by Gavin Lyall
He was maybe my age but more solidly built, with a soft-edged square face, brown hair that was thinning back from a high forehead, fluffy side-whiskers and very calm blue eyes behind rimless glasses. He just rested his forearms on the wheel and looked coolly from Ken to me, and finally asked: ‘What are you doing?’ A slightly clipped accent.
‘Louder,’ Ken suggested, ‘and more worried. You’re an innocent citizen out for an afternoon drive and we could be the Hole-in-the-Wall gang for all you know.’
‘I do not think you will rob me here.’ We had quite a nice little traffic jam building up around us, with innocent bystanders watching curiously. Our own driver was climbing out.
I said: ‘It’s a hire car. He’s not resident.’
‘Sure,’ Ken said, leaning in and punching the preset buttons on the car radio and watching the wavelength needle jump along the scale. ‘But … that’s 292 metres, isn’t it?’ He turned the on-off switch and the car flooded with a fast-talking gabble in … Hebrew.
Ken said reprovingly: ‘That’s not clever, is it? Staying pre-tuned to the Voice of Israel. Ha Mosad wouldn’t like it.’
‘Ha Mosad?’I queried.
‘The Establishment. Latest name for the Sherut Bitachon.’ The Israeli secret service. ‘Ask him what he does for a cover job here.’
‘What do you do for a cover job?’
‘Not that he’ll tell you.’ Ken added.
‘Then why ask him? We know what he looks like, we can find out his name by reporting his car number.’
By now a couple of cars in the rear rank were hooting impatiently, and our own driver was shaking my arm and making imploring noises.
Ken said: ‘What do you think, friend?’
The new friend looked at me and his voice was as calm as ever. ‘I think you are Roy Case.’
I stepped back and said politely: ‘You have the advantage of me.’
‘Not yet.’ He pulled the doors shut. ‘My name is Mihail Ben Iver. I deal in non-ferrous castings.’ He swerved out past our taxi and on across the square.
‘You see?’ Ken said. ‘All done by kindness.’
Chapter 4
I overtipped the taxi driver without changing the suspicious stare he was giving us, and Sergeant Papa saluted and swung open the glass doors for us. And gave Ken a rather careful look.
Inside, everything was calm, except Kapotas, of course. I introduced Ken, gave him the register to sign, and asked: ‘Did the Spohrs arrive yet?’
‘Yes. Father and daughter.’
I raised an eyebrow and he said: ‘Austrian. They are upstairs, in 323 and 321, the best rooms.’
That niggled me a bit. So why wasn’t I in a best room, instead of tripping over holes in the carpet of 208? ‘Did you send up the champagne?’
There was a peculiar neutral look on his neat accountant’s face. ‘Not yet. They said they would wait for Mr Cavitt.’
Ken said: ‘Well, they can wait a bit longer; I’m having a bath first.’ He rubbed his palms together as if he could still feel the prison grime – and maybe he could; he probably hadn’t come out more than a couple of hours before they stuck him on to the airliner.
I said: ‘I’ll tell them you’re here.’
Kapotas gave him a key. ‘I have put you in 206, near to Mr Case.’
Ken took it and picked up his bag. ‘Thanks. Drop in and take a glass with the Professor, Roy. You’ll like him. I haven’t met the daughter.’ He ignored the lift and bounced lightly up the stairs.
Kapotas said in his most blank voice: ‘I would welcome your opinion of the champagne.’
I looked at him, but he turned away. So I followed through the service door and down the corridor to the wine cellar. He unlocked it, and we went in. It was a small square rough-plastered room with no window and just a single unshaded bulb glaring down on the near-empty wine racks, the heavy scarred old table in the middle, and in the middle of that the opened box of Kroeger Royale ’66. Behind me, Kapotas carefully locked the door again. What the hell …?
When he turned around, his face and voice weren’t neutral any more.
‘Will you tell me,’ he hissed, ‘exactly how you take the cork out of a sub-machine gun?’
Five of them, actually. Partly dismantled to fit into the box, and wrapped in newspaper to stop them rattling, with other twists of newspaper holding a few cartridges each.
