The Private Sector (A Peter Marlow spy thriller)

by Joseph Hone

  He pulled the razor round in a neat half-circle between ear and chin, did the same for the other side, then soaped his face again. He remembered all the other times he had done this, preparing to go out with Bridget. He would have to do something, take some action, if only for her sake.

  The Colonel wondered what their reactions would be: if he told them that the call, when it came, was for him alone, that he was not with London but with Israel, and was going back there. What would they do? They wouldn’t like it. That’s what it amounted to. Before he finished shaving he knew he would have to get out on his own without telling them anything. And yet … There was still time before a final decision. He hunted around for Bridget’s rose-water which he’d used since his own cologne had run out.

  *

  The refrigerator started to purr. Henry wobbled it and it stopped. Another jerk and it was on again. He turned the freezer carefully up to “high” and put half a dozen bottles of Stella on the top shelf, along with some local cheese which had gone like dry putty, and an oil-stained paper bag of olives. He didn’t bother about the milk or butter or the other food. He felt in better shape already. The heaviness of the past few days lifted—the depressing inactivity and befuddled thought. He had achieved something, started to work himself out of the situation, and he felt as relieved about the beer as a traveller come to an oasis having seen it hover for many days in the sky.

  For those three days he’d been prepared to believe that the Colonel was one of Williams’s private appointees in their Mid-East section—or someone who had been placed in Cairo years before when the British Army still occupied the city. And that—in the secretive ways of things, the bluffs and double bluffs of his Holborn department—he’d never known about him. It would have been a natural course to take with someone so highly placed in Egyptian intelligence, keep him buried completely from everybody, even to the extent of giving him his own completely separate “supporting staff” in Cairo and elsewhere—men whose job it would have been to “service” the Colonel, warn him of possible breaks in his own Cairo apparat—and get him out of the country in the event of his being unearthed: his “ticket men”. At his level the Colonel would have had all these ancillary services, just as he’d had them himself in better days in London and New York from his Moscow source.

  All that was perfectly possible. But the one thing that made no sense was that a man in such an exalted position would have run from them long ago, left them and made his own way home. Whatever his personal affections, and the Colonel obviously had these for Bridget, such a man would have bolted from the word go. And the way to do that was to do it alone, not with two other people hanging round your neck.

  The information gathered from twenty years with Egyptian security, and latterly as head of counter-intelligence, would have been invaluable to Holborn and no man would risk the chance of getting it home by hanging round with friends, or even his colleagues, and least of all his mistress.

  The Colonel would never have taken the risk: affection, love, personal loyalties—whatever it was—didn’t arise in a situation like this; not for someone with his professional skills.

  Who was the Colonel with then—and where was he running? Henry hardly cared; he would have to run for it on his own, that was his only clear thought. London was over, and Cairo. And Bridget. The places where he wanted to be, and the people who lived there, were gone. Affection, love, loyalty—whatever it was—didn’t arise in a situation like this …

  There was only Moscow and that wasn’t certain : the long de-briefing, a badly-heated apartment, unintelligible rows with a provincial housekeeper, a job in some backwater of the service, ghosting books with the others of his kind, getting drunk with them on Christmas Day: airmail copies of The Times when everybody else had thumbed through them: a life within a belief he didn’t believe in any more. It lay over the bridge, all this—the scrubbed subways and too much vodka—over Kasr el Nil and down to the hospital where the Moscow Resident worked, just a short walk away. He began more and more to think he didn’t want it; now that the fridge was going again.

  *

  Bridget finished her drink and looked across the cricket pitch to the entrance of the Club in the distance. It was six o’clock, just starting the half-hour of twilight. The day had cooled, the wind was finished: there would be a few weeks now of perfect weather before the summer really started, tearing everything to shreds. People, other friends of hers in the city, would be doing things : she’d arranged some time before to go down with a doctor’s family she knew to their farm in the delta, the remains of a once large estate: a few days walking about the dovecotes and banana groves, watching the grain being forked from pile to pile, the chaff blowing away in the north summer wind from the sea. The creak of Sakias, Shadufs, Archimedes screws; the endless lapping of water. The blanket of night. Card games.

