There was a hiatus as everyone ruminated over this. It was Caine who broke the silence. ‘Corporal Naiman,’ he said, ‘can you ask the sheikh how long ago the rest of the column went off?’
Naiman was about to translate when the sheikh said, ‘No, I understand. How long since Tedesci went with girl… you want to know, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was one hour after sunrise.’ He turned and extended both arms, pointing them due north. ‘They go that way – Benghazi.’
‘One hour after sunrise is around 0800 hours,’ Caine said, glancing at his watch. ‘Dammit – that's three hours ago. We'll never catch them now.’
The sheikh shook his head. ‘No, no, no,’ he repeated. ‘You catch. Yes – you get there before Tedesci.’
‘How is that possible?’ Caine asked.
Adud pointed to his nose with a slender, gnarled finger. Obviously feeling that he'd exhausted his English, though, he spoke to Naiman in Arabic. ‘The sheikh knows a shortcut,’ Naiman translated. ‘The road the Boche take avoids the Green Mountain, but the sheikh's way cuts through it. They call it the Hag's Cleft. He says it's an old route known only to the Senussi. The Arabs do it on foot or by donkey – it's hard in places, and it might be dangerous for motor-vehicles. He says if we're willing to risk it, he's ready to show us. He'll guide us personally as a mark of gratitude to Allah for what we did here.’
‘The Hag's Cleft,’ Caine repeated. He stared at Naiman. ‘How far ahead of the enemy will this put us?’ he enquired.
Naiman repeated the question to Adud. ‘You get there long before Tedesci,’ the old man said energetically. ‘Long enough you hide and wait – boom.’ He grinned and drew a hand across his throat. ‘You kill them. You take woman. You kill them all.’
18
It was three o'clock in the morning when Sim-Sim unlocked the door of her flat in Zamalek, exhausted from the Benzedrine hangover, from the endless coasters of cheap champagne she'd consumed, from the physical exertion of her act, and worst, from the strain of having to keep smiling and to maintain a constant flow of inane banter with the clients. She sometimes brought johnnies back to her flat, but not today: today she wanted nothing more than to collapse on her cot and sleep for a week.
The flat was dark and full of shadows, but she didn't switch on the light in the sitting room. Instead, she went straight to the bathroom to empty her bladder, and to remove her make-up. As she wiped it off with cotton wool, she studied herself in the mirror, wondering how long her good looks would last in this twilight profession, and whether, with a name like Levi, she would survive at all when the Boche took over – as many predicted they soon would.
She detested being ‘Sim-Sim’, but in a sense it was a fitting name for a trade in which it paid to appear more stupid than you were. The whole ‘Sim-Sim, a Lebanese Christian from Beirut’ routine was part of the act – in fact, she was Rachel Levi, a Palestinian Jew from Safed, near the Sea of Galilee.
She let down her gorgeous black hair, changed into her dressing gown and walked through to the sitting room. She was groping to switch on a standard lamp when a rough hand grabbed her wrist, twisted her arm sharply behind her: another massive hand clamped her mouth. ‘If you scream I'll kill you,’ a voice croaked.
Her assailant dragged her to a straight-backed dining chair, pushed her down into it, and tied her hands to its back. She felt the cold, sharp prick of a knifepoint against her throat. ‘I'm going to switch on the light,’ the voice said. ‘If you make any noise, believe me, you're dead.’
Electric light exploded in her face and she blinked frantically, bringing into focus a strapping man in a black suit. He looked at first like one of the Egyptian playboys she'd frequently entertained in the club – cleanshaven, dark suit, dark glasses, greasy dark hair, shiny patent-leather shoes. He spoke Arabic with an unmistakable Cairo accent. Rachel's eyes fell on the slim stiletto in his right hand. She'd known clients who carried weapons for self-defence, but this struck her as being the weapon of an assassin. ‘Who are you?’ she stammered. ‘What do you want?’ It had to be sex, she thought – it was always sex. He was one of those crazies – the bane of her profession – for whom simple submission wasn't enough. She shuddered at the thought of what ‘those crazies’ had been known to do.
