When I put my own hand in the pocket I felt one of those big buck teeth a camel grins with. I turned back to say thank you, but the door was already closed. I heard the bolts go home. It was as black as in an outdoor privy out there.
I thought I saw a movement in the dark shadows across the road, and waited more than a minute before I shifted. No one stepped out to follow me. Things look different at night. Cats can even become lions. I walked down to the corner of the road between dull houses. The occasional window laid the occasional square of dull light on the ground. No pavements. Just as I reached the junction, a person stepped out in front of me, still in shadow. Someone in a nearby room lit a lamp, and our faces were suddenly illuminated by the light from its open window. My heart beat like a tom-tom.
She said, ‘Hello, Charlie. I hoped it was you. I know somewhere they’ll give us good coffee.’
Chapter Twenty-One
The Sheik of Araby
‘Your parents gave you the wrong name, Grace,’ I told her. ‘They should have called you Tinkerbell . . . from Peter Pan.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you always turn up when I least expect you to, and then you make a mess of my life.’
‘You didn’t complain in Cyprus.’
‘You never gave me a chance to. You sodded off again before I could blink my eyes.’
Grace bent over and extinguished the candle on the table between us with a moistened forefinger and thumb. It was the sort of thing she’d do; and she wouldn’t change her expression even if it had hurt.
She said, ‘I read a novel about Peter Pan once. It ended a year after the Darlings had returned to their family. Tinkerbell had died, and Peter couldn’t even remember her name. Isn’t that sad?’ She always asked you questions that made you pause and think.
‘I’ll never forget you, Grace. Fat chance.’
‘Good.’ She put her hand over mine, on the table.
I asked her, ‘What is this place?’
‘It’s an illegal drinking den. They had them in Ireland when I was delivering planes during the war. They called them shebeens there. They are places you can go and drink in whatever company you like – men, women or in-betweens – and no one asks you your religion, or for your identity card. Places made for folk like you and me.’
The place was dark, and smelled of hashish – now that I knew what the stuff smelt like. I’d followed Grace through the dark streets trying to memorize our route – twice I suspected she had deliberately diverted to confuse me. You entered this den through a wooden gate in what appeared to be a high garden wall, but found yourself instead in a darkened corridor like a tunnel. The dull light at the end of it was over something like a bar in a large circular room. You could get coffee, a hookah or smuggled beer. There were probably girls, or men or whoever you fancied on the menu, if you asked. It was busy: buzzing with low-pitched conversations.
We took a couple of bottles of beer each, and went into a small semicircular alcove. There were about twenty around the periphery of the room. Cushions and a curtain, low table, small oil lamp on the wall and a candle on the table. Grace seemed to know the form. She swapped a few sweet words with the owner – but they were in Turkish so I didn’t understand what was said. The smell of the oil from the wall lamp hung around us like a crude scent. I didn’t mind that.
Grace clinked bottles with me, and said, ‘Cheers.’
‘Did you know I was here?’ I asked her.
‘Partly. The leader of our little embassy has paid some of the street kids to let him know if any European strangers turn up. As soon as I heard the description of you walking out of the mountains, I think I knew. So I hung around the end of the street, and waited to see who came out of the English House. I saw the big man go in, and a few hours later you came out. Now, here we are.’
‘Why didn’t you just knock on the door?’
‘I wanted to see you alone.’
‘Why?’
Even in the half-light I could see how she dropped her eyes before she replied. Her voice dropped a register as well.
‘I thought we could manage better on our own. The others would just have wanted their say, and have probably cocked things up: you know what men are like.’
I could have said something smart, but I just nodded, and asked, ‘Cock what up, my pretty one?’ I shocked myself. I don’t think I’d ever used a pet phrase for Grace in my life. She allowed herself a brief smile, as if she’d won a point. She may have, for all I knew.
‘The deal of course, darling.’
‘What deal?’
‘The deal for the money you brought down with you, of course. You have it, and I want it.’
‘What’s in it for me?’
‘I will convince my people not to kill you – which is what they want to do at the moment. Shall we smoke one of those things together, for old time’s sake?’ She nodded at the bar, where a large man was preparing several water pipes.
‘No. I never saw myself as a dope user. Booze and pipe tobacco will do me. I still smoke the pipe you gave me.’ Grace ignored my last sentence.
She said, ‘You can get opium here, you know. I always fancied doing that once; just to see what it did to me.’
‘No, Grace.’
‘You’re an old square, Charlie. Not fun any more.’
‘Does square mean . . . ?’
‘Yes, old-fashioned and unadventurous. American teenagers are using it. You weren’t like that when I first met you.’
‘I’m older now.’
‘And I’m not; is that what you mean?’ Her bottom lip turned down.
We were back to Peter Pan again, weren’t we? People who never grew up. Grace had started off by insulting me, and had turned that into a reason to feel insulted herself. It was something that couldn’t have happened in a conversation between two men. Nothing to be done about it. And she was still the most enchanting woman I had met in my life. Nothing to be done about that either.
‘We can get a room upstairs, if you like. It’s quite private.’
In order to give myself thinking space I asked, ‘How do you know about places like this, Grace?’
