by Jessica Mann
Not a conquistador; a bird catcher . . . a lion hunter . . . a big-game stalker? Softly softly catchee monkee, she thought, making a good mix of her metaphors.
‘I wonder whether we shall manage to get away tonight,’ Hugo said.
‘Sayeed thought he would be able to organise at least a minibus; or a couple of taxis.’
‘We’ll be reduced to sleeping out on the corniche otherwise.’
Did Hugo suppose they could set off without Janet, in the same way that they were without Vanessa and John? Would he perhaps create evidence that she had left of her own free will; or that she, like Vanessa and John, was dead?
Tamara thought of John Benson, perhaps still with the tattered remnants of his red shirt clinging to what was left of his flesh. And she thought of the ingenuity that had enabled someone, his murderer, to take the paler shirt, and stain it with red, and arrange that it should be found in the water at Qasr Samaan. They might all be there still, if such proof of his death had not turned up. It was important to someone, to whomever had made those arrangements, that they should get away.
But here, and now, was Hugo sure that Janet would be safely—and uncomplainingly—returned? What was the connection between them? Was there a connection at all? Ten little Indians went out to play . . . at this rate, there would soon be none.
She kept the desultory conversation going. ‘It seems hotter than ever.’
‘Yes. The khamsin doesn’t help.’
‘It will be almost nice to get home to rain.’
But Tamara could not go home without Janet. This was a mystery that really was her business.
‘Pity there is no chance to go and see the Aga Khan’s tomb,’ Hugo said. It was invisible through the cloud of dust that swirled over the desert and the water.
‘It would have been nice to see the Tombs of the Nobles too,’ she agreed.
Hugo Bloom. Tamara tried to remember what she had learnt about him in her quick pre-trip briefing, but nothing gave her a clue as to his behaviour and motives now.
‘And the monastery of Saint Simeon,’ Tamara added.
Hugo was Irish. Could that have anything to do with it? He didn’t look it though. He looked remarkably like the Egyptians themselves.
‘I’m quite happy to give Saint Simeon a miss. I’ve had enough of deserts for the time being,’ he said.
If Hugo Bloom had set himself to get the details of her discovery from Janet, in bed or out of it, while they were out of the world at Qasr Samaan, and had not managed it . . .
‘Can I order you another drink?’ she said.
Had he made fail-safe arrangements for acquiring the information? But what did he want it for, so badly as to commit crimes for it?
‘The wind makes one quite parched. I’d love one. What about you?’ Hugo replied.
Was Hugo the perpetrator of those other crimes? He had the opportunity to poison Vanessa, and to push John Benson into the deep lake. Everyone had had the opportunity.
‘I’ll have some coffee, I think,’ Tamara said.
That would anchor him a little longer, give Tamara more time to think. It was a pity that her brain felt so soggy. Sharpen your wits. Think.
Hugo was sitting by this pool in perfect idleness. He did not glance at his watch. His body language did not express any tension or impatience.
‘May I join you? You both look so comfortable and relaxed.’ Max Solomon, remarkably imperceptive for a man of his trade.
‘Any luck on the transport front?’ Hugo asked, waving for the waiter.
Hugo could have ensured that there was no transport away from Qasr Samaan. Ann Benson had mentioned his tipping the barge captain. Had he bribed him to keep the engine out of order while he worked on Janet?
‘I am waiting to be called back. I will have mango juice, please.’
When the message was sent to Wadi Halfa Hugo must have realised that he could not keep them marooned any longer. He went over to the demobilised barge to do something mechanical—he said. He had probably done something financial instead.
‘I have had a most interesting encounter,’ Max said. ‘One of the older members of the hotel staff, a local man. He was telling me that as a child his great friend was his neighbour, a Jewish boy. It seems that many Jewish families lived here, forty, fifty years ago, and emigrated for the usual reasons.’
‘To Israel?’ Tamara asked.
‘Presumably. Certainly this man did, for he came back with an Israeli package tour as soon as it became possible after the Camp David accord and reforged his old friendships. Now his grand-daughter and my new friend’s grandson have become close. After all that had happened.’