Kapotas unwrapped a long straight magazine that looked fully loaded. ‘Five to one box, so if the other eleven boxes are the same vintage, that makes sixty guns. And over a thousand bullets.’
‘Christ.’ Stupidly, my first thought was the risk I’d been taking by flying with an unmeasured weight on board. But the Queen Air had been nowhere near her maximum load anyway – and of course, somebody had made sure the boxes weighed just what a dozen of champagne would, making it up exactly with those extra cartridges.
I fingered the box with its neat lines of staples and paper taping. ‘This was done properly. On a machine.’ Probably at the Kroeger bottling plant one quiet weekend? Then I remembered: ‘But one box got opened at Rheims. It had got ripped. And that was champagne, all right.’
‘Did you collect this in France?’
‘Sure, that was the whole point. It was a last-minute order and they didn’t know how the hell to get it here in time and then remembered I was flying down anyway, so told me to stop off and pick it up direct from the growers.’
‘This was no last-minute order.’ And by now I was wondering for myself about how much of the story I’d just told him was true, plus exactly why Castle’s regular pilot had left in a hurry. Then Kapotas added: ‘But did you bring the torn box?’
‘No, they’d brought down a couple of extra boxes by mistake – so they said. So I left the torn one and another – of course.’
‘Very clever,’ he said grimly. ‘They bring some real champagne and tear it open as a decoy – and if you had taken it also, what does it matter? Very neat.’
I’d smoothed out a bit of the newspaper wrapping: it was a Le Monde of nearly a month ago. What did that tell us except an earliest possible date for the packing? Kapotas had picked up the major part of one of the guns.
‘What are they?’ I asked.
‘Not even French. American. The M3; they called them ‘grease guns’ because they look a bit like them.’
‘Ah. You know quite a bit about it.’
‘We all know about sub-machine guns in Cyprus,’ he said, just a little sadly. ‘Some of our National Guards have these.’
‘Ah. But at least you don’t believe I knew what I was carrying?’
He thought about this. And took rather too long, in my view. But finally: ‘No. You would not have let me open this box if…but what matters is what the police believe.’
‘Now, hold on, hold on, don’t let’s rush things—’
‘Don’t rush?’ he hissed. ‘Do you know how they feel about gun-running out here?’
‘Much the same as they do in the Lebanon, I’d guess, except here I’d probably get a fairer trial.’
He shut up, thinking – for the first time – about what might have happened to me if the flight had gone ahead as planned. ‘Well …’
‘Look: this is nothing to do with Cyprus. If I’d been flying on today, nobody here would know anything about the guns. So let’s start again from that premise.’
‘Do you mean not to report them?’
‘What do we gain? – except the chance of being disbelieved. And whatever happens in the end, we’ll have a bad time getting there. The newspapers’ll be full of it …’
I let him write his own headlines, and from his expression they were good ones. Meantime I counted the rounds in one of the magazines: thirty. Oddly, the cartridges themselves had been made in Spain. Or maybe not so odd. Somewhere down the line, somebody had kept his hands clean by selling empty guns, somebody else had stayed a virgin by selling only cartridges without guns. Some minds think that way.
Kapotas asked: ‘W
hat do you want to do, then?’
‘Get ’em off the island.’
‘Where to?’
I shrugged. ‘It doesn’t have to be further than the sea. I can take out the escape hatch and just feed them into the drink.’
‘Are they all right where they are now, though?’
‘As long as they stay airside they’re no concern of Customs. And they know our problem – or think they do – so they treat it as entrepót cargo; as if it was just changing aeroplanes. Happens all the time.’
He considered this and decided that it really must happen all the time.
I said: ‘Now, on the more pressing problem: what about the real champagne? – you’ve got guests waiting.’
‘I rang up and had some sent round from the shop. For cash.’ He made it sound like he’d paid in his own blood. ‘It’s cooling now, but it could not be the Kroeger Royale. The best they had was Dom Perignon 1966. Is it good?’
‘Some say it’s the best, but I only drink for effect. What are you going to do with this cuvée?’ I waggled a hand at the bits of weaponry. ‘Stick it in the boot of your car?’
He shuddered at the idea, but had to admit it was a good one. Anywhere in the hotel was too risky. ‘All right – but what do I do with them then?’
