The Private Sector (A Peter Marlow spy thriller)

by Joseph Hone

  True, it was May and the end of the Khamseen winds—that part of the year when the city, in the best of times, very nearly gave itself back to the desert—that scorching, gritty breath which now, without money and the foreign adventurers long gone, made it seem as if all the buildings had been detonated and were simply waiting to be pushed over, like trees standing firm as ever after the blade has passed, the moment before the fall.

  *

  “Ah,” El Khoury said, “Mr. Cherry has had—an accident?—no. A trouble?—yes.” Mr. Khoury’s English stumbled and doubled back in much the same way as the language did in his magazine. He led you on with it in sudden leaps through horrible misunderstandings only to dump you, equally ignorant, in the waste spaces among “abbreviations” and “recent additions” at the end of the dictionary. His office for Arab Focus was in a corridor of the Gazette building, at one end of it in fact, so that we sat opposite each other, pretty close to, with a few feet to spare on either side of our chairs, Mr. Khoury with something less than that for he was a large man with moist locks of dark hair round his ears, broken yellowish teeth and very bloodshot eyes—eyes which seemed to have looked long and without reward on some sunspot nirvana.

  “An accident? Trouble?” I queried.

  “A wife—his wife,” Mr. Khoury responded vigorously, suddenly hooking on to the right words with a huge smile. “She is not very well. In fact—” he paused, massaged his stomach under his shirt, then wiped the sweat off his hand on a blotter, “—she is very bad. You will like to see her? Yes?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. I remember her when I was last here. She’s French, isn’t she?”

  “Franciowey. Aiowa.” He broke into Arabic. Then he glanced doubtfully down at his fly. Then the hand went under again.

  “And you are here to do some stories,” he continued after the moment’s repairs. “The New Egypt. The new UAR as we call it. We can reprint them. The new High Dam, the new Arab summit, new pyramids from the World Bank—we are very keen. We will talk for a long time about it You will have food with us. I am very glad to see you. There will be much talk about it.”

  “I’d thought really of doing a fairly simple colour piece—‘Life in Cairo Today’‚ that sort of thing—”

  “Of course, of course,” Mr. Khoury interrupted. “We will do that. I will show you the new hotels—the El Borg, the Cairo Tower, the TV centre at Maspero, one of the very best—I think we have some English equipment—bathing, holidays, Nile cruisers. We will do everything. My wife will be very pleased to help.”

  “And perhaps something on the antiquities, I’d thought. You’re doing something new at Sakkara, I understand. Looking for Imhotep’s tomb—”

  “Mr. Marlow, I tell you frankly, everything is new. With the antiquities we are doing many new and wonderful things. Very up to the minute. And I am doing a drama myself. In four acts and a prologue.”

  Mr. Khoury shuffled among a crowd of typescripts and paper rubble on his desk. He produced a small booklet, a play in English by Taufiq Al-Hakim, a well-known Egyptian writer.

  “There.” He handed me the play in triumph. “Mine is so much different. This man is talking about townspeople, Cairo people, talking and having their coffee in Groppi’s. I am writing a story of country folk—the world of the village. the man who comes to the city. The pressure—” he raised both arms in hold-up fashion and then brought them together about his head, a cage of fingers over each ear “—the pressure of urban disturbances on the rural mind. The millennia of the past—” he opened his arms out again “—faced with the millennia of the future!” He opened his arms wider still so that his fingers bumped the walls on either side of him. “These are the things of most importance. I am calling it Yesterday and Tomorrow. We will talk about it”

  “It’s most kind of you—”

  “You say ten years before you were here—teaching at Maadi?” I nodded. “You know, three times I have been in London since then. Three times. The Strand Palace Hotel, I always stay there. You know Mr. El Bakri at Chesterfield Gardens? He has an apartment now near Kew Gardens. Very strange luck—no? You are knowing him, I expect. We were always eating at Lyons restaurant in Piccadilly—you are knowing that place too, I am sure. What good times we had in London—what a place! Well, we will be arranging things for you here, Mr. Marlow, I can assure you. You are at the Semiramis? At what time are you free tonight? You will meet my friends and we will talk seriously, most sensibly. And I will prepare a programme for you between time. Six o’clock at the hotel then. I will be waiting on you.”

