‘I’m grateful, believe me. What else?’
‘Strange stuff,’ said Eph’s twin, speaking for the first time. ‘They’re tipping out all the skips along King Street. That’s hard work. They don’t usually do that.’
‘They?’ Daniel asked.
‘Youths,’ she said contemptuously. I would have put her own age at about fifteen, if that. ‘Also, there’s a nasty assault happening on Swanston. Right in front of the cops. Both men now arrested.’
‘Did anyone recognise that weapon they used on Alasdair?’ I asked.
‘It was a sap,’ said Daniel. He looked from one twin to the other. ‘Do you know anyone who uses such things? Or sells them?’
‘They sell them in Knives and Fishing Supplies in King Street,’ replied the twin.
‘Sorry,’ I told her, ‘I didn’t catch your name.’
She smiled at me. ‘Raim.’
The two girls then said in unison. ‘Our code name: Ephraim.’
‘Lovely to meet you both,’ I said, smiling in return. Though it did seem like I was talking to one person. Ephraim being one of the Twelve Tribes, it seemed an appropriate name for them both.
‘All right, Agent Ephraim, will you keep me informed?’ asked Daniel.
They giggled. ‘Certainly, Agent Daniel.’ Then they added a crisp phrase in Hebrew which made Daniel laugh.
We went back out through the shop, carrying the documents in a New York Deli tote bag into which I also gathered some of Uncle Solly’s marvellous potato salad, a green salad with a sachet of Thousand Island dressing and some sausages. ‘With good sourdough bread,’ announced Uncle Solly, kissing the tips of his fingers. ‘A feast.’
We kissed him goodbye and plodded home through the steamy heat.
Insula had never seemed so cool and clean. We met Trudi in the atrium. (Of course we have an atrium, with an impluvium and goldfish. What else?) She was down to navy cotton shorts and a blue T-shirt with a modified leather glove strapped to her shoulder for her kitten, the diabolically inspired Lucifer. He was a small orange cat whose karma, Meroe says, is already indelibly smirched and who lives for trouble. He was presently swimming in the pool, diving for – but not catching – goldfish. Trudi reeled him in and he came up grabbing with both clawed front paws.
She put him on her shoulder and he dripped all down her T-shirt.
‘Can I dry him for you?’ I asked. Her trolley stood nearby and she always had cat-drying towels. A wise precaution, given Lucifer’s propensities.
She smiled wearily. ‘No, it’s nice and cool. Maybe one day we’ll be cold again, eh?’
I fervently hoped this was the case and left her to continue reasoning with the freight elevator. It only obeys Trudi.
I won the game of scissors paper stone and got first shower. I dressed in a loose green batik robe with blue butterflies; Jon – our resident overseas aid worker and inexhaustible mine of information about the world and everything in it – had brought the fabric from Bali and Therese had made it into a garment for me. We work on a barter economy in Insula. Then I yielded Daniel the shower and went to cook the sausages. Instantly Horatio woke and reminded me that it was cat food time. Actually, I had remembered that all by myself. It was always cat food time. Horatio munched, I cooked sausages, and Daniel washed.
He came out of the shower dressed in a rather abbreviated towel. I still gasp at the sight of him. The muscular lines of his body, the scar where a Palestinian shell had nearly scooped out his insides. The very gleam on his kneecaps is strong enough to peel paint off walls and does terrible things to my libido. I didn’t even know that libidos notched up that high. But his eyes were glowing with another kind of hunger.
‘Food,’ he said, getting out plates and doling out salad.
‘Yes,’ I agreed. I was hungry too.
He poured me a glass of Marlborough Sound sauv blanc and we sat down to eat.
‘Just one phone call first,’ he said. He made a call, and spoke fast to someone called Mike. ‘Dog bites,’ he explained as he picked up his fork. ‘Geordie sank all his teeth into one thug’s forearm. He would have needed a doctor. Mike has access to all the hospital emergency departments. That bloke would have had a very sore arm.’
‘Not sore enough,’ I said, biting vengefully into a sausage. It was a very good sausage. ‘And I hope his tetanus jab stung. Bastards. Are you in contact with Alasdair?’
‘Yes, he rings me every couple of hours. At least I can tell him that Geordie is still alive, though captive. I need to know when he gets a ransom demand.’
‘Will he give them what they want?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Daniel slowly. ‘He might. I think he might. He really wants Geordie back and he may not care what he has to do, or how far he has to go. The whole campaign was one long nightmare, and Geordie is all he has to remember it by with any pleasure. I’m meeting a mate of a mate tonight. Another engineer. He might be able to explain Alasdair’s service to me, what he’s likely to know. He was with him in Helmand Province.’
‘A pesthole?’ I guessed.
‘And that’s throwing roses at it,’ agreed Daniel. ‘It’s easier for me. I’m an Israeli: I defend Israel from her enemies, which encompass her just like in biblical days. It can all get questionable and political, but that’s the basis of being an Israeli soldier. Self-defence. I’m in front, and behind me are the people. It’s my duty to defend them, even with my life, because Jewry must survive. Clear?’
‘Crystal,’ I agreed.
‘But we – that is to say, the Western Alliance, of which Israel is possibly a member – got into Afghanistan, a war that no one since Alexander the Great has ever won, a war that cannot be won, and we are in the same position as the Russians, who thought they could beat up a bunch of ragged tribesmen and got horribly beaten up themselves. Bad guys, bad guys, and slightly less bad guys. Add to that a lot of Western capitalists screwing everyone over, and it gets murky. Like Vietnam. The fight is not against soldiers in uniform, but against the people, and every road might hide an IED, and the people you gave medical care to this morning will cheer when you are blown up this afternoon.’
‘Horrible,’ I commented.
‘Never get involved in wars in the Middle East unless you are already there,’ Daniel said. ‘Some more salad?’
‘Thank you.’ I crunched a leaf. ‘Where are you meeting this mate of a mate?’
‘His name’s Russell,’ said Daniel, ‘and I thought I’d take him up to the roof garden.’
‘Good idea,’ I approved. ‘I’ll sit quietly in the Temple of Ceres and listen.’
‘And you’ll hear everything I miss,’ he said, and kissed me at last.
CHAPTER FOUR
Said dog I stay and hear
And none shall know my fear
While lord and lady sleep whom I hold dear
DAVID GREAGG, ‘CAT AND DOG’
A couple of hours later I took another shower, re-donned my blue butterflies, and watched Daniel sleep. He lay flat on his back, spread-eagled. Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. He breathed deeply, his chest rising and falling. I noticed with a certain vicious pleasure that the mark of my very own teeth were outlined in purple on his columnar throat. That mark said, as unequivocally as a cat’s foot on a stolen piece of smoked salmon, Mine. Though, of course, once it has been under a paw, there is usually not any serious attempt made to repossess the smoked salmon. I was getting foolish with staring at Daniel, so I picked up my novel. I was rereading Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, The Healer’s War. Engrossing. And utterly brutal.