I shrugged. ‘Bury them, if you like. We can’t try taking them back through Customs.’
‘I suppose so. But—’ he showed a new flash of annoyance; ‘—you should have been suspicious. Bringing champagne by air!’
‘People charter aeroplanes to send boxes of cut flowers. I wouldn’t hire a bike to send a bunch of them.’
‘Now I understand how you have avoided being married,’ he said bitterly.
In the end, I took the champagne and caviar upstairs myself. Pure snoopiness; I’d never met a professor who’d done time before, let alone one who pulled guns on coppers.
The hotel was an L-shaped affair with the low-numbered rooms – like mine – on the street front, and the better ones in the quiet wing that stuck back from it. The view from 323 was the blank wall of the apartment building next door, but blank walls don’t throw bottles, rev up jeep engines and sing Swedish drinking songs at one a.m. Apart from that, it was a bigger room than mine, and with a bathroom, but the furniture was the usual heavy Victorian mahogany and chintz, just more of it.
When I went in, the Professor was the only one there. I put the tray down on the round table by the window, took the first bottle from the ice bucket and started a careful job of opening it.
‘I’m sorry the hotel’s in a bit of a muddle at the moment, but I expect you heard about our troubles.’ That was just to try and get him talking; he didn’t look like the type who normally chatted with servants.
In fact he looked like the last of the hairy English kings: neat sharp imperial beard, black flecked with grey, on a square face with cold grey eyes above a solid square body. But all a bit shrunken, which could have been a year of Beit Oren food. With a deep tan – the jail pallor had gone – and an elegant Chinese silk dressing gown over a bare chest, and Moroccan slippers, he looked as fit a sixty-year-old as I’d seen in my life.
He screwed a small cigar into an ivory holder and said: ‘You are not the floor waiter, then?’ A slight German accent and a touch of dry humour.
‘No, I’m sort of the company pilot.’
‘Ah so?’ He was interested. ‘Perhaps you are Mr Cavitt’s friend, Mr …’ I suppose Ken must have mentioned my name at some time, but he’d forgotten.
‘Case, Roy Case.’ I’d got the wire off the cork, and now—
‘Please do not work it with the thumbs. Twist it out gently with a napkin. We waste less that way.’
Of course, I hadn’t brought a napkin. He sighed, took a folded maroon silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and passed it across. I got the cork out without any bang, poured a glass and took it over to him.
‘Please to give yourself one.’
‘Thank you, Professor.’ And so I did. ‘Can I give you some caviar now?’
We’d done what we could, like finding a poncey-looking dish and filling it with cracked ice and the caviar pot in the middle and a plate of bread and butter … But he wasn’t offering to share all that.
‘I will wait for Mr Cavitt. He seemed well?’
‘I think so. He tells me you’re a medievalist?’
He moved a chunky, strong hand in a deprecating motion. ‘Only a humble artisan. I dig things up; it needs a real scholar to decide what I have found.’ And he sipped his Dom Perignon like any humble artisan.
‘D’you find much from that period out this end of the world?’ I was thinking of medieval times as being knights in armour and most of the ruins out here being Greek or Roman or Hebrew or Islamic …
He looked mildly surprised. ‘The Crusades, Mr Case, the Crusades. Four centuries of holy warfare leaves its mark.’
‘Silly of me. And where you find a mark, you dig?’
‘When there is permission.’ He smiled gently.
‘Found any new Lost Cities recently?’
‘God grant nobody finds any; the Middle East is full of old cities that nobody has the money to excavate yet already. But no – my business is artifacts, not so much buildings. Coins, pottery, a fragment of a helmet, a lance tip.’
‘Where were you working when … er …?’ I didn’t know quite how to put it to a professor. But he just smiled again.
‘At Acre, then Caesarea. Both, as you know, were important Crusader ports and fortresses.’
Actually, I did remember something like that. ‘Wasn’t Richard the Lion Heart involved around there?’
‘Certainly. He recaptured Acre in 1191 – his first battle with the great Salah ed-din.’
‘Huh?’
‘Saladin, you would say.’
