The Private Sector (A Peter Marlow spy thriller)

by Joseph Hone

  Why?

  He thought carefully over the events of the last month—the last year perhaps? Blake’s escape? Blake had worked out of Williams’s Middle East section and there had been some uneasy times after his arrest and during his imprisonment. But Blake didn’t know of his involvement with Moscow—as he hadn’t known of Blake’s. They were careful of that sort of thing in Moscow these days. No KGB double knew the identity of any other in the same position—not after the disasters of the past. Unless Moscow had arranged to shop him? The permutations, non-existent a month ago, were endless now.

  Edwards tried to isolate and catalogue them for the hundredth time, yet in the end only one thing was really clear: London wanted him to do something which they knew would result in his immediate obliteration if he attempted it—so they must have known too that he would never attempt it. At the same time they’d surely not gone through all this elaborate charade for nothing; they had something else in mind, something which he hadn’t seen, which he couldn’t see. It almost began to amuse him, the clues were so obvious, like the values for a simple equation … yet he couldn’t work it out. And he’d been good at that sort of thing in school.

  3

  The passengers came back from the transit lounge. Edwards could see them through the cabin window, forcing themselves into the wind, whipping the puddles into blisters on the concrete apron, clutching their hats, their faces wrinkling painfully, and he was glad he’d not gone with them. He stretched his legs down beneath the seat, yawned, closed his eyes. He gave himself over to the feeling of warmth and safety which the cabin induced in him. A weakness, he thought, but this was a place, probably the last place, where he could safely indulge it.

  There were a dozen or so new arrivals, half of them Egyptians, too sharply dressed in Italian-cut suits that hadn’t been made with quite enough cloth; returning from some trade or government mission, Edwards thought, when he opened his eyes cautiously and looked at them flapping about the aisle, pushing for seats, making a nuisance of themselves like men who don’t travel often and are determined to make the most of it.

  He had taken a place at the very back of the plane, where he always sat, next to the cabin staff, hoping that none of the new arrivals would get that far. To discourage the possibility he put his briefcase and a pile of newspapers on the two vacant seats to his left and looked determinedly out of the window like a stuffy woman travelling below her class.

  He’d always had an obsession about sitting by himself on journeys; he couldn’t bear enforced company, being with anyone, in fact, whose presence he hadn’t actively encouraged. As a child—it had begun then, at the end of term: the vicious, howling cabal of schoolboys savaging each other with their peaked caps and bunching in the corridors on the train away from Capetown—the sense of release he’d craved then, as he did now, and had only found when he’d changed at the junction and was sitting alone in the rackety wooden carriage which took him along the branch line to his uncle’s home up country.

  “May I?”

  Edwards nodded distantly, barely turning his head, as the small, perky, almost balk figure in a glistening Dacron suit moved the papers diffidently and sat down on the far seat from him. Nodded, and closed his eyes again. But he couldn’t avoid hearing the storm of Arabic which followed from the man—the brusque, admonitory phrases of someone too long accustomed to giving orders, as he shouted for the steward. Apart from the rough country accent—from Upper Egypt, probably Aswan—the voice might have belonged to some petty court functionary from Farouk’s time and not Nasser’s. But then Nasser had been in power now for as long as Farouk had, Edwards thought, and one regime is much like another as far as the functionaries are concerned. When they get into their stride you couldn’t tell them apart: obsequiousness by the well-heeled, with the well-heeled, and stuff the people; the secret society of boot strappers: the new rich, and the “government class”; and between them the shared nightmare memory of a mud village lost in the delta two decades before, when the night came down in black frustration and you were the only person in the café with trousers, talking revolution over the sizzling pressure lamp.

  And the revolution had come; others had brought it, sought death for it, denned it—you were buying stamps in the General Post Office at the time. Never mind. It was just what you’d always talked about in the village café, it had come to pass exactly as you had said—it was yours, your number had come up at last. You were out in the streets for the rest of the week, you yelled more than anybody and looted a little. And later you bought a jacket to go with the trousers and had a word in someone’s ear—a friend of your uncle’s who had actually been seen with a stick in his hand on the first day.

  Now the ranks had closed again after the whirlwind, you met the fixers again, the ones you’d rallied against in the village, only they wore suits now—you met them again, came together like long-estranged and passionate lovers: the ten per cent man; the kick-back, as violent and profitable as American football; government by baksheesh: the call from the hotel lobby before the tender is put out, the piece of marshy land beyond Ismailia bought from a small family for £200, already surveying it in the mind’s eye, seeing the graceful curve of the new road, the tall chimneys of the chemical factory …

  The trouble was he’d gone on thinking there was a difference, between one sort of government and another, for too long. The man’s arrogant, peremptory attitude came to him as a shock, he realized—as another indisputable sign of something he’d long wanted to avoid recognizing: that the things some people fought for didn’t make the rest any better, that if there were improvements in their life they took them as being no more than their due; that was the accepted order of things—personal advantage, material gain—these were the things that came first whichever side you were on, whatever you had fought for. Edwards wished that he could start now like everyone else, dreaming of a colour television set and a second car, that he’d never come to believe in sides.

