‘Has he come over all enigmatic again?’
‘’E has a new secretary bird, an’ the guys in the car pool think he’s trying to impress her by keeping his distance from the rest of us.’
‘I suppose it will get him off our backs. I’m thirsty, Pat, so get a bloody move on if you don’t mind.’
Pat sniffed, and said, ‘You’re beginning to sound like a bleedin’ officer again. It didn’t take long, did it?’ Maybe he was right.
Ten minutes later, when we were halfway to Famagusta he asked me, ‘Lunch?’
‘Spam sandwiches, lashings of mustard. NAAFI tea.’
‘Told you.’
Famagusta is an old walled city – so’s Nicosia come to that. That’s two of the things the army doesn’t tell you about Cyprus. You drive through the usual suburban sprawl until you come up against enormous walls and defensive gateways. It’s as if the crusaders or the Templars are still only a breath away. I looked up at the walls and expected to see a soldier in steel armour on top. Once the Champ was through the gateway we plunged into a medieval city, but Pat seemed to know where he was going. From time to time a local would raise a hand to him, and give a quick smile of recognition. I guessed that we were moving inside Pat’s personal fiefdom.
And another thing, Collins had been right: the men had a much better class of moustache. If my face had still done hair – and it never did once it had been burned in that air crash – I would have grown one myself. Tobin threaded us down a narrow old lane, and made a sharp right turn into a walled, flagged courtyard which fronted a big old residentia. The sign on the wall outside was a Turkish word about four feet long, but someone had painted the word ‘Tony’s’ untidily in black paint across the end of it.
Steep, wide stone steps climbed to a porticoed door large enough to have occasioned envy in Whitehall. The man who stood at the top of them was grossly overweight, and wore a gleaming white dishdash and a red fez. He was smiling a smile which cut his face in half, and holding his arms open; Pat was grinning like a dervish.
When I reached the top of the steps I was hugged. I hate being hugged, but it’s something that happens all the time when you are as small as me.
He said, ‘Charlie.’
And I said, ‘David. Pat told me you’d become a banker.’
David Yassine.
‘Only when I was in Egypt.’ In Beirut, where he had been born, he was a club owner, with premises along the Corniche. He had a spice business in Istanbul, and in Germany . . . well, he was my partner in the Leihhaus, and the Klapperschlange club with Bozey, but I’ve said it before – that’s another story.
‘You are well then?’
‘Very. I have two more children, both boys.’
‘Is this your place?’
‘Of course.’
‘What about that dancing girl I liked? Mariam?’
‘Pouff! She married a German weightlifter, and went to America. Hollywood. Los Angeles. She wants to be in the pictures. I hope she ends up sweeping floors in a brothel.’ But he was smiling, and I knew he had a soft spot for her. Mariam had had some nice soft spots if I came to think about it. ‘Come in, Charlie. Come in. I need someone to manage this place when I am away – maybe I sell you a share.’
‘Who’s Tony?’
‘I am. Me. Anthony. My middle name is for the saint. Didn’t I tell you?’
‘No.’
‘We can always call it Charlie’s Place.’
Yassine did business at breakneck speed, as if his world was going to end tomorrow. It never failed to seduce me.
An hour later I remembered why we were there. Sitting in a private walled garden, beneath a fig tree, with three empty beer bottles in front of each of us I told him, ‘I came here to meet a woman. An air stewardess with Eagle.’
Yassine’s face always telegraphed his emotions. He suddenly looked as if his favourite wife had died in childbirth. Desolation invaded him.
‘Alas, she has gone. They checked out this morning.’ Then he smiled. ‘But she left you this.’
He had picked up an envelope as we passed the reception desk, and had been fingering it ever since. I didn’t mind his sweat marks: he had once given me a name and address that had saved my life. Inside the envelope was a cheap postcard of the ruins at Salamis. I turned it over. The card bore my name, and the imprint of a pair of lips. Nothing else. When I bent over it I could just smell the lipstick. It smelt its colour – a deep pastel pink. That was interesting: I had received a similar card when I had been in Egypt three years earlier, but had never identified the correspondent. I still had it, and would compare them when I got home.
I pulled a sad face, and showed the card to Yassine and Pat. David leaned across the small table between us, and placed his hand over mine. ‘She trusted me with a message for you. Verbal. Do you wish to hear it?’
Pat rolled his eyes to the sky, but I said, ‘Yes, please.’
‘She wants me to tell you that she never makes the same mistake twice, and she thinks that you shouldn’t either. Do you know what she means?’
‘I think so, David,’
‘Good. She will be back in a week, maybe less. You will be a little more familiar with our beautiful island by then.’ Then he switched tracks on us. ‘Will you be staying tonight? I have a fine cook, and new girls.’
Yassine left us to talk and drink as the food was being prepared. It became cooler in the garden, even a little chill. I asked Pat, ‘Why didn’t you tell me
