The Private Sector (A Peter Marlow spy thriller)

by Joseph Hone

  *

  We had lunch on the terrace of what must have been a sort of senior security men’s dining club, under a parasol, looking over the river. There were grilled steaks of Nile perch to start with and a bottle of white Ptolémées on ice.

  “From the old Roman vineyards outside Alex. Have you been there? A Greek gentleman—there he is, Gianaclis, on the bottle. I used to know the family—he started it up again in the last century. I rather like it. In fact, unlike some of my colleagues, I’ve never doubted the civilizing influences of all the many cultures who’ve found a place in this country over the centuries. Though I must admit I never expected to see the Irish as part of that great tradition. Your health.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to take the job you’ve been offered, Mr. Marlow. That’s all. If you’ve been in any doubt about it let me tell you it would be the best course open to you—for you and your wife. And your friend Mr. Edwards. And I want you to tell us all about it.”

  “I thought you knew all about their operation here. You seem to.”

  “In Egypt, yes. But I’m sure you won’t be spending all your life here. If you do well, and I think I can arrange things so that you will, you’ll be promoted, sent back to London, where some of the real news about the Middle East comes from. We’d like to know about that. Obviously. Does the whole thing shock you? I mean, you don’t seem to have been very enthusiastic about working for Usher and you may not be for us either.”

  “I don’t think I have much choice—from either of you.”

  “On the contrary. You do have a choice. You could go and tell Usher what’s happened and he’d have to pull you all out of here—including himself. We could put that to some advantage. We could make something of that.”

  “You could round us all up and give us thirty years apiece too, couldn’t you? Or shoot us. Wouldn’t that be even better?”

  “Yes, we could do that. If we had to, if it were forced upon us. But it’s a much better idea, isn’t it, now that we know about you all, so that your outfit is harmless to us anyway, to turn the screw the other way, to make it a long-term operation, find out how your people manage things at the centre, in London, as I was saying.”

  “Why me? Why didn’t you go for Crowther? Or Edwards? You could have got a lot more from them.”

  “We wouldn’t.”

  The Colonel eased his cravat, ventilating his body against the heat, and looked out over the river. He drained his glass with an expression of kindly patience.

  “You’re a beginner, not marked yet. Not trained. The others would have shut up shop at once, wouldn’t have given a thing away. They’d have had their thirty years rather than let out a squeak. And it would hardly have done to bring your wife into the matter.” He smiled, not facetiously, but in a way that made me think he meant this. “But really, what I’m getting at is if you thought it worth your while working for Usher—then why not us? Apart from the accident of your birth you’ve no special connections with Britain. Just the opposite in fact, I’d have thought—being Irish. You should ask yourself again—why work for Usher, why consider him and not us? What are you having next? There’s a set lunch or would you like to have something from the à la carte? There’s not a great deal, I’m afraid. Perhaps a salad and a steak. And some of Gianaclis’s Red? The Omar Khayyam. That’s rather good too.”

  He rang a bell for the waiter who didn’t recommend the steak. We had Kebab Semiramis instead: the pieces of lamb and red pepper cold, on a skewer, in a marinade of oil and lemon; and Gianaclis’s Red.

  “Personally I’ve always thought it madness to go round threatening people—prison sentences, shootings and so on—unless you have to. Think about it, be rational. What we’d want from you would be no more than Mr. Usher wants of you. And if you can in any way justify his needs in the matter above ours I’d be pleased to hear how you do it.”

  “I can’t. I don’t see any justification for either point of view. And that’s the trouble surely—to do this sort of work properly you have to believe in it. And I don’t. I prefer looking out over the river, being here, in the world, drinking the wine. I’ve never taken to those hard-bitten frontiers of right and wrong—in nationalisms or private affairs; a sort of tabula rasa of belief, I’m afraid. I came too late to see countries in a pecking order, one above the other, one against the other, too late to see people as toy soldiers. I never played that game.”