  And there were others she knew, comfortable casual acquaintances, probably some of them were walking up the drive of the Club at that moment, if she could have distinguished them, between the squash and croquet courts, on their way for an evening drink.

  She wanted to be one of them; quite plainly and vehemently and suddenly she wanted to be done with all this. She wanted to walk out of the flat, down the corniche, up the long drive of the Club and into ordinary life. It was as simple as that.

  Behind her the telephone started.

  She heard the muffled buzz beneath the cushions in the armchair next to the window. Henry was clattering the last of the bottles into the fridge and the Colonel was dousing his face repeatedly in a flush of water from both taps, screwing his ears out with his fingers, plastering back his thin hair.

  She let the phone go on ringing until it stopped. Then she got up and went to get her headscarf and shopping bag.

  5

  We turned up the drive to the Club with Cherry stepping along briskly in front of me—a goat on his small legs and grubby suede shoes, red tie and dirty linen coat flapping out around him and his beer belly pushing out over his trousers. He had the pedantic, bear-like, weather-beaten air of some minor British Council official who’s been thankfully out of England since Munich, traipsing round the grubby corners of the Levant on the same small salary and in the same clothes: the sort of rundown happy academic who “keeps in touch with things” at home, and ministers to the locals, with a box of lantern slides telling “The Story of Parliament” in one pocket and Desmond MacCarthy’s last book of Critical Essays in the other.

  He smelled vaguely of old beer and long siestas; of ink and chalk and small evening classes on the Lake Poets in some baking upstairs room above the tramway, looking out at a statue of Garibaldi—or Ataturk, or Soliman Pasha: a bare trickle of sense seeping through into the willing, mystified faces of refined old ladies and the secretaries who dreamed of a season at the Berlitz in Oxford Street Cherry, the genuine expatriate with his weekly copy of the T.L.S.—the sort who’d never even thought of getting a job on the Third Programme.

  Cherry was full of certainties; he’d found his mark in this isolated, crumbling city: it was exactly his weather. He was someone here.

  The cars and taxis swirled past us on the drive, full of flannelled, blazered men and girls of “good family”. The slow “thunk” of the croquet, and the vicious “snap-FLACK” of the squash, resounding from the courts on either side of us—and Cherry strode along towards the entrance with the vigorous impatience of a child on its way to the nursery. He was someone here; yes indeed. It made all the difference.

  “Yallah, Mohammed!” he called to a waiter at the top of the steps. “Entar Mabsout? Quais Ketir?”

  “Aiowa, Bey! Am di’illah.”

  The man saluted and we walked through the small hallway and out on to the covered terrace by the small pool beyond.

  I said, “You weren’t a member here before, Herbert Rather overdoing the Raj thing, isn’t it—for a good Dubliner?”

  “Nonsense, Marlow. This is for Egyptians now.” And before he went over to the ta
ble on the far side of the pool where I could see Mr. Khoury sitting, he had started to clap his hands impatiently at another waiter.

  “Dine etnine Stella, fi cubia,” he shouted, as we threaded our way between the tables where the smart set in polo necks and armless cotton frocks were gathered in huge circles, the men, in groups, lying back with their feet up on opposite chairs, spinning rackets in their hands, looking serious; the girls in just as easy, confident, though much straighter, positions, skirts sometimes an inch above the knee. Before the British had entirely left Egypt ten years earlier, an Egyptian had publicly relieved himself in the Club’s small pool by the terrace. “It’s Egyptian water now,” he’d said. “Like the canal.” It was a famous incident. But in these days there was no need for such insecurity; the smarter Cairenes had replaced the English exactly in the hierarchic ecology of the Club, were indistinguishable from them in their proprietary and superior airs.

