‘It might be advantageous to get to the point, Mr Alverson.’
That got a smile, which was picked up by the moon and starlight, because there was no anger in Jardine’s voice: it was even and controlled.
‘Let’s just say your name rings a bell, shall we, and it occurs that, since we are on the edge of a country with another of these League embargoes in place, it might turn out to be just as porous.’
‘And if it was, what would you do about it?’
‘Why, take advantage, Mr Jardine, what else? I am looking for a story.’
‘I might not be one.’
‘And I might be Al Jolson without make-up. Let me level with you. I want not just to get into Abyssinia, but to get to where the action is.’
‘And you think I can take you there?’
‘I am guessing you can. I could get back to Addis, and quick as that through the Sudan.’ He clicked his fingers and drew deeply on his cigar. ‘But sitting on my ass drinking whisky is not my style. You are a man who runs guns and I picked up on what you did in South America.’
‘I could be acting on behalf of the British Government.’
‘You’re not, and the way Mason changed the subject was like semaphore. All I am asking is to come along with whatever it is you are up to, at my own risk and on my own dollar.’
‘What do I get out of it?’
‘Good company.’
Jardine laughed. Alverson would not say he might blow the gaff on the whole thing, but he could with one telegram, and it was not malice. He was a reporter and they reported, while no appeal to his better nature was likely to cut much ice.
‘Let me think about it. I’ll talk to you in the morning.’
‘Suits me,’ came the reply. Alverson knew ‘yes’ when he heard it.
Mason was, as he said, in his study, the only jarring note that one of his boys was there too.
‘Don’t worry about Rani, he speaks little English.’ He pointed to his desk, on which lay a piece of paper with the Colonial Office crest, really the British crown with the necessary departmental embellishments.
‘I have forged for you a set of orders from London, instructions to me to give you every cooperation. It has at the bottom the name of one of the undersecretaries who is a new appointment, so I would not know his signature. Please sign it in his name so that, should things go wrong, I am covered. I have no desire to lose my post.’
Mason could not help looking at his boy and that said everything. He was a homosexual, probably with a preference for the young, and out here he was safe to indulge his tastes, with the added advantage that his paramours were damned attractive and, given his position, no doubt numerous. It had been in those fleeting glances at the dinner table and, once realised, in the man’s gestures, which were slightly fastidious.
It was possible that his proclivities were the spur to make him act as he was doing, sympathy for the natives overriding his sense of duty to his office. Jardine was not bothered, nor was he in the least bit disgusted: what people did in the privacy of their own bedroom was no concern of his.
What revolted him was hating people for their colour or their bloodline, torturing them and depriving them of the right to a decent life because of their race. The Jews of Hamburg, with their mordant humour, would loudly proclaim their thanks to the Lord they were not homosexual, Gypsies, Communists or mad, for life would be intolerable: the Nazi state hated them more than Semites.
‘Of course,’ he said, looked at the name, picked up the pen and signed with a flourish.
The noise that woke him was slight, but a life of danger makes any such disturbance a matter of concern, doubly so given he was in what should be a safe place. There was a zephyr of breeze as his mosquito net was pulled aside and the bed dropped as another body got in. About to hit out, he was stopped as a hand searched for his cock, the untoward thought that it might be Mason unavoidable. Yet his own hand touching flesh, looking for the throat, brushed a breast, and that told him the body was female and a vision of Corrie Littleton filled his mind at the same time as blood filled his tugged-at penis.
That outstretched hand, the size of the mammary, plus a sort of snuffling sound gave him the first intimation he was mistaken, that and the sheer force with which he was dragged into full body contact. Part of his mind was telling him to resist, to insist Margery Mason get out of his bed, but her incessant tugging and the fact that an erect cock had no conscience overrode his scruples. Their coupling was swift, grunting, and for her, judging by her rising then choked-off whimpering, deeply satisfying.
Cal Jardine could not deny he was pleasured too, but when she was gone and he lay back to go to sleep, he also felt like a Boy Scout who had performed his good deed for the day.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The choke point for the MS Tarvita was Port Said, where there was a British garrison guarding the entrance to the Suez Canal. That was the means by which Mussolini had reinforced his troops in Eritrea and Somaliland, and was still supplying them, given the colonies the Italians occupied could not easily feed his armies. Howls of protest in the democracies from those opposed to Italy fell on deaf ears; Britain could have choked off the whole Abyssinian operation by one simple stroke: the banning of military equipment from using the canal.
Vince was enjoying himself, using the deck as a mobile running track, finding things on the ship to use as weights, teaching boxing to some of the hands, who were of a dozen nationalities; whatever it was, he was outdoors. Having started off a bright pink in the Black Sea and itching from sunburn, that soon changed; he had been in the Middle East before, and given his Italian bloodline he soon began to turn brown, seeming to get palpably darker by the day.
Peter Lanchester stayed out of the sun as much as he could, spending his time in the shade trying to read Marcel Proust, an endeavour he had promised himself he would undertake as soon as he had time. There was nothing for them to do on the boat — the captain sailed her, he had a woman to cook for them and plenty of supplies, while the crew were pleasant fellows who tried very hard to speak with both him and Vince in fractured English.
Both could only wonder at how Cal Jardine was doing, but given they had no way of knowing, it was not a thing to fret on. Sailing on a sound vessel with reasonable accommodation across a blue Mediterranean Sea in midsummer, it was best to treat it as what it was: a cruise. With the coast of Egypt on the horizon, that came to an end, and the tension increased as the twin minarets of the Grand Fouad Mosque became clear, piercing the sky across from the muggy sky of Port Said.
In the end it was a formality: the canal was under British oversight but it was a commercial enterprise and profit was the primary concern, not the seeking of contraband. From Istanbul Lanchester had organised the payment of the necessary tonnage dues to the Suez Canal Company, and this was a British cargo being moved in a hired foreign bottom, in other words, commonplace and not worth a search. Soon Lanchester was back to A la Recherche du Temps Perdu and Vince was back to his running, boxing and browning, this time with desert sand on either side of the vessel instead of sparkling sea.
* * *
Zeila made Berbera look like a sort of paradise: if it had been a major port once there was scant evidence of it now. A scruffy town of dilapidated buildings, surrounded by a low mud wall, it reeked of no sanitation and loss, the only boats plying any sort of trade a few Arab dhows, while most were tied up in harbour or dragged out of the water altogether on to the beach, some of them now too rotten to take to the water.
The outer roads, a mile and a half offshore, so slight was the fall of the seabed, were empty. There was an official resident here, a bachelor, but no troops or other Europeans. He had gone home on sick leave, hardly surprising given the flyblown quality of the place. Being here on one’s own would be nothing less than soul-destroying.