‘Ring the bloody bell, you fool; what do you expect?’
What I expected, or rather hoped for, was the arrival of the 7th Cavalry if the Indians went on the warpath. I didn’t say that; I tugged on the ironwork and was rewarded with a jangling loud enough to bring back Lazarus.
Watson frowned. ‘Enough, Charlie.’
A dog barked, and then another. They were at least a quarter of a mile away. The bell jangled away to a sullen silence. Nothing: then more nothing. I liked more nothing. Then a door banged somewhere close, and after a minute the door in front of us was opened by a yawning seven-year-old boy.
In English he asked us, ‘Yes?’
I asked him, ‘Is your Master in?’
‘My Master?’
‘Is Mister David Yassine here?’
‘I will look,’ and, before I had time to intrude a friendly foot, he had shut the door in my face and bolted it. I felt very stupid standing there. Dawn was beginning to show.
‘Well done, Charlie.’ Bloody Watson.
‘You weren’t exactly much help either, sir.’
‘What was I supposed to do,’ he growled, ‘. . . pull a gun on a kid?’
That was one of the odd things, now I come to think about it. The child had shown no distress at finding a couple of fully armed Englishmen on his doorstep before dawn . . . he looked merely a little irritated.
Before we had taken the decision to heave the door in ourselves, Yassine opened it. In his sleeping robe he looked even fatter. The difference between the daytime djellaba and the thing they sleep in is that the latter has short sleeves. Men wearing them look like the seedy old transvestites you see at the Henley Regatta Ball . . . and before you ask, the answer is yes; go and look for yourself: the place is full of them.
He pulled us quickly through the door as if he was ashamed to be seen with us. That can’t have been too far from the truth.
What he said was, ‘I suppose you want breakfast.’
Watson replied, ‘. . . and a thirty-ton Comet tank, please.’
‘That too, that too . . .’ Yassine smiled, and turned his back on us. He waved his arms like a market trader in a bazaar. ‘I’m sure we’ll come to an arrangement. Do you mind if I leave you in the kitchen whilst I go and dress? I should, in courtesy, offer you the dining room, but I gain the impression that this is an unofficial visit.’
By then we were inside Yassine’s seaside residence. The kitchen was large and hot, and I immediately felt sleepy. Watson noticed, and cautioned me.
‘Bloody well stay awake, Charlie; this cove is as slippery as a fish.’ I could have agreed My new partner is as slippery as a fish, but it wasn’t the right time to bring that up.
‘Don’t worry, boss.’
‘But I do, that’s the problem.’
Yassine came back dressed like an Arab, and brought a plump, pretty, middle-aged woman with him. He didn’t introduce her properly; he just pointed and said, ‘Wife.’
Minutes later Mariam slipped down the stairs, wearing a blue silky robe that clung to all of the right places.
I asked Yassine, ‘Your daughter perhaps?’
‘No, of course not. Occasional concubine. She gets a few days away from the lustful clients at the Blue Kettle.’
‘And you’re not lustful of course?’
‘. . . only on Christ’s birthday, and at Easter – I am a good Christian. Didn’t I tell you that?’
Before I could answer Mariam wriggled the fingers of one hand at me and said, ‘Hello, Charlie.’
Watson gave me a look, but kept his trap shut. There’d be some questions to fend off later.
To begin with we sat at the table and drank coffee, and watched Yassine drink water. Then he watched us eat fried eggs as he picked at a little fruit. The women retired as soon as the food was before us.
I said, ‘We didn’t know how to contact you, David . . .’
‘Are you your brother’s keeper?’
‘Stop pissing me about, and tell us about the tank.’
‘Its new owners will be pleased that at last you have missed it, and that someone has come to ask for it back. They were getting worried.’
‘What are they worried about?’
‘What to do next. They don’t know what to do with it, now that they have it. Acquisition is one thing: disposal another. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing – only a few boys.’
‘And nothing to do with you I suppose?’ Watson had shaken himself into life at last. I shouldn’t have judged him; at least I’d slept for an hour in the truck.
