Hudd sniffed, and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. Only real men do that. It’s probably a dominance gesture they teach them at Special Forces school. Smiler didn’t seem to notice.
Hudd asked, ‘What did you bring?’
‘Eggs and slices of lamb salted and smoked. Not unlike your bacon. I miss bacon. I was at Cambridge University. We had bacon for breakfast every morning. Here it is mainly grains.’
‘Why don’t you get down,’ I asked him. ‘We can talk.’
‘We brought fresh water as well,’ he said. ‘They make wonderful tea.’
‘My name is Charlie Bassett,’ I told him. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘Şivan Mohamed Van,’ he came back. ‘I’ll explain that later.’ I realized that I actually didn’t know Hudd’s Christian name, so I left it to him.
Hudd just said, ‘Hiya,’ and ostentatiously put the gun down. It was funny how you felt the tension go out of the scene immediately.
Van’s men made two decent fires, and gathered around one of them scoffing something that looked like blue porridge and quarrelling good-naturedly. They were young and a boisterous bunch, who laughed a lot. Most of the jokes were on us, I guessed. They were small men – I would have fitted in here – but the guns, swords and lances they were carrying definitely made them look bigger. I didn’t look too closely, but I reckoned that a couple of the lances were adorned with hanks of human hair. Bloody scalp hunters!
One of them fussed around Van, and also made our breakfast. It started with the tea, and Van had been right; it was exquisite.
‘When were you at Cambridge?’ I asked him.
‘Immediately after the war. Your university needed the money, and Pater was ready to pay.’
‘What did you study?’
‘Absolutely nothing, old boy. I sowed my wild oats: girls, alcohol and as many other un-Islamic things as I could find. Three years later I came back to take my place in the family. Here I am a pious and responsible man – with three wives.’
I reckoned he’d done all right for himself, and asked, ‘You didn’t get a degree then?’
‘Of course I did, old boy: Classics and Mid-Eastern Studies: First-Class Honours. My father always gets what he pays for – it is a matter of principle.’
‘I suppose it is, really. Nice tea.’
‘Thank you. Did you go to university also?’
‘No, my family could never have afforded it.’
‘Don’t forget to tell him you were too thick, as well,’ Hudd offered.
‘That too,’ I said. ‘Life’s unfair.’ But I was grinning.
‘That’s exactly what I thought when I saw your fire. After all this time I had hoped that we might keep it.’ He was talking about the money again.
I said, ‘We’ve come to negotiate about that.’
Van shook his head. ‘When you’re British and you own something, you don’t negotiate over it. You reach out your hand and take it back.’
Hudd nodded gravely, and observed, ‘It’s a matter of principle,’ as if he had just invented the phrase. I glanced over at Van’s army whooping it up at the other fire. Easier said than done, I thought.
The eggs were small and gamy-tasting, but to me they tasted wonderful. Van’s man had scrambled them in a kind of curd. Terrific. Kurds with curds; that’s not bad, Charlie. We finished off with another cup of scented tea.
‘It’s from Iraq,’ he told us. ‘That part of Iraq was once part of Kurdistan. One day it will be again.’
‘Who took it away from you?’ I asked. I get all the dumb questions – that’s my role in life.
‘The British did. You aren’t all that popular around here.’
‘I heard that your people never surrendered.’
‘That’s not surprising, Charlie. There is no word for it in our language; we can’t surrender because we do not know what a surrender is.’
‘Which could make you a difficult neighbour to get on with?’
‘. . . or the very best of allies. Your choice.’
I didn’t even give Hudd a chance. I said, ‘We want to be your friends.’
‘Good choice,’ Van said. He muttered something to his man who was cleaning the utensils with dirt – interesting, but just work it out. He went across to speak with the others. Seconds later they surprised me by beginning to shout and jig about, and fire their guns in the air.
‘Well done, Charlie,’ Hudd groused. ‘I think you just started an uprising.’
Van touched me on the shoulder, ‘Don’t worry . . . but before you pack you must tell me why you buried the Jew.’
The man in the turret had been one of an Israeli party sent out to recover Frohlich’s cargo several years earlier. The implication of that was that at least one of Frohlich’s crew had made it all the way to the Promised Land. The Israeli in the turret had been bitten by a snake, and abandoned by his mates. At the time I thought that was a very Israeli way of looking at things: they’ve changed since then. He’d shut himself in the turret when Van and his people had turned up, and threatened them all with a pistol.
‘It was very sad,’ Van told us. ‘We could probably have saved him. There are several useful antidotes. All you have to do is chew one of the grasses, and spit it inside the wounds.’
‘How did you finish him?’ Hudd: being awkward again.
‘We didn’t. The snake already had. We watched him until he was dead, and then left him there. He seemed to be where he wanted to be.’
‘How many were there in his party?’
‘Fifteen. They were heavily armed.’
‘Did you finish them too?’
‘No: who wants to make an enemy of Israel? Any people unafraid of blowing up a hotel full of British soldiers are not going to
