by Joseph Hone
*
The Kasr el Aini Hospital lay on the north spur of Roda Island, up-river along the eastern corniche past Garden City—a complex of dun-coloured, featureless Victorian buildings with open terraces and one or two half completed new wings. Like most Egyptian hospitals it had the permanent air of a casualty station in bad times: bandaged figures moved around the main hall, groups of numbed country people had made temporary camp about the passages, seemingly paying court to their confined relatives; stretchers and trolleys were in constant traffic up and down, many of their occupants permanently stalled outside surgeries, operating theatres and dispensaries. There was a feeling of “maleesh”, an overpowering sense that the will of God was having it over the ways of man: a smell of leaking sores and the strongest sort of disinfectant.
I hobbled up to the reception desk, peering over a dozen chattering, frenzied heads all intent on extracting some vital information or permission from a single porter equally intent on withholding it. But the mention of Dr. Novak’s name had a steadying effect on him. He gave me a form to fill in where I had to give my own name: Henry Edwards I put. In a moment I had a response. Dr. Novak would see me at once.
He had his surgery in another, more modern wing some distance away at the back of the main building, and the single ward which we passed on the way was full of sturdy Russian gentlemen. Most of them were moving about the beds in baggy underpants listening to Borodin on a radio and reading luridly coloured Soviet engineering journals. It was ferociously hot and unpleasant in the corridor, with wafts of illness coming from somewhere, and I had qualms. If Henry really was running over to the other side it was his business, his affair if he wanted to change one toy-town for another, not mine. If there was any mistake and Novak happened to know what Henry looked like, then he would never get out. And neither might I. But I went on.
Dr. Novak had a round bouncy face, hair cut en brosse, a curling moustache and a good-natured expression which rather surprised me. He looked like a provincial baker from some French film of the ’thirties. He gestured to a chair in his tiny office, looking at me with an uncertain interest.
“I didn’t expect you so soon,” he said.
“I had the opportunity. I’ve cut myself—so I thought I’d come straight away.” I started to take off my shoe and sock. “A piece of glass. I wonder if you could take a look at it.”
There was a perfectly appropriate casual doctor-patient relationship between us. But Dr. Novak remained puzzled.
“Can you get up here?” He pointed to a raised couch in one corner and I clambered up on it.
“Yes, I can see it.” He swabbed the wound and went away to get some probes. “Would you like a local?” He seemed to have a remarkable grasp of English.
“I’ll try without.”
“How did it happen? Can you turn round and lie down flat on your stomach?” I twisted away from him so I couldn’t see anything of his face.
“A splinter from the top of a soda bottle.”
“You shouldn’t have come round here just now, you know.” He lowered his voice. I felt some steel implement clip the top of the wedge of glass, nudging it a fraction further into the flesh so that I jumped forward in pain, the sweat coming out in rivers all over me. “Jesus!”
“Sorry.” He took the probe or whatever it was out, it clattered in a dish and he went away for something else. “Have you been able to make some arrangements? Have you changed your mind?” It was just as well he couldn’t see my face. I was puzzled now.
“No—not yet. I was—hoping you could help me …”
“How?” he said urgently. “You mean I should come round to your Embassy? Tell me. Every moment is urgent. I cannot be sure of things here much longer. You said before on the phone could I help you?—I don’t understand what you mean. I have already contacted your people here, at the Consulate. I was expecting you—someone from London, they said—to make the final arrangements.”
“You will have to wait. A little longer. I came to tell you. A day or two.”
“When do you think you can get me out?”
Dr. Novak had a pained insistence in his voice now.
“It’s difficult, we haven’t an Embassy here now. We have to make different arrangements—Oooch! Christ Almighty!”
A knife, it must have been this time, cut into the skin again, through inches of it.
“You should have had a local. Keep still now for one moment. I’m getting it out.” The knife came again. I shuddered.
“Have confidence, Dr. Novak. Do nothing for the moment.”
