by Len Deighton
‘Allah yittawil omrak,’ May Allah lengthen your life, replied Wallingford glibly.
The old man bowed. In true Arab style he welcomed them with exuberant compliments and wide movements of his cloaked arms.
Upon a brass-topped side table, tiny cups appeared. The servant – a man who did little other than continuously make and serve coffee – brought a highly polished long-handled copper pot, a kanaka. He held it over the flaming charcoal long enough for it to bubble up, and then repeated the action twice more. While the liquid was still frothy he poured it into tiny china cups. The first cup was served to Wallingford, to mark him as the more honoured of the guests. Two tiny porcelain plates were produced. Each bore four honey-brown pastries, kunafa and baklava. Two were filo pastry layered with finely chopped nuts; the others were made of shredded dough. The servant sprinkled them with rose water.
Robin Darymple knew something of the drill. He knew that there would be much coffee consumed, and time would pass before they got down to business. It was one of the many things about Arabs that he found unbearable. He didn’t like being tested and scrutinised, especially by these men. Darymple felt demeaned at finding himself in the role of supplicant. He looked at Wallingford, but he was talking to the thin old man next to him in an animated and amused manner, calling him Tahseen. They obviously knew each other very well. This didn’t in itself surprise Darymple. Even at school Wallingford had been something of an outsider. His people had come to collect him one Easter: a weird couple. Wally’s father had had a beard and his mother wore too much jewellery. They were flashy. Since then Darymple had always wondered if Wallingford was really as English as he claimed to be.
Offered the mouthpiece of the shisheh, Darymple had been about to decline it but decided that such a response might give offence. A servant put a new chunk of tobacco into the bowl and prodded the flames. The smoke had to be drawn through the water; it was chilled and honey-sweet. Such smoking required strongly inhaled breaths, and that increased the effect. It took a bit of getting used to but Darymple decided it wasn’t so bad. In fact, damned good.
Mahmoud’s English was slow but fluent. He told a couple of good stories about losing money on the horse races at the Gezira Sporting Club. Everyone laughed although not all of them spoke English. They must have recognised Mahmoud’s jokes.
Wallingford was not smoking. He said he’d had some trouble with his throat and was under doctor’s orders. The bantam Tahseen spoke perfect English. He’d been to school in England and had a son at Lancing. Tahseen’s jokes were more English in style.
By the time he’d been there for an hour, Darymple was enjoying himself. He was quite a raconteur himself, and when he stood up and sang a song about an elderly camel from Benghazi, it was greeted with applause.
‘We must be off,’ Wallingford whispered, but Darymple was just getting into his stride. He’d learned that when the water of the water pipe became warm, there was a gesture with the mouthpiece that signalled for the servant to put a new pipe into position. This too won him a round of applause.
‘Let’s go,’ said Wallingford again.
‘Not yet,’ said Darymple. ‘I haven’t sung the sand bag song for them.’
‘I’ve got work to do,’ said Wallingford testily. ‘I’ve got chaps arriving.’
‘Don’t be such a bloody little swot,’ said Darymple. ‘He was always a bloody little swot,’ he told the others. They looked at Wallingford and nodded sagely.
Wallingford smiled indulgently and said to Mahmoud. ‘Have you got the five hundred quid for him?’
‘It is here. He has only to sign.’
‘Now listen, Robbie. I’ve made them give you this loan on the same terms as they do it for the army. You’d better read it all through.’
‘Where do I sign?’ said Darymple. He waved the printed agreement in the air and clowned with it so that the men laughed.
‘It’s in Arabic on one side, English on the other. Mahmoud’s cashier has signed. You must put your name, your address and your place of employment.’
‘Place of employment?’ Darymple laughed and brandished a silver pen. ‘I’m in the bloody army, aren’t I? What shall I write: GHQ Cairo? Or will Grey Pillars do?’ He looked at the others. They smiled.
‘Banks prefer a street address. Put Seifeddine Building, Garden City, Cairo. What do you want: Egyptian money, English fivers?’
‘Fivers will do the trick, old bean.’ Darymple signed the papers with a flourish.