  I looked at the Colonel’s striped cravat, like a regimental tie, and thought: he has. And he’s tired of it in some way; the slacks and the chatter about wine; toy soldiers and some army’s colours; they suited him once, they were part of an obsession—but not any more.

  I felt that I had talked to him in the way I had because some great disenchantment in his character had allowed it, encouraged it even; because he secretly agreed with me. There was none of Crowther’s cunning or Usher’s flamboyant theatricality in the Colonel. And I felt suddenly that Egypt might well be my home, as Bridget was my wife, and that between the two of them perhaps, if anywhere, lay the kernel of the only sort of belief I was capable of. I was beginning to like Colonel Hamdy.

  “Yes, perhaps you’re right,” he said. “Toy soldiers. A younger generation, fed up with the mess; the kind of world we’ve left you with. I can see all that. You’re quite right to want no part of it, to get away from something that we’re trapped in. But you see—I can’t escape it—”

  “—Then what are we worrying about? You agree with me. I’m not your man.”

  “I said I could see your point of view, Mr. Marlow; not that I could agree with it. That’s always the tragedy, isn’t it? Seeing but not believing, not being able to. You see, as far as we’re concerned in Egyptian security you are one of Usher’s people. There’s no going back on that. I may believe otherwise, in fact I do, but the others never will. And that being so the rest follows. What I said earlier.”

  “That I work for both of you?”

  “One without the other wouldn’t be much use to us.”

  “And if not?”

  “I’d prefer not to go over it all again. Believe me, I really don’t choose to use threats. I’d hoped to appeal to your logic, to suggest to you where your real interests might lie—and I still do: I want you to see the thing in reason. And I think you will. But the real point I was going to make before you interrupted was that you’re trapped, just as much as I am. With the toy soldiers. You’re completely compromised. And that wasn’t us, remember. That was Usher, Crowther, your friend Edwards. Your wife even. You were compromised by your friends, Mr. Marlow; you became part of their circle. They had no alternative but to include you in their real affairs. Nor have I.”

  12

  We met that afternoon at Groppi’s and had lemon ices on the terrace. It was July and the heat had become unbearable.

  “Did you have lunch?”

  “A sandwich.”

  “Well, tell me all about it. What did they say to you?”

  “Nothing much. Routine. They don’t have anything on us.”

  I was lying to her, at last. I knew something which she didn’t. But I felt no sense of responsibility, of doing the right thing, the only thing; for her good and Henry’s. The Colonel’s secrets ran about in my mind, oppressive, inescapable, like the weather—an almost physical presence, I thought, which anyone could have recognized if they’d looked at me, like a tic or a bad haircut.

  Bridget sat there easily on the little garden stool, the line of her body arched over the table, elbows on her knees, hands clasped around her face; there was an air of comfort and trust about her. She was like a tired child looking into the fire waiting for a story.

  I thought: I could tell her now. Tell her all about the Colonel: get it over with. Aren’t we more important than their games? Even than her parents, even Henry … Couldn’t we accept the consequences, ride it out together?

  The consequences. Surely, if it were ever discovered by Usher or Crowther, t
here could only be one consequence in working for “both sides”. They didn’t retire people in the middle. They would have something quite different in store: like burying their mistakes. A house in Wimbledon or a dacha in the Moscow suburbs? For the lucky ones, perhaps, yes. For the really valuable men. I wasn’t one of them. I was simply an inconvenience—unmarked, untrained; involved simply of necessity, through the accident of friendship, as the Colonel had said. I certainly wouldn’t be missed. For Crowher it might even be a pleasure. He wouldn’t hesitate in getting me out of the way if he thought I’d been near Colonel Hamdy. And Bridget was one line of communication to him.

  Bridget was a tired child that one couldn’t trust. Children told stories out of school. And Henry was no use either. For there was another Henry, not just the friend whom I was protecting by keeping silent. There was the Henry who’d known Bridget long before I had, whose past with her—days and nights together, things said and done—was still a mystery to me because I’d left it that way. There had been arrangements between them; and there still were. He was her operator after all. They had their secrets too, I felt, which I wasn’t to know simply by being in their “circle”. It was simple enough: neither of them was to be trusted.

