wasting our time.'
Roskill cleared his throat. The Scot would be wondering why he'd insisted on getting through to him directly when a message would have served well enough.
'I think I ought to warn you – ' he began awkwardly. 'I feel I must warn you personally that there could be a connection between my car and – the car that killed Alan Jenkins. There may not be, but there could be.'
There was a pause at the other end of the line.
'Thank you, sir. I had that in mind, verra much in mind. I'll not forget it – and you'll have your car back in one piece as well, never fear.'
The smell that greeted him as he entered Shabtai's took him directly back to the mess tent under the netting beyond the baking runway where the Israeli Skyhawks had been poised: a Jewish cooking smell that was strange rather than exotic, and exciting as everything on that airstrip had been exciting.
He pushed through a curtain of beads – there was no other way to go – and came to the head of an ancient wrought iron spiral staircase which looked as though it had been extracted from some Victorian garden. Below him was a brick-arched cellar, with dim dummy2
lights and crowded tables and a hubbub of conversation. There was a smoke haze and a whole range of further smells, each of which seemed to predominate at a different level as he descended the staircase, like the strata in an exposed cliff face.
As he reached the bottom step a girl started to sing in the furthest corner. She sang loudly and uninhibitedly, unaccompanied except by rhythmic clapping from people at the tables nearest her.
Presumably she was singing in Yiddish, but Roskill couldn't make out the words anyway – it; was the sort of singing that always embarrassed him because it seemed to insist on audience participation.
He stopped a perspiring waiter and inquired for Jake Shapiro. The man grinned and nodded, pointing to the far corner opposite the singer.
He threaded his way between the jammed tables. In a purely British establishment – at least one with a widely mixed collection of age groups like this – his passage would have been marked by blank looks and murmured apologies on both sides; but here he was received with smiles and left with the impression that he would have been welcome at most of the tables he disrupted.
Audley was wrong, he thought. Caricature or not, Shabtai's atmosphere was genuine. Or perhaps it was simply that Audley was a born loner who couldn't take crowds of people in any form except between the covers of a book, so that his judgment betrayed him in their presence. It would be the idea of Israel, not the Israelis in the flesh, which would attract him.
'Colonel Shapiro.'
dummy2
His vision had adjusted to the dimness, but there was no mistaking the man anyway: the bushy, ragged Stalin moustache and the broad, heavy shoulders – where Razzak was deceptively fat there was nothing deceptive about this hard-muscled bulkiness. It reminded Roskill of one of his father's prize bulls, amiable but unsafe.
Shapiro looked up at him – a confident, unhurried look. The mouth was hidden in the moustache's shadow, but the complex of lines on each side of it suggested that he was smiling.
'Ah! I wondered who it would be.' Shapiro set down the heavy pewter tankard he'd been nursing and brushed back the lick of black hair from his forehead. 'Roskill, isn't it? One of Sir Frederick's band of brothers? We met at poor old David's nuptials
– you were one of the zoot-suited ushers, weren't you?' He gestured with a large, hairy hand. 'Take a seat, Squadron Leader, take a seat!'
'It's nice to be expected,' Roskill drawled. 'I was afraid I might be disturbing a private party.'
'Not at all! Any friend of David's is welcome – even on business.
You must have some of my beer, now you're here.' Shapiro raised his tankard in one hand and snapped his fingers at a waiter. 'I've got my own little barrel – special strong ale, a firkin of it. Not a bit like this pressurised nat's water they flog everywhere now – a
He drank deeply.
'To be honest, I didn't expect
S like Cooper or Cox, I thought it'd be – or if Sir Frederick was in dummy2
on it, maybe Jack Butler. I thought you were strictly airborne these days – in fact, you've just been over to pick old Hod's brains, haven't you?'
'A flying visit – yes,' Roskill said carefully. 'Your chaps were very hospitable.'
'You asked a lot of sharp questions, so I hear. The feeling is that you got more than you gave.' Shapiro wagged a finger. 'I shall have to look out now, shan't I!'
Roskill grinned at the incongruous idea of anyone outsmarting an alerted Shapiro. That, as 'old' David was so fond of saying, would be the day!
'But you have been expecting someone?'
'Someone was asking for me this afternoon, I'm told. And I've been wating for something to happen ever since I heard about Llewelyn's car.' Shapiro gazed frankly at Roskill. 'I suppose you already know I was dining with him that evening?'
So much for security...
'You've got good hearing. Colonel Razzak doesn't seem to have heard so quickly.'
Shapiro shrugged. 'It's my job – and you can't blame me if Razzak isn't up to his. But that's hardly fair to the poor bugger – he's been enjoying a dirty mid-week in Paris, hasn't he. Is he back yet?'
Roskill watched their waiter manoeuvre his way towards them bearing a tall glass jug of beer and another tankard. He set the tankard before Roskill, filling it exactly with one graceful, practised movement, and then did the
