A Cold Touch of Ice

by Michael Pearce

  And here was yet another of the threatening letters. He picked it up. The same handwriting as before, and much the same sentiments. No originality here.

  He was about to put the letter down when a thought struck him. The same letter-writer wrote all the letters, not just to him but to all the other recipients. That must cost quite a packet; quite a packet, anyway, to someone so (presumably) poor and ignorant as not to be able to write themselves. Apart from the actual writing of the letters, there were the stamps to be paid for. Not everyone had a Box that messages could conveniently be dropped in.

  And then another thought came to him. He summoned Nikos.

  ‘Those letters,’ he said, showing Nikos the one he’d just received, ‘how are they delivered to the other people who get them? Are they simply posted?’

  ‘They are addressed,’ said Nikos. ‘But they are addressed to people at their places of work. They could simply be handed in at the mail offices.’

  Each Ministerial block had its office where the mail was sorted. Messages between Ministries were carried by bearers, as was mail generally throughout the city. Letters were constantly coming and going. It would be easy to slip one into the common pile.

  ‘I will check,’ said Nikos, chagrined that he had not done so before. ‘At least I should be able to find out whether they are sent by stamped mail.’

  Owen continued reading through the other messages the Box had contained. He had half hoped there might be some reference to the guns, but there wasn’t.

  ***

  Zeinab’s appartement was still smelling of coffee when he went in. Zeinab herself was curled up on a divan, her legs tucked under her.

  ‘How did it go?’

  ‘All right. She didn’t say much, but she passed the cakes nicely.’

  ‘She’s very young. It must be difficult for her.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Zeinab, ‘it is very difficult being a woman.’

  ‘How was Rosa?’

  ‘Rosa is pregnant.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know?’

  ‘Well—’

  Zeinab got up from the divan and picked up the empty coffee pot.

  ‘I expect you want to know if I behaved myself?’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I did.’

  Then she hurled the coffee pot against the wall. It broke into pieces.

  ‘But I’m damned if I’m behaving now!’ she said.

  Chapter Ten

  As Owen was crossing the Bab-el-Luk he saw Trudi von Ramsberg. At first he thought he must be mistaken, for surely she had left Cairo? But the tall, blonde figure was hard to mistake and something about the way she walked—

  On an impulse he turned up the Cheikh Sibai after her. Yes, it was her. There was no doubt about it now. He hurried after her and caught up with her when she paused to cross the Sharia-es-Saha.

  ‘Hello!’ he said. ‘You still here?’

  For a moment she seemed disconcerted. Then she kissed him.

  ‘Just making a few last purchases,’ she said. ‘But you’re right, we should have been on our way a couple of days ago. At the last moment, though, something had still not come through. All sorted out now, and I’ll be off at dawn tomorrow.’

  ‘Feel like a coffee?’

  She glanced at her watch.

  ‘I would,’ she said, ‘but I’ve got to get to the bank. These extra days have run my cash down.’

  She looked at her watch again.

  ‘But what about later? How about lunch? We could try that place you told me about. It’s not far from here, is it?’

  ‘The Mirabelle. You’d need to take an arabeah. But yes, why not?’

  They agreed to meet at the restaurant at one o’clock and then Trudi continued on her way.

  Owen stood for a moment, wondering slightly. He was a little surprised that she was still here. She seemed so efficient. Perhaps it was not her fault but that of the thing that hadn’t come through. And what was all this about cash? She had looked at her watch, as if she had an appointment; but you didn’t need an appointment to get cash. Still, it was none of his business.

  The Cheikh Sibai continued on the other side of the Sharia-es-Saha, and at the top were the offices of the Dresden Bank. She had almost got there when an arabeah drew up alongside her and a man jumped out. She stopped for him and they went into the bank together. He knew the man. It was Beckmann, the German at the Consulate about whom there’d been that to-do over the librarianship. Perhaps it was his business, after all.

  ***

  Owen was dropping some things in at the Palace. As he was walking along one of the corridors, a door opened and a group of men came out. Slatin Pasha was one of them. From the way they were shaking hands, Owen guessed that they were saying goodbye to him.

  One of the men was Ibrahim Meck, from the Khedive’s office. He was talking to Nuri. Owen was pleased to see this further sign of Nuri’s acceptability. Perhaps he was on his way back into office. It would make no difference to Owen, but Nuri had been out of favour for a long time and it would cheer him up. He seemed pretty cheerful this morning, giving Owen a warm wave. The recent coolness between him and Owen had evidently been forgotten and Owen was pleased about that too.

  Slatin detached himself from the group and came along the corridor to Owen. He seized Owen’s hand between the two of his.

  ‘So glad to see you, dear boy, and to be able to say goodbye!’

  ‘You’re off, then?’

  ‘Yes, this afternoon. Back to the Sudan.’

  They embraced each other in the Arab fashion. Slatin was half Arab by now. Owen rather liked the old boy. In the world of careerists and bureaucrats he was an original.

  ‘Don’t let Wingate work you too hard,’ he said.