  Mr. Khoury stood up in a hurry.

  “May I confirm that with you?—I have to see if I can find Mr. Cherry. Where do you think I might get him now?”

  “Ah, of course, your friend Mr. Cherry. I have not seen him for some time. He writes English for us now and then. His wife is very—not well …”

  “In hospital?”

  “I am afraid yes.”

  “Where?”

  “The Anglo-American in Gezira. She’s French, you know,” he added regretfully. “Behind the Cairo Tower, you can’t miss it. A most unfortunate occurrence, I’m sure. A toudaleur then, Mr. Marlow—and I must say I can’t say how nice …”

  A ragged porter, who insisted on carrying Khoury’s gift to me of the last twelve issues of Arab Focus, saw me down the dark circle of stairs smelling of machine oil, and, having had his five piastres in the hallway, ushered me out on to the boiling street.

  *

  I took a taxi back to the Semiramis and lay down at once. I’d felt very queasy in the cab and now, on the bed, the room started to tilt and veer around me; the ceiling moved. I must have had a temperature, it seemed too soon for a go of Gyppy tummy. There was a nineteenth-century Italian print on the wall: a ruined temple on a hill, with shepherds and flocks of assorted animals in the foreground. A classical landscape. It twisted slowly on its axis, goats walking up one side of the frame, the ruined temple sliding down the other. I was unable to take my eyes off it. Pain shot up the back of my neck and I realized I was twisting my head violently trying to steady the picture and get it level again. I gave up and left the frame to slide around as much as it wanted. It proceeded to spin and flutter like a wagon wheel in a Western.

  The terrace doors were open and the remains of the Khamseen wind kept the muslin curtain steadily flapping against the glass. I seem to have been quite conscious of the noise it made—and of the cries drifting up distantly from the corniche outside, the water lapping against the embankment, the slowly circling ray of sunlight passing over the end of my bed—throughout the rest of the morning. All the same, during some of this time, I must have dropped off to sleep more than once. For the dream I had, in reconstructing it immediately afterwards, was half fact, half fiction—the first commenting on the second, as I fell in and out of consciousness.

  I had started to think about my last day in Cairo ten years before. I was catching a TWA flight that evening back to Paris and the three of us, Henry, Bridget and I, had just left the airline office in Opera Square where Bridget worked and she had given me a folder with my ticket in it.

  “A drink in the Continental?” Henry suggested. And we had gone there and sat up at the dark, mirrored bar and Angelo had served us arak in tall whisky glasses, ice-cold water circling down the outside. The bill had been forty-five piastres, plus the service, and Angelo had put the strip of paper in Henry’s little glass behind the bar, on the first shelf of bottles. Henry was staying on in Egypt, his credit was good. But my own sherry glass was there as well, full of previous chits, at least two hundred piastres worth. Was Angelo going to ask me to settle up with him now?—had they told him I was leaving? Or didn’t he know? I’d have to tell him I was leaving myself, and pay up. But when? Now—or at the end of the session? However I handled it there was going to be an awkward break—this saying goodbye to Angelo, paying my bill. It would be the beginning of the end, a public acknowledgement of my departure—and I was absorbed in wondering how
to face it. I was determined not to get involved in any goodbye business.

  We drank on at the Continental for an hour, swapping polite inconsequential chatter—English teachers taking the morning off with a girl in town … We’d arranged to go on for lunch at the Estoril.

  All this was fact; it was exactly as it had happened. But in the moments after remembering it, when I’d fallen asleep, the dream came which was quite different. Instead of going to the Estoril we were driving down Soliman Pasha in a taxi, to Bridget’s flat in Garden City, the heat lapping round the car in waves.