‘Nothing at all, Mr Watson. But I heard what happened, and am willing to act as the go-between – your agent, or an honest broker.’ He used the words with irony and relish.
‘Is it damaged?’
‘Not as far as I know. Tanks are difficult to damage.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Exactly where your driver left it: at the end of a street of our poor native houses.’
‘No, it isn’t. The driver was merely moving it to the repair shop. He says he left the hatches open to ventilate it, that terrorists climbed in, drugged him with chloroform, and when he came to, he was outside the Land Forces HQ with a headache and no tank.’
‘His recollection is very flawed. The drug must have damaged his memory.’
‘What’s your version?’ I asked him.
‘Not mine: the boys who found it abandoned.’ I nodded for him to continue: I wasn’t going to argue until I’d heard it all. ‘Your driver stopped the vehicle outside the house of a well-known beauty, and cannot have believed his luck when she called him inside. When he came out an hour later his tank had completely vanished without a sound. Like the Indian rope trick – except in Egypt. Nobody saw it go. It was a mystery.’
‘That’s not possible. It weighs . . .’
‘Thirty-three tons, yes, I know . . . it is possible if the street now has a new small house, and that house has a door, but no windows.’
He paused for dramatic effect. My brain was slow to pick up – I’ve never been a morning person.
When I twigged I asked, ‘They built a house around it?’
‘Yes. Very enterprising young men; they did it in less than an hour. I shall employ them all, once they have left school.’
‘How old are they?’
‘There are five of them, and the eldest is thirteen. Can we now pretend I haven’t told you where the vehicle is, and negotiate a price for them? I thought ten Egyptian pounds each would be a fair finder’s fee for returning a lost piece of valuable military equipment? But we will need to move fast – our honourable police force is also looking for it, for an entirely different purpose. It would be better if the British recovered it – we don’t want another massacre on the Empire’s conscience, like the one in Ismailia, do we?’
Watson asked me, ‘Do you have fifty quid on you by any chance?’ I had, but not much more. As I handed it to him, the Wing Commander told me. ‘Congratulations, Charlie. You just bought a tank: the Army’s gonna just love you.’
Watson stood up, and shook hands with Yassine.
He said, ‘Thank you, David.’
‘The house boy will take you to your lorry. And you can tell those three policemen they can go back for tea now.’
‘How did you know about them?’ That was my question.
He shrugged, and I knew that I was about to get the old Egyptian heave-ho again. Then he took pity on me and smiled, ‘I watched you from an upstairs window. Very noisy. Half the neighbourhood will have known that you were here.’
‘What will you tell them?’
‘That I bribed you with a woman, and money, to let me reopen my club. All’s well that ends well.’ I bloody knew it. That’s what Tommo always used to say after he’d had someone over.
I drove us back following the tail lights of the police Land-Rover. Watson looked all-in. The MPs were pretty perky after we told them where the tank was, and then let them relay the news on their walkie talkie. By the ti
me they got back to camp they’d probably been persuaded that they’d found it themselves. Heroes. By then, of course, the High Command of British Middle Eastern Land Forces would have flung a ring of steel around their lost treasure in its new garage . . . probably one commanded by a general who had already convinced himself that he’d recovered the bleeding thing on his own. Yet another fucking hero: what goes around comes around.
They took us to Weston Camp, and after a bit of back-slapping led us to some decent guest quarters, and let us sleep. I don’t know about Watson, but I was out of it before my head hit the pillow, and I didn’t see him again until the next noon, when they fed us up and hurried us away. I thought their haste to see us gone us was all a bit ungrateful, but the Wing Commander explained,
‘We’re a bloody embarrassment, Charlie. They want to see the backs of us as soon as possible. How would we feel if we lost a Canberra, and a grubby little squaddie brought it back?’ He concentrated on his driving, and I concentrated on seeing Egypt for once. I saw a few scrubby hills, loads of barbed wire, even more Army lorries, and a few aircraft. Not a bloody pyramid or sphinx in sight: maybe I’d come to the wrong bloody country.