  ‘I won’t,’ Slatin promised. He embraced Owen again. ‘And you yourself take care,’ he said. ‘These are slippery times.’

  Slatin’s English was always inclined to the idiosyncratic; but ‘slippery’, thought Owen, was about right.

  ***

  ‘I think Nuri may be going to come back in,’ he said to Nikos, as he went through the outer office, back at the Bab-el-Khalk.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Nikos.

  He came through with Owen and put some papers on his desk.

  ‘You may need these,’ he said.

  Owen had a meeting at the Consulate with Paul later that morning. It was a routine one but he thought it likely that this time it might include some questions about the gun-running, so he had asked Nikos to find him the latest reports. He began to go through them now to remind himself.

  Something was niggling away, though, at the back of his mind. It was to do with his meeting with Trudi. Beckmann he had figured out now. He wasn’t so much the Paul of the German Consulate as its Cavendish. That was what the business of the Librarian had been about. Kitchener had wanted to stop him being planted in a post where he could continue to do his work independent of the existence of a German Consulate. Owen couldn’t see why the Germans would want to do that nor why the British should want to stop them. Things hadn’t reached such a point, had they? He put it down to a fondness for silly games.

  But Cavendish could have been right about Trudi. He and Paul were both convinced that she was here because she was somehow acting as an agent; and now here she was having a meeting with Beckmann. If she was having a meeting, and it had not just been an accident. If she was, then what had the meeting been about? And why had it been held in the bank? Something to do with money? But if it was, it certainly wasn’t Trudi’s need for petty cash.

  He realized what it was that had been niggling away at the back of his mind. It was that the bank was the Dresden. That was the bank that that German—what was his name? Scharn-horst—had worked for. The one who had been involved in the discuss
ions with Nuri about the Khedive’s private railway. The Dresden had obviously been lined up to provide the finance.

  He wondered where that had got to. On the spur of the moment he picked up his phone.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘is that the Continentale? I wonder if you could tell me whether one of your guests is still with you? A Mr Scharnhorst. No? He left yesterday? Thank you. And someone else, a colleague of his: a Mr Gurnik? Left, too? I see.’

  He put the phone down and sat thinking. The image came into his mind of Nuri, a newly cheerful Nuri, at the Palace talking to Ibrahim Meck.

  He got up from his desk and went into Nikos’ office.

  ‘I have a feeling,’ he said, ‘that a meeting might have taken place very recently, either yesterday or the day before. It would have been between two people staying at the Continentale Hotel, a Mr Scharnhorst and a Mr Gurnik, and two of the Khedive’s senior staff, Ibrahim Meck and, probably, Sidki Bey. Oh, and Nuri Pasha might have been there too. Could you find out? And if you could let me know before my meeting with Paul—’

  999

  At the meeting, as he had suspected, the gun-running issue did come up and he was glad that Nikos had got the reports for him. It gave him something to talk about.

  ‘As you can see,’ he said, ‘there have been very few interceptions in the past fortnight. It looks as if the steps we have taken are having an effect. The coastal traffic seems to have practically dried up.’

  ‘That’s good!’ said Paul. ‘As long as it has not just moved elsewhere.’ He looked pleased. ‘I’ll tell His Lordship. It might do you a bit of good,’ he added.

  ‘Thanks.’ Owen hesitated. ‘Actually, I’ve been thinking of writing him a memo.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t seem to be able to get through to him talking, so I thought I’d put it down on paper.’

  ‘Exactly what were you thinking of putting down on paper?’

  ‘Well, you know. Look, Paul, I’m really not happy about what we’re doing. Stopping the Khedive from selling his railway, if that’s what you’ve still in mind. I thought I’d send him a memo outlining more precisely my objections—’

  ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘I feel it’s important.’

  ‘Yes, I know. And you’ve made your point. Only now I think it would be best to leave it.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘It will only annoy him.’

  ‘Well, I could put up with that if it would only make him think again.’

  ‘It’s no good, Gareth. Once he’s made up his mind—’

  ‘He’s inaccessible to reason, is that it?’

  Paul sighed.

  ‘You know, he’s really quite reasonable.’

  ‘That wasn’t how he struck me.’

  ‘That was because you contradicted him.’

  ‘I didn’t contradict him. I merely expressed doubt.’

  ‘Yes, well, he doesn’t like doubt.’

  ‘Well, he ought to like doubt. About this, at any rate. I tell you, Paul, if he goes ahead on this and forces the Khedive to back down, he’ll have the whole country up in arms!’

  ‘Aren’t you exaggerating on this, Gareth? Just the teeniest bit?’

  ‘No, I’m bloody not. He’s out of touch. Things have changed since he was here before. The whole country has become much more—well—aware.’

  ‘In the towns, perhaps.’

  ‘In the countryside, too. Everywhere. Look, Paul, it’s even boiling over in the schools.’

  ‘All we are going to do is point out to the Khedive that he doesn’t actually own the thing he is selling. He was given a personal concession to construct a small railway to his private estates in the west. So that he doesn’t have to get there on a camel. The land on which it was built remained the property of the state.’