  The lift wasn’t working and when we’d climbed to the top of the building we had gin from the cardboard crate which Bridget kept under the chaise-longue—the three of us, romping around the small burning room, throwing our clothes off, laughing and chattering like bright sparks at a cocktail party.

  And then Henry had suddenly gone into the bedroom with Bridget—as simply and naturally as though it was an arrangement, an appointment they’d had together which we’d been aware of for a long time.

  I stood at the window, my back to the bedroom doors, chuckling, sipping more and more gin, looking out over the river, perfectly happy, until Bridget called me, her head half-way through the glass doors.

  “It won’t work,” she said. She seemed to be shouting at me, her sun-burnt face showing up like a full stop against the yellow whiteness of her body. “We can’t get down. We’re trapped.”

  “Why ever not? “I said casually. “The door isn’t locked.” And I moved towards it. It gave easily in my hand, swinging inwards, and the afternoon sun dazzled me. Instead of the door-mat and corridor there was a small window ledge where my feet were, with some withered plants in pots, and below them the outside wall of the tall apartment block, a sheer drop of twelve storeys to the corniche below.

  When I woke, I had opened my eyes several times, thinking about this, but had closed them again, drawn back each time by the memory of the dream—trying to re-achieve it; its light-headed smooth dazzle, its sex, its extraordinary reality. And for moments I was part of it once more, could feel its exact shapes and sizes, but soon there was nothing left; I had exhausted it. I kept my eyes open the next time. The landscape on the wall was rock-steady, frozen goats and broken grey columns.

  I got up and went on to the balcony and looked to left and right along the rooftops of the buildings on the corniche. I could just see the top of Bridget’s apartment block in Garden City beyond Shepheard’s Hotel. She was probably still there, living in the city. She might even be in the same place. Her parents were dead, I knew that, and in the years afterwards, when Henry and I had met again in London, he had never told me that she had left Egypt. After the first bits of news he had given me about her and her family, and after our marriage was dissolved, we had dropped the subject altogether.

  But now it was different. Henry was no longer my only consideration in the city. For the first time in years I was thinking of Bridget again, thinking intensely, trying to imagine where she was and what she was doing, wondering whether I might not simply go up to her old apartment and ring the bell, or phone her. The dream had suddenly freshened everything about her, the details had re-created her completely: I had seen her face again, the dark triangular features, the eyes so far apart and the nose turning slightly upwards like a petal. And in the glass doorway of the bedroom the same barely formed body, the narrow shoulders and wide hips. A woman in her late thirties now, somewhere in the city. I was sure of it.

  2

  Bridget had gone out each evening for food, but Henry and the Colonel had not set foot outside the apartment in Gezira for more than two days. They were by now nervous and short-tempered and all of them were thankful of the three separate bedrooms which the accommodation offered. It was an old turn-of-the-century block on the island and the apartment ran right across the building, fronting on to Gezira Street and the river on one side and, from a covered terrace, looking out over the playing fields of the Sporting Club on the other.

  The place had belonged to an aunt of the Colonel’s, distantly Jewish and aristocratic—a minor grande dame of the city during Fuad’s and Farouk’s time—who had spent her life there and died just before the revolution when the Colonel had quietly taken it over as a possible bolt-hole, a “safe” house. The furnishings were immensely heavy and portentous: pseudo gold-caked second Empire mixed with a few genuine oriental pieces—a wooden filigree harem screen by the drawing room door, a silver hookah with passages from the Koran finely inlaid, and some Persian lambswool rugs, barely trampled, deep and splendid as a snowfall. All the rooms were dark; there were few enough windows in the apartment in any case and over those were hung tall velvet curtains which, when they were fully opened, let in no more than just a central A-shaped panel of light.

