The Alamut Ambush (16 page)

‘You’ve got good hearing. Colonel Razzak doesn’t seem to have heard so quickly.’

Shapiro shrugged. ‘It’s my job – and you can’t blame me if Razzak isn’t up to his. But that’s hardly fair to the poor bugger – he’s been enjoying a dirty mid-week in Paris, hasn’t he. Is he back yet?’

Roskill watched their waiter manoeuvre his way towards them bearing a tall glass jug of beer and another tankard. He set the tankard before Roskill, filling it exactly with one graceful, practised movement, and then did the same for Shapiro’s without bothering to find out whether it was empty. Presumably it was more often empty than not.

‘There now!’ said Shapiro with a growl of satisfaction. ‘You’ll not find a better beer than that in London – it’s as near as you’ll get to the old London strong ale. Man I get it from swears it’s all in the fining and filtering and dry-hopping, but I think it’s just got more malt and less water. All the rest of it’s bullshit.’

Good beer it might be, Roskill reflected unhappily, but on an empty stomach lined with whisky it was likely to be disastrous. Yet the laws of hospitality and the honour of Britain demanded that it should be drunk, and drunk properly. ‘Open your throat and pour it down’ had been the first boozing rule he’d learnt: there was nothing he could do but obey the rule.

He took the tankard, opened his throat and poured it down in. Surprisingly, it descended very easily – smooth, heavy and only moderately cool.

‘Bravo!’ Shapiro regarded him with enthusiasm. ‘The same again?’

‘With what I’ve had already tonight I think that’ll do very well. I shan’t be fit to drive – ‘ Roskill stopped in mid-sentence, sobered by the thought that as of the moment he had no car; for the time being it was the dangerous property of the soft-voiced Scotsman.

‘Ah! The breathalyser!’ Shapiro nodded regretfully. ‘I never use a car in London, and I forget that some people still do. You should use public transport, my friend – it’s like they say on the posters: car free, carefree. There are too many cars in London anyway.’

‘So one blown up here and there doesn’t matter?’

Shapiro stared in silence at the check tablecloth in front of him. When he raised his eyes to meet Roskill’s, there was no longer any amusement in them.

‘Now that was a bad business — a sad business,’ he said heavily. ‘Not the car – the car is nothing. But you lost a man, didn’t you?’

‘A good man.’

‘All men are good when you lose them. We know that in Israel better than most, because we can’t afford to lose anyone. There are too few of us as it is.’

‘Then you’ll understand that we want to know why we lost him.’

Shapiro raised his eyebrows expressively. ‘Doesn’t Llewelyn know?’ He paused, and then went on, nodding to himself. ‘Obviously he doesn’t know, so because I was having dinner with him he thinks I might have set up the whole thing – is that it? Does he think that? Do
you
think that?’

‘I think – ‘ said Roskill slowly, searching for the right answer, and finding it in Audley’s own words ‘ – I think it’s not quite your style.’

‘My style?’ Shapiro smiled a rather sad, twisted smile. ‘There’s no style in killing. You either do it, or you don’t do it. But I’m glad you don’t think I did it. You see, I haven’t any reason for killing Llewelyn. I don’t like him and he doesn’t like me. But he’s working for peace in the Middle East, and frankly I’d rather have any sort of peace, on almost any terms, than what we’ve got now.’

It sounded an honest answer, thought Roskill. It was just a pity that it wasn’t an answer to the real question. But the time to put that one had not yet arrived.

‘So if it wasn’t me, who was it? Is that what I’m supposed to tell you?’ Shapiro grinned again, some of his good humour re-turning. ‘I’m sure you didn’t come slumming down here just to put my little mind at ease.’

‘I did rather think you might be able to tell me about Muhammed Razzak, for a start,’ said Roskill.

‘Razzak?’ Shapiro frowned. ‘You don’t mean to tell me that old Razzak’s a suspect? I doubt whether he knows Llewelyn from the Earl of Snowdon. He’s a soldier, not a terrorist, any– ‘

‘Plenty of soldiers have changed their jobs, Colonel Shapiro. Like you, for instance.’

‘Huh! Like you too, Squadron Leader,’ Shapiro murmured ironically. ‘And I don’t doubt we shall both live to regret it. But Razzak’s been in Paris – is that supposed to be a suspicious alibi?’