‘Come on, my dear Sim-Sim,’ the man said, his voice almost unctuous. ‘Your memory can't be that bad. We met only two days ago – it's not very flattering that you've forgotten me already. Let me give you a clue.’ He switched to perfect, accentless English. ‘You are a nice, respectable British officer, but there's at least one person out there who has good reason to want Betty dead.’
Rachel's mouth fell open in shock. ‘You?’ she gasped. ‘Captain Sandy Peterson?’
‘Good, very good, but not exactly. You see, Captain Sandy Peterson is a figment of my imagination.’
Rachel twisted her face up at him incredulously. ‘Who are you?’ she asked weakly.
‘Who am I? I am the person who wants information about your friend Betty. You weren't very kind to me the other day, so I have returned. It was an easy matter to follow you here. Now I want to know all those things that you refused to tell me the first time around, and you are going to tell me, or I shall disfigure you so badly the only thing you will be good for is doing sex acts with donkeys for money.’
Her eyes fixed on him, wide with horror. Even when he had been dressed as an officer she'd felt that there was something familiar about him. Now she was certain of his identity. This was the man who had brutally raped and murdered Lady Mary Goddard at Madame Badia's – the man whom Betty had discovered in the ladies' room, the man she herself had seen Lady Goddard attacking verbally in the bar, only minutes before her death. What other reason could he have for asking questions about Betty? He was obviously afraid that she might be able to identify him. What really frightened Rachel was the thought that he might recall her own presence in the club that night, and consider her a threat too.
‘Go to hell,’ Rachel said.
Eisner took a flying leap over to the chair, and in a flash of movement pinched the lobe of her right ear between finger and thumb and sliced it off with his knife. Blood spurted from the clean cut. Rachel tried to scream, but once again he stifled her with a big hand over the mouth. He scrabbled at the neck of her dressing gown and ripped it off her shoulders, exposing her ripe breasts. ‘No,’ he whispered in her bloody ear. ‘You are the one who's going to hell, my dear. It would truly give me pleasure to carve up this beautiful face of yours – I would enjoy that.’ He held up the piece of ear he'd just cut off. ‘This you won't miss much, but your nose, your lips…’ He let the knifeblade linger on a perfect nipple. ‘Or one or both of these…’ He felt excited at the thought.
Rachel shuddered. Blood from her injured ear was dripping on her shoulder, running down one breast. She cried silently, the tears running down her cheeks. ‘What do you want to know?’ she sobbed.
‘I want to know about Betty.’
Rachel screwed up her face again. She was aware now what her fate would be if she didn't do what he wanted. In her trade, she'd learned to read men, and she had seen it in the man's eyes, heard it in his voice. It wasn't just talk. This was a man who really did enjoy hurting women. She didn't want to betray her friend, but she reasoned that Betty was safe. She was too far away for this man to be able to hurt her.
Eisner wrenched the dressing gown again, slitting it with the knife all the way down the back, so that it fell in pieces, leaving her body naked. He grinned with evident enjoyment, stroking her belly with the flat blade. Suddenly he pinched her nose hard, jerking her head back, touching her nostrils with the knife. ‘Once it's gone, you won't grow it back,’ he growled.
‘All right,’ Rachel squeaked. ‘Let me go. I'll tell you.’
He released her nose and she hunched forward, winded. ‘Her name is Betty Nolan,’ she panted. ‘She's British. She was an actress before the war – she was too good for a cabaret girl… She had
a wonderful memory. She was popular, got on well with the clients. Like I told you before, she never dated them… never took them home.’
Eisner let the knifepoint touch the nape of the girl's now-bloody neck. Rachel trembled, cringing at the pain from her severed ear-lobe, which was still pulsing blood.
‘Why not?’ Eisner asked, his voice silky. ‘She doesn't like men?’
Rachel tried to clear her head. ‘No… it wasn't that,’ she whispered. ‘It was… she had a boyfriend in England… Peter. They were going to be married… only Peter was killed by the Nazis…’
‘Killed in action?’
‘No – she said he was a secret agent in France. He was betrayed. The Nazis tortured and murdered him. Betty said she couldn't go with anyone else until she'd… laid him to rest in her mind.’
Eisner nodded, thinking that the jigsaw pieces were beginning to fit.
