by Joseph Hone
It simply hadn’t been worth it, he thought. In his sort of work you had to have an anvil of belief—in a people better than others, in one country above another, in a first idea against a second. But one could lose faith in a country like a dripping tap and find the tank quite empty one morning. Whatever was fine in it hadn’t helped you—as an exile, living outside its borders, its spirit hadn’t come across to make one day better than another; the days had got worse and you knew the land you worked for wasn’t in your bones.
He’d worked for the British, as an intelligence officer attached to the Eighth Army. He was Jewish, he’d been born in Egypt and after the war he had worked for the Israelis. But he’d spent his life in Egypt and had never ceased to enjoy the place: the people and the river, the remains of so many empires, so much crumbling thought. He’d liked it better, far better, than the few glimpses he’d had of his own adopted country—which he remembered mostly as a new and raw place, full of emptiness and ambition. The land had reeked of fresh concrete: the fine grey powder blew everywhere around the new buildings. It grated against one’s hands when one washed them and left a tide mark round everything. It was uncomfortable and disconcerting, like a pair of spectacles worn for the first time.
He believed in his own people all right, in their belief and their suffering, but he enjoyed the other things, in Egypt; he loved them, he realized—why pretend otherwise?
The whole business was a bad book about history. Belief required something better than an ideal, or a story they made up about you after you were dead. It was the drink before lunch with friends—something in that direction at least. It was a selfish, deprecating thing—not this crushing self-importance which was the only return he had got from the necessarily secret nature of his work—work which he knew now was simply a foil against loneliness. It was better not to be lonely, if it was at all possible to do anything about it, he thought.
“How did you leave things with London—what about the others in your section? They’ll be wondering about you. Marcus for example, the new man you told me about. No one else knew of course—that you were coming here—besides Williams?”
“No. Not as far as I know. I only dealt with Williams.”
“No friends …? The grocer—the milkman? You still have your milk delivered in England, don’t you?”
“I buy it from the corner shop—and cream, for horseradish sauce. You know all about that too, I suppose …”
“Nobody? You were just going to leave London forever—and you told nobody?”
“What are you getting at? You mean I’d have risked telling someone in the face of an ‘overwhelming temptation’—wanting to leave some memorial behind me?”
“That sort of temptation goes with a bad conscience, after all. Let’s get back to the beginning—you may have run too soon. That’s what I’m getting at It’s possible Williams wasn’t on to you at all.”
“Of course he was. You know the Yunis plan would never have worked. It was a trap.”
“So you were going to ‘retire’—come home to Mama? You were running surely? Isn’t that all?”
“Not running away. I was running towards something.”
“Here—in Egypt?”
“Yes.”
“Your friends are all here, you mean—and there’s nobody in London that would miss you. You reckoned on just walking out of that life as if it had never existed?”
“People tire of their jobs, you know. Others in the London section talked about it. About getting out. It’s a fiction—that bit about never being able to leave work like this. I talked with Marlow about it the other day, said he ought to get out, that the whole thing was a toytown.”
“You what?”
“A toytown—a pretence—for children.”
“No, you talked to someone. Who did you say—?”
“Marlow—you remember Marlow. He’s in the Library. You approached him once, to work for you. He was worried about it.”
The Colonel remembered Marlow. Or rather he remembered him through Bridget. She had loved him and left him, like cheap fiction; they had even got married. He had never understood how she had become involved with him in the first place, what she had seen in him. And here he was again, waving his arms about inexplicably in the firing line; the Jester or thirteenth guest, fate’s toy who upset every calculation. You could never make sufficient allowance for people like Marlow; their innocence was the most dangerous of all imponderables. It gave them a talismanic gift: no matter how distant, they could ruin your own careful dispositions, as polar storms affect tropic weather.
With Edwards, for example: Edwards had told Marlow he was getting out of Holborn, or as good as told him, the Colonel was sure of it. Thus, among all the others and against all the laws of probability, Marlow would be the one chosen to look for him, to stop him before he got to Moscow. And with Bridget; Marlow’s relationship with her was not necessarily dead, but sleeping. The Colonel resented Marlow ten years before; a case of sheer envy at his marriage to Bridget—even though it hadn’t lasted, and their own affair had begun again soon afterwards. He had as well, he remembered, tried to break up their relationship by implicating Marlow with Egyptian intelligence, and having him packed off home as a result.
And later, when it was all over, and Marlow had gone home in any case, he had resented still more Bridget’s compassion for him, the responsibility she felt for the disaster, which had worked itself to the surface long after she had ceased to have anything to do with him, which had soured some of their own days together. It was the quality in Bridget which he most feared—these obsessive residuals, which could flare again. If Marlow ever did come back to Egypt, he thought … The nostalgic temperament which he recognized so well in her, could fall in love with remembered passion just as easily as falling off a log.
Marlow would be the least expected person in Cairo, yet it was exactly his nature to come untimely. And so, the Colonel argued, with that certainty of intuition that comes of loving, fearing loss, Marlow would return—just as surely as if he had bought the ticket for him in London himself.