Tahseen, who worked for Mahmoud and had worked for his father too, examined the signature and the address. ‘One copy for you and two copies for the bank,’ he said handing Darymple one of the printed sheets. Then he counted out the big white five-pound notes and Darymple seized them happily. ‘Now I’ll sing the sand bag song.’
‘Save that for next time, Robbie. Always leave them laughing, as they say in show business. It’s time we moved on. Where shall I drop you, that little hotel?’
‘The Magnifico will be magnifico,’ said Darymple.
‘Percy will be waiting with the car,’ said Wallingford, to encourage his friend.
‘Your Percy is a Hun,’ said Darymple accusingly. Wallingford took his arm and urged him out into the crowded street.
‘Percy is a good sort,’ said Wallingford calmly. ‘South Africans are good soldiers. I have half a dozen South Africans.’
‘Damned Boche. I know a Hun when I see one,’ said Darymple, his mood darkening suddenly. Then he was propelled forward by the passersby. There were beggars and men selling bootlaces and two children with long sticks who pushed past them, shouting to keep a herd of goats moving through the crowded alley. Darymple was almost knocked off his feet, but Wallingford took his arm and saved him.
‘Come along, Robin.’
Darymple became quieter as they pushed on through the noise and movement of the crowded bazaar. It was getting dark now, and the electric bulbs made yellow blobs in the tiny shops. The windows were crammed with sweets and spices, beans, brightly coloured vegetables and elaborate gold ornaments. Eventually the top of the El Azhar mosque came into view above the heads of the crowd, and Wallingford breathed a sigh of relief.
Percy had parked the car right in front of the main entrance of the most important teaching mosque of the Muslim world. Around him there were carts and camels and crates containing chickens. Only with some difficulty, and much sounding of the horn, was Percy able to get the car out into the road. Wallingford heaved Darymple into the back seat. ‘The Hotel Magnifico,’ Wallingford told his driver as he climbed into the car.
Robin Darymple slumped over sideways and seemed to be asleep. ‘Is your friend sick?’ asked Percy.
‘You know what Mahmoud is like. They kept piling the old hashish into the shisheh,’ said Wallingford. ‘He’s totally stewed. Maybe he isn’t used to the stuff. He always was a bit of a berk when I knew him at school.’
The driver turned his head and shot a glance at Darymple, who was lying back in his seat, eyes closed and mouth open. ‘Powell and Mogg will be back any time now,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Wallingford. ‘Get going. We must unload El Darymple at the Magnifico and turn around fast. There will be lots of work to do when the boys get back.’ He noticed that the wad of five-pound notes was sticking out of Darymple’s pocket. He pushed it well inside and buttoned the pocket. ‘Did you see the prisoners of war being marched past the club?’ Wallingford asked with studied casualness.
‘And every one of them perfectly in step,’ said Percy as if he’d been expecting just such a question. Wallingford chuckled. Percy liked to have the last word.
The desert road was narrow. As the sun lowered in the sky the driver switched on the truck’s tiny slits of light that were permitted by the blackout regulations. Faintly visible under its coating of dust, the yellow-painted truck bore the stencilled marking of the white coiled snake. It was the same design that Toby Wallingford wore on his shoulder patch: the badge of the Independent Desert Te
ams.
Two men were sitting side by side in the cab of the truck. ‘My kid will be five years old on Saturday,’ said Samuel Powell.
He was a thin man with pinched cheeks and large plaintive eyes. His forage cap was tucked under his shoulder flap. His red hair was cropped short at the back and sides, so that the wavy hair on top of his head sat there like a cheap toupee. His moodiness and glum appearance had encouraged the other men to call him Sandy Powell, after a popular BBC comedian. He was leaning well back in his seat as he held the steering wheel of the AEC Matador. He liked driving it; it provided him with a feeling of power. The Matador was a canvas-sided truck designed for towing six-inch howitzers. On trips across the desert, it was good to know that its heavy-duty tyres, the winch, and four-wheel drive could drag itself out of almost any kind of sand.