‘That’s a cheering tale,’ Hugo said.
‘I thought so.’
Bloom. It is not an Irish name. He must be Jewish; James Joyce’s Irish Jew was called Bloom too.
‘Didn’t Anwar Sadat come from Aswan himself?’ Tamara said.
‘Perhaps he too had a Jewish friend when he grew up here. It may have made it easier for him to talk to Begin,’ Hugo said.
‘When I was here in nineteen eighty-one, with my dear wife, Sadat’s photograph was all over the place. He had a villa here.’
What had Mr Black said when he explained about Janet’s work? ‘You could knock out every tenth man across disputed borders . . .’ He had not been more specific, and Tamara’s thoughts had jumped to the border between Northern Ireland and Eire. Hugo Bloom might have thought of that too; but perhaps he had visualised every tenth Israeli soldier on guard over the Golan Heights or the River Jordan, temporarily blinded or paralysed . . . chaos . . . invasion, destruction and—ever present in a Jew’s fear—genocide. If Hugo knew what Janet had developed, he could well have decided that any risk was worth taking to get it.
‘Excuse me, I must just . . .’ Tamara went in as though towards the lavatory. Ann and Polly were even more deeply asleep. Ann’s jaw was open and she was dribbling. Timothy was snoring. Polly’s head was buried on her folded arms. Her hair straggled across the table. Tamara went outside again.
‘I can’t think what has happened to Janet,’ she said.
‘Isn’t she with the others?’ Max asked.
‘I think we had better look for her.’
‘No need, surely?’ Hugo said. ‘She’s bound to be back here before we leave.’
Does that mean that he has managed to ensure our departure is delayed as he did before? Or does he know exactly how long his colleagues will take to get everything out of Janet? Either way, the implication was that Janet was either not going to remember what had happened to her, or that she would be persuaded not to complain of it, or that she would not live to tell her tale.
‘Look at the storks,’ Max Solomon said.
There must have been several thousand of them, great white creatures in an incredible flock, flapping northwards. Hugo looked at them through steady binoculars. With his arm raised a sticking plaster showed pink against the brown. Tamara thought again of the blood on John Benson’s rags of sport-shirt.
‘It was amazing to see the birds migrating out of Africa while we were at Qasr Samaan,’ Hugo said.
Cool or genuinely not nervous. What could the man have arranged, on that quick so-called shopping trip into the town? His colleagues must have been all ready to do whatever they were doing. This was a very smooth operation. Hugo must have discussed it beforehand, when they were all in Aswan before going down to Qasr Samaan. His insurance.
‘The birds were my wife’s great pleasure when we were here before. Ornithology was her passion.’
Max could talk about her again. He’s changed, Tamara thought. Earlier on he would only utter polite nothings, like when he discussed the weather or the tat the old ladies had amassed in the market. He had been so kind and so uninvolved, admiring Lady Gentle’s appallingly crude replicas of Nubian ivories, and Ann Benson’s necklace of fake turquoise, and even Hugo’s brass tray that was probably imported from Taiwan.
‘When we are back in Engl
and you must come and see my Audubon Birds of America,’ Hugo said.
‘You have the originals?’
‘Yes, I bought them at Sotherans about ten years ago.’
A man who treated himself to the Audubon birds, neither wanted an obvious fake of a David Roberts temple, nor a brass tray from Taiwan. Tamara leant back and allowed her eyes to fall closed. She knew what she looked like to the two men—candid, unsuspicious and unworldly.
She worked backwards in her memory. They had been sitting in the garden of the Oberoi Hotel, shaded by lush acacia and eucalyptus trees. Hibiscus flowers floated in small vases on the tables. Hugo had walked up from the boat that ferried hotel guests over to the town. Lady Gentle was twitting him, in a kind of heavy-handed, elderly flirtation. She had seen him in the bazaar and accused him of having a lady friend there. That tinkling, memsahib’s voice. ‘In Sharia el Suq, just beside the shop where they sell ebony models of feluccas.’
