The Private Sector (A Peter Marlow spy thriller)

by Joseph Hone

  “Dear Peter.” And I was kissed again, while Henry poured out the gin and went into the kitchen for some ice. This time, I thought, there’s ice. In just a year we’d passed from awkwardness to respectability.

  “You seem happy.”

  “I couldn’t tell you. Didn’t Henry explain?”

  “Yes. That he was your ‘operator’. It all seems so childish.”

  “Perhaps.” And she sat down on the old chintz chaise-longue, head in hands, collapsing like a puppet, a sad doll. “Surely it’s better though? That we all know now. Now that you’re with us.”

  “Oh yes. That’s what Henry said. It’s all much better, now that I’m on ‘your side’. But you see I thought I was already. I didn’t know I had to go through a second initiation with you. And another with Crowther. And Usher. And Henry. It’s like that game—tugging children across the drawing room over a handkerchief at Christmas—what’s it called?—‘Nuts in May’. As childish as that. And not as fun. I thought I was part of the fun already.” I went over, drew the curtains back and looked out towards the Kasr el Nil bridge and the lights of one of Farouk’s old boats on the far shore which had been turned into a night club. “Not that I was given much choice in the matter—whether I played the game or not. You don’t mind my opening the window? I mean, you’re not expecting an air-raid or anything?”

  It was hotter with the window open. The day’s heat, rising from the streets, finding no escape through the dense furnace of air which lay above the city, fell back in one’s face, with a sour, rotten smell of dust and urine. Bridget had leant back against the end of the chaise-longue, hands clasped behind her head, her back towards the window. One side of the cotton house-coat had fallen away from her body on to the floor.

  “Take your coat off or something, for God’s sake. You’ll expire.”

  “You said that last year.” I turned and sat down at the dining room table and fiddled with the wooden corkscrew which had been neatly laid out between the two wine bottles. “Were you preparing for all this? The dinner and so on? Was it all arranged, as a sort of grand finale to our going to the Embassy and my being conscripted? Or would there have been two places laid and not three if things hadn’t gone off properly? And which of us, Henry or I, would have been left out? I mean, if they hadn’t liked the look of me, what then? How were you so sure there’d be three of us for dinner this evening, that I’d be here?”

  “Henry was sure.”

  “Were you?” I turned. Henry had come in from the kitchen.

  “Pretty certain. I told you. They need people here. Badly. Your credentials were impeccable and now let’s stop going on about it.”

  “What happens if I decide to go back to England?”

  “That’s up to you.” Henry squeezed a quartered lemon into his gin, then made one up for me.

  “Oh God.”

  He walked over and put the glass of gin and tonic very carefully on the table beside me like a doctor leaving medicine for a patient after the bad news. I drank half of it down, looking at Bridget over the rim of the glass, quite still on the sofa—fear, nervousness, in her face, love perhaps—as if she saw completely my predicament and had no idea for the moment how to deal with it.

  Then she came across and knelt in front of me, arms on my knees, hands in mine.

  “Peter, it was because of this, my work with Henry, Crowther and the rest of them, that I didn’t want to get involved with you in the first place. So that you thought me a sort of whore when we were first together. But with you, eventually, I told Henry I couldn’t go on, with not telling you. It was my idea that you go to see Crowther, that you become involved in all this—because that was the only way you could know about me. I couldn’t live with it, the idea of losing you.”

  “‘Losing me’—how? You’d have stopped your goings on with Crowther, with Henry, if I hadn’t been ‘acceptable’, wouldn’t you?”

  Henry started to open one of the wine bottles officiously behind us, the cork squeaking fiercely against the glass.

  “Of losing you, yes,” she went on hesitantly, ignoring my question, seeing no help from Henry. “Because you can’t stop in this business, whatever they say. There’s no getting out—if they don’t want you to get out. And they didn’t, with me. So it was losing you—or giving it all up, and losing my parents. Or getting you in—and its being all right.”

