Judas Country

by Gavin Lyall

  Ken suggested: ‘Why not put up Eleanor as a bond? In Beirut she must be worth—’

  She straightened her back, chin and breasts pointing a broadside at him. ‘And why not your own mother?’

  I said: ‘Oh, he traded her in years back, when she still had some mileage left on—’

  ‘For God’s sake be serious!’ she snapped.

  I slapped my hands on the table, tilted back my chair and said: ‘Right, one serious thought coming up. We catch the lunchtime flight for Cyprus. Let him have the aeroplane – it isn’t ours, anyway. In a way, that order’s our safe-conduct. It implies he’d settle for the aeroplane, so if we give him that

  Ken shook his head. ‘Hell, no, Roy. I just hate to let go of an aeroplane – and it won’t look good on your reputation, bugging out so easy.’

  He had a point there. ‘So, let the girls take the flight. We stay here and see what we can do. It’ll be more without you hanging on our sword arms.’

  Eleanor looked momentarily wistful, then resigned herself. ‘I guess that’s the best idea.’

  Mitzi still looked worried. ‘Herr Aziz … he will not stop us leaving?’

  He might try. One thing he’d almost certainly do was have a man sitting around the airport to see what we did next.

  I slapped the table. Third great thought coming up. We give you back to the deputy manager; he’ll get the tickets for you on the quiet. May I?’ I leant across and undid another button on Eleanor’s blouse. ‘Now he wouldn’t hand you over to God or the Gestapo.’

  Ken and I lunched in one of the little Arab cafés up on the Corniche de Chourane by the new hotels built by and for the gulf oil sheikhs. It isn’t the European end of town, but we wanted to stay clear of obvious places. We hadn’t been followed from the airport, but they could have been so bad that they’d lost us by accident.

  ‘After all,’ I said, ‘Aziz isn’t a mobster. He doesn’t have real professionals on his staff; he’s just improvising with what he’s got.’

  ‘There’s some hard boys around Beirut, and I don’t mean those jazzy guerrilla groups.’ We were eating a cold mezze sort of thing: spicy olives, pickled cucumbers, houmus, sliced Kafta sausage and other cold meats. It was pretty good, though maybe not as much as Ken thought it was. Anything that wasn’t served with four stone walls around it still tasted like the day you lost your virginity.

  ‘They’re there,’ I agreed, ‘but Aziz himself wouldn’t know them, and he might be careful not to know the people who do know them. He’s doing all right in straight business and he’d screw himself if he went in for the narcotics and prostitution and stuff.’

  He looked up from his plate, unconvinced. ‘How d’you know he isn’t in already?’

  ‘Because he’s too vulnerable. The boys in those trades don’t believe in competition, and the easiest way to get rid of him would be to send out a whisper that he was involved. He’s got to talk to people like Hilton and Sheraton and Coca-Cola and any smell of dope-peddling and white-slavery would rub off on them. They’d be looking for a new contact man as from yesterday.’

  Ken stuck an olive in his mouth and chewed it with grudging agreement. ‘All right, so from nine to five he loves small animals and big children. What was he doing after hours last night?’

  The café doors swung open and a couple of well-built characters in bulging lightweight jackets stood looking coldly around. The waiters froze in a relaxed, familiar way, and everybody else gave one glance and then looked at their plates.

  The bodyguards’ eyes fixed on us, the obvious strangers. Ken’s right hand crawled on the table.

  I hissed: ‘Keep still. You know the form in this town.’

  He nodded and relaxed. A small, tubby man in a blue silk suit and Arab head-dress walked in between the tough guys, and the proprietor made a small gesture towards a reserved corner table. The bodyguards watched us warily as they followed him across.

  The room quickly got back to its normal murmuring and clattering. ‘Cheap millionaire,’ Ken commented. ‘What were you saying about Aziz?’

  I shrugged. ‘He turned rough when he thought he was getting cheated. You know what these types are like: they’ll lose thousands on some crazy gamble, they give it away in handfuls inside the family – but you cheat them out of a penny and they feel you’re trying to castrate them.’

  Ken finished his plate-load except for the houmus. ‘Who was cheating him, then?’

