The Private Sector (A Peter Marlow spy thriller)

by Joseph Hone

  The two men lied to each other, comfortably, secure in the knowledge that each of them would have to make quite different moves in the end. All that worried them was when.

  3

  I had dosed myself, and slept all afternoon and it was after five when I left the hotel to look for Cherry. The Khamseen, the fifty-day desert mistral, had practically beaten itself out and the city had an air of empty battered fatigue: resting for a moment on its knees, after the wind and before the oven of summer. Or so I thought: it might well have entered on its last rest for all the activity about: the City of the Dead beyond Mokattam seemed to have moved into the real city. The feluccas and barges had disappeared from the low sand-filled water and a soldier dozed, nursing an ancient sten-gun beneath the bronze Trafalgar lions which guarded the entrance to Kasr el Nil bridge.

  A great network of streets had been built by the exhibition ground on the far side of the bridge, the Cairo Tower sticking up from somewhere in the middle of them, and I couldn’t make out where the hospital was in this ugly, half-built scatter of roads. I walked through the remnants of an arboretum, part of the old Gezira botanical gardens, with lines of broken Edwardian green houses on one side, down through an avenue of magnificent, towering Emperor palms. At the end was a long low wooden building, with a terrace and doors all along its length, overhung with creeper; a rackety, impermanent affair—a memory now, from the Illustrated London News, of one of the new hospitals in the Crimea.

  “Mr. Cherry?—I understand he’s staying here. With his wife.”

  A young man had come into the hallway, a stethoscope in his pocket, wearing plimsolls and a long white coat. A boy stood behind him in an open doorway which led to a dusty courtyard, throwing a ball impatiently from hand to hand. The man took off one of his shoes and thumped the sand out on the floor, knocking the heel vigorously against the reception desk.

  “Yes. Yes—Dr. Cherry,” he said. “Dr. Cherry and his wife are in number 9. I’ll show you.”

  The glass doors of the room were open, a length of dark muslin hanging between them, so that I had to bend down and struggle with the sand-coloured material to get in, like passing into a fortune teller’s booth. There was a smell of sugar and burnt milk inside. Cherry was sitting on a kitchen chair facing the bed reading the Egyptian Gazette and the woman in front of him seemed like a child who had been tucked in and gone to sleep for the night, the sheets pulled right up against her ears, lying flat out without a pillow, neat and still and straight and precisely rounded under the bedclothes—as lifeless as a roll of linoleum. There was a four-pound tin of Nescafe on the chest of drawers, some imported tinned milk and a primitive paraffin burner. Many elderly British people, governesses and the widows of civil servants on minute pensions, spent their last years permanently in this hospital, and Mrs., or Madame Cherry must have taken over one of their rooms without bothering, or having the energy, to change the ancient Empire decor.

  She must have been an old woman, I thought, whoever had occupied the room previously, her roots in Egypt stretching back to before the turn of the century, married to a soldier by the looks of it—he’d probably been taken off with cholera in the Sudan forty years before—for the walls were covered with military photographs, yellowing in cross-cornered frames: a regiment of lancers lined up on some nude provincial midan, a formal group of officers sitting on elaborate garden furniture in front of their mess—thin faces and moustaches and scabbards scraping the dust. And there was a sampler which had been made into a screen on the far side of the bed; row on row of faded stitching in different Gothic lettering commemorating odd skirmishes in that part of the Empire: Omdurman, Tel el Kebir, Khartoum.

  There was a bamboo bookshelf next to the window with broken struts all down one side, so that the shelves had collapsed over the books : a row of Victorian adventure novels in coloured pictorial boards—Cleverly Sahib, A Tale of the Khyber Pass—holding up another row of less inspiring books—Bishop Butler’s A Tour of the Shire River—which held up a third collection, a line of sporting memoirs—The Turn of the Wheel, MCC in Australia 1928 and Gilligan’s Men.

  Cherry was sitting on a pile of thick blue books, so that he could get on a level with the closed eyes on the bed—two volumes of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia, I saw, when he stood up. The doctor had gone back to his soccer and I could hear the thump of leather on a wall and odd, quick cries in Arabic.

