“M’sieu?”
“Monsieur Tufik,” Solo said in French. “He is here tonight?”
The hard-faced barman regarded him levelly. “But of course. He is always here.”
“One would appreciate a few moments’ conversation with him.”
“That is impossible.”
“My friend and I have come a long way to see him. We have a message from a mutual friend.”
“No.”
A tall half-caste with a broken nose elbowed Solo aside. “Here, Gaston,” he growled. “Attend to your business; there’s clients waiting. Three marcs and a large glass of red—and make it quick. We’re thirsty.”
“If perhaps, one could allow monsieur the proprietor to decide for himself…” Solo began when the barman had filled the order.
“Look—I told you no. Nobody sees the boss without an appointment.” He moved away to the espresso machine and began preparing three cups of coffee.
“There would be a certain amount of money involved—for all concerned,” Solo called, mastering his temper.
“Keep your money. Tourists are not welcome here, especially American tourists!”
“We are not tourists. And I am not American,” Illya said suddenly, adding something in an Arabic dialect with which Solo was not familiar. He caught something about “the Indian journalist, Anand.”
The barman leaned his hands on the counter and thrust his face towards them. “How many times do I have to tell you,” he snarled, “that the answer is no? No, no, and again no. Now drink your drinks and shut up, or else get out of—”
He broke off as a high-pitched buzz from below the bar cut through the noise. Reaching down, he unhooked a house phone and held it to his ear. “Yes,” he said. “That’s right. Two. What, right away? You’re quite sure?…As you like, then.”
He slammed the instrument back on its hook and scowled at them. “He’ll see you,” he said curtly, jerking his head towards a bead curtain behind the bar. “This way.”
Draining their drinks, the two agents followed him through the curtain and along a dark passageway. They skirted a patio bordered by a grimy glass canopy rattling under the assault of the rain, pushed through another bead curtain, and found themselves in a softly lit anteroom. The contrast with the coffee shop was extreme. Subtly colored Persian rugs strewed the mosaic floor, and the room was dotted with low divans in the oriental style. There was only one other door to be seen: a sheet of beaten copper; gleaming dully in a vaulted stone arch. As they entered, a slim man in a waisted suit rose quickly to his feet, one hand hovering near the top button of his jacket. Beneath the tarboosh, his sallow, moustached face was watchful.
“For some reason he’s agreed to see these types, Ali,” the barman said sullenly. “You take over from here, eh?”
The slim man nodded, gesturing to the copper door. As the barman turned and went back through the curtain, he pressed a button concealed in the stonework and the door swung slowly open. Another corridor stretched ahead, stone-flagged and illuminated by wrought iron lamps on brackets.
“After you,” the slim man said evenly. Professionally, he kept some distance behind them as they walked past a number of closed doors. Apart from their own footsteps on the stone floor, not a sound disturbed the silence. When they had passed five doors, Ali called softly, “The next on the left. Knock four times.”
Illya rapped on the teak panels. There was a subdued buzz, terminating in a click—and again the door swung open.
Habib Tufik was a surprise. To begin with, the man was enormous, one of the biggest men Solo had ever seen. He must have weighed close to three hundred pounds, the great swell of his belly thrusting against a crumpled sharkskin suit, the fat shoulders merging into a bulging neck. A few strands of red hair were combed across his freckled scalp—and a pair of unexpectedly humorous blue eyes twinkled in among the rolls of pale flesh forming his face.
Secondly, he was sitting in a wheelchair. And thirdly, he greeted them in the broadest of County Cork accents.
“Well now, boys,” he called cheerfully, “and what can I be doing for you? Come in, come in, and sit you down—if you can find a place, that is. For it’s queer and cluttered it’s getting to be in here at all!”
He waved a fat hand around the windowless room. It was indeed difficult to find a seat, for the whole area, which was about thirty feet square, seemed at first to be swamped in a great tide of paper. There were a few piles of reference books, matched by corresponding spaces in the bookshelves filling one entire wall, but most of the litter comprised an apparently endless variety of newspapers, magazines and journals from all over the world, which strewed the vast table, overflowed onto chairs and divans, and dotted the floor in untidy heaps. Most of them, Solo saw, contained passages paneled off in marker pencil, with underlinings and annotations in various colors. And in among them lay dozens of sheets of writing paper covered with scribbled notes, sheaves of clippings, and rolls of teleprinter paper bearing agency messages from Reuter, Havas, Associated Press and Tass, the Russian newsagency. Steel filing cabinets along one wall flanked a modernistic console which looked like the control panel of a recording studio. The remaining two walls—one containing the door through which they had entered, the other pierced by an archway masked by the inevitable bead curtain—were hung with oriental rugs.
The room was airless and hot. The two agents stripped off their soaking raincoats and dropped them by a pile of month-old Herald Tribunes. Illya perched on the corner of an ottoman covered in purple silk, and Solo removed copies of Paris-Match, Stern, Oggia and Izvestia from a low armchair and sank into it with a sigh of relief.
“’Tis a foul night out there, they tell me,” the fat man continued, “and you’ll be needing a spot of refreshment.” He clapped his hands three times and then turned to, the man in the tarboosh. “That’s all right, Ali, thank you,” he said. “I’ll let you know when these gentlemen are leaving.”
The thin man bowed and withdrew, closing the heavy door after him. A moment later, with a rattle of beads, a veiled Arab girl of about thirteen with enormous black eyes pushed through the curtain. She was carrying a large brass tray containing tiny cups and saucers, a copper pan full of fragrant coffee, a stone flask, glasses, and a squat bottle half full of pale yellow liquor. She cleared a space on the table and set down the tray, then slipped quietly out through the curtain.
Habib Tufik smiled widely as he waved at the tray. “Turkish coffee, now? With a drop of rosewater to settle the grounds? And you’ll take a spot of the hard stuff? It’s Izzara, the finest liqueur...I have the sweet tooth, as you see!”
Pouring the drinks, he spun the wheelchair with dexterity and propelled himself rapidly to each of them in turn. The eggshell-shaped glasses, Solo saw as he sipped the aromatic liqueur, were held in a fine filigree cage black with the patina of age.
“You have a most—unusual establishment here, Monsieur Tufik,” he said.
“I suppose I have. Though if it’s the girls you mean…
“I didn’t only mean the girls. There’s something of a contrast, you’ll admit, between the—er—coffee shop and this room. And then there’s the electrically controlled doors, the professional gunman outside, the fact that you knew we were here and invited us in just as your barman was about to turn us away…”