‘How long ago did Betty leave Madame Badia's?’ he demanded.
‘It was… about… six months ago. She was never the same – never felt the same – after that night… the night I told you about.’
‘And what did she say about that night – about the man she saw in the ladies' room?’
Rachel shivered again. She dreaded approaching this dangerous ground. ‘She didn't say anything,’ she stammered. ‘She was questioned… but she couldn't give any information… not enough to identify him. A lot of people saw him in the club – we were all…’ She stopped suddenly, realizing she'd made a slip.
‘Go on,’ Eisner said coaxingly. ‘You were going to say, “We were all there, and we all saw him,” weren't you? So you were in the floor show that night.’
The barman had told him that she'd been there the longest. He should have remembered her face, he told himself, but part of him knew why he hadn't. It was the same reason that had prevented him from recalling where he'd seen Betty when he'd first glimpsed her in the staff-car – the need to deny to himself that he'd been in the club that night, that he'd had anything to do with the murder of Lady Mary Goddard. There was a battle going on inside him, a war between the professional spy and the man who enjoyed having a beautiful woman like Sim-Sim tied naked to a chair, and at his mercy.
‘Why do you want to know about that?’ Rachel sobbed, cutting short his musings.
‘I don't,’ he snapped. ‘What did Betty do after she left Madame Badia's?’
‘I don't know. I never saw her again…’
Eisner pushed the knife gently against one of her breasts. ‘Don't!’ she squealed. ‘It hurts.’
‘Of course it hurts. It's supposed to hurt. Now, what did she do after she left?’
‘All right. Stop, I'll tell you what I know.’
He withdrew the knife, leaving a small, V-shaped incision on the breast, from which came a trickle of blood.
Rachel felt her head gyrating and had to take deep breaths to prevent herself from passing out. ‘I didn't see her again after that,’ she said, her voice almost a whisper. ‘I heard she joined the army – the British Army.’
Eisner surveyed her face, and knew she wasn't lying. ‘The army?’ he said. ‘You're sure it was the army?’
‘Yes, I'm sure.’
‘Did she join as an officer or a private?’
‘It must have been a private… a… a clerk or telephonist or something.’
‘Where does Betty live now?’
‘I don't know… really… She used to have a flat on the Gezira, in al-Hegida Street.’
‘Number?’
‘Twenty-Two… but I don't know if she still uses it.’
Eisner paused. He doubted that Sim-Sim had much more to tell him. Actually, in a few words, she'd told him plenty. There was something strange going on, and he could almost smell deception.
‘Why are you asking these questions?’ Rachel said. ‘What are you going to do to Betty?’
‘Nothing – necessarily,’ he said, smiling. ‘Your question should be, what am I going to do to you?’
‘Let me go,’ she said. ‘I've told you everything I know.’
‘Now I'd like to do that but, unfortunately, I can't.’
Rachel stared at the grinning mask of a face, focused on the stiletto in his hand. A quiver ran down her spine. The knife. Betty had said something about the man who'd murdered Lady Mary – that he was using a knife with a long, narrow blade. A knife like this one. That made it certain. This was the man who'd sold secrets to the Germans, who'd raped and killed Mary Goddard in cold blood.
‘It was you,’ she said, her voice dead now. ‘You're the one Betty saw. Whatever you do to me, one thing is certain: you're going straight to damnation.’
Eisner didn't seem to lose his cool, but there was a green tinge to his face that revealed a terrifying inner battle. How pathetic he was, he thought. Trying to deny it to himself. Trying to pretend to himself that he was a cold, logical operator when in reality he was what he'd always been – a sadistic punisher of women, and there was nothing – nothing – he could do about it. A tidal wave of fury burst in his head, overwhelming him. With a sudden movement he cut through Rachel's ropes, snatched her long, beautiful hair and dragged her, shrieking, towards the bedroom.
19
They glimpsed the Hag's Cleft not long before sunset – from afar a barely perceptible slit in the wall of the Green Mountains, a warren of heat-weathered hills, rubblestone slopes, cave-riddled valleys and steep-sided canyons that rose to sixteen hundred feet and filled the whole bulge of Cyrenaica. The pre-Saharan slopes of the jebel were covered in goat-grass and camel-thorn, but the further north you penetrated, the deeper you pushed into dense thickets of maquis scrub and cool forests of cypress, cork-oak, pine and juniper, that seemed a million miles from the sterile emptiness of the desert.
