above it and a snatch of conversation boomed from a hi-fi speaker to one side of the console.
“…asked H.E.’s daughter to slip the package into the diplomatic bag, but the bitch wouldn’t play…
“…Gaston! Three flats and a glass of white!…”
“…and all you have to do, my friend, is listen a bit…”
“…wipe that smile off your face, if I were you, or there’s one or two of us’ll bloody well wipe it off for you…”
“…they’re flics, that’s what they are. Mark my words, that pair are up to no good…”
Solo recognized in the last voice the bad-tempered half-caste who had shouldered him aside at the bar. He had noticed the man glaring at Illya and himself before they had been brought through, and he had no doubt that they were still the subject of conversation. “Very ingenious,” he said. “You have every table wired for sound, and other mikes concealed at strategic points around the room. How do you know when to listen to what?”
Tufik was delighted. He giggled like a schoolboy. “It’s good, isn’t it?” he crowed. As to listening, the whole lot are recorded automatically. I have two secretaries who go through the tapes and draw my attention to any interesting stuff each morning.” He pointed to two enormous spools revolving at sixteen and two thirds rpm on a complex tape deck beyond the speaker. “It’s multi-track, recording both sides.”
“And this, I take it, is information for which you do not pay?”
Tufik burst out laughing. “That’s it,” he wheezed. “Gratis. That’s what it is. This stuff’s the bunce to offset all the money I lay out in other directions!”
“I imagine there’s one class of information you don’t sell.”
“Something I can’t provide? You name it.” The fat man bristled. His professional pride was impugned.
“I mean information about one client’s demands—to another.”
“Ah, no! ’Twouldn’t be right, now, would it? No, I couldn’t do that at all.”
Somewhere, a telephone was ringing. Tufik eventually tracked it down under a heap of color supplements on the table. “Hallo, hallo… It is that…Yes, Colonel. And you too….” He listened for a few moments and then said crisply, “Yes, I think I can. Just hold on, will you?…Now where did I put that cutting?”
He hunted among various piles of papers, wheeling himself around the room with extraordinary speed. At last, with a cry of triumph, he came up with a clipping in what looked like Japanese characters. “Got it!” he announced proudly into the mouthpiece. “A model girl from Tokyo who works a lot in New York. Name’s Umino Takimoto. They stayed at the Imperial in…let’s see…yes, from the 21st to the 28th of March, last year.”
“Military attaché,” he said as he put the instrument down. “Now there’s some poor fellow’s going to have the bite put on him!”
“Your work must make you somewhat…unpopular…in certain quarters,” Illya commented.
“It does that. There’s plenty would try and stop me, believe you me, boy…They nearly did once; that’s why you see me here in this contraption. It was when I was younger and stronger, and I had a mind to put a stop to a gang of boyos was spreading lying tales about me behind me back, see. They was tryin’ to put me out of business and I went up to sort them out—only they had more friends than I did and somebody put the boot in. Result: a spinal injury and partial paralysis.”
“You seem to have plenty of protection now.”
“Ah, sure. I never go out now. I have my girls and my work—I keep in touch, as you might say! Then there’s Ali and Gaston and a couple more good ones to look after me. Wait’ll I show you…”
He clapped his hands twice and called, “Charles!”
Behind a blank space in the bookshelves a shutter slid open and the muzzle of a machine pistol poked into the room, capped by the long snout of a silencer. Above it, watchful eyes glinted in the reflected light.
“All right, Charles, thank you: just a demonstration,” Tufik said over his shoulder. The shutter snapped shut again. “But there you are, you see. My visitors are covered all the while they’re here. Still, I don’t want to rush you gentlemen—but I have callers expected. What did you want to know?”
“I gather you must have helped Devananda Anand,” Solo said easily. “Perhaps he was a client?”
“These many years. You’d not have got in, mind, if I hadn’t heard you mention his name out there. This is strictly a personal recommendation business. I don’t know who he was working for—that’s not my affair. But I helped him many times.”
“He was—shall we say—a colleague,” Solo said tightly. “He was trailing a consignment of a certain commodity that we have reason to believe left here on a camel train for Alexandria yesterday or today. We want to know the name and address of a contact in Alexandria who can put us in touch with someone who’ll be able to identify the caravan for us when it gets there. And, for good measure, we’d like confirmation of what the consignment is and the fact that it is on that caravan. Can you oblige?”
“I can. Now, we have two systems in this business. We have the subscription account—which is fine for clients like that military attaché, who constantly wants snippets of information. But it’ll hardly interest you…Then we have the flat fee.”