  “What sort of madmen are they? You mean they said ‘Square Marlow or else—’ Get me in on the deal or else get me out of your way? And if you did neither they’d blow you—let the Egyptians know you’d been involved with them?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s true,” Henry said, and he popped the cork and sniffed the top of the bottle. It was a French burgundy, rarely obtainable in those days, a Pommard. I wondered where she’d got it from. Henry, I suppose—or Bahaddin or the Greek auctioneer. I felt as if I’d crashed a bottle party, without a bottle.

  “I told you, the two of them have a completely free hand here. They can do what they please. They’re fanatics. They are madmen. That’s the danger. They mean what they say; they’d certainly shop Bridget—if they’d thought there was any danger in her being with you. But they haven’t, they took a liking to you. We’ve been lucky. Now for God’s sake realise the situation. It could have been quite hopeless—Usher could have said ‘get rid of him’—he didn’t.”

  Henry moved away to the window, waving the bottle gently in his hand.

  “Bridget, there’s no food. I forgot to pick it up. Let’s drink the wine and go out.”

  “Let’s finish the gin first.” Bridget got up, kissing me briefly again—as if these small repeated contacts might somehow convince me of her good intentions in the whole stupid matter—and went back to the sofa. We finished off our gins, vehemently, quickly, like strangers suddenly trying to be friends.

  “We can go to the boat,” Henry said hopefully. “There’s food there. We can dance.”

  “Bahaddin’ll be there. He usually is. Bahaddin.” Bridget repeated his name abruptly, almost with disgust. “He’s part of the whole thing as well. He’s with us. Henry was going to tell you.”

  Henry nodded his head sadly, as if embarrassed by the further complicity, this additional character in the charade.

  “Oh—what is he? ‘Active’ or ‘passive’? Or ‘Information Only’—or is he the gunmetal man, stalking the alleyways and embassies with a .38?”

  The whole thing had begun, faintly, to amuse me; Bridget and Henry’s seriousness—in minutes they had become dull and unhappy and I felt it was my fault, that I had broken a pleasant day and evening, wrecked the homecoming. I smiled and they looked at me hopefully—a well-disposed audience desperately hoping for relief, looking for a laugh in a bad comedy.

  “All right, it’s making us all so boring. Let’s forget about it for the moment. I’m sure you’re right, there’s nothing to it, Usher just wants me to give him a bit of gossip about the morale of the canal pilots, and I’m being obstructive, pedantic. Just I never missed the toy soldiers thing as a child. And I don’t miss it now. It all seems rather mindless to me.”

  *

  The farmers had settled down for the night underneath their corrugated paper huts against the river wall and their evening fires crackled with light all along the far pavement as we walked towards Kasr el Nil bridge. The smell of sesame, and beans cooking, and desert tinder drifted over to us, mixing with the terrible sweetness of jasmine which groups of Pyjama boys hawked around the hotel entrances, the great garlands looped around their arms and necks turning them into Michelin children.

  Since afternoon the taxis had redoubled their attack, charging to and fro along the corniche, picking up and depositing groups of chattering frenzied people bent on the same pursuit as ourselves. And above all the heat, rising from the darkness, embracing everything, like a huge steaming towel: a breathless, moist evening in which everything seemed just about to suffocate and then to survive, with an immense gasp, at the last momen
t: everything poised for the relief of a storm which one knew would never come. Ten o’clock, June 13, the Queen’s birthday.

  The boat, the Nefertiti—one of Farouk’s Nile steamers, a long graceful Edwardian affair—was moored on the far side of Kasr el Nil bridge near the main entrance of the Gezira Club. Its aft promenade deck had coloured lights along the rails and streaming down from the mast, and a small Italian orchestra was tuning up, plucking dissident strings, underneath the funnel.

  In what had been the Royal Lounge under the bridge there was another orchestra, a restaurant and a bar, and here we had a drink before going out for supper on the fore deck. It was early and hardly crowded. I recognized Farid, the manager of the boat, with a party of friends at a large table outside near the rail. Some of his guests hadn’t turned up, there were empty spaces here and there, but he was in high good humour—jumping up and down, toasting and being toasted, a little scut of a man, bald, with a half rim of hair going from ear to ear round the back of his head. It was his birthday too, apparently. Giant pitch-black Nubian waiters in blues and golds, like coloured pictures from a child’s Bible, padded aloofly round their table, pouring out whiskies and dumping ice from great silver bowls, strangers to this tribal feast.