  ‘We were – in way. If we’d let the post go through, and Sergeant Papa had, too, that authentication would’ve gone straight to Aziz.’

  Ken grunted. I went on: ‘And before that, the Professor himself was.’

  ‘Oh, come off it, Roy.’

  ‘Well, I’ll give you odds Aziz thinks so. Look: the Prof found the sword over a year ago, right? Some time before he got arrested, anyway, because he had time to get it hidden and have that authentication drawn up. Yet he never told Aziz anything, not then, not after he got out of jail and that was six weeks ago.

  What d’you expect Aziz to think? He’s got twelve thousand dollars on this horse and the jockey cuts him dead in the street.’

  Ken shook his head. ‘You’re trying to have it both ways. You can’t say Bruno was cheating by not sending him the authentication when we know he was.’

  ‘So he changed his mind. We know he changed it enough to shoot himself: suicide isn’t long-term planning.’

  ‘Or is, if you look at it another way,’ Ken said gloomily. ‘You still prefer a suicide verdict?’

  I shrugged. ‘I’m not the coroner. But posting that letter sort of fits. Irrevocable step and all that.’

  ‘It’s still bugger-all use if it doesn’t tell you where the sword is. And you’re only taking Aziz’s word that Bruno didn’t contact him.’

  ‘I suppose I am.’ And I began wondering why I was.

  ‘Still,’ he perked up and snapped his fingers for the waiter, ‘that isn’t our immediate problem. We’ve got to get the aeroplane out of hock.’

  I looked at my watch. ‘They should just have taken off – but we don’t make any move until we’ve confirmed they got on that flight.’

  ‘Agreed.’ He did a quick check of the bill and dealt some scruffy notes on to the table. ‘Then what?’

  ‘Should we try for a lawyer?’ I asked.

  ‘Hell, no; the length of a lawsuit increases by the square of the lawyers involved. Aziz’ll have enough already. Anyway, this town doesn’t work on law, it works on pull. We need some pull.’

  ‘And where do we find that on a Saturday afternoon?’

  He looked slyly happy. ‘At the races? We never cancelled that date there …’

  Chapter 17

  Beirut Hippodrome is a fairly standard sort of course for that end of the world: an oval sand track with a fancy colonnaded wooden stand on the south side by the finish, an open-air café next to it and the ring and stables and stuff somewhere behind that. Two things make it different: you come in through the north gate so you have to walk clear across the track to reach the stand, and most of the middle is a forest so that spectators can’t see the north side and most of the last turn to home.

  Some say this is so you won’t notice what’s happening on the back straight, others that it’s a bluff to make you think something’s happening there instead of it all being arranged beforehand by le Combine with its go-go and stop-stop pills. Oddly, the locals don’t seem to get angry about this: le Combine is just another factor to consider along with the jockey, recent form, hard or soft going, distance, whether Orion is in Venus and whatever else racegoers worry about.

  Me, I have no opinions bar one: that the first time I bet on a Beirut horse it’ll be because I saw a tout in a vision and he had nail-holes in his wrists and ankles.

  We just missed the first race, so by the time they let us across the track people were drifting back from the rails tearing up tickets and calling for another jar. The stand looked about half full, the café area more so, with Jehangir at
a front table, his tin leg stuck stiffly out and his smile gleaming in the sunlight. He waved us in and I introduced Ken and we sat down.

  ‘Three more beers,’ Jehangir called, and a crumpled old waiter took off at a hand-gallop. For once, our style of dress – if that’s what it was – didn’t seem too far out of place. Royal Ascot this wasn’t, though there were still a number of city suits around. But Jehangir himself was in candy-pink trousers and striped shirt, and a lot of the crowd had had similar ideas.

  ‘You see that man in the glasses?’ Jehangir pointed inconspicuously. ‘Seventeen years ago, he assassinated the President of Syria.’ He seemed pleased by the thought, like a man recommending a horse. The man looked fiftyish, but still lean and hard; a policeman wearing a carbine that had gone green, I mean green, around the breech wandered up, saluted the assassin smartly. Jehangir nodded approvingly.

  Our drinks arrived. Jehangir said: ‘Now we can drink beer and talk champagne. But first, you must let me mark your cards for you.’

