The Private Sector (A Peter Marlow spy thriller)

by Joseph Hone

  I looked through the binoculars, scanning the bay from the headland at Port Tewfik right down to the red and violet haze which hung over the horizon far down the gulf. Twenty or thirty ships lay at anchor in the roads, waiting to go up the canal in the night convoy. And to the right, along the coast, in the shadow of the hills, two Russian tankers were berthed at the refinery jetty. I could even make out their names. If that was the sort of information Crowther really wanted, getting it didn’t appear too difficult.

  And in due course I was able to inform Henry of these shipping movements, the frequency of buses and trains to Cairo, the name of the secretary of the Greek Club and the time of the first house at the Regal on Sundays. Henry reported that he was perfectly satisfied and Bridget agreed that Crowther seemed even more of a fool than I’d taken him for.

  My relations with Colonel Hamdy were equally uneventful and satisfactory. I passed on to him exactly what I gave Henry for Crowther. And every so often I’d get a message in return: “Very glad to receive your good news. Look forward to meeting again.” This correspondence was conducted, whenever we came to Cairo for week-ends, through Rosie, the Greek telephonist at the Semiramis Hotel, and through the receptionist at the same establishment. I used the letter rack behind his desk, dropping an envelope in the compartment marked “H” for Hamdy on my way to the gents while the Colonel left his messages with Rosie; which I later picked up from the large assortment of similar billets-doux on blue paper which were kept for customers on a board outside her booth. A great many people used the hotel in this way, as both post office and telephonic poste restante, the official channels in Egypt for such communications being notoriously uncertain.

  14

  But I stopped working for the Colonel, as I did for Crowther and Usher, for by the end of the spring term I’d stopped living with Bridget, had left Egypt and returned to London.

  Our marriage, like the events consequent on our first meeting, went through appetite, satisfaction, farce and enmity; it ran a fixed course for the rocks, the two of us struggling gamely at the wheel to keep it steady. And soon enough we had reached that point where words became as useless and unnecessary as they’d been in the times when we were most at ease and happy. We were genuinely incompatible. It was a classic journey.

  Bridget resigned herself to the fact that whatever I might become, or might be “underneath”—in more favourable circumstances—I was not the person she thought I was, expected me to be. She had been mistaken. I was not the “right” person, and there would be therefore, at some future date—she didn’t know when, for she would not precipitate it—an end to it all. Meanwhile she would close up shop.

  I, on the other hand, seeing her running, hiding in this way, the words drying up like a guilty witness, dropped the role of lover and assumed that of detective. I became a genuine agent—proficient, ruthless, imaginative—in a way I never did with Usher or afterwards with Williams. A St. George in dark glasses and shoulder holster. The battle was on: I would save love.

  Why we play this game, to which we lend a passion we never quite give to loving, I don’t know; unless it be just one more of the unconscious steps we make towards our real ambition, evidence of our secret craving, which is to end love, to be released from it.

  Bridget would be disappointed, of course, in having to assume again that truth which is implicit in all affairs—except the one shared with the “right” person—that love does not last. But to offset this there would be room for congratulation: she would have faced this demise with me—and survived; and she would have learnt something for next time, for the next person. And there would be that, wouldn’t there?—another time, someone else; in a bar or at a party, the friend of a friend. Above all she would be free again. Once more she could pick and choose from all the huge promise of the future; the charm of the unexpected, so long withheld, would once again be lying in wait for her—the unknown passions she would embrace, which already existed in the form of someone who even now was rising towards her, along the lines of destiny, to that future point where their paths would cross.

  It was a girls’ story, something from a popular magazine. I thought Bridget was like that—though not at heart; I was the literate man who would bring her to better reading, wreck her conventional assumptions, explain a serious love in a long book.

  Neither view was real. I was the agent running to the crime, the man from the gutter tabloid on to a good story, forcing the pace, getting a foot inside the door, flourishing the cards of desire. And it cannot have surprised Bridget; it was quite in keeping with the form these protracted endings take. It was natural that I should become the inquisitor, pondering the clues of a vanished emotion, marshalling the evidence, with which, when I knew everything else had failed, I would indict and slander her, so that we should both part satisfied, that is as enemies, happy in the knowledge that all the proprieties had been observed. It was natural, because only in being arraigned and accused in this way could she rise guiltless and clear above the sordid argument I had reduced our association to.

  It ended. A simple failure of the imagination. I came to inhabit the cliché: I couldn’t accept another man’s future with her, someone unknown, the stranger who would climb on my shoulders into the light, smiling, after a strong gin and a romp, appreciating the river view; the man who would replace me in those empty afternoons when there was nothing to do except the one thing we had done so well. I shouldn’t have worried about strangers; I knew the men well enough at the time, and came to know them even better. In other circumstances I should never have charged Bridget with infidelity. Fidelity was really her strong point.

