Gavin Lyall - Judas Country

'I wasn't thinking about people.'

'Nor strawberries nor monkeys?'

He finished his Scotch and clattered the ice in his glass. 'No, hell, but… what else do we know?'

'Jail?'

He took a deep breath and then nodded briefly and waved at the waiter leaning on the bar.

'By the way,' I said, 'what are we doing here?"

'Helping Mitzi track down her father's sword… Sounds like something out of a folk song, doesn't it? '

'What are we getting out of it?'

'I liked Bruno – and he pretty well promised me a piece of the action once we got out.'

'D'you think Mitzi accepts that as a debt against the estate? She might just say Thank You very prettily. Even if we find the bloody thing.'

'Look, Roy, she needs me – us – a private aircraft, just as much as her father did. Nobody can walk aboard a scheduled flight carrying a three-foot sword; the Lebanese would nick it and swear it had been found in Tyre or Sidon. It could just as well have been.'

'Have you been swotting up the Crusades?'

'What the hell d'you think Bruno and I talked about in jail? Women? Cold beer?'

'Sorry.' Then the girls arrived. Changed, of course, since women can't unpack a suitcase without putting on something fresh, but in Eleanor's case a good idea too: Beirut's a bit stuffy about women in denim pants. Now she had on a plain white shirtwaister with a wide pleated skirt showing a nice pair of sum' brown legs. I wondered if she was sun-tanned all over and then wondered why I wondered it.

The waiter took an order for a couple of vodka tonics and the girls said their rooms were fine and how were ours and we said fine, although in fact we'd only hired one and it was lousy, and finally Mitzi said: 'We rang Mr Aziz-'

'Did you?' Ken was a bit surprised.

'There are many pages of Aziz in the telephone book. I would not have found his number without the address.'

'Big family,' I said. 'I thought I knew the name.'

Eleanor said: "They can't all be one family. You should have seen how many.'

'Better word would be a "clan", like the Campbells or Stewarts. The clans run the country. Not so much Beirut, there's too many foreigners and foreign money here, but certainly the rest.'

'What did the mansay T asked Ken.

Eleanor was still looking at me. 'It sounds positively feudal.'

I said: 'No, it's all done through Parliament. In the Smiths' district you get a Smith standing as Conservative candidate, a Smith for the Liberals, a Social-Democratic Smith and so on… the peasants get a free vote, and if that isn't democracy, what is?'

Ken snapped: 'What did he jay?'

Mitzi said: 'Come to a party.'

'That's Beirut,' Ken groaned. 'Where and when?'

'At his house in… in Beit Mery. After dinner.'

'I'm hungry,' said Ken.

It was dark when we started up the hill, which was probably good for the girls' nerves. But I knew what sort of drop there was beyond the low walls on the outside of the hairpin bends, and the taxi driver was – as usual – practising for his fighter-pilot badge. From the way Ken talked between clenched teeth, he remembered those roads, too.

'When we get there,' he asked Mitzi, 'what are you going to say?'

'I will tell him my father is dead and ask where is the sword he found.'

It was all right – the taxi driver didn't speak English. That's why I'd picked him out of the bunch that rush you whenever you step out of a hotel in that town. Ken said: "That sounds a bit sort of… straightforward.'

'But why? He knows it is true, that he owes me the sword.' It all sounded a bit straightforward and true to me, too, but of course I've never had the chance to play the bereaved daughter. The Lebanese can be sentimental about family ties. Their own, anyway.

Eleanor said: 'I wonder if…" and then seemed to change her mind and went on: 'Do you have any idea why Mr Aziz got involved in this at all?'

'My father needed some person to sell for him. He was an archaeologist, not a salesman.'

'But why somebody in Beirut?'

I said: 'I can guess at that. Anywhere else – Cyprus or Rome or anywhere – the Israeli government might get an injunction to stop the sale as an illegal export. They'd try, anyway. The Lebanon just doesn't recognise Israeli law.'

Eleanor grunted and sat back – the three of them were on the back seat, me leaning over from beside the driver.

Then Mitzi got an idea: 'He cannot have sold it already?'

There was a silence except for the roar of the engine and the squeal of the tyres. The headlights swept across a battered wall covered in rows of political posters, all showing almost identical confident chubby faces with a few lines of coloured script below. Only the colours were different.

Eleanor said: 'No, I don't think so. We'd have heard something. And like I said: it wouldn't go for half the price without the documentation that you've got. I guess that's why your father kept the two separate while he was… while he was away.'

That didn't exactly explain why the Prof had posted the authentication off to Aziz just before he died, though. But I didn't mention it.

Ken said: 'So, in a way, that bit of paper's worth as much as the sword itself.'

'In a way,' Eleanor agreed, 'Hell' – her voice got a little thoughtful – 'I'm in a kind of equivocal position about all this. Employees of the Met aren't supposed to go chasing about after illegal exports.'

'You mean they're not supposed to get caught,' Ken said dryly.

Aziz lived not quite at the top of the hill and not quite where the driver first thought he did, either. But we found it; a rambling modern split-level affair dug back into the raw rock hillside, and a drive-way jammed with big cars glistening in the warm orange light flooding from a dozen thinly-curtained big windows. But outside, there was a sudden sharp chill to the air. We'd climbed less than 2,000 feet, but that included the difference between the hot, cramped streets and an open hillside facing the sea. You should be here in summer to get the real contrast.

Eleanor and Mitzi were shivering slightly, but still looking out over the spread-out lights of Beirut below. It's funny how, down there, you never seem overlooked by the hills, but up here you seem to be staring straight down the city's cleavage.

Ken came back from bargaining with the driver and said briskly: 'Any city looks beautiful from up high at night. Let's get in where the booze is free.'

Eleanor murmured: 'I bet he writes fairy stories in his spare time, too,' but she followed.

It was a big room, with a higher ceiling than you'd expect in that shape of house, bright and white-walled and not looking full with over thirty people standing around sipping and chattering. As we came in at the top of a small flight of steps, most turned to look at us.

I'd known Ken and I wouldn't be contending for the best-dressed award, but I'd put off thinking about it. Now we stood out like two witches at the Princess's christening. Almost everybody else – they were mostly men anyway – was in a neat city suit and crisp white shirt. The exceptions were a character in the gold-embroidered white robes of the Yemen and a cove who'd had his length of blue pinstripe cut into a normal jacket and a calf-length skirt; arab head-dress and sandals, of course. I'd seen the mixture before but it still gets me.

The door-opener in the white jacket was still wondering if we'd come to collect the garbage when our host bustled through the crowd with hand outstretched.

'You must be Mademoiselle Braunhof- Spohr, of course. And Mademoiselle Travis. Eleanor Travis of the Met? You don't know me but I've heard of you. And also…? ' He looked at Ken and me and held the smile with an effort.

He was shortish, with a comfortable round body in a dark blue-green silk suit and a surprisingly bony square face. It was as if forty-five years – I guessed – of good living had all sunk into his belly and left his chin and cheeks untouched. His hair was thin and dark, shading to pure white over his ears.