“But I must get out of here, Mr. Edwards. I must have some firm arrangements from you. It was promised me. You are from London. We must talk. I have committed myself.” I felt something grate inside my heel, as if he’d reached the bone.
“I know,” I said miserably. “But we’ve had some difficulties on our side too.”
“I’m not interested in the Americans. Or the French. I explained that. I want to go to England. That is what I have prepared. I have prepared my de-briefing.”
“I know you have. But it’s just not as easy as that to get out of Cairo at the moment. You’ll have to take my word for it. Be patient.”
He seemed to have started to scoop the flesh out now with some kind of apple corer.
“For how long must I wait then?” S-c-o-o-p. “What will be the arrangements?” Grind. “When will be the de-briefing?” I thought I was going to faint.
“I think I’d better have that local. Dr. Novak, you have me at your disposal. If I—if we—were double crossing you I’d hardly have come here and let you go through all this with me.”
“I’m sorry. It’s finished. I was just tidying it up. You can get down now.” I hobbled back to my chair.
What, indeed, would the “arrangements” be? Who was going to run Dr. Novak out of Cairo—who was going to de-brief him? There was no counter-intelligence interrogator in Egypt. And then it was clear. The man Novak had been expecting, waiting for, was Marcus. No wonder Henry looked ill at the Omar Khayyam Hotel. His contact man was a defector himself. They had both been looking for the same sort of help. Of course, it was farcical.
The little bouncy face was crestfallen. I could see the horror this whole business had for him—looking for a bolt-hole, never knowing where trust lay.
“Well, what shall we do?”
He was fiddling with his probes and forceps. I wondered if he was more doctor than KGB man, or the other way round. What would he do in England? Where was his family? What made a man like him drop everything and run like this—and why to England? An overwhelming belief in fish and chips and a few broken down carriers east of Suez? It didn’t make much sense. Perhaps he had distant relatives in Highgate. I almost asked him, and thought of telling him the truth about what had happened to Marcus.
“Do nothing. One of us will contact you again in a few days. It might be longer. In the meantime, do nothing.”
It wasn’t until after I’d left that I realized why I hadn’t been forthcoming with him—an unconscious reticence from my years in Holborn: I couldn’t trust him; Dr. Novak might simply have been an infiltrator, a Trojan horse. That’s why we had men like Marcus in our section, to check such people out before they got into the citadel.
One checked everything and trusted nobody. It was a dull, grubby business. Going over to the “other side” was worse than staying put, not because you’d broken trust with a country or an organization but because you’d really betrayed all human contact. No one would ever be sure of Dr. Novak again, whether he was playing a double game or not. The guilty can look just as crestfallen as the innocent
*
The microfilm was a more difficult matter to unravel. I needed special equipment, a projector not easily come by outside a security organization. But there might be another way of deciphering it, I thought—with a good microscope and a strong light beam under the slide: a science lab would have done, the American University off El Trahir Square for examp
le. But I needed an excuse. Microscopes … Wednesday afternoons at school. Botany, stamens and petals … Yes, the identification of rare wild flowers. Egypt had been famous for that in previous days—the fabulous carpet of spring flowers on the limestone spur beyond Lake Mariout at Alexandria. That would serve as my background and such flowers as I needed I might pick up from the dazed herbaceous border by the fountain in the Hilton forecourt.
*
I went round to the University at five o’clock having slept fitfully through the afternoon and picked up some dusty weeds at the Hilton. The University was an impossible building to find anyone in and the porter completely misunderstood my interest so that I found myself, in following his directions to the Science department, at the back of the University theatre. A rehearsal was just getting under way managed by a middle-aged American, shouting quickly at a lot of students standing open-mouthed on the stage. They were doing Charley’s Aunt. I’d seen the poster in the hall.
“Now, Lord Fancourt—over there in the easy chair. And remember, this is Oxford in the ’twenties: very blue porcelain, very la-di-dah. Jack Chesney? Where is Fawzi, for God’s sake?”
