The Private Sector (A Peter Marlow spy thriller)

by Joseph Hone

  “Oh, no. I had a much better way. In the old days all these apartments had a row of ventillation strips in each room, at the top of the wall, so that the air from the ceiling fans could circulate all over the apartment, a sort of primitive air conditioning. Well, I worked one of the strips loose and could see most of what was going on next door. And hear everything, the voices echoed up through the room like a loudspeaker. You see this here?” Morsy went over to a huge sideboard in the corner of the room, four feet off the ground, with a tasselled velvet cloth over it.

  “I stood up here,” he said with a ringing, sudden enthusiasm. “Look here—on that very cloth, so it made no noise. And you see the drapes on the wall? They’re the original ones too. I got some of the same material and wrapped it round me. And you know, if you stand absolutely still in the identical colour—I was perfectly camouflaged. My father walked past me once, not ten feet away, and never saw a thing.”

  I looked at Morsy in genuine astonishment and then up at the ceiling.

  “They’ve blocked them in now, of course. And painted them over. That was a long while ago. What a child—up to every sort of mischief I suppose …”

  “Indeed.”

  “One must ‘put away childish things’ …”

  “Depends on what you put them away for.”

  “Badminton and croquet. And cutting pages out of your Daily Telegraph. We’re a young nation as the President keeps on reminding us. A childish nation, would you say?”

  We chattered away late into the night and when I left it was no effort to tell them both that I was looking forward to another game of badminton.

  “Come any time,” Morsy said. “Use the place if you need somewhere quiet to work. I’m at the office in the mornings—there’s a study, typewriter, all the papers you need. If Leila isn’t here the suffragi will let you in. I’ll tell him. Or go up on the roof, there are chairs and a sunshade. Feel quite free to come and go as you please.”

  I took Morsy up on the offer at once and asked if I could come round the following morning, that I’d some notes to put in order.

  *

  Morsy had had set up another table for me in his study looking out over the cricket pitch and Leila showed me the key to the roof and the other two keys that would let me back into their apartment again. Then she went out. The kitchen woman and Ahmed, the other suffragi, were padding round the rooms behind me and I pretended to work for half an hour before I picked up a book, my notes and a plastic ruler which I’d bought that morning. Ahmed wanted to come with me, to show me the way, to help “arrange” things, and I had some difficulty in putting him off. Even so he came half way up the third flight of stairs with me, past the Armenian’s door, so that I had to go out on the roof first, settle down under the sun shade, and then creep back downstairs again.

  As I’d thought, one of the keys to the Tewfiks’ apartment, an old-fashioned mortice type, just about fitted the first Armenian lock; the other, a Yale-type key and lock, didn’t. The ruler cracked when I first pushed it in between the jamb and the door, trying to slide open the tongue. I pulled out the bit that was left, a narrow strip now, and suppled it vigorously with my fingers: a shoddy Russian import, I noticed, but it worked eventually.

  The door opened quite suddenly, with a resounding click, so that I almost fell into the hallway and I realised that I’d been leaning on it with one shoulder which was what had been keeping the tongue in place. I was as ham-fisted at this sort of work as a bank manager.

  The hallway and apartment beyond were in almost complete darkness when I closed the door behind me. But the disposition of the rooms must have been the same as downstairs, I thought, as I touched my way along the corridor, and into the drawing room at the back. A crack of light came through the heavy curtains, great shapes loomed up all around me, furniture under dust covers, and there was a sharp smell of paper, a bookish smell, when books have been stored and dried out for a long time. I pulled the inner curtain back, draped the tail of it over one of the mounds of furniture and looked round me. The books were everywhere; a whole library had been taken off the shelves about the room and dumped in piles on the floor. And on top of them were the other domestic possessions of the familydresses, carpets, pictures and kitchen equipment. The room next door—the dining room—was empty. Not a stick of furniture, nothing. I had to open the curtains inch by inch as they squeaked on their runners about the empty bell of the room.