  Cherry didn’t say anything. He might even have been crying. He put both his hands round mine and pumped them slowly.

  “Well, I’d never have believed it,” he whispered at last. And his face confirmed it. He was like a remittance man suddenly confronted with the one relation from his past who had borne with him, vaguely understood his follies and given him lunch in his London club every July: a thinner figure now, sunburnt with bad eyes, squashed linen trousers and a red Irish tweed tie that had completely faded; the flesh in the face and neck just clear of the bones, falling away in small dewlaps, the air imperceptibly, but definitely, leaking from the inner tube. The moon face was on the wane and his hair had thinned out into one or two black strands which ran across his bald head sideways like earphones.

  “What are you doing here, in God’s name?” He smiled and there was the old put-on glare in the eyes for a second.

  “Looking. Just looking.”

  “What?” he said in a roaring whisper. “You’re not playing cops and robbers, are you? For God’s sake! They arrest people out here now for that sort of thing. Nasser’ll bang you into the Siwa oasis on beans and water, you know …”

  I looked at the wisp of fuzzy grey hair on the sheet, the dark coal-scuttle eye-lids, the pointed, slightly dilating nose: the doll’s head by the Omdurman sampler.

  “I’m sorry to hear—”

  “Yes. Madame …”

  He furrowed his brow and pouted his lips judiciously. A boy had done something serious at the back of the class.

  “Yes, we’re waiting. Not long now, I should think,” he said, as though when his wife “arrived” we would all go off somewhere and enjoy ourselves for the evening.

  “Is there another room? I don’t want to wake—”

  “She can’t hear a thing. She’s on the drugs. She was deaf lately as well. I’ll leave the radio on in any case. She always used to be able to hear that, so she said.”

  Cherry turned on a small transistor by the bedside and an orchestra crackled out, and a voice—a Neapolitan tenor it sounded like, something from Puccini perhaps. The music surged and faded from its distant station as we clambered under the muslin and out of the dark, sweetly smelling tent, and took seats on wicker chairs on the terrace.

  The late sun streamed through the vine-like tendrils that had grown up over the balcony and Cherry flapped about on his neat small feet like a waiter.

  “Tell me—wait. I’ll go and make some coffee first. There’s a night nurse who comes on at six and I usually go to the Gezira Club for a drink then. It’s near enough for them to send a message. We’ll go on there.”

  Cherry went back into the room and I stretched my feet out over the terrace and listened to the squeaky opera behind me. They were coming to the end of an act, a pair of voices tearing at each other in explosive counterpoint. Madame Larousse making an exit. Or was she? There had been no sign of illness or pain in the tiny features; the pencil of flesh beneath the bedclothes had been as calm as a small wave. The devoted Cherry—and Cherry the stringer for our Mid-East section. And Cherry the man who had once driven a taxi backwards over Kasr el Nil bridge, sitting on the windshield, his feet on the steering wheel, with the driver and myself navigating from the rear window. And Williams’s Mr. Cherry—“Don’t trust him—he doesn’t, and he mustn’t, know what you’re doing in Cairo.”

  Cherry was the sort of person I should have gone on trusting—Williams the kind I should never have become involved with: a wrong turning made long ago; expectations lying in the gutter: that was what I’d believed of Henry, thinking myself
tougher and less sensitive in accepting it all. I wondered about that now. The hell with Williams, I thought.

  Cherry came back with two glasses of milky Nescafé and we stirred the mixture slowly like chemists.

  “My God, when I got the message that someone called Marlow was coming out here … I thought you’d gone back to Dublin when you left here. And now it’s the bloody cloak and dagger stuff. You must be out of your mind.”

  “And you? You’re in the same line of business in Cairo, aren’t you?”

  “Not full time, not really. Not a London man on Establishment. What are they paying you? Four grand plus?”