Fawzi peered round a door on the set, a thickset Egyptian with Presley locks and campus sweater, smoking one of the new hundred-millimeter cigarettes.
“Fawzi,” the American yelled, “make that entrance much sharper. And remember you light the cigarette after you get in. His Lordship gives it to you. So put that one out and start again.”
The Lord Fancourt in the proceedings, in plimsolls and T shirt, remonstrated at this stage direction.
“Mr. Pershore, it’s just an excuse. Fawzi’s just smoking all my cigarettes. That’s the third one I’ve given him.”
I crept up behind Mr. Pershore. “I’m sorry to bother you. I was looking for the Science lab.”
He turned and I explained my purpose, brandishing my nature study which I’d stuck neatly in the pages of a book I’d brought with me.
“It’s closed, I guess. But Magda might be able to help. She’s majoring in Science—over there. Don’t keep her too long. She’s Donna Lucia quite soon, goddammit.”
Magda, a tall girl with good legs, was more than willing and only her dramatic commitments prevented her from leaning over the microscope with me throughout. Luckily botany wasn’t her speciality. None the less she gave me some uneasy moments.
“That looks like a weed to me.”
“Yes, it is. Quite right. It’s the earth attached to the roots that I’m interested in. The properties of the soil—it’s quite different in Egypt. The Nile mud, you know. I want to see what bearing it has on the seeding. I suspect pollination here is induced by quite a different trigger mechanism than is usual. And of course this would have an important bearing on the growth and spread of wild flowers generally in Egypt.”
“Of course.”
Magda left me to it. I cleaned the earth from the two glass plates, slipped the microfilm in between them and pushed the tray back under the lens. The magnification was far too high, giving me a bad photograph of light and shadow on the moon. I swivelled to the next smaller lens, and then to the one below that. Now I could make it out, at least the heading and part of the first paragraph.
It was an Israeli Ministry of Defence memorandum from the Chief of Staff, General Yitzhak Rabin, to the Commander Northern Front, General David Elazar, dated a few days previously, May 7, 1967. It outlined a series of recent El Fatah raids made from Syria and the Lebanon on Israel’s northern borders: a water pipe line at the kibbutz Hagoshrun damaged on April 29, an irrigation pump destroyed near Kfar Nahun on May 5 and an Army truck mined on the Tiberias-Rosh Pina highway on the same day the memo was written. I moved the slide up a fraction. The note went on to say that in view of this dangerous escalation of guerrilla activity General Rabin was authorizing a large military deployment near the Syrian border—six armoured brigades, an engineering corps, commando units and artillery, supported by various detachments of the local National Guard, a supply and pay corps, field hospitals, etc. The memo then outlined primary targets in Syria—the fortified village of Kalian, the hills of Tel Faq’r and Azaziat—and discussed the necessary first-strike immobilization of the Syrian 130 mm and 122 mm artillary emplacements in these areas. The note ended with a provisional strike date: May 17 at 0300 hours, a week hence.
Israel was going to knock the Syrians out of the ring in a pre-emptive strike. Nasser, with all his bellicose trumpetings of the past month, could hardly stand by and watch: with this sort of information in his hands he would be forced to mobilize his own troops on Israel’s southern flank in Sinai as a diversionary tactic. If he heeded this memorandum, as he must, he was going to be dragged into a war he couldn’t win.
The message, if Egyptian Military Intelligence believed it, was more or less the President’s death warrant. And they would believe it, wouldn’t they?—having found it on Marcus, or myself, genuine Mid-East section men. Which of course didn’t mean that the memo hadn’t been forged. But true or false its results would be the same. Who could have wished such ill will on the two of us? And on President Nasser. Williams again. We were one of his “ploys” in action, implementing his or the U.S. State Department’s view that Nasser was another Hitler and must be deposed at all costs. Marcus and I had been sent out to start a war, planted, and with Marcus the roots had taken well, I had no doubt. But why Marcus? What had he done to incur Williams’s disfavour? Just then, I couldn’t imagine.
