The Ariadne Objective

by Wes Davis

  Another admirer was King Farouk himself. On one occasion, when Sophie encountered Farouk at a nightclub, he called her over to join him at his table. Realizing too late that there was no chair for his new guest, the king called out, “A throne, a throne for Countess Tarnowska!”

  Sophie was particularly fond of Farouk’s wife, Queen Farida, who invited her for tea at the Abdin Palace, the royal family’s sumptuous house in Old Cairo. Since the queen was forbidden by Islamic custom from appearing in public, she and Sophie often met surreptitiously. At parties, the queen would call Sophie away from the ballroom to join her in an out-of-the-way room or a hidden spot on a balcony so they could spy on the social swirl below. Other times Farida sent Sophie tickets to a movie theater, where, after the lights went down, the queen would join her, her identity disguised by a strategically draped veil.

  For all that she had lost since the war began, Sophie recognized that she was now living a kind of charmed life. “This is like being in heaven,” she wrote to her now estranged husband. “My life is seven hours of work (just like the seven lean cows in the Bible) and then, whoopee. After that I sleep very little.”

  Sophie’s Cairo fairy tale lasted until the summer of 1942, when a crisis in the desert sent a wave of panic through the city. All year Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps had been on the offensive, taking Benghazi, on the Libyan coast, at the end of January, then pushing east throughout the spring. By June, Rommel was on the march toward the crucial harbor city of Tobruk, just five hundred miles westward along the coast from Cairo. When Tobruk fell near the end of the month, the residents of Cairo were left wondering whether Rommel could be stopped before his tanks rolled into the city itself. Two days later he crossed the border into Egypt.

  July was a time of year when few would have chosen to be in Cairo under the best of circumstances. The air hung still and hot beneath a sun so bright it seemed to bleach the color from everything in sight. Now the threat of siege, or worse, had the British and their allies streaming out of the city. A letter arrived from Andrew asking Sophie to come to Palestine. But it was her sister-in-law who went. Finally, the head of the Polish legation ordered Sophie to evacuate. She refused. But on the following day she drove her car out to the main road to see what was happening. The roads were choked with vehicles. One long line stretched eastward, carrying evacuees toward safety in Palestine. In the other direction, along the road to Alexandria, trucks loaded with soldiers rattled slowly toward the front lines.

  It was obvious that she ought to join the convoy headed for Palestine. But recalling her earlier departure from Poland, Sophie refused to let herself be forced, once again, to give up her home. “I’ll be damned,” she said to herself. She would not run away. In fact, she would do the opposite. “I’ll take the train and go to Alexandria, to be closer to the front.”

  That evening she made her way to the railway station and boarded an eerily empty train. A little more than three hours later—an air raid had caused a short delay—she stepped down in Alexandria and walked ten minutes north to the waterfront esplanade known as the Corniche, where she took a room at the Beau Rivage Hotel. Though it cost more than she could comfortably spend, she was drawn to the hotel for its garden terrace by the sea. Alexandria was smaller and quieter than Cairo, and she felt that she had left the chaos of the city’s evacuation behind her, though in fact she had put herself closer to the action. Except for the blackout restrictions that were still in place following a recent attack by the Luftwaffe, it was hard to believe a battle was raging only seventy-odd miles away. That evening, when Sophie went down to the restaurant on the terrace, she found that she was the only guest. She had the entire staff of waiters to herself, and the manager of the hotel—grateful to have such an agreeable patron in a difficult time—treated her to a bottle of his best wine. As she enjoyed the meal there by the sea, she was convinced she could hear the faint rumble of the guns at El Alamein.

  Over the following days, while Sophie read books on the beach near the hotel, British troops fighting in the desert to the west at last managed to stop Rommel’s advance. She returned to Cairo. By the end of the month, the evacuees flooded back. The crisis, which the British began to call “the flap,” was over. But for Sophie the near disaster, weathered entirely on her own, marked a turning point that allowed her to put the past behind her. It was the following summer that she met Moss. A friend who saw them together called them “the best looking couple he had ever seen.”

