Death or Glory III

by Michael Asher

  Nolan heard footsteps, heard a door bang. She waited a few moments, then threw a man’s trenchcoat over her pyjamas, belted it loosely, opened the door, walked out into the derelict room Taylor had facetiously christened the ops centre. Their safe-house was an old Fellaheen homestead in an almost deserted Delta village, with boarded-up windows, crumbling mud walls, and a ruined yard out back.

  She found Taylor and Willets lounging in wicker chairs in the lamplight, smoking, drinking snorts of whisky from chipped mugs. A brown bottle stood on the plywood sheet mounted on piled bricks that passed as a table. Taylor looked rough: he was wearing his superfluous eyepatch. Willets, an overweight former Catering Corps cook, had a head like a picklejar and an aggrieved expression. Swarthy and unshaven, he was dressed as an Egyptian in tattered shirt and trousers, broken shoes, a shapeless fez.

  They glanced at her as she entered. ‘Cor,’ Willets gasped. ‘You were right, mate. Talk about dead ringer. Got a twin sister, darlin’?’

  Nolan yawned, swept the golden quiff out of her eyes. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked. ‘Who was that screaming just now?’

  She picked up the bottle, unscrewed the cap, sniffed it, made a sour face. It was cheap Palestinian hooch: the only whisky available these days. She leaned over Taylor, took the cigarette from his mouth, puffed it coolly, blew a stream of smoke. She ran a hand through her tangled curls, arched her head back so that her coat fell away slighly from her shoulders, revealing the smallest cleavage. Willets stared: his fatlipped mouth formed a small ‘o’ before she readjusted the coat.

  ‘The cow bit me, didn’t she?’ He displayed a fat, grubby hand, showed her five neat bite-marks in the palm.

  Nolan put the fag back between Taylor’s lips. ‘Who?’

  Taylor removed the cigarette from his mouth. ‘Your twin sister. Either that or your doppelganger.’

  ‘I haven’t got a twin sister.’

  ‘No, ’course you ain’t. An’ this bint’s an Itie. Spittin’ image ’o you, though. Just as feisty an’ all.’

  Nolan nodded, kept her face blank, disguised her interest. There weren’t many Italians at large in Cairo now. Most male Italian residents of military age had been interned by the British back in 1940: a lot of the women had been placed under house arrest.

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘Locked in the shed. Any longer an’ she’d ’ave ’ad Willets’s flamin’ arm off.’ He chuckled.

  ‘It ain’t funny. I’ll have to put iodine on it. Never know what you might catch.’

  ‘So what’s the story?’ Nolan insisted.

  ‘We was doin’ the rounds in the Miski, leanin’ on Gyppo shopkeepers, when we come across this blond bit. Only holding up a grocer’s with a pistol, wasn’t she?’

  ‘For a minute I could of sworn it was you,’ Taylor cut in. ‘I said, ’allo, what the ’ell is Maddy doin’ here?’

  ‘Anyway, the Gyppo cuts up rusty,’ Willets went on. ‘Tries to slice her with a cleaver. Lucky for her we ’appened to be passin’. We gave the old bugger sommat to think about and pulled her out. Was she grateful? Was she heck. Scratched and fought like a cat all the way out. Good job the flamin’ Redcaps didn’t catch us.’

  ‘Pistol wasn’t even loaded,’ Taylor chortled. ‘Amateur job.’ He brought out a handgun from the pocket of his leather jerkin: an old Beretta revolver. Nolan examined it, gave it back to him.

  ‘Ain’t been fired in years,’ he said. ‘Firin’ pin’s broke. She reckoned it’d belonged to her father – MPs didn’t find it when they interned ’im, she said.’

  ‘We took her off to the Bulaq house, asked her a few questions. She kept tryin’ to escape, so we had to tie her up. She reckoned she was brought up in Cairo, went to the Italian school, worked as a secretary for a cotton company. Name of Camilla, Camilla Pellozzi … sommat like that. Father owned a garage. He and her brothers got rounded up before the war, and she and her mum was forbidden to go out. Said it was like bein’ in clink: she couldn’t stand it, so one day she takes her dad’s gun and does a bunk. Said she’d been livin’ rough. Only took to robbin’ ’cos she got hungry.

  ‘So all the time I’m askin ’er these questions, I’m thinkin’ she could almost be your twin – I mean, all right, she’s a bit more wiry, maybe, eyes a different colour, and she’s got a different look on her face – like someone just farted – but in a certain light, she could have been you.’