  The three of us had a drink in the Continental the day I left to get my plane to London, Henry with us, as I thought, in the guise of a friendly receiver for a bankrupt. It was early summer, with the usual warnings of savage heat to come—the crowded first class carriages to Alex, the flocks of shimmering cars on their way out over the bridge through Dokki to the desert road, while those who remained in town became animals, searching out intuitively the darkest corners, the deepest shade, emerging only at nightfall to feed and ravage. We had Zibib and talked about the weather; polite inconsequential chatter. We left each other as perfect strangers.

  Henry had said he would get Usher to recommend me for a job with Mid-East Intelligence in London, something quiet, “Information Only”. I told him not to bother, that I was thinking of something else altogether. “Besides,” I’d said, “you don’t know about it, but I met someone, a Colonel Hamdy …” And I told him what had happened six months before. He laughed.

  “Hamdy? Military Intelligence? As long as it wasn’t the Political Intelligence, they’re more serious. But Hamdy, he’s doing that all the time. It’s happened to most of us out here at one time or another—happens to almost everyone in this business; subversion, blackmail, infiltration—we played a game with each other out here, his set-up against ours. I shouldn’t worry about that.”

  I didn’t. I never mentioned the fact when Williams first interviewed me. But of course I joined headquarters establishment in London before the rot set in, when there were still things to hide, secrets to betray, and little or no screening. I got in just before the vets arrived, before the doors were finally bolted on the deserted stables.

  Why? Why did I bother with a pursuit that had already wrecked one good part of my life? In those weeks in Cairo I had acquired a taste for conspiracy, and deceit, almost a craving, a loyalty towards betrayal. This ridiculous sense of vengeance didn’t last but it was enough to carry me to Holborn, to make me almost a professional in a trade I had scorned before. One speaks of “turning” a man in our line of country—turning him into a double through psychological or physical pressure; of making him deny his own “side”. But the expression is misleading in that context; one is “turned” in this way from the very beginning, through some reverse or imagined slight, or some long-nurtured sense of injustice; it can start in childhood, or later, through a childish resp
onse; the seed blooms in secrecy that is the nature of the business, doing much ill; one is “turned” only from the business of sensible life.

  BOOK THREE

  LONDON AND CAIRO, MAY 1967

  1

  Williams was talking to Marcus, his deputy and head of the new security bureau within the section. Marcus, though only six months started on his career as ferret in Mid-East Intelligence, already had a nickname throughout the department—“The Grip”, the one who didn’t let go. They were in Williams’s small office at the back of the tall building in Holborn, which he preferred to his quarters at the front, looking over the courtyard and the huge Hepworth abstract which he couldn’t abide. Contemporary sculpture sent him into a fury, ever since he’d first gazed at Reg Butler’s “Unknown Political Prisoner” in the Tate.

  “Our only problem is that we don’t know—do we?—if Edwards and Marlow know. We don’t know the real nature of our “agreement” with them. Still, it won’t much matter. That’s the beauty of the plan.

  Williams took up the file which lay in front of him and ran his fingers gently over the red cardboard folder as if there’d been dust on it—the file marked “MOUSE”.

  Williams had never been one for code names; it had been Marcus’s idea. He was new to the business. If he wanted it that way—why not?

  Williams put the file away in his safe, got up and walked over to the hatstand where he fingered his hat and coat absent-mindedly for a moment, looking out of the window towards the glimpse of St. Paul’s between the tall white buildings which threw back the early May sunset in a blaze of light. He turned away from the vision with bored resignation.

  “I suppose I shall have to put in an appearance at the liaison meeting downstairs. The Americans would take it badly if I didn’t. The usual lot this time, are they? Dutton and Elder—the ‘callous gentlemen’. They’re so keen on protocol. Like we used to be. Care to drop by with me, Marcus?”

  The two men left the eighth-floor office. The lifts were busy so they walked down the stairs to the liaison annexe three floors below.

  “I never asked you, Marcus—why ‘Mouse’? Why that for the code name? The usual connotations—‘cat and mouse’?”

  “Partly. It’s the poem by Burns.” And Marcus recited a verse as they moved through the dusty shafts of sunlight from the stair windows between the floors, his dull, classless accent massacring the original lines:

  “Wee, sleekit, cowrin, timirous beastie,

  O, what a panic’s in thy breastie,

  Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

  Wi’ bickering brattle!..”

  The tread of their feet echoed down the vault of the stairwell, the slow irregular smack of leather on concrete, like a horse dragging along a road at the end of the day.

  “Yes, I know. I’m not quite sure I see the point, though.”

  “Edwards is the mouse, isn’t he? It’s obvious, isn’t it? When you come to look at the plan. Because he doesn’t see it. He can’t.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course. I wouldn’t have thought if it. The title, I mean.”

  Williams suddenly remembered the Russia doll his mother had given him to play with as a child—the brightly coloured barrel-like figures all with the same frozen expression, one inside the other, and another inside that, getting smaller and smaller. And he remembered the feeling of despair that had come over him whenever he played with the toy, the fearful idea that real children, too, went on for ever, one inside the other, in the body of their mother, for he had been an only child at the time: the knowledge, which must have been born in him then, of the endless ramifications of deceit, the tricks which lay up every sleeve; the voices beyond the nursery at the end of the landing, the doctor’s voice, the nurse’s, someone else’s—his mother perhaps, a shout of pain, and the screaming infant; the feeling that you could never be sure of anything, returned to him now for an instant before he heard the bland accommodating drawl of Dutton speaking to McCoy at the entrance to the liaison annexe. And his cold memories of the past were washed away in a tide of even stronger resentment.