  “Bahaddin! We thought you’d come. How are you?”

  Bridget was the first to see him as he ambled up to the bar in a crisp white jacket, slacks, frilly Italian dress shirt and a bow tie. In the light of her earlier bored attitude to the possibility of his being on the boat that evening she seemed unaccountably pleased by his arrival.

  “Good evening.” He kissed her hand, bending down much lower than necessary, more than usually punctilious in these gracious formalities which he so enjoyed.

  “What are you doing? Have dinner with us.”

  Perhaps it was just the day’s drinking that gave such extraordinary warmth to Bridget’s invitation.

  “I’m very sorry—I’m with Farid and his party. I wish it were otherwise.” Still holding her hand they looked at each other for a moment with an awkward knowingness, like two people in a wedding photograph, before he turned away.

  “How are you, Henry?—and don’t ask me about my ‘O’ levels. I’ve given them up for the summer. I’ll try again next year, if you’re still around to help me.”

  And he laughed easily, as if these exams were an old joke between them, worn thin with use, a cover for quite a different pursuit, as I now knew them to be.

  “What, you didn’t get them then?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid I didn’t sit for them, sir.” And he took out some money and began to play with it on the counter, looking at me curiously, and then at Henry behind me.

  “Don’t go on calling me ‘sir’, Bahaddin. I’m not a schoolmaster any more.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I had been wondering how things were with you—about work. I’m sure I could help you out—” And he added, as if the fact were proof against all mortal difficulties: “My father is coming over from Aden next week …”

  He looked at me with genuine concern, running what I now saw to be a Maria Theresa dollar between the fingers of one hand like a conjurer.

  “It’s all right, Bahaddin. We’re getting Peter a job. He’s with us now,” Henry broke in quietly. “We’re all together. Are you going to buy us a drink?”

  “I won’t congratulate you—I won’t take your hand, too obvious—but I’m very glad. Most happy.”

  And he was. Like everything he did or said, he meant it. He nodded his large head slowly at me several times, like an old cricket coach from the boundary, determined to offer some acknowledgement of my honour, albeit clandestinely. He was a person, I realized afterwards, with a far too highly developed sense of the proprieties for the job in hand.

  “Yes—a drink. By all means,” he continued. “A quiet celebration, a decent drink, before I have to fulfil my other objectives.”

  “Obligations, Bahaddin, not objectives,” Henry said. And Bahaddin ordered champagne from Mustafa, the squat Sudanese barman.

  We lifted the tall tulip-like glasses—which Mustafa said he’d rescued from Farouk’s pantry, keeping them for just such an occasion as this—and drank a minute toast to each other. From a distance, if anyone had been interested, our little group must have appeared suspiciously subdued. I was beginning to feel drunk and didn’t like the taste; the champagne fizzed in my mouth, reanimating all the other tastes of the day, with a stale nausea. Bahaddin drained his glass.

  “Well, I mustn’t stay—but very good wishes.”

  He bowed again, picked up his cigarette case and gold Dunhill and made off, pushing his way delicately among the crowd of people who were rapidly filling up the room.

  “Everyone’s pleased. It’s as if I’d just got engaged—though I can’t remember anything like this when I was …”

  “Let’s not talk about it here.”

  “Come on, Peter. Dance with me—before you fall off the stool. Get some air.”

  “I’ll join you.” Henry went off towards the lavatory. Bahaddin meanwhile had joined Farid’s party amid scenes and shouts of great welcome. Their long table faced over the small brightly lit square in the centre of the foredeck where couples were trying vainly to keep up with the measure of a new Italian number. The orchestra, a recent import from Milan, and perhaps unaccustomed as yet to the fiery Egyptian nights, were themselves showing signs of fatigue in sustaining the fast rhythm, and had it not been for the sudden and unexpected arrival of Bahaddin on the floor they would, I’m sure, have quickly changed to something slower in tempo. As it was they were forced to keep up the murderous pace for a good five minutes more, going full blast, as Bahaddin and a woman careered over the boards in a frenzied, kick-stepping dance, half Charleston, half twist, clapping their hands, separating, coming together again and even squirming around each other’s backs, arms linked overhead, their hips and feet retaining the furious beat of the music.

