Good Morning, Midnight

12

Two hundred miles to the south, Tony Kafka had fled from the dining room of the Mastaba Club as soon as his phone rang, knowing from previous experience how much the members (referred to disrespectfully in St James’s circles as Mastabators) disliked being reminded that the Old Queen was dead.

His host watched him go. His name, not unfittingly, was Victor Warlove. His job (how fittingly was a matter of debate) was Under-Secretary in the Department of Overseas Aid. He was a short man, very stout, even his head was stout, and also completely bald, a deficiency he balanced by wearing a Harris tweed suit so hairy, you could have sheared it and got yourself a matching rug.

As if chosen deliberately for contrast, the other man remaining at the table was very thin, very tall, and so smooth of person and suit that a housefly would have found it hard to land on him. This was Timothy Gedye, one of whose passports described him as a civil servant but whose actual job was as hard to get a purchase on as his person.

Warlove picked up a carafe and filled his companion’s glass with a wine bright as arterial blood, saying, as he poured, “I often wonder what the Vintners buy one half so precious as the goods they sell.”

Gedye said, “Perhaps you should change your trade, Victor.”

He had the kind of English face whose mouth only moves under the thin lower lip, spilling each perfectly enounced syllable to drift floorwards like a dried leaf and rustle into a corner.

“And deprive my country of my services? Wouldn’t dream of it, dear lad. So, what do you think of him so far?”

“Without prejudice, I’m getting the faintest butterfly-in-the-neighbouring-meadow feeling that our friend’s heart may no longer be in it.”

“Oh dear,” said Warlove. “I do hope you’re wrong. He has been a valuable colleague for many years. But I’ve noticed radical changes in so many of our transatlantic cousins since that sad business, what do they call it? Ten eleven?”

“Nine eleven,” said Gedye.

“That’s the one. Was a time when profit and patriotism went hand in hand, you couldn’t have one without the other. All changed, all changed. Back in the sixties it used to be commies in the cupboard, now it’s terrorists under the bed.”

“I think our friend has particular reason for wanting to swim in the mainstream,” said Gedye. “What do you know about his background?”

“Not a lot. No idea where he went to school. Not Eton, else I would have known. Winchester perhaps? They have a thing about foreigners.”

Sometimes even Tim Gedye did not know when Warlove was joking.

“I meant his racial background,” he said.

“What’s that then? Czech family, first or second generation American, I’d have guessed.”

“We don’t guess. Not Czech. Those cheekbones and that nose are not, as you might imagine, Slavic. The family name is, or was, Kafala. Or perhaps it wasn’t.”

“You chaps may not guess but you don’t mind speaking in riddles,” said Warlove.

“Sorry. His background is Arab, not European. In Islam kafala means something like sponsorship or providing support and sustenance, the latter quite literally as it comes from a root word meaning to feed. Kafala is their form of looking after homeless, abandoned or orphaned kids. It bears some superficial resemblances to Western adoption, but there are significant differences. In kafala the child acquires no automatic inheritance rights, and it has to retain its own family name. You may treat the child as a member of your family and you may even love it like a member of your family, but it is strictly forbidden that you should ever try to fool people into thinking that he or she is in fact a member of your family.”

“Fascinating,” yawned Warlove. “And no doubt, ultimately, relevant.”

“Indeed. It seems that sometime in the twenties, Kafka’s grandfather was discovered wandering around the shed on Ellis Island, age five or six, unaccompanied and unaccounted for. Whether his name was Kafala or something like it, or whether he got called Kafala because he was taken care of under the system, is impossible to say at this remove.”

“And the change to Kafka?”

“That came after the war. Tony’s father was drafted in 1943. Good record, got wounded, mentioned in despatches, fitted in well. But when he came out, he quickly realized that not even a Purple Heart stopped a dark-skinned fellow called Kafala from being relegated to the bottom of the social pile. In the army a bit of bad handwriting on his records often resulted in his being called Kafka by mistake. It hadn’t seemed to matter all that much in the camaraderie that develops among fighting men, but back in civvy street a bit of experimentation probably quickly revealed that a suntanned Central European called Mal Kafka stood a lot higher up the heap than a brown Middle Eastern called Amal Kafala.”

“Our Tony’s basically Arab then? No wonder he’s been such a star out there.”

“Indeed. But like his father before him he has been totally converted to the American dream and, like most converts, he perhaps feels the need to make up in devotion what he lacks in background.”

“Needs to wave a bigger flag, eh? How about religion? Not Muslim, is he?”

“Not so we’ve noticed. But one thing seems clear from his history, especially with regard to his wife. He may have lost the name, and probably never had the religion, but the concept of kafala still plays a large part in his philosophy. Looking after homeless and parentless children. Excuse me.”

A slight agitation was visible to the left of Gedye’s breastbone.

“Not having a coronary, are you, old boy?” enquired Warlove.

Ignoring him, Gedye spoke into the air.

“Yes?”

He listened, frowning, and said, “How certain are you, Larry?… I see… That puts a different complexion on things… Question is, how did he know? Wasn’t there some detective…? Yes, check it out. But no action, not while there’s still a good chance Mrs Kafka’s friend can sit on things.”

Warlove looked round at the other diners. No one was paying any attention.

Marvellous thing, hands-free technology, he thought. While the Mastabators objected vehemently to phones ringing in the club rooms, the sight of a fellow diner apparently talking to himself was too commonplace to cause concern.

“More wine, Tim?” he said. “Not bother, I hope? Too old for bother.”

“A slight tremor along a thread. Coincidentally on our friend’s patch.”

“Oh dear. Do tell.”