  The man was loudly demanding the basket of sweets before take-off, like a fractious child, and when the steward came he grabbed a whole fistful, and then another, and stuffed them in his pocket, some of them dropping down between the seats.

  “Please, Your Excellency,” the steward fawned in Arabic, “I can arrange for you to take a bag of them with you before we get to Cairo.”

  His conciliatory, false voice—how quickly the steward had changed from privileged official to grovelling servant. It reminded Edwards of his father’s basement office next to the cellars in the old Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo and the monthly agony of paying, and docking, the servants’ wages. Edwards had worked there for a few months when he’d left school at a time when his parents still hoped he’d follow them in the hotel business. “Please, Effendi—Please, Mr. Edwards—” when some floor waiter had broken something or had had a complaint laid against him. And he remembered the repeated pleas of one particular servant who had smashed a decanter, an elderly Nubian who spoke like a child as his father calculated the three-month deduction from his salary: “Please, Effendi, I’ll never do it again, I’ll never do it again.”

  He’d wanted a world then, really ever since he could remember, where saying things like that would never again be possible. That was when the vehemence had begun, the anger that had lit all his life, and which seemed to be dying in him now.

  Sweets, he thought—that’s what it all comes to. That’s all they want. That’s all the anger has really been about.

  “Sweets,” the man in the seat next to him said affably, sucking and chomping on one loudly. “You can’t get them like this in Cairo these days, I’m afraid. My grandchildren love them. What can one do?”

  Edwards had to turn now and was about to nod his head again in vague assent when he saw that it was Mohammed Yunis who had spoken. His Excellency Mohammed Yunis, Secretary General of the Arab Socialist Union.

  For a moment Edwards thought he saw the answer to London’s riddle: that Williams had organized some kind o
f incredibly subtle end for him, whose instrument was to be Yunis. The first stages were already under way.

  Or perhaps the plan was that he and Yunis were to go down together, literally, on the flight to Cairo. But it couldn’t have been planned like that, nothing could have been organized so that he should meet Yunis in this way: he’d changed his flight himself at London Airport, as he often did, from a BOAC one to another an hour later on United Arab Airlines. Still, there was an advantage in seeing Yunis—it confirmed his only course of action. Yunis, he saw now so clearly, was nothing more than the largest cog in what they were pleased to call the “elected government” of Egypt—the Arab Socialist Union which was simply a rubber stamp for the President’s intentions. He might have been somewhat to the left of Nasser but not nearly enough, and quite without sufficient support in the country, for anyone in the West ever to think of approaching him with ideas of a counter-revolution. Yunis was just a dapper, greedy old socialist, anxious for trips to Berlin and London, for good English sweets, properly boiled, and long-playing records of Jewish musicals. Edwards thought: anyone who could see him, as Williams apparently did, in battledress, master-minding a coup, didn’t have Nasser’s end in mind but his own. Yunis would have him in the hands of the police the moment he suggested such a scheme.

  It was a fortunate coincidence in fact, Edwards thought again, this meeting with Yunis. It had come as a last warning, a clear sign pointing to sanity and survival: he would have to disappear; into Egypt or further south, from where he’d come. Williams had burnt his boats on one side and he couldn’t see Moscow taking him back.

  The currency he’d worked with for so many years would be discredited at once, he realized—the moment he tried to work outside the peculiar circumstances which alone gave it a value. No single organization could trust him now, not with his long history of work with that organization’s enemies. Each side had trusted him so long as he remained in the middle, like a reliable news agency, giving them all the news. But for one side to give him sanctuary would not only be valueless to them, it would be dangerous too. For how could they be sure it wasn’t a trick, that he wasn’t a Trojan hen come home to roost? Williams had put him quite beyond trust and he cursed him for it. His deceits in the past seemed like honesty now—by comparison with the future, which he’d thought of as the beginning of that state at last. The dacha in the Moscow suburbs wasn’t really on, he saw. Or the hot toddy.

  4

  Williams’s dinner with his mother had gone off rather well in his house in Flood Street: they’d reached the coffee before she’d embarked on the condition and position of her daughter-in-law.

  “How is she—where is she, Charles? I never hear of her. Why all this mystery?”

  “Alice is in Devon. You know that perfectly well. There’s no mystery. She’s been there since Christmas.”

  And just then the telephone had thankfully gone. It was Marcus. “Just to confirm his movements, I’ve had word from Heathrow: he’s on his way.”

  “Good, Marcus. We’re under way then, too. Now there’s only Marlow to send packing.”

  “We’re seeing him tomorrow afternoon. It shouldn’t be too difficult. They were close friends after all.”

  Williams put down the receiver and blew his nose. A minute sliver of the chicken fricassee they’d had for dinner had lodged somewhere in the back of his throat and he felt the need to clean his teeth.

  He’d like to have left his mother at once and gone back to the office. There was so much to do. There was no denying it—his plan was shaping well.

