The Private Sector (A Peter Marlow spy thriller)

by Joseph Hone

  The Private Sector

  JOSEPH HONE

  For Jacky

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface to the 2014 Edition

  Book One LONDON, MAY 1967

  1

  2

  Book Two CAIRO, MAY 1957

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Book Three LONDON AND CAIRO, MAY 1967

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Book Four CAIRO, MAY 1967

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  11

  12

  13

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Preface to the 2014 Edition

  Originally published in 1971, The Private Sector is the first in a series by Joseph Hone, who I regard as one of the great spy novelists of the twentieth century. In the last few decades Hone’s standing in the field has been somewhat eclipsed by the likes of John le Carré and Len Deighton, but in his day he was widely seen as their equal. Newsweek featured a full-page review of this book, and hailed it as the best spy novel since Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin.

  The idiosyncrasies of public taste are often unfathomable, but I sometimes wonder if more people don’t know of Hone’s work simply because it was neither fish nor fowl in the genre – rather, a less easily marketed combination. Spy fiction can be divided, very roughly, into two camps: ‘Field’ and ‘Desk’. James Bond is a field agent – we follow his adventures, not those of his superior M. In John le Carré’s novels, on the other hand, the focus tends to be on those back at headquarters – George Smiley is a senior officer at the Circus (he later, briefly, becomes head of it).

  I enjoy both genres, but sometimes find myself wishing that the Field book I’m reading were as deft at characterisation and prose style as it is at the suspense. Similarly, I often find myself reading a Desk book and desperately hoping that something will happen. It’s all beautifully drawn, but is everyone going to be searching their filing cabinets for that manila folder for ever? In my own work, I’ve tried to have my cake and eat it: my character Paul Dark is a Desk man sent unwillingly back into the Field. In this I was partly influenced by Hone, who combined both camps in a way that leaves me breathless – and sick with envy.

  Before I was a published novelist I interviewed Mr Hone about his work, and afterwards he sent me a very charming and touching letter, and enclosed copies of many of his reviews. While it was reassuring to see that others had also highly valued his work, I found the reviews depressing reading. When I see a quote from a newspaper on the back of a novel, I’m conscious that it may have been taken wildly out of context. But here were long reviews of Hone’s work from Time, the Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post and other august publications, comparing him favourably with le Carré, Deighton, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. Better still, the books live up to the praise.

  Hone’s protagonist – ‘a man with almost no heroic qualities’, as he describes himself – is British intelligence officer Peter Marlow. He is repeatedly being taken out of his grubby office in the Mid-East Section in Holborn and dragged into the line of fire. The plots come thick and fast, and feature ingenious twists, femmes fatales, high-octane action, Machiavellian villains – all the great spy stuff you’d want. But it’s wrapped up in prose so elegant, and characterisation so subtle and pervasive, that you put the books down feeling you’ve just read a great work of literature.

  Marlow himself is a wonderful character, and I think deserves to be as well known as Smiley. He’s the constant outsider, peering in at others’ lives, meddling where he shouldn’t, and usually being set up by everyone around him. He’s a kind and intelligent man, and terribly misused, but he’s also a cynic – he sees betrayal as inevitable, and tries to prepare for it.

  In The Private Sector, we meet him as an English teacher in Cairo who is gradually drawn into a spy ring. It’s one of those ‘innocents in too deep’ stories, but the evocation of both Egypt and the shifting loyalties of the protagonists are dazzling. Hone alternates between third and first persons, which he makes look like the easiest thing in the world. Set in part in the run-up to the Six Day War, it is superficially about Soviet moles, as much British spy fiction of this era was, but the subtext is about how we can never know anyone else. That’s a feeble attempt to describe the novel’s complexity, though, so here’s L. J. Davis writing about it in the Washington Post in July 1972 instead:

  There are moments in this book – indeed, whole chapters – where one is haunted by the eerie feeling that Joseph Hone is really Graham Greene, with faint quarterings of Lawrence Durrell and Thomas Pynchon. His tone is nearly perfect – quiet, morbidly ironic, beautifully controlled and sustained, moodily introspective, occasionally humorous and more often bitter, with a persistent undertone of unspeakable sadness and irrecoverable loss.

  Hone went on to write three further Marlow novels – The Sixth Directorate, The Flowers of the Forest (published as The Oxford Gambit in the US) and The Valley of the Fox – as well as a standalone spy thriller, The Paris Trap. All of these novels have now been reissued in Faber Finds. All of them are packed with beautiful writing, astute psychological insight and pace: Hone never forgot he was writing thrillers. It’s the melding of the prose style with the twists and turns of the plots that makes Hone so special – makes him, I think, one of the greats.

  Jeremy Duns

  Jeremy Duns is the author of the Paul Dark novels Free Agent (2009), Free Country (a.k.a. Song of Treason, 2010) and The Moscow Option (2012), and also the non-fiction Dead Drop (2013).

