The Private Sector (A Peter Marlow spy thriller)

by Joseph Hone

  I saw Usher put his arm round Pearson and manoeuvre him towards the little cell at the end of the room, and then Leila Tewfik bumped into me.

  Tomorrow, I thought, and that will be the last of it; not any more of it—ever. Not here. For she looked at me with a quite unexpected warmth. There would be an end of that, the chances of women in foreign places, and it might be no bad thing: I had gone through that routine once before in these parts. Yet how easily I could have taken up with Leila at that moment, not for any sort of consolation, just the opposite: we would fall to it with all the skill of trained adventurers, believing that having emerged from the vengeance and disappointment of one affair we were now qualified to avoid those pitfalls in a second. Leila put one in mind of a really professional, joyous few weeks. I don’t suppose it was a realistic notion; such thoughts at Cairo parties rarely are—and it was this potential of the city that I was going to miss: its electric vacancy which begins by making every plan possible and ends by making them all unnecessary; the airs of a place whose citizens have long ago come to genuine terms with their ambitions.

  “Well,” she said, “did you get plenty of work done this morning?”

  “Thank you. I’d meant to say so before but I’ve not stopped running. I gave the keys back to Ahmed.”

  “How long are you staying here?” She crooked her glass in an elbow, took off her glasses and wiped them.

  “What are you thinking? A trip to Helwan on a boat together? I’ve never done that.”

  She put her glasses back on and blinked at me for a moment, focusing, her eyes narrowing a fraction into the smallest of smiles, nose dipping in an even smaller nod.

  “Trouble is I’m supposed to be going back tomorrow. If all goes well.’

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “I’ll come and do some more work on the roof if I may. Where do the boats go from these days?”

  “Below Shephearďs, by Garden City. Why don’t you come? Tomorrow morning. Morsy might come. And he might not. I could find out.”

  The little conspiracy was perfectly presented.

  “Can I let you know?” A suffragi had tapped my arm; Usher wanted me to come to his cell.

  “Please. Will you let me know?”

  “I’ll be back.”

  Yes, we could have begun there and then; trips to Helwan and the Viceregal kiosk by the pyramids, cocktails on the Semiramis terrace, and cold hangover beers in the stuffy back bar of the Cosmopolitan: we could have pushed off straight away into the infinitely shoddy glamour of the city which would so soon become precious for us. But again, I was bitten by tomorrow: a half view of St. Paul’s lurking behind the vile new concrete, from a matchbox office where one would hardly remember the crumbling architecture of this changeless valley.

  I saw that Cherry had been given the same message from Usher and was following me through the crush of people. The festivities were at their height.

  Usher was standing at the door and when we were both inside the small room, he closed it carefully and locked it. Pearson was lying stretched out full length on the Moroccan counterpane, legs apart, arms wide in a position of suggestive abandon. His shoes were on the floor and his tie loose. For a moment I thought he was awake and waiting for something untoward, and that Cherry and I had been invited to participate or witness it. And then I remembered Usher’s phrase, that he “had something” for Pearson. He had obviously received it.

  Usher was moving round the bed with fussy efficiency. The shoes were back on now, the tie fixed. Finally Usher carefully replaced a number of papers from Pearson’s inside pocket.

  “Poor chap. I’d forgotten his ulcer. Stomach wall must have very low tolerance for that kind of medicine. Went out so fast I barely caught him. Now I need your help. These knock-out drops will keep his curiosity at bay for forty-eight hours. I want to get him home to his wife in Zamalek. She doesn’t care for me; I think she may well come to hate me after tonight. But there’s no matter—the point is he’ll be too ill to file anything until we’re all out of here. And he certainly won’t get his ten o’clock news circuit to London this evening.”

  Usher bent over him, lifted an eyelid, checked his breathing. He stood up like a policeman.

  “Funny things, these new cough drops. You know what they do?—they give you an almighty go of Gyppy tummy. Appropriate, what? Just the same symptoms; clever fellows, those boffins. Like to get him home before that starts. Of course he was filing on Marcus. It was in his pocket—Informed sources here suggest’ sort of thing; he’s going to inconveniently mislay the cable; hope he loses his mind as well. Now, if you two could help me downstairs with him. I’m rather too old for much potato work.”

