City of Gold

by Len Deighton

  ‘Help him, he’s sick,’ called Peggy softly. ‘Get him to a doctor.’

  Solomon slowly turned to her, and with a gentle wave of the hand that took in the houseboat, he said, ‘Where I am going, they are all doctors. Enjoy!’

  She waved back but he had already turned away. As soon as he was aboard, the men pushed it off. When the rowboat was alongside the felucca, willing hands helped Solomon aboard. Then, as it swung in the currents, the felucca’s motor started with a sudden burst of power that settled back into a gentle purr. There were no lights anywhere on it, and even the shape of its great lateen sail was soon swallowed by the gloom. The last she saw of Solomon, he was huddled in the stern and being wrapped in a blanket.

  Peggy stood for a moment staring into the purple dusk. She felt sad, and yet she had never liked Solomon. There was about him, a male arrogance that she did not find attractive. Sometimes she told herself she expected too much of men.

  It seemed that only a minute or two passed between Solomon’s departure and the sound of booted feet and the Egyptian police inspector’s urgent warning: ‘Don’t throw anything overboard, madam!’

  She turned to see them clambering aboard with their rifles and steel helmets. ‘I wasn’t about to throw anything overboard,’ said Peggy.

  ‘I’m looking for the owner, madam,’ said the police inspector politely.

  ‘I’m the owner now,’ said Peggy. ‘This boat, the City of Gold, is mine. Someone just gave it to me.’

  More and more policemen came on board. Eventually Captain Lionel Marker appeared and gave Peggy a cheerful and informal salute. ‘Good evening, Peggy.’

  ‘What is it you want?’ said Peggy, looking from one to the other of them.

  ‘We wanted to be sure you were all right,’ said Marker.

  ‘And you were after Solomon?’ she suggested.

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘We were also after Solomon.’

  ‘He’s gone,’ said Peggy. She couldn’t decide how pleased she was that Solomon had escaped them. She had never understood Solomon. She didn’t know what he wanted or what he really believed in, but it was good that he escaped. She didn’t like the idea of anyone being locked up.

  ‘Yes, we were just too late,’ said Marker solemnly.

  They stood there for a moment, as if their previous friendship had never existed. The Egyptian police inspector came up to Marker, saluted and said that his men had found nothing of importance. ‘Thank you, Inspector Khalil. You can stand your men down. The birds have flown.’

  ‘The boat went upriver,’ said the police inspector. ‘It was the one I told you about,’ he added with just a hint of admonition.

  ‘Perhaps the navy patrol will pick him up,’ said Marker.

  The police inspector saluted. The look on his face said he didn’t think the navy would pick up anyone.

  Peggy watched the policemen as they clattered across the gangplank, climbed back into their truck, and drove away.

  Peggy said, ‘He gave me the houseboat.’

  ‘Yes, I heard you tell the inspector. Congratulations.’

  She stroked the rail. ‘I’ve never owned anything before.’ She looked at him. ‘I didn’t work for him, if that’s what you are thinking.’

  ‘I was only thinking nice things, Peggy.’

  ‘If you want to come downstairs, I can offer you a drink,’ said Peggy. This boat was almost the last in the line nearest the bridge, so they could see traffic moving on the road from Giza. Every vehicle from the entire Western Desert had to cross the English Bridge to get to Cairo. Only horses and mules went through the Delta. Now they watched the blinkered headlights of the trucks crossing the bridge. Nose to tail, a long convoy. It was coming from the desert, and it was made up entirely of army ambulances. At the hospital tomorrow there would be another day of grim hard work.

  They both stood watching the convoy as if it were some formal parade, as if turning their attention away in search of a drink would be disrespectful to the bloody, mutilated men from some distant battlefield. Only when the last ambulance had given place to a noisy demonstration, of students shouting slogans about welcoming Rommel, did they move.

  ‘Did you say a drink?’ said Marker eventually.

  Once in the comfortable cabin they relaxed a little. Marker tossed his cap onto the rack and sank down into a soft armchair while she boiled a kettle and made a pot of tea. Marker preferred something stronger.

  She searched through the bottles. ‘Whisky, cognac, gin or vodka, Captain Marker?’

  ‘Lionel. A very small whisky with water, please, Peggy. Half and half.’ She poured it carefully, as if measuring something in the hospital pharmacy, and handed the glass to him. He held it in the air and proposed a toast. ‘Congratulations, Peggy. Here’s to the City of Gold. God bless all who sail in her.’

  ‘The City of Gold,’ said Peggy. She smiled, sat down and poured out her tea. ‘It’s a city of brass really. I’ve always thought that. The brass trays, vases and cheap ornaments they sell in the souks – most of them made in Birmingham, England – the brass bugles that wake everyone up every morning, the brass buttons on the uniforms of the British soldiers, and the brass hats who act as if they own the whole country.’

  ‘In my father’s part of the country, brass was a word meaning money,’ said Marker.

  ‘It shines like gold, but it’s only an alloy. If you don’t keep polishing it every day, it goes green, doesn’t it?’

  Marker watched her. She was unusually philosophical tonight. With masculine simplicity he decided that she was feeling rejected. ‘Were you planning to go with Solomon?’

  ‘Yes, I was.’ It wasn’t true, but she wanted to see how he took it.

  ‘To Palestine?’

  ‘To visit my husband.’

