by Philip Kerr
“The key to this whole problem is Stalin himself,” said Skomorowski. “If Stalin were removed, the whole edifice of Soviet communism would collapse. That’s the only way forward I can see. As long as Stalin remains alive, we will never have a free and democratic Poland. He should be assassinated. I’ll do it myself if I ever get half a chance.”
There was a long silence. Even Captain Skomorowski seemed to recognize that he had gone too far. Removing his glasses, he began to wipe them again.
“Well, I don’t know,” said Major Sernberg. “Really I don’t.”
“You’ll have to excuse Captain Skomorowski,” Pulnarowicz told the major. “He was in Moscow when Russian troops marched into Poland and for a while he was a guest of the NKVD. In the Lubyanka Prison. And then in one of their labor camps. At Solovki. He knows all about Soviet hospitality, don’t you, Josef ?”
“I think,” said Elena, getting up from the table, “that this conversation has gone far enough.”
We listened to one of the British officers play the piano after that. This did little to improve anyone’s spirits. Just before midnight, Elena’s servants stopped serving alcohol. And gradually she was able to shoo her guests away. I would have left, too, but she asked me to stay on for a while, to talk about old times. Our old times. Which sounded just fine. So I went outside and told Coogan that I was staying on for a while and after that I would probably walk home.
“Be careful, sir,” he told me.
“I’ll be all right,” I said. “I have my pistol.”
“If you were thinking of going anywhere on your own, sir, then the nicest chorus girls in Cairo are at Madame Badia’s, sir. There’s a belly dancer called Tahia Carioca who’s first rate, if you like that sort of thing.”
“No, thanks.”
“Or if you was with a lady, sir, there’s a new place on the Mena Road, on the way to the Pyramids. The Auberge des Pyramides, it’s called. Opened in the summer. Very flash. Young King Farouk goes there a lot, so it must be good on account of how that boy knows how to enjoy himself.”
I grinned. “Coogan. Go home.”
Back in the house, the servants had disappeared, the way good servants do when they’re not wanted anymore. Elena made us some mint tea, just to prove that she could still boil a kettle, and then showed me back into the drawing room.
“Where do you find these guys?” I was feeling kind of sore about the way the evening had gone so far.
“Wlazyslaw can be quite charming sometimes,” she said. “But I’ll admit, tonight was not one of those occasions.”
“Just sitting next to him made me want to look for some life insurance.”
“He was jealous of you, that’s all.”
“‘He was jealous, that’s all’? Elena, a guy like that gets jealous, you’re liable to end up with a pillow over your face. And me taking an early-morning plunge in the Nile.”
She sipped her tea from a glass, snuggled up next to me on the sofa, and crossed her legs, carelessly.
“Did you ever do this with him?”
“Now who’s jealous?”
“That means yes. In which case no wonder he’s pissed. If you were my girl, I’d be pissed myself.”
“I’m nobody’s ‘girl,’ Willy. He knows that. Anyway, whatever happened between me and Wlazyslaw happened right here on this sofa. He’s never seen the wallpaper in my bedroom. Nobody has. Not since Freddy died.”
“That’s a long time to spend on the sofa. Even in Egypt.”
“Isn’t it? A long time.” She sighed, and for a moment we were both silent. “Why did you leave Berlin?”
“I’m half-Jewish, remember?”
“Yes, but the Nazis didn’t know that.”
“Maybe so, but I did. It took a while for my Jewish half to wrestle my Catholic half to the floor. Longer than it should have, perhaps.”
“So it wasn’t me.”
I shrugged. “But for you, I’d probably have left a lot earlier. It’s all your fault.”
“It sounds like you’re going to punish me.”
“Right now I’m having a lot of fun thinking about it.”
For a moment Elena’s eyes grew more distant, as if she were trying to visualize something important. “What’s she like? The girl in Washington.”
“Did I mention a girl anywhere?”
“Not specifically. But I can tell that there is one. I always could with you.”
“All right. There is and there isn’t. Not anymore.”