  “What does it matter? A sheep as a lamb—and you’re actually in the firing line. I’ve just been stacked away in a cupboard in Holborn with a lot of Arab newspapers. If they catch you they’ll really make you jump. Why—what made you do it? Greystones is pretty British and you used to wallop the wogs out here. But—?”

  Cherry said nothing, sipping his coffee, enjoying the mystery.

  “What was it? Playing a role or something, the satisfaction of doing something exciting which no one ever knows about? Or did you have genuine ‘ideological’ motives?”

  “Nothing as grand,” Cherry said. “You’re the first open contact I’ve ever had with London. I just give them the mood of the place, background stuff, cocktail chatter.”

  “Give it to who?”

  “To Usher of course. You must know about him. The Mameluke house beneath the Citadel.”

  Usher. The ancient gentleman by the swimming pool at the British Embassy ten years before—carnation and spotless sea island cotton shirt. Crowther and Usher and the Queen’s birthday.

  “Usher? Is he still here? He recruited me. I’d forgotten.”

  Cherry looked pained. Someone from London should have known all about Usher. I think he almost began to mistrust me.

  “But aren’t you setting up something new here? Or have I got it all wrong—and you’re really working for the Russians?”

  “I’m looking for Edwards. Henry Edwards. You remember him from Maadi—or had you gone to Alex by then? He was going to run the circle here and now he’s disappeared. You never had any dealings with him?”

  “A short fellow with glasses and a haystack of hair?”

  I nodded.

  “I’ve seen him several times at Usher’s place. A journalist.”

  “That was the cover. Like mine. Yours too, I suppose. What a lot of writing gets done on behalf of Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a real patron of the art. Anyway, he’s gone off somewhere, possibly out here. He was a friend of Bridget’s too. You remember her?”

  Cherry smiled willingly enough. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to the wedding.”

  “I didn’t manage yours either. Did you have a good time at the Beau Rivage?”

  “We had the two days. She was quite old you know.”

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose you wondered.”

  “A little.”

  “She was a good woman, though. Amusing. Good company. She talked her head off, sensibly. There was nothing crumbling or faded, until quite recently. Ten good years, marvellous really. I was at the college in Alex, she took the music; a lot of laughter. Then we came to Cairo—Alex became barbaric. Then this.” He turned towards the bedroom. “Bone cancer. What happened to your wife?”

  “I don’t know. She’s probably still here.”

  “I meant to say—I knew you’d left her. I saw her once about three years ago, a party at Usher’s, she was with your friend Edwards, I think. The haystack.”

  “Three years ago?”

  “Yes. I’m not likely to forget her. I kept clear.”

  “She bites, you mean? You’ve become very proper, Herbert.”

  “Settled down, that’s all, I suppose.”

  “It wasn’t like you though.”

  “I know. It won’t be for much longer.”

  He stirred the sugar at the bottom of his glass and spooned it up like strawberry jam, mouth wide, eyes agape in the old staring way. He might have become a proper man, I thought, but the old matrix, the innate rumbustious folly was not quite dead.

  “Are you going to look for her as well—your wife?”

  I shook my head. “Not my wife now. But I might look her up.”

  “For old times’ sake, you mean? The old Marlow. At the rodeo again. Into the ring …”

  “‘Lord Salisbury and party and hurry about if, you mean? And a taxi backwards over the bridge.”

  “You won’t get anything of that sort of thing around here nowadays. That’s all gone. All deadly serious now. You wouldn’t recognize it.”

  “What is the mood here then, Herbert? That’s your department.”

  “There’ll be a war. Third round. Seconds getting out of the ring at the moment. People are jumping round the place right now, vile tempers and bad hangovers. You won’t notice it at once. Battle fever—but no battle; that’s what irks them. They’ll be slaughtered if they start. Nasser knows that, but the others don’t; and not the Army. They’re going full belt over the cliff. There’s trouble at the top too. Yunis of the ASU was talking out of school in Moscow last week. Now he’s reportedly under house arrest. Moscow wants to keep things on the hop here, keep their finger well in. That’s the mood—just a matter of waiting for the bell to go.”

  “I’d rather the old times.”

