The Private Sector (A Peter Marlow spy thriller)

by Joseph Hone

  No sixth sense warned us that the future might be sour, the next morning or a month hence. We didn’t have that sort of future and we knew it. No debts would have to be paid, nothing lay in wait for us; no days over the smelly summer river, arguments over coffee at the Semiramis, or lies with dinner at the Estoril; no plots, misunderstandings; no tears or departure; no Usher and no Henry—no one to manipulate the slight events we might try and shape our lives with. There was no more of that life to shape. The professional, the personal, exploitation was at an end.

  I had arrived in a country years before where nothing was as it seemed, a territory defended everywhere against trust, and I had come now to a broken barrier at the end of a smashed and empty landscape, a deserted customs post—to a point where no one stopped or chased you; where you simply stepped over the border and walked away.

  *

  She must have gone very early. I had woken once in the night and seen her leave the room, the long naked back and widely-spaced legs moving in clear silhouette towards the shaft of light in the corridor, sharply isolating the narrow rectangle between her thighs.

  And then I had woken a second time, abruptly with a headache in the darkness, the place beside me empty, and I had stayed where I was, waiting for her to come back as before, eager for her again. But I knew within moments that this time she had really left.

  I moved fretfully around the apartment, wondering what she had taken with her, looking for some evidence that would tell me she had gone, and where, perhaps, and why. But there was nothing; a few of her clothes in the wardrobe, a sleeveless white dress I’d remembered her in, some soiled cosmetics on the dressing table, a small pile of underwear on the bathroom floor.

  Not London, she had said. And not Israel. She was simply getting out of it all. But where? I almost began to miss her—that infection of sex, as if she and I had, after all, a future. There was a surge of bitterness, a moment’s fierce resentment that I had lost her once more and would now have to start the search for her all over again.

  I went to the window in the drawing-room, eased the heavy curtain back a fraction, and looked out on the brown grass of the cricket pitch at the Club. The early sun slanted over it in a bright golden wave. A man with a hose paddled about the edge swamping the boundary in pools of grey-blue water. Kites fell about the sky like footballs and the flame trees by the back entrance were just beginning to explode into rusty crimson light.

  The minute Egyptian spring was finished, the Khamseen had whirled itself out over the dunes to the south; the dog days had arrived on the dot, when the heat would lie over the city for six months like a plate. From now on one would need the Stella really cold.

  I wanted to be out of this too-known country, where the seasons were invariable, where duty and pleasure and sleep rang out as clearly as a monastery bell, but where I could never again be an indistinguishable part of the foliage. I was no longer part of the timetable, had lost all the habits. I wanted to leave it as quickly and violently as I could, and I thought for a moment of just going out to the airport and chancing it. But the chance didn’t really exist. And then I remembered the Provost’s deputy at the Cathedral: Mr. Hawthorn was going on a tour of his Christian dominions in a long wheel-based Land Rover. Anything—anything would do.

  I left the apartment, making as quick a passage as I could from the darkness to the light.

  11

  The Cathedral of All Saints’ stood up on the left as I walked over Kasr el Nil bridge, dun-coloured, with its bulbous central tower like some atrocious chocolate shape; a boast of some Scottish bishop fifty years before, an empty fortress now, relegated to an imaginery holding operation against the alien faith. For many years the City Corporation had planned to build a bridge over the river at the point where the Cathedral fronted on to the corniche, but the cost of demolishing the gigantic pile had disheartened them. It was now the fourth pyramid within the city’s boundaries, only thirty years old, but already eroding, chipping away at the edges, taking on the mysterious patina of the other three: an abode of men who had been gods, who like their Pharaonic predecessors had disappeared without trace.

  Mr. Hawthorn was at a meeting, I was told by his secretary, a defiant middle-aged English lady, when I called at his office on one side of the Cathedral forecourt. “An Ecumenical Committee.” Perhaps I’d care to call back? The lady moved from one outer room to the other, very fast, carrying envelopes and brochures to and fro with terrible concern. I was barely able to keep up with her.