“Sounds like Wlazyslaw.”
“We got further than the sofa.”
“What happened?”
“She wanted me to care when I was pretending not to.”
“Sounds complicated.”
“Not really.”
“Tell me about it. And don’t think you have to make a joke about it. I can see it still hurts.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Only when I look in your eyes.”
So I told her about Diana. Everything there was. Including my betrayal of her. It took a while, but when I had finished I felt better. I had lifted something from my shoulders. Like a couple of hundred tons of self-pity. It helped that she kissed me, of course. For quite a long time. The way old friends do sometimes. But for now, we kept it to the sofa.
“Do you want to stay?” she asked at about two A.M. “There are plenty of spare rooms.”
“Thanks, but I have to get back to my hotel. In case there are any messages from my boss.”
“Would you like Ahmed to take you in the car?”
“No, thanks, I’ll walk. It will feel nice to put one foot in front of the other without breaking into a sweat.”
“Tomorrow evening,” she said. “Let’s do something.”
“Something sounds good,” I said.
“Come around seven.”
I WALKED NORTH, with the Nile and the British embassy on my left. In front of the embassy, British soldiers stood in sentry boxes looking slightly embarrassed at the size and grandeur of the building, a great white wedding cake of a place set in lush green gardens that looked as big as, and a lot nicer than, Buckingham Palace. For a while it seemed that a dark green sedan was following me. But after I had crossed the road, close to the Cairo Museum of Antiquities, and walked east along Aldo Street toward Opera Square, I looked back and saw that it had gone.
Not that I felt at all nervous. Cairo was still wide awake. Despite the late hour, shops remained open, clinging on to life like moss-covered shellfish in some ancient aquarium, their shabby owners surveying me with a mixture of amusement and toothless fascination. Old men in turbans dozed on street corners. Families sat in gutters and talked and pointed at me. And from an open window in a building, what sounded like a party was under way: rhythmic hand-clapping and women ululating like a war party of Cherokee Indians. Dogs barked, trams whined, car horns blared. That night, Cairo seemed like the most magical city on earth.
I walked past Groppi’s, the Turf Club, and Sha’ar Hashmayim—Heaven’s Gate, the largest synagogue in Cairo and instantly recognizable from the Hebrew inscriptions on the wall. The black sky above my head was swept by the cones of searchlights, hunting for German bombers that would never come. In Opera Square, near Shepheard’s, neon lights advertised the existence of Madame Badia’s Opera Casino. I looked at the place, remembered Coogan, and smiled. I thought I saw a man in a tropical suit step smartly sideways into a shop doorway.
Curious to see if I was being followed, I retraced my steps a few yards, but was forced to make a retreat when I encountered a whole posse of fly-whisk sellers, shoe-shine boys, flower sellers, and unshaven men selling razor blades (mostly used), at the edge of the open-air movie theater in Ezbekiah Gardens. There was a movie showing. Or rather, it was just ending, and I found myself walking against a human current made up of hundreds of people on their way out of the gardens.
I had removed my jacket to walk home. And now I dropped it on the grass. As I bent down to retrieve it I felt an
d heard a smallish object zip over my head. It sounded like a thick rubber band flying through the air and then striking something. I straightened up again and found myself face-to-face with an Egyptian wearing a tarboosh and a surprised expression on his face. His mouth was wide open as if he had been trying to catch the largish red fly that was crawling on his forehead. Almost immediately he dropped onto his knees in front of me, and then collapsed onto the ground. I glanced down and the red fly seemed to settle on the man’s head; then I saw that it was not a fly at all, but a very distinct hole from which six small leglike threads of blood were now running. The man had been shot between the eyes.
I knew that the shot had been meant for me. I put my hand in the specially tailored pocket of my tux and on the grip of the little .32-caliber hammerless Colt they had given us at Catoctin Mountain for evening wear. I was ready to put a hole through the lining if I saw what I was looking for. A man with a silencer on the end of a small-caliber pocket pistol like my own. At the same time, I walked quickly away from the body, which no one had yet noticed belonged to a dead man. Cairo wasn’t the kind of place where it was uncommon for people to lie on the ground. Even dead ones.
