A Little White Death Read Online Free PDF

the next. It takes belief. It’s the only thing that’ll keep you at it.
Personally, I never thought Charlie had that belief. More often than not we’d cover for him, wouldn’t we, Said? He couldn’t be arsed half the time. He was lucky. Without us
he’d’ve gone under. Mind you, he was good company – you get Charlie in the bar with a few drinks inside him. Talk about laugh!’
    Troy heard his cue and knew his exit. Arthur Alliss was decidedly not good company. He had heard enough of Alliss’s vision of Charlie. If it turned out he really had seen the last of him,
then he wanted his vision of Charlie, warts and all, not the spiteful, sentimental vision of a drunken hack who scarcely knew him.
    Troy pushed his untouched glass towards Alliss and got to his feet. ‘Forgive me, but I’m flagging badly. I really do need to sleep now.’
    Alliss bustled and missed the hatred in Troy’s eyes. Prised himself from his chair with some loss of breath, stuck out his hand again and said, ‘But you’ll join us for
breakfast? It’s not often we . . .’
    Perhaps he had read the look in Troy’s eyes after all. The sentence dwindled down to nothing.
    ‘Yes,’ said Troy. ‘Delighted.’

 
§ 3
    He kicked off his shoes, tore off his jacket and tie and lay on the bed beneath the motionless punkah. He decided he’d give it fifteen minutes and then hang out the
‘Do Not Disturb’ sign. In less than ten there was a gentle tap at the door.
    Hussein stood in the corridor, one hand oh-so-casually in his trouser pocket, the other poised to knock again. ‘Do you really want to have this conversation now?’ he asked.
    ‘If it’s the only time you’re free of Alliss, yes,’ said Troy.
    Hussein carefully hung his jacket on the back of an upright chair and sank slowly into a deeply upholstered armchair. He loosened his tie, stuck a fat Turkish cigarette in his mouth, crossed his
legs with a fastidious tug at the knee of his trousers and lit up. Troy flopped into the chair opposite, feeling as creased as his clothes.
    Hussein could be no more than twenty-two or three, his eyes were bright, his skin shone with health and at the end of a working day he seemed not have a single close cropped hair out of place.
The tie at half-mast was a concession to after-hours occasion. He looked like Madison Avenue man launching into a difficult pitch. Compared to him, Troy felt ancient.
    ‘Arthur is colouring the story. You must forgive him. He is an old man. Out of his time.’
    The preamble over, what they both knew so succinctly stated, he inhaled deeply and savoured his smoke a moment.
    ‘No one carried Charlie.’
    A hand batted the smoke away from his face, the gesture cutting, absolute, to reinforce his words.
    ‘Far from being unsuited to the job, I’d say Charlie was a natural. Arthur got here just after Suez, less than a year before Charlie – just long enough for his nose to be out
of joint when your brother hired Charlie. I suspect they were both sent for much the same reason. Suez put us back on the map. Every newspaper on earth increased its Middle East coverage, simply
waiting for the next skirmish or the start of Armageddon. I joined them in 1961. My first job when I graduated Yale. I’m the new boy, but being from Jerusalem I’m near enough a native,
and I know the lie of the land, and I think I know my job. I’ve seen enough to know that Charlie loved the job, and rather than letting Arthur carry him, he carried Arthur. After seven years
Arthur has only a smattering of Arabic – good French; he’d have been OK here before the war, in his element in the time of the Beiks, but that’s another age. I rather think Arthur
hasn’t acknowledged that.’
    ‘England is full of men like Arthur,’ said Troy.
    ‘I’ve never been there,’ Hussein replied with an almost imperceptible shrug. ‘But I can quite believe it. He’s right when he says you can find yourself in Aden one
day and Jerusalem the next.