  We hadn’t even bought race-cards, since they come only in Arabic – which tells you about how many tourists come here – but Jehangir bent studiously over his own. ‘I know nothing about the second, but in the third and fifth, ah …’

  I said: ‘On her death-bed, my mother made me promise never to take sweets from strangers or advice from friends.’

  Jehangir grinned.‘You will die rich.’

  ‘I’m sure half of that’s true.’

  Ken asked: ‘Are you feeling lucky or knowledgeable?’

  Jehangir shrugged deprecatingly. ‘A little of both. But surely you don’t believe all these stories about le Combine that one hears from losers?’

  ‘I knew a man here who bought an ex-racehorse, just for some exercise, and he swore it wouldn’t get up in the morning without him shouting “The joint’s raided!”’

  Jehangir grinned automatically. ‘Who wants to hear stories about honest dealing and hard work?’

  ‘Not me,’ Ken assured him, and both of them smiled.

  I said: ‘Were you doing any work for Castle Hotels when they were still in business?’

  He bent his head gracefully. ‘They asked me to be host on the opening night – and bring a few friends from Rome. Some say I run the best non-political party in Beirut.’

  I nodded. So the ‘champagne’ would originally have been delivered, maybe not direct to him, but certainly close to him. I glanced at Ken and knew he was following the same thought-prints.

  Jehangir looked at his fingernails. ‘Am I to take it, from your arrival in Beirut, that Mr … er, Kapotas is no longer an interested party?’

  Ken said: ‘He’s a busy man, a lot of things on his mind. We don’t want to see him overworked. You know how it is?’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ Jehangir said softly. Then, to me: ‘So, if all the documentation is still complete, one might just go ahead as if nothing as heart-breaking as Castle’s failure had happened?’

  One might,’ I said.

  ‘Apart,’ he added, ‘from the matter of the delivery charge?’

  So then a tall young black man in blue jeans came up to the table and gave Jehangir a wad of money the size of a club sandwich. Ken stared. ‘Jesus. Was that the first race?’

  Jehangir flapped the wad casually. ‘It looks more than it is. But you haven’t met Janni, have you?’

  The Negro shook hands and gave me a quick, slightly uneasy smile showing a lot of very white but uneven teeth. He was very dark, with a bluish sheen on his skin but a sharper nose than you’d expect; East Africa, somewhere, which went with a Muslim name. That apart, he had shoulders like a bulldozer blade and a chest like a concrete mixer, but carried his weight lightly.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Jehangir said gravely, ‘you have just shaken hands with the next heavyweight champion of the world.’

  Now I could see the thin pale scars above and below the eyes. Janni smiled again, but not until we looked at him.

  Ken sounded impressed. ‘Are you a fights manager as well?’ It fitted, of course: horses, Via Veneto parties, boxers – they went together. And boxes of guns, too?

  Jehangir lit a cigarette and waved it. ‘Only for the best. Janni boxed on the Ethiopian team at the Olympics, but went down with flu in the second week. I was the only one who’d spotted him by then. If he’d gone through and won, of course, the Americans would’ve got him. And given him ten fights in six months and mined him.’

  I asked: ‘What’s the score so far?’

  ‘Fourteen fights in two years, and we’ve won the last nine in a row, mostly inside the distance.’ I love that ‘we’ you get from managers, just as if they’d been in there, too, throwing left hooks with their cigars. ‘Next month to Rome, and once we’ve won that, the Sporting Club in London.’

  ‘Tomorrow, the world,’ Ken murmured, looking at Janni.

  Jehangir nodded. ‘But Janni hardly speaks any English yet. And why rush it? So far he can’t understand what stupid questions sports writers ask nor what rubbish they write.’ Nor read account books where somehow the boxer ends up with minus ten per cent of the take.

  The crowd stirred and several people stood up from tables around us: a line of stubby, sawn-off horses was walking out between us and the stands, jockeys in the driving seats, one in green silks who could have switched weights with his horse and the records book would never have noticed a thing.

  Jehangir hauled himself upright, said: ‘Excuse me, gentlemen, just one moment,’ and walked stiffly off to get a closer look. Janni went with him, carefully blocking people from bumping the master’s left leg.