  ‘Except she’s an Itie,’ Willets added.

  Nolan giggled, tried to suppress the excitement she was starting to feel. Italian women were a rarity in Cairo: she only knew one, and, by coincidence, that woman bore an uncanny resemblance to herself. But why would that woman be robbing a shop at gunpoint?

  ‘So what are you going to do with her?’ she asked casually.

  ‘I know what I’d like to do with her,’ Willets wheezed. ‘I’d like to …’

  ‘Shut it,’ Taylor snapped. ‘None of that talk in front of a lady.’

  He scratched his flopping tuft of hair. ‘We could ’ardly turn ’er in, could we? I suppose we could of dumped ’er, but she might have snitched on us. Then I thought, why not take ’er with us? After all, she’s on the run just like we are, and ’avin a bird that’s almost Maddy’s double might be handy. When I put it to her, though, she threw a bleedin’ wobbler. We ’ad to drag her here, an’ she was still fightin’ when we arrived. Tell you what, though: she’s got some spirit: she’d be good with us if she’d just come round, but she won’t see reason.’

  ‘She will,’ Willets grinned.

  ‘Maybe she will. But I don’t want you layin’ a finger on her, mate. If I find out any bloke’s messed about with ’er there’ll be hell to pay.’

  He looked at Nolan. ‘Maybe you could ’ave a word with her, love. Help ’er see sense.’

  Nolan hesitated. ‘I don’t know. It’s not my business, is it?’

  ‘Go on. She won’t feel threatened by another woman.’

  ‘All right then. But let me talk to her on my own. Girl to girl, no blokes breathing down my neck.’

  ‘You’re on. But watch it – she’s as full of moves as a monkey.’

  Two scrawny dogs barked when Nolan entered the yard carrying a torch: they recognized her and soon sat down. The moon was waning and gibbous, the night warm, scattered with stars. The outhouse was small: it had once been occupied by goats and Nolan knew it was still full of their droppings. Its crude wooden plank door didn’t fit properly: it was held in place by a wooden bar. She paused to make certain that Taylor and Willets were out of earshot before she slid the bolt back. She pulled the door open, shone her torch inside. Huddled in a corner among the goat turds, her face bruised and tearstreaked, sat Angela Brunetto.

  I’ll be sending backup. Someone who’ll be able to fit in easily among the deserters. You’ll be able to keep contact with me through her. Nolan had wondered who it might be: she’d never guessed it would be the Italian woman who’d saved their lives on the Runefish mission, who’d prevented her own husband, Michele, from assaulting Nolan, who’d killed that same husband with a knife in defence of Harry Copeland, the man she loved.

  Nolan didn’t know much about Brunetto’s life: she was originally from Milan: she hated Mussolini. Her father had been killed fighting the Germans in the Great War, and she’d never forgiven them. Aged seventeen, she’d been sent to live with an uncle who had a business in Tripoli, but she had been so wild and unruly that he’d threatened to send her home. It was then that she’d met Michele, an Italian soldier and a communist, who’d later deserted and taken her with him. Brunetto had very clear ideas about personal loyalty: she’d never been unfaithful to her husband until she’d found him playing around with other girls. Then, she’d set her sights on Harry Copeland, gone after him like a torpedo, and had been ready to risk her life for him. She appeared excitable sometimes, but she was as cold as ice when the chips were down. She didn’t have the diffident greyness that made the ideal agent, perhaps, but she was resourc
eful, independent and tough. Nolan was delighted to see her.

  Brunetto rose to her feet, blinked in the torchlight: she was wearing black FANY one-piece overalls that made her almost invisible in the shadows, but for the pale, angular face and feral blond hair.

  Nolan shone the beam obliquely on herself. ‘Good evening, Camilla,’ she said.

  Brunetto’s eyes widened: Nolan put a finger to her lips, beckoned her out of the shed. She led her across the yard, through one of the gaps where the mud walls had collapsed. They stood outside in the moonlight under part of a wall that was still standing. ‘If anyone comes, the dogs will bark,’ Nolan said.

  They wrapped their arms around each other, held on tightly for a long time. ‘I thought you were dead,’ the Italian girl whispered. ‘That night with Caine. In the river. Then Stocker, he tell me you are alive, hiding with deserters … just like me in Libya, no?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Nolan said. ‘I didn’t know who I was when they picked me up. Tom was … he didn’t make it.’