  And I thought with clarity, the idea standing out sharply as none other did: this is what it’s really like. The game. This is how it touches you—in everything, each detail of life, not just the job itself which by comparison I could see becoming a source of release, as something quite prosaic. I had come into a narrow world suddenly, made up of secrets and deceits, traversed by long and careful lies, defended everywhere against trust. And I would have to remember this each time I said anything or looked at anyone in the future. I would be reminded of it everywhere, as an endlessly repeated feeling of nausea.

  This was what stretched in front of me: a disability—as if I’d emerged from the room in the Semiramis, as from a car crash, without a leg and a crutch for the rest of my life.

  Bridget lit one of my cigarettes.

  I said, “Let’s have a drink,” needing it now in a way I’d not done before.

  “What did they ask you? Who did you see?”

  She appeared so calm.

  “Just my connections with Bahaddin. The school and so on. I told them the truth—as we agreed. That we went on to the Club, that Henry joined us there.”

  She drew deeply on the cigarette, sipped the whisky the waiter had brought us and said hopefully, with relief, as if she too felt that our life was beginning all over again, but in a happy way: “The thing now, surely, is to continue as if nothing had happened. Get the job in Suez. Apart from Crowther—it would be something for you to do. Some work.”

  “Why do you suppose I would get work there? I’ve been thrown out of one ex-British school here already.”

  But I knew there would be no trouble. When I’d put the same point to the Colonel he’d smiled and said it would be the easiest thing in the world; they actually needed an English teacher in Suez, apart from needing a double agent there as well. It was something which he’d hardly have to “fix” at all. Once I’d made my decision I was to apply to the Ministry of Education in the ordinary way. The application would go straight through, the place would be kept open for me.

  “You could try it, go and see the Ministry. We could go to Suez now in any case. There’s a new resort down the Red Sea. Underwater fishing. Couldn’t we do that—and get out of here?”

  “Money?”

  “We’ve got it. I got it this morning, through the Council library; that’s the way we’re keeping in touch now, through books, I’ll tell you about it later. It’s your money, from Crowther. And I’m due two weeks’ leave from the office. We could leave the place altogether …”

  She was happy, enthusiastic. It seemed a sensible change, a move from the unbearable city that Cairo had become, something which, in ordinary life, we would probably have done in any case: a few weeks by the sea, lying in the sun, and looking at the fish. In fact it was a cliché, perfectly translated into action—it was the point of no return. Once on the road to Suez I was in Crowther’s hands, the Colonel’s. And Bridget’s. They came together in a package; the professional, the personal, obligations. The alternative was an exit visa. Or a boat coming through the canal. And both were as unlikely a means of escape as a trip on foot across the Sahara … It hardly mattered now. I would have to work for them. The Colonel had made that decision. But again, the feeling swept over me, one had to pretend; if one spoke at all one had to lie; that was the other side of the coin, the second secret of survival: only pretend.

  And I thought, we blame life for our disillusions whereas much more it’s the trespass we make away from it that sends us over the precipice.

  13

  No one has written a true book about happiness, so they say. But that fortnight was happy. So perhaps it alone, among the incidents of this story, may not bear description.