  Cherry looked on hopelessly and I tried to find a cigarette.

  “Downstairs how? Where? There’re no windows or doors. You’re not thinking of taking him back through the party?”

  “Well, upstairs, really. Then downstairs. That’s why I needed you.”

  Usher stood up on the bed, between Pearson’s feet, and pulled at a red silk canopy which covered the ceiling in folds. “Had no roof in the old days, this room. So I put in a false one when I converted the place. Now you get up there, Marlow—that’s right, you’ll have to use your arms.”

  I had joined Usher on the bed and had started to pull myself up between the frame of an open trap-door immediately above us. When I was up and had turned round, bracing myself against the rafters, Cherry and Usher grasped Pearson by either arm, and the three of them commenced a brisk dance about the bed springs for some moments, trying to steady themselves, in a fearful drunken fandango, Pearson’s head lolling about between them, his dancing pumps dragging about the counterpane, marionette-fashion.

  It struck me that Usher was doing something seriously stupid, that he’d kill the man, snap his neck or asphyxiate him with his antics. Then Cherry tried to steady himself by grasping the edge of the trap-door but instead managed to drag the entire canopy down over himself and Pearson.

  “For God’s sake man,” Usher murmured. “Pull yourself together. Don’t tear the material.”

  I lay down along the rafters burying my arms in the bouncing red shape, crooking my arms beneath two armpits. Then I pulled hard.

  “Wrong one, old fellow,” Usher said after a moment. “Pull the other one.”

  We got Pearson up. Cherry followed, and together we hauled Usher after us. We even managed to replace most of the canopy.

  “A ladder would have been useful,” Cherry suggested, as we carried Pearson across the beams to some other part of the Mameluke warren.

  “No doubt,” Usher puffed. “Never got round to it. I don’t normally use this exit myself. It’s really a direct entrance from the garage to my bedroom for some of my more limber acquaintances.”

  We came to the end of the attic, moved through some angled joists, through a plywood door, and nearly fell headlong into a garage twenty feet below us. Here there was a ladder, and we moved more quickly now, with Pearson in a fireman’s hold over my shoulder.

  Usher opened the back door of an immense old navy blue Rolls and I toppled Pearson straight in.

  “This used to be the main entrance,” Usher said. “It gives straight out on to the street behind the mosque. Open the doors and I can run down hill as far as Abdin Palace without starting the engine. Very convenient.”

  “This car is a bit much, though, isn’t it, Robin? Bit conspicuous for a job like this. I didn’t think you still used it.” Cherry was excusably nervous and was trying to work off his forebodings on Usher. “Doesn’t it rather irritate people out here?”

  And it could well have done with its shapely arrogance, its immense spokeless wheels and tall coach-like box for the passengers behind. The radiator might have caused particular offence for instead of the usual winged angel there was some antique automobile club emblem—a wheel in the shape of a large Union Jack.

  “It belonged to the editor of the Egyptian Mail in Alexandria. He had it specially made for hi
m in the ’twenties. Why should it irritate anyone, Herbert? Envy, perhaps. But not irritation.”

  “I didn’t think we wanted to draw attention to ourselves, that’s all.”

  “One of the secrets of secret work is to be conspicuous; I’ve often told you. The more obvious you appear, the less suspicion is aroused. To slink round town in a Morris 8, in my position, would be to invite both mistrust and cramp. Come now, let’s not argue methods of approach at this juncture: I’ll prime the motor, open the doors, and I’ll drop our friend back home. You two go back to the party. If anyone asks you can tell them I’ve been helping the press in their inquiries. And I think one could hardly deny it. Drunken sods …”

  Usher climbed aboard and began tinkering with various levers attached to the central rung of the steering wheel. Things whirred and clicked and groaned beneath the long bonnet. Cherry and I opened the two doors. The garage gave on to a narrow unlit side street, which ran across the hill, away from the El Rifai and Hassan Plaza on our left down towards the El Azhar mosque and the Mousky bazaar northwards to our right.