  7

  Tara

  THE HOUSE MOSS had found sat on the northern end of the Gezira island, near a point where the river flowed past a colonnade of mature sycamore figs. Cultivated lawns bordered the villas that dotted the area, and not far to the south began the outlying stretches of the golf course, cricket pitch, and polo fields maintained by the nearby Gezira Sporting Club. Jasmine and honeysuckle flourished on villa gates and railings, sending out scents that, once picked up by the river breezes, “made the air of summer nights intoxicating.”

  The villa itself offered everything a field-weary SOE officer could want. A wide balustraded stairway swept up from the garden to the front door, which opened onto an airy and inviting first floor. The half dozen bedrooms scattered throughout the house were a comfortable step up from the lodgings at Hangover Hall. From one or two of the upstairs windows you could scramble out onto the roof to gaze at the night sky or bask in the sun. There was an ample dining room and a drawing room dominated by a cozy hearth. Moss thought one room would make a good study. Most important, as it turned out, was the parquet-floored ballroom, a grand, open space that seemed to demand lavish parties. The new residents put this to good use before they had hardly moved in.

  They soon gave the new house a name, christening it Tara. Although SOE had spirited him away from the Irish Guards, Leigh Fermor still felt the pull of his Irish ancestry. To him the name pointed to the legendary seat of the high kings of Ireland, a great hall situated on the River Boyne. It was there that “thronged assemblies of all the notables were held,” one historian wrote of ancient Tara, “rude Parliaments of the kings and their free-born kinsmen, and of bards, historians, and druids.” It was easy to see why this romantic idea appealed to Paddy’s imagination. But “Tara” was also the name of the once-stately plantation house in Gone with the Wind. And that was an even more apt model for the house that had brought this group of wartime friends together. Sophie Tarnowska even dressed as Scarlett O’Hara for one of their house parties and was caught in a photograph that might have been of the fictional heroine herself, if not for the cigarette held delicately between her first two fingers, its lit end angled upward.

  AMONG THE FRIENDS who took up residence at Tara was a twenty-five-year-old Sandhurst graduate named Billy McLean. Moss had been the conducting officer when McLean was extracted from his most recent mission, and he had liked the young man’s disarming smile and romantic outlook on the war. Born in London, McLean came from a family with Highland roots, and he could trace his lineage back through seven centuries’ worth of Gaelic chieftains. He was stronger than his tall, thin build made him appear, but he had an easygoing way about him. It was tempting to say he was lazy, until you had seen him stirred into action.

  He had served in Palestine in 1938, at the time of the Arab revolt, and had picked up some Arabic there. Later on he organized irregulars to fight the Italians along the Gojjam heights in Abyssinia. Waiting in Addis Ababa before going into action, he had tried to learn Amharic, without much success. But he still took pleasure in mimicking the kind of syntax he had tangled with, thickets like “the mule who-riding-man-is-having-gone is now going.”

  When Xan Fielding, Leigh Fermor’s friend from Crete, moved into the house later in the winter, he at first took McLean for some kind of fop. It was true his name appeared at the top of the party lists maintained by Cairo hostesses. And he wore his fair, straight hair so long that he was continually brushing it away from his eyes. “He struck me as a human epitome of cavalry dash and swag
ger, even though he had long ago exchanged his steed for a parachute,” Fielding later wrote. “But, as I soon discovered, this charming and lackadaisical façade concealed a toughness of steel, great powers of physical endurance, and a needle-sharp intelligence.”

  In Albania the previous July, McLean had ambushed a German staff car, ostensibly to capture documents that might disclose something of the enemy’s plans in the Balkans but more for the fun of it. His mission, which had been under way since April, had been drawing to a close, and there had been no engagements with the Germans. “I’m damned if I’m leaving here without having a crack at something,” he had told a fellow officer. When the story reached his friends, they thought it sounded like characteristic McLean behavior.

  Also becoming a fixture at the house, though he lived elsewhere, was the former war correspondent turned SOE officer Julian Amery, a trim young man with a narrow, delicate face, penetrating dark eyes, and hair swept back from a high forehead.

