The Lij was a disillusioned man when he disembarked with four of his senior advisers and made the short journey by lighter to where two hired open tourers awaited his arrival on the wharf. Hire of the motor vehicles had been arranged by Major Gareth Swales and the drivers had been given their instructions.
"Now, you leave the talking to me, old chap," Gareth advised Jake, as they waited anxiously in the cavernous and gloomy depths of No. 4 Warehouse. "This really is my part of the show, you know. You just look stern and do the demonstrating. That will impress the old Ethiop no end." Gareth was resplendent in a pale blue tropical suit with a fresh white carnation in the buttonhole, and silk shirt. He wore the diagonally striped old school tie, his hair was brilliantined and carefully brushed, and the sleek lines of the mustache had been trimmed that morning. He ran a judicious eye over his partner and was mildly satisfied. Jake's suit had not been cut in Savile Row, of course, but it was adequate for the occasion, clean and freshly pressed. His shoes had been newly polished and the usually unruly profusion of curls had been wetted and slicked down neatly.
He had scrubbed all traces of grease from his large bony hands and from under his fingernails.
"They probably don't even speak English," Gareth gave his opinion.
"Have to use the old sign language, you know.
Wish you'd let me have that dead one. We could have palmed it off on them. They are bound to be a gullible lot, throw in a handful of beads and a bag of salt-" He was interrupted by the sound of approaching engines.
"This will be them, now. Don't forget what I told you." The two open tourers pulled up in the bright sunlight beyond the doors and disgorged their passengers. Four of them wore the long flowing white shammas, full-length robes like Roman togas draped across the shoulder.
Under the robes they wore black gabardine riding breeches and open sandals. They were all of them elderly men, the dense bushes of their hair shot through with strands of grey and the dark faces wrinkled and lined. In dignified silence they gathered about the taller, younger figure clad in a dark western-style suit and they moved forward into the cool gloom of the warehouse.
Lij Mikhael was well over six feet in height, with a slight scholarly stoop to his shoulders. His skin was the colour of dark honey and his hair and beard were a thick. curly halo about the finely boned face, with dark thoughtful eyes and the narrow nose with its Semitic beak. Despite the stoop, he walked with the grace of a swordsman and his teeth when he smiled were glisteningly white against the dark skin.
"By Jove," said the Lij, in the drawling accent that echoed Gareth's with surprising accuracy. "It is Forty swales isn't it?"
Major Gareth Swales's composure seemed to fall away, leaving him tottering mentally at the use of a nickname he had last heard twenty years before. He had been so branded when his unexpected attack of flatus had clapped and echoed from the vaulted ceiling and stone walls of College Chapel. He had hoped never to hear it spoken again, and now its use took him back to that moment when he had stood in the cold stone chapel and the waves of suppressed laughter had broken over his head like physical blows.
The Prince laughed now, and touched the knot of his necktie. For the first time Jake realized that the diagonal stripes were identical to those that Gareth Swales wore at his own throat.
"Eton 1915 Waynflete's. I was Captain of the House. I gave you six for smoking in the bogs don't you remember?"
"My God," gasped Gareth. "Toffee Sagud. My God. I just don't know what to say."
"Try him with the old sign language, then," murmured Jake helpfully.
"Shut up, damn you," hissed Gareth, and then with a conscious effort he resurrected the smile that lit the gloomy warehouse like the rising of the sun.
"Your Excellency Toffee my dear fellow." He hurried forward with hand outstretched. "What a great and unexpected pleasure." They shook hands laughing, and the solemn dark faces of the elderly advisers lightened with sympathetic merriment.
"Let me introduce my partner, Mr. Jake Barton of Texas.
Mr. Barton is a brilliant engineer and financier Jake, this is His Excellency Lij Mikhael Wasan Sagud, Deputy Governor of Shoo and an old and dear friend of mine." The Prince's hand was narrow-boned, cool and firm. His gaze was quick and penetrating before he turned back to Gareth.
"When were you expelled? Summer of 1915 wasn't it?
Caught boffing one of the maids, as I recall."
"Good Lord, no!"
Gareth was horrified. "Never the hired help. Actually, it was the house master's daughter."
"That's right. I remember now. You were famous went out in a blaze of glory. Talk about your feat lasted for months. They said you went to France with the Duke's, and did jolly well for yourself." Gareth made a deprecating gesture, and Lij Mikhael asked, "Since then what have you been doing, old chap?" Which was a thoroughly embarrassing question for Gareth. He made a few airy gestures with his cheroot.
This and that, you know. One thing and another.
Business, you understand. Importing, exporting, buying and selling."
"Which brings us to the present business, does it not?" the Prince asked gently.
"Indeed, it does," agreed Gareth and took the Prince's arm. "Now that I realize who is buying, it only increases my pleasure in managing to assemble a package of such high quality." The wooden crates were stacked neatly along one wall of the warehouse.
"A .
"Fourteen Vickers machine guns, most of them straight from the factory hardly a shot through the barrels-" They passed slowly down the array of merchandise to where one of the machine guns had been uncrated and set up on its tripod.
"As YOU can see, all first-class stuff." The five Ethiopians were all warriors, from a long warlike line, and they had the true warrior's love of and delight in the weapons of war. They crowded eagerly around the gun.
Gareth winked at Jake, and went on, "One hundred and forty-four Lee-Enfield service rifles, still in the grease-" Half a dozen of the rifles had been cleaned and laid out on display.
No. 4 Warehouse was an Aladdin's Cave for them. The elderly courtiers forgot their dignity, and fell upon the weapons like a flock of crows, cackling in Amharic as they fondled the cold oiled steel.
They hoisted up the skirts of their shammas to crouch behind the demonstration machine gun and traversed it happily, making the staccato schoolboy imitations of automatic fire as they mowed down imaginary hordes of their enemies.
Even Lij Mikhael forsook his Etonian manners and joined in the delighted examination of the hoard, pushing aside an old greybeard of seventy to take his place at the Vickers gun and triggering off a noisy squabble amongst the others in which Gareth diplomatically intervened.
"I say, Toffee, old chap. This isn't all I have for you. Not by a long chalk. I've kept the plums for the last." And Jake helped him to gather up the robed and bearded group of excited old men and herd them gently away from the display of weapons and down the warehouse to the open tourers.
The motorcade, headed by Gareth, Jake and the Prince in the leading tourer, came bumping down the dusty track through the mahogany forest and parked in the clearing in front of the candy-striped marquee that had taken the place of Jake's weather-beaten bell tent.
The Royal Hotel had undertaken to cater for the occasion, despite Jake's protests at the cost.
"Give them a bottle of Tusker each and open a tin of beans," he insisted, but Gareth had shaken his head sadly.
"Just because they are savages doesn't mean that we have to behave like barbarians, old chap. Style. One has to have style that's what life is all about. Style and timing. Fill them up with Charlie and then take them for a stroll down the garden path, what?" Now there were white-robed waiters with red sashes and little red pillbox fezes upon their heads. Under the marquee, long trestle-tables were laden with displays of choice food decorated sucking pig, heaped salvers of boiled scarlet reef lobster, a smoked salmon, imported apples and peaches from the Cape of Good Hope and case upon case, bucket upon bucket of champagne. Although Gareth had been swayed t by Jake's pleas for economy sufficiently to order a Veuve Clicquot not of a selected vintage.