Silent War

by David Fiddimore

  ‘Not enough for a man of our business stature. I will give you . . .’ From a small safe in the corner he took out two small bundles of notes. The thing looked stuffed with them. ‘. . . two hundred pounds Egyptian. Here.’ He offered them.

  ‘I have nothing yet to exchange for it.’

  ‘I take it from your ten per cent. Your Mr Borland will be happy now: he was worried about you. Easier for me too: less currency to get out of the country.’ So that was all right then.

  ‘OK. Thank you.’ I buttoned them into my KD shirt pocket. Someone had told me about that, hadn’t they? ‘Did I tell you I saw a lion a couple of nights ago?’

  ‘No. In a cage in a club? They used to do that in the old days.’

  ‘No, loose on the street not far from here.’

  ‘Not possible, Charlie. No lions in Egypt for many years.’

  ‘Someone else told me that.’

  ‘So now two people have told you. Maybe you will believe?’ It sounded sarky, but it wasn’t. He was smiling. He was also shovelling away a second breakfast, so I was left in no doubt where his bulk came from.

  The last thing I asked him before making my plans was, ‘Could I make telephone calls from here? The military base exchanges are expensive, rationed and monitored . . . and I was warned that the MPs listen in.’

  ‘They sometimes listen to me as well; hoping to catch me spying for the Egyptian police. You can tell because the phone clicks when you lift it. Once their technician left his microphone open, and I heard him snoring.’

  ‘Would you do that? Spy for the Egyptian police?’

  ‘If I didn’t, they would put me out of business: maybe worse.’

  ‘Who else do you work for?’

  ‘Egyptian Army if they ask. If I said no to them, then some night a hand grenade comes through the window. Anyway, they pay well.’

  ‘Your business affairs seem very complicated, David.’

  ‘I would say interesting. Anyway – safer now that I have two English partners.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bet on that.’

  ‘Ah, but I am, I am. These calls you want to make; they are also business?’

  ‘Some business; some private . . . to my family.’

  ‘You have a family . . . nice. Children?’

  ‘Two boys.’

  ‘Wife?’

  ‘No, just the boys.’

  ‘You are a widower . . . sad. Wife dead . . . you get a new one. Mariam is healthy: a woman like her would work hard.’

  ‘Thank you, but no. Not yet, at any rate. My wife is not dead; I just never married. Just a couple of phone calls would do for now. I would appreciate it.’

  ‘Of course. Whenever you please, but whatever you do remember the clicks.’

  ‘I will remember the clicks.’

  ‘And come and go across the courtyard. There is a British policeman at the front door now. It would be impolite to embarrass him.’

  Ever since my pal Tommo had bought it in an air crash in ’49, there had been something missing from my life. Now I knew what it was: that special sense of danger and unpredictability he brought, hanging about at the periphery of my vision. God had now sent me David Yassine to fill that gap. Bravo, God.

  I borrowed a pool Standard Vanguard from the commissariat, and drove over to El Kirsh. Finding the gears on its worn column change was like stirring the Christmas pudding. Haye was on duty, pleased to see me, but not pleased to be still working.

  ‘Call me next time; then I can swap for a couple of hours, and take you somewhere.’

  ‘You’re not the only person I came to see.’

  ‘. . . and telling me that will get you nowhere fast.’ But she was smiling, and that counted for a lot. I wondered if I’d get to see her in her bikini again. She handed me four letters that had come into the BFPO, had been sent on to the hospital for me, but arrived after I’d moved on. ‘These came yesterday. I was hoping you’d catch them. You can sit on the veranda and read them if you like. I’ll bring you a mug of tea.’ The British race has an unnatural fixation with tea; have you noticed that?

  Two were from Elaine, one was from Dieter, and one from a person whose handwriting I didn’t recognize, but when I turned it over the return name and address were Flaming June’s. I decided to keep her for later. I read Dieter’s first. He had a superb, clear, small hand which put mine to shame, and wrote on pencil-ruled lines on airmail paper. It took me about twenty minutes to read, and told me enough for me to imagine their lives in Bosham in detail. After I had finished it, I let it lie in my lap while I stared out across the ugly camp and into the desert in the distance. Susan came out, touched my shoulder, gave me the tea and left again without saying a word. That was very clever of her.

