When Troy got back to the Saint-Georges, before he could even ask for his key the concierge told him that a man was waiting to see him. Simultaneously he gestured over Troy’s shoulder. Troy turned, expecting to see Hussein, but there sat a man with a face like a walnut, perched nervously on a plush red chair, wearing a multicoloured shirt in the Hawaiian style, sharply pressed black trousers and an expression that told Troy he was deeply unhappy at being there at all. A small man in his late fifties with short grey hair, and a bushy grey moustache hiding most of his top lip. He got up as Troy approached. He was even shorter standing up, no more than five foot two.
‘You are Misterfred?’ he said, rolling name and title into one to produce an appropriate near-homonym of ‘mystified’. Pretty much what Troy had felt for days now.
‘Yes,’ said Troy to both.
‘Please, sir, could we go to your room?’
They rode up in the lift in silence, and when Troy had closed and locked the door behind them, the man pulled his shirt from his trousers and removed an envelope hidden in the waistband.
‘From Mr Charlie,’ he said. ‘Mr Charlie.’
Troy opened it. The letter was written in biro on the back of a receipt for dry cleaning. Troy turned over from ‘T b cllcted Tues 5pm 2 pr gents trsrs 1 drss Shrt’ and found, ‘Freddie. Stay put. I’ll get a message through as soon as I can. Tell nobody. Charlie.’
‘Where did you get this?’
‘From Mr Charlie, last Tuesday.’
‘You saw him the day he left? When?’
‘It would be about half past two, sir. In the afternoon. Perhaps a little later.’
‘Where?’
The man regarded Troy blankly as though each of a series of rather simple questions must mean more than it appeared to.
‘At my place of work.’
‘And where do you work?’
The dark eyes lit up. At last it seemed he and Troy were on the same wavelength.
‘Oh, sir. Did I not say? I am Abu Wagih. Head doorman at the British Embassy. I am a Druze, sir. All we servants of Her Majesty are Druze.’
He smiled, beamed at his own forgetfulness, and the pleasure of revelation and understanding. All the same, Troy could hardly believe this. Would rather not believe this. It put wheels within wheels.
‘Charlie was at the embassy?’
‘Oh yes, sir. From just before noon until just after two thirty. Almost three hours. He came for his meeting with Mr Smith. On his way out he wrote this letter and said I was to give it to his good friend Misterfred at the Saint-Georges. My son is bar-waiter in the hotel, sir. Every evening I ask, “Did Misterfred come today?” and every evening he say, “No, Misterfred did not come today. Perhaps he will come tomorrow.” Until last night. Last night I came and saw you with the fat English one, and so I went away. Mr Charlie was most anxious that I give you his letter alone.’
‘Smith?’ said Troy.
‘Beg pardon, sir?’
‘You say Charlie saw a Mr Smith.’
‘Yes sir.’
‘An Englishman?’
‘I know no Arabs called Mr Smith, sir.’
Touché, thought Troy.
‘An Englishman you knew?’
‘No sir. Each year a Mr Smith would come to see Mr Charlie. But always a different Mr Smith. The family of Smith is very big I think, sir. Perhaps it is a tribe?’
Big? It was infinite. The nom de plume of the dirty weekend for three generations.
Unsure of the protocol in the matter, Troy rummaged in his pockets and came up with two five-pound notes. Somehow offering a man sterling rather than the local currency made the transaction seem less like a bribe and more like a reward. As though he might frame the notes rather than spend them.
Protocol seemed satisfied. Abu Wagih smiled and trousered the loot.
‘Not a word to anyone,’ said Troy.
‘Indeed, sir. “Mum’s the word,” as Mr Charlie used to say.’
‘I don’t suppose’, Troy said, pushing his luck, ‘that Charlie said what the meeting with Smith had been about?’
‘Yes, sir. He did say something about it being “a bollocking waste of time”. Then he said, “Goodbye, old chap.” Most odd. Usually he would ask after my sons, and after several minutes as I recited who was where and doing what, he’d say, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” and then he would walk away. Always the same, asking after my sons, and in the proper order of their birth, then the same phrase, “Don’t let the bastards” . . .’
Abu Wagih stopped. As though he had realised for the first time the full meaning of Charlie’s words, that he would not be back, that the bastards had, at long last, ground him down.
An hour or so later, the sun was setting. Troy sat on the terrace beneath a vast red parasol, sipped a citron pressé, and watched the sun sink into the Mediterranean. The last hardy hearty roared by on waterskis, rubber-suited against the January day. Small boats and big boats dotted the seascape all the way to the horizon. He knew next to nothing about boats and ships. The little ones, the ones with single masts, he was pretty certain were sloops. The bigger ones sailing into the network of wharves and warehouses on the north side could be anything – he could not tell a bark from a barquentine, a square-rigger from a schooner.
A day without the cutting wind, a day albeit far from his fantasy of floating around in shirtsleeves, had warmed him, literally, to the Mediterranean. He was, he had always thought, ‘not a Med person’. He had been dragged uncomplainingly on several grand tours as a child; he had seen towers lean and heard bridges sigh, and gazed unimpressed on the dug-out ruins of a city that bore his own name; but had never seen himself as a man to laze away his days on a Greek island, or become one of those Englishmen in exile, Graham Greene in Antibes, D. H. Lawrence on Sardinia, or Robert Graves on Majorca. He took holidays, when he took them, in England. With his pigs and his long-playing records – though he had yet to get around to the joys of stereophonic sound – and his books.
A waiter coughed politely to drag Troy back to the real world and the present day.
‘A package for you, M’sieur. Delivered by hand.’
It was one of those padded envelopes, bulky and heavy. Charlie. It had to be from Charlie.
Troy ripped it open. Inside the package was a second envelope and a short, typed, unsigned message.
‘Sorry. Change of venue. Still, you always did want to visit the old place, didn’t you?’
In the second envelope was a Soviet Foreign Ministry letter of authorisation in lieu of a visa, stamped and signed and counter-stamped and countersigned, made out in Troy’s name, and four airline tickets – Beirut to Athens by Zippo Charters, Athens to Moscow by Aeroflot, Moscow to Zurich by Aeroflot and Zurich to London by BOAC. He checked the itinerary. He had two days in Russia. Two days in Russia. The old country. Land of his father, land of his grandfather and all their fathers before them. It was the last place on earth he wanted to be.