  ‘It’s a quibble, Paul. That’s how they’ll see it.’

  ‘You think they’ll come out on to the streets? For this?’

  ‘They’ll see it as his, Paul. He’s the ruler of the country, after all, and what they’ll see is Egypt forced to back down. Not just him, but Egypt.’

  Paul shook his head.

  ‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘It’s too late now, anyway. He’s made up his mind.’

  There was a little silence. Then Owen got up from the table.

  ‘Well, if he has,’ he said, ‘you’d better tell him to get a move on. Because there was a meeting yesterday at which, I strongly suspect, the railway was sold.’

  ***

  By one o’clock, the time he had arranged to meet Trudi at the Mirabelle, the unusual heat had made the open street unbearable. The Mouski was deserted. The shops, small, dark, open-fronted and native Egyptian at this end, were apparently empty. In fact, their owners were lying down in the shadows behind their counters, taking their siesta. They would have jumped up at once if anyone had come in, but that was unlikely. Ordinary Egyptians were at their lunch or else sleeping afterwards. The tourists would not come again till later when it was cooler.

  Owen went straight into the restaurant when he arrived but Trudi wasn’t yet there. The restaurant was only half full, but there was someone he recognized: Grenville, the officer he had met at the barracks, sitting at a table with three elderly ladies, whose complexions suggested they had only just come out from England. He gave Grenville a nod and chose a table which he thought neatly combined cooler darkness with the possibility of a draught from the door.

  Shortly afterwards Trudi came in.

  ‘I’m going to make the most of this,’ she informed him. ‘After this it’s durra and beans for three weeks!’

  He saw Grenville looking at her. Well, that was not surprising. Trudi was the sort of woman that men looked at; all the more so in a place like Cairo where women normally went unseen and there were few tall blondes for famished soldiers to feast their eyes on.

  This was even more true of the desert, of course, and he wondered how Trudi would fare.

  Trudi shrugged.

  ‘I have curiosity value,’ she said.

  Bearing in mind what Paul had said when he had first heard of her destination, he tried to get from her some idea of her route; not just to satisfy Paul, but also in case she might at some point need help. He couldn’t get much from her, however.

  ‘Well, there aren’t places mostly,’ she said. ‘Just rocks and things. You find out the name of them as you go along.’

  Owen decided again that the explorer’s life was not for him.

  He asked her if the thing she had been waiting for had come through.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we’re all right now.’

  Again, without being obvious about it, he couldn’t get anything more out of her. After a while he decided he’d done his duty and concentrated on enjoying her company.

  They had nearly reached the end of the meal when he saw Grenville looking again: only this time he seemed to be looking at him, not at Trudi. He half rose from the table and jerked his head.

  Owen followed him to the cloakroom.

  ‘That girl you’re with,’ he said, ‘she’s friendly with one of my officers. An Egyptian officer,’ he said significantly.

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Yes. Thought you’d like to know.’

  ‘Well, yes, thank you.’

  ‘Saw them talking in the square. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But I thought that if you were taking the girl out, you might like to know.’

  ‘Thank you, yes.’

  ‘Says something about the girl, doesn’t it? Of course, maybe it didn’t amount to anything, in which case, well, I wouldn’t want to make too much of it. But it doesn’t look good. You need to stick to your own sort. You know, some of these girls, they come out from home, where they can get away with being free and easy, and think they can be
just the same here, with anyone they please. But it’s not like that here. You’ve got to stick to your own sort. I’ve nothing against a bit of enjoyment, especially if you’re a man, but you need to stick to your own sort.

  ‘That’s what I tell chaps when they’re new out from England. It’s not like England, I say, where if you get a girl into trouble you can go ahead and marry her. It’s different here with the local ladies. You can’t go ahead and marry them; at least, not if you’re an officer. It would make for all kinds of trouble. So best not to let the situation arise. Stick to your own sort, I say, and don’t get in too deep with the local ladies. A bit of enjoyment is all right, but don’t get in too deep! That’s what I tell them.’

  ‘Very wise, I’m sure.’

  ‘Not, of course, that I need to tell you that.’

  ‘Well, no.’

  Or, alternatively, thought Owen, Zeinab coming to mind, yes.

  ‘And, of course, this lady may not realize that she is cheapening herself. She just may not know the form here. She is English, I suppose?’

  ‘German.’

  ‘German!’

  ‘Of course, it may not apply to German women,’ said Owen, straight-faced.

  ***

  By the time they came out of the Mirabelle the city was beginning to stir once more. The water-sellers and ice men were starting up their rounds again and one or two shopkeepers were standing yawning at the front of their shops. There were still no arabeahs about in the Mouski, however, so they walked down towards the Khan-al-Khalil, where Owen knew there was a rank of them. There was a solitary donkey coming towards them. As it drew nearer, Owen saw that it belonged to Mustapha, the ice man for the Bab-el-Khalk; and there behind him, as ever, was his assistant, Amina. They exchanged greetings; but then, after the donkey had passed them, Amina turned her head and spat, with considered deliberation, at Trudi’s feet.