He kicked off his shoes, tore off his jacket and tie and lay on the bed beneath the motionless punkah. He decided he’d give it fifteen minutes and then hang out the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign. In less than ten there was a gentle tap at the door.
Hussein stood in the corridor, one hand oh-so-casually in his trouser pocket, the other poised to knock again. ‘Do you really want to have this conversation now?’ he asked.
‘If it’s the only time you’re free of Alliss, yes,’ said Troy.
Hussein carefully hung his jacket on the back of an upright chair and sank slowly into a deeply upholstered armchair. He loosened his tie, stuck a fat Turkish cigarette in his mouth, crossed his legs with a fastidious tug at the knee of his trousers and lit up. Troy flopped into the chair opposite, feeling as creased as his clothes.
Hussein could be no more than twenty-two or three, his eyes were bright, his skin shone with health and at the end of a working day he seemed not have a single close cropped hair out of place. The tie at half-mast was a concession to after-hours occasion. He looked like Madison Avenue man launching into a difficult pitch. Compared to him, Troy felt ancient.
‘Arthur is colouring the story. You must forgive him. He is an old man. Out of his time.’
The preamble over, what they both knew so succinctly stated, he inhaled deeply and savoured his smoke a moment.
‘No one carried Charlie.’
A hand batted the smoke away from his face, the gesture cutting, absolute, to reinforce his words.
‘Far from being unsuited to the job, I’d say Charlie was a natural. Arthur got here just after Suez, less than a year before Charlie – just long enough for his nose to be out of joint when your brother hired Charlie. I suspect they were both sent for much the same reason. Suez put us back on the map. Every newspaper on earth increased its Middle East coverage, simply waiting for the next skirmish or the start of Armageddon. I joined them in 1961. My first job when I graduated Yale. I’m the new boy, but being from Jerusalem I’m near enough a native, and I know the lie of the land, and I think I know my job. I’ve seen enough to know that Charlie loved the job, and rather than letting Arthur carry him, he carried Arthur. After seven years Arthur has only a smattering of Arabic – good French; he’d have been OK here before the war, in his element in the time of the Beiks, but that’s another age. I rather think Arthur hasn’t acknowledged that.’
‘England is full of men like Arthur,’ said Troy.
‘I’ve never been there,’ Hussein replied with an almost imperceptible shrug. ‘But I can quite believe it. He’s right when he says you can find yourself in Aden one day and Jerusalem the next. That’s the nature of the job. But it was Charlie who made those journeys; it was Charlie who gathered enough information to support his own column and Arthur’s news file. Most of the time you can’t prise Arthur out of the bar here. We don’t live here – even Troy Newspapers can’t afford that – but we might just as well. It has its pluses – anyone who’s anyone passes through here eventually – and its minuses, in that you can delude yourself that the Saint-Georges Hotel bar is the world. Until very recently Charlie never fell for that. There was always a world elsewhere for Charlie. True, he drank like a fish, I’ve never met an English reporter that did not, but until last autumn it never interfered with his work.
‘Last October he was due three weeks’ home leave. He never went home. Charlie’s idea of leave was Spain or Morocco – I never heard of him taking home leave to go home to England. Perhaps you will say this is just as well – a man living under a cloud. Perhaps he did pick places where no one gave a damn whether he’d spied for Russia or even whether he still spied for Russia. Last year he chose to go home. He spent his usual ten days in Morocco and then he flew on to England. He visited his mother in Dorset – I gather they had not met in years – and he spent a weekend in London – I think he might have done the round of his old haunts, but the look on your face, Mr Troy, tells me that you did not see him. Whatever, he came back a changed man, dejected, angry, less willing to humour the insufferable Arthur, and his interest in the job vanished. I saw it evaporate like a dish of water put out in the noonday sun for the dog.’
The image seemed a suitably Levantine one on which to pause, inhale deeply from his cigarette, and let the words sink in. He blew a billowing cloud of aromatic smoke at the ceiling and levelled his eyes on Troy.
‘And I heard the will to go on snap in him like a rubber band coiled too tight or a bowstring stretched too far. Something in Mr Charlie snapped.’