What was downright odd, if not suspicious, was that these two old enemies each discounted the other’s guilt. At the very least, and whatever they might think privately, they ought to be doing each other as much mischief as they could.

‘Being in Paris doesn’t clear him any more than being on the spot makes an assassin of you, Colonel. You’ve both got dogs to do your barking for you.’

‘And you think Razzak may have loosed his dogs?’

‘I think I don’t share your low opinion of Colonel Razzak. And I don’t really know what his style is.’

Shapiro waved his hand impatiently. ‘Style – I tell you, that’s a lot of balls. I
know
the man, and I tell you he’s not – ‘ He broke off abruptly as the waiter materialised in front of them, beer jug at the ready. Roskill reached forward to cover his empty tankard with his hand, but this time the man spoke instead of pouring.

‘Phone in the back room for you, Jake,’ he said familiarly, indicating the back room’s direction with his thumb. ‘Urgent.’

‘It’s always bloody urgent,’ Shapiro complained. ‘Thanks, Shabby. Look after mv friend.’

Before Roskill could protest, a slender stream of beer frothed into his tankard. Shapiro eased himself out from behind the table, but turned back towards him before he had taken two steps. He looked down at Roskill.

‘You’re always off target about Razzaik – and me. I don’t have a low opinion of him at all. For a Gyppo he’s quite a guy – he’s quite a guy by any standard. You wait till I get back.’

Roskill watched him bulldoze across the room. Everyone seemed to know him and on his triumphal progress towards the back room he contrived to kiss the two prettiest girls along the way. They appeared to enjoy it, too.

The waiter smiled at Roskill and shook his head. ‘That Jake – he’s a bad man,’ he confided happily. ‘I am glad my girls are out of his reach, safe at home.’

He filled Shapiro’s tankard – Roskill hadn’t seen it being emptied, but empty again it undoubtedly was. ‘Say – do you want something to eat? The egg and aubergine’s special tonight– or the stuffed tomatoes, maybe? On the house, anything you want, yes?’

Roskill was torn between hunger and a faint queasiness deep down which told him that he’d already drunk well but not too wisely on an empty stomach.

‘Cottage cheese fritters – or if you’re not really hungry, maybe a slice of honeycake?’

The mention of fritters and honeycake reinforced the shrinking feeling. In any case, if he started to eat now the night would develop into a carouse, and the morning after would be a purgatory when the clearest of heads was required.

He shook his head with feigned regret. ‘It’s tempting, but I’ve already eaten.’

‘Well, if you change your mind, just sing out.’

Roskill stared down into his beer and tried to concentrate. For whatever reason, Razzak and Shapiro were each concerned to make no trouble for the other. And Razzak had even offered to get him information about Hassan. So perhaps Shapiro could be prevailed on to make an even belter offer.

And yet Hassan, who was everyone’s bogeyman, was still a completely nebulous figure. There was absolutely nothing concrete so far to link him with East Firle, and consequently with Alan Jenkins. It was Razzak and Shapiro who were surely involved there — the bastards
were
involved somehow, no matter how clean the bills of health they advertised for each other.

He nodded his head angrily. As usual, everyone was giving everyone else the runaround, and he couldn’t even think straight any more with the liquor and the noise and the heat.

He picked up his tankard, glanced around to make sure no one was watching him, and then quickly tipped most of it among the bright plastic blossoms arranged in a long display box on his right. If it was as good as Shapiro said it might bring them to life; at least it couldn’t do them any harm.

He was only just in time, for a moment later the Israeli loomed up in front of him just as he was ostentatiously draining the last swallow of beer.

‘Sorry about that, Roskill – my date got hung up at the hospital. She loves her work far more than me, that’s the trouble. But she’ll be here any minute now.’

‘Then perhaps I’d better be pushing along.’

‘Before you’ve got what you wanted? Man – don’t be silly. Besides, Rosie Halprin could tell you a thing or two about Muhammed Razzak. After we took him apart she put him together again, back in ‘67.’

‘Put him together again?’

Shapiro drank, lowered his tankard and carefully wiped the froth from his moustache.

‘How much do you know about Razzak’s little war?’

‘He was a hero of some sort, wasn’t he?’

Shapiro shook his head. ‘Not the half of it, friend – not the half of it. He was a special sort of old-fashioned, cold-blooded hero.’

He stared out into the smokey room, and then back at Roskill.