  “I’ll call back,” I shouted, as she settled in one room and began cranking an old duplicating machine.

  “Do. In half an hour Mr. Hawthorn should be free. Before he goes to the Jumble Sale at twelve.” She stopped cranking. She looked at me, pondering my credit worthiness.

  “Oh, there’s a sale, is there?”

  “Yes. In the hall opposite. You may like to buy something while you’re here in Cairo. It’s in aid of the new extension at Tobruk.”

  “I’ll take a look in, certainly.”

  The lady warmed. “Here!” She drew off an early sheet from the machine and handed it to me. “It’s our Libyan plan. It may be of interest”

  “Indeed—it was just what I wanted to talk to Mr. Hawthorn about” I looked at the page of rough yellow foolscap:

  “The Churchwardens again take this opportunity of announcing the opening of a fund to provide an extension to the present severely limited office and domestic accommodation at the parsonage in Tobruk. …”

  The gods were not quite dead yet; the remnants of the last dynasty were counter-attacking; a message was on the way, an outpost would be relieved; once more the infidel would be repelled. There was even talk at this very moment of a united army gathering in the north, implacable legions blessed by nearly all the disparate Princes. God had been mocked and had retreated; but now there were plans at last: this was the second front.

  The lady in the long cardigan cranked the machine again, the inky paper peeling off ominously, orders for the day; a General Mobilisation: “The dogs of war … The Cannon’s Mouth … Citoyens, aux Armes …”

  I went into the Cathedral to pass the time, through the minute side door into the dusty golden-moted cavern beyond. One’s eyes were lost at once following the Odeon curves and pillars into the shadows above; mid-’thirties, high renaissance ferroconcrete. A silver grille in front of the Lady Chapel at the top of the Cathedral, a distance that seemed hundreds of yards away over an empty no man’s land of wooden trenches, the chairs running from north to south in yellow, untrammelled pine, disused communication lines between the opaque glass of the high windows on either side, last occupied by the Eighth Army.

  On the walls, at distant intervals, like brief footnotes to a lost history book, were plaques and memorials from other long since ruined churches within the diocese; headstones and memento moris rescued from Port Said, Suez, Zagazig and even further afield.

  In Memoriam

  Colonel Campbell Scott Moncrieff

  killed in an attempt to

  prevent a dervish rising

  Tigr Blue Nile Province

  April 29 1908

  Major Esme Stuart Erskine Harrison DSO

  11th Hussars

  who died on the polo ground

  Gezira Nov. 1 1902

  “In the midst of life we are in death.”

  “Lt. Col. R. W. T. Gordon, 93rd Sutherland Highlanders. Died at Port Said from a fever contracted during the Suak-in expedition …” “Robert Septimus Grenfell, Lt., 12th Lancers. Killed in charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman, aged 23 …” “Lt. Col. Baker, who died in Egypt, November 17, 1887. He highly distinguished himself at the battle of Tachkessen while in command of a small Turkish force … a service which was brilliantly and successfully carried out … sincere friends and admirers—a token of their respect … qualities of the highest order which he possessed as a soldier and commander.”

  “Justice is the foundation of Empires.”

  In
the dust-inflamed Cathedral with its soft and pulpy curves, its neutral colouring, the men became a film, a coloured epic; lancers and swordsmen in red or blue tunics. They were the only thing that moved in the yellow spaces, the shafts of empty light. There was nothing of any god here; no mercy, pity or resurrection; nothing remotely Christian. The building was simply a memory of violent life, the plaques an album of adventure turned to stone. Battles and games—sunrise, noon and night; exultation falling, nipped by a mosquito finding the one flaw in the net after an exhausting day’s march from the coast towards some empty quarter; fantasy dying, killed by some small, frightened men with greasy hair rising from behind a thorn bush in the Blue Nile Province while your back was turned; a dismal winter rectory in Worcestershire thrown into real mourning, nanny weeping on the servants’ stairs, through just a piece of bad luck as the pony swerved in the last chukka at the end of a warm afternoon at Gezira: it was the rumour at nightfall, the sound of drums, the parley on the hill top, the pipe of a false peace and a lot of liberal politicians at home, umpires blowing shrill and distant whistles, calling foul.

