I nodded. Solomon had opened his eyes. ‘How big a quantity?’
Solomon took another deep breath, wanting to get the whole thing out at once.
‘A friend of a friend of a friend who was there, said it was two crates, each one roughly twenty feet by ten by ten, that they were accompanied by sixteen male passengers, nine of whom were in uniform, and that these men immediately took charge of the crates, and removed them to a hangar by the perimeter fence, set aside for their exclusive use.’
‘Barnes?’ I said.
Solomon thought for a moment.
‘I couldn’t say, master. But the friend thought he might just have recognised an American diplomat among the party.’ Diplomat, my arse. Diplomat, his arse, come to that.
‘According to the friend,’ Solomon continued, ‘there was also a man in distinctive civilian clothes.’
I sat up, feeling sweat shoot from the palms of my hands. ‘Distinctive how?’ I said.
Solomon put his head on one side, trying hard to remember the exact details. As if he had to.
‘Black jacket, black striped trousers,’ he said. ‘The friend reckoned he looked like a hotel waiter.’
And that sheen to the skin. The sheen of money. The sheen of Murdah.
Yip, I thought. The gang’s all here.
As we drove back towards the centre of the city, I described to Solomon what I was going to do, and what I needed him to do.
He nodded every now and then, not liking a single moment of it, although he must have noticed that I wasn’t actually blowing party streamers either.
When we reached the consulate building, Solomon slowed right down, and then eased the Peugeot round the block, until we came level with the monkey-puzzle tree. We looked up into its high, sweeping branches for a while, then I nodded to Solomon, and he got out and unlocked the boot of the car.
Inside there were two packages. One rectangular, about the size of a shoe-box, the other tubular, nearly five feet long. Both of them were wrapped in brown grease-proof paper. There were no marks, no serial numbers, no best before dates.
I could tell that Solomon didn’t really want to touch them, so I leaned in and hauled the packages out myself.
He slammed the car door and started the engine as I walked towards the wall of the consulate.
Twenty-four
But hark! My pulse like a soft drum
Beats my approach, tells thee I come.
BISHOP HENRY KING
The American consulate inCasablanca stands half-way down the leafy boulevard Moulay Yousses, a thoroughly minuscule enclave of nineteenth-century French grandeur, built to help the weary colonialist unwind after a hard day’s infrastructure-designing.
The French came toMorocco to build roads, railways, hospitals, schools, fashion sense - all the things that the average Frenchman knows to be indispensable to a modern civilization - and whenfive o’clock came, and the French looked upon their works and saw that they were good, they reckoned they had bloody well earned the right to live like Maharajahs. Which, for a time, they did.
But when neighbouringAlgeria blew up in their faces, the French realised that, sometimes, it’s better to leave them wanting more; so they opened their Louis Vuittons, and packed their bottles of aftershave, and their other bottles ofaftershave, and that extra bottle that had slid down behind the lavatory cistern, that turned out, on closer inspection, to contain aftershave, and stole away into the night.
The inheritors of the vast, stuccoed palaces that the French left behind were not princes, or sultans, or millionaire industrialists. They were not nightclub singers, or footballers, or gangsters, or television soap stars. They were, by an amazing chance, diplomats.
I call it an amazing chance, because that now makes a clean sweep. In every city, in every country in the world, diplomats live and work in the most valuable and desirable real estate there is to be found. Mansions, castles, palaces, ten-up-ten-downs with ensuitedeer park: whatever and wherever it may be, diplomats walk in, look around, and say yes, I think I can bear this.
Bernhard and I straightened our ties, checked our watches, and trotted up the steps to the main entrance.
‘So now, what can I do for you two gentlemen?’ Call-Me-Roger Buchanan was in his early fifties, and he had risen as high in the American diplomatic service as he was ever going to get.Casablanca was his final posting, he’d been here three years, and sure, he liked it just fine. Great people, great country, food’s a little too oil-based, but otherwise just grand.
The oil in the food didn’t seem to have slowed Call-Me-Roger down all that much, because he must have been pushing at least sixteen stone, which, at five feet nine, is quite a push.
Bernhard and I looked at each other, with eyebrows raised, as if it didn’t really matter which one of us spoke first.
‘Mr Buchanan,’ I said gravely, ‘as my colleague and I explained in our letter, we manufacture what we believe to be the finest kitchen gloves presently coming out of the North African region.’
Bernhard nodded, slowly, as if he might have gone further and said the world, but no matter.
‘We have facilities,’ I continued, ‘inFez,Rabat, and we’re shortly to be opening a plant just outside Marrakech. Our product is a fine product. We’re sure of that. It’s one you may have heard of, one you may even have used, if you’re what they call a "New Man".’
I chortled like a numbskull, and Bernhard and Roger joined in. Men. Using kitchen gloves. That’s a good one. Bernhard took up the story, leaning forward in his chair and speaking with sombre, respectable Germanicism.
‘Our scale of production,’ he said, ‘has now reached a point where we’d be very interested in considering a licence to export to the North American market. And I think what we would like from you, sir, is a little help through the many mechanisms we would need to have in place.’
Call-Me-Roger nodded, and jotted something down on a pad of paper. I could see that he had our letter in front of him on the desk, and it looked as if he’d drawn a ring round the word ‘rubber’. I would have liked to have asked him why, but this wasn’t the moment.
‘Roger,’ I said, getting to my feet, ‘before we get started in depth.’
Roger looked up from his pad.
‘Down the hall, second door on the right.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
The lavatory was empty, and smelled of pine. I locked the door, checked my watch, then climbed up on to the seat and eased open the window.