  The three inhabitants seemed to move on perpetual tiptoe over the heavy carpets. One of them would enter a room on some casual errand only to find that, without intending it, he had frightened the wits out of someone else already there. There was a telephone in the hall which they had moved on its long extension to a heavy armchair by the drawing room window, putting cushions round it, stifling the very possibility of its ringing. And it never did.

  The Colonel had made two calls, both to someone in Athens—a coded message dealing with the export of so many kilos of dried fruit. He had explained that it was his contact with Central Office in London and that all they had to do now was wait.

  Henry wasn’t convinced. He had never heard of any Cairo-Athens contact in his experience with the Holborn section; on the other hand, it could have been a uniquely Central Office link. In any case he wasn’t prepared to run for it on his own just yet. The only contact he could make would be with the KGB Resident in Cairo. And he hadn’t made up his mind about what welcome he might receive there. He was “resting”. That’s what the house was for, he told himself: a “safe” house.

  Bridget listened to their tiresome conversations about British Intelligence, about how and when they would all get out—an English boat passing through the canal, the same thing at Alexandria, disguises at Cairo airport, or as BO AC freight. There was something false and constrained about their talk, she felt, because they wouldn’t get out, would they? The Russians—and even the Egyptians too—managed these things with ease, to spirit people away in foreign places, in trunks and packing cases with chloroform over their noses.

  But not the English.

  They no longer had the bite in their intelligence service for that sort of thing; their men got caught in Prague with false-walled caravans or distributing religious tracts in Red Square. And how, in the best of times, was one to leave Egypt covertly? Through the Sahara on foot with a compass or a walk on the waters? Its land and sea frontiers were as open and harsh and empty and as easily controlled as the lines on a hard tennis court. They were trapped, were they not? It was as simple as that.

  They talked these things round and about in low voices, drank beer at six o’clock that, without the refrigerator which had broken, now tasted dull and watery. They listened to the hourly broadcasts on Cairo radio, shredding the dull communiqués for some sign of their pursuers, a sign that they were equally on the run—a feeling which the heavy soporific apartment completely denied them. They wanted some confirmation of the action they had taken, which had pulled them forever from a familiar world but which had not yet brought them any other life.

  And they felt impelled, against their professional judgment and training, to stick together as much as possible now, each watching the other. For in a life of disloyalty which had just ended, mundane personal considerations were all that was left to them for the moment—the private concerns of ordinary men and women.

  Thus they were careful in everything they did and polite to each other, taking on the colourings of their bourgeois surroundings; Bridget laid the table studiously for every meal and the men didn’t drop ash on the carpet. And at night they took to their separate beds like the inmates of a monastery and tried
to read French popular novels of the utmost decorum and triteness which the Colonel’s aunt had collected in profusion.

  The real strain in the ménage, of course, didn’t come from their predicament, or from the loss of a happy past; it came from the fact that neither of the men dared tell each other—least of all Bridget—that despite all the confessions and dramatic disclosures they were not what they seemed, that there was in each of them a final layer of deceit which they had not revealed. The two men weren’t prepared to risk the consequences of displaying their real allegiances, not merely for professional reasons, but because they didn’t believe their relationship with Bridget would survive such a confession.

  “I am an Israeli agent.” “I work for Moscow.” The phrases themselves would sound ridiculous in the present circumstances, they thought. And they would not be said, or acted upon, except in the last resort, for to assume their final identity, although it might mean individual salvation, would also mean losing Bridget. Whereas for as long as both men held to their lie, both were trapped, both were secure, with her.

  So the two men watched each other, and wondered, hiding their real absorptions, while the Colonel talked of the merits of Oxfordshire or Northamptonshire as counties to look for houses, and said he’d square things with Williams when they got back to Holborn. Henry would be all right, the ridiculous business with Yunis would be forgotten; he’d see to that. As for the fact that Henry had been a double, really working for the Egyptians—the Colonel said he would forget about that too. In the circumstances. And in the circumstances Henry agreed with him, describing his offer as a reasonable return for the cover he’d given Hamdy over the years.