  It was just a lot of bad luck really; they always sold you short—just as you’d got the boot in and had cracked a first skull. When the maxim platoon had a proper alignment and trajectory, and it was going nicely, the black gentlemen scurrying over the hill, you had a telegram from some competition wallah in Whitehall and picked up a dose of blackwater fever on your way back to H.Q. You never made that first class cabin on the Port Said boat; another telegram to the War Office took your place instead, while you lay up in the little cemetery beyond the French Club, looking over the canal, watching the boats go home forever. Justice is the foundation of Empires.

  It wasn’t so very different these days, I thought. The fevers and the maxim guns had gone, and nanny had died weeping for the brave and foolish. But the umpires were still around in Whitehall, men like Williams, and far from liberal. And in Washington. And Moscow. There wasn’t the sound of any whistles now. They knocked on the door late at night; and there was still no boat home.

  The Blue Nile Province had become an acrid-smelling barracks, or a nissen hut in Heliopolis—or in Athens or in Saigon. But the men died just the same, on the direct current, with ruptured kidneys or gangreened shins. The brave and foolish went to the wall, just as they had always done, but at midnight now, not high noon; in a cellar, not an empty quarter. And there wouldn’t be any memorial; no one would weep, for no one would ever know. It was a foolish story about history.

  Something scraped over the glass in a corner window, high up; a shadow flicked across a row of yellow pews like a bird flying quickly over furrowed stubble. I turned and saw a lizard, six inches of still, mottled-green flesh, splayed out on the Gordon memorial window, a tiny cross of Lorraine stamped in the sun above the legend “I have done my duty for our country”. I moved down a row of benches to take a closer look at it.

  Charles General Gordon, C.B.,

  1833-1885

  I thought the lizard had moved a second time when I heard the scraping sound again. But it was in just the same position when I looked up—a misplaced heraldic device, an idea the artist had forgotten to rub out in the cartoon of the window. I looked to my right.

  Henry was standing beside a pillar at the top of the wall aisle, just beneath psalm numbers for the previous Sunday. For an instant I thought he might have been one of the Church-wardens. He was wearing a navy blazer I’d not remembered him in, and his hair toppled about in wild growths, grey matted strands, some upright, some flattened like an unsettled harvest. His eyes sloped down on either side of his face, with tiredness or drink, as if someone had tried to make him up as an oriental and got it wrong from the start. There was nothing sinister or hunted about him; there never had been. When Henry was worried he simply looked in need of a bath. A shave and a haircut wouldn’t have been wasted either. He seemed to me defiantly conspicuous.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I thought you were one of the sidesmen or something.”

  He came towards me, those busy small steps neatly and exactly marking out the space between us as though he were measuring a pitch.

  “Didn’t mean to give you a fright.” I put out a hand in astonishment, but he didn’t see it. “I saw you walking along the corniche, couldn’t think what you were coming in here for.”

  “I came to see the Provost.”

  “Didn’t know you’d taken to good works.”

  “I may be able to get a lift out of here with him. He’s going to Libya. By car.”

  Henry considered the idea and I looked at him, waiting. I wanted to see what he had in mind. But he said nothing.

  “It seems there’s only you and I left.”

  “You think there’d be room?” He smiled briefly, an expression half meant, half not; waiting to see how the land lay as well.

  “I didn’t know you wanted to go back. In that direction.”

  “Where are the others then?”

  “The Colonel disappeared last night. Bridget this morning. I don’t know where they went. I thought she might be with you. The others—Usher, Cherry, Marcus—they were picked up earlier still. Probably in Heliopolis now.”

  “In the Army Hospital at Maadi. But that’s another story.”