  I looked up to where the ceiling joined the wall, five or six feet above my head. The plaster was the same colour all the way up. How many books would I need?

  It took me another twenty minutes before I’d carried enough of them from the other room to make a platform to stand on. I started with a large base made up from the heavy paper edition in seventy volumes of the Hearings of the Mixed Courts in Egypt 1888-1913, stacked the middle with English Common Law followed by the Code Napoléon, and ended with a number of bulky modern treatises on Company Finance. The Armenian lawyer must have had an old and comprehensive practice and in the end I had a rocksteady lookout with steps up to the top in both real and false morocco.

  I prodded the tip of my ballpoint pen about the plaster just under the ceiling and soon I’d displayed a honeycomb of small holes in what had been a long rectangular metal ventilation grille, about twelve inches high. I wasn’t able to pull the whole thing out and in the end I had to chip away at the plaster which held it at the top. Then I managed to bend the whole grille out and down—a section about three feet long. There were no bricks inside, that would have been the only catch, just an empty space two feet wide and with the same sort of grille the other side, with curls of old plaster sticking through the holes, like larvae, from the wall of the apartment next door.

  The light was hopeless but I started to work on one of the plaster curls on the far side as gently as possible, using the little trowel-like pen clip to chisel away at it until there was just a flat membrane of paint covering the wall on the outside.

  There was a risk, but there wasn’t a way round it—I couldn’t pull the circle of paint towards me. I listened, heard nothing and pushed. A tiny iris of grey light appeared. I turned my head sideways and pushed it through into the shaft. I couldn’t see anything and there was no sound from beyond, only a smell I noticed, a new smell which obliterated the chalky lime dust of the disturbed plaster: like a blocked drain, faint but distinct. But it was fresher than drains, I decided: a recent eruption of the body, diarrhoea or vomit. I chipped away two more holes in a line downwards and by straining my head impossibly for a few seconds I could see across to the far side of the room, from the ceiling down to about the half-way stage of the wall.

  Henry’s ruffled hairline bobbed into view before I had to get my neck out again, or risk dislocating it, and then they started to talk, their voices coming up to me with astonishing clarity, reflecting off the walls and ceiling, like a drum, just as Morsy had said.

  “… How long do you think then?” Henry said irritably.

  “Well, it’s not Gyppy tummy, is it?” Bridget replied in the same shrill vein. “It’s food poisoning. We’ve all got it. The place stinks. You put the beer in the fridge and left the rest of the stuff out. Just like you.”

  “For God’s sake—you’ve been getting the food fresh every day. It shouldn’t be bad.”

  “Well, Hamdy’s not going to go anywhere. He looks pretty ill to me. There’s no point—listening to him. He’ll have to have attention.”

  “How—who?”

  “I’ll find someone. Money. We still have that. I’ll go to Usher. He’ll know someone.”

  “Don’t be mad. They’ll have his place surrounded.”

  “Look—if we don’t try and contact Usher—there’s nowhere to go: the Embassy’s closed and the Consulate people aren’t likely to know anything about getting us out of here. We can’t just stay on here indefinitely.”

  “You want to leave him then?”

  “Of course not. But we have to do something. W
e know they’re not on to this building. I’ve been out every evening for the last three days. And Security here can only have a very hazy idea of what you look like. You’ve got it into your mind that you’re a marked man. If we stay cooped up here much longer you will be.”

  “You know what it’s like in Cairo—every shoeshine boy is in someone’s pay. They’d be on to me pretty quick. And they must be looking for you—they went straight to your house after all. I thought we’d been over all this.”

  “What, then? Is there no one else here we can contact? Get a message to London? I mean, there are three of us. I’m not important, but you are and Hamdy must be. Don’t you think London has any interest in getting us back?”

  “Certainly—but the three of us aren’t going to get out together, that’s the point. However much London wants it they’re not going to be able to arrange for all of us to get to the airport and step on to a BOAC flight. That was always the problem here. If you got caught you were stuck. The only chance is to divide up, take it on our own. When Hamdy is better. God, I feel sick.”

