The Private Sector (A Peter Marlow spy thriller)

by Joseph Hone

  I said, “Of course if the revolution is making things much better for everyone, if it’s lifted the oppression—as it has—the peasants won’t have much to dramatize, will they? The raison d’être for their fine words will have disappeared rather. When the saviour actually comes he puts an end to the drama, no?”

  “Certainly not. You are being subtle, Mr. Marlow. I will take you to the cultural centre at Zagazig and you will see for yourself. Let me get you some more lemonade. I know the drink—at Oxford once, we were visiting with some chaps and we had it there by the river. You call it ‘Shandy Guff’, don’t you? ‘Give me Shandy Guff,’ I remember the fellows saying.”

  Shandy Guff and Colonel Hassan Hamdy … a new strip cartoon for Rose el Yussef … The gaps in the talk between Olive and Pearson had been easy enough to fill: Colonel Hamdy and Egyptian Army Intelligence. And Mr. Pearson had been in a hurry about him. I noticed now that Whelan had turned round and was talking to them, Cherry having moved back to our side of the table.

  Something was afoot about the Colonel, Yunis was under wraps and a journalist had been with him at the time of his arrest. Possibly Edwards, Olive thought. They were building something; the various people being connected in some way—or were they simply being connected by the International Press Agency? Colonel Hamdy and Yunis—I could see a connection there. But Edwards? They weren’t going to tell me—unless they came to believe that I held an essential clue to the whole affair.

  I turned to Mr. Khoury again and said in a voice slightly sharper than usual: “Did you ever hear of a good writer, a friend of mine, Henry Edwards? He was fond of the folk drama. Very interested.”

  “Edwards? I don’t think so. No,” Khoury said reluctantly. “But we will meet, certainly we will. You will introduce me.”

  Pearson had looked up, I saw him out of the corner of my eye, his flat shiny hair reflecting the light for a second—the street lamp affair which had gone on above our table.

  He turned away again at once but he’d seen the bait and I knew he’d come for it again. Henry counted for something, I realized now, in the rumours he was collecting—was one of the missing pieces in the puzzle which involved Yunis and Colonel Hamdy. And they weren’t looking for this man who’d been with Yunis, this possible Henry, because he was a journalist, but because he was a possible defector. If it had been Henry at the airport with Yunis, then Pearson’s interest in him was because he smelt a Blake or a Philby in the whole affair.

  Journalists believed that our service, and particularly my own Middle East section, formed an inexhaustible source of sensational copy. They had good reasons for that belief. Like hunters at a rat hole they waited for the next exit—the man who came running from the grimy depths into the light and across the guns for a second, only to disappear down another bolt-hole on the far side of the common. They were rarely caught on this blind run through the dazzle, but they were seen, or thought to be seen, and the presses rolled with half-facts and rumour. And Pearson was a real “no smoke without fire” man. On some sort of tip-off he was getting his team together outside the warren, organizing the long vigil, and no doubt Whelan would have the exclusive North American rights. Was the rumour genuine, then, that Edwards was on the run, defecting? I’d not believed anything of the sort in London. But it struck me that Pearson wouldn’t have been so excited over anything less.

  Cherry was squabbling again—with Mr. Khoury this time, wagging his finger at him about an article on Palestine in the last edition of Arab Focus. I took another dash of beer. The Palestine Problem: I’d gone through the Arab press about that for ten years in London—how did Cherry have the enthusiasm for it? It was his expatriate version of the Irish Question, I suppose.

  In all this talk what I wanted was a hard fact or two: was Henry in Cairo—and if so, why? Had he defected, or just been caught by the Egyptians? That was the equation.

  I got up to go to the pissoir next to the showers on the other side of the pool. There was a row of small frosted glass windows, half open, above the immense porcelain urinals, and I could see part of the driveway that ran round the front of the Club, down past the cricket pitch and out of the back entrance into Zamalek.