*
I walked back to the Semiramis and called Cherry at the Anglo-American from my room. It was just after six and I could see across the river from my window the usual chocolate box sunset over Gezira; an orange sinking out of a violent and gold sky into the palms of the exhibition ground. And there were all the other sounds and senses of the city waking again, grinding into life, after the hours of silence. It was just the sort of evening, among so many in the past, when one felt like doing something, starting afresh. Going to a party.
“Herbert?—what are you doing? Usher’s party—are you coming to it?”
It turned out he’d had a call from Usher that morning and had been trying to contact me. I met him downstairs in the bar half an hour later.
“Well?” he said.
“Well nothing. I’ve been looking round, that’s all.”
“Not with Mr. Khoury, though. He’s been on to me all day. You were due with him out at Helwan this afternoon. And he’s got a trip arranged for Sakkara tomorrow.”
“One can’t do everything. How’s Madame?”
“The same. But listen—” Cherry assumed one of his serious expressions, screwing his face up, tightening his skin, like air being sucked out of a bladder “—if you don’t make an effort to play the part, aren’t they going to wonder?”
“Who?”
“Khoury has friends. In Security. They all have. They talk.”
“Have you heard something?”
“The jump is on about something. They picked up someone else today. From London.”
“You’re thinking of me, Herbert. I was. They got the wrong passport. A mistake.” And I told him of my visit to Heliopolis. He would learn of that from Pearson in any case, it would be all round the place within hours. We ordered drinks and I started to try and add up what Marcus’s capture might lead to. It was possible, of course, that my laissez-passer about the city might run out if they put any pressure on him. Marcus had never had the training to withstand the water drop—or whatever the favoured technique of the moment was with Egyptian intelligence; unless one could expect his native intransigence to stand foil against any torture. It was possible.
He knew about my being in Cairo—and Herbert and Usher for that matter. Perhaps this really was the end of the Cairo-Albert circle—the end of so many good days—on so little money, for even less information.
I tried to think of Marcus under pressure, strapped to a chair or something, a moist and swarthy gentleman moving towards him with a carpet beater. Was
that how they did it? But whatever they did to Marcus he wouldn’t see Holbora again for a long while. And the rest of the picture suddenly came into focus: I saw why Williams had switched to Marcus, made him take the fall instead of me: Marcus, the spy-catcher, had been on to him. Williams didn’t work for Holborn or the CIA. He could only have been from the other side, from Moscow. And I saw, too, how the Israeli memo would serve Russian purposes even better than our own: a war with Israel, which Egypt would lose, and Nasser’s subsequent fall which would allow Moscow really to take over in Egypt; to make good their battle losses and install a properly Marxist government with someone like Yunis at the head of it. Nothing would suit Moscow better than that Egypt should suffer a quick knock-out blow from Israel, a blitzkrieg war over the cities and across Sinai; such an outcome would ensure the Soviet position in Egypt for years to come.
Williams must have been the fourth man who had come into British Intelligence before Philby and the others, who had outlasted them all, and who now worked alone at the heart of it. Marcus had somehow stumbled on this. And Williams had somehow got him out to Cairo—to interrogate Dr. Novak, but to be picked up before he got near him. It didn’t matter that the circle out here would be broken up as a consequence of this highpowered tit for tat; it mattered not at all. All that was necessary was that Williams should survive. And he would, with increased credit in Holborn, as the “war maker”, the man who did for Nasser at last—until the Russians made the real capital out of that disaster. For the West certainly never would; we’d be selling arms to South Africa by then. And to Rhodesia.
The Egyptians would be the only ones really to suffer in it all; they, and people like Herbert and Usher who would get ten years apiece in Siwa. They would have to be warned. God knows how many contacts Usher had about the city—innocuous old clerks and waiters who remembered the British affectionately—or how quickly he would turn them over to ease whatever pains Egyptian Intelligence might have in store for him.