Cut Throat Dog by Joshua Sobol, Dalya Bilu Page A

why we came too close to him. Because we weren’t sure if it was him.… And Jonas paid for it with his life.
    What exactly do you remember?
    In the photo he had a black beard that covered half his face. That’s all I remember.
    In the period when we were looking for him, you made all kinds of sketches of his face, says Shakespeare.
    Yes I did, says Yadanuga, but years have passed since then.
    Can you find those sketches?
    How can I? I don’t even remember what I drew them on.
    You had a little Kohinoor notebook, with an orange cover.
    You know how many of those notebooks I’ve been through since then?
    Perhaps you could try to reconstruct his face from memory, take off the beard and add twenty years?
    Shakespeare, Yadanuga laughs despairingly, I can make you twenty sketches, what good will it do?
    I don’t know, admits Shakespeare. On every trip it seems to me at least five times that I’ve seen him. In the end it’s just some guy. But this time I have a feeling—
    You don’t want a repeat performance of the story with that poor waiter from Islay, warns Yadanuga.
    That’s the problem, says Shakespeare. That’s why I’m asking you what you remember. Your visual memory is the only thing I have to rely on.
    What do I remember.… Yadanuga tries to fish up details. I remember something with brown and white.
    What brown and white?
    Is there such a thing as a brown-white wine?
    A brown-white wine?! It sounds like that bastard wine whose taste changes from bottle to bottle.
    Right! It was called ‘Vino bastardo’ I think, the wine he liked, a sweet Spanish wine, don’t you remember they gave it to us to taste, so we would be able to identify it?
    Wait a minute, wait a minute, Shakespeare remembers, bastardo … that rings a bell.
    And he liked white carnations with red stripes.
    That’s it, says Shakespeare. He was wearing a white shirt with red stripes, or maybe the opposite: a red shirt with white stripes.
    A lot of people wear shirts like that, Yadanuga tries to dampen down Shakespeare’s excitement, without success.
    No, no! Shakespeare protests, the shirt had a white collar, and he was wearing a brown tie.
    All that means is that he’s got terrible taste, Yadanuga demurs, but it doesn’t prove that he’s our man.
    He’s our man, pronounces Shakespeare.
    Where did you meet him? Asks Yadanuga.
    In Manhattan, in an Irish pub. He was sitting there drinking muscatel, into which he poured creme-de-cassis from a flask he took out of the inside pocket of his jacket.
    How did we come up with the name ‘Tino the Syrian’? Yadanuga wonders.
    Don’t you remember? When they gave us his profile, they said that he had a lyric tenor, and he liked chansons from the thirties; and because he was called Anton, and he was one quarter Russian, we called him ‘Tino Rossi’, and later on, when we found out that he trained in Syria, and for a while he acted as a bodyguard to that old Nazi who lives in Damascus—we turned ‘Tino Rossi’ into ‘Tino the Syrian’.
    Even if it is him, he’s no longer the same person. He must be forty-five today … Yadanuga reflects on all the years that have passed together with the secret
gloria mundi
of their stormy youth in the quartet of the ‘Cunning Cooks’.
    Listen, Yadanuga, confesses Shakespeare. Weird things are happening to me. I need a break.
    And Yadanuga, aware of every nuance in his friend’s voice, lays a beefy hand on Shakespeare’s shoulder and says:
    Shakespeare, we’ll make a decision, and after that take a break, go where you want.
    Where I must, corrects Shakespeare, if I take responsibility for my actions.
    You take responsibility, if I know you, says Yadanuga, but now we have to come to a decision, and you, as the boss and the CEO of the firm—
    I can’t sit there, Yadanuga. I can’t!
    Those two yuppie pipsqueaks raise my revulsion level too, confesses Yadanuga, but we haven’t got a choice. Mona’s tending in their direction. You have to throw all your