Gedye told, concluding, “Fortunately I have one of my spiders handily placed to keep the vibrations under control. I’m more concerned about the degree to which our American friend could agitate the web by trying to abandon it.”

“Tony’s sound, I’m sure of it,” said Warlove, with the slight irritation of a man who doesn’t like bother. “And even if he wobbled, old Joe Proffitt would soon steady him up. He’s rock solid.”

“Perhaps. But he may soon have other things to occupy him. Post Enron, the Securities and Exchange Commission have issued their people with fine-tooth combs. A rumour has reached me that they have A-P in their sights.”

“They’ll need very sharp eyes to find any nits on Joe,” laughed Warlove.

“I wish I shared your confidence. They could move very soon. And I understand Proffitt has just ordered himself a luxury yacht with space on it for a golf driving range.”

“There we are then. Must feel safe as houses.”

“Hubristic, I think, is the term you’re looking for. Ah, here comes our nomad friend at last.”

“And so does the soup. Perfect timing as always, Tony. Everything all right?”

“Fine. My wife. Sorry.”

“The lovely Kay. You’re a lucky man. Do tuck in.”

Kafka dipped his spoon unenthusiastically into the gently steaming grey-green pond which had been set before him. True, the wine at the Mastaba was always excellent, but it needed to be. How anyone could call the food here good-or indeed call it food! — baffled him. But if you ate in a tomb, maybe you should expect your soup to be Stygian.

He glanced around the gloomy dining room. It was the size of a small cemetery. Most West End restaurateurs would have crowded a couple of hundred diners in such a space, but here there were no more than twenty discreetly spaced tables, only half of them occupied and most of those by solitary men. Probably resting actors, if his theory about the real nature of the place was right.

As always, soup was the signal for serious business to begin.

“By the way,” said Warlove. “Hear there was a little bit of bother up your way last night. Anything we should worry about?”

“Under control,” said Kafka indifferently. He’d been right when he guessed they’d know about it. They thought they knew everything. But if they thought they knew what he was thinking, they were wrong.

“Pleased to hear it. Now let’s talk turkey, as you chaps say. It’s the first day of spring, isn’t it? Time of the big clearance sales!”

“You reckon?” Kafka put his spoon down. “I’ve been thinking. Maybe it might be a good idea to cool things for a while, in view of the current state of things.”

“The current state…?” said Warlove, faintly puzzled.

“The great war against terrorism, all that stuff-haven’t you noticed?”

“Indeed yes. And a splendid marketing opportunity it is, too. Do you have a problem you’re not sharing with us, Tony?”

“I’m just wondering in the circumstances whether it’s wise…” He took his spoon, raised a gill of soup to his lips, then spilled it back into his bowl untasted. Gedye was regarding him with that English look which, without being a sneer, somehow suggested a sneer was on the assembly line.

“Whether it’s right,” he concluded defiantly.

“Right?” said Warlove, enouncing the word with great care as though it were foreign. “In what context would that be?”

“In the context of right and wrong,” said Kafka. “Is there some other fucking context I don’t know about?”

Warlove and Gedye exchanged glances.

“My dear boy,” said the stout man. “Normally I don’t do ethical debate over lunch, even though I did carry off the prize for Religious Knowledge three years in a row at school. But what I will say is we know we are right because we know they are wrong. Right? And because they are wrong, every last damn one of them, we either have to trade with none of them or with all of them. We choose all of them because our masters tip us the wink that, if they didn’t move in polite circles like the UN, they’d choose all of them too. No harm done because everybody’s treated the same. What could be fairer? Now, let’s talk plans. Know what I was thinking the other day? Uzbekistan. No idea where it is. Been there once, I think, some fact-finding tour-they do like a jaunt, these ministers-didn’t take much notice, but there’s a chap in my office always going on about it. In the end I had to listen or send him to Easter Island, and you know, it rather sounds our sort of place. What do you think, Tony? Uzbekistan. Got a real Harry Potter ring to it, hasn’t it?”

He smiled like a benevolent uncle at a favourite nephew’s birthday party and refilled Kafka’s glass.

I mustn’t let him do this to me, thought Kafka. He’s trying to get me thinking he’s Bertie Wooster and I can run rings round him! Remember, over the past fifteen years, this asshole has made A-P huge profits and almost certainly made himself a millionaire into the bargain.

But what made the fat bastard tick? Could it actually be some form of patriotism? There were guys back home who did stuff ten times more outrageous and still claimed they were flying the flag.

More importantly perhaps, what was Gedye doing here with his undertaker’s eyes?

“Uzbekistan,” he said cautiously. “Sounds interesting for the future. But right now it seems to me we need to look at our Gulf shipments. There’s one due out of the plant this weekend and I’ve been wondering whether maybe we should put it on hold.”

“Now why on earth should we do that?” asked Warlove, apparently amazed.

“Because sooner or later there’s going to be another goddamn war out there,” said Kafka. “And it’s not going to look good if the place is littered with Ash-Mac gear.”

“Hardly likely. Lessons have been learnt, old boy. They could follow the paper chase we lay nowadays twice round the globe without coming close to Ash-Mac’s.”

“That’s not my point. It’s whether we should be doing this at all with a war on the cards. In a lot of people’s eyes, it’s a war that’s started already.”

“My dear chap, don’t get so upset. You take these things far too seriously. What was it Aristotle said? War is just a marketing campaign pursued by other means.”

“Aristotle said that?”

“Onassis,” laughed Warlove. “Let’s have a toast!”

He raised his glass so that the blood-red wine caught a dim ray of sunshine which had somehow sneaked in through the high dusty casement.

“The toast is war,” he declared. “Gentlemen, I give you war!”