  I’d not seen the woman before. She must have arrived by the front gangway, one of several latecomers to Farid’s party. Perhaps she was Bahaddin’s new girl or something and yet, besides the interest which Farid, like everyone else, was taking in this wild dance—which had really become an act, clearing most of the other dancers off the small floor—there was as well in his wrinkled urbane face a distinct measure of distaste as he watched their antics; Farid looked at the woman as if she, as well as her dancing, were out of place. There was no good-humoured understanding in his consideration of the spectacle—an attitude he might well have taken, as he had before, in the high spirits of his birthday guests; she might have been an unpleasant stranger to him and I thought simply, remembering Farid’s real proclivities in sexual matters and Bahaddin’s good looks, “He’s jealous of her. She’s snapped up Bahaddin before he’d got his hand in. He’s the angry suitor. He shouldn’t have asked her.”

  The woman—girl really, she hardly looked twenty—could have been Italian or Greek, not Egyptian, with her long, sharply triangular features and dark hair parted down the middle; a classic strangely formal face, childlike and unmarked, bland and empty in a way, like a photograph taken before first communion or a Renaissance virgin in the Uffizi. And yet it was she who led the dance, encouraging Bahaddin to ever greater flights, always one step ahead of him.

  Henry had joined us and we sat round the table we’d booked on the opposite side of the deck to Farid’s party, next to the river wall.

  “Who is she?”

  “No idea. Not one of Farid’s friends. He’d never risk inviting someone so attractive. One of the girls with the orchestra perhaps. She’s quite something.”

  People had come out of the bar and had crowded round the floor, several deep, thinking the cabaret had started early, so that we had to stand up to see the last tumultuous flourish of the dance. Their hands linked across the floor together, the girl was spinning Bahaddin round in circles like a weight at the end of a piece of string—his face quite without expression, his body so relaxed, inert
, that its animation seemed due to centrifugal force alone and not to any muscular process. The music finally exhausted itself in a long crescendo of chords and drums. But the two figures spun on in silence afterwards, only gradually losing momentum, unwilling to release themselves from what appeared now as an intensely private affair, not connected with the music or the place. At last they stopped, faced each other for a moment in surprise, like strangers, standing quite still—and then, taking no account of the applause which broke over the deck, they disappeared among the press of people on the far side of the floor.

  “What on earth got into Bahaddin? Was he drunk? He didn’t look it,” Bridget asked and the people drifted away and the band mopped their faces, looking pleased and super-cilious as if they, and not the girl, had been the reason for this outburst of enthusiasm.

  “Who is she?” someone asked at the next table.

  We could see Farid’s party now but she wasn’t there. Bahaddin had his back towards us and was sitting next to an elderly European lady who seemed to be congratulating or berating him without receiving the smallest flicker of a response.

  The orchestra broke into a ragged version of “Happy Birthday” and everyone at Farid’s table stood up, glasses in hand, and toasted the beaming figure at the end, now fully restored in his traditional self-satisfied humour. They mouthed the ridiculous words with embarrassment, for they hardly knew them, so that the old lady had to lead the song, like a matron at Sunday school. I supposed that Farid had once had some service of her—as an entrée to a sexual opportunity among the English community in the old days perhaps—and that thus, unwittingly, she had been numbered among his guests this evening. And I was wondering about this when I saw her trying to manhandle Bahaddin to his feet.

  For everyone had stood up except Bahaddin.

  Instead, with the old lady’s prodding, he fell across the table like a happy drunk. And because we all thought this to be the case, that drink and exhaustion had taken him, and seeing the waiters help him indoors, we thought nothing of it until fifteen minutes later.