I walked slowly, reading the paper as I went. An attack on the Government by the conservationist and fishing lobbies for failing to do anything about oil pollution in the North Sea had ousted the Iranian bombers as the lead story. At the waterfront I paused, standing with the paper held up to my face, but half turning so that I could see back up the alley. There was nobody there except a big fair-bearded man strolling with his hands in his pockets. His face was shaded by the pale khaki peak of his kepi-type cap.
Khalid’s uncle proved to be a hook-nosed piratical-looking rascal with a headcloth pushed well back to reveal a thin untidy fringe of black hair that straggled down each cheek to join a neat little wisp of a beard. The boat was from a boom loading at one of the wharfs. It was little more than a cockleshell and crossing the Creek it bobbed and bounced to the wash of power boats, launches, ferries, runabouts and load-carriers. I lost sight of the man with the kepi cap and on the far side of the Creek, where we were out of the shadow of the high bank buildings and in the sun, it was hot and the smells stronger as we threaded our way through the dhows, through narrow guts between wooden walls that sun and salt had bleached to the colour of pale amber. He rowed me to what I think he said was a baghla. ‘Khalid say is this one.’
It was a big dhow, one of the few that hadn’t had its mast sawn off and was still capable of carrying sail. It had its upcurved bow thrust in against the wharf. Two men were unloading cardboard cartons of tinned goods from a trolley, carrying them across a narrow gang plank and passing them down into the hold. Khalid was there already, beckoning me to join him on the wharf. I clambered up and he grabbed hold of my hand and drew me back into the shadowed entrance to the warehouse. ‘Sahib say you look, then you know what ship is and who is on her.’
It was a two-masted vessel with an exhaust pipe sticking up for’ard of the poop and a little group squatting in a tight huddle round a huqqah, or water pipe, whose stem they passed from one to the other. Khalid pointed the naukhada out to me, a big man with a bushy beard and wild eyes peering out of an untidy mass of black hair. ‘Mohammed bin Suleiman,’ he whispered. ‘Is not Dubai. Is from Ras al Khaimah.’
I stood there a while, taking in the details of the dhow, memorizing the faces squatting round the bubbling water pipe. Then Khalid was tugging at my arm, pulling me further back into the warehouse. The man in the kepi cap was coming along the wharf. I could see him clearly now, the sunlight providing his burly figure with a black shadow and glinting on the fair skin and the blond sun-bleached beard. He came abreast of the little group on the dhow’s poop and stopped. I couldn’t hear what he said, but it was in English with a strong accent and he indicated the warehouse. Then he was coming towards us and we shrank back into the dim interior, slipping behind a pile of mealie bags.
He stopped in the entrance, pushing his cap back and mopping his brow as he shouted for a man called Salima Aznat who was apparently in charge of the warehouse. He wore locally-made sandals with curved-up toe guards, dark blue trousers and a white short-sleeved shirt with sweat stains under the arms. ‘Waar is het?’ he muttered to himself. ‘Waar hebben zy het verstopt?’ It sounded like Swedish, or Dutch maybe. He turned, beckoning to the Arabs loading the dhow, then began moving slowly into the warehouse, peering at the labels on the larger wooden crates, checking the stencilling on the sides.
‘Who is he?’ I whispered as he was joined by the warehouseman and the two of them disappeared into the cavernous recesses of the building. But Khalid didn’t know. ‘Is at your hotel,’ he said.
‘One of Baldwick’s people?’
He nodded. The sound of voices echoed from the far end and a moment later there was the slam of a crate and the rumble of a trolley being dragged towards us. The little group was coming back now, two or three cases on the trolley. They reached the entrance and paused, so that I saw the man very clearly, the bleached hair, the pale eyes, his bare arms like freckled gold in the sunlight. He was talking quickly, radiating a ponderous sense of nervous energy. A round, Dutch-looking face. Hals! I was remembering what Baldwick had said at Balkaer when he’d talked about pollution. It had to be Pieter Hals. And as the little group stood there for a moment in the sun I could see the letters stencilled on the wooden sides of the nearest case, radio equipment — fragile — handle with care. The word fragile was stencilled in red.
Back at the hotel I found that Pieter Hals had checked in that morning. I also enquired about Price, but nobody of that name had stayed in the hotel for the past month at any rate. I was convinced then that the dhow had taken him straight to the ship and that he was there on board. I didn’t see Hals again that day, and though I met up with several people I had known before and had a word with Perrin on the phone, none of them could tell me anything about Baldwick’s tanker people or where the vessel lay. I even took a taxi at considerable expense to Port Rashid, but every ship in the harbour was owned by old-established companies.
That evening, strolling along the waterfront just as dusk was falling, I saw bin Suleiman’s dhow haul out into the crowded waterway and watched her crew hoist the lateen mainsail as she motored with a soft tonk-tonk round the down-town bend towards the open sea. From this I concluded that Baldwick’s employers must have their tanker loading at Mina Zayed in the neighbouring sheikdom of Abu Dhabi, a supposition that was to prove hopelessly wrong.
That night I had dinner at the hotel, in the roof garden restaurant where Varsac and our two other ship’s officers had got themselves a corner table with the sort of view over the dog-legged waterway that a sheikh’s peregrine would have, poised high in the air before a stoop. The Creek was an ink-black smudge curving between dimly-lit buildings. The only brilliance seemed to be the flood-lit tracery of some sort of palace and Port Rashid with its cranes and ships and and an oil rig lying to its reflection, all brightly illuminated in the loading lights. Varsac hailed me as soon as I entered the room and when I paused at their table I found myself confronted by a ferrety little Glaswegian engineer with ginger hair and a grating accent. A cigarette burned unheeded on the plate beside him and in the middle of the table was an ashtray full of stubs.
‘Ah’m Colin Fraser,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘What’s yur nem?’
‘Trevor Rodin.’
‘And yur job on boord?’
‘Second mate.’
‘Aye, weel, Ah’m an engineer mesel’, so we’ll not be seeing very much of each other now. Sit down, man, and have a drink.’
The other man, a big Canadian, pulled out a chair for me, smiling, but not saying anything. I sat down. There wasn’t anything else I could do. Fraser turned out to be a casualty of the Iraqi-Iranian war. He had been in one of the cargo vessels stranded in the Shatt al Arab. It was Greek-owned and had been badly shelled. The end of it was her owners had abandoned her and he had been thrown on to the beach, an engineer with shrapnel wounds in the shoulder, no ship, no money, not even a fare-paid passage home. ‘Bankrupt the bastards were.’ The world was still in recession, the beach a cold place to be. ‘Och, the stories Ah could tell yen Ah bin on rigs, ferry boats, aye, on dhows, too, an’ if it hadna bin for our mootual friend Len B…’