Troy sat in silent awe of the man’s command of a language not his own, startled by his own recognition of this final metaphor. Years ago – in the 1920s – his father had taken him to France to one of those damningly nostalgic cultural get-togethers, organised by the then vast body of Russians in exile – Russians in hope – of Russian arts. Such were their numbers so soon after the Revolution they even ran their own émigré magazine, Teatr i Zhizh, and under the auspices of the Teatr crowd the then less than fashionable Le Touquet had staged Chekhov in the original. He had sat in the stalls through The Cherry Orchard, aged thirteen or so, enraptured by the play of ideas he soon learnt were wasted on more than half the audience – who surely were those cherry trees? – beautiful, useless. And then as the curtain fell, then rose again for the bows of the cast, his father rose too. ‘Where was the breaking string?’ he said. Cast and audience stared at him. No one answered. ‘Where was the bloody breaking string that comes with the sleep of Feers?’ he yelled. ‘Chekhov is quite clear: “My life has passed as though I’d never lived. I will lie down now . . . nothing . . . nothing . . .” a distant sound, as though coming from the sky, like the breaking of a string! Where was the breaking string? What do you think the play means without the sound of that string snapping?’ Troy had fled up the aisle to escape his father. Even then he was too important to the émigrés to be thrown out. They would have to reason with him, and Troy knew damn well that was nigh impossible. But in the ear of the mind he had heard that string snap even as his father launched full rant on the unfortunate players. He read the play on the train on the way back from Paris Plage to Calais and finished it on the Channel crossing. He could hear the sound of the breaking string and the life that broke with it. ‘Something snapped in Mr Charlie,’ Hussein said. Yes, thought Troy, of course it did.
‘Why is Alliss so convinced that Charlie has defected? Why can’t he just have vanished?’
‘He did board a Russian ship. Of that there is no doubt. Charlie was well known. A man from the dockyard did come to us with the story. Charlie boarded that freighter without so much as a briefcase, not even a hat or topcoat. I went to his room. It was as Arthur described it to you, the way I had described it to him. If he was setting out on a journey, he did not know it.’
‘Passport,’ Troy said. ‘Did he take his passport?’
‘It wasn’t in his desk. I looked. But then not to have a passport on you at all times is a sackable offence in this business. On the other hand, if he really was defecting I doubt it would be an issue. Who asks a defector for a passport? The real issue is this – where was he between eleven in the morning and four o’clock, between his sending of that telegramme – which of course was to you, although Arthur cannot figure that out—’
‘Said, please,’ said Troy, ‘please don’t tell him.’
‘Of course. It is your secret. The issue remains, where was Charlie between sending that telegramme and his boarding the ship at about four in the afternoon?’
‘The telegramme said he didn’t have much time.’
‘But hours, only hours?’
‘No,’ said Troy. ‘He meant days. He sent for me. He held this room for me for a whole week.’
‘Then something changed his mind. And changed it in less than five hours.’
‘He knew the game was up or he’d not have written to me. We’d kept our distance. He’d no more seen me these last few years than he’d seen his mother.’
Hussein stubbed out his cigarette, leant across to his jacket, pulled out the packet and lit up another straightaway. He picked a flake of tobacco off his tongue and played with a phrase.
‘The game was up. The game was . . . up.’
He smacked his lips over the ‘p’s. Rendered this lost fragment of Cymbeline as if into a foreign language for Troy. ‘How very English.’
Another billow of smoke blown at the punkah, another wellconsidered phrase.
‘Whose game?’
‘That rather depends on where he was, don’t you think?’ Hussein nodded slowly.
‘Can you find out?’ said Troy.
‘What do you think I’ve been doing for the last four days?’
Hussein was right. It was an utterly stupid question on Troy’s part. The man was a journalist. It was as though someone had read him lesson one of Teach Yourself Detection.
‘Sorry,’ he said faintly.
‘But – it may well take another day, possibly two. Can you stay that long?’
He couldn’t, but it looked as though he would have to, or return home without a clue as to Charlie’s whereabouts – and to be clueless was, after twenty-seven years a-coppering, the condition he hated most; insomnia or impotence would be preferable.
‘A day in Beirut wouldn’t hurt,’ Hussein was saying. ‘You have not been before?’
Troy shook his head.
‘There are many ways of passing the time. Beirut is . . .’
Hussein paused for reflection but came up with only a cliché.
‘. . . It is the crossroads of the world. The great bazaar. Lemons from Antilyàs out, Citroëns from France in. Everything passes through the port. Everything. Everything from anywhere. It is the city that proves Kipling wrong. East really does meet West in Beirut.’
He rose, stubbed out his cigarette and reached for his jacket.
‘If the weather turns, you could drive out to Bayt Mirí for lunch – the view will take your breath away – or you could catch a tram into the Suq and buy silk for your wife, or get a pair of sandals made. God knows, everyone does. Or if the weather really cheats the season, you could just stand on your balcony and watch the harbour life. I’ll be back tomorrow evening or the morning after.’