  Elaine’s letters were a mixture of news, gossip and technical questions that she hadn’t mastered before I left . . . and, in case I had forgotten, she signed one with a very suggestive drawing. I’d seen the same symbol in the sky before: fighter pilots can draw it with their vapour trails. I decided to call her at work tomorrow. I read recently that some sod thought he’d now invented a new business style which he cleverly called remote management, and probably got a knighthood for it. Give him a call somebody, and tell him we were doing it back in the 1950s.

  Half an hour later Susan came out with her own tea, and sat alongside me. She asked, ‘Everything OK at home?’

  ‘Fine, but it slows you down when you read about it. There’s a whole life back there going on without you.’

  ‘I know. The services say it’s good for us to stay in touch, and encourage our relations to write . . . but sometimes I wonder.’

  ‘Wonder what, pet?’

  ‘They just couldn’t imagine what it’s really like out here; not unless they’ve been here themselves. I had a boyfriend in Nottingham who expected me to save myself for him . . . stupid idea!’

  ‘How long do you have to do?’

  ‘Two and a half; but they often extend that by six months, and you get no choice in the matter.’

  ‘How long have you been out?’

  ‘A year.’ I realized that, with a bit of luck, I would be home long before her, but didn’t say it. She added, ‘I finish in half an hour; do you want to come down to my place for a long, cold drink?’

  ‘. . . come up and see me some time?’

  ‘Try, if you don’t like my peaches, why do you shake my tree? That was Mae West as well, I think.’ She was smiling a sad smile that came of us talking too much about home. Egypt had taught me another lesson.

  ‘I’d love to come down to your place for a drink.’

  ‘And please make a pass at me; so that I can say no.’

  ‘OK.’

  Chapter Twelve

  Blackbird blues

  ‘I met a friend of yours in Ish.’

  ‘We are forgetting something, Charlie. Try remembering the sirs now and again.’

  That was Watson of course. We were sitting under the fan in his office, with a Sundowner each, jostling for a foot of floorboards a degree cooler than the next.

  ‘I think this had better be a completely confidential conversation, sir. Sort of a chat between two old friends, before one of them fills the other in for compromising him.’

  ‘Ah, that sort of a conversation.’

  I had surprised the pair of us by coming off leave a day early. The truth was, as a reservist back in Watson’s private air force, I didn’t actually feel as if I was in the services again, or subject to its bizarre vagaries. It felt more like being a member of an easygoing criminal gang. Ninety-six hours might have meant ninety-six to them, but it had only meant seventy-two to me. I’d take the other day when I felt like it, although I was old soldier enough to know that could lead to trouble. After the New Zealander had been murdered, they shut down all traffic on the road south for a day anyway, so I travelled back with Roy Rogers, whose leave had been extended a day. What goes around comes around, even in the armed services – I’ve told you that before. We travelled in
a sand-coloured motor coach with a small RAF roundel on its wing, in a sand-coloured dust cloud in a small sand-coloured convoy. Some god with a paintbrush had clearly had a severe deficiency of imagination in the colour department on the Treaty Road. The convoy had a fore-and-aft escort of heavily armed jeeps. Three Comet tanks were parked up around the Mile Twelve telegraph posts. Their main guns pointed purposefully back down the road to Ismailia. I was already beginning to call it Ish, by the way, the same as Trigger’s mates.

  We passed a body on the road. Tossed into a gully by the wayside, like a piece of discarded rubbish. He had been a man once. I could clearly see the dried bloodstains on his dirty djellaba. He was surrounded by a cloud of flies, and a bizarre scattering of fruits; some of which were mashed into the road surface; we weren’t the first to drive past him.

  Trigger yawned and observed, ‘That’s ’ow you know we’re more civilized than your average wog. Our boys often vanish without a trace; as if they’d never been on the Earth. But we always leaves them the bodies to bury. It’s because of differences like that the wog’s not to be trusted to run the Canal.’

