on the chest of drawers glittered, and the flame of the oil lamp was seen again in the swivelled vanity mirror that reflected the room. To a casual observer they could have been old friends getting drunk together, but a closer look might have revealed the sort of tension that came from arguing and bargaining, for when the two men met here it was for business, not for pleasure. A brothel provides a discreet rendezvous for men who want their meetings to remain secret.
Sergeant Smith was on the bed. At first his feet had been resting on the large oriental carpet but, having stubbed out his cigarette, he untied his laces, eased off his boots, and swung his stockinged feet up onto the bed. ‘Ahh!’ he said wriggling his toes and delighting in the feeling of resting full-length upon the freshly laundered bedding.
Smith was thirty-three years old. His cheerful face was made memorable by a waxed moustache, its ends twisted into sharp points. The Grenadier Guards drill sergeant who had taught him, and his recruit intake, to march had had a moustache like that, and Smith had immediately decided to grow one for the duration of the war.
Smith glanced at the mirror to see himself and the big bed reflected there, and then he sipped at his glass of lemonade. On his eighteenth birthday he had promised his father that he would never touch alcohol, and he had kept his promise. Even at his wedding he’d stuck to soft drinks. That was long ago. Now his wife and two daughters lived in the upstairs part of his mother-in-law’s house near the big railway depot at Crewe in Cheshire, England. Although he missed his family, Smith did not brood about things he could not change. Before the war he’d worked for the railway as a senior storeroom clerk, and they were holding his job open for him. Meanwhile he was making a great deal of money, and his work did not entail exposure to enemy bombs, bullets or shells. As Smith repeatedly said in his letters home, he was a very lucky man.
The other soldier, Percy, was sitting in a large wicker armchair. He was younger, twenty-seven years old, and exceptionally neat and tidy. He’d sewed on the buttons, the South African shoulder flashes, and the white, coiled-snake unit badges, with the same meticulous care that he serviced the engine of his truck and oiled the guns he used. The tight webbing belt he wore was perfectly brushed and its brass-work was fastidiously polished so as to leave no stains on the webbing. The only jarring note in Percy’s uniformed appearance was the dagger attached to his belt. It was a German army trench knife. Some people said that Percy had killed its previous owner.
Percy was not his real name. He’d adopted the name Percy on the battlefield when he deserted. That’s why he liked to call it his nom de guerre. He was very adaptable. He told anyone interested that he had made the transition from civilian to soldier by the same sort of effort that he’d devoted to getting good exam results at university. Percy’s whole life had been marked by his willingness to accept his new circumstances and adapt to them. One of Percy’s lecturers had said that Homo sapiens survived, and came to control the planet, only because he’d adapted more completely and more quickly than had other species to changing climates and environments. Percy took that lesson to heart.
Now he looked at Sergeant Smith without admiration. Smith’s hair was dark, wavy and somewhat dishevelled; Percy’s hair was fair, bleached by the sun, and cut short in military style. The sergeant was at least ten pounds over-weight; Percy was slim and athletic. Percy’s khaki shirt was starched and ironed; Smith’s shirt was marked by a few drips of lemonade. For Smith the abundance of native labour meant that he could change his shirt as many times as he liked, and such marks and stains were of no importance. But Percy was fussy about his clothes and often ironed them himself.
There had been a long silence. Sergeant Smith said, ‘All good things come to an end, Percy.’ And as if savouring his own keen wit he gave a brief smile.
‘It is your loss,’ said Percy. His voice was throaty and his English had that hard accent that was not unlike the one that distinguished many of the South Africans, especially the ones from the farms. ‘I thought a family man like you would want a nest egg for after the war.’ He drank some beer. It was local beer, little more than chilled coloured water, but that suited him. He had to keep a clear head.
‘Who told you I was a family man?’ said Smith, as though a dark secret had been unearthed.
‘It was a manner of speaking,’ said Percy. He was unruffled and his cane armchair creaked as he sat well back in it, his legs extended in front of him as if he had not a care in the world.
‘You don’t mind, then?’
Percy put his hand into his shirt. After unbuttoning a secret pocket, which he’d sewn there, he brandished a bundle of paper money. ‘What is it we owe you, nine hundred Egyptian? I have it written down somewhere.’
‘What’s it matter how much money?’ said Smith, and a note of anxiety came into his voice. ‘I can’t get the bloody stuff back to England. I’m up to my ears in Egyptian money. The sergeant in the cashier’s office promised to fix it, but suddenly he’s scared shitless.’
‘Is that the problem? Getting the money back to England?’ Percy leaned forward and passed the money to Smith.
Smith took it. ‘I told you. I don’t want any more deals. We’ve got a new young officer. Instead of just signing the inventory on the dotted line, he wants to see everything he’s signing for.’ Smith shuffled the money in his hands, as though counting it. Then he slipped it inside his paybook, but he didn’t put it away. He shuffled the money around in the pages of his paybook as if comparing the two, weighing the bundle of money as if still trying to make up his mind.
‘Because I might be able to get your money to England.’
Smith looked up suddenly. ‘Are you listening to me, you prick? Every item! My officer wants to see every item before he signs. If he goes raking through all my stores, he’ll soon discover that half the stuff is missing.’
‘But that is no trouble. You can write it off as damaged, or lost to enemy action or beyond local repair or whatever.’
Smith was angry now. ‘Not tons and tons and bloody tons of “warlike stores” … not in the week or so I’ve got before he signs the inventory.’
‘Pull yourself together, Smith!’
‘Don’t tell me to pull myself together, you ugly little bastard. I just don’t want to do business with you people, that’s at the root of it. I don’t trust you. Where is all this stuff going? Who are you selling it to?’ He sniffed and pushed out his legs on the bed. ‘South African, are you? You sound like a bloody German to me.’ He still held the money on his lap, holding it tightly enough to reveal that he was not as indifferent to it as he pretended.
Percy said nothing.
Percy’s silence made Smith more angry. He thought he saw a look of amused contempt on the younger man’s face. For two pins he’d pick up this fellow bodily and shake the life out of him. Although Smith’s affluence had encouraged him to put on weight, it was not so long since he’d been a heavyweight on the railway boxing team. On one memorable occasion he’d knocked out the reigning champion from the locomotive works. The loco men were big brawny fellows, and this one had weighed in seven pounds heavier than Smith.
‘Let me tell you a little secret,’ Smith said. ‘Last time we met, I was a little late getting here, remember? The reason being, I was taking a closer look at that truck of yours. I took a note of the engine number. You changed the licence plate number, but you didn’t think of the engine number, did you? Back at the depot I got my corporal to look that number up in the records. Stolen: well, I expected that. When stolen it was loaded with small generators. Generators are like gold dust round here, everyone knows that. But what I wasn’t ready for, was hearing that the driver was killed, murdered; the truck ran right over him.’ He looked Percy full in the eyes. ‘Run over! The death certificate said the cause of death was “accidental”, but no one explained how he came to lay himself down in the road and run over himself. Any ideas?’
Percy made no response.
Smith bared his teeth. ‘Now perhaps you see why I don’t want to do any more business with you.’
‘You