  ‘I thought you were going with our courier.’

  ‘You don’t have a courier. I made enquiries about it.’ In fact she’d asked Alice, and Alice had innocently admitted the truth: they had no courier to anywhere.

  ‘You’re right.’ He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender.

  ‘You don’t have a courier, and I don’t have a husband any more. There is no point in my going anywhere.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He knew Karl was dead. She could tell that from the way he reacted. He must have got official word of it through the police.

  ‘Don’t be sorry, Captain Marker,’ she said. ‘It all happened a long time ago. He’s dead. I think he only wanted the British passport. Perhaps I’ve been a fool.’

  ‘Call me Lionel. Anything I can do? I’m off duty now. This is strictly off the record.’

  ‘Lionel, yes. Can you tell me of a good place to get drunk, Lionel?’

  ‘Getting drunk is not a course I’d recommend,’ said Marker seriously.

  ‘Can you think of something better to do on a Saturday night in Cairo?’

  He looked at her for a long time. She was a very attractive woman; he’d thought that from the moment he first met her. ‘Pursuant,’ said Marker, who was likely to resort to legal jargon in moments of tension, ‘pursuant to a good dinner with a bottle of wine, I might well be able to recommend something.’

  She laughed for the first time in a long while. She realised then that Lionel Marker had deliberately let Solomon escape him. Marker was his own man. She liked that.

  Tomorrow she would be back on duty. She could hear the rumbling sound of more ambulances crossing the English Bridge. There would be lots of hard work for the surgeons, and the theatre nurses, for many days and nights to come. They’d stop Rommel, she had no doubt of that, but they’d pay the butcher’s bill.

  He was watching her carefully. He saw her frown and said, ‘What is it, Peggy?’

  ‘Perhaps I’ll have a drink with you,’ she said. She got up and poured herself a whisky and water. No ice; she didn’t like ice in it. She looked at him and raised her glass. Tonight was hers to do as she wished. Suddenly she felt free. Tomorrow she’d change the name of this damned boat.
The City of Brass, that’s what she’d call it.

  Postscript

  The American military attaché in Cairo was suddenly recalled to Washington in the summer of 1942. ‘And when the new military attaché there began using the M-138 strip cipher, which defied all Axis attempts at solution, it cut Rommel off from the strategic intelligence on which he had so long depended. The loss occurred just as he was crossing the frontier into Egypt and seemed to have the pyramids and victory almost within his grasp. The British 8th Army fell back to its fortified positions at El Alamein.’*

  So Rommel and his Afrika Korps never got to Cairo. Deprived of his most valuable source of information, Rommel went on the defensive. In October the British offensive began. It was a complete surprise to the Germans, who suffered a defeat that marked a turning point in the whole war. Rommel’s Afrika Korps began a retreat that ended with it being pushed right out of Africa. Said Churchill, ‘Before Alamein we never had a victory; after Alamein we never had a defeat.’

  About the Author

  Len Deighton was born in 1929. He worked as a railway clerk before doing his National Service in the RAF as a photographer attached to the Special Investigation Branch.

  After his discharge in 1949, he went to art school – first to the St Martin’s School of Art, and then to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship. His mother was a professional cook and he grew up with an interest in cookery – a subject he was later to make his own in an animated strip for the Observer and in two cookery books. He worked for a while as an illustrator in New York and as art director of an advertising agency in London.

  Deciding it was time to settle down, Deighton moved to the Dordogne where he started work on his first book, The Ipcress File. Published in 1962, the book was an immediate success.

  Since then his work has gone from strength to strength, varying from espionage novels to war, general fiction and non-fiction. The BBC made Bomber into a day-long radio drama in ‘real time’. Deighton’s history of World War Two, Blood, Tears and Folly, was published to wide acclaim – Jack Higgins called it ‘an absolute landmark’.

  As Max Hastings observed, Deighton captured a time and a mood – ‘To those of us who were in our twenties in the 1960s, his books seemed the coolest, funkiest, most sophisticated things we’d ever read’ – and his books have now deservedly become classics.

  Other Books by Len Deighton

  Fiction

  The Ipcress File

  Horse Under Water

  Funeral in Berlin

  Billion-Dollar Brain

  An Expensive Place to Die

  Only When I Larf

  Bomber

  Declarations of War

  Close-Up

  Spy Story

  Yesterday’s Spy

  Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy

  SS-GB

  XPD

  Goodbye Mickey Mouse

  MAMista

  City of Gold

  Violent Ward

  The Samson Series

  Berlin Game

  Mexico Set

  London Match

  Winter: The Tragic Story of a Berlin Family 1899–1945

  Spy Hook

  Spy Line

  Spy Sinker

  Faith

  Hope

  Charity

  Non-fiction

  Action Cook Book

  Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain

  Airshipwreck

  French Cooking for Men

  Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk

  ABC of French Food

  Blood, Tears and Folly

  Copyright

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

  The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Harper

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  Hammersmith, London W68JB

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  This paperback edition 2011

  First published in Great Britain by

  Century in 1992

  Copyright © Len Deighton 1992

  Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2011

  Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2011

  Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978 0 00 738584 3

  CITY OF GOLD. Copyright © Len Deighton 1992. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © AUGUST 2011 ISBN: 978-0-00-745084-8

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  * David Kahn, The Codebreakers (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966).

  * David Kahn, The Codebreakers (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966).