  David Smiley was a friend of McLean’s who had been living elsewhere too. But he decided to move in when he found he was spending all his time at Tara and too much money on Moss’s suffraghi, Abdul, who tapped guests for contributions to the household fund as they came and went. Smiley had met McLean three years earlier aboard a troopship in the Red Sea. Both were then in mounted cavalry regiments and were returning to their units in the Middle East after an aborted volunteer mission intended to help the Somaliland Camel Corps fend off an Italian advance into British Somaliland. As they became acquainted, trading stories about their experiences in Palestine, they convinced each other that horse units were unlikely to see real action in the fighting that lay ahead. Rather than rejoin their cavalry regiments, both men made a detour to Cairo and wangled their way into other units.

  Smiley wound up in a commando detachment leading long-range raids against enemy supply lines behind the Italian front in Abyssinia. When he learned that his former cavalry unit had traded its horses for tanks and was on its way to Iraq, he asked for a transfer back. The regiment fought its way to Baghdad, and Smiley stayed on for campaigns through Syria and Persia. Later on, reequipped with fast-moving armored cars, they were sent to the Western Desert. “After the breakthrough at Alamein,” he recalled, “we pushed ahead collecting thousands of Italian prisoners, having occasional shoot-outs with pockets of German or Italian resistance, and passing vast quantities of abandoned enemy guns, tanks, vehicles and equipment.”

  On leave in Cairo before heading out into the desert, he had bumped into McLean again and heard tales of his exploits in SOE. Although intrigued, Smiley was looking forward to his own unit’s upcoming tussle with Rommel’s forces in the desert and thought no more about it. However, when his unit was later pulled back from the fighting due to dwindling fuel supplies, SOE suddenly looked like the best route back into the thick of things. McLean helped him secure an interview, during which he laid out his qualifications.

  “In Palestine I had done a course on mines and explosives,” he explained. “I had trained with explosives again in the commandos, served in guerilla-type operations in Abyssinia, operated against guerillas in Palestine, and gained battle experience from fighting in Iraq, Syria, Persia and the Western Desert.” On top of all that, he had also completed a secret course in guerrilla warfare and demolitions that was conducted at a monastery on the site of the biblical Emmaus, outside Jerusalem.

  It came as no surprise when SOE accepted his application. Just after the first of the year Smiley traveled to the SOE camp near Haifa for the standard training course. “We studied German and Italian weapons, uniforms, insignia, badges and organization, map reading, explosives and demolitions, as well as such unorthodox subjects as sabotage of all types, the use of secret inks, tapping telephone lines, lock picking and safe blowing.” One lesson on the use of a timed incendiary device reduced the classroom itself to cinders. Smiley called the program “my dirty tricks course.”

  When it was over, he went to Kabrit, on the Suez Canal, for parachute training. By the middle of April, a week after his twenty-seventh birthday, he was lounging in the cargo hold of a Halifax bomber, reading Horse and Hound while he waited to drop into Greece as McLean’s second in command. They touched down in the mountains on Greece’s northwestern frontier and set out toward the north. Several days later they slipped into Albania.

  Smiley’s arrival at Tara had an immediate impact on the atmosphere of the house, at the olfactory level. For an outdoorsman, he had an unusual weakness for what he called “smells,” by which he meant various exotic scents and perfumes. Whenever he came home, the aroma of the sandalwood oil he wore wafted in with him. And he took great pleasure in burning incense, first in his room and later in the drawing room or Moss’s study, wherever he happened to be. Sophie, for one, did not mind this quirk, and when Christmas rolled around, her present to him was a sizable flagon of sandalwood oil. Unfortunately the gift led to some unexpected difficulty when Smiley applied the scent a little too freely as he was leaving for a meeting with a delegate from the Yugoslav partisans. He arrived smelling like the proverbial French whore, and the delegate apparently got the wrong impression about his sexual interests, causing an awkward exchange. Smiley preferred not to talk about it.