The roof of the driving cab was canvas. It had been rolled back to let in the air but at their last stop for a cup of tea – at the Halfway House – they’d closed it as tight as they could. Next to Powell sat Thomas Mogg. His face and arms bore a coating of brown desert dust. Around his neck was a silk scarf and a pair of sand goggles. He sat inside a cocoon made of a grey army blanket in which he’d spent the previous night. Mogg was a brawny Londoner with a reputation for eating and drinking and being a ‘know-all’. His hair was dark and he had a neat moustache that made him look extremely handsome until he opened his mouth to reveal a missing tooth. Mogg had been to a grammar school and passed his matriculation exams. He boasted about having been accepted for London University to study geography. He claimed to have volunteered for the peacetime army, giving up college in order to fight Hitler and the Nazis. In fact he’d joined the army because the magistrate had offered it as an alternative to serving a sentence for striking a policeman during an argument outside a pub at closing time.
‘Five years old?’ said Mogg reflectively. He knew it was the way he was expected to respond. He’d been shown the family snapshots many times. ‘How long since you saw them?’
‘Two years and three months,’ said Powell. There was no pause for calculation. He kept careful accounting of the time.
‘Does your missus manage all right?’
‘Last time I heard, she was with her mother. But she’s looking round for a place of our own.’
‘You’ve got to watch that,’ said Mogg.
‘Why?’
‘Birds in a place on their own,’ said Mogg. ‘She could get up to anything in a place of her own.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Powell. He had a quick Welsh temper.
‘I didn’t mean nothing,’ said Mogg calmly. He was big and strong. He had nothing to fear from any of the other men, let alone a little fellow like Powell, but he didn’t want to provoke him. ‘But what about the rent and the bills and that?’
‘She says when everyone comes back from the war, houses will be hard to get. Now it’s easy to find a place.’
‘Yeah, well, like that,’ said Mogg vaguely to show he wasn’t really interested in Powell’s domestic problems. There was a lot of traffic coming up towards them; it was coming from Cairo. The oncoming side of the road was busy all the time now. Darkness would soon render them invisible to prying Luftwaffe reconnaissance aircraft. Night was a time of movement. Eighteen-ton White transporters had the enormous weights of cruiser tanks swaying gently on their backs. There were long Service Corps convoys. Those dirty old trucks – slow and weighed down by infantry tightly packed into them – had obviously done the journey countless times. Right behind them came a medical convoy that might have come straight from the depot: half a dozen brand new ambulances and a three-ton Bedford operating theatre with trailer. There was even a shiny new Church Army canteen. All of it was going westward to the battlefront.
‘But we don’t get any mail, do we?’ said Powell. Sometimes, as now, the Welsh accent was strong. He bit his lip as he caught sight of an oncoming motorcycle: some bloody fool weaving about to demonstrate his riding skill. Powell touched the brake pedal. Blue and white armband: signals corps. Those dispatch riders were all the same. They had to show you how daring they were. As he passed them the rider cut it very fine and accelerated away with a loud burst of sound. ‘Stupid sod,’ said Powell, without much emotion.
‘Well, you must have known what it would be like when you joined us,’ said Mogg. Mogg hadn’t even noticed the closeness of that imbecile on the motorbike. Mogg had never learned to drive. He was like all the rest of them who couldn’t drive. They just plonked themselves down in the passenger seat like a sack of potatoes and were completely oblivious to what went on in front of them.
‘What do they do with it? Where does it end up?’
‘The mail? Just piles up in the army post office, I suppose.’
‘Along with the letters for the dead and the missing and the POWs,’ said Powell, thinking about it. ‘I suppose it does.’
‘Bloody cold, isn’t it? I’ll be glad when Cairo comes.’ Mogg pulled up the collar of his jacket and arranged the blanket round his body. He tried to doze but the road wasn’t good enough and he wasn’t tired enough.
