by Len Deighton
Sayed came over to the women. No wonder the MP had saluted him. Sayed looked every inch the British officer. He had no Egyptian army badges: just two pips on each shoulder strap. His complexion was no darker than what many of the British had acquired out in the desert sun.
He smiled a flashing white smile. Was it a smile of triumph, or was this just the same friendly Sayed that she knew from the Hotel Magnifico?
‘Are you all right, Miss Stanhope?’ Sayed asked. He seemed genuine in his concern for her.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Alice. ‘I’ve caused you so much trouble.’
‘Hush. Here, drink some more water. It is good water.’ He handed her the glass, and she sipped some and felt better for it. ‘Peggy thought you’d be better out here in the open air.’
‘I fainted.’
‘Are you fit enough to return to town?’
‘Of course,’ said Alice.
‘Can you drive the van, Miss West?’ It was Miss West when he spoke to her; Sayed was always respectful.
‘We’ll be all right, Sayed.’
He smiled. ‘This is my father’s village,’ he said again. ‘They are good people here.’
‘You’re safe,’ said Jimmy Ross feelingly, ‘and that’s the only important thing.’
‘I completely messed it up,’ said Alice Stanhope. She felt like weeping, but she decided that such a display of emotion would spoil her chances with him forever.
‘I should never have sent you,’ he said.
‘It was my idea.’
‘I should never have sent you.’
When he repeated the same words she looked up at him with a sudden thought. ‘Has Mummy been interfering again?’
‘It’s nothing to do with your mother, Alice. It was my stupid decision.’
She sat in silence for a minute or two. ‘Was it all a stunt, Bert?’
He answered without hesitation. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘But the magician: the chanting and the magic spells. You don’t believe in magic?’
‘But Sayed does.’
‘I suppose he does. Do you know who the magician is?’
Ross smiled. ‘Yes, Sayed’s father. That was Sayed’s house you were in.’
‘Good Lord! Is he a part of it?’
‘Ahmed Pasha?’ said Ross. ‘Sure to be. He’s so anti-British that he’d help Satan himself occupy Cairo, given the chance.’
‘I can hardly believe it.’
‘That damned house out there is a centre for intrigue and treason. My predecessor tried and tried to get someone inside, but it’s no use. The old swine vets every servant carefully.’
‘But what was it all about? What was Sayed doing there with his father?’
‘They were helping Abdel-Hamid Sherif. He’s an Egyptian army captain. Marker is chasing everywhere after him. He’s been collecting signatures from all the opposition leaders. It’s a sort of declaration that says Britain is fighting fascism in Europe while actively supporting it in Egypt. They plan to send a copy to all the ambassadors in Cairo: American, Canadian, French, Dutch, Norwegian – anyway, you see what damage it will do. It’s certain to get into the newspapers.’
‘Helping him how? What is Sayed doing?’
‘I should think that was obvious: he’s helping this fellow Abdel-Hamid Sherif.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Alice.
‘Helping him to get away. Sayed’s driver. You said he was thinnish, about six feet tall, with pale skin, black moustache and black frizzy hair greying at the temples? That was Abdel-Hamid Sherif.’
‘You can’t be serious.’
‘Why not?’
‘He was driving the Bedford. He was so ordinary.’
‘You can become ordinary when you have a price on your head, and an army of police and informers trying to catch you.’
‘You say it as if you are sorry for him.’
She’d caught him off guard. ‘It’s my duty to catch fugitives.’
‘Are you going to raid the house?’
‘It’s too late now. Once clear of the city, a fellow like that can dress in rags and just disappear into thin air. By this time they’ll probably have taken him to Suez and put him aboard a ship … a neutral ship that they know we’ll not want to stop and search.’
‘I’m sorry, Bert.’
‘It’s not a complete disaster, but Sayed will know that we are on to him. Perhaps he’ll move out of the Magnifico. In any case, you stay there for the time being. You didn’t tell Peggy West about … about me, about what we do in the office here?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘She’ll guess.’
