Fast and Louche

by Jeremy Scott

  We drove into town. Amman was a desolate spread-out slum, stinking of garbage. Knots of ragged restless people hung out in the streets, everyone was waiting for the revolution to begin. We stopped outside a dilapidated building. ‘Hotel,’ the driver announced. Telling the driver to wait, I went into the hotel and asked a man in a djellaba behind the desk if he had a room. Hitching down a key he walked me upstairs. An adolescent squatted on the landing filling Coca-Cola bottles from a jerrycan and wadding their necks with rag. He glowered at me as we went by; there was a strong smell of petrol.

  The room I was shown to had a gritty cement floor and walls splattered with crushed flies. It was bare except for a bed. The window overlooked the dusty square, which was filled with a crowd of ragged people milling about aimlessly. A couple of Daimler armoured cars of the type I’d commanded myself were drawn up on the far side, supported by an Arab Legion foot patrol armed with twelve-bore Greener guns. I went downstairs, got back in the taxi and told the driver to take me to the Philadelphia.

  This latter turned out to be a pleasant, modern hotel set in a garden of date palms and plants. It was full to overflowing. The lobby was besieged by press correspondents demanding rooms. More were arriving all the time, entering the country with customary ingenuity. I sought out the ITN crew with their reporter Reggie Bosanquet, and introduced myself. The three of them were sharing a room crowded with equipment; they’d had a bad trip and did not seem especially pleased to see me. Reggie said there was no chance I could move in with them.

  At a bit of a loss I went to the hotel bar, still carrying my bag, and ordered a drink. It was amazingly expensive. I had a float of £150 which had been reluctantly advanced by the COI cashier. At these prices my funds weren’t going to last long. I realised I had a problem but recalled Christoph’s advice on what to do if caught short by a revolution while travelling. Before his father became president of Roche International he’d run their operation from Uruguay, where Christoph had lived as a child. Familiar with the inconvenience caused by a putsch, he’d said you must go at once to the best hotel and put yourself in the hands of the hall porter.

  I looked for the concierge and slipped him £20 – a small fortune at the time. A little while later I found myself sharing a room with the Daily Mirror photographer. A small man with slicked-back, nicotine-coloured hair, he was not happy with the arrangement, but then he wasn’t happy about anything because, though he still had his camera bag, his suitcase had been lost in transit.

  I spent the next few days hanging around the Philadelphia and sitting on the terrace, drink in hand, with the rest of the international press corps, waiting for the coup to take place. Nothing was happening. The single event to provoke any flicker of interest was caused by the unexplained arrival at the hotel of a stranger who was not a journalist. A taxi drew up, and from it stepped a man wearing an African safari suit, a revolver in a holster and a hat; he was carrying a stick. Without glancing at the crowd of correspondents slumped on the veranda he passed through us into the hotel, followed by his driver with a Gladstone bag. He was an unlikely figure.

  ‘Who’s that geezer, then?’ The Mirror photographer demanded. ‘He’s a personality, he is.’ His eye brightened at the potential.

  Apart from this stranger, who avoided conversation and kept to himself, and a party of four Scandinavian call-girls and their pimp who’d been trapped here in their working tour of the Middle East by the closure of the airport, everyone in the Philadelphia was press. Infrequently a bomb would go off and a wispy trail of smoke appear above the roofs of the shanty town in the distance. Downing their drinks, everyone would pile into taxis and go to look, but Amman was such a ruin that a small bomb made little difference to the architecture. Returning to the Philadelphia, everyone would resume drinking and the Mirror photographer would complain there wasn’t a shot in it. I understood why war correspondents are all alcoholics: they’re driven to it by the stultifying boredom of their job.

  I sent a cable to the COI requesting money and asking what to do. The reply came back: URGENT DESPATCH FAVOURABLE FOOTAGE SOONEST.

  One morning I happened to remark to my room-mate that, years before, I’d once met King Hussein of Jordan when he’d been playing bongo drums in a London nightclub. The Mirror photographer was unexpectedly stimulated by the news and suggested we call on him. I thought this a poor idea, unlikely to succeed, but at his insistence I telephoned the palace and spoke to the chef de protocole. I was here for COI and would like to do an interview, I told him. Most surprisingly, he called back to say to come at 5 pm.