Caine halted the column at the foot of the cleft, and he and his crew jumped out to survey it. Wallace was grinning all over his broad face. ‘You can see why they call it the Hag's Cleft, can't you?’ he said.
Caine nodded. It was clearly the mouth of a steep, narrow wadi, cutting deep into the heart of the mountain, but at close quarters its eroded edges gave it the unmistakable shape and texture of giant, raddled female genitalia.
Copeland didn't join in the joke. ‘We'll never get the wagons through there,’ he said.
Caine ignored him and lit a cigarette, holding it in his bandaged hand. He was satisfied that they'd made good time, despite the fact that they'd had to run for cover twice when Axis planes reamed over the horizon. He had no doubt the pilots would spot the burning Senussi village and drop altitude to scope it out, but they wouldn't see much. Before his column had pulled out, he'd had a change of heart over the German dead and had ordered his men to collect their rifles, Schmeissers and spare ammo and throw the corpses into the blazing buildings. They hadn't been able to do anything about the vehicle wrecks, but he guessed that the place would be screened by thick smoke for a while yet – and it would soon be sunset. Axis patrols would certainly have been alerted, but they wouldn't know what they were looking for. The damage could just as easily have been done by an RAF bombing raid.
Sheikh Adud came over to the White with Layla and Naiman. The old man crouched down by Caine, sketching lines in dust with a gnarled finger. ‘It is steep and narrow,’ he confirmed, ‘but only in one place very steep. That place is Shallal – like a… a waterfall. In that place sometimes Arabs have to drag donkeys up by rope.’
Caine gulped. He didn't like the sound of ‘waterfall’. If even donkeys could only get up with difficulty, how would the 3-tonners fare, or the Marmon Herrington? He considered taking only the armoured vehicles but rejected it. The lorries had all the kit on board – weapons, rations, spare ammo. He would need everything he'd got to take on the Brandenburg convoy. He thought ruefully of the column his men had avoided that first morning. A couple of those six-wheeled Bredas would have been ideal for this.
‘It looks mighty narrow to me,’ Copeland said, ‘and it'll get narrower as we go up. If we get stuck
in there, that'll be the end of Runefish.’
Caine was thinking about what his rash attack on the village had already cost them – two good men, Cavazzi and Rigby, lying in unmarked graves by the mosque. Of the two seriously wounded, Jackson was still laid up in one of the trucks. O'Brian, his throat thickly bandaged, was already on his feet. Then Caine remembered that the assault on the village had also produced something positive: without those clues to the whereabouts of Runefish, they'd have been high and dry.
He flicked away his cigarette butt and glanced at Copeland. ‘It's a gamble,’ he said, ‘but on the other hand, it has advantages. The Boche will be on our trail by now. Even if they manage to track us here, they'll never follow us through, not unless they have an Arab guide. No one's going to spot us in the cleft, not even from the air.’
Cope hadn't lost his dubious look. ‘How do you know we can trust the old man?’ he asked. ‘He might be setting us up. If we get bumped at the other end, it'll be a massacre.’
‘Harry,’ Caine said, shaking his head almost pityingly. ‘The old fellow just saw his daughter escape death by the skin of her teeth, not to mention a bunch of cousins strung up like dogs. Whose side is he likely to be on?’
‘Who can tell how these Arabs think?’
Caine yawned and realized he was dog-tired. If they were going to get through this they'd need half a ton of Bennies. The men had been up all the previous night and had fought a sharp action. To expect them to keep going through another night and fight a second action at the end of it was asking a heck of a lot from anyone, even special-service troops.
‘I don't see that we have a choice,’ he told Copeland. ‘If the Hun get Runefish to Benghazi, we'll never get her out. She'll be on a submarine to Deutschland before you can say “Adolf Hitler”.’ He looked the corporal in the eye. ‘We'll go for it, Harry. Don't underestimate the sheikh – he seems pretty switched on to me.’
Death or Glory I: The Last Commando: The Last Commando Page 15