Gavin Lyall - Judas Country

I said: Til tell them you're here.'

Kapotas gave him a key. 'I have put you in 206, near to Mr Case.'

Ken took it and picked up his bag. Thanks. Drop in and take a glass with the Professor, Roy. You'll like him. I haven't met the daughter.' He ignored the lift and bounced lightly up the stairs.

Kapotas said in his most blank voice: 'I would welcome your opinion of the champagne.'

I looked at him, but he turned away. So I followed through the service door and down the corridor to the wine cellar. He unlocked it, and we went in. It was a small square rough-plastered room with no window and just a single unshaded bulb glaring down on the near-empty wine racks, the heavy scarred old table in the middle, and in the middle of that the opened box of Kroeger Royale '66. Behind me, Kapotas carefully locked the door again. What the hell…?

When he turned around, his face and voice weren't neutral any more.

'Will you tell me,' he hissed, 'exactly how you take the cork out of a sub-machine gun? '

Five of them, actually. Partly dismantled to fit into the box, and wrapped in newspaper to stop them rattling, with other twists of newspaper holding a few cartridges each.

Kapotas unwrapped a long straight magazine that looked fully loaded. 'Five to one box, so if the other eleven boxes are the samevintage, that makes sixty guns. And over a thousand bullets.'

'Christ.' Stupidly, my first thought was the risk I'd been taking by flying with an unmeasured weight on board. But the Queen Air had been nowhere near her maximum load anyway – and of course, somebody had made sure the boxes weighed just what a dozen of champagne would, making it up exactly with those extra cartridges.

I fingered the box with its neat lines of staples and paper taping. 'This was done properly. On a machine.' Probably at the Kroeger bottling plant one quiet weekend? Then I remembered: 'But one box got opened at Rheims. It had got ripped. And that was champagne, all right.'

'Did you collect this in France?'

'Sure, that was the whole point. It was a last-minute order and they didn't know how the hell to get it here in time and then remembered I was flying down anyway, so told me to stop off and pick it up direct from the growers.'

This was no last-minute order.' And by now I was wondering for myself about how much of the story I'd just told him was true, plus exactly why Castle's regular pilot had left in a hurry. Then Kapotas added: 'But did you bring the torn box?'

'No, they'd brought down a couple of extra boxes by mistake – so they said. So I left the torn one and another – of course.'

'Very clever,' he said grimly. They bring some real champagne and tear it open as a decoy – and if you had taken it also, what does it matter? Very neat.'

I'd smoothed out a bit of the newspaper wrapping: it was a Le Monde of nearly a month ago. What did that tell us except an earliest possible date for the packing? Kapotas had picked up the major part of one of the guns.

'What are they?' I asked.

'Not even French. American. The M3; they called them 'grease guns' because they look a bit like them.'

'Ah. You know quite a bit about it.'

'We all know about sub-machine guns in Cyprus,' he said, just a little sadly. 'Some of our National Guards have these.'

'Ah. But at least you don't believe I knew what I was carrying?'

He thought about this. And took rather too long, in my view. But finally: 'No. You would not have let me open this box if… but what matters is what the police believe.'

'Now, hold on, hold on, don't let's rush things-'

'Don'trush!' he hissed. 'Do you know how they feel about gun-running out here?'

'Much the same as they do in the Lebanon, I'd guess, except here I'd probably get a fairer trial.'

He shut up, thinking – for the first time – about what might have happened to me if the flight had gone ahead as planned. 'Well…'

'Look: this is nothing to do with Cyprus. If I'd been flying on today, nobody here would know anything about the guns. So let's start again from that premise.'

'Do you meannot to report them?'

'What do we gain? – except the chance of being disbelieved. And whatever happens in the end, we'll have a bad time getting there. The newspapers'!! be full of it…'

I let him write his own headlines, and from his expression they were good ones. Meantime I counted the rounds in one of the magazines: thirty. Oddly, the cartridges themselves had been made in Spain. Or maybe not so odd. Somewhere down the line, somebody had kept his hands clean by selling empty guns, somebody else had stayed a virgin by selling only cartridges without guns. Some minds think that way.

Kapotas asked: 'What do you want to do, then?'

'Get 'em off the island.'

'Where to?'

I shrugged. 'It doesn't have to be further than the sea. I can take out the escape hatch and just feed them into the drink.'

'Are they all right where they are now, though?'

'As long as they stay airside they're no concern of Customs. And they know our problem – or think they do – so they treat it asentrepôt cargo; as if it was just changing aeroplanes. Happens all the time.'

He considered this and decided that it really must happen all the time.

I said: 'Now, on the more pressing problem: what about the real champagne? – you've got guests waiting.'

'I rang up and had some sent round from the shop. For cash.' He made it sound like he'd paid in his own blood. 'It's cooling now, but it could not be the Kroeger Royale. The best they had was Dom Perignon 1966. Is it good?'

'Some say it's the best, but I only drink for effect. What are you going to do with thiscuvée T I waggled a hand at the bits of weaponry. 'Stick it in the boot of your car?'

He shuddered at the idea, but had to admit it was a good one. Anywhere in the hotel was too risky. 'All right – but what do I do with them then?'

I shrugged. 'Bury them, if you like. We can't try taking them back through Customs.'

'I suppose so. But-' he showed a new flash of annoyance; '-you should have been suspicious. Bringing champagne by air!'

'People charter aeroplanes to send boxes of cut flowers. / wouldn't hire a bike to send a bunch of them.'

'Now I understand how you have avoided being married,' he said bitterly.

In the end, I took the champagne and caviar upstairs myself. Pure snoopiness; I'd never met a professor who'd done time before, let alone one who pulled guns on coppers.

The hotel was an L-shaped affair with the low-numbered rooms – like mine – on the street front, and the better ones in the quiet wing that stuck back from it. The view from 323 was the blank wall of the apartment building next door, but blank walls don't throw bottles, rev up jeep engines and sing Swedish drinking songs at one a.m. Apart from that, it was a bigger room than mine, and with a bathroom, but the furniture was the usual heavy Victorian mahogany and chintz, just more of it.

When I went in, the Professor was the only one there. I put the tray down on the round table by the window, took the first bottle from the ice bucket and started a careful job of opening it.

'I'm sorry the hotel's in a bit of a muddle at the moment, but I expect you heard about our troubles.' That was just to try and get him talking; he didn't look like the type who normally chatted with servants.

In fact he looked like the last of the hairy English kings: neat sharp imperial beard, black flecked with grey, on a square face with cold grey eyes above a solid square body. But all a bit shrunken, which could have been a year of Beit Oren food. With a deep tan – the jail pallor had gone – and an elegant Chinese silk dressing gown over a bare chest, and Moroccan slippers, he looked as fit a sixty-year-old as I'd seen in my life.