  5

  Edwards assumed there’d be one of his section officers checking on his arrival at Cairo. There usually was, though he never knew who, and certainly Williams would want to know in this case, so he left the aircraft with Yunis, ending a conversation with him about Egypt’s balance of payments problem as they walked down the steps to the apron, before Yunis was swallowed up in a crowd of party hacks and photographers who had come to meet him. The thing was to keep London happy for as long as possible, let them think he was going through with their plan, whatever it was, until he could get his bearings in Egypt, decide what to do and then dump the whole thing.

  And surely Bridget would have some ideas, he thought.

  Things, in fact, worked out rather better than he’d expected. He must have made more of an impression on Yunis than he’d realized, with his talk of World Bank loans (he’d said he was going to Egypt to do some articles on their hard currency crisis) for from the middle of the crush of well-wishers Yunis turned back towards him and offered him a lift back into the city—turned round like a friend recognizing him in a crowded street and suggesting lunch. How easy it was, Edwards thought, to lead an ordinary life, to make up one’s day with meetings and activities that one enjoyed. He thought of Yunis’s sweets and found he didn’t resent his greed any longer. The two men pushed their way through the crush to the passenger exit. A big government Mercedes was humming by the kerb. They got into it like minor royalty and drove off towards the city.

  6

  The rather distinguished-looking Egyptian eased the collar of his old-fashioned linen summer suit in the moist air of the airport’s main lobby. The lapels were far too wide. He knew that. The air-conditioning plant had long since broken down and he had spent some uncomfortable minutes pretending to make a phone call from a booth which looked out over the main passenger entrance before coming out on to the concourse, mopping his brow, breathless and perturbed. He nodded absent-mindedly towards a man in a suit of grubby blue cloth on the other side of the hall who at once left the building and disappeared after Yunis’s cavalcade in a small Hillman. An angry squabble of passengers were shouting and waving their arms on the baking pavement outside. The airport coach either wouldn’t start or, by arrangement, wasn’t leaving then, and they’d been left to the mercies of the rapacious taxi drivers who had started to move in among them, hawking their broken down American cars for a trip to the city. An American woman it was who had supposedly been raped in one of these taxis several months before, the man in the summer suit remembered, at night on the old road back into Cairo past the City of the Dead; appropriate. The incident had come up to him in Military Intelligence: someone in the city police, as a way of avoiding responsibility for the investigation, had suggested that the woman was an imperialist spy and the taxi driver had only really been doing no more than his patriotic duty.

  The man in the summer suit dealt with spies, as head of Egyptian Counter-intelligence. He finished tidying himself up, tucking away a large spotted handkerchief in his breast pocket. It was frayed at the edge, but you’d have to be close to notice it. Too much laundering, for too long. That’s the only thing they’re really good at. Nothing else works here, he thought, with unusual impatience. Everyone is a liar, all of them—absolute rogues. But then that was exactly what he had always liked about the country, he remembered, trying to calm himself: he’d never cared for efficiency or skill in those he worked with; it cramped his own effectiveness in that sphere. He could pretend, as he had for a long time, that he was slipshod and vain like the others, knowing that he wasn’t. That was his pleasure, which Egypt gave him every day of his life: the confirmation of another secret, inside the secret of his work.

  But now someone from outside had come up with a mystery, something he wasn’t in on, and it had thrown him completely. Until then he’d known about everything, everybody else—he had been in the middle of the web—but what was Henry Edwards doing with Mohammed Yunis? Nothing, nobody, had prepared him for that.

  Colonel Hassan Hamdy thought about it all over a cup of sweet coffee with the airport’s Chief Security Officer in the stuffy little room on the second floor of the passenger building. He hadn’t in the least wanted to see Selim but it might have looked odd if he’d not put in an appearance. Home Security expected that sort of condescension from the senior military branch of the service and the Colonel had never failed to supply it—to play the arrogant role whenever
necessary, as it so frequently was—in his twenty-three years with Egyptian Intelligence.

  Selim was both annoyed and pleased to see the Colonel—unable to decide whether the honour of seeing him at the airport outweighed the implications of his having felt it necessary to come there in the first place. Had not His Excellency’s arrivals always gone off exactly to plan?—without interference from the military branch? Unfortunately, though Selim continually thought about such real or imagined slights, he knew he could never voice them, so he proceeded instead to welcome the Colonel with an effusive, elaborate courtesy.

  “Salaam alaikum … ’am di’illah, Colonel …”

  The Colonel listened to the usual succession of God-be-with-yous and other invocations to the deities while carefully adjusting the small fan on Selim’s desk so that it favoured him rather than Selim. They expected that sort of thing too, he reminded himself, they really enjoyed being cast down, and now of all times it was important to behave just as usual. Was he behaving a little nervously? Selim’s next words made him think he might be.

  “I hope His Excellency the Secretary General had a successful mission. I believe our security arrangements for his arrival were satisfactory?” Selim made his inquiry with just a hint of directness and dissatisfaction, as though he’d suddenly become aware of a certain unusual vulnerability in the Colonel.

  “Yes, Selim, they were all right” the Colonel retaliated, emphasising the words so that they suggested a doubt rather than a recommendation. “I think the car should have met His Excellency on the apron and not at the passenger exit. There’s a risk—in his walking between the two, through the corridor, other passengers and so on. The press and film people in the main lobby, like chickens round a corn sack. Anything could have happened.”