‘Sammy to my friends, darling!’ He emptied his glass, still oblivious.
‘Mister Ryderbeit, are you a sadist?’
He looked at her dead straight, with his bloodshot cat’s eyes, and said, in a dangerously soft tone: ‘I don’t know, Mrs Conquest. You tell me.’
Murray broke in: ‘Come on, that’s enough.’ But she ignored him.
‘If you are not a sadist, then you must be a pathological liar. A psychotic, I think they call people like you. What is your opinion?’
‘Come on, that’s enough!’ Murray said again, feeling absurdly British and inadequate.
‘Keep out o’ this,’ Ryderbeit said, in the same soft voice. ‘This is strictly between me and the lady.’ Very deliberately he poured himself another drink — the last of the bottle — and sat for several seconds squinting at the dark golden liquid, his head half turned towards the girl as though waiting to catch her next words. Then, with a smooth sweep of his hand, he emptied the entire contents into her face.
She gave a short scream and Murray hit Ryderbeit across the table. He hit him hard on the nose and mouth, feeling the skin of his knuckles split; then again very hard in the left eye, with the rage rising uncontrollably within him as he looked into the girl’s face, wet and white with fury — springing round the table and trying to strike him again, a final blow on the jaw to silence the drunken lout, but instead the thin figure of Jones loomed in front of him and something collided with his head, carrying on through like the point of a spear to the back of his skull, and he went out cold.
He came to, looking at a confusion of legs — chair legs, trouser legs, legs in black suede — as he started grappling his way slowly up the side of the table, trying to mumble something, worrying about the girl, when someone hit him again — a low, nasty, calculated blow that made him think of Ryderbeit and his smashed cheek at the hands of the karate expert, Maxwell Conquest.
This time he took a lot longer to get to his feet, blinking through warm blood as he was helped down some steps past a row of foul-smelling vats of food, to be sick over a wooden parapet into a cesspool full of bubbles that were like pustules on a wet black skin, and he was sure he could hear them popping as he stood retching down at them. He had no idea how long he stayed there. He stood up at last, still heaving and blinking through blood. All in the cause of chivalry, he thought. And at the end of it all he somehow had the vacant, dismal realisation that Mrs Jackie Conquest had disappeared.
CHAPTER 2
On the steps Murray found he was still being helped, slowly and steadily, but he could not quite see who it was. Some things he saw very clearly indeed. He passed the boiling vats and saw a gibbon on a chain sitting astride a very thin cat. The gibbon looked up at him with bright button-black eyes, furtively, as though it knew it were doing something it shouldn’t.
He was led up more steps, into a stone room and was sat down on a bed. It was a low double bed covered with one grey sheet, under a mosquito net that had holes in it that would not have kept out a fairly large rat. The walls were bare and peeling, and there was a rusted iron bidet and a huge armchair in the corner under the half-shuttered window.
In the armchair a man was sitting. The door closed and Murray looked up and saw No-Entry Jones. He guessed it was he who’d helped him up the steps. He looked back at the man in the armchair. He recognised Ryderbeit — but he looked different now, like a photograph of someone in a newspaper that’s been badly folded. The lean satanic grace of the features was gone, oddly misshapen, and one side of his face was swollen the colour of a plum. ‘Hello soldier! How d’ye feel?’
‘Fine. But you look bloody awful.’
Ryderbeit tried a lopsided grin. ‘You should see yerself!’
‘Is there anything to drink?’ said Murray: ‘Something quickly medicinal?’ The pigskin flask plumped on to the bed beside him.
‘Help yerself. Cognac on whisky — not the best combination, but it’ll have to do.’
Murray took only a sip and had to go and retch again into the bidet. When he got back to the bed he felt slightly better. ‘Did you know there’s a monkey downstairs trying to screw a cat in the kitchens? Seriously. I’ve just seen it.’ He nodded at Jones by the door, feeling slightly light-headed.
‘Disgusting,’ said Ryderbeit. ‘Throw us the brandy.’
Murray tossed the flask back, surprisingly accurately, and Ryderbeit fielded it low in the slips. ‘Soldier, you’re doin’ fine. In a moment we can get down to serious business.’
Murray sat for a moment, breathing hard. ‘Did you do this to me?’ he said at last. ‘I don’t mean old Muhammed Ali here. I mean the second job?’
Ryderbeit nodded. ‘That was me. Real mean, eh soldier?’
‘Why didn’t you try it on Maxwell Conquest? Why me?’
‘Perhaps because you’re not as good as Maxwell Conquest.’
‘Perhaps not,’ said Murray thoughtfully. ‘Where’s the girl?’
‘She’s gone back to the USAID office to wait for the chopper. We’ve still got about half-an-hour.’
‘You shouldn’t have thrown that drink in her face,’ Murray said.
‘She insulted me. You heard what she said. I don’t usually waste good bourbon, even on a bitch like that.’
‘That’s no excuse,’ Murray said lamely. ‘No bloody excuse at all. I have no apologies’ — remembering vaguely that he still owed his life to Ryderbeit and the Negro by