  A woman had walked past, in a crowd of strollers, with her back to me now, carrying a string shopping bag: tall, in a light cardigan and headscarf, a thin body, coming out suddenly at the hips and in again, down to long narrowing legs; not typical of Cairo at all. Looking at her moving away from the Club I tried to put a face to the body. I imagined myself on the far side, up the drive, walking towards her. That way of walking, the confident brisk step, the flat backside: what would I see if I were looking at that figure the other way about?

  And the face I saw when I reversed the image was Bridget’s.

  By the time I’d run round back on to the terrace, out through the main entrance and on to the driveway she had disappeared. I raced along the grass verge but the road was crowded with people, cars pushing through them, their lights blinding me as I dodged in and out of the traffic. I tried to get ahead of the strollers so that I could look back along the headlights at their faces. But when I did there was no one I recognized in the long pencils of light. Nothing. If not her, I thought, then who?

  When I came back up the Club steps again Olive Moustafa was in the hallway. She seemed to have just come out of the ladies’ room, but I had the impression she’d been looking for me.

  “There you are. We thought you’d gone. We’re going to play some croquet. Do you play? Morsy has the court for seven o’clock and he’s suggested dinner with him afterwards.”

  Snapping at the bait again, I thought. I wondered how they would handle it.

  Cherry, Whelan and Mr. Khoury came down the drive with us and sat on the balcony of one of the little wooden pavilions which ran along one side of the four floodlit courts. A suffragi flustered round them and they ordered coffee; drinks weren’t allowed near the field of play. Many Egyptians took this game very seriously, as something mystical, second in importance only to the Koran, and I’d picked up some slight skill in it myself when I’d lived here. They’d never taken to cricket, as had other former British “Dominions”, seeing it as pointless, long drawn out nonsense which denied any really individual nastiness. But croquet, perhaps because it specifically allowed for this, had some great magic for these upper-class Cairenes and they played it with a passion they gave to few other things in their life.

  Mrs. Moustafa partnered Morsy and I played with Pearson.

  We knocked the four coloured balls round the first three hoops with the mildest of chatter. Pearson wasn’t all that good at the game, I was worse, and the others were several hoops ahead of us as we turned up the back straight.

  “You’re not looking for Edwards yourself, are you?” Pearson said, studiously and suddenly, lining up a shot for the fourth hoop.

  “No. Why should I be?”

  He smacked the ball up court, passing the wire and going off the edge at the far end, leaving me an impossible angle to get back on.

  “Just a little worried about him, that’s all. Someone was seen at the airport with Yunis three days ago, just before he was arrested. A journalist, my contact at the airport said. Someone he’d seen out here quite often before. But he couldn’t describe him exactly—except for the hair. He said the man had a lot of hair. Henry usually drops in to see me when he’s here. That’s what made me wonder.”

  I tapped my shot back to the far side of the wire, giving Pearson a straight through on his next turn.

  “You think there’s a story in it?”

  “Whoever was with Yunis at the time has a story. No one has any firm details on his arrest or what it’s all about We’re scratching around trying to fill them in.”

  “You mean if it was this man Edwards—he’d tell you what happened?”

  “He used to let me know odd things when I saw him out here. Straight news, agency stuff, things he didn’t use himself. If it was Edwards, that is …”

 
; We’d nearly caught up with the others. Mrs. Moustafa had failed at a hoop and, if played right—it wasn’t difficult—Pearson’s next shot should croquet her. He’d then have an easy passage through the iron and, once through, could take her on down with him to the pole at the end. He missed. On purpose I’d have said. The others went ahead of us.

  I said, “Who else could it have been then, with Yunis?”

  “It wasn’t any of the regular correspondents—something would have broken on the story by now.”

  “Why a journalist in any case?”

  “Passport control. We have a little money on the right horse there. The man who came through with Yunis had a British passport—profession was marked as ‘Journalist’. That narrows it down fairly.”

  The others were two hoops and a pole ahead of us. I tried to pull back a few shots but without success. Olive was playing like a demon and Pearson was fudging everything. He put his foot on his mallet like a big game hunter on a lion while the others streamed ahead up the home straight.

  “We’ll make it worth your while. Very much so. Unless of course you’re contracted already. Anything you know about the Yunis business.”