  “We’ll look for this fellow Edwards then—and your wife? That’s just like old times—nothing serious. Nothing about your setting up a new circle here, that was just cover?”

  “That’s what they want in London. ‘Find Edwards,’ they said.”

  “And how have they lost this fellow—if they know he’s in Cairo? You mean he’s gone under—or over?”

  “Possibly. But I don’t know if he’s even here. It was just an idea of mine. We had a meeting—”

  Cherry let out a dreadful bellow of laughter.

  “That’s really serious. We need a bit of that out here. Happy days again all right: you just dropped by to see if he was here, like you’d drop into Davy Byrne’s on a wet afternoon looking for the price of a drink if Harry was there. And if he isn’t, well, I’ll drop over to McDaid’s later, he might be there. Or the Bailey. That’s how it is, isn’t it? But they shoot people out here for that sort of thing, didn’t you know?”

  Cherry, with another bark, had woken up into some kind of form.

  “Jesus, nothing serious all right!”

  The little opera had come to an end in the bedroom behind us. Cherry got up. An elderly country woman in a baggy black cotton dress and cap flapped along the terrace in plastic toe-hold sandals, and Cherry spoke to her in Arabic, enumerating various details on his fingers, counting out the things that would have to be done for his wife that evening, like teaching a child on an abacus.

  “Come on, we’ll have a beer at the Club. I’ve got to meet Khoury there in any case. My ‘editor’.”

  “I was supposed to meet him back at the hotel at six.”

  “You must have got it wrong. Khoury practically lives in the Club. That’s where he meets everybody.”

  4

  Bridget said, “I don’t damn well care. No one can see me on the balcony, unless they can look round corners. And there aren’t any buildings opposite. It’s crazy being stuck in here.”

  She opened the French windows, took a paper and a drink with her and lay down on a wicker garden couch, opening her house-coat at the neck and flapping the lapels, trying to move some of the evening breeze about her damp, hot body.

  They had been there three days now; nothing had happened, the papers hadn’t mentioned anything of them, nor the news. The telephone hadn’t gone. The resigned immobility of the two men was beginning to annoy Bridget. They sat around the place, talking and smoking endlessly, doing various chores in the mornings like housemaids. She had expected more urgency; she wanted something to occur. But Hamdy was damp and lethargic: “We mustn’t do anything, don’t you see?
Mustn’t upset the arrangements. Just wait for them to call. It’ll take time for them to organize things. We can’t get out of here on our own, you know that…”

  But she’d had her own way about going out on the balcony; the Colonel hadn’t stopped her. And now he went back to the bathroom and began to shave, as he did every evening, as if expecting an appointment or a party an hour hence.

  Henry was in the kitchen tinkering with the fridge. Warm Stella drove him wild and he’d been trying to get the thing to work ever since they’d arrived.

  “She doesn’t like being trapped, Hamdy,” Henry called through the doorway.

  “It’s us, isn’t it? Not so much her. She goes out, after all. We’re the ones who’re stuck.”

  “That’s what she doesn’t like.”

  “So what does she expect me to do—call a cab to take us all out to the airport?”

  Had he lost some weight? the Colonel wondered as he looked at himself in the glass. Sweating? Fear? Hardly that. There’d been a moment’s panic at Bridget’s house, but not fear : he couldn’t somehow feel that emotion about a country, about a people and a security organization he was so familiar with, whose ways he knew so deeply. It was having Henry with them that made it so difficult. If he and Bridget had simply been together … They would have slept in the same bed, the cumbersome affair with its silk hangings and hardened mattress, that she alone now occupied. That was what was wrong. He could have tended her, consoled, comforted her. He could have loved her and perhaps smothered her impatient fear. For she was frightened, he thought; simply that.

  But now the situation was a French farce, with the three of them manoeuvring round the set, suspecting false doors and waiting for their trousers to slip. And he had to deny her the one sort of attention, his obsession for her, which he knew would calm her. He had to keep to the rules. And the only encouragement he had was in knowing that Henry had to keep to them as well.