After a while Watson asked me, ‘What chance has the Empire got?’
‘Sorry, sir.’ – I’d yawned – ‘What do you mean?’
‘A hundred Brown Jobs searched that bloody street all day long yesterday, Charlie. All day! What chance has the Empire got if we can’t even count the bloody houses?’
There were long spaces in our conversation that afternoon, but I do remember making one point with him. ‘If David Yassine was our agent in this matter, what did he get out of it?’
‘He got his club opened up again, didn’t he?’
I played one of those jazz tunes inside my head. ‘Sleepy time gal’: I remembered Josephine Baker singing it before the war.
‘Does that mean he organized the whole bloody thing?’
‘Now why wouldn’t that surprise me?’
I thought about it for fully five minutes before telling him,
‘No: it wouldn’t surprise me either sir.’ Then I suggested, ‘We could stop at the Officers’ Club at Fayid, and get a glass of lemonade . . . I’m parched.’
‘Good idea, Charlie. You can drive this old cow after that. I still feel like I’ve been up half the night.’
‘When do I get my fifty quid back, sir?’
‘When you tell me where you got it in the first place.’
I knew I hadn’t heard the end of it, and he hadn’t even said anything about Mariam yet. Give him time.
Chapter Sixteen
Kinda blue
I never felt more like singing the blues. Didn’t Tommy Steel make a barrowload of dosh singing a song like that fifty years ago? Remember how I’d buttoned a letter from Flaming June into my shirt pocket to save it for later? I didn’t. I sent the damned thing to the laundry instead, but even when I got it back it was just about readable.
The sergeant she’d been engaged to had not come back from Korea, apparently: it was just an impostor she didn’t recognize wearing the same body. Three days after he got back he tried to murder a Chinese laundryman in Epsom. Now he was in a straitjacket locked up in Banstead, and Flaming June thought she might be in love with me after all. But we’d left it a bit bloody late, hadn’t we?
If the letters from home got you down because you weren’t there, the biggest problem for the serviceman in Egypt was that if you weren’t working, and the alert was high enough for you not to be able to go visiting, then there was damn-all else to do. The camp cinemas tried their best, but there was a difference between the films the troops wanted to see, and the films the powers-that-be thought were good for us. I wanted to see Macao, not Groucho Marx. Bugger them. So I hung around Watson’s office, and sometimes he threw me a bone, by giving me something to do. Pat Tobin ran a card school. Nancy learned to ride a motorbike rather well, and scraped both his knees. M’smith had cocked up somewhere and drew ten days’ stag down at Fayid, so we never saw him.
Eventually I sat down, and answered my mail. The letter to the boys was the longest, and I learned that I’d found out more about Egypt than I’d realized. I embellished it with drawings of the pyramids I’d never seen, me being sick over the side of the corvette, and trudging out into the desert with a spade to do what a man’s gotta do. You can’t go wrong writing to kids about vomit and crap; they like that sort of stuff.
I wrote asking Elaine to tell Old Man Halton to start pulling strings to get me out of this madhouse, and wrote to Flaming June that I might love her too, but we’d have to wait for me to get back before we knew . . . never give a girl a complete knock-back, as you never know when you might want them again. That was another of my dad’s rules, but one that I didn’t share with anyone.
The truth was, as Watson had indicated, that the Charlie I knew in his twenties could have been mistaken for a pretty shallow person. That’s as much as I’m willing to admit. I sent one of the dirty postcards to Bozey, and one to Dolly at her mews flat. After I dropped them in the postbox I realized that I no longer knew if she lived there. It was things like that which stopped you short. Then I wondered if the postcards would get past the BFPO censors, or would I get a couple of hefty service coppers knocking on the office door one day soon? I suppose the more likely scenario was that the censors would simply nick them, and stick them in their pockets.