He feared Marlow. He was another of the signs of the last twenty-four hours; they were not messages of logic but a kind of magic which until now had preserved him in his profession and protected his passion—signs, there was no other way of putting it, given in tents, heard on the wind, written on sand. But he could no longer interpret them. He feared his luck had just started to run out.
The Colonel thought of his long affair with Bridget Girgis as if it were already finished. It had begun when she was hardly twenty, and he nearly twenty years older, just after the war. It had started so easily in those fluent days of parties and dances before the British had left; it had been an affair of light carried forward effortlessly on a tide of dazzling linen tablecloths, sheets, glazed martini glasses, picnic hampers. She had taken to him without a murmur, had become a perfect part of his conspiracy.
Perhaps she had found out that he had once been with British intelligence in Egypt from her father, with whom he’d had professional contacts during the war. And the rest had followed without any strain: Bridget had gone on assuming he was with the British, working now as one of their men in Egyptian security. It had been a joke between them on the few occasions when the subject had come up; he had warned her never to talk about it—and they had both subsequently contrived to forget their knowledge of each other’s work, when they were apart—or together. It had been a matter of no importance, a detail which, though acknowledged, had nothing to do with their real focus of intent, their ambition as lovers.
And yet she had gone on seeing Edwards whenever he came to Cairo—in the same generous, impossible way that she had taken up with Marlow. He knew that; he’d had Edwards followed, though he’d never mentioned it to her. That had been the one proviso in their love—never to question trust. And she had been trustworthy, certainly: to him, to Edwards, even to Marlow. She had been more than kind to everyone. While he and Edwards, and no
doubt Marlow, nursed uneasy consciences, she seemed to ride high above doubt, living with suspicion and dissension as happily as she did with the men who brought these things to her.
But Edwards had more than a bad conscience now; he had come to the last peg as an agent: Edwards was beyond trust, therefore he was as good as dead. And in any case one never picked women up on the way down, on the run, even if they were old friends. A passion to save yourself—your neck or your conscience—stopped the kissing like bad breath. Henry was finished with loving too.
The Colonel thought of Bridget again with sudden hope, as something vital still within his grasp; for her sake alone, perhaps, he had not yet tired of conspiracy; because of her he still had armour, could bring foresight and professional skill against disruption or whatever the signs held for him. He would hold her as long as he never came to pity himself—that was the way to look at it.
Edwards had been chattering away about “devious plots”. The Colonel was bored out of his mind by his theories. He knew the facts now: Edwards was going to double-cross him, expose him and the other Tel Aviv men in Egypt. He would kill him in the morning: not now, but tomorrow. He was late already now.
The ceaseless questions which had raged through the Colonel’s mind for the past twenty-four hours drifted away as he remembered his appointment with Bridget that night. He was due to pick her up later at Maadi. They were going on to dinner afterwards on the Semiramis terrace.
The Colonel turned to Edwards. “Look, you’ll have to stay on here for the moment. I can’t immediately countermand Major Amin’s orders. It’s his show—this business with Yunis, and you’re involved with it one way or another. I believe what you say; there’s been a mix-up, we’ll get it straightened out. I’ll see Amin tomorrow and we’ll talk about it then. The quarters are comfortable enough here. I’ll have them send you some food.”
“Yes. Certainly.”
Edwards spoke with the good nature of someone trying to ingratiate himself, having decided some time before that he would get himself out of the hospital at the first opportunity and make his way—by whatever means, the canal seemed promising—to Bridget’s house in Maadi.
Edwards was quite determined to escape for he was certain now that he was involved, not just in a trap, but in a trap set to kill him in the morning. He couldn’t understand why the Colonel hadn’t got under way with it that night. Perhaps he was in a hurry, was late already for an appointment with a woman or something.
10
After the Colonel had left, Edwards sat in the office and listened. Now, twenty minutes later, he was in complete darkness. All the lights had gone out just after they’d brought him some food—a plateful of mushy courgettes and some stringy meat fried in breadcrumbs. It was the last he’d see of it, thankfully.
They hadn’t locked the door. They had brought blankets and shown him to a bed in the next inter-connecting office. But the entrance to the low building would still obviously be guarded on the outside. Before the lights went out there had been a noise too, Edwards remembered now that it had stopped: a generator or a boiler, an insistent powerful humming noise. What was it? And now the room was getting warmer, the whole atmosphere of the building becoming slightly muggy and velvet, like any other Egyptian night, while before there had been a slight crispness.
Minute beads of sweat began to form around his hairline before Edwards understood: the Colonel’s office was next to the hospital’s refrigeration plant—the cold rooms where they kept drugs, food and obviously the bodies as well. Presumably the humming would start again the moment power returned, or the emergency generator was activated.
The lights came on. The soft purr from behind the walls returned. A power failure; as regular and certain an occurrence in Cairo as the weather. But there had been several minutes during which the whole building must have been in complete darkness. Which meant that the emergency generator didn’t cut in automatically.
Edwards looked around the office and noticed two strands of exposed cable above the Colonel’s desk, the beginning of a light fitting which hadn’t yet been installed. Both ends of the flex had been bound up with tape, something they’d have hardly bothered to do, he thought, if the wires had been dead.
