by Ken Follett
Dickstein took off his glasses. "Never mind justice. I want a place to call my own."
"Even if you have to steal mine?" Hassan said.
"You can have the rest of the Middle East."
"I don't want it."
Rostov said, "This discussion proves the necessity for partition."
Eila Ashford offered a box of cigarettes. Cortone took one, and lit hers. While the others argued about Palestine, Eila asked Cortone, "Have you known Dickstein long?"
"We met in 1943," Cortone said. He watched her brown lips close around the cigarette. She even smoked beautifully. Delicately, she picked a fragment of tobacco from the tip of her tongue.
"I'm terribly curious about him," she said.
"Why?"
"Everyone is. He's only a boy, and yet he seems so old. Then again, he's obviously a Cockney, but he's not in the least intimidated by all these upper-class Englishmen. But he'll talk about anything except himself."
Cortone nodded. "I'm finding out that I don't really know him, either."
"My husband says he's a brilliant student."
"He saved my life."
"Good Lord." She looked at him more closely, as if she were wondering whether he was just being melodramatic. She seemed to decide in his favor. "I'd like to hear about it."
A middle-aged man in baggy corduroy trousers touched her shoulder and said, "How is everything, my dear?"
"Fine," she said. "Mr. Cortone, this is my husband, Professor Ashford."
Cortone said, "How are you." Ashford was a balding man in ill-fitting clothes. Cortone had been expecting Lawrence of Arabia. He thought: Maybe Nat has a chance after all.
Eila said, "Mr. Cortone was telling me how Nat Dickstein saved his life."
"Really!" Ashford said.
"It's not a long story," Cortone said. He glanced over at Dickstein, now deep in conversation with Hassan and Rostov; and noted how the three men displayed their attitudes by the way they stood: Rostov with his feet apart, wagging a finger like a teacher, sure in his dogma; Hassan leaning against a bookcase, one hand in his pocket, smoking, pretending that the international debate about the future of his country was of merely academic interest; Dickstein with arms folded tightly, shoulders hunched, head bowed in concentration, his stance giving the lie to the dispassionate character of his remarks. Cortone heard The British promised Palestine to the Jews, and the reply. Beware the gifts of a thief. He turned back to the Ashfords and began to tell them the story.
"It was in Sicily, near a place called Ragusa, a hill town," he said. "I'd taken a T-force around the outskirts. To the north of the town we came on a German tank in a little hollow, on the edge of a clump of trees. The tank looked abandoned but I put a grenade into it to make sure. As we drove past there was a shot--only one--and a German with a machine gun fell out of a tree. He'd been hiding up there, ready to pick us off as we passed. It was Nat Dickstein who shot him."
Eila's eyes sparkled with something like excitement, but her husband had gone white. Obviously the professor had no stomach for tales of life and death. Cortone thought: If that upsets you, pop, I hope Dickstein never tells you any of his stories.
"The British had come around the town from the other side," Cortone went on. "Nat had seen the tank, like I did, and smelled a trap. He had spotted the sniper and was waiting to see if there were any more when we turned up. If he hadn't been so damn smart I'd be dead."
The other two were silent for a moment. Ashford said, "It's not long ago, but we forget so fast."
Eila remembered her other guests. "I want to talk to you some more before you go," she said to Cortone. She went across the room to where Hassan was trying to open a pair of doors that gave on to the garden.
Ashford brushed nervously at the wispy hair behind his ears. "The public hears about the big battles, but I suppose the soldier remembers those little personal incidents."
Cortone nodded, thinking that Ashford clearly had no conception of what war was like, and wondering if the professor's youth had really been as adventurous as Dickstein claimed. "Later, I took him to meet my cousins--the family comes from Sicily. We had pasta and wine, and they made a hero of Nat. We were together only for a few days, but we were like brothers, you know?"
"Indeed."
"When I heard he was taken prisoner, I figured I'd never see him again."
"Do you know what happened to him?" Ashford said. "He doesn't say much . . ."
Cortone shrugged. "He survived the camps."
"He was fortunate."
"Was he?"