  I heard the thump of Henry collapsing on a chair.

  Bridget said, “Well, that’s the first thing then. There’s another doctor I’ve thought of, he’s at the Anglo-American.”

  “How well do you know him?” Henry asked with just a trace of tired sarcasm.

  “You know him too, you ass. He did first year English with you at Dokki. Gamal Cherif.”

  “He won’t want to get involved.”

  “He won’t know. I’ll ask him to prescribe for me. We’ve all got the same bug. We can share whatever he gives.”

  I tried to turn my head again in the ventilator, from a listening to a looking position, round to where I could get a glimpse of Henry, but he was out of sight somewhere in the corner of the room. Bridget passed my awkward eye line for a moment—was she taller than Henry? I’d forgotten. Her hair had turned a slight rust colour, it seemed, a mixture now of her parents’ colouring, where before it had been very nearly sheer black. And it seemed to have receded too, half an inch or more over her forehead, giving her profile a smoother shape than I’d remembered.

  I just had time to see her nose before she passed out of sight, slightly turned up, the same as ever—that feature which had given her a permanent air of cheeky interest and unrest and had made her face so different from the languid boneless expressions of the other women of the city. If Egyptian Security were on the lookout, I feared for her: she had the kind of features you’d pick out in any Cairo crowd, particularly in that nervous time: confident, assured, gentle. I knew them well enough.

  Indeed, I knew in the few short moments as she passed across the ventilator that I would try and follow her now myself, wherever she went, and get her back. Something had gone wrong ten years before, the time had come when the fault could be corrected. There had been some simple error in our marriage, a miscalculation, and the answer to it was in front of me now, beyond the wall. It was something which I’d simply had to wait for, which had to mature for all those years, until I’d seen her passing by for a second, a bright face glimpsed through the darkness of a ventilator.

  I felt a proper sense of direction again, knowledge of a job to do—a task properly outlined at last, something which could be pursued to an end. I had something to go on, the numbing professional mysteries of the years in Holborn and the nonsense of this present mission were dissolving, clearing into another perfectly grasped pattern: a personal enquiry.

  I left the bottom mortice lock open and pulled the door to. I could get back into the Armenian’s apartment with the plastic ruler alone now, and I left the keys with the suffragi in the Tewfiks’ place downstairs.

  *

  There was a desolate riverside night club and café about five hundred yards down the Gezira corniche, a few broken chairs outside by the river wall, and a kind of dark-room shack in the middle where they served coffee and Cokes during the day; a place that years before, in the evenings, had catered for the envious fantasies of the poorer middle class. I waited for Bridget here. She would have to pass down on the far side of the corniche, going towards the Kasr el Nil bridge, if she were making for the Anglo-American Hospital.

  I didn’t know exactly what I had in mind—not to follow her, there was no need for that, just to look at her perhaps, as a free person walking along a street, to see her in a complete perspective which the ventilator had not allowed—someone without the trappings of a woman on the run, or of my following her; free of all that—in a situation where I might have come out of the café and bumped into her by chance: I wanted the temptation of a casual encounter.

  When she passed I did nothing. I watched her disappearing down the far side of the road, standing by the curtained window in the smelly, tobacco-stale gloom sipping a gritty, sour coffee.

  One’s gaze was so drawn to her among the other passersby that I wondered how she could walk a pace without being noticed. But perhaps that was the trick which had preserved her from Egyptian Security—she was so obvious, open. They were looking in the dark corners.