  ‘Maybe he was only a poor fucking greengrocer after all . . .’

  ‘Then he shouldn’t have argued with a Bren gun, should he?’

  I’d already heard that there were revenge killings and beatings of Egyptians after a murder of one of ours; some divisional commanders were even rumoured to encourage it. When would that nonsense stop? When we were simply tired of killing each other, or when the politicians realized that it wasn’t going to work any more? Maybe it would go on until there were no longer any of us left on either side to die – I really didn’t deserve to be in this bloody madhouse.

  ‘Why don’t you get some kip?’ Roy asked me. ‘You’ve ’ad a busy weekend. I’ll wake you up when I have to start calling you sir again.’ There it goes again: what comes around goes around. What we need is a world where everyone calls each other ‘sir’, or else no one does it at all. Believe me: if they ever make me dictator of the British, the only bullshit left will come out of creatures with four legs and a bad attitude.

  Watson was always uncomfortable with what he called that kind of a conversation. He was better at bludgeoning the uneducated to death with public-school vowels than coping with the meeting of two equal minds which comprised that kind of a conversation.

  After a pause into which I could have played a rumba he asked, ‘What’s on your mind, Charlie?’

  ‘A greasy fat bastard called David Yassine is on my mind.’ I had already decided not to say anything about my personal and unexpected connection with the fat man. I was sure that he wouldn’t have told Watson yet – he would surely save that titbit up until he could make use of it. ‘When I walked into his club he already expected me. He knew my name and description, and as much as admitted that you had given them to him.’

  Watson looked shifty. That was interesting. He called Daisy before he replied to me.

  ‘Another couple of the same if you don’t mind, old dear; Charlie’s thirsty.’ Then he told me, ‘It’s just a little arrangement we have. He keeps an eye out for my lads on his premises, and keeps them out of trouble. It’s a shocking place, really; you’ve got no idea what goes on there.’

  ‘And you buy information from him; and route duff intelligence to the Gyppoes through him when you feel like it.’

  ‘Hang on, old son, that’s a bit stiff. You’ve no reason to say that.’

  ‘Yes I bloody have, sir. I know exactly what you’re like, and I spent an evening getting to know Yassine. I’ve met people like him all over Europe. They’re the Clapham Junction in human form: information in/information out – and the bell on the cash register never stops ringing. I’d hoped I was clear of all that when I came out here.’

  ‘Maybe I should have told you to be careful,’ he admitted grudgingly, ‘. . . seeing as we’ve worked together before.’

  ‘Have you told any of the others?’

  ‘No, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Then bloody don’t. They’ll lynch you – boss or not.’

  Daisy came in with another couple of drinks. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t the quick on-off smile to grimace I got – as if she’d gone off me in a big way.

  After she left I asked loudly, hoping she’d hear, ‘What’s up with her?’

  ‘Don’t know, Charlie; funny creatures women . . . she’s been giving me the silent routine for a couple of days. I would have minded if she hadn’t been doing the same to everyone. It looks like Little Miss Sunshine has gone on holiday, and left something dark in her place.’ That was interesting – and you know what I’m like by now, I was going to make a point of finding out what was what.

  ‘Is that the end of that sort of a conversation for the time being? Can we get back to sir and Charlie?’

  ‘If you like, sir.’

  ‘Good, after you’ve got yourself sorted out, nip over to the Doc’s and make sure you have all the Istanbul and Tehran inoculations. You’re rejoining the RAF, and getting back into the air tomorrow.’

  Bollocks.

  ‘Doing what, sir?’

  ‘Would you believe that you’re showing the flag?’

  ‘No, sir, I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Sightseeing then; you’ll have Nansen with you, so try to keep him out of trouble for once.’

  The MO declined to make any more puncture marks in me, but gave me some thick sloppy stuff to drink, and some ointment. I had seen the ointment before in 1944. It had the consistency of the stuff Castrol sold for greasing cars.

  ‘What’s this for, Doc?’