  Mr. Khoury had stood up long before we reached his table, wreathed in smiles, his mouth a twinkling hollow of black gaps and gold fillings, already waving his arms and giving his companions a running biography of us and our affairs before we were near him.

  “… and Mr. Marlow from London who is doing some programmes and we are going to help him.”

  There was a woman near him in the latest saucer-like sun glasses and half a dozen others round the table: middle-aged, intellectual, young-at-heart. Two wine coolers with bottles of Stella rammed neck first into the middle of them stood at either end of the table.

  “We don’t see many people out from England here these days,” the saucer-eyed lady said to her companion before Mr. Khoury had finished with the introductions.

  “… Mohammed Said, Ahmed Fawzi, Morsy Tewfik, Ali Zaki, Mrs. Olive Moustafa …”

  Mrs. Olive Moustafa. I leant across the wine coolers and shook hands. She took her glasses off. A sunburnt, small, hard-worked sort of face, neat brown hair with threads of red in it, the remnants of freckles showing through a tanned and oily forehead. She might have been Scots or Irish.

  “Mrs. Moustafa works for the International Press Agency here—that right, Olive?—you’ll get all the news from her, what you won’t read in the papers. That right, Olive? Is Michael coming down?”

  Olive smiled lightly, perhaps even bitterly, at Khoury.

  “He might. He’s very busy right now.”

  Cherry had gone over to the side of the table and was leaning over a young American, berating him vigorously, clapping him repeatedly on the shoulder to emphasize a point.

  “… and why can’t we read what you write about the place? Why can’t we get your bloody paper out here—eh? You tell me.”

  “You ask Morsy that, Herbert He’s Press Censor. He never gets out to the airport to check them through, that’s why. They just lie there, I think. That right, Morsy?”

  Morsy Tewfik was sitting next to him—a soft, round, pulpy face, a very well-kept fellow going to fat in a silk shirt and gold cuff-links, with what used to be known as a “brilliantined scalp”: each hair flowing straight back over his head like a petrified oil slick. When he spoke it was in a perfectly enunciated, top-drawer, Oxbridge drawl.

  “I don’t stop your paper, Jim. You don’t send any—except the ones for the Embassies. And the Ministry copies we get. Who is there could afford fifty piastres on the streets out here anyway? It costs too much, that’s all. That’s why Herbert doesn’t read it.”

  Mr. Khoury butted in—“Jim Whelan, New York News correspondent out here. Mr. Marlow, from London …”

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Marlow.”

  Whelan had a tennis shirt on, with a green laurel garland embossed over the heart, fine but profusely growing hair all along his forearms, a pair of colourless spectacles—of the old-fashioned Bakelite sort that you see in photographs of Harold Ross—and behind them a slight squint. He had a bounce of flaxen hair that stood up and shivered when he spoke and was one of those ageless young Americans. He might have been anything between fifteen and forty and his permanently quizzical, disappointed expression suggested that he’d never been able to find out how old he was himself; a serious man on an even more serious earth, one felt, and by God he was going to find out the truth about it all if it killed him.

  “Mr. Whelan writes about us every day,” Mr. Khoury said, as though Whelan was working out a prison sentence.

  Morsy Tewfik and Whelan and Cherry embarked on an argument about the price of rice in the delta as opposed to Cairo—Whelan’s piece for the next day apparently—and Olive Moustafa leant across to me.

  “Could I get some lemonade to mix with the beer?” I managed to say to Mr. Khoury, before she pinned me down.

  “What are you doing …” She started off like a greyhound out of a trap.

  What, where, why and for whom. She was a persistent party. I wondered who Mr. Moustafa was and how she’d come by him, but didn’t have the chance to ask. She quizzed me studiously for several minutes without getting much back.

  “You ought to meet Pearson, Michael Pearson, our correspondent here. He’ll be able to fill you in,” she said, rather aggressively, I thought—the physical connotation more in my mind than the journalistic.