‘You know what happened in Sinai? The first two days were the fighting days – the third day was Grand National Day. There was nothing wrong with their defences, they had perfectly good Russian linear system positions. It’s just that the Russians would have smacked us with counter-attacks once we were through the forward lines, and the Egyptians didn’t do a damn thing – there weren’t more than a couple of attempts at counter-attacking.

‘On the second night I was picking up strays – tanks we reckoned we could put right quickly enough for the other fronts if we needed them. It was all over bar the shouting, and the odd mishap.

‘And then I got a call that someone was hitting the junction of the roads from Abu Agheila and Bir Lahfan, just south-west of Jebl Libni – there’d been some sniping there earlier, but this was kind of determined. And inconvement, because next day we were going flat out for the Canal, as I say.

‘But I had a few patched-up Centurions with me, and we picked up a few more en route, and we sorted it out. And that’s where we took Razzak.’

‘You mean Razzak organised a counter-attack?’

‘It wasn’t much of a counter-attack – more a forlorn hope. He’d scratched together a handful of T 54s and one or two S.U. 100 tank-destroyers, and there were some infantry and engineers on the run from Abu Agheila he’d cobbled together. But that wasn’t the point – the point was how he’d got there.’

Shapiro paused. ‘I pieced some of it together from a talkative lieutenant we picked up with Razzak, and some of it afterwards. It’s quite a story – quite a story…’

‘I thought Razzak commanded a tank unit on the frontier?’ That had been what Audley had said.

‘He did – in their 7th Division forward area. But he wasn’t there when we attacked on June 5th – he was in Cairo having his balls chewed up for defeatism!’

The Israeli showed his teeth in a wolfish smile that had no honour in it.

‘Razzak’s no fool. He reckoned we were coming, and he sent back a report saying that they ought to pull all their armour back from the frontier and dig in deep round the places that really mattered – like El Arish. Leave the Gaza strip to fend for itself, he said apparently.

‘Hell – I’m not going to give you a lecture on his tactics! We would have licked ‘em anyway, but it wouldn’t have been a walkover and we’d have lost even more good men than we did.

‘But as it was, they didn’t like it and they had him back in Cairo on the Sunday to tell him so in no uncertain terms. And he got up early on the Monday morning to hitch a lift in a light plane back to one of the forward strips. Not quite early enough, though – the field he was taking off from was one of our priority strikes.

‘So the poor old sod was grounded two hundred miles from where his command was getting pasted — the sort of situation every commander has nightmares about!’

‘But he did get to his regiment?’

Shapiro shook his head. ‘His unit was mincemeat before he even reached the desert, and I don’t doubt he knew it would be. No – when most of the regimental brass was heading for home, old Razzak was just steering for the sound of the guns. He knew damn well what would be happening – he knew what our air strike meant because he’d seen it himself. He set out simply to try to hold us up somewhere so that some of the army could escape as it did in ‘56 – he didn’t reckon anyone else was going to do it.

‘God alone knows how he managed to get as far as he did. A Fouga strafed his staff car sometime that first day and creased him a bit – but he just went on walking until he met another car coming in the opposite direction, making a break for it. He took that one at gunpoint – left a brigadier standing by the roadside in the middle of nowhere. And when that ran out of fuel he just went on walking.’

A special sort of old-fashioned hero indeed – the paunchy, pock-marked sort, obstinately trying to salvage something from the ruin achieved by the fools and the loudmouths…

‘He never had a chance, of course. If he’d reached the front that first night he might have knocked some sense into someone, but I doubt it. The second night was too late – it was just a gesture, that’s all. But it was quite a gesture: you know what he said when we finally picked him up? – which was when he’d fired off everything he’d got, I can tell you.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He’d been hit several times, actually. He was a real mess by then. But he just lifted up his hand and said – in English, too, he said it – he said: “You’ve shot my bloody trigger finger off – look what you’ve done!” Cheeky old sod!’

Shapiro wagged his own trigger finger at Roskill. ‘And that’s the man you’re suggesting had a bomb plugged into Llewelyn’s car! Friend, I’m not a great admirer of Egyptians in general, but I’d stake my last shekel that Razzak wasn’t in on it. That handsome side-kick of his – Majid, is it? –
he
might do it if he had the knowhow. But not Razzak. If that’s what you mean by style, then it’s not his style. With him it’d be face-to-face or not at all.’