“You have met the Governor before?” Zamora asked Wavery, when they resumed their places.

“Once,” said Wavery.

“And you took a bath after?”

Wavery maintained a diplomatic silence.

“I do not belong to his admirers,” said Zamora. “He is a thief and a monkey.”

“He seems in a good mood.”

“The Moroccan deal!” Senator Zamora said. “I tell you, Señor Wavery, it’s the thin end of the wedge.”

Senator Zamora had learned of what had become known as “the Moroccan deal” one week before. He had learned of it from Dionisio Porcil, the banker now joining the Governor by the open window at the table where Menendez habitually sat, enraptured by the sound of drilling. Zamora hated men who had favourite tables! How apt that Menendez and Porcil should have gained first and second places respectively in the Zamora Christmas card competition.

Wavery had several times been to call on Porcil. As Chairman of the Bank of Abyla, one of two hundred banks to have signed a credit agreement for the tunnel consortium, Porcil had been enthusiastic to learn of Wavery’s contacts in the City. Last week he had invited Senator Zamora to the domino table. As they played beside the fire, Zamora reflected that Porcil deserved to have been glummer than he appeared. He was losing the game. The tunnel had been inoperative for seven days. The latest share issue had not been a success. According to a report in El Faro translated from the Gibraltar Chronicle the Abyla Tunnel consortium was engaged in a bitter dispute over funds with the Straits Tunnel Company. And there was no more money to pay the workforce.

But Porcil, extraordinarily, was happy.

“Teodoro, do you have any inkling why our beloved Governor has not been seen in Abyla since Christmas?”

Zamora did not. He played a double four.

“He was in Morocco.”

“Really? How do you know?”

“I myself accompanied him to Rabat.”

So? Rabat was an exceedingly dull place. Duller than Cadiz if that were possible. What had they found to do there? Paint casbahs?

Porcil ignored him. In Rabat, he went on, Menendez had used the auspices of La Société Nationale des Études du Détroit to negotiate a further loan with the President of the Greater Moroccan Company for Development and Investment. As a result, the tunnel was almost certainly saved.

For the first time in seventeen years Zamora lost to Porcil at dominoes.

Under the terms of the deal, twenty per cent of the tunnel workers would be recruited from Moroccan nationals in El Hadu. It was what Zamora had always feared and suspected: the tunnel had become the unspoken revenge of the Arabs. In allowing them to invade Abyla like this, Governor Menendez was another Count Julian!

“We consider the Governor has abandoned us to our expansionist neighbour,” Zamora told Wavery, the excellence of the bife Zamora having failed to remove the taste which had settled in his mouth at the appearance of Menendez. “He acts as if the tunnel is an eager aspiration of everyone in Abyla. It is not. It’s a crime against our country.