  I thought: I’ve only got to go to the Council Library at the back of the Embassy, make a report out to Williams, put it in the map flap of the book I’d brought with me for the purpose—a Shell Guide to the West Country—and give it to the little lady by the desk. They’d have the message in London by evening and it would be Williams’s responsibility from then on; he would have to take the decisions and make the arrangements. I would have done my job, could pass out of the picture, back to my desk, last week’s Al Ah-ram and a half view of St. Paul’s. It would have been the sort of thing one did for one’s friends, after all, apart from any professional consideration. And even Colonel Hamdy was a friend of sorts, with his quiet blackmail in the Semiramis after Suez: Hamdy who had somehow got caught up with the two of them, either trying to defect or as one of our Mid-East men all along. Perhaps that was why Henry had come out to Cairo in the first place—to make contact with him and get him out of the country. Something had gone wrong and I could put it right, play my part in rescuing them, and we should have civilised amused talk about the whole affair among ourselves for years afterwards in various separate, well appointed apartments in north London—a sweet memory of derring-do. Would Henry have married Bridget by then?—was that how it would all work out, as just a little arrangement among friends? And perhaps, for my part, I’d get some sort of promotion out of Library & Information.

  And I think I would have left it at that, given in to some sort of “better judgment” in the matter, gone over the river with my Shell Guide, and dropped the personal pursuits I had in mind as regards Bridget—if Henry hadn’t come out of the apartment block a moment before I moved towards the doorway of the café. He walked fairly slowly up the corniche in the opposite direction, his usually neat footsteps shaky now, the way he used to move when he’d had too much. None the less I would have lost him, I think, if, just before he disappeared from sight, he hadn’t turned into the drive of the Omar Khayyam Hotel next to 26 July Bridge at the end of the Gezira corniche.

  This splendid palace had been built as a rest-house for the Empress Eugénie on her visit to Cairo in 1869 to open the Suez Canal; now it was a stopping place for a package tour holiday organization. A coach-load of tourists were getting down outside the doorway and another group was milling about inside the hall. There seemed little risk that anyone would spot him there; Henry had chosen the place well. He’d almost certainly gone there to use the phone, I thought, but I wanted to see if I could confirm it.

  The booths were out of sight behind the reception desk and I stationed myself on the far side of a group of elderly Germans in sandals and plastic straw hats who were counting their suitcases earnestly in the middle of the lobby. A bag was missing.

  “A scandal!” one of the ancient Brünnhildes was shouting, and she was soon joined by a chorus: a stream of vicious gutturals falling over several beady-eyed, sweating bearers and an assistant manager.

&n
bsp; In a minute or so Henry appeared from behind the reception desk and walked straight to the door without looking left or right. It was worth trying. I went round to the booths—there were only two of them—and picked up the receiver.

  “That last call I made—I was cut off—can I have it again?” I said to the hotel operator, even capturing something of Henry’s sardonic, busy colonial voice.

  “The Kasr el Aini Hospital?” the operator asked me.

  “Yes, please.”

  I let the phone ring and put the receiver down when the call came through.

  The Kasr el Aini? Something for their Gyppy stomachs? Where was Bridget off to then? Or had Henry some other contact to make there? Or had I simply not heard some amendment to their plans after I’d left the ventilator?

  8

  There was a note from Pearson waiting for me when I got back to the Semiramis towards lunchtime and I took it to the bar with me just off the main hall, the ancient air conditioning throbbing and shaking the floorboards as it had done ever since I’d first come here and had gin and tonics with Bridget and Henry ten years before. And there was another moment’s doubt then: I should have been drinking here with them now—and the hell with Williams, the Egyptians and all their various cloaks and daggers. Henry had wanted an end to all that and I had agreed with him. I had come out to tell him so. And now, less than a week later, I was snooping on him and Bridget with all the gracelessness which characterises the best traditions of our trade.

  Pearson was at the bar, his back to me, leaning over a chalky drink. I hadn’t noticed him.

  “Ah! Good to see you, I didn’t expect—”

  “Just got your message.”

  “What will you have? I’m afraid I’m on the wagon. Upset stomach. I’m prone to it.”

  “You should have it looked at.”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact I am. A specialist in gastric medicine. Dr. Novak, a Russian chap at the Kasr el Aini. Their fellows pick up a lot of that sort of thing out here.”