  Brunetto flushed. She broke away, squeezed both Nolan’s hands. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Nolan dropped her eyes. ‘What about Harry?’

  ‘That cretino Stocker. I say yes I do this, and he tell everyone I am a dirty little Itie spy all along, as … how you say … cover. He don’t even tell me this until after. Now my Harry believe it is all falso, you know, him and me.’

  ‘No he won’t. He’ll never give up on you.’

  Nolan fished for a packet of cigarettes in the trenchcoat pocket, lit fags for both of them.

  Brunetto drew in smoke.

  Nolan peered at her face in the moonlight, inspected the bruising on her cheek.

  ‘I’m sorry they knocked you about.’

  ‘I have to fight to make it look true.’ She shrugged. ‘But they are stronsi, no? How you stand them? The fat one, he is brutto, but the other, with the bad eye, he is handsome, maybe? He is your friend, now?’

  Nolan shivered despite the heavy coat. ‘He’d like to be. He can be violent, but he adores me. He has his moments, but he’s not –’

  ‘Not Thomas?’ Brunetto smiled. ‘You never give up on him, no?’

  ‘They’ll be here in a minute. What are we going to tell them?’

  ‘That Camilla agree to stay, because she cannot go back to her family. You tell them also that I am not puta, that I am, how you say … a hard bitch … and if any man touch me I cut his throat. You know I do it, too.’

  Nolan nodded grimly, remembered how Brunetto had once shot her husband, Michele, in the foot, crippling him for life – a life that she herself had terminated when she’d buried his own knife in his gullet. She’d do it all right.

  Brunetto finished her cigarette, stubbed it out against the wall.

  ‘Now tell me quick about this Calvin,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know much,’ Nolan said. ‘Only rumours. Stocker’s right about him taking control of deserter gangs: girls are being abducted, and the gangs are carrying out operations against military targets.’

  ‘Si. Si. But who is he? Where he live?’

  ‘No one knows. The rumours seem to point to Alex as his base, maybe in a villa of some kind.’

  ‘That is no good for Stocker: he want name, address and telephone number.’

  ‘How are we going to get hold of those?’

  ‘You get invited home by Calvin. Is the only way to find out.’

  34

  I’ll have to tell him, Johann Eisner thought. Calvin will have to know. He paced the floor, cursed, paused for another gander at the four-by-six photograph that lay on his desk. He peered out of the window across the harbour, saw the mirrored waters of the Mediterranean, saw drifts of seagulls on straffing runs, saw the bright hulls of Allied vessels riding at anchor under a hazeless sky. Among the ships, he knew, lay Admiral Godefroy’s renegade French fleet, which Winston Churchill had as yet adamantly refused to release. Eisner’s house stood on the Alexandria waterfront, a stone’s throw from King Farouk’s rambling seaside palace at Ras el-Tin.

  The photograph showed a beautiful blond girl with an enticing kiss-curl, wearing a calf-length skirt, a white blouse and a light jacket. She was smiling, revealing the cute overlap of her front teeth, holding up a copy of the Egyptian Gazette to the camera. The headline was clearly legible. Tripoli Falls to the Allies. The paper was dated 23 January 1943.

  It’s no good. Calvin will have to be told.

  The photograph had arrived that morning in a manila envelope, accompanied by a letter embossed with the royal seal. It was signed by Mohammad Hassan, the king’s butler, whom Eisner knew was also chief of the palace intelligence service. He’d sometimes made use of Mohammad Hassan’s organization – a surprisingly efficient spy network of mainly Nubian and Berberine waiters, barmen, maids and other domestics, who had access to almost every establishment in the country.

  The documents had been delivered by a blueskinned Berberine with grave eyes and long fingers, in a spotless white gallabiyah and skullcap. He had stood very still while Eisner studied the image: Eisner had had to hold on to the edge of the desk, waiting for the rage and shock to subside.

  ‘It must be a fake,’ he’d grunted finally.

  ‘I can assure you it is not, effendi.’

  ‘Then where did you get it?’

  ‘That, I can’t say.’

  Eisner had examined the image minutely with a magnifying glass, but found no sign of tampering. No, he had to face it: it was her, the Nolan bitch, standing there as brazen as ever, holding a newspaper that indicated she’d been alive and kicking three months after she was supposed to be dead.