  We lay on the beach under a long canvas awning that had been put up over the sand and we swam with goggles over the coral that sloped gently out to sea, and among the coloured sea plants and strange fish. At night we slept in a small wooden cabin at the end of the line, naked in the dry air of that burnished marine sandscape. The cabin was like a cell; just a chair, a medicine cupboard with a mirror and two army camp beds which we strapped together with an extra sheet that Bridget had weedled out of the manager. The resort had only just opened and apart from the goggles had no other underwater facilities. None the less it was full up and the other guests never lost an opportunity of telling us how unlucky we’d been in getting one of the end cabins that hadn’t been “properly finished”. We didn’t listen. We were living again in the present, after so much that had been unreal; living in that uncomplicated adventure of the moment, caught for once in the fabric of life where we saw or felt nothing except with the eyes and heart. We looked at each other again; and it was that regard which played by far the biggest part in our loving each other then: her face, moved into so many patterns by her thoughts—thoughts, I know now, she could not admit and others she was barely conscious of—which rose up, like the tide filling the indentations of a strand, flooding her face with desire, humility, sadness—with all that she really felt, so that her real words, when she spoke, seemed no more than apologetic, unnecessary captions to a series of unique photographs.

  We invent passion: so that it can become a thing in itself, without past or future. It has to be invented. We made love then, we lived, so fluently that I can only see that passion as a quite separate creation, as something which had nothing to do with our real selves, and which died when those selves intruded and demanded the same accents.

  I had spoken to her one day about our staying on in Egypt, not going back to England, of my making a career there in some way. And she had said doubtfully, “You mustn’t cut off the approaches, your approaches, to yourself. This country won’t always satisfy you.”

  “Us, I meant. Won’t it satisfy us? Don’t you have to live here?”

  “How can I tell anything now? What should I say?”

  “Why are you so doubtful?”

  “I’m not.”

  But she was.

  On our last day she sent a postcard to Henry.

  “What’s the point?” I asked. “We’ll be seeing him when we get back to Cairo. Or you will anyway.” And she said seriously, “How do you know?”

  *

  In the middle of September we went to Suez. The school was a tiny yellow building with a corrugated iron roof at the other end of the main street from the Bel Air Hotel where we lived. It sat right on the edge of the desert so that on coming into the town from the Cairo road it loomed up before the other buildings of the place came into sight like a small fort, an abandoned outpost from Beau Geste, with a wall round it, a tall flagpost in the concrete yard at the back and a lifeless flag.

  Mohammed Fawzi ran the place. “Fawzi Esquire” as he Jiked to be addressed. I imagine he considered the suffix as an impor
tant Anglo-Saxon title, resting somewhere between plain Mister and being a Lord, so that he became known to us all as “Esquire”.

  There were two other teachers there who, like me, had been sent down from Cairo, Cassis and Helmi, and the four of us spent most evenings together, sampling the few pleasures of the shoddy little town; the second show at the Regal Cinema, cards, drinks at the Refinery Club outside Suez, or the French Club at Port Tewfik, and odd trips to the Casino, a strange little night club five miles up in the Attaka hills to the south. At other times we had supper with Cassis and Helmi looking out over the Red Sea from rooms they had taken high above the oily waterway.

  “‘Neither the Arabian quarter, with its seven mosques and unimportant bazaar, nor the European quarter, which contains several buildings and warehouses of considerable size, presents any attraction.’” I read them the passage out from an old Baedeker I had brought with me one evening.

  “It’s not changed much, has it?”

  And Cassis, who taught English, had said, “But it has a Biblical importance, or perhaps,” and he looked at Helmi who taught geography, “perhaps one would put it better by saying that the place has a certain geophysical interest.”

  “Oh, yes.” Helmi took the allusion confidently and more bluntly. “If you stepped from a boat out there, way out there, you would only be above your knees.” And he went on to explain the Bible trip, how the Israelites had crossed over the Red Sea because they knew the line of sand bars which ran right across the neck of the bay and how the wicked Egyptians, who didn’t know the route, had been swallowed up. Helmi was a Copt.

  “Before they made the canal you could walk right across the bay—if you knew the sands. They were very various. Even now you can walk right up to the canal channel. And that’s what happened. The first group knew their way across. And the others didn’t. Or got lost in a sandstorm maybe, that often happens here. Quite suddenly. Phut! Whizz. Finish!” Helmi moved his arms in circles vigorously about his eyes. “You see nothing and the boat can upset Here, take a look through these glasses. You can just see where the sand bank ends and the channel begins.”