  I couldn’t find the ITN crew, who’d gone off somewhere with Reggie Bosanquet, and I was regretting the whole thing by now. If I was to meet the king, it seemed a mistake to pitch up with an uninvited guest in the shape of a pushy tabloid snapper wearing the same soiled suit he’d had on for the last five days. But he wouldn’t hear of my going to see the king alone. ‘In this game, it’s all for one and one for all,’ he said.

  By 4.30 there was still no sign of the ITN crew. Asking the concierge to send them to join me the instant they reappeared, the photographer and I took a taxi and arrived at the palace gate, which was guarded by concrete machine-gun emplacements. After examination of our documents and a body search we were let through to walk up the exposed drive to the building. It was very, very hot.

  A tough-looking major domo showed us into a large ugly room with gilt sofas covered in shiny material standing against the walls and a gaudy carpet. After a while an ADC appeared wearing Desert Legion service dress. ‘Where’s your camera crew?’ he asked.

  ‘On its way,’ I told him breezily.

  Waiting only for the photographer to come back from the lavatory, the ADC escorted us to a room larger and even more hideous than the one we’d left. Throwing open the door, he said, ‘The people from CBS, Your Majesty.’

  The king, who was rather a small man covered in medals, was seated behind a desk so enormous it obscured two-thirds of him. I had the impression we didn’t resemble the heavyweight envoys of a US TV network that he’d been expecting.

  Clearly, the king had no memory of our meeting, which was hardly surprising. At the mention of Edmundo Ross’s Calypso Club, where it had taken place, the royal countenance tightened a little; he didn’t respond with the warmth I’d hoped for. The photographer, who’d been squirming in his chair with impatience, chipped in to ask if he could take a shot of what was showing of the monarch above the desk, and was told no.

  Conversation flagged; there was still no sign of the camera crew. I attempted to revive things by remarking how handy it must be to have the British army fly in to help out, but he said the Hashemite Kingdom was perfectly capable of taking care of its own internal affairs, adding that this wasn’t a very good time to chat as, what with the state of emergency and everything, he was quite busy at the moment … but he hoped we’d enjoy our stay in Amman.

  ‘A lot of fucking good that was!’ the Mirror photographer remarked as we walked back to the main gate where our cab was waiting surrounded by a gang of urchin beggars who pounced on us, tugging at our clothes and trying to get into our pockets. ‘Animals!’ said the photographer, and stared moodily at the filthy streets as we drove back to the hotel. He said he couldn’t understand how people could live like that, he thought Jordan was a disgusting country, he’d had the runs ever since he’d got here. He said this wasn’t his line of work anyway, normally he worked on the sports pages, but no one else had been available to go at such short notice.

  Every morning the international press corps got up hoping for revolution, and every night they went to bed drunk and disappointed. The airport stayed closed, water and electricity supplies were erratic. It took four hours to get a call through to the COI. ‘I can’t pay the hotel bill,’ I told Charles Beauclerc.

  ‘Where’s the news film? Have you sent it?’ he demanded.

  ‘There is no favourable footage,’ I told him. Scenes of paratroopers playing draughts with Arabs in
cafés, fraternising, enjoying a fine time together, dandling kids on their knee, did not exist. ‘They don’t want to be dandled,’ I explained. ‘I went out with a para patrol yesterday and they threw rocks at us.’

  ‘We need favourable footage. Organise a football match,’ he told me.

  It wouldn’t have been possible without Noel Barber. He was there working for the Express, and God guided me to the bar stool next to him. A generous and engaging man lived behind that creased and well-worn face, who lent me £100 against a receipt I wrote him on COI paper.

  I took a taxi to the para brigade tent lines and had a word with the adjutant, who told me his men wanted to shoot the local kids, not play football with them. I said it was a point of view I respected, but I could drop them a few quid. The stately Arab concierge in the Philadelphia put together the opposing team.

  The match took place next day on a patch of sandy wasteland outside town. The para side consisted of nine 20-yearolds in peak physical condition, wearing combat boots. The Arab team was aged between twelve and sixteen and barefoot, but there were about thirty of them. At the start, until the Arab supporters poured on to the field to join in, the two were evenly matched.

