‘You British?’
‘No, my generation. You and me. All of a sudden I can’t wait to go home.’
Yassine took a minute to consider his response before he said, ‘You swear too much, Charlie, did you know that? You should clean up your language.’ Then he stood up and walked away.
I kept my word to Steve: I took a room of my own. In the small hours I couldn’t sleep, and lay awake digesting the implications of what Yassine had told me.
I’d complained for years that the Palestinians and Israelis had no place fighting each other, because they were both Arab tribes with identical concerns and needs. There was nothing they did apart that they couldn’t do better together. You could say the same for the Pakistanis and the Indians. And you know what I’ve said about the Greeks and the Turks – can anyone tell them apart in the dark? Now David had told me that the German guy had copped it because no outsider could tell the difference between a Brit and a Jerry at six feet. So why did we spend six years murdering each other in the 1940s? Suddenly that didn’t make so much sense.
Yassine’s new dancer put her head round my door before breakfast. She was a cleaner in the morning and a dancer at night, and looked even younger without the blue eye make-up they danced in.
‘Just checking. I’ll clear the room up later if you like.’ Her accent put her in the bullseye of England.
I asked her, ‘Where are you from?’
‘Halifax. You?’
‘God only knows these days. Sometimes I feel as if I’m from bloody everywhere. I have a house in a place called Bosham, down on the south coast. Will that do for now?’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Charlie Bassett.’
‘I’ve heard people talk about you.’
‘Nothing good, I hope. What’s your name?’
‘Jessie, but Mr Yassine calls me Reem – because of my white skin.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘White antelope.’
‘It’s a pretty name,’ I told her firmly, ‘but I prefer Jessie.’
‘So do I, but he pays my wages.’
‘How old are you, Jessie?’
Her next smile was the smile of a thirty-year-old.
‘Old enough, so don’t go fathery on me.’
‘OK. I’ll remember that. You can tell the kitchen I’ll be down in five minutes.’
Yassine was in a foul mood; cursing the kitchen staff, and following the cleaners around the bar quality-checking their work. Everyone looked jumpy.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ I asked him.
‘You bloody British are.’
‘What have we done now?’
‘Some delegation of English schoolteachers is calling for martial law. It was on the radio.’
‘How will that matter?’
‘Because a bastard of a military governor will ratchet up the state of emergency, and take powers to control the prices of everything. Everything! That’s what military governments do. How can a businessman expect to take his profit when the army is in charge?’ He stood with his feet planted apart, and his hands on his hips. His stomach stuck out in front of him like a barrage balloon straining to break free.
‘Is that all, David?’
‘What do you mean, is that all? Isn’t it enough?’
‘It won’t happen. Believe me.’
‘You are suddenly an expert on politics?’
‘No, but I know the British ruling class, and it does not trust its armed forces – never did. After Oliver Cromwell dissolved parliament on the end of a pike, things were never the same for them. Our politicians will never put the army in charge of anything if they have a choice. They don’t trust it.’
‘Do they have an alternative?’
‘Bound to have. And another thing . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘We Brits distrust schoolteachers even more than we fear the army – and no one ever pays any attention to anything they suggest. Too much flogging and pederasty. The day that teachers start being elected to parliament will be the day my country dies.’
‘And you really believe this.’
‘I’m willing to bet you fifty quid it will come to nothing. You can stop kicking the staff about now, and join me for breakfast.’ He probably didn’t need breakfast. He was half the size again, larger than the Yassine I had met three years earlier. He shrugged – but the tension went out of him. Then he smiled. It was like the sun coming out after a squall.
‘I take your word for it.’
Over the fresh orange juice I scouted around him for the places that Pat might have taken off for, but David didn’t know either . . . or if he did, he wasn’t saying. I asked him about the girl Jessie. ‘She says you’ve given her a new name.’
‘I’ve given her more than that – she rides like a champion jockey. They are wonderful when they are young.’
‘You’re a dirty old man.’
‘So are you. I been to your club in Berlin, remember? Just because you don’t handle the money don’ make you a saint, Charlie.’
I sat back in my chair. I thought the coffee was especially good that morning. The golden smell of fresh bread. He broke into a bread roll, and tapped his forehead with a fat finger. ‘You think I debauched a nice English rose too young for this sort of life, right?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Think again. She’s been on her back since she was twelve, and was wanted for killing a man in Hamburg. She gutted him with a skinning knife. I smuggled her here in a fishing boat – a friend did that for me. I saved her life so far. But I don’t live it for her, an’ she wouldn’t thank you for trying.’ There was a so there inflection in his last words. The girl had told me more or less the same herself, hadn’t she?
‘OK, David. I’ll take your word for it.’
‘Take my wager instead, Charlie.