  There was no one about, a moonless, close evening with the ticklish smell of pepper in the air, and no sound apart from the distant crash of traffic down in the city. Cherry saw them first, he was on that side of the door looking along to the Rifai Plaza a hundred yards away, though we had heard the sounds half a minute before, standing rooted to the spot: the groan of heavy diesel engines changing down through the gears as they came up the hill; a line of military vehicles circling now round the plaza and going on up to the higher road which led to the new entrance to Usher’s house; a small convoy of jeeps, followed by several police Fiats, and two Military Police lorries with bren-guns mounted on the cab roof.

  Another historic ambush which would end a dynasty was under way: it was Mohammed Ali’s massacre of the Princes at the Citadel all over again; the remnants of the Saxon Raj as victims this time, rather than the last of the Mamelukes. Amongst the startled multitude damask and richest silk would have given way to cotton polka-dot print, chain mail to faded pin-stripe, and there would be no caparisoned chargers at the door, just a few ruined Hillmans; but the result would be the same: trapped in a narrow defile beneath the fortress walls there would be no escape for the lumbering Lords and Ladies as they sought vainly for release in stout Northampton boots.

  Usher got down from his bridge on the Rolls and looked out with us.

  “Pearson must have got something through after all,” I said.

  “Or they may have just changed their minds about us. They’re like that.” Usher seemed unaffected by their arrival. Was there a hint of relief even in his voice, now that he realised he might not be seeing St. John’s Wood for some time?

  “Never mind. I’ve burnt all the papers. Never kept many papers anyway. We might as well all go together then. Rather fortuitous even.”

  “Go where?” Herbert asked bluntly, shades of anger and despair gathering in his voice. The M.P.s had left their lorries and were ringing the plaza, blocking off the south end of the lane, their backs towards us. “I’ll really have to be getting back to my wife,” Herbert continued. “I’ve been out long enough already.”

  Cherry and Usher had commitments in Egypt, I realised again, ties of pleasure and misfortune, and I suppose it must simply have been Usher’s dedication to form which made him run that night: a sense of keeping his end up. Or he may just have felt it was too good a chance to miss, a last excessive raspberry in the face of authority.

  “Come on then, Herbert. I’ll drop you home.”

  The chatter above us had suddenly died. There was a sound of glass breaking.

  “I wonder who that was,” Usher said with real indignation. “That’s the second tonight of those goblets. Shan’t bring them out again.” He got back behind the wheel. “Give us a push.”

  The huge car glided out of the garage like a boat, a noiseless blue craft indistinguishable as velvet in the darkness, the Union Jack moving in a steady circling arc at the distant end of the bonnet like a gunsight on the bows. Usher locked the wheel to the right with vigorous pumping movements, one hand flashing over the other, thwacking on the wood as it spun, his jowls shuddering, white hair bouncing in strands over one ear. With a yachting cap he would have been Sir Thomas Lipton caught in a squall.

  Cherry and I crouched in the leather cathedral of the huge interior, Pearson propped up in the seat behind us. But as we moved away down the lane with nothing following us we got up off the floor, pulled the jump seats out, and sat down.

  Usher still hadn’t fired the engine and I couldn’t make out whether he was trying to or not. We had long since left the lane, turned into Bab el Wazir and from there into the narrow streets which skirted the Mousky bazaar, going downhill, heading northeast, roughly in the direction of Opera Square. Market stalls lay within a foot of either side of us now, pressure lamps flaring above each of them in a snake-like dazzle that went all down the street, and a huge crush of people moving in between them, buying their evening meal. We had arrived in the middle of that interminable Egyptian supper time, in which whole streets of the city become dining rooms, and the going was difficult.

  Usher fired the engine now, a delicious warbling, throaty roar, which was drowned only by the klaxon on the vehicle which he started to exercise violently. Whole families sprang from their food, running for the gutter in a clatter of tin dishes, galibeahs pulled about them, jumping for their lives. Our progress could not have been more noticeable or better judged to support Usher’s theories on the art of inconspicuousness.