  “Oh, I’m not doing any news stories. More background material, colour stuff. I used to live out here. It’s a trip back to look at the place as much as anything …”

  We were vaguely worried about each other.

  She was the sort of woman who, without any obvious show of impatience or ruthlessness, none the less gives an impression of bitter inner speculation: a sense, like the threat of a hidden time bomb, that she’d find out everything in the end so one might as well tell her straight away; it would save trouble.

  She would have been just the sort of person to send looking for Henry, I thought. She’d know all the ropes, all the nooks and crannies: a greedy woman, unsatisfied—her feminine intuition not at all domestic but loose and roving: friend or enemy depending on what you fed her, and she obviously regarded my coming to the city as an interesting plate of meat.

  “There’s another man who often comes out here doing odd articles—do you know him at all—Henry Edwards? He does pieces for the Spectator and some of the glossies. Ever come across him?”

  I took the question on the run. “Yes, I’ve met him once or twice. Haven’t seen him recently, though. Has he been out here?”

  “I saw him a month ago. I was just wondering, there was a journalist with Mohammed Yunis when he left the airport—you know about Yunis, he’s under house arrest now—and I thought it might have been Edwards. We don’t know much about it, the flight came via Munich, so it could have been a Stern man he was with. We’re trying to get something on it. Unless you came on that flight too—did you?”

  She was running it hard. “No, I didn’t, as a matter of fact. Where did you meet Edwards?”

  “Michael knows him really. He comes into our office when he’s here. But how does he make his money at this freelance business, that’s what I’d like to know. He’s out here half a dozen times a year and there can’t be that sort of interest in the UAR—even in the glossies …”

  Mrs. Moustafa was printing now and the trick was to run with her, past her, pip her at the post.

  “Has he money of his own? Or maybe he does rep work for some firm. Or perhaps he works for British Intelligence. One never knows, does one?”

  “One never does.”

  Mrs. Moustafa looked at me, her expression more intrigued than ever for a second; looking at me, waiting for a sign, a knowing hint that she and I were in the same line of country. I didn’t hammer it and she lost interest. But I could see she felt she was on to something, worrying at an idea: “British agent arrested in Cairo” and a pat on the back from the Chairman in London. There was a war brewing up too and perhaps she felt she might be first in the line this time, to break the story of another Suez—another “collusion”.

  A small, thin man—narrowed out to the point of emaciation—weaved his
way like a dancer through the tables, tiny feet skipping across the terrace, out into the last of the sunlight, and over one corner of the pool, in a frienzied quickstep; a fox face, a double-breasted linen suit and thin jet-black hair combed straight back with a central parting completed the picture of a’ thirties dance band leader running from the management with the evening’s takings. He seemed excessively worried as well as pressed. But closer to, the deeply lined face and springy movements suggested that his nervous motion was habitual, not temporary. He waved round the table and there were the barest introductions before he squeezed himself into a seat next to Olive. I turned away and engaged Mr. Khoury in a concentrated talk about Egyptian folk drama. I wanted to hear what Michael Pearson was possibly in more of a hurry than usual about.

  “… and what about these rural folk-art centres, the one in the Fayoum you mentioned? Are they really inspired by anything local, or just something got up by the government? …”

  “Certainly they are real, Mr. Marlow: this is the true folk drama, centuries, millennia old …”

  “… Hamdy … Army Intelligence …” I barely caught the words from across the table.

  “... a drama based on centuries of oppression …”

  “… can’t file anything. But we’ll see …”

  “… ‘Words are the only weapons of the poor.’ You remember your Sean O’Casey …” Mr. Khoury boomed, spreading his arms upwards in a half circle. “A genuine peasant drama, Mr. Marlow. These people aren’t worrying about your angst like your John Osbornes or your Louis MacNeices—they are trapped—”, another boom and shake of the arms, “—in a prodigious drama of real events, Mr. Marlow. That’s what it is, I assure you. And now under the revolution we are uncovering for the first time …”