“You would like a Gauloise? Here! Take the pack, Paul.” He tossed the cigarettes to me.
“I’ve given up. What the hell do you want?”
“You’ve given up smoking! That’s wonderful, Paul, really wonderful! The doctors say I should give up, but what do they know? My brother-in-law is a doctor, did I ever tell you that? He smokes forty a day, sometimes fifty, and he’s fit as, what do you say? A fiddle! As a fiddle! You’d like some tea?”
“What the hell do you want, Shafiq?”
“I want you to deliver a boat to America, of course, just as I told your secretary. Is she beautiful?”
“As a rose in morning dew, as a peach blossom, as a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader. What kind of a boat? From where? To where? When?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Oh, great! That’s really helpful, Shafiq.” I leaned back in my overstuffed armchair. “It’s your boat?”
“It is not mine, no.” He lit a cigarette, then waved it vaguely about as if to indicate that the national boat belonged to someone else, anyone else, no one of importance. “How is your love life?”
“It doesn’t exist. I’ve just been junked for a married French pharmacist. I got custody of the cat. Whose boat is it?”
“You lost your girlfriend?” Shafiq was instantly concerned for me.
“Whose boat is it, Shafiq?”
“It belongs to friends.” Again he gestured with the cigarette to show that the ownership was unimportant. “How long will it take you?”
“How long will what take me?”
“To deliver the boat to America, of course.”
“That depends on what kind of a boat it is and how far it’s going and at what time of year you want it delivered.”
“A sailboat,” he said, “and soon, I think.”
“How big a sailboat?”
“With a big lead keel.” He smiled, as though that detail answered all my queries.
“How big?” I insisted.
He sucked on the cigarette, frowned. “I don’t know how big, so give me, what do you Americans call it? A ballpark guess? Give me a ballpark guess.”
I cast a beseeching look toward the ceiling’s ornamental plasterwork. “Three months? Four? How the hell do I know? The bigger the boat, the quicker. Maybe.”
“Three months? Four?” He sounded neither pleased nor displeased with my ballpark guess. “Is she blonde?”
“Is what blonde?”
“Your secretary.”
“She’s got brown hair.”
“All over?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ah.” He was sad for my ignorance. “Why did your lover leave you?”
“Because I want to retire to America one day and she doesn’t, because she says I’m too secretive, because she finds life in Nieuwpoort dull, and because her Frenchman gave her a Mercedes.”
“You want to live in America?” Shafiq asked in a tone of shock.
“Yes. It’s home.”
“No wonder you are unhappy.” Shafiq shook his head, I think because Sophie had walked out on me rather than because I was an American.
“If I’m unhappy about anything,” I assured him, “it’s because of this meeting. For Christ’s sake, Shafiq, you ignore me for four years, then you drag me to Paris to tell me you want me to deliver a boat, and now you can’t give me a single Goddamn detail of the job.”
“But it’s business!” he pleaded.
“After four years?” I sounded hurt.
He shrugged, tapped his cigarette ash into a crystal bowl, then shrugged again. “You know why, Paul, you know why.” He would not look at me.
“You didn’t like my deodorant, Shafiq?” I mocked him.
He raised his eyes to meet mine. He did not want to articulate the old accusation, but I was putting him through the wringer and he knew he would have to endure the ordeal. “They said you were CIA, Paul.”
“Oh, shit.” I leaned back in the chair, disgust in my voice.
“We know it isn’t true, of course.” Shafiq tried to reassure me.
“It’s taken you four years to make up your minds?”
“We can’t be too careful, you know that.” He sucked on the cigarette, making its tip glow bright. “Our business is like modern sex, isn’t it? Practice it safely or not at all, isn’t that right, Paul?” He laughed, inviting me to join in his amusement, but my face did not change and he shook his head sadly. “It wasn’t our side that accused you, Paul, it was the girl! Your girl! What was her name? Roisin?” He even pronounced it properly, Rosh-been, proving that he remembered her well enough. “She was your girl, Paul.”
“My girl? She was the office bicycle, Shafiq. Anyone could ride her.”
“That’s good, Paul, I like it! The office bicycle!” He chuckled, then made a dismissive gesture. “So you understand, eh? You see why we could not trust you? Not me, of course! I never believed you were CIA! I defended you! I told them it was a ridiculous notion! Cretinous! But they wanted to make sure. They said wait, wait and see if he runs home to America. I guess you didn’t run home, eh?” He smiled at me. “It’s good to see you again, Paul. It’s been too long.”
“So this sailboat,” I asked coldly, “what kind of business is it?”
“Just business.”
“Is it to do with Iraq?”
“Iraq?” Shafiq spread hands as big as oarblades in a gesture suggesting he had never heard of Iraq or its invasion of Kuwait.
“Is this to do with Iraq?” I asked again.
He gave me a smile of yellowed teeth. “It’s just business.”
“The business of smuggling?” I asked.
“Maybe?” He offered me a conspiratorial smile.
“Then the answer is no.” It was not, of course it was not, but if I yielded too easily the price would be low, and I wanted the price for this job to be very high, so I laid on the objections. “I don’t smuggle things, Shafiq, unless I know what I’m smuggling, and how it’s hidden, and why it’s being smuggled, and where it’s going, and who it’s going to, and how much, and when, and who benefits, and who might be trying to stop it, and how much they propose paying me to get it past them.”
“I told them you’d say that!” Shafiq sounded triumphant.
“They?” I challenged him.
“The people who want you to go to Miami tomorrow,” he answered coyly, hoping that the mention of Miami would sidetrack my question.
“They?” I said again.
“your old friends,” he said, confirming what I had suspected.
“They’re in Miami?” That did surprise me.
“They want you there tomorrow.” He stuffed a slice of almond cake into his mouth, then mumbled, “They’re expecting you, and I have your ticket. First class even!” He made it sound like a treat, like a red carpet into the lion’s den. Not that I needed such an enticement. I had waited four years for someone to rescue me from hydraulic systems and fiberglass osmosis and rotted keel-bolts.
So I telephoned Hannah at her Nieuwpoort home. It was a Sunday afternoon and she sounded sleepily warm and I wondered if I had interrupted the plump policemen’s revels. “Cancel this week’s appointments,” I told her.
“But, Paul…”
“Everything,” I insisted, “is cancelled.”