I asked Daisy, ‘When’s this bloody trip back out into the blue supposed to come off? I don’t want to do it, but I do want to get it over with.’
‘Like a visit to the dentist?’
‘Exactly like that.’
‘I don’t know. It’s something to do with fixing up the transport. Do you want some of David’s gin? He’s away at GHQ for the day.’
‘Yes please . . . and don’t get cross at me for saying that you’re looking better, and it shows.’
‘No. I won’t, and I am. The thought of those two bastards having to stand all the way home, and then having to explain away their tattoos, really bucked me up no end, although I’ve given up sunbathing except down at the Beach Club. I still don’t know who – you or David – I have to thank for the dark pleasure of revenge; both of you deny it.’
‘Maybe neither of us.’
‘Or both?’
‘Anyway, you realize now that you weren’t to blame. That’s the important thing.’
‘I was to blame for being dumb, Charlie; but that was all. What did you come in for, anyway?’
‘To shoot the breeze . . . isn’t that what the Yanks say? I was bored, and didn’t know what to do with myself. I was never any good at lying around doing nothing. I just begin to think too much.’
Daisy sat on Watson’s desk, and swung her legs. She had a long G and T in her hand; tonic water is something we were never short of. I had a sudden vision of my kid sister Francie, who died when she was fourteen or fifteen. Would she have looked like this if she had reached her twenties?
‘What do you think about?’
I found myself saying, ‘You, sometimes. What happened to you changed how I felt around women – as a bunch, I mean – almost overnight.’
‘In what way?’
‘Less aggressive and more protective. Sometimes it feels a bit soft, but I think I can live with that.’
‘Do you like women, Charlie? Outside the sexual thing I mean.’
I sensed that it was a serious question, and gave myself the time to think about the women I’d known. ‘Yes; very much.’
‘Well, maybe something good has come out of this after all. That’s worth thinking about, too. Fancy the camp cinema tonight? Groucho Marx is in a film with Frank Sinatra.’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘And Jane Russell.’
‘OK.’
The grin she gave me told me that she thought I still had some way to go.
‘Who got the tank away?’ I asked Watson. ‘It must have taken them hours to dismantle that bloody house.’
‘A little Scots tank driver called Fotheringham. It’s one of those names you remember. He made a hole for the gun barrel to go through – like threading a needle – then he simply drove the thing out. He left them with only a pile of rubble where their new house had been.’
‘When you said little, you meant my size, sir?’
‘I meant smaller than you, Charlie: almost a dwarf, but much wittier. Explain to me why we always start off talking about anything except the reason I send for you in the first place.’
‘I’d love to know, sir.’
‘Then shut up and listen. You’re going out tomorrow.’ That had the effect he wanted. I was all ears. ‘I’m not supposed to tell you, because the Brown Jobs are being all mysterious as usual, but you will be out with a scheme that will cross into the desert west of here, above Abu Sultan, go northwest up towards the Sweet Water, then drop down towards Gebel el Girba.’ He was facing a large-scale military map on the wall. The areas he was pointing out contained large amounts of absolutely fuck-all. I doubted that a flea could live out there.
‘What’s the ground like, sir . . . or is that a silly question?’
‘It is – because this is Egypt. The bloody ground is changing all the time. If you go too far north you’ll be in drifting sand, but further south there are some decent wadis . . . or at least there were the last time anyone looked.’
‘What’s the tasking?’
‘Whatever communications the Army wants; they’ll take one of their own signallers this time . . . and you’ll be his relief. When he’s not working you’re to monitor any air traffic you can detect. We particularly need to know if their Lancasters are serviceable or are just heaps of junk sitting on their airstrips looking threatening. One more thing . . .’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Take more underwear than you own; you’re going to be working this time, and you’ll sweat your bollocks off in that radio room.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Don’t mention it: I’m known for looking out for my people.’
It was already so hot that I was stuck to my seat. Before I got up I asked him, ‘What was that massacre Yassine was so worried would happen again?’
Silent War Page 29