The fat man chuckled delightedly, the rolls of flesh around his neck wobbling uncontrollably as he sucked in coffee through pursed lips. Sure there’s a splendid coincidence,” he said. “You’ve come to the right man, then—for information is my business! I’m a merchant of information, to be sure: wholesale or retail, in gross or single items—you name it, I’ll get it! And let’s be quite clear on one point: I’m precisely that, a seller of information. I play no favorites, I take no sides, I offer no loyalty, no allegiance. If a man comes to me and pays for information, I give it to him. I don’t care who he is. The customer is always right, gentlemen—and my customers come from all over. Police, private detectives, lawyers, intelligence men from here to hell-and-gone—they all come to Habib Tufik.”
“That’s a fine old Irish name,” Solo said.
“And it’s my own, I’ll have you know, boy. Me mother was Irish, God rest her poor soul and indeed I was brought up there. But me father was a Casablanca man, born and bred—though you’d not think it to look at me, now would yer?”
“I would not. But I understand you’ve been here a great number of years, just the same.”
“I have and all. The kind of setup I have here doesn’t grow in a day, you know. It’s taken a long time to build up. You wouldn’t believe how many hundred dollars a week it costs me in wire services and papers alone.” He gestured at the mass of periodicals around the room. “And then of course there’s the informers, the hotel porters, the airport people, the travel agency men and I don’t know what-all.”
“I would imagine you had a formidable knowledge of current events over the world just from reading these,” Illya said with a smile.
“Well, you know how it is: you never know when it’ll come in useful knowing who’s knocking around with whom. The gossip columns—when you add two and two together from different ends of the world—can tell a man a great deal. Then, of course, there’s the diplomatic and the political pieces. There’s much to read in between the lines there.”
“And the coffee shop?”
“Perhaps that’s the most useful of all. You know the way they used to say, in the big houses like, that if you wanted to know what went on, then you’d ask in the servants’ hall? Well, my coffee shop’s a bit like the old servants’ hall. We get seamen there—from the boats, waiters from the embassies, layabouts, porters. All kinds. Sure I’m like a recording machine in here, preserving everything that comes in—and the coffee shop’s one of my main microphones, as it were…”
“As I said before,” Solo remarked, “we were impressed with the way you knew about our inquiry.”
“And isn’t that the simplest thing, though? Wait’ll I show you.” Tufik wheeled himself across to the console and flicked a switch. A pilot light glowed red on a wide indicator board. “What’ll you have?” he asked. “The bar? Second table from the left? The far end where the tough boys stand?”
He thumbed a series of buttons ranged across the board. As each one was depressed a colored light glowed above it and a snatch of conversation boomed from a hi-fi speaker to one side of the console.
“…asked H.E.’s daughter to slip the package into the diplomatic bag, but the bitch wouldn’t play…
“…Gaston! Three flats and a glass of white!…”
“…and all you have to do, my friend, is listen a bit…”
“…wipe that smile off your face, if I were you, or there’s one or two of us’ll bloody well wipe it off for you…”
“…they’re flics, that’s what they are. Mark my words, that pair are up to no good…”
Solo recognized in the last voice the bad-tempered half-caste who had shouldered him aside at the bar. He had noticed the man glaring at Illya and himself before they had been brought through, and he had no doubt that they were still the subject of conversation. “Very ingenious,” he said. “You have every table wired for sound, and other mikes concealed at strategic points around the room. How do you know when to listen to what?”
Tufik was delighted. He giggled like a schoolboy. “It’s good, isn’t it?” he crowed. As to listening, the whole lot are recorded automatically. I have two secretaries who go through the tapes and draw my attention to any interesting stuff each morning.” He pointed to two enormous spools revolving at sixteen and two thirds rpm on a complex tape deck beyond the speaker. “It’s multi-track, recording both sides.”
“And this, I take it, is information for which you do not pay?”
Tufik burst out laughing. “That’s it,” he wheezed. “Gratis. That’s what it is. This stuff’s the bunce to offset all the money I lay out in other directions!”
“I imagine there’s one class of information you don’t sell.”
“Something I can’t provide? You name it.” The fat man bristled. His professional pride was impugned.
“I mean information about one client’s demands—to another.”
“Ah, no! ’Twouldn’t be right, now, would it? No, I couldn’t do that at all.”
Somewhere, a telephone was ringing. Tufik eventually tracked it down under a heap of color supplements on the table. “Hallo, hallo… It is that…Yes, Colonel. And you too….” He listened for a few moments and then said crisply, “Yes, I think I can. Just hold on, will you?…Now where did I put that cutting?”
He hunted among various piles of papers, wheeling himself around the room with extraordinary speed. At last, with a cry of triumph, he came up with a clipping in what looked like Japanese characters. “Got it!” he announced proudly into the mouthpiece. “A model girl from Tokyo who works a lot in New York. Name’s Umino Takimoto. They stayed at the Imperial in…let’s see…yes, from the 21st to the 28th of March, last year.”
“Military attache,” he said as he put the instrument down. “Now there’s some poor fellow’s going to have the bite put on him!”
“Your work must make you somewhat…unpopular…in certain quarters,” Illya commented.
“It does that. There’s plenty would try and stop me, believe you me, boy…They nearly did once; that’s why you see me here in this contraption. It was when I was younger and stronger, and I had a mind to put a stop to a gang of boyos was spreading lying tales about me behind me back, see. They was tryin’ to put me out of business and I went up to sort them out—only they had more friends than I did and somebody put the boot in. Result: a spinal injury and partial paralysis.”
“You seem to have plenty of protection now.”
“Ah, sure. I never go out now. I have my girls and my work—I keep in touch, as you might say! Then there’s Ali and Gaston and a couple more good ones to look after me. Wait’ll I show you…”
He clapped his hands twice and called, “Charles!”
Behind a blank space in the bookshelves a shutter slid open and the muzzle of a machine pistol poked into the room, capped by the long snout of a silencer. Above it, watchful eyes glinted in the reflected light.
“All right, Charles, thank you: just a demonstration,” Tufik said over his shoulder. The shutter snapped shut again. “But there you are, you see. My visitors are covered all the while they’re here. Still, I don’t want to rush you gentlemen—but I have callers expected. What did you want to know?”
“I gather you must have helped Devananda Anand,” Solo said easily. “Perhaps he was a client?”
“These many years. You’d not have got in, mind, if I hadn’t heard you mention his name out there. This is strictly a personal recommendation business. I don’t know who he was working for—that’s not my affair. But I helped him many times.”
“He was—shall we say—a colleague,” Solo said tightly. “He was trailing a consignment of a certain commodity that we have reason to believe left here on a camel train for Alexandria yesterday or today. We want to know the name and address of a contact in Alexandria who can put us in touch with someone who’ll be able to identify the caravan for us when it gets there. And, for good measure, we’d like confirmation of what the consignment is and the fact that it is on that caravan. Can you oblige?”