  BOOK ONE

  LONDON, MAY 1967

  1

  I don’t know. Certainly I’m not going on Williams’s calculations. It may have been a week before—or a day. Anyway, sometime before he disappeared, for no good reason I could think of, Henry had given me an Egyptian ten-piastre note: the remains, among other pieces of grubby paper—hotel bills, ticket stubs and so on—from one of his trips abroad. He’d thrown the mess down on my office table, just after he’d come back from Egypt—from one of his “missions”, as he described his visits to that part of the world which interested him most. When he went further afield—east or west—he talked simply of having been on a holiday, as if the only real work he did took place in the Middle East. And that was probably true though I didn’t know much about his work. We were friends in other ways.

  Perhaps he had meant to encourage me with this collage of foreign bric-à-brac—encourage me to travel or to sympathize with my not having travelled (I did very little of that); or perhaps the rubbish which he emptied on my desk that afternoon was his way of saying the journey hadn’t really been necessary. Again, though I knew Henry well, I’m not sure what effect he intended—which was fair enough, I suppose, for a man whose job it was to conceal things. Later it struck me that this clearing out of his pockets might have had something to do with his disappearance—but it’s not the sort of thing one thinks of questioning one’s friends about when it happens. It was one of the few details which Williams didn’t manage to worm out of me so perhaps it had a significance.

  I’d bee
n with Henry in Egypt years previously—we’d both been teachers there before I’d joined Intelligence—so later that day in the tiny afternoon drinking club round the corner from our building in Holborn, I’d listened willingly to his account of the trip; days spent in empty, panelled bars we’d both known in Cairo, places the English had once patronized, like the Regent at the top of Kasr el Nil with its flaking discoloured mirrors advertising long-vanished tonic waters. And other days when he’d gone across to the Gezira Club on the island, drinking with the last of the old-style Egyptian playboys. Henry had been looking for someone, looking for leads—another of our men had disappeared, I gathered. It was happening all the time then. But he didn’t go into that. It could wait until he saw McCoy. McCoy was his immediate control. In fact on that trip I remember him saying he’d not spent much time in the smarter, previously European parts of Cairo—the centre, around Soliman Pasha Street, Opera Square‚ the corniche by the Nile and the smart Embassy apartments in the Garden City beyond the New Shepherd’s Hotel. He’d been in the back streets behind Abdin Palace, in old Cairo beneath the Citadel, in and around the dusty flarelit alleys which clustered about the Mousky bazaar.

  Somewhere on these slopes of the old city he’d been staying with Robin Usher, our Cairo Resident, a man he’d first met years earlier when he lectured at Fuad University just after the war.

  “I was with Robin most of the time. You should have got to know him better. An incredible house, rather like a male harem with cushions and boys littered all over the place. But genuinely Mameluke. One of the very few left. A jolly old party, especially when he’s had a few. Though I must say the boys were inclined to get under one’s feet. ‘A thing of beauty is a boy forever’—that was rather his style. That and the Daily Telegraph—it’s all the English have left in Egypt. Can’t blame them really.”

  Henry, without being aware of it, for he was a displaced colonial, used a slangy Edwardian shorthand when talking about the truly English. It was his way of admiring them without admitting it.

  He had been talking about Cairo ten years after Suez and it was this new situation in the country which attracted him. ‘The fun of going back somewhere and finding it quite gone to seed,” as he put it.

  He’d talked as little as possible in my office in Information and Library.

  “What a terrible place to meet again,” he’d said as he shuffled through his pockets, staring sadly at the haggard walnut furniture, the files of Arab newspapers, the half-carpet, and the hat stand I never used. And then, looking out at the mass of hideous concrete that had cropped up all around us: “You used to be able to see St. Paul’s.”

  I liked the way he used the phrase “meet again” as if we’d met that afternoon quite by chance and he and I didn’t work for the same organization. Not that I’d ever thought he worked for “somebody else” as Williams used to describe whoever the “other side” happened to be at the time. I thought then that Henry was simply being his own man.

  We went on that evening to a wine bar further down the Strand, a place we’d gone to for years and where Henry ordered champagne—as he did whenever we met after he’d got back from a trip. I don’t think he really liked the drink; he bought it, I always thought, because it was expensive and because he could run his finger down the side—tracing a line through the condensation like a child playing on a clouded window pane—to see if it was cold enough. He enjoyed touching things carelessly, as though wondering whether to steal them—looking warmly at strangers as if he’d suddenly seen an old friend. He had that trick of immediate intimacy, a headlong approach to any experience, and he drank too much.

  Because I liked Henry’s humanity—envied it obviously—and envied his sense of invention and ease of manner, I thought them to be the qualities that had made him good at his job. One never likes to think of one’s colleagues in a dull occupation as being less tied to it than oneself so it never properly struck me until after he’d disappeared that this naïveté and freshness were quite at odds with the sort of work he had to do—the depressing daily grind of extracting information from people or things—of spying on them. Though that word evokes a drama which our work never had.

  I had done very little work in the field, not since I’d been a teacher in Egypt after Suez and even then there had really been a minimum of danger or personal confrontation in the job. I had prepared elaborate memoranda on the situation there when I came back on leave to England and now I did the same thing in London, from Arab newspapers, without going anywhere. Sometimes I “evaluated” reports from people in the field, which went on to the Minister, but McCoy liked to do most of that now, hogging the few excitements of our department for himself. I thought Henry by comparison was happy with his position, which at least took him all over the place, and I was surprised that evening when he said he wanted to get out.