  2

  The United Arab Airlines Comet had stopped at Munich on its way to Cairo and for the first time in years Edwards felt near panic when he was in a position to reflect it.

  He didn’t mind that Williams might now know that he was a double—or that perhaps he had known for a long time; that could have been so and he would have survived, as long as his account had shown a profit and he’d seen to that, he knew it had. What worried him now—as it had since he’d first been asked to go on this mission by Williams a week earlier—was his complete uncertainty about the purpose of the plan; it didn’t add up. It might make sense to someone who’d never been to the Middle East, but that person wasn’t Williams; he knew the situation there backwards. The man in Cairo would never look at the plan, Edwards knew his background and his real inclinations fairly well—Mohammed Yunis, mildly “left-wing” and secretary of the only legal party in Egypt, the Arab Socialist Union, “political rival to the President” as Williams had naïvely described him at one of their meetings over the plan together. That didn’t mean much in Egypt these days; every putative Marxist there, both in or out of jail, saw himself as a potential rival to Nasser—just as most of the leaders of the right-wing Moslem Brotherhood did, not to mention some of the younger army officers. Nasser himself stood firmly in the middle of these warring idealogies, supported fervently by the great public who cared little for alternatives; they never had—the army of bureaucrats and farmers, ninety-five per cent of the population, who saw nothing beyond their next pay chit or weevils in the cotton crop. Political rivals, in these circumstances, were a drug on the market in Egypt. They didn’t have a chance and the idea that Yunis, helped by Britain and America, might stir the country to a new revolution and overthrow the President seemed impossible in the first place and in no sense an advantage to the West, if it happened, in the second. And anyway, he thought, Yunis was so much the last man in Egypt to get himself involved in this sort of thing: Yunis had once harboured vaguely Marxist ideas it was true, but he was a very conservative socialist now. He had come to an age and position in life where he could personally reap the benefits of the first Egyptian revolution and the idea of creating a second, Edwards thought, couldn’t have been further from his mind.

  The plan was so palpably unrealistic that Edwards not only saw a trick in it but saw as well that he was meant to see this in it, which was something quite different, quite new in the history of his relations with Williams who until now had always given him definite, realizable aims—operations where success or failure could be accounted for as meticulously as figures in a ledger.

  If only he could have approached Williams as the others in his section did, the ones who genuinely worked for him, he thought, how easy it would have been to say to him, look, this won’t work and this is why … And he longed for that sort of trust, knowing it was the one step he could never take, the step which broke the gentlemen’s agreement he had with Williams—broke the rules which governed the game and which for so long had ensured his survival as a player on both sides of it. In his position he could never query William’s directions, alternative suggestions from him could only be taken as evidence of bad faith, of the wrong kind of double dealing, favouring one side more than the other; one had to go through with the instructions, to the letter, and he always had.

  But now, with this plan—here was an operation that could never show a profit or a loss—to anyone—for it could never succeed. And the logic then was inescapable: he was being dropped. He was a tight-rope walker who went to and fro between the poles, and there was trust at either end as long as he managed the feat, as he always had. And now, here was Williams at one end shaking the wire vigorously, knowing that he could do nothing but try and weather the storm, that he couldn’t move to safety in one direction or the other. And that was the only logic of it all—that he had to fall.

  But why?

  He decided
to stay on the plane during the half-hour stop at Munich, noticing the sharp east wind which blew the mechanics’ overalls into vicious flapping shapes about their legs. He knew the airport anyway; there was nothing to be got out of stretching one’s legs, or even a café-crême and a cognac with the weary commercial travellers at the horseshoe bar. He’d done it so many times before. Until he thought suddenly, ashamed at his fear, that it wasn’t the cold wind that kept him in his seat, but the idea of something lurking for him outside: someone behind the swinging glass doors of the terminal building, a car waiting for him on the tarmac, a marked transit ticket. All the traditional fictions of his profession surged into his mind and he realized he was a complete stranger to them, that they had never impinged on his professional life, and they were as unreal and frightening to him now as they might have been to an outsider, a happy man in the back row of the stalls.

  He was quite unprepared for this sense of mystery; the idea that these fictions might suddenly become facts had never occurred to him. Until now he’d played the tune, from the middle as he’d seen it, and all three sides—Moscow, Cairo and London—had been happy. He’d always known what was happening and had been quite prepared to see himself as a huckster who gave full value for money; and he’d justified his behaviour in terms of maintaining what he thought of as his “primary interest”; his Russian connections, his belief, for it was still just that. But if he went, if Williams were getting rid of him, he knew his other interests would vanish as well. It was a cat’s cradle; one tiny movement of a string and the whole intricate pattern of trust would collapse. And Williams had made that move by involving him in this hare-brained scheme.