‘Every town in Turkey and North Africa has a place like this, Charlie . . . you just have to know who to ask.’
Later we lay back on an old mattress covered in carpets. Where we touched, we stuck lightly together. Sweat. Grace always worked you hard I remembered.
She asked, ‘Will your people worry about where you are?’
‘Maybe, but I shouldn’t think so. I was sent out to find where the Israelis were . . .’
‘. . . and you found them.’
‘I was going to ask you about that. What were you doing, there in Cyprus?’
‘Exactly what I told you. There’s a deal between your government and the state of Israel. Britain is going to support us when the Arab League girds its loins for another attack on Israel, but can’t do so openly because that will offend NATO. I was tying up the last threads, that’s all. They must have really been scraping the bottom of the barrel if I was the only person they could find who both sides would trust. When I ran off to Israel in 1947 I was called a traitor to my country: now I am a trusted intermediary. Isn’t life odd?’
‘So how does the deal work?’
‘At the first sign of trouble, we storm through the Sinai and up to the Canal, gratefully capturing all of the arms and stores dumps the British have thoughtfully left behind for us. We could have reached the Canal in 1948 if our supply lines had stretched that far . . . as it is we’ve kitted out the Army with your war-surplus stores, and you are the best people to supply us with the spares.’
‘You know where our secret supply dumps are . . . ?’
‘Most of them.’
‘Because we’ve told you?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the Egyptians don’t know of course, but are desperate to find out.’
‘Correct again, Charlie . . . and to think we once thought that Never-Nev
er Land was only in a book!’
‘What do we get out of it?’
‘Your lovely bloody Canal, I should think. All of a sudden, Mr Churchill is scared the Egyptians are going to kick you out, and take it back. He talks about the vital lifeline to our Empires in the East. But he’s mad: all of them are. You need someone to help you hang on to the Canal, and we need someone to help prevent the Arabs shovelling us into the sea the next time they have a go at us. A nice little self-preservation society of two.’
I lit a couple of fags from a packet of bootleg Players Navy Cut that came with the room, and handed her one. We lay on our backs smoking, an aluminium ashtray balanced on my belly.
‘Grace?’
‘Yes?’
‘I knock along quite nicely in life, you know.’
‘Do you?’
‘Yes. I read the newspapers, talk to my boss, run a small airline. I think that I know the way the world works . . .’
‘But?’
‘Then I meet you again . . . and each time I do, after you’ve gone, I find that the world isn’t like I thought it was after all. It’s as if you change history every time I see you.’
She rolled over, and kissed me on the cheek. I felt warm tobacco smoke against my face before she spoke.
‘Don’t worry, Charlie. You’re much better at it than most. You know nearly all the answers most of the time. I just fill in a few of the little gaps for you.’ I felt a brief tickle on my belly, and knew that she’d flicked off her fag ash, and missed the ashtray. I hoped she’d look before she stubbed it out.
‘Knowing what’s in those gaps changes the way I see things.’
‘Good. It’s nice to know that someone’s listening.’ Hadn’t Hudd said something like that to me? The flat pressure on my belly told me she had looked before extinguishing her smoke. She rolled away, and turned her back on me. ‘I’m going to have a little nap now, darling, and when I wake up we can talk about the money.’
I looked at the ceiling. The room was completely black. It was like being suspended in space. Hudd had wanted to know if the Israelis had the money, before we split. It was clear now that they hadn’t. All I had to do was get back to him in one piece, and tell him the news. And for the first time in my life, I needed to get away from Grace. That was interesting.
When I awoke, Grace was humming a tune. It was ‘The Sheik of Araby’. Back in my prefab in Bosham I had a Tommy Dorsey recording of that. It was popular in the jazz clubs, where we roared out a vulgar version whose words we had learned in the war.
‘How long have you been awake?’ I yawned.
‘Five minutes. I was bored so I started to sing. I wanted to find out how loud I would have to get before you sat up.’
‘How loud were you?’
‘Not very.’
‘Shall we do what we usually do when you’re bored?’
‘No, Charlie. Let’s talk about money.’
‘You know your trouble, don’t you?’
‘No, what?’
‘You’re a square.’ The words fitted nicely in my mouth. I’d thought since the war that the next adventures for the English language were being written in America. It was time the world started to pay attention to the American teenager. I bent over and kissed a big nipple on a small breast, but Grace pushed me away.
‘Money.’
‘You never used to be interested in money,’ I told her cheerfully. ‘It must be the people you’re mixing with.’
‘Shit!’ Grace sat up. ‘You don’t think I’m serious, do you? We could all get killed over this!’
‘You never used to be worried about that either, when we smuggled you on to Tuesday’s Child and flew you over the Ruhr in 1944. You didn’t worry about living and dying at all.’
‘Maybe I’m older now,’ she spat at me.
When I said, ‘I’ve been trying to get you to admit that all night,’ she flung herself at me in a fury, punching and scratching and sobbing. Very un-Grace.
It ended with making love again, of course. With Grace everything always ended with love making. But she quietly cried herself to sleep afterwards. That was new.
Before dawn, I woke her and asked, ‘Would they really kill me for a couple of boxes of coins?’