‘Look-out, Gestapo,’ said Powell in a matter-of-fact voice, slowing down to obey the signals of a red-capped military policeman. He was hoping that at the last minute they would wave him on, but it wasn’t to be. He stopped with a little squeal of brakes, followed by a hiss of compressed air as he took his foot off the pedal. There were two MPs, with perfectly pressed uniforms and blancoed webbing. Their attire was a way of telling all personnel that from this point eastward, soldiers had to look like soldiers. One of the cops walked around the back of the truck to inspect it. The other one scrutinised their papers very slowly and carefully. ‘Battlefield salvage?’ said the policeman reading from the paper. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It’s signed by the ordnance wallah,’ said Mogg craning his neck to look at the manifest as if he’d never seen it before. ‘It’s stuff the boffins want to shufti.’ On the other side of the cab, Powell got out onto the running board, and stood up to inspect the canvas top of the driver’s cab. He took the opportunity of watching the other policeman walk to the back of the truck and pluck at the loose canvas to look inside.
‘What kind of stuff?’ Mogg heard the second policeman trying to open the rear. It was an offence not to have loads secured against casual theft.
‘German odds and ends,’ said Mogg. ‘Tank periscopes and artillery sights. It’s for evaluation at the depot.’
‘Any small arms?’ said the policeman. The second red cap was now writing down the registration number on his sheet.
‘Naw, I don’t think so,’ said Mogg. ‘It’s all crated up. Do you want to take a look-see? You’ll need a lever or something to open those crates. And I’ll want some kind of properly signed paperwork to say it was you lot who did it. Signed by an officer.’
The policeman looked at Mogg for a moment before handing back his papers. ‘Get going,’ he said. ‘And take off that stupid scarf, do up your buttons, and get your bloody hair cut. You’re not in the blue now, laddie.’
Mogg stifled the indignation that almost made him explode. Powell started up the engine and revved it a moment before they pulled away.
‘They made a lovely couple,’ said Powell, when they were well away from the checkpoint and making a good speed.
‘Bloody toy soldiers,’ said Mogg. “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” “I put real soldiers on fizzers for not polishing their boots and washing their faces.” Get your hair cut! Shitheads, that’s what they are.’
‘This road gets longer every time I drive it,’ said Powell. He looked out across the sand, trying to spot the pyramids that marked the outskirts of Cairo. There were more and more hand-painted signs at the roadside. Pointers indicated the positions of dumps, depots, training battalions, divisional headquarters, field hospitals and grave registration units. Powell saw no unit names he recognised. It was a turbulent time: Rommel was coming and everything available was bein
g thrown at him. From what he’d heard, half those signs were bogus ones anyway, put there to confuse spies. The whole land was full of spies.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ said Mogg suddenly. He imitated the policeman’s accent well enough to make Powell jump. ‘Stupid sod.’
‘I’m going to talk to the boss about my mail,’ said Powell. ‘I’ve got to know what’s happening back home. I want to send my missus some money.’
‘Old Wally will give you a right rocket if he hears you calling him the boss,’ said Mogg and chuckled at the thought of seeing Lieutenant Commander Wallingford’s reaction to such a form of address.
‘Well, I mean it. I will talk to him,’ said Powell.
Mogg looked at him and said nothing. Once Sandy Powell got an idea in that Welsh head of his, there was nothing to budge him. ‘I’m hungry,’ said Mogg, in an effort to change the subject. ‘I wonder what’s on the stove tonight.’
‘I can’t stand those wog eggs,’ said Powell, as he began thinking about what he’d have for supper. ‘I don’t think they came from hens.’
‘No, they’re buzzard eggs,’ said Mogg. ‘A hen’s egg hereabouts is no bigger than a pea.’
‘Here, boy! Are you serious?’ said Powell. He looked away from the road to see Mogg’s face.
‘Course I am. Old Ali Baba goes out every morning with his buzzard gun. Don’t say you haven’t seen him.’
‘You bloody fool.’ Powell laughed in relief. ‘I thought you meant it for a minute.’
‘Crikey. Look at those bloody pyramids. Spooky looking.’
They made that mysterious transition from the desert to the valley of the Nile. For over four thousand years this place has been celebrated by the pyramids and the Sphinx. The fading light and the dust in the air made the pyramids shimmer with reds and mauves and golden colours. The constantly changing angle of the sun’s rays made the shapes flat and unreal. ‘At the depot there was a sergeant who reckoned they were from another planet.’