about all that Dalby volunteered on the subject of Jay, but I had lots of other chatty topics of discussion ready as we walked back to the villa. I asked him about his new IBM machine, about the Chester Committee Report on the Intelligence Services, and how it was likely to affect us, and about my arrears of pay (now approaching four months) and whether I couldn’t have the whole of my expenses available to me in cash against petty cash vouchers instead of submitting accounts and settling down to a long wait as I did now.
It was Dalby’s day for proving that he could be one of the boys. He wore his short-sleeved shirt outside his denim trousers and an old pair of suède shoes, against which he kicked every small movable object we encountered. I asked him about Mr Adem, our host, and about him he was more forthcoming than he had ever been about pay and expenses.
Dalby had got him from Ross, who had got him from the US Anti-Narcotics Bureau (Mediterranean Div). He had run Indian hemp* across the Syrian border as a section of a chain to New York. The Americans had done a deal with him in 1951 and, although the pay wasn’t up to drug traffic rates, he had been happy to avoid a spell up the river. In the NATO Intelligence Service regroupings of ’53 Adem had come into British service. He was about in his mid-sixties; gentle and humorous with a face like an apple that’s been stored through the winter. He was a fine judge of horses, wines and heroin, and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of an area stretching from Northern Turkey to Jerusalem. If you trod on a beetle for miles around you’d find he had it under contract. His role was a giver of information and understanding this, he had, or showed, no curiosity about the affairs of his employers. His salary was virtually unlimited, with one proviso – no cash. As Dalby put it, ‘We pay any reasonable bill he runs up, but he never handles a pound himself.’
‘It’s going to be difficult for him to retire,’ I said.
‘It will be damn well impossible if I have anything to do with it,’ said Dalby. ‘He’s hooked, we need him.’
‘You mean he never tries to re-channel some of his debts into cash?’ I asked, just to be provocative.
Dalby’s face cracked open in one of those big boyish laughs he gave out when he felt proud of his even teeth. ‘He does!
‘When we first gave him the Sud Aviation Jet helicopter,’ Dalby went on, ‘I told him to jazz it around somewhat. “Live it up and be proud of it,” I said. “Give a few of the big Government boys a ride around.” I wanted him to be seen up and down the shore line, occasionally riding out to sea. With a Lebanese big-wig aboard, inquiries were not going to be encouraged.’
We’d reached the sloping driveway, and beyond the lemon trees I could just see the light green Cadillac in which Adem had met us a few kilometres along the road in the small hours.
‘So?’ I said. ‘It worked?’
‘Worked?’ Dalby tilted his head, pulled his earlobe and smiled in admiration as he thought about it. ‘He brought twenty kilos of heroin across from Syria within seven days of getting his licence. Twenty kilos,’ Dalby said, his thin lips forming the words yet again in tacit joy at the sheer ambition of the old man.
‘At five shillings a dose that’s a lot of green,’ I agreed.
‘It was a big improvement on Indian hemp. The sort of ruffians he knows can get 100,000 doses from a kilo, and five shillings is the Beirut price, in London it’s going to be more like ten. A couple of runs like that and he could buy Cyprus as a weekend place. It gave me a problem, but I told him I’d break his head if he did it again, and in the long run it was beneficial. When the news of the shipment leaked out – it’s bound to in a place like this – well, people never trust a completely honest individual.’
The smell of Dgaj Muhshy (chicken stuffed with nutmeg, thyme, pine nuts, lamb and rice, and cooked with celery) taunted the nostrils. The old man was dressed in a shirt of bright yellow locally-made silk and was poking away among his vegetable garden as we got to the front door.
‘Hello,’ muttered Dalby. ‘The old swine is probably growing his own.’
The soft wind blew across the high-ceilinged dining-room. The décor, except for two beautiful gold thread brocades of very old Persian design, reflected Adem’s peasant origin more than his present-day affluence. The scrubbed woodwork, the small-patterned cloths, an enormous dresser, crowded with plates, saucers, jugs and cups. The rugs on the wall of simple dark-toned peasant weaves. All this provided a background against which a food opera was played out. First sambousiks (small pastries containing curried meat served freshly baked) were served. I looked at old Adem as he stood at the end of the table; under his bulbous nose hung an enormous grey moustache which, because of his thinning hair, gave one the curious feeling that his face was upside down. His skin was hard and tanned in such a way that when his face was relaxed and serious, the wrinkles around the mouth and eyes were white; but he was seldom serious.
He divided up the huge joint of lamb with a well-worn horn-sided folding knife that came from his pocket and was used in every operation from vegetable gardening to changing a tyre. I had watched him do both with the same smooth enjoyable efficiency. His mouth contorted with the effort of his hands, and each slice was delivered with a great flashing smile of his brown uneven teeth.
‘It’s good?’ he asked me.
I told him to be careful or he’d have a guest for life. It was the right thing to say. He was a born host and, as Dalby said, I am a born guest.
That afternoon as the sun reached its apogee Adem and I sat talking and drinking under the trees. Adem did the talking, I did the drinking. He told me of his uncle who had killed a lion single-handed with only a spear in 1928. ‘A challenge. He went to this lion in challenge. In his right hand he had a spear.’ Adem raised his right hand, fingers clenched. ‘This arm,’ he raised his left arm, ‘is tied with clothes and bandage for guarding.’ Adem demonstrated guarding. ‘After this lion die he is called “Hamid the lion-killer”; he never work again.’
‘Never works again?’
‘Never. A man who kills a lion, everyone gives him money and food, everything; never work again.’
‘I can see the attraction,’ I said. ‘Are there lions about here now?’
‘Not here. To the north perhaps; many times I go. Many animal; many gazelle, many leopard, ibex … bears. But they become less each year. Many people hunt.’
‘Like your Uncle Hamid.’
Adem looked serious, then he laughed a big laugh. ‘Not like him. People with guns. I do not like this.’
‘You go north hunting?’ Now I was doing it.
‘Not the hunt. I go to look. I stay very still, very, very still, near water, and I watch them come.’
‘You never photograph them?’
‘No, I watch. It is just for me, not for pictures. Just for me and the animal.’
I imagined Adem holed up overnight in the bleak brown area to the north watching and sniffing the night air and never taking a film or a bullet. I told him of Xenophon’s men who chased the ostrich and wild ass. He liked that part of the story but found the effort of imagining a greater period of time than two generations very difficult. As far as Adem was concerned, Xenophon was a contempary of A. W. Kinglake. Adem told me of the attempts to conserve the wild life farther north, and of the money they needed. When I told Dalby
