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 dummy2
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 dummy2
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 dummy2
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 dummy2
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 dummy2
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.'
He spoke with a sudden passion which was not really out of character; some of the biggest comedians became like this the moment they stopped playing to the gallery, and there had never been any question that Shapiro was a hard man under his clowning.
What was out of character was not only that he was going out of his way to give Razzak an unsolicited testimonial, but that he now seemed inclined towards Audley's contention that there could be any recognisable style in killing.
But Razzak's self-sacrificial tactics in Sinai certainly didn't prove that he was capable of removing opponents by any available means. It almost suggested the very opposite – that under the layers of fat lay an iron determination unshaken by odds, difficulty and danger.
'Do you get my point?' said Shapiro.
'I'm not at all sure that I do, no,' said Roskill slowly. Perhaps it was the opposite point the crafty sod intended – to damn the Egyptian with praise. 'But I think your admiration for Colonel Razzak is –