‘He’s a tremendous liar, you know, so I wouldn’t take that as gospel . . . These people you offended – are they the kind to harbour grudges?’
‘They all worked for their respective governments, I think, so they’re probably bad types.’
He swilled the wine around moodily, and then swallowed it in a oner. I signalled the owner behind his bar for another bottle.
‘Governments do bear grudges,’ he said, ‘so I see what you’re getting at. It would be handy to know who’s got it in for you. Do you want me to see what I can do?’
‘I’d be obliged.’
‘And in return you’d make sure your pals, whoever they are, lay off Adonis and his mother? Just between you and me, of course – no reason for Adonis to know.’
That seemed like an agreeable compromise to me. So I said, ‘Thank you.’ Then, ‘I should also thank you for bringing me here in the first place, shouldn’t I? You could always have said no, and let them knife me in the dark.’
He grinned like a boy.
‘I wondered when you’d work that out. As it happens I didn’t want the apple cart being upset at the minute – not until we find out what happened to that army pilot – so preserving you suits me. Good job all round.’
A waitress with a nice figure, spoiled by a light moustache and a cast in one eye, propped a great bowl of fish pieces on the table between us: it was like a spicy fish stew. There was a side plate of sliced potatoes fried in olive oil, and I was suddenly hungry.
Halfway through the meal I asked him, ‘Where are we going to sleep?’
‘Out there, unless you buy Konstantin’s girl for the night. She’s not all that expensive.’ He was talking about the waitress, but pointed out into the harbour with his spoon. ‘Pater’s boat – an old Greek caique with a bloody great Mercedes engine. You’ll love her.’ I was sure that I wouldn’t, but it wasn’t the right occasion to indicate just how quickly I became seasick. Steve had called me sailor the first time we woke up together; maybe she was a clairvoyant.
He’d parked his small lorry up in the UN compound, so all we had to do was walk down to the quay and find a boat. He rowed me out into the harbour to the large, odd-shaped sailing vessel which sat sedately at anchor. Big thing. Maybe sixty feet of greasy woodwork and two masts. We secured the skiff to a tired-looking Jacob’s ladder dangling from the well of the craft. Warboys went up first, with a pistol in his hand – he didn’t make a sound. The first thing he did was search the vessel. It didn’t take long; there wasn’t all that much to search. There was a small cabin above the stern and an even smaller engine bay beneath it. A single cargo space and a small forecastle. Another small skiff – aluminium this time – was lashed down in the well of the vessel.
‘They love my father in this town,’ he told me. ‘I don’t think they could bring themselves to blow up his son, but it’s always better to be safe than sorry, don’t you think?’
I did; but it’s not one of the questions you answer. I slept under a few damp blankets on a wooden bunk in the cabin; Warboys slept out on deck under the open stars. I think that he’d been exposed to too many copies of Boy’s Own when he was a lad.
When I awoke we were at sea. The pitching of the vessel had thrown me from the bunk.
Chapter Sixteen
Aphrodite
A caique does not cut the water like another ship. Neither does it ride it. Caiques attack the ocean as if they hate it: that should probably tell us something about the men who first built them. The design has been around in its current form for at least four hundred years, so for the deceptively turbulent waters of the Eastern Med it is probably a perfectly evolved design. My stomach didn’t think so. The only reason I didn’t vomit over the side was that I had nothing left to vomit, so I contented myself with dry retching for ten minutes before clawing my way back to the raised poop deck, where Warboys clung to the wheel. He was so wet that his clothes were stuck to him, and the grin on his face said it all. The pitch of the boat threatened to explode my head as it rode up the waves coming for us . . . then crashed down. The sky was a brilliant blue. Within a minute I was as wet as he was.
‘I didn’t know two of us could handle a thing this size,’ I shouted.
‘We can’t.’ He had had to shout back against the wind. It came back as ‘We ca . . . n . . . t!’ He took a deep breath and shouted once more, ‘We could never handle her under ca . . . nnn . . . vas!’
I clung to the compass binnacle. It and the wheel were between us.
‘I’m no good as a sailor.’
‘Don’t worry, neither am I.’
‘I get seasick.’
‘Don’t worry, so do I. Isn’t it smashing though? You feel so alive.’
You feel so alive, I thought, because we are shortly going to be dead. When the ship wasn’t trying to bury its head in the sea, it was trying to stand on its tail. He gestured violently to a box built onto the deck to my left. I staggered to it between the leaps of the deck, and threw back the lid. There were