  And strangely enough few people seemed to pay us any real attention; no one shook fists after us in the rear mirror or threw marbles under the wheels. True, we were passing down one of the oldest parts of the mediaeval city, between the Blue Mosque and the Bazaar, whose populace, since the days of the Fatamids, had long been inured to foreign arrogance in a variety of the most eccentric forms. Not half a mile away the insomniac Caliph Khumaraweh had had himself rocked to sleep on an air mattress on a lake of mercury, a sybaritic transport not far removed from our own extravagant progress in the Rolls. For some of the older bystanders our headlong career may have seemed no more than happy evidence that the British had at last returned to Egypt and they could look forward to sharpening their wits and financial idioms again.

  And we would have made any destination we chose in the city that night, I think, if an elderly, courteous policeman at the entrance to Opera Square had not spotted the car and its proud enamel colours on the radiator, and thought almost exactly this: not that the British had returned in any permanent form, but that they had come back temporarily and were on their way to a little reunion downtown, which he, among many of his colleagues, was helping to effect smoothly.

  The man stepped gallantly up on the wide running board while we were at the lights at the top of Adly Street, saluted Usher with one white-gloved hand, while holding on to the side of the car with the other. The white gloves gave me the clue. Cairo police wore them on only the most auspicious occasions. But I couldn’t get any further. It seemed simply that we were being arrested with more than the usual Egyptian courtesy.

  Then the blossomy round old face shouted at Usher above the din of traffic, “Montgunnery, sir! You wanting Montgunnery party. Follow me!” The man tightened his grip on the car, urged Usher forward, while at the same time lashing out at some luckless pedestrians with one foot. I would have run for it there and then if Usher hadn’t driven off smartly, breaking the lights, while thanking the old fellow profusely in Arabic.

  Other traffic police waved the car on now in a gale of whistles, and we were passed through a barrier at the end of Adly Street and into Soliman Pasha which had been cleared of all traffic. The crowds were fairly thick on either pavement, held back by police every few yards, and further down by Lappa’s and Groppi’s they were six-deep, quiet, full of interest, devouring ice cornets.

  Cherry and I sat rigid in the jump seats; prominent, upright men—d
etectives I supposed they’d think us—accompanying some Ambassador who had unaccountably dozed off in the back of the car. I straightened my tie and wondered if we should wave to the crowds in lieu of our master. Cherry drummed his fingers on the upholstered floor, his arms hanging down across his body in the minute seats, like an ape about to spring.

  “What does Usher think he’s up to? We’ll never make it. Not a hope.”

  “I should think that was exactly what we were going to do,” I replied.

  The moon face was wild and sweating now, as he shook his head from side to side in desperation. He had at least managed a suit in place of his usual crumpled flannels and stained linen coat. Usher, of course, was resplendent, while my linen tropicals were still in fair order. From the sartorial point of view it struck me we would make it all too well. Conversation, on the other hand, might be more difficult.

  “What was your war like, Herbert? A good armoured regiment, I hope. Monty has a horror of backsliders. And he’s northern Irish, isn’t he? Not southern.”

  And there was Mr. Pearson of the International Press Agency dreaming of a Stop Press behind us. I wondered what Monty would make of him? He might take it that, on this occasion, the press had gone a little too far.

  We swung round Soliman Pasha quickly and on down towards the river. There was a queue of limousines in front of us, turning off to the right at Bustani Street, light blazing from the covered terraces of the Mohammed Ali Club on the corner. Usher had stumbled on a suitable place for our Valhalla; the Club had been previously only less select than the Khedival Club; now it was where the Egyptian Foreign Ministry held their most dignified receptions.

  We turned—there was no alternative now, the rest of Soliman Pasha was barred against us—and drew up outside the huge doorway with its two glittering brass street lanterns illuminating the red-carpeted space between us and the marble steps. A young army officer in full dress uniform approached and opened the back door. There was absolutely nothing for us to do but get out, leaving Pearson where he was, propped up in the corner of the seat, eyes closed, the foxy nervous face perfectly at peace, the not-too-popular ‘thirties bandleader coming into a show stopper, now a sweet melody that would fell them all at the Metro Ballroom, Huddersfield, next week.