Tamara opened her eyes. She put her straw hat on her head.
‘I shall go for a stroll,’ she said. ‘No. Don’t come. I just feel like looking around a bit.’
Chapter Twenty
Tamara met Giles on the steps into the main hotel. He had moved on to the next stage, the real thing in his life, and looked surprised to be reminded of the previous one. He said, ‘Still here?’
‘You found your team?’
‘They are raring to go. We managed to get onto this evening’s flight back to Abu. Fletcher has had a new idea about section seven-B, he’s been talking to a bloke from Qasr Ibrim where they had a similar problem. We think the thing is to extend the cutting to the east.’
‘I’m looking for Janet,’ Tamara said.
‘Janet?’ Giles’s capacity for expelling unnecessary lumber from his mind demonstrated the reason for his success in his own subject. If Janet were the remains of a woman from an early dynasty, she would have a more secure place in his memory. ‘Pity you can’t come back with us and see. It should be interesting.’
Interesting, no doubt; but what had waited millennia for discovery could wait a little longer. Janet Macmillan could not.
Standing two steps above Giles, Tamara could look into, rather than up to his face. It all seemed rather a pity; the chunky brown skin, green eyes and delightfully zig-zag mouth were wasted on a man who was bored by the living and enthralled by the dead. He was quick-tempered and intelligent, at least about what obsessed him. As far as her present purpose was concerned, he was completely useless. She turned and went back into the building.
In the privacy of a lavatory cubicle, Tamara took her polythene bag of desert sand from her overnight case. To it she added a chunk of rock from the garden of the Cataract Hotel. She fed the full bag into the toe of a sock and hefted it experimentally. It would do—unless it broke the strap of her shoulder-bag first. She had brought some nylon stockings, but worn neither them nor her socks in the heat. They were an indispensable part of her equipment.
Tamara found Timothy Knipe awake and about to soothe his impatience with alcohol. It was not hard to induce him to come down towards the town with her. He began, as she had intended, by misinterpreting her motive but it was easy to brush off his roving hands while keeping his usually roving attention fixed on her. It was also easy, as she had not expected, to press him into her service.
‘The thing about being a poet,’ he explained, ‘is that nothing is improbable.’
‘You can believe six impossible things before breakfast?’
‘No problem, especially when someone who looks like you asserts them.’ The difficulty was not going to be persuading, but restraining him. He walked beside Tamara with a swash-buckling stride, like a man setting out to glorious battle, and the crowds parted to let him through. With a small part of her mind, Tamara thought about the unreliability of appearances. Giles and Tim both belied theirs; but then of course, so did she. Tim, who looked like a warrior, would do very well for watching and waiting. Tamara would cope with any necessary action herself.
The bazaar was very busy, and in its narrow streets the dusty wind was less uncomfortable.
‘Look casual,’ Tamara said, and she and Tim strolled between the shops and stalls, glancing from side to side at the heaps of powdered spices, the meat dripping its thin blood into the pavement runnels, the lengths of woven and cotton materials, the ivories and ebonies and other exotica from the dark continent. Arabs, Nubians, Africans, tourists from all over the world and of all colours jostled through the crowded alleys. Police in their sand-coloured uniforms walked in pairs, hands on revolver butts, their opaque dark glasses swinging from sight to sight.
Tim did not want to wait on his own by the window full of ebony models of feluccas.
Tamara said, ‘You seem too formidable. Let me prowl a bit, I’m obviously harmless.’
A man in a business suit was leaning against the wall, just inside the door from which Lady Gentle had once seen Hugo emerge. He was certainly more highly trained than she, with combat experience she could hardly imagine, but her appearance gave Tamara that instant’s advantage; and he was not expecting trouble. She entered looking at once tentative and curious. He turned and saw her, and she gasped prettily and clapped her open palm over her mouth. She went on walking forward. She said, ‘Oh gosh! I didn’t know—I say, do you understand English?’
