‘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 time 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