  It’s not possible. She died that night. She drowned in the Nile. I know Caine escaped, but not Nolan. There was no record, not the slightest rumour.

  He tasted bile, felt dry fury welling up once more. He touched the scar on his throat – the scar from the wound she’d given him with a knife. Nolan was as slippery as a tart’s crack: she’d eluded him on every single occasion, from that first time she’d stumbled on him in the ladies room at Madame Badia’s nightclub, to the time he’d broken into her flat in al-Hadiqa Street, when her stand-in, Susan Arquette, had accidentally been killed. He’d had her cornered that time in his stepfather’s villa: she’d even been handcuffed. Yet she’d escaped, thanks to the knife – given her by that traitorous whore Hekmeth Fahmi, whom he’d once regarded as a sister. And the last time, on the Nile Corniche. I planned it so meticulously: I risked everything by going back. To get her and Caine in one fell swoop. It was all going perfectly until she recognized me. She tried to snatch my weapon. I lost control. The car shot through the barrier, plunged into the Nile.

  How he himself had survived the crash he couldn’t say. He’d come round after the impact to find himself floundering in dark water some way downstream, carried by one of the Nile’s maverick currents. He’d been lucky. Some boatmen had pulled him out: he’d still been wearing his fellah’s clothes, and he’d managed to bluff his way without attracting the attention of the police

  He’d been chagrined to find out later that Caine had been rescued, of course, but for five months now he’d been convinced that Nolan’s bones lay at the bottom of the Nile. All this time he’d thought her dead, yet here she was again, popping up like an infernal jack-in-the-box.

  His first concern, after the initial rage had faded, was for his own security. Nolan didn’t know he was alive, and he wondered if she’d still be able to recognize him. He dressed Egyptian-style now, and was known to the world as Sayfaddin Lutfi. Only members of the palace inner circle knew him as Hussain Idriss, supplier of the king’s pleasures – in the form of an endless stream of nubile girls.

  The fact that Nolan might be able to identify him as the man who’d murdered Mary Goddard at Madame Badia’s didn’t matter to him any longer: that man had not been himself, just a shadowy presence that haunted him. He hadn’t really been responsible for sodomizing and murdering the cabaret-girl Sim-Sim, either, or Sus
an Arquette, or the others. He’d simply been away for a moment and found them dead when he came back. No, there was something else about Nolan that itched like a sore on his back, something that he’d never be able to admit to anyone. Her dreamy, unselfconscious presence – it was almost fey – made him feel helpless and impotent. Yet despite that or, more likely, because of it, somewhere in the dim recesses of his mind, he wanted her. The very knowledge of her existence would eat at him until eventually he would be obliged to take her, to have her for himself.

  He didn’t know where she was, of course. At first he’d concluded that she must be in Cairo: the photograph had certainly been taken in a Cairo street. But how was she living? Where? Why hadn’t his sources picked up any intelligence about her? The only explanation was that the British were keeping her under wraps. But that didn’t add up either. If so, why would they allow her to wander around the streets, or to pose for such a photograph?

  It was the Berberine messenger who’d provided the solution. ‘The woman is known to be living among deserters,’ he’d said. ‘We have no idea which group or where.’ Eisner had been puzzled at first, then the only possible explanation occurred to him: Betty Nolan had lost it completely – she no longer knew who she was.

  35

  There was an underground tunnel connecting Eisner’s house with the sprawl of basements Calvin inhabited, under the ruins of the old Baylun palazzo. There was another secret passage from there to King Farouk’s magnificent Ottoman citadel on the waterfront at Ras el-Tin. They were so close that you could walk between all three places in thirty minutes, yet it was an hour and a half, and two stiff drinks, before Eisner arrived at Calvin’s abode. There were no guards here, no obvious security, but Eisner knew Calvin could summon a platoon-sized mob of thugs at the snap of his fingers. He hurried down the decrepit pasages, lingered nervously outside the heavy iron door.

  Calvin was one of the few men who could reduce Eisner to a stuttering wreck. The wholly German stepson of an Egyptian Muslim, brought up in Egypt, he spoke Arabic as fluently as he spoke German, English, French, Italian and several other languages. He was unique: he’d been more useful to the Abwehr than any other agent in Egypt, he told himself. The problem was that he’d never really been a German patriot, never been truly committed to the Nazi cause. He’d been able to pull the wool over the eyes of his Abwehr instructors, but not Calvin. Calvin knew.