  In normal circumstances competitive sport tends to bring out a particularly vicious streak in people, but in this case the two sides loathed each other already. The match was a grudge fight from the beginning and the uncut footage showed atrocity and slaughter. Nevertheless, until the game degenerated into an all-out brawl, it yielded enough material which the magic art of film editing, capable of turning black to white, could convert to the purpose for which it was intended. And, unusually for the COI, generate worldwide exposure.

  Paras £20; Arabs £20, I noted in my expenses.

  Returning to the Philadelphia relieved that it was over, I discovered a drama had occurred; the Mirror photographer had been wounded. What had taken place wasn’t clear, for it had happened after lunch when everyone was asleep. But it seemed he’d run into the lobby dripping blood and had been rushed to hospital.

  Glad to have the room to myself, I took a shower and a nap. I woke around 6 pm. No sign of the photographer, but the water was cut off again. I dressed and made my way blearily to the hotel veranda. It was empty except for the safari-suited stranger, who sat alone, drink in hand.

  ‘Where are they all?’ I asked.

  ‘Those press chaps? They went off to see a bomb.’

  Without twilight the sun extinguished itself in the desert. The stranger sniffed the air of evening starting. ‘Anywhere decent to go around here?’ he enquired.

  Everywhere was closed because of the emergency, I told him. ‘There’s always somewhere,’ he insisted. In the taxi on the way into Amman a few minutes later he introduced himself: Richard Crichton. ‘Take us to the best restaurant,’ he told the driver.

  ‘No restaurant. All finished.’ The driver answered.

  ‘Nightclub,’ Crichton instructed with authority.

  The man’s face brightened immediately. He spun the car around. We sped out of town into the desert. ‘You have to speak to them loudly,’ Crichton explained.

  After a few miles we swerved off the road on to an unsurfaced track. I began to feel alarmed. ‘Where are we going?’ I asked, but the driver, hunched over the wheel, only grunted. Bumping through a featureless landscape of scrub and rock, we came to a small oasis in the desert. We stopped at an unlit collection of tents pitched around some shanty buildings of tea chests and tin. There was no sign of life. A dog howled forlornly.

  ‘What’s this?’ demanded Crichton.

  ‘Nightclub,’ the driver announced.

  Crichton regarded the unpromising encampment unperturbed. ‘You go fix everything,’ he told the driver. ‘Tell them who we are.’

  The man nodded and disappeared into the gloom. He was gone a long time, undoubtedly making arrangements for our murder, I thought. Inside the building blots of light appeared as lamps were lit to welcome us. The driver materialised out of the darkness at the car window. ‘You want belly dancer?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Crichton.

  ‘I fix,’ the driver said, and darted back.

  A fence surrounded a small sand-floored compound containing a couple of tired palms and a small table. Despite the time they had had to achieve the effect while we waited in the taxi, it bore no resemblance to a restaurant or place of entertainment. A shoeless and toothless man set a candle in front of us. ‘Whisky,’ Crichton ordered. ‘A bottle. And food.’ He leaned back in his chair and looked around with satisfaction. ‘Not bad,’ he commented. ‘These out-of-the-way places can often surprise you.’

  Over the meal that followed he told me he’d been at Leicester races when he’d learned of the revolution in Iraq – ‘bloody wogs ate the king’. In the ensuing week he’d followed the news from Jordan and the troubles facing King Hussein, with whom he’d been at Sandhurst. He’d decided to help. In London’s Burlington Arcade he bought a dozen gold $20 coins, minted in the USA, whose obvious worth would be acceptable anywhere. Carrying these in a canvas bag slung inside his trousers he made for the airport, only to discover all flights to Jordan had been suspended. Purchasing a ticket to Beirut, which was more or less adjacent, he left immediately.

  To those who assume enough the Gods provide room service. It was a rule which Crichton exemplified. Lebanon was under curfew and martial law, yet within an hour of arriving on the last flight into Beirut he had been winging out again on his way to Amman aboard the chartered plane of Woodrow Wyatt, member of Parliament and special correspondent.