  A fondness for scents was not the only peculiarity Smiley brought with him to Tara. Unlike many of his housemates—Leigh Fermor and Moss, in particular—who shared literary interests, Smiley found even the workaday writing that went into mission reports pure drudgery. When his housemates discovered him hunched over a half-written report in obvious misery, they wondered aloud whether, as Paddy put it, “perhaps he was happier with the sword than the pen.” Julian Amery agreed: “Smiley lived for action alone and was happiest on a dangerous reconnaissance or when ‘blowing things up.’ ”

  Smiley and McLean labored for over a month on the summary of their recent Albanian mission. The two of them could often be found encamped in Moss’s study, surrounded by the loot they had brought back with them, staring at the typewriter. Moss sometimes overheard them sniping at each other out of frustration. Smiley would shout, “You bloody communist!” And McLean would snap back, “You bloody fascist!”

  The two remaining inhabitants were Arnold Breene—he worked behind the scenes at the SOE headquarters—and Rowland Winn. Winn, the son of an eccentric baron from Yorkshire, had been a reporter for Reuters during the Spanish civil war. He was captured by the republicans and had turned twenty-one in a Barcelona jail, where he would have been executed if the British consul had not managed to spring him. Now twenty-seven, he was in an armored cavalry regiment but had applied for transfer to SOE. His friends were trying to push his application through.

  Much as they liked Winn, however, it was sometimes hard to imagine his faring well in the field. Around three o’clock one night, driving home from a party with him, Julian Amery suddenly realized his friend was not in the car. He wheeled around and drove back to find Winn sitting by the side of the road cursing. It seemed he had not managed to secure the door when he got in, and he had tumbled out as Amery rounded a curve.

  His misfortunes seemed part and parcel of his persona. Winn used a monocle, had an awkward manner of walking, and wore an extravagant waxed mustache, all of which seemed to invite mockery. Sophie quickly made a game of hiding his cap, just to watch him bang the table and demand to know where it had gone. On one occasion her teasing went too far. She found him asleep on a sofa in the drawing room, stole back to her room to retrieve a pair of scissors, tiptoed back in, and snipped off one waxy wing of his mustache. When it came free in her hand, she was mortified to see that he had worn it to conceal a scar on his lip. Winn nevertheless remained devoted to Sophie, bringing her a little gift of chocolates or some household luxury whenever he had been out. He had a volatile personality and could be incensed or sociable by turns. But there were women who found him chivalrous. Paddy thought him “quixotic.”

  Leigh Fermor was on less friendly terms with another member of the househo
ld. While Moss was still living at the house alone, he had acquired a German shepherd puppy, at first no bigger than a teapot, that came with an unusual pedigree. Its parents had been captured at Tobruk, where they were trained as police dogs by the Gestapo. Moss called the dog Pixie, a name that put a cheerful spin on the mischief he was constantly stirring up. For some reason it was Leigh Fermor who wound up cast in the role of long-suffering victim. As Pixie grew by leaps and bounds over the course of the fall, so did the ongoing feud between the two. The dog had a particular knack for adding insult to injury whenever anyone was involved in some sort of mishap.

  One morning Paddy lurched awake just before dawn to find the couch he was lying on in flames. He realized later that he had come in after a night out and fallen asleep with a cigarette in his hand, a practice he was engaging in more and more often these days. The drawing room was filling with smoke as he dashed down the hall to wake Moss, and when the two of them returned, flames were already sweeping up the wall as high as the ceiling. They grabbed a bowl and a wastepaper basket and dashed for the kitchen sink. What ensued was a scene out of a slapstick comedy. At one point the bottom fell out of the wastebasket, which was made of parchment. When they finally had the fire doused, Pixie arrived, sniffed the couch, raised his leg, and urinated on it. In fact, at the height of the emergency, Moss and Leigh Fermor had resorted to the same tactic, so Moss felt the dog was simply pitching in, but this opinion was undermined by the fact that Pixie had once performed the same act on the leg of King Farouk, who was not on fire at the time of his visit to Tara. Two days later Paddy set the sofa in the hallway ablaze under similar circumstances. This time, Pixie did not respond.