  “I’m not doing that sort of work out here, Mr. Pearson. I was telling Mrs. Moustafa—just background stuff.”

  “That’s what I thought—”

  “I haven’t got any hard news and I didn’t come on that flight. I came in last night.”

  Pearson nodded impatiently. These were preliminaries for him. I could see he believed me—as I didn’t believe him. What he wanted was to talk to me, to pretend I was a serious journalist, while searching out my real business in Cairo. And he had to have a good reason for broaching the subject of Edwards with me at all, one that would give the impression that he was interested in Edwards and myself purely from the professional point of view—as journalists who might be on to a good story: he had to cover what I was sure now was his real interest in the whole matter—that he believed Henry was running in the Philby stakes, that he’d used Yunis in some way to get into Egypt, and that I’d been sent out from London to stop him before he went over to Moscow. He’d never really bought the idea that Henry was a Fleet Street man, or that I was even a serious freelance. Pearson had made a reasonable job of the bluff, but he’d left a loophole, intentionally no doubt, knowing I’d go for it, which I shouldn’t have done; it was just his cockiness.

  “You must have known who was on that flight with Yunis then. If you had his profession and nationality—your contact could hardly have overlooked the name.”

  Pearson belted his shot wildly to the pavilion, smiling. The game was over, the others had tipped the post We walked back after them slowly.

  “Now I’m telling you something,” he said.

  “Why not? What’s the mystery?”

  “You don’t know yourself?”

  “Of course not. Was it Edwards?”

  “Yes. It was. That was the name on the passport”

  “Why the elaborate front then?”

  “I couldn’t put it directly, you’d have shied away. I had to get you to ask the questions. You’re looking for Edwards too, aren’t you? We could probably help each other.”

  “We probably couldn’t, Mr. Pearson. I doubt that very much.” And I left it at that.

  Pearson had got his sights on Edwards all right: Edwards, out of the hole and on the run, in the light for a moment before disappearing again. They’d missed it all with Philby in Beirut and they weren’t going to miss it with Edwards in Cairo. It was the same thing all over again. But was it? It was just possible that Henry had become involved with Yunis somehow, on a job which had gone wrong, and had been picked up with him by Egyptian Intelligence—by Colonel Hamdy, the other man in Pearson’s crossword.

  Either way he was somewhere in the city. I knew that now and I’d no doubt that Pearson would try and make me pay for the information. He wouldn’t have given it to me unless he had been confident I had got something for him in return.

  Pearson had a hunch, his network about the city had given him a lucky break, and he was going to play it for all it was worth. At this distance I couldn’t read him the Official Secrets Act or slap a D notice on him. There wasn’t enough to go on. It was a question now of who would find Edwards first; probably Pearson would. It seemed he was several steps ahead in the chase and he was also in the best sort of position to use me. All he had to do was have one of his Egyptian contacts keep an eye on me—not a difficult exercise in Cairo where every shoeshine boy, kiosk vendor and porter were keeping their eyes on somebody—for somebody else’s money.

  *

  After the croquet we all walked down the back drive, round past the Omar Khayyam Hotel and along the corniche to Morsy’s apartment It was in an old turn of the century building on the third storey. At the back there was a balcony that looked on to the Club’s cricket pitch while the main entrance on Gezira Street faced out over the river: a long narrow apartment with the usual pseudo second Empire furniture caked in gilt, cracked family portraits, heavy carpets and very few windows. It must have been awfully dark in the daytime.

  There was plenty to drink and a buffet of Port Said prawns and rice, grilled delta pigeon, stuffed courgettes and so on. Pearson didn’t bother me. I talked with Morsy’s wife, Leila, an attractive woman, just fractionally plump, in her late thirties, but with the weary isolated air of so many educated Cairo wives: a woman who had wanted, and been capable of, much more than she had ever got, either from her husband or from life in Egypt. She made suitable sounds about the President and the sort of society he had created in Egypt, but one felt it didn’t really touch her, not because she was frivolous or stupid, but because she came from the city’s professional upper class—from a family of bankers or lawyers or whatever—from a metropolitan society which had been liberated for generations. She would like to have exercised herself in a larger world, or at least felt a part of it—of Paris, and London and Günter Grass.