  Whisky had been brought to us some time ago and two plates of something unrecognisable. Crichton had eaten heartily while he’d told his story; together we’d drunk over half the bottle. The waiter cleared the table. Crichton removed a cigar from its metal cylinder and warmed the end in a match flame. ‘Pity I can’t offer you one,’ he remarked, blowing a cloud of smoke in my direction as terrible wails of Arab music started up nearby. The toothless waiter limped up with a wind-up gramophone, already turning, which he set down on the sand beside our table. A motherly belly dancer emerged from behind corrugated tin and wiggled towards us in or out of time with the cracked shriek of the music. Crichton stretched his legs, sucked contentedly on his Havana and settled back to enjoy the floorshow.

  People don’t always fit the image of their profession. Crichton didn’t resemble any character in The Dirty Dozen, yet it transpired that he was a mercenary none the less. The previous year he’d passed in Kenya helping with the Mau-Mau insurgency. On his arrival here in Amman he’d presented himself at the palace, offering his services to the king.

  ‘Did he want you?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course,’ he answered stiffly. ‘The Desert Legion’s loyal, but the rest of the army’s dead wobbly. It’s all about to happen, you’ll see.’

  ‘No I won’t,’ I told him. ‘I have my football match in the can, my job’s done. I’m leaving tomorrow, if I can get a lift out.’

  ‘No! You have to stay for the revolution,’ he insisted.

  It was very hot in the little courtyard. I’d drunk a lot and several times in the course of Crichton’s narrative I had caught myself nodding off. The music now was winding to its appalling climax and the middle-aged belly dancer seemed to be coming apart in rolls of fat. ‘What actually happened to the Mirror photographer?’ I roused myself to shout.

  ‘The Mirror photographer?’ he repeated crossly, tearing his attention from her jellied flesh.

  ‘Someone said he went to your room after lunch.’

  ‘Is that what he was? Burst in, wanting to take a photo. Got him in the bum with my swordstick. Hopeless shot, but I was asleep. Do it correctly across the cheeks and the whole arse falls open like a ripe peach.’

  Sometime later I was woken by him prodding me. The moon had moved across the sky. The belly dancer sat at our table. The whisky bottle was empty.

  ‘Time to go,’ he said. ‘This lady will be coming with us.’ He pushed
over a grubby scrap of paper. The bill. ‘Do you mind doing this?’ he asked. ‘All I have on me is gold.’

  14

  Mayfair

  The crowded nightclub was dense with cigarette smoke and loud music. On the cabaret stage in front of where my client and I were seated the near-naked, oiled black bodies of the dancers gleamed in the syncopated pulse of coloured spotlights cutting through the pungent haze. He leaned closer to say something.

  ‘What?’ I yelled back.

  ‘Ever slept with a black girl before?’ Ramage shouted, raising his voice above the thudding rhythm of the mambo.

  I shook my head minutely, my eyes fixed on the writhing line of dancers high-kicking to the beat.

  ‘Not the octoroon, she’s mine. Yours is Fay – the one in the emerald G-string.’ Ramage owned an ad agency in Mayfair which had the Players cigarette account and two identical blonde twins as receptionists. Urbane, articulate, ten years older than myself and driving a Ferrari, he’d left the Colonial Service to enter advertising and was ahead of me on the moneyed road of self-indulgence I had recently embarked on myself with such enthusiasm. He was generous with counsel as he was with his hospitality. I was taking flying lessons; he had already obtained a pilot’s licence. ‘Are you going to buy your own plane?’ I’d asked him.

  ‘No,’ he told me. ‘There’s a rule you must remember. If it flies or floats or fucks, rent it.’

  For the first time in my life I could truly afford to do so. I was rich. Not long ago Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had addressed the British nation on TV, speaking in his characteristic patrician drawl. ‘You’ve never had it so good,’ he told us.

  He was talking to me. I had a flat in Chelsea and a red E-type Jaguar with state-of-the-art four-way speakers set into the black leather upholstery. I had a high salary and an expense account. Restaurants, bars, theatres, air travel – everything was chargeable to the company, and the company was a goose which had started laying golden eggs. The goose was called James Garrett and Partners, and a quarter of that plump young fowl was mine.