‘That sounds very like camels.’
‘Spot on, old boy. The main road, not much of one I am told, runs through Hargeisa, the administrative centre of British Somaliland, while the railway from Djibouti to Dire Dawa is under French control, given they built it. Neither is useable.’
‘Would you be offended if I said this whole idea is a bit half-cocked? I have to buy a load of weapons and get them to the Horn of Africa, with no feeling of assurance that when I get there I will not be kyboshed by my own government, then sneak them overland across what might well be a bloody desert.’
‘Using the old slave trade routes, Cal, which, I’ll have you know, are not entirely redundant.’
‘There are too many “ifs” in this, Peter.’
‘Never knew any operation to be different, Cal. “If” number one! Will the backers agree to what is being proposed? “If” number two, can you get hold of what is available in the time we have? Three, can they be got, by ship, to the Somali coast? Four, can we get them ashore and across one of the least hospitable places on the planet to where they can do some good?’ Lanchester leant over grinning and slapped him on the back. ‘Bloody simple, really.’
‘One step at a time in other words?’
‘Precisely.’
‘You could lose your shirt on this.’
‘It’s not my shirt.’
‘How long before we know the funds are available for use in Rumania?’
‘They are in place now, Cal, in a Swiss bank, three hundred thousand pounds sterling, with the reserve if you need more, which means that you and I should pack our bags for Bucharest.’
‘You’re coming too?’
‘Old chum, I trust you, but not with that much lolly. I am there to sign the cheques.’
* * *
There were two people to see before heading east, the first being the man who had recruited him for the Hamburg operation. He took Elsa Ephraim with him to the huge heath-side house in Hampstead, though after the introductions, she was asked to wait outside.
‘Now, that is a real looker,’ said Sir Monty Redfern, as always, when using an ‘r’, making it sound as if there were several instead of just one. ‘I didn’t know you liked them so fresh.’
‘I admit to temptation, Monty,’ Jardine replied, ‘and I was sorely tempted a few nights back, but I kept my buttons done up because she is young and naive.’
‘So you are a fool.’
‘How was New York?’
‘Too many Jews, what do you think, and loud, so loud. Worse than Palestine, my God!’
Patron of several Jewish charities, Sir Monty was a self-made millionaire who had earned his money in chemicals, never boasting that he started with nothing as a fifth son of refugees selling such things as bicarbonate of soda door to door; such tales had to be dragged out of him. Money had not sophisticated him much: he dressed in clothes he had owned for years and his shoes were never polished, but if anyone in Britain was doing what they could for the Jews of Europe it was he, because, as he insisted, anti-Semitism was not confined to Germany, there was plenty of it in Britain.
‘You raised some funds?’
‘Not as much as those crooks could have contributed.’ To Monty there were only crooks or good people; there was nothing in between. ‘Of course, they have their own organisations who are pleading for lolly.’
Jardine laid the money belt he had brought from Hamburg on the desk. ‘This will help.’
Monty picked it up and weighed it in a way that made Jardine think he could count the unseen contents; maybe he could.
‘I took a lot of money off those Jews who could afford to pay and used it to get anyone too poor but under threat through the port.’ The word ‘Communist’ hung in the air, but was unmentioned. Jardine had got several Reds out from under the threat of a National Socialist bullet, but it was not a thing to make public. Few countries wanted Jews, none wanted to import revolution and no one of that political persuasion had been sent on to England. ‘That is what is left over.’
‘Jardine, you I should employ to sell my chemicals, then I would be rich, no?’ That was followed by a frown. ‘You have taken care of your own needs.’
‘I have.’
‘Good.’ Monty knew and approved of the Jardine rule: never work for nothing. As he had observed, there were not many rich Jews in his native Scotland, the competition was too stiff. ‘Now, your young lady.’
‘She wants to help.’
‘You think perhaps she would consider to make an old man happy?’
‘Your wife would kill you.’
‘What do you think she does already? Spend, spend, spend!’
‘She could act as some kind of secretary.’
‘My wife sees that kind of secretary, I will be eating my own balls for dinner.’
‘Talk to her, see what comes up.’
‘Jardine, I know what will come up, it is what I will do then that counts. Now, what are you up to?’
‘Who says I am up to anything?’
‘When God gave me this big hooter, Jardine,’ Monty said, grabbing his hooked nose, ‘he did it so I could smell my fellow humans telling fibs. You will be up to something or you would have asked me if there was some job needing doing.’
Jardine grinned and explained: not one to trust easily, he trusted Monty Redfern absolutely.
‘That is a good cause, those poor black people, even if they are misguided religious. There are many Jews in that land, but not that Haile Selassie. Lion of Judah, my arse. How can you be that and not be Jewish, eh? You know Bucharest?’
‘I don’t even know Rumania.’
‘There are good people there, but many bad ones, too, and it is not the easiest place to be Jewish. It’s hard to lay blame — forgive me saying this, but I know, ’cause deep down I am still Russian, the Bukovina Jews are dumb Hasidic bastards. But there are some good Ashkenazim and Sephardim in Bucharest.’
He went to the back of his desk and opened an address book, penning a quick name and address. ‘Call on this fellow, tell him I sent you. If you need anything he will help. Now, show in that delightful young lady and let me dream the dream I can look forward to repeating when I try to get to sleep tonight.’
Jardine’s next stop was in South London, at a gym down the Old Kent Road. He walked through the door to the smell of sweat and high-odour embrocation. The place needed a lick of paint, if not several, and the windows were missing several panes, with bits of cardboard where there should be glass, while the lights were bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling. Around the room lay the various things required to keep a boxer at his peak — hanging punchbags, weights, mats for floor exercises — while in the middle was a full-sized ring in which two young fellows were sparring.
Shouting at them from the ringside was Vince Castellano, a one-time soldier in Jardine’s regiment and a useful welterweight boxer. A tap on the shoulder made him turn round, which revealed a flattened nose and the scarred eyebrows of a fighter, as well as a couple of proper bruises. The voice had the slight slur of badly fitting false teeth.
‘Good God, guv, what are you doin’ ’ere?’
‘Come to see you, Vincenzo.’
‘Keep sparring, you two,’ Vince shouted, ‘my old CO has come to call.’
‘It’s a long time since I was that.’
‘Must be three years since I seen you last, Mr Jardine, when you’d just got back from South America.’
‘I’ve still got the hangover and the bruises.’
‘That was a right night out that was, eh? You should never have taken me to that posh club up west. Toffee-nosed gits.’
‘And you should not have tried to fight everybody in there including the coppers who came to arrest us.’
‘Shouldn’t drink, should I, guv? But you knew that, so I always blamed you for that barney. That’s why I let you pay the fines.’
‘How’s business?’
‘Dire and don’t it show? Fallin’ down, this gaff is. I only keep the place goin’ ’cause of the kids. If they wasn’t ’ere ’alf of them would be in choky.’