Free Time and Time Again by Ben Elton

snarled. ‘I was coming to that. The palace above it fell into disrepair and has been redeveloped many times but the foundations remain—’
    ‘And we’ve bought it!’ McCluskey shouted, now jumping up and joining Sengupta on the stage. ‘It belongs to us. It will be waiting for us on the thirty-first of May next year. Waiting for you, Hugh. Waiting for Captain “Guts” Stanton.’ She pointed her stubby, nicotine-stained finger towards him. With all the talk of 1914 Stanton found himself thinking of the famous Lord Kitchener recruiting poster. Perhaps McCluskey was thinking of the same thing.
    ‘Your country needs you, Hugh. The world needs you!’

8
    ‘ COME ON, CHOP chop. Christ, what a country! I said coffee and cognac. And breakfast. Got any eggs? Fresh, mind.’
    He’d heard that voice before.
    His head had been bowed, his eye focused on Cassie’s emails. Now, quietly, he folded them away in his wallet and put it back in his pocket. Then, as much by instinct as intention, his right hand slid down beyond his pocket and dropped down into the bag at his feet, fingers closing round the handle of his little polymer machine pistol.
    Although God knows he couldn’t use it.
    Discharging a weapon like that with its awesome and currently unimagined capabilities could scarcely fail to raise the interest of every intelligence agency in the city. And as any student of military history knew, there were more spies than dogs in pre-Great War Constantinople.
    ‘I said coffee! And a drink! Dammit, what’s the bloody Turkish for booze?’
    It was a curious voice, very clipped with short vowels, but the tone took Stanton back to Sandhurst. To officer training and all those private-school boys with their effortless sense of entitlement.
    ‘Lazy kaffir’s probably on some carpet praying,’ the voice went on. ‘They never stop praying, do they? If they spent less time praying and more time
doing
, then the country wouldn’t be such a bloody basket case, would it?’
    But it wasn’t just the tone he recognized. He’d heard this
specific
voice before.
    How could that possibly be?
    He gripped the weapon tighter.
    And then he remembered. His fingers relaxed around his gun.
    How stupid. How very stupid. Of course he’d heard the voice before. Not in another century but scarcely an hour ago.
    It was the idiot from the Galata Bridge, the driver of the Crossley 20/25.
    He turned and glanced. It was them all right, the men in the car. All five of them. Early twenties. Boaters, blazers, flannel bags. Swagger sticks and old school ties. Smart enough but with bloodshot eyes and sweaty, pasty faces. Still half drunk. Hooligans. Wealthy ones but hooligans nonetheless. You got them in any age, any class. Swap the boaters for hoodies and they could have come from the twenty-first century.
    Quite suddenly Stanton felt a terrible anger rising within him.
    These could have been the four bastards who wiped out his family. They very nearly
had
wiped out a family.
    ‘I
said
coffee and cognac!’ the young man repeated loudly and unpleasantly as he and his companions slumped themselves noisily around one of the little tables, scraping back their chairs, lounging about and generally making it clear that they owned the place.
    One of the others spoke up from behind a street map.
    ‘I’m sure it’s around here somewhere,’ he said. ‘Hey, you!’ the man barked at the cafe owner, who having disappeared into his kitchen was now emerging with a tray of cups and a coffee pot. ‘House of Mahmut – where is it? Girls? Dancing? House of Sluts? Where – Mahmut – House?’
    The owner merely shrugged and shook his head.
    ‘Bloody idiot’s got no idea what we’re talking about,’ the first man said, ‘
and
he’s forgotten the brandy. Oi, you. I said coffee
and
cognac.’
    The owner shook his head and turned away, which infuriated the Englishman, who banged the table in protest.
    ‘Don’t you bloody turn your back on me, you bloody dago!