Ashford looked at Cortone for a moment, confused, then turned away and looked around the room. After a moment he said, "This is not a very typical Oxford gathering, you know. Dickstein, Rostov and Hassan are somewhat unusual students. You should meet Toby--he's the archetypal undergraduate." He caught the eye of a red-faced youth in a tweed suit and a very wide paisley tie. "Toby, come and meet Dickstein's comrade-in-arms--Mr. Cortone."
Toby shook hands and said abruptly, "Any chance of a tip from the stable? Will Dickstein win?"
"Win what?" Cortone said.
Ashford explained, "Dickstein and Rostov are to play a chess match--they're both supposed to be terribly good. Toby thinks you might have inside information--he probably wants to bet on the outcome."
Cortone said, "I thought chess was an old man's game."
Toby said, "Ah!" rather loudly, and emptied his glass. He and Ashford seemed nonplussed by Cortone's remark. A little girl, four or five years old, came in from the garden carrying an elderly gray cat. Ashford introduced her with the coy pride of a man who has become a father in middle age.
"This is Suza," he said.
The girl said, "And this is Hezekiah."
She had her mother's skin and hair; she too would be beautiful. Cortone wondered whether she was really Ashford's daughter. There was nothing of him in her looks. She held out the cat's paw, and Cortone obligingly shook it and said, "How are you, Hezekiah?"
Suza went over to Dickstein. "Good morning, Nat. Would you like to stroke Hezekiah?"
"She's very cute," Cortone said to Ashford. "I have to talk to Nat. Would you excuse me?" He went over to Dickstein, who was kneeling down and stroking the cat.
Nat and Suza seemed to be pals. He told her, "This is my friend Alan."
"We've met," she said, and fluttered her eyelashes. Cortone thought: She learned that from her mother.
"We were in the war together," Dickstein continued.
Suza looked directly at Cortone. "Did you kill people?"
He hesitated. "Sure."
"Do you feel bad about it?"
"Not too bad. They were wicked people."
"Nat feels bad about it. That's why he doesn't like to talk about it too much."
The kid had got more out of Dickstein than all the grown-ups put together.
The cat jumped out of Suza's arms with surprising agility. She chased after it. Dickstein stood up.
"I wouldn't say Mrs. Ashford is out of reach," Cortone said quietly.
"Wouldn't you?" Dickstein said.
"She can't be more than twenty-five. He's at least twenty years older, and I'll bet he's no pistol. If they got married before the war, she must have been around seventeen at the time. And they don't seem affectionate."
"I wish I could believe you," Dickstein said. He was not as interested as he should have been. "Come and see the garden."
They went through the French doors. The sun was stronger, and the bitter cold had gone from the air. The garden stretched in a green-and-brown wilderness down to the edge of the river. They walked away from the house.
Dickstein said, "You don't much like this crowd."
"The war's over," Cortone said. "You and me, we live in different worlds now. All this--professors, chess matches, sherry parties . . . I might as well be on Mars. My life is doing deals, fighting off the competition, making a few bucks. I was fixing to offer you a job in my business, but I guess I'd be wasting my time."
"Alan . . ."
"Listen, what the hell. We'll probably lose touch now--I'm not much of a letter writer. But I won't forget that I owe you my life. One of these days you might want to call in the debt. You know where to find me."
Dickstein opened his mouth to speak, then they heard the voices.
"Oh . . . no, not here, not now . . ." It was a woman.
"Yes!" A man.
Dickstein and Cortone were standing beside a thick box hedge which cut off a corner of the garden: someone had begun to plant a maze and never finished the job. A few steps from where they were a gap opened, then the hedge turned a right angle and ran along the riverbank. The voices came clearly from the other side of the foliage.
The woman spoke again, low and throaty. "Don't, damn you, or I'll scream."
Dickstein and Cortone stepped through the gap.
Cortone would never forget what he saw there. He stared at the two people and then, appalled, he glanced at Dickstein. Dickstein's face was gray with shock, and he looked ill; his mouth dropped open as he gazed in horror and despair. Cortone looked back at the couple.
The woman was Eila Ashford. The skirt of her dress was around her waist, her face was flushed with pleasure, and she was kissing Yasif Hassan.