‘She’s British, Bert. She’ll not tell anyone, will she?’
He looked at her. He wondered whether to tell her that Peggy was in regular communication with what he strongly suspected was an illegal Jewish spy network. For the time being it was better that she didn’t know: Peggy West might detect a change in her. ‘No, of course not. Let’s go and get something to eat, shall we?’
‘There’s one other thing, Bert. The other night, after you left Prince Piotr’s cocktail party, one of the people there bought wine in the downstairs bar, using this.’ She pushed an Egyptian bank note across the tabletop to him. It was disfigured by a pattern of tiny dark-brown spots.
He picked it up and looked at it for a moment and then said, ‘Damned good work, Alice. The blood is spotted just like the paybook we took off the body of the ordnance sergeant major.’
‘Yes, I remembered the paybook. I try to keep up with what’s happening.’
‘Who passed the money?’
‘The naval officer. You saw him. A thin man with wavy hair. His name is Wallingford. He’s a great friend of Darymple; they were at school together.’
‘Damn good work, Alice.’
‘You won’t take me off the job, will you? No matter what Mummy says?’
‘No, I won’t, no matter what Mummy says.’ Her hand was still on the bank note. He reached out and touched her hand. It was the first time he’d ever made such an intimate gesture. For what seemed like a long time they sat there, his fingers resting lightly upon the back of her hand. She didn’t move; she tried to read his face but he was not a man who revealed his feelings even in normal circumstances.
The circumstances were anything but normal. He was frightened of getting more involved with her. He must get ready to depart and disappear as this artful man Sherif had done.
14
Harry Wechsler had been thinking about Alice Stanhope right up until the time of departure. And now, as the car bumped through the busy Cairo streets, he went back to thinking about her. He’d been thinking about little else since meeting her at the party. She was beautiful in a withdrawn and reticent way that haunted his memory. And she was highly intelligent and educated too, without showing any need to challenge him or make him feel like a dope, the way so many of his female colleagues seemed to want to do. And of course there was the potent fact that Alice Stanhope had shown no interest in Harry whatsoever.
Among newspapermen, most of whom worshipped more frequently at the shrine of Bacchus than Aphrodite, Harry Wechsler was regarded as something of a ladies’ man. Ever since his second wife left him back in 1938, Harry Wechsler’s love affairs had been intense and emotional but of fleeting duration. Meeting Alice Stanhope had had a strange effect upon him. It made him think it was still possible for him to fall in love.
‘A penny for ’em,’ offered the driver. His name was Chips O’Grady. He was a small furtive figure who held the wheel with whitened knuckles and had to have a thick foam rubber cushion under his behind to give him a good view over the wheel. He was wearing a British army bush shirt and shorts. Anyone who thought that one bush shirt was much like another had only to compare the one Chips was wearing with that of Harry Wechsler sitting beside him. Harry Wechsler’s bush shirt was one of a dozen he’d had made for him by a shirtmaker in Rome. It was a subtle shade of olive green, the stitching was p
recise, and the buttons were made from horn.
‘Packing. Just going back over things in my mind. Thinking back to be sure I’ve not forgotten anything,’ said Harry Wechsler, who shared his opinions with everyone but his thoughts with no one. Perhaps it was just as well that he was going into the blue again. All his life he’d mocked and derided men who talked about the magic fascination of the desert. But, without admitting it to anyone, he was finding the prospect of going back a welcome one.
He settled down for the long journey. His driver, Chips, was an Irishman, a notorious drunkard who’d worked for – and been fired by – almost every news agency in the Middle East. Harry Wechsler stumbled on Chips in Tommy’s Bar, one of Cairo’s best-known drinking places. Chips had been out of work for almost a month and the manager at Tommy’s Bar, like his many other creditors, was pressing for payment. It seemed as if fate had arranged their meeting. Harry hired him immediately as his assistant. Chips already had a press card and accreditation, although it was over a year since anything he’d filed had actually got into print. Chips could drive, type, speak enough French, Italian and German to get by, and Arabic enough to handle the sort of transactions that a newspaperman was likely to enter into. Chips knew that working for Harry Wechsler was probably his final chance to get his life back on the rails. All he had to do was keep away from the hard drink.