  ‘The trots. Everyone gets them in Istanbul. Don’t panic when your shit turns a khaki dark-green colour with yellow streaks, and starts running out of you like Emil Zatopek. Just dose yourself up and stay close to a bog for a day. After that, normal service will be resumed as soon as possible . . . probably.’

  I didn’t like the probably, but, generally speaking, I don’t like doctors either. Just like coppers, they all fancy themselves as comedians, and these days it’s remarkable how many of them manage to get on to the telly or the radio – once they realize that they’re no good at doctoring, and not corruptible enough to make it into Parliament.

  ‘Somebody stole your fore an’ after,’ Oliver told me. ‘I must have had my back turned.’ It wasn’t what he said, you see; it was always the way he said it that made you look up. Anyway, it was the narrow RAF forage titfer he was talking about. It sat on the top of your head looking like a fanny waiting for a kiss, and made you look like an air cadet. I hated the bloody thing – so I wasn’t going to report it.

  He changed the subject. ‘Good leave?’

  ‘They murdered someone while I was there. A New Zealander.’

  ‘I told you that you weren’t going to like it over here. See any dancers?’

  ‘I met one in the Blue Kettle.’

  ‘Just the one?’

  ‘I met the same one twice.’

  ‘Hope you’ve been to the Doc for some of the old cock wash.’

  ‘Just come from him, if you must know. Have you got a beer? I’ve just been drinking something obnoxious with the Wing Commander.’

  ‘You have the words in the wrong order, Charlie, but yes, we have some beer. It’s about time you contributed some of your own.’

  Who would I have to see? I asked myself. Pat Tobin? I rearranged the words I had last used. The best I could come up with was I’ve just been drinking something with the obnoxious Wing Commander. Maybe Nancy was brighter than he looked.

  The next day we climbed back into an aeroplane.

  In some ways the aircraft was a miracle. It was a miracle because most of the things the RAF had stuffed me into so far had been beat-up and falling to pieces. One of the things you are almost certainly unaware of is that the bright, shiny war planes you see dancing in the sky at air shows are not typical of RAF equipment. Most of the real kit it uses needs a fresh paint job, has bits missing and severa
l essential systems that won’t work. The Varsity sitting on the strip for us at Deversoir looked brand-new. RAF Transport Command at its very best: a polished and beautiful passenger aircraft. All we needed was a couple of those BOAC trolley dollies and I probably would refuse to get out of her again.

  The problems started when we climbed up inside, because if this was a Transport Command ship then I was a Dutchman, mijnheer. The pilot and his oppo hadn’t shaved for a couple of days – they looked like thugs. There was a bang-up-to-date-radio rig behind the pilot, for me . . . although a bulkhead separated us, and across the walk space from me was a decent navigation table with bloody M’smith already seated at it.

  He said, ‘Hi, Charlie. Good leave?’

  ‘Fine thanks. I didn’t know you were here.’

  ‘Fayid. The old man likes to keep us spread about a bit.’ Were Nancy and I being billeted closer to Watson so he could keep an eye on us?

  There was a radar station behind M’smith, still facing forward, but anything portable was missing. Nansen slid into the seat, and began to sort out his cameras. We stowed our small packs beneath him. Oh; I forgot the policemen. There were two RAF policemen wearing side arms sitting up close to the tail. Sightseeing with guns in their hands. Who knows – perhaps it will catch on? Bung on the old earphones, Charlie.

  In my ears I heard the skipper’s voice ask, ‘Everyone nailed down?’ . . . and the acknowledgements he received one by one. Then he opened the taps and we were airborne in two shakes of her tail. I was impressed by her speed and nimbleness, compared with the Jack o’ Diamonds from whom she had been developed. A stressed-skin fuselage can make all the difference. Apart from the occasional instruction the skipper was a man of few words. In fact, practically none. I eventually worked out that he was an Australian, so he probably didn’t know all that many words anyway – you know what Aussies are like. The co-pilot/engineer came back for a chat now and again, and he and Oliver went down to the tail occasionally, to share a smoke with the coppers.

  It was while they were doing this that I asked M’smith, ‘What do we need coppers on board for? Are they frightened we won’t come back?’