It was a narrow corridor, once white-washed and now dingy. It was lit from above, through holes in the roof which had never been mended. At the far end was a closed modern door. It fitted far better between its jambs than it probably had two weeks earlier. Wood shavings lay on the floor near it.
The man stretched his arm to the other wall to bar her way. He smiled; a good-looking tough, with steady eyes and clean, short-nailed hands and white, even teeth. He was not labelled by anything except his self-confidence. Tamara was sure he was an Israeli. He spoke in almost unaccented American:
‘Yes, I speak English.’
‘Oh great. So many people here don’t. Actually you’ve got a wonderful accent.’ Tamara went on moving forward as she chattered. His outstretched arm was above her head and she hardly needed to duck to get under it. He grabbed at her shoulder.
‘There’s nothing here. This is private.’
Tamara turned round, facing him and the street. She smiled up at him. ‘What a shame. It’s such fun exploring. Everything is so quaint. Darling,’ she called, ‘do come and have a look in here.’
The man whirled round.
Standing on tiptoe, Tamara swung her cosh neatly behind his ear just as she had practised during training on a dummy with chalk marks that indicated the vulnerable points. The man punctually and almost silently collapsed to the floor. Tamara tied his hands and feet together and to each other behind his back with one nylon stocking and used the other to gag and blindfold him. She removed the small revolver from his shoulder holster and put it in her own pocket.
The new door was locked. Tamara tiptoed back to the outside entrance and called to Tim. He came towards her as willingly as a dog. Tamara put her hand over his pursed lips to stop him whistling at the sight of her victim. She whispered, ‘It’s just a knack. Honestly. I go to self-defence classes. That’s why you might as well leave all this to me. I think Janet’s in there.’
One could read in his changing expressions the rival emotions of cowardice and the desire to show off. Tamara did not give him time to decide between them. ‘Give me a leg up, and then stay just outside again. Make sure the other man doesn’t escape with her.’
He heaved her upwards, and she scrambled through a ragged hole onto the roof. It was piled with rubbish; an open-air lumber room. On neighbouring flat roofs goats, chickens and children seemed to lead their daily lives. All the same, she had better hurry in case somebody noticed how unlike the usual roof-dwellers she seemed.
There was new glass above the locked room, but it was propped a little way open with a long pole. It must be unendurably hot inside. The second man had taken off his jacket and his
gun harness and left them on the back of the only chair. He was standing over Janet’s recumbent form. She lay on a straw pallet, her hands by her side and her feet together. A syringe was on the floor beside her. Though her eyes were closed, her lips lazily moved. She was answering the questions the man put to her. He was crouched by her side. With one hand he held a recording machine close to her mouth, with the other he repeatedly wiped his dripping forehead. His back was to Tamara, and she was above him.
Tamara pointed the gun, first at the man’s head and then at his chest. But she did not want to kill him.
If the gun did not shoot true she might regret her restraint. She took careful aim, and shot him through the right wrist. It was a sophisticated new weapon and made a noise no louder than the military aeroplanes in formation overhead. The man’s scream sounded like a cock crowing. She shot again, as the man staggered backwards, through the shoulder blade. How I hate guns, she thought, as she lifted the skylight and dropped through the opening onto the floor, and how I hate blood.
The man was not unconscious, but immobilised and concentrating on his own agony. Knocking him out with her sandbag seemed almost like a kindness. Tamara wiped her own sweaty prints off the gun with her own shirt and dropped it on the floor. She took the cassette out of the recording machine and put it and the spare one in her pocket.
Tamara unlocked the door. The guard was conscious, but she had gagged and tied him well enough for it not to matter. She stepped past him and hissed to Timothy to come in. He would cringe and heave at the sight of the blood. He would be frightened by what he was involved in. But Janet was several inches taller and pounds heavier than Tamara. Alone she could not remove her. Tim was strong enough to support an almost inert woman and it was for that function that Tamara had brought him along.
Chapter Twenty-One
‘Timothy Knipe kept well clear of me after that,’ Tamara said.
Mr Black said, ‘I expect you had frightened him off.’