  She was interested in things beyond the narrow confines of Arab nationalism and such idle preoccupations were no longer on offer in Cairo. The city was bereft of ideas. There was only one idea, the war against Israel. It made the fearful middle class nervous and short-tempered, full of upsets and hangovers, gave them thoughts of a boat to Canada.

  But Leila Tewfik was committed to something she couldn’t give anything to, stuck where she was, with the latest foreign papers and magazines stacked neatly about the living room, all the news of the world her husband got before he censored it. She—and Morsy too—were part of the “new class” spawned by every revolution; except that in Egypt that class was often composed of the children of the old, inheritors of necessary intellect—and unnecessary, unsatisfied longings.

  I was exhausted and left early, dropping Cherry off in a cab by the hospital. “We’ll have a drink another night. Seriously,” he said in a slow voice. “And Edwards is in town,” he added, commenting on my talk with Pearson which I’d told him about. “That should please you.”

  “Vaguely. I could do without Pearson. And I hardly know where to begin.”

  “Why don’t you climb that tower? You’ll probably spot him from there.”

  Cherry smiled and disappeared up the avenue of palm trees to the woman who lay like a pencil, stiff and straight, lightly wrapped in a sheet. And I thought of the other woman with the flat backside and narrowing legs who’d walked away from me towards Zamalek. And again, so easily, I saw myself walking towards her, seeing her face.

  6

  The Cairo Tower was in the middle of the old Botanical Gardens, on Gezira Island, just across from the hospital, and I went there first thing next morning: a huge 700-foot phallus in latticed concrete wrapped round the central elevator core. It had been built, so we had been reliably informed in our Holborn section, with three million dollars innotes which the CIA had attempted to bribe Nasser with ten years before. It was a pure undisguised folly, with no function whatsoever other than that of being an affront
to the “forces of neo-Imperialism”—and it succeeded well enough in that, facing as it did the expensive bedrooms of the Hilton on the opposite bank of the river—the terraces from which latter-day CIA men had to view it every morning when they woke up, sniffing the airs of the city in their towel-robes and wristlet name-plates.

  A drowsy clerk, sipping a glass of milky tea and burning ruts in the pay desk with his cigarette, took my ten piastres and the lift crawled and squeaked for minutes on my way up. There was a minute cafê at the top, surrounded by glass, with a terrace beyond that and a coin-operated telescope fixed on to the concrete balustrade, leaning drunkenly down over the river.

  Apart from an even more sleepy waiter who made me a coffee there was no one else about and the whole pinnacle, though it hadn’t been up for more than a few years, had a dilapidated, run-down air about it. The concrete window casements were beginning to flake away at the edges, eroding in the dry windy weather up here, a pane of glass eight feet square was cracked from side to side, and the wooden chairs and tables must have been taken from some back-street café or a mission school that had closed.

  The Tower wasn’t a popular attraction apparently; perhaps there had been a scare about its safety once. It was a mysterious toy, a Trojan horse which the local people mistrusted, I imagined. Egyptians have little head for heights, theirs is a flat country, and I suppose many of them, particularly those on the bread line and beneath, must naturally have questioned the safety of such a patently useless, expensive ornament.

  I went out on to the balcony, forcing the iron door open. Although the vantage point was tremendous the view was unsatisfying somehow. The desert sands, brought by the Khamseen, hadn’t yet subsided in the air so that the city was covered in a film of sepia and ochre, and the buildings seemed to flap about in the haze like dirty brown and yellow sacks. There was a monotonous sameness in the view from this height. Nothing, none of the mosques, the minarets or cupolas, stood out. Everything looked as haphazard and dirty as a collection of nomad tents thrown up about the place, which, of course, was how the mediaeval city had begun—“El Fustat”, the tent—so I suppose the view was appropriate enough. With eyes half closed against the glare one saw the unchanged continuity of a thousand years—an encampment of ragged cloth by a huge brown river. The modern city disappeared; a ribbon of dun colours took its place beneath a tired lead-blue sky.