‘You know the way?’ said Harry, whose career had persuaded him that it was better to voice the obvious frequently than face the consequences of things going wrong silently.
‘Do I know the way!’ said Chips feelingly. He’d learned to recognise every inch of this road since the fighting started in the summer of 1940. There was only one main road to the Western Desert. This was the highway to the war.
It was half past five in the afternoon as they crossed the Nile. The sun shone upon the domes of the mosques, which Allah decreed must be of gold. Sundown: time for prayer. From all the tall minarets across the city there came the call of the muezzin.
The heavy Ford car rattled onto the island of Gezira, over English Bridge to Doqqi and followed the road alongside the river. They passed the university before turning west. At Giza they looked – for everyone looked, no matter how jaded a spirit – for the place where the great pyramids of Khufu and Khafre cut notches from what was now a pink sky.
The Khafre pyramid looks bigger than its neighbour, but this, like so much else in Egypt, is a deception. The Khafre pyramid stands on higher ground.
‘It’s good to be out of that fleapit,’ said Chips. So far, he’d kept off the drink just as he’d promised Harry he would. One pint of beer a day was all he allowed himself, and a pint of local Stella beer was too thin to have much effect on anyone. To some extent, Chips’s abstemious regime had been made easier by his dedication to the preparation of the car. Harry Wechsler’s agency had footed the bill, and with that sort of blank cheque Chips had come back with something exceptional. It was a secondhand Canadian-built Ford station wagon with a V-8 engine. By discreet payments to the right people, Chips had had it completely rebuilt in the army workshops. Now it had army sand-colour paint, desert tyres, roof hatches and a reinforced chassis just like the station wagons the army used in the desert.
‘It’s a good goer,’ said Chips as they left Cairo behind. He had taken a personal pride in the car and said such things from time to time, as if a few words frequently repeated would encourage the Ford to keep going. ‘Sweet. Sweet.’
Harry nodded. He didn’t like driving and Chips was a good driver as long as he was sober. Harry looked at his diminutive companion, with his drawn face, red ears, pointed nose and thin lips. The photo in his press card showed a man looking at the camera with amused contempt. Rodentlike was the first description that sprang to mind, and his stealthy movements encouraged that idea. And yet so far Harry had found Chips to be a decent, hard-working fellow. He wondered to what extent the prejudice arising from a man’s appearance disabled and dogged him throughout his life.
There were a few scattered dwellings and some fields of beans, and then the land of the Nile ended and abruptly the landscape became sandy and bare. When they reached the place where the route goes north, Chips waved to the poor devil on duty. The corporal was grateful for any sign of compassion from a human race which seemingly loathed military policemen with a terrible vindictiveness. More than once he’d had to jump aside to escape the wheels of heavy trucks. He waved back. There was always a military policeman detachment at the junction. Perhaps they thought some dozy drivers might keep going and wind up somewhere out there in the Libyan Desert, on the edge of the mighty Qattara Depression, the loneliest place in the world.
They made good speed on the open road. It was the right time of day to travel. In the gloom they saw corrugated-metal Nissen huts and the lines of carefully whitewashed rocks that are the mark of British military presence anywhere in the world. ‘That’s the airfield at Amiriya,’ said Chips, pointing at it. ‘Looks like they have a flap on.’
Harry looked at where the floodlights illuminated a fighter plane having its engine revved up.
‘Look at that,’ said Chips. ‘The RAF have started painting those big shark’s mouths on their fighters. There might be an American story for you there.’
‘How?’ Harry was always looking for stories with some sort of US connection.
‘Those planes are American: Curtiss Tomahawks. The big mouth and teeth would make a great photo.’
‘No, no. By the time we get back the RAF brass will have ordered them painted back to camouflage again. You know what stuff shirts they are.’