Chapter One
The public-address system at Cairo airport made a noise like a doorbell, and then the arrival of the Alitalia flight from Milan was announced in Arabic, Italian, French and English. Towfik el-Masiri left his table in the buffet and made his way out to the observation deck. He put on his sunglasses to look over the shimmering concrete apron. The Caravelle was already down and taxiing.
Towfik was there because of a cable. It had come that morning from his "uncle" in Rome, and it had been in code. Any business could use a code for international telegrams, provided it first lodged the key to the code with the post office. Such codes were used more and more to save money--by reducing common phrases to single words--than to keep secrets. Towfik's uncle's cable, transcribed according to the registered code book, gave details of his late aunt's will. However, Towfik had another key, and the message he read was:
OBSERVE AND FOLLOW PROFESSOR FRIEDRICH SCHULZ ARRIVING CAIRO FROM MILAN WEDNESDAY 28 FEBRUARY 1968 FOR SEVERAL DAYS. AGE 51 HEIGHT 180 CM WEIGHT 150 POUNDS HAIR WHITE EYES BLUE NATIONALITY AUSTRIAN COMPANIONS WIFE ONLY.
The passengers began to file out of the aircraft, and Towfik spotted his man almost immediately. There was only one tall, lean white-haired man on the flight. He was wearing a light blue suit, a white shirt and a tie, and carrying a plastic shopping bag from a duty-free store and a camera. His wife was much shorter, and wore a fashionable mini-dress and a blonde wig. As they crossed the airfield they looked about them and sniffed the warm, dry desert air the way most people did the first time they landed in North Africa.
The passengers disappeared into the arrivals hall. Towfik waited on the observation deck until the baggage came off the plane, then he went inside and mingled with the small crowd of people waiting just beyond the customs barrier.
He did a lot of waiting. That was something they did not teach you--how to wait. You learned to handle guns, memorize maps, break open safes and kill people with your bare hands, all in the first six months of the training course; but there were no lectures in patience, no exercises for sore feet, no seminars on tedium. And it was beginning to seem like There is something wrong here beginning to seem Lookout lookout beginning to--
There was another agent in the crowd.
Towfik's subconscious hit the fire alarm while he was thinking about patience. The people in the little crowd, waiting for relatives and friends and business acquaintances off the Milan plane, were impatient. They smoked, shifted their weight from one foot to the other, craned their necks and fidgeted. There was a middle-class family with four children, two men in the traditional striped cotton galabiya robes, a businessman in a dark suit, a young white woman, a chauffeur with a sign saying FORD MOTOR COMPANY, and--
And a patient man.
Like Towfik, he had dark skin and short hair and wore a European-style suit. At first glance he seemed to be with the middle-class family--just as Towfik would seem, to a casual observer, to be with the businessman in the dark suit. The other agent stood nonchalantly, with his hands behind his back, facing the exit from the baggage hall, looking unobtrusive. There was a streak of paler skin alongside his nose, like an old scar. He touched it, once, in what might have been a nervous gesture, then put his hand behind his back again.
The question was, had he spotted Towfik?
Towfik turned to the businessman beside him and said, "I never understand why this has to take so long." He smiled, and spoke quietly, so that the businessman leaned closer to hear him and smiled back; and the pair of them looked like acquaintances having a casual conversation.
The businessman said, "The formalities take longer than the flight."
Towfik stole another glance at the other agent. The man stood in the same position, watching the exit. He had not attempted any camouflage. Did that mean that he had not spotted Towfik? Or was it just that he had second-guessed Towfik, by deciding that a piece of camouflage would give him away?
The passengers began to emerge, and Towfik realized there was nothing he could do, either way. He hoped the people the agent was meeting would come out before Professor Schulz.
It was not to be. Schulz and his wife were among the first little knot of passengers to come through.
The other agent approached them and shook hands.
Of course, of course.
The agent was there to meet Schulz.
Towfik watched while the agent summoned porters and ushered the Schulzes away; then he went out by a different exit to his car. Before getting in he took off his jacket and tie and put on sunglasses and a white cotton cap. Now he would not be easily recognizable as the man who had been waiting at the meeting point.