‘Don’t be stupid, Charlie . . . not now you’re beginning to do so well. You can do whatever you please with the bloody coins. I want the real money.’
‘What for? It’s fake isn’t it? That’s what I was told.’
‘It’s exceptionally good counterfeit dollars, Charlie. Billions of them. So good that you could pass it off anywhere in the world other than Washington. America has fully committed itself to rebuilding old Europe, and Japan, and its own peacetime industries. Its armed forces occupy parts of Korea, Germany and Japan. In order to counter the Reds it has a bigger Air Force establishment in Britain, Italy, Germany and Iceland than it had during the war. This is costing a colossal amount of money to keep going. America is fully stretched, she has no money to spare – absolutely none at all – and anyone dumping that amount of dud money on the market will simply bankrupt her.’
‘But that won’t do you any good.’
‘The threat of it will do us good. If Israel has the cuckoo’s egg and America knows it, she will have to support us through thick or thin. Israel will be able to sort out its neighbours, and any attempt to restrain us will be vetoed by the US within the UN. It’s a get-out-of-jail-free card that will last for years.’
‘And we want the money back to stop you blackmailing the Yanks with it?’
‘Don’t be so bloody naive, darling.’ Grace yawned. ‘You want it for the same reason as us. If you have it safely tucked away in the Bank of England you’ll subtly indicate to our American cousins that you’d prefer them to support any British move to guarantee British control of the Suez Canal. The Americans wouldn’t dare to interfere.’
‘But I thought you said Britain and Israel are secretly cooperating over the Canal?’
‘We are, darling, but we’re like two wild cats tied up in a sack. Both of us would prefer to have the means to go it alone.’
I mulled this over for a couple of minutes then said, ‘Poor old Yanks. Whichever way it turns out someone is going to have them over a barrel.’
‘One thing is certain in the Middle East, Charlie. Either Israel is going to put her neighbours back in their place, and start building secure borders . . . or Britain will strengthen its hold on the Canal. But only one of those two things can happen, because it depends on who has control of your dud money. If Israel gets it the Americans will do as we tell them; if Britain gets its hands on it, America will support your illegally annexing the Canal.’
‘What if the Yanks get it back themselves?’
‘Then we’re both stuffed, aren’t we?’
‘. . . and your people will kill me to get it?’
‘They will kill you to get it, or to stop you getting it. Either or both.’
‘You’re beginning to move with a very unpleasant class of person, Grace. Do you know that?’ At least she giggled when I said that.
‘You’re priceless, Charlie.’
‘But I haven’t got your money. All I brought down from the hills were boxes of coins: sovereigns and half-sovereigns . . . and funnily enough – which is why I believe you this time – my bosses said exactly the same as you: that we could keep the coin for all they’d care. All they wanted to see was banknotes.’
Grace was quiet for a long time, and then she said, ‘Bugger.’
‘There were two expeditions before ours – the local tribesmen told us that. One French and one Israeli. Maybe they got it.’
‘No; I’d know that.’
‘Maybe it was never there in the first place.’
‘No. I’d know that too. Our best interrogators questioned the aircraft crew when they crossed over into Israel. The stuff was in the plane.’
‘Where in the plane?’
‘We don’t know.’
‘Didn
’t they tell you?’
‘No. They held that detail back until we guaranteed them citizenship. Then some fool took it into his head that they were lying, were spies, and had them shot.’
Poor Frohlich, I knew him, Horatio. I didn’t see that I needed to tell Grace that, but Grace was nothing if not sharp.
She asked, ‘How come you’re mixed up in all this anyway, Charlie?’
‘They wanted someone to identify the aircraft: somebody they could control – I’d seen it at Tempsford a month before it got here, although I was in hospital by the time they ran.’
‘That’s where you burned your face and your shoulders?’
‘That’s right: what goes around comes around.’
It was an odd, peaceful moment. We had said all that needed to be said. Grace would tell her people what she’d learned from me. If I made it back, I’d tell Hudd.
If her pals didn’t believe me, and genuinely thought I had the dollars, they would try to kill me for them. If they believed me, they still wouldn’t be able to take a chance on my not being able to work out where the money was anyway . . . and if they wanted another shot at finding it they’d still have to kill me, to be on the safe side. Tails I lost; heads they won. I suppose we both knew that when Grace left the place she would be carrying my death warrant with her. I sat up and swung my feet over the edge of the old mattress. Yawned, and stretched.
Grace asked me, ‘Do you still carry that silly little pistol of yours?’
‘Yes.’
I pulled over my leather jacket, and took it out of the pocket. I handed it to her. What I was left with was a camel’s tooth in my hand.
She asked, ‘What’s that?’
‘A camel’s tooth. Someone gave it to me for luck.’
She handed back the pistol, and I put it and the tooth in separate pockets. The pistol was shoved into the left one.
Grace said, ‘Why don’t you kill me: now? You’d get a head start. You and your pal could be away before they realized anything had gone wrong.’
‘I couldn’t do that, Grace. You know that.’
‘Yes, Charlie, I do.’ She said that very sadly. ‘Bugger off. I’ll give you an hour.’
Silent War Page 41