I walked back toward Shepheard’s Hotel, my tux jacket wrapped around my hand like a large black bandage, my finger on the trigger of the little Colt. Ahead of me I saw a man walking almost as quickly. He was wearing a beige tropical suit, a straw hat, and two-tone wingtips. I couldn’t see his face, but as he went by a shop window, I saw that he had a newspaper in his hand. Or rather he had a newspaper folded over his hand, and pressed close to his chest, like a bath towel. He didn’t run. But he was on his toes, and I knew that this was my man.
I wanted to shout after him but guessed that this would only have made him run or draw his fire. I had no idea what he was going to do. I didn’t expect him to run smartly up the red-carpeted steps of my own hotel, neatly sidestepping the man who had been there all day working a dirty postcard pitch. The street hawker had his reputation to consider. He wasn’t about to be sidestepped so easily again. Not when he had a living to make. As soon as I neared the edge of the red carpet, he saw me and calculated my likely route. Wheeling around, he held up his obscene wares in front of my face and brought me to a standstill, using his malodorous body to block me first one way and then the other. The third time he did it, I swore and pushed him roughly out of my way, which earned me a mild rebuke from a British officer sitting behind the safety of the brass rail on the terrace.
Entering the lobby of the hotel, I glanced around and saw that my quarry was nowhere in sight. I went to the desk. The clerk sprang to my assistance, smiling handsomely.
“Did you see a man come in here a second ago? A European, about thirty, beige suit, panama hat, brown-and-white shoes? Carrying a folded newspaper.”
The desk clerk shrugged and shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir, no. But there is a message for you, Professor Mayer.”
“All right. Thanks.”
I checked the bar. I checked the Long Bar. I checked the dining room. I even checked the men’s room off the lobby. But there was no sign of the man with the newspaper. I went outside and back down the steps. The man with the postcards saw me and backed away nervously. I smiled and apologized and handed him a fistful of the greaseproof paper he called money. He grinned back at me, with absolute forgiveness. I had made his evening. He had sold another stupid American some dirty postcards.
XX
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 1943,
CAIRO
COOGAN PICKED ME UP from Shepheard’s at eight-fifteen and we drove west. There were police milling about in Ezbekiah Gardens. With the green grass, and the men in their white uniforms, it looked more like a game of cricket than a murder investigation, and was probably just as baffling.
“Shot right between the eyes, so he was, about two-thirty last night, just after the pictures was finished,” said Coogan. “Local businessman, apparently. Nobody saw or heard a thing, of course. And the police don’t know anything. But that’s not very surprising.” He laughed. “The police never know anything in Cairo. There are five million people live in Cairo. Finding a murderer in this city is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”
There were a number of reasons I had decided that it was best to keep my mouth shut about what had happened the previous night. One was that I didn’t think FDR, Hopkins, or Donovan would have welcomed any member of the American delegation getting involved with the local police. Another was that after my run-in with the Secret Service in Tunis, I wanted to keep a low profile. But the main reason I had kept silent was that I had no evidence for what I now believed: that the attempt on my life was connected with the death of Ted Schmidt. Ted’s killer must surely have reasoned that suspicions would have been raised by another death aboard the Iowa. Killing me in Cairo would have been a lot easier than trying to kill me on the ship.
We drove across the English Bridge, and then south, toward Giza. Cairo’s city buildings gave way to mud-brick villages, strong-smelling canals, and fields recently harvested of their beans. We passed the university and the Cairo Zoo, as well as a caravanserai of domesticated animals on the Giza Road: donkeys adorned with blue beads to ward off the evil eye, nervous flocks of sheep, scrawny horses that pulled ancient open-topped carriages, the gharries that plied the tourist trade all over Cairo, and, once or twice, camels carrying so many palm branches they looked like Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane. It would have been a colorful scene except for the flat white light that lay on the city like a layer of dust, draining the color out of almost everything. I felt a little drained myself. Being shot at wasn’t good for my plumbing. But then again maybe that was just Cairo.