  “It’s a hack job. We shouldn’t fool ourselves. If we hadn’t been together in Cairo then we’d never have been involved. If we hadn’t had some Arabic, had connections there …”

  “If we hadn’t wanted it …”

  “What?”

  “The excitement. That Embassy party. We thought—didn’t we?—that our bits and pieces of information were important. We were stupid enough. If we hadn’t been—things would have been different. We might have still been there. Teaching. I suppose we thought it more exciting than that.”

  I spoke of the past indefinitely, as if I’d forgotten it. I knew we both had thought it was more interesting then—that summer after Suez. There had been those madmen, Usher and Crowther, at the Embassy then—whose veiled suggestions and eccentricities in that empty Egyptian summer had been a happy reminder of secret and important purposes elsewhere—when we had chatted vaguely about some distant political mischief on the Queen’s Birthday and the suffragis had chased to and fro beneath the flame trees on the huge lawn, stumbling under the weight of the ice buckets and martini trays.

  There is an innocence about the beginning of things, a blindness I suppose most would call it—even in work as sordid as ours—which keeps one at the job for years in the hope that we may be able to recapture the freshness of the original impetus which drew us to it, some of the morality which we gave to it all then. And I thought this was what must be worrying Henry: the disappointment of a wrong turning long ago, of expectations lying in the gutter. Once, it had worried me too. But I’d soon come to see that sort of loss as being part of the deal.

  Henry looked at a woman across at another table in the quiet back room. The commuters, the Principal Officers from Orpington and Sevenoaks, had had their dry sherries and left. The candle flames on the barrels were dead still in the air. She must have been a secretary from one of the Government offices nearby, getting on a little, with an older man who didn’t look like her husband or her boss. There was an intense awkwardness between them—as if they’d just started on something, or had just ended it.

  “I wish I could wake up one morning only knowing Irish. And just the name of a village near Galway. I’d like it all to stop. And start again.”

  “The Olive Grove Syndrome. The song of a man at forty,” I said. “You can’t stop it. And you’d be no good at anything else if you did. They’ve seen to that. You’ve got a job after all, a trade: how would you describe it?—to pretend, to cheat, only to go for the man when he’s down and so on. The dark side, like insects under a stone. The real world would kill you, if you ever got into it again. With its haphazard, petty deceits, its vague decencies—you’d be quite out of your depth. There’d be something wrong in it for you, things you wouldn’t follow at all. You’d feel like an innocent man in prison. When you accepted your language allowance for colloquial Arabic you accepted all the rest.”

  I was facetious since I didn’t really believe Henry was being serious. But he was, I suppose. He smiled at the girl, hopelessly.

  “It’s all a toytown. A lot of dour old men who can’t forget their youth and their good sense over Munich—who think they can liv
e it all over again by casting Nasser as another Hitler. They’re as stupid now as Chamberlain’s mob were then. One could resign.” And then he added, as if he’d already made the decision—but this may be only hindsight—“You should leave too.”

  Afterwards we dropped the subject and talked again about Egypt ten years before—about everything we’d done then, except the woman I’d married towards the end of my time there and who at that moment seemed as remote as it.

  When we left Henry didn’t have enough money to pay and he’d somehow mislaid his cheque-book—probably among the debris he’d thrown down on my desk—so I gave the barman, a friend of ours, the ten-piastre note as a sort of deposit. “Don’t worry, he’ll be back,” I said.

  *

  Anyway, when McCoy said Henry had gone I’d assumed he meant on another trip, and I said, “So soon—where to?”

  “No, I meant ‘disappeared’ not ‘gone’.” He underlined the difference like a schoolmaster, looking at me as if I’d been responsible for the inaccuracy.

  “He was to have reported on his whole Mid-East operation last Thursday. At the area committee. He never turned up.”

  I said nothing. I’d known Henry to be away for days on a drinking bout without too many ill effects; he’d always turned up again and I was sure that McCoy knew this too. He’d probably been the first to report him as a security risk for his drinking years before. But people didn’t listen to McCoy—not the sort of people who ran our section. He wasn’t one of them.

  McCoy was from Belfast, a Navy man and a Nonconformist who’d been a shipping movements officer in Port Said for part of his war. An abrupt, short-sighted fellow, he’d been taken off active duty—there had been one or two near collisions in the harbour or something—and had joined Middle East Intelligence. He was good at picking up languages—perhaps the missionary spirit of his creed hadn’t quite died in him—and he’d made his way up through the ranks in London after the war. It was one of his jobs to coordinate reports from the field for “processing” at “committee level”—his words for the endless, pointless, claustrophobic chatterings which went on all over our buiding—and he treated his informants, and their information, like a breach of Queen’s Regulations. He wasn’t at ease in matters of deceit. He didn’t like his position as a filter between the sordid and respectable and he looked at me now like a shopkeeper I’d not paid in full.