'Sergeant.' I stayed out there on the step with him, filling a pipe and watching Regina Street switch on around us. 'Any more news?'

'Mr Kapotas talked to London again but he told us nothing. And somebody called again for the Professor. Again, I said we did not know.'

'Popular, isn't he? Seen anything of my friend Ken?'

'He has not been out.'

I nodded and lit my pipe. The first srnoke puffs just hung there, dissolving before they could drift away. It was the moment of stillness between the day wind and the night wind. Then two young ladies who wouldn't have known a day wind if it had jumped into bed with them click-clacked past on their high heels, on their way to work. Sergeant Papa bowed solemnly.

Thave been thinking about your problem,' he said when they'd passed. 'I think you should go to the Atlantis Bar-' he nodded down the street, and about fifty yards off I could see the red neon sign; '-and I will send somebody to meet you there. It would be… safer. And I will make sure you are not treated as tourists.'

'Thanks. That sounds fine.' It didn't; I wasn't looking forward to this evening much, but I didn't want to let Ken out on his own, either…

I said: 'Fine,' again and went inside to look for Ken or Kapotas.

I found Kapotas first, sitting in the little office behind the front desk eating a plate of something and sorting through a small black cashbox. He didn't seem to be finding tidings of great joy in either.

'Have you been taking stamps out of here and not paying?' he demanded. The box had only a handful of coins, a couple of scruffy 250-mil. notes and about half a dozen stamps in it.

I sat on the edge of the desk. 'No, I've done all my Christmas thank you letters. Is that the dinner? '

'Yes.' He stared at the end of his fork. 'I can think of no bit of a sheep shaped like that.'

'I can. Any news from London yet?'

He pushed the plate away and shut up the box. 'They say thereis a finance house with a first charge on the plane. Now Harborne, Gough have to decide whether to default on the payments, whether to pay up and sell the plane themselves, o to keep on operating it.'

'Any and either way, it's got to get back to Britain; any new on that?'

'No.'

'Well, any news on my pay?'

He didn't look at me. 'You should have got payment in advance."

'Now, I agree with you. But is that all the bloody help you're going to be?' He didn't say anything. So I said: 'Oh – by the way, I've found you a buyer for the champagne.'

'Oh God.' He leant his head on his hand and shuddered. 'What can I do?'

'I've heard suicide highly recommended, though never by anybody with practical-'

'This is serious! '

'So'smy pay."

He stood up shakily. 'I need a drink."

So we went through to the bar and sat at a table out of earshot of Apostólos and two other couples who were anaesthetising themselves to face the dinner.

Kapotas asked: 'Who is this man?'

'A Beiruti, Uthman Jehangir. Sajss he wants to sell it to visiting oil sheikhs.'

'Is he… genuine?'

'He's got a poncey English accent and a nice blue pinstripe, but underneath I'd say he was just a simple old tiger-shark.'

He suddenly remembered something. 'Did you tell him we'd opened one box?'

'Of course not. If heis after guns, that'd tell him we knew.'

'Yes, of course. I'm sorry.' He stared into his whisky. 'But… which is he mostly likely to be after? '

'Champagne or sub-machine guns? In Beirut it's a fifty-fifty chance, isn't it?'

'I suppose so,' he said miserably.

'But if you know anybody in Beirut you could ring up and try to get the word on him. It's a small town in that sense."

He cheered up a bit. 'Yes, I can do that tomorrow.'

'And sooner or later you're going to have to tell London we can't sell this cargo. Only don't put the real reason in a cable or telex.'

'I'm not stupid.'

'No, but you're drinking whisky after dinner again.'

'Oh God, so I am.' He shook his head sadly and then drank some more anyway. 'But why should anybody send you on a flight like this?'

'There's an obvious profit in it – probably paid for in advance and certainly not going through the company's books. If Kingsley saw the crunch coming he might want to squeeze the last drop of blood out of the firm while he still had it.'

'A man like Mr Kingsley?'

'A man exactly like Mr Kingsley.' A charming, handsome, well-dressed polite man with the morality of dry rot. Who'd come as near parking me up the creek as I'd been for ten years. So why wasn't I more resentful? Probably because I was too busy being annoyed at myself to be surprised at him. I'd been concentrating on getting a paid ride down here instead of looking for snags. And the bastard hadn't even made the mistake of overpaying me for an apparently simple job. In fact, he hadn't made the mistake of paying me at all.

Oh well. With Ken back, things might be different.

I asked: 'I don't suppose there's any news of Kingsley himself, yet?'

'Nothing.'

'I see why, now. For all he knows, there's a gun-running warrant out for him.'

6

Appropriately enough, the Atlantis was below normal ground level, although probably it hadn't been down there for three or four thousand years; it just smelt that way. We were the first into the place except for a bunch of Canadian soldiers at the bar. We squeezed past them and parked around a small round table in a corner.

A waiter came over, lit the small night-light candle on the table and took our order for two large Scotches and two Keos.

Ken peered around. 'Difficult to be colour prejudiced in a place like this.' The room had a lighting level a bit better than a coal hole in a power strike.

'Cheapestdécor you can get: don't pay your electricity bill. But it must be an improvement on Beit Oren.'

'Yes, you couldsee some of that.'

'Was it bad?'

'Oh…' Just then the waiter put our beers, two small glasses and a bottle of soda on the table; '… not really tough or anything, just bloody depressing. Grey stone and brown paint and bugger-all to do. No art classes and all the books in Hebrew… You name it, they haven't got it.' He picked up his glass. 'Do I make the old joke about Hey this glass is dirty! No, sir, that's your double Scotch.'

I'd been expecting something like that. 'Put in some soda.' While he did, I sneaked out the tonic bottle that I'd filled with Scotch from the hotel bar. If the manager here didn't like it, he could turn up the lights and catch me at it.

Ken watched as I poured. 'Nice to see your brain hasn't gone to fat. Cheers. What are these girls like?'

I shrugged and drank two-handed. 'All the usual mod cons, I expect. I haven't met them; I just passed the word through Sergeant Papa.'

Ken chuckled. "That man… Did he show you his army snapshot album?'

'Sure. How d'you think he got to know all those generals? -those are all real.'

'He procured for them. Hell, couldn't you guess?'

'I should have done, I should have done… So let's hope he gives us five-star service.'

'It isn't the servicehe gives that interests me…' Ken smiled hungrily in the candlelight. 'How much money have we got?'

'Here and now? – something over twenty-five quid, that's all.'

'They didn't pay you for the flight down here, yet?'

'Not yet – if ever. Just a nice line about receivers not being responsible for earlier debts.'

'Bastards,' he said unemotionally. 'What was the whole idea of sending you down here, anyway?'

I took out my sole Dunhill pipe and began to fill it carefully. 'They were opening a new hotel in the Lebanon – but that's off, now. I was coming down to fly the VIP guests around a bit, and bringing a spot of cargo.'