Mena House stood a stone’s throw from the Pyramids. The former hunting lodge of the Egyptian khedive, it was now a luxurious hotel where Churchill, Roosevelt, and Chiang Kai-shek were meeting. The whole area bustled with troops, armored cars, tanks, and antiaircraft guns, and the strictest cordons guarded all of the approaches to the hotel and its extensive grounds.
Mena House looked very different from Shepheard’s. Surrounded by lawns and palm trees and shrubberies, only the Great Pyramid spoiled the view. From the outside, it resembled some grand movie star’s Hollywood mansion. I preferred the more cosmopolitan atmosphere of Shepheard’s. But it was easy to see why the British military had favored a conference at Mena House. With just the desert and a few pyramids for neighbors, the former hunting lodge was easily defended. Not that the Western allies were taking any chances. There were four antiaircraft positions on the lawns, and truckloads of British and American troops, stiff with boredom and parked in the cool shade of some breezy palm trees. Everyone looked as if they were praying for a plague of locusts, just so that they might have something to practice shooting at.
I got out of the car and stepped onto a long verandah. The several steps leading up to the front door were equipped with a ramp, and inside the hotel’s cool interior were yet more ramps to accommodate Roosevelt’s wheelchair.
An officer at the front desk directed me to Hopkins’s office, and I walked through the hotel with its fine Mashrabia wooden screens, blue tiles and mosaics, and brass-embossed wooden doors. But for the large fireplaces, which added an English touch to the decor, everything looked very Egyptian. As I sauntered down a long corridor, a small man in a white linen suit came out of a room and then walked toward me. The man was wearing a gray hat, a gray summer-weight suit, and smoking a very large cigar. It took less than a moment to register that this was Winston Churchill. The prime minister growled a “Good morning” at me as he passed.
“Good morning, Prime Minister,” I said, surprised that he would have bothered speaking to me at all.
I hurried on down the corridor and found Harry Hopkins in a room that had the air of a seraglio, with arabesque arches, more Mashrabia screens, and brass lamps. But instead of some grande odalisque, or even a small one, Hopkins was with Mike Reilly and another, patrician-looking man I half recognized.
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br /> “Professor Mayer,” said Hopkins, smiling warmly. “There you are.” I was still a couple of minutes early, but he sounded as if they were about to send out a search party. “This is Chip Bohlen, from State. He came with Averell Harriman, from the embassy in Moscow. Mr. Bohlen speaks fluent Russian.”
“That’s going to come in handy,” I said, shaking Bohlen’s outstretched hand.
“Chip here’s been defending State against me,” grinned Hopkins. “Explaining all the handicaps that State Department officials have to put up with. By the way, it seems he knew your friend Ted Schmidt and his wife.”
“I still can’t believe he’s dead. Or Debbie, for that matter. I went to their wedding,” Bohlen said.
“Then you knew them well,” I said.
“I knew them very well. Ted and I joined the Russian-language program at State around the same time and studied together in Paris. That’s where most of our officers were sent for language study. After that we went to Estonia together, to get the sound and feel of spoken Russian, and shared an apartment for a while before he went back to Washington.” Bohlen shook his head. “Mr. Hopkins says you think they were both murdered.”
I tried not to look surprised. I had shared my suspicions regarding the death of Deborah Schmidt only with General Donovan and Ridgeway Poole in Tunis.
“We received a radio message for you from your people in Washington,” explained Reilly. “I’m afraid that after what happened in Tunis I read it.”
“You mean in case I really was a German spy?” I said.
“Something like that.” Reilly grinned.
He handed me the message from the Campus. I read it quickly. There was more information about the traffic accident that had ended Debbie Schmidt’s life. On Monday, October 18, she had been killed by a hit-and-run driver as she came out of Jelleff’s, the ladies’ store on F Street. The Georgetown apartment where the Schmidts lived had been turned over, too, and the Metro police were treating her death as suspicious.