He figured the agent would have parked in a no-waiting zone right outside the main entrance, so he drove that way. He was right. He saw the porters loading the Schulz baggage into the boot of a five-year-old gray Mercedes. He drove on.
He steered his dirty Renault on to the main highway which ran from Heliopolis, where the airport was, to Cairo. He drove at 60 kph and kept to the slow lane. The gray Mercedes passed him two or three minutes later, and he accelerated to keep it within sight. He memorized its number, as it was always useful to be able to recognize the opposition's cars.
The sky began to cloud over. As he sped down the straight, palm-lined highway, Towfik considered what he had found out so far. The cable had told him nothing about Schulz except what the man looked like and the fact that he was an Austrian professor. The meeting at the airport meant a great deal, though. It had been a kind of clandestine VIP treatment. Towfik had the agent figured for a local: everything pointed to that--his clothes, his car, his style of waiting. That meant Schulz was probably here by invitation of the government, but either he or the people he had come to see wanted the visit kept secret.
It was not much. What was Schulz professor of? He could be a banker, arms manufacturer, rocketry expert or cotton buyer. He might even be with Al Fatah, but Towfik could not quite see the man as a resurrected Nazi. Still, anything was possible.
Certainly Tel Aviv did not think Schulz was important: if they had, they would not have used Towfik, who was young and inexperienced, for this surveillance. It was even possible that the whole thing was yet another training exercise.
They entered Cairo on the Shari Ramses, and Towfik closed the gap between his car and the Mercedes until there was only one vehicle between them. The gray car turned right on to the Corniche al-Nil then crossed the river by the 26 July Bridge and entered the Zamalek district of Gezira island.
There was less traffic in the wealthy, dull suburb, and Towfik became edgy about being spotted by the agent at the wheel of the Mercedes. However, two minutes later the other car turned into a residential street near the Officer
s' Club and stopped outside an apartment block with a jacaranda tree in the garden. Towfik immediately took a right turn and was out of sight before the doors of the other car could open. He parked, jumped out, and walked back to the corner. He was in time to see the agent and the Schulzes disappear into the building followed by a caretaker in galabiya struggling with their luggage.
Towfik looked up and down the street. There was nowhere a man could convincingly idle. He returned to his car, backed it around the corner and parked between two other cars on the same side of the road as the Mercedes.
Half an hour later the agent came out alone, got into his car, and drove off.
Towfik settled down to wait.
It went on for two days, then it broke.
Until then the Schulzes behaved like tourists, and seemed to enjoy it. On the first evening they had dinner in a nightclub and watched a troupe of belly-dancers. Next day they did the Pyramids and the Sphinx, with lunch at Groppi's and dinner at the Nile Hilton. In the morning on the third day they got up early and took a taxi to the mosque of Ibn Tulun.
Towfik left his car near the Gayer-Anderson Museum and followed them. They took a perfunctory look around the mosque and headed east on the Shari al-Salibah. They were dawdling, looking at fountains and buildings, peering into dark tiny shops, watching baladi women buy onions and peppers and camel's feet at street stalls.
They stopped at a crossroads and went into a tea-shop. Towfik crossed the street to the sebeel, a domed fountain behind windows of iron lace, and studied the baroque relief around its walls. He moved on up the street, still within sight of the tea-shop, and spent some time buying four misshapen giant tomatoes from a white-capped stallholder whose feet were bare.
The Schulzes came out of the tea-shop and turned north, following Towfik, into the street market. Here it was easier for Towfik to idle, sometimes ahead of them and sometimes behind. Frau Schulz bought slippers and a gold bangle, and paid too much for a sprig of mint from a half-naked child. Towfik got far enough in front of them to drink a small cup of strong, unsweetened Turkish coffee under the awning of a cafe called Nasif's.
They left the street market and entered a covered souq specializing in saddlery. Schulz glanced at his wristwatch and spoke to his wife--giving Towfik the first faint tremor of anxiety--and then they walked a little faster until they emerged at Bab Zuweyla, the gateway to the original walled city.