‘Oh, him.’ I sipped my champagne – although I don’t like fizzy drinks much. Then asked: ‘Are you going back to Israel to carry on the good work?’
‘Probably. Permits may be a little more difficult to come by, but …’ He flapped the problem aside.
So he hadn’t been deported. Or was good at hiding the fact. And just then there was a knock on the door.
The Professor bounced on to his feet – he’d locked the door behind me – and moved pretty nippily across, opened it, and let in a girl. I’d expected Ken.
His daughter – it had to be, since they let go a quick rattle of German as she stepped inside – was a short, properly shaped girl in her late twenties. Almost everything about her was mousey: the colour of her hair, the neat quick movements, the sharpness of her face, the polite hesitant smile as her dark eyes followed the direction of his nod and she saw me.
‘Mr Case – my daughter, Mitzi Braunhof.’ He shut the door behind her.
I held out a hand. ‘Frau Braunhof …’
‘No.’ She took a few quick steps and shook my hand quickly. ‘My marriage is finished. Just Fraulein again.’ She was wearing a simple black skirt, thin black high-necked sweater and a light suede jacket. I bowed in what I thought was a formal German way, turned back and poured her a glass.
The Prof said: ‘Mr Case is a friend of Mr Cavitt, Liebchen. Also a pilot.’
‘Ah?’ she looked politely interested and took the drink. ‘Thank you. You must have arranged for him to stay here.’
‘Mr Case,’ the Prof said gravely, ‘flies for the Castle Hotel company.’
Mitzi cocked her head and said, a little curiously: ‘You are not going back to work with Mr Cavitt?’ ‘Oh yes. Soon as we can arrange it.’
‘There is a problem?’
I shrugged. ‘It takes time to get back to where we left off.’
‘Ah yes …’ and she gave a quick mousey nod, just as if my remark had meant something.
There was another knock on the door and this time it really was Ken. Looking a little pinker and cleaner from the bath and in a pair of fawn twill trousers with a lot of horizontal creases from lying on a shelf for – maybe two years. But t
he same new white shirt.
I put down my glass. ‘I’ll leave you to it. I want to get to some shops before they close, anyway. Anything you want besides a pair of sunglasses, Ken?’
Ken shrugged. ‘Just about everything. But it can wait.’
The Prof said: ‘Ledra Street is not quite Bond Street, Kenneth’
I went past them to the door. ‘See you downstairs, Ken?’
‘Sure. About seven.’ He gave me a quick, and perhaps slightly nervous smile. I went out
Sergeant Papa was sipping coffee at the lobby desk. No sign of Kapotas. I asked, ‘Any messages?’
He turned his head ponderously and took a slip from my pigeon-hole: a Mr Uthman Jehangir had called from the Ledra Palace. He was news to me. ‘Did you take the.call?’
‘Yes. I would guess he is Lebanese. He said he would call again. And somebody asked for Professor Spohr. I said we do not know him.’
‘Good. You checked the passports?’
‘Ye-es.’ He frowned. ‘The woman’s name is Braunhof.’
‘She’s still his daughter. Busted marriage, I gather.’
He frowned on. ‘They changed the Austrian passport in 1970. Now it does not show the maiden name or even if women are married.’
I didn’t know women’s lib had taken over in Vienna. ‘Well, don’t charge them the immoral rate – though I suppose we are already, for secrecy. Anyway, I’m out until about seven. Then Ken Cavitt and I are going on the town.’
‘He has just come out of…ummm…?’
‘BietOren.’
‘Yes.’ He nodded slowly. ‘They all have the paleness under the sunburn.’
‘We’ll be looking for some bright lights and dark corners. You must advise us where we won’t get screwed.’
‘Where you won’t get screwed?’ he frowned.
‘Not expensively.’
Chapter 5
In the afternoons they close Ledra Street to all traffic except taxis and delivery vans, so I could just drift down the middle of the road with the easygoing crowd, mostly local and mostly in bright cheap clothes. Just a few uniforms and blue berets, a few old ladies wrapped in the traditional black. The sunlight was warm and soft, not the trip through the toaster that it would be in a month or so, but there were thunderheads stacking up on the mountains to the south-west, and an occasional distant grumble of thunder.