  Ken said: ‘Give me five pounds to put on that fat jock. There’s no way he can be honest.’

  ‘My mother’s dying words were: “If you lend money for gambling it’s a hundred to six you’ll never get it back”.’

  ‘Gabby old bat on her death-bed, wasn’t she?’ Then, with no change of voice, he went on: ‘I’d said nobody hit anybody on the chin except on TV. I forgot about trained boxers.’

  I rubbed my chin and nodded. ‘And Jehangir knew I’d got all the documents. Well, if the kid ever makes world champion I’ll remember to feel honoured.’

  ‘Not in a million years. Not if his eyes get cut like that at this level of competition. Two real fights and he’ll be learning English by Braille. What are we asking as a delivery price?’

  ‘Let’s see what he suggests about shaking the aeroplane loose.’ I lit a pipe and leaned back comfortably. The sun was pleasantly warm but no more, and the air smelled only faintly of horses. A young waiter hurried around putting fresh charcoals on the pans of the hubble-bubble pipes that stood beside half the tables; you just plugged in your own mouthpiece and took a drag. Simple; I keep on meaning to try it sometime.

  By and by the horses cantered off to the start, Janni hurried away to the Tote and Jehangir came and sat down again.

  Ken said: ‘I thought you didn’t know anything about this race?’

  Jehangir grinned and shrugged. ‘I can’t resist any race. Now – we were talking about a delivery price, I think.’

  I said: ‘There’s a snag: the aeroplane’s been sort of confiscated.’

  Jehangir went stiff and expressionless.

  ‘Only a tiny bit sort of,’ Ken reassured him, and passed over the copy of the court order.

  The crowd grunted the Lebanese version of ‘They’re off,’ but Jehangir went on reading. Even when the rest of us got up and stood on our chairs to watch the finish, which was nicely choreographed into a tight bunch with our fat friend in front by a nose. Mind, his horse could have dropped dead twenty yards before and they’d still have won on combined inertia.

  The sand cloud settled and Ken shook his head at me. ‘The next time you get your mother on the ouija board, pass her a message from me, will you?’

  Jehangir looked up. ‘How did you get on the wrong side of the Aziz family?’

  ‘Do they frighten you?’ Ken asked.

  ‘Only like a big truck: no problem if
you can see it coming.’

  Ken grinned. ‘It’s a frame, of course. Mitzi – the lady mentioned there – her father may have taken twelve thousand from Aziz to finance an archaeological dig, but that’s nothing to do with us anyway: we just gave her a lift to Beirut.’

  Jehangir nodded gently. ‘Of course. I heard about her father’s suicide in Cyprus.’

  I’d forgotten he’d been in Nicosia perhaps as late as we were, and I rather think Ken had, too.

  Ken said: ‘She’s on her way back to Cyprus now, so we can’t count on any help from her … Any steps you think we should take?’

  The line of horses walked back past us, led by the fat boy, who at least had the decency to look a bit uneasy. Jehangir just sat frowning at the paper.

  At last he said: ‘This is a nuisance. I hoped to be able to unload this evening. I suppose I could try talking to Aziz himself … point out that the lady has gone, that by keeping the plane here he’s only causing you unnecessary trouble …’

  ‘I don’t think,’ I said, ‘he much minds about that.’

  Jehangir raised an elegant white eyebrow. ‘Ah – it’s gone that far, has it? Well, I’ll try ringing him anyway. I might persuade him to release the cargo, at least.’

  Ken said: ‘I’ve just thought of a much simpler way: you give us twelve thousand dollars as a delivery fee, we give it to Aziz – and bingo, everybody’s happy.’

  Jehangir was staring at him, mouth drooping. Then he closed it with a snap and swallowed. ‘Actually, that sounds to me rather a complicated way – as well as making for somewhat expensive champagne. Let me see … at a thousand a box that would be … er, just over $83 a bottle. I know champagne’s been going up quite frightfully these last few years, but …’ And he smiled appraisingly at Ken. He’d only been talking to give himself time to think.

  ‘It’s a rather special champagne,’ Ken said quietly. ‘And in fact it isn’t twelve boxes any more. One got opened in Cyprus by mistake.’