He got a chair, stood up and wound the tape off each strand of wire. He took a coin out of his pocket, an old copper piastre with Fuad’s head almost rubbed away, and pushed it into the plastic clip of his pen …
In the first moment of blackness Edwards ran as fast as he could down the corridor towards the entrance, shouting in Arabic:
“Quick, quick! The foreigner—he’s broken through the window. Out the door—quick!”
He avoided the approaching beams of torchlight, which now swung away from the corridor towards the main door of the building. He actually opened the door himself, cursing and shouting at the other two figures by his side, and the three of them raced out into the night, two to the left of the building where his window was, and the third to the right, making eastwards towards the white spurs of the Mokattam Hills which showed in the faint light.
Edwards crashed straight into the fence in the darkness and wondered how he’d got to the far side when he picked himself up, gasping for breath, his face covered in soil, spitting grit and something that tasted like spinach. He must have caught the top wire, chest high, and somersaulted on to the other side.
He had, he calculated, at least fifteen seconds start on them, and double that time before the lights came on again in the compound: about two hundred yards start, but across completely flat, open countryside.
For the moment there was no sound of a chase behind him and by the time he had got to the canal, and the lights had come on again, he saw why. The two smart men had stopped by the fence. They stood next to one another now, as though holding each other up in shaky indecision, before one of the men turned and ran back towards the hospital. The other fell to the ground, perhaps with a rifle, his body flat out in a line facing the canal.
Edwards ducked beneath the shallow bank and was twenty yards down the water before he realized that one of his pursuers had been electrocuted.
His feet sank deep into the mud each time he moved, the water rising and falling over his mouth, soft and tasteless as rainwater, and it was a sudden old-fashioned fear of bilharzia or a monstrous go of Gyppy tummy—more than drowning, or cut glass or his slow progress—that made him scramble up on the bank a few minutes later. Fifty yards to his left, between the feeder canal and the Mokattam Hills, there was an embankment and on top of it the double railway line which ran from Bab el Luk to Helwan. When he got to it he saw the lights of Maadi station winking through clumps of palm half a mile away to the south. And beyond the station he could just make out the glare from the croquet floodlights at Maadi Sporting Club. That strange Egyptian passion for the game, which they played late into the night, meant that the locker rooms would still be open.
He came in over the sagging chicken wire beyond the last tennis court, walked past the deserted pool, into the gents, across the showers and from there to the locker room beyond. He knew this moist geography of the Club almost as well as he knew his own bathroom in Kentish Town.
Abdul Khaki, under the letter K, was his benefactor. He had known him ever since he’d first come to teach at Albert College—a witty, careless, overweight man who had once, in slimmer days, played squash for Egypt before making a fortune in real estate—and he had left his locker open. There were a reasonable pair of plimsolls, Slazenger shirt and pants, an old blue blazer and an even older squash racket: Abdul’s second division equipment. Edwards transferred his money, his damp cheque-book, passport, and a book of English stamps and threw his own clothes into the laundry bin. He would get them back in twenty-four hours, beautifully done, if he wanted.
They were playing bridge behind the glass windows of the terrace—beaky, white-haired ladies and crop-headed old men in Rex Harrison cardigans, utterly absorbed. And he could hear the furious clonk of wood on wood as other ol
der and even more vehement members dispatched each other to the nether ends of the croquet court on the far side of the building.
The minute porter in the ragged corduroy jacket who had once looked after King Fuad’s stables at Abdin Palace saluted Edwards carefully as he passed the little sentry box by the main gate of the club.
“Good night, Mr. Edwards, sir. Taxi?”
They never forgot you here, Edwards thought, and he put his hand down the vest pocket of Khaki’s blazer and found a few coins there—the little essential baksheesh that every good club member kept in store for such contingencies. He gave the old fellow a five-piastre piece.
“Thank you, Ahmed.”
A taxi pulled out from the station rank, swung round the sandy circle in leaps and bounds, carburettor stomping and spitting vigorously, and pulled up at the entrance.
“Thank you, sir, thank you,” Ahmed said, opening the door. “Your bat, sir! Don’t forget your bat!” And he pushed the mysterious instrument through the cab window.
*
He left the taxi at the end of the dusty street, the arch of evergreens stooping overhead all along its length, and came to the house by its back entrance which led to the garden—past the suffragi’s quarters in a thicket of bramble and flowering laurel, through the wilderness of papyrus on the damp margin of the lawn and over the willow pattern bridge.
The lights were on downstairs and on the terrace but all he could see was Bridget’s feet stretched out on a sun chair behind the parapet and its tumble of orange flowered creeper. She was reading probably, as she often did late at night, and Edwards wondered what it was: a travel book from the Council library, a new biography perhaps. He had often brought her out the latest success in that line when he came from London. A surprise … And he wished now that he didn’t have to surprise her, that she’d known he was coming, as he walked up the terrace steps, broken racket in hand, in his billowing shorts. That was surprise enough. A joke as well. Perhaps that was the way to handle it. Anyone for tennis?