  He brushed his hair back, put a finger in one eye, wiping sleep away. His glasses had broken, I noticed, and he’d mended the hinge with tape. We started to walk down towards the font at the west end of the Cathedral.

  “Why didn’t you go straight to the Russian Embassy—when you got the wrong end of the stick from Dr. Novak?”

  Henry stopped and began fiddling with the metal ring on top of the covered bowl.

  “You’ve really been working.”

  “I haven’t done a stroke. You’ll have to go somewhere. Won’t you?”

  “I don’t have to go anywhere. That’s the nice thing. I don’t have to spin off anywhere and get broken up. I just have to stay put. Wait till they’ve forgotten about me. Then I can move off. Not somewhere Williams knows of, or Moscow. Or you. Leave the busybodies out.”

  “The toytown, you told me—last week.”

  “And you came running with a miniature baton and a set of traffic lights. That was a trick to buy from Williams—invoking the old pals act.”

  “I’ve been just as cunning as you.”

  “Why haven’t you ‘turned me over’ then?”

  “If you thought that, you’d hardly have followed me.”

  “I didn’t think it. I was curious. Can’t seem to drop the habit. What was Williams up to? Why did he send you?”

  I told him nothing of the microfilm. I supposed, even then, that Henry might make it back to Moscow and would warn them that I had my theories about Williams—and I wanted to be left to deal with Williams entirely on my own.

  “He thought you might have had an accident, that you’d just disappeared, been abducted or something. I thought you might have come here—so he sent me after you, said I had good ‘connections’ in the place. What did you come here for?”

  “Some cockeyed idea Williams had about subverting the ASU. I knew he was on to me the moment he suggested it.”

  “On to your being with Moscow? Listen, if you’ve spent twenty years doubling for the KGB you might as well get out of it in one piece. Take the pickings, go home. Go to Moscow, for God’s sake. Don’t hang around here, you’ll get nothing but fifteen years for that, or a bump on the head in some alley. They can get you out of here with no difficulty. Go. Good seats at the Bolshoi, a pass to the dollar shop. Take it. And stop frigging around the Nile in dark glasses. They shoot people out here for that sort of thing, you know.”

  “Good news from Her Majesty’s Government. I never expected to hear the like. Aiding and abetting treason. You’d get fifteen years yourself.”

  “If Williams is on to you—run. You could be on a plane out of here tonight.”

  Henry was indignant. “You met Novak, didn’t you? He’s the Moscow Resident here.
One made for the hospital, not the Embassy; that was the way out for people like us. And when I used it, I found him coming the other way. If a Resident wants to come over, finds things that bad—you think I want to swap places?”

  The Cathedral door creaked—a whine of pity that seemed to last forever.

  An old suffragi in a skull cap and patched galibeah crept into the arena and made his way gradually towards us, pretending carefully to dust the immense spaces which separated us. While he was still some distance away I turned and scowled at him, but he took this as his welcoming cue; yellow-faced and obsequious, he saluted smartly, and padded forward in the busy, unstoppable way these men have; a manner which fawns and insists in exactly equal measure.

  “Good morning, sah! I will show you Gordon’s Window, King Farouk’s Golden Gates and very interesting things. Come with me.”

  “No. No, thank you. We’re just looking round on our own.” I tried to tip him off but he brushed past us, wiping his nose with a sleeve, the bright dark eyes close together, glittering like a conqueror passing over the border who knows the few essential phrases of command but nothing else in the language of the people he has set upon.

  “Come this way, please.”

  We wandered after him. He might have started to make a fuss. He was determined to do his duty, echoing the General’s sentiments, as he stopped in front of his window.

  “Great General Gordon, sirs. His head was taken off by the Mahdi and sent down here. This is his window. Very fine glass made in England by Pimplingtons, the extraordinary manufacturers. You are English—yes?” We weren’t paying attention. He looked at us doubtfully, two laggards who might be American and upon whom he would thus be wasting his eccentric knowledge of Sudanese and British industrial history. But he chattered on comfortably when I nodded.