‘They’ve been painted like that since September last year.’
‘Watch the road, Chips.’
‘I could drive this one blindfold,’ said Chips.
‘Curtiss Tomahawks?’
‘He’s come from One-twelve squadron at Gambut, unless all the squadrons are copying the same paint job.’
‘I know Gambut. I flew there last month.’
‘We’ll pass it on this road.’
‘Okay, that might be a story. Can you handle a camera?’
‘What kind of camera?’
‘Speed Graphic.’
‘I can manage but I’ll need a meter.’
‘I’ll give you a lesson or two.’
‘Why don’t you see if you can pick up a Leica … they use that roll film. It’s easier to use for the sort of stuff you want. And near the fighting there are always good cameras to be had, if you’ve got the cash … they take them off the German prisoners.’
‘What sort of shots do I want?’ said Harry.
‘Candids. Human interest. People. A Speed Graphic is too bulky, and changing those damn slides is too slow for that kind of coverage.’
Chips was right; he was no dummy. ‘Keep your eyes open for a Leica then.’
‘Okay, boss.’ Just a few miles along the road Chips pointed out another airfield. ‘Dekheila. Looks like they have planes on the circuit to land.’
‘Bombers, I hope. I’m telling you, Chips, your people will have to bomb the shit out of Tripoli if they are to stand any chance of bringing Rommel to a halt. A few more shiploads of those up-gunned tanks he’s using, and he’ll come through Egypt like a hot knife through butter.’
‘Easy does it, boss,’ said Chips. He’d discovered that he was expected to play the part of Limey sparring partner in this sort of exchange. ‘We’ve given the Hun a headache, made him come to a stop, and knocked out half his tank force. And the RAF is really beginning to get his measure now. Admit it, Harry!’
‘The trouble is that last year your British propaganda flacks were handing out such a lot of garbage about how strong the British army is. Now Rommel is pushing them back again, everyone is looking pretty damn silly.’
‘You’re right, Harry.’ Chips always let him win the arguments. Then to himself he said aloud, ‘Mustn’t go wrong at the next turn-off.’ It was cloudy and the moon switched on and off like a flashlight.
At Alexandria the road skirted the town, and Chips kept his foot down as they found and followed the coast road. As the moonlight became brighter its beauty became evident.
‘What do they call this place?’
‘El Alamein: there is no decent place here to eat or sleep. Too near Cairo to be of much use as a stopover.’
‘It’s pretty.’ For the first time Chips saw that Harry was right. On one side of the road there were fig plantations, still in good shape despite the war. On the other side of the road, the pure white sand made the sea look dark and deep. The waves came rolling in to break into a vast lace overlay, so that the sea seemed to disappear. The moonlit scene was so inviting that Harry felt like stopping the car and taking a swim in the sea, but he resisted the temptation. There was work to be done.
At the place where the fig plantations ended, the road deteriorated into a maze of potholes and corrugations. ‘You know something, Chips? That was really smart of you British to build a railroad along the coast. And monumentally dumb of the Italians not to do the same along their coastline.’
‘The British didn’t do it,’ said Chips. ‘The Arabs built it in the nineteenth century.’
‘Is that so? Well, it’s come in useful for the war. The railroads can move all the heavy stuff and leave the highway free. Rommel hasn’t cottoned on to that yet. Maybe Rommel’s not so bright after all.’
‘I hope not.’
‘The British have got enough on their plate with a dumb German general down the road, Chips, without having to contend with a smart one.’
Chips nodded. Harry Wechsler liked to have the last word. He was like a film star, thought Chips, who during his time as a newspaperman had met many of them. Harry gave a great deal of attention to his clothes, his appearance and his comfort. And he had that childish need for approval and admiration that is so often the driving force behind success in public life. Harry Wechsler could have managed this trip quite easily on his own, but he seemed to need a companion, a sounding board, or maybe an audience. Whatever it was Harry Wechsler needed, as long as the pay was adequate, Chips O’Grady was happy to provide it.
