The Key to Rebecca

by Ken Follett

  The officer in charge of the picket walked over to the colonel who had told Wolff to take off his hat. "Everything in order, sir?" the MP said.

  "Nothing untoward," the colonel replied.

  "What's the matter with you?" Smith said to Wolff. "I say, you are entitled to those pips, aren't you?"

  "Of course," Wolff said. A drop of perspiration ran into his eyes, and he wiped it away with a too-rapid gesture.

  "No offense intended," Smith said. "But, you know, Shepheard's being off limits to Other Ranks, it's not unknown for subalterns to sew a few pips on their shirts just to get in here."

  Wolff pulled himself together. "Look here, sir, if you'd care to check--"

  "No, no, no," Smith said hastily.

  "The resemblance was rather a shock."

  "Of course, I understand. Let's have another drink. Ezma!"

  The MP who had spoken to the colonel was taking a long look around the room. His armband identified him as the assistant provost marshal. He looked at Wolff. Wolff wondered whether the man remembered the description of the Assyut knife murderer. Surely not. Anyway, they would not be looking for a British officer answering the description. And Wolff had grown a mustache to confuse the issue. He forced himself to meet the MP's eyes, then let his gaze drift casually away. He picked up his drink, sure the man was still staring at him.

  Then there was a clatter of boots and the picket went out.

  By an effort Wolff prevented himself from shaking with relief. He raised his glass in a determinedly steady hand and said: "Cheers."

  They drank. Smith said: "You know this place. What's a chap to do in the evening, other than drink in Shepheard's bar?"

  Wolff pretended to consider the question. "Have you seen any belly dancing?"

  Smith gave a disgusted snort. "Once. Some fat wog wiggling her hips."

  "Ah. Then you ought to see the real thing."

  "Should I?"

  "Real belly dancing is the most erotic thing you've ever seen."

  There was an odd light in Smith's eyes. "Is that so?"

  Wolff thought: Major Smith, you are just what I need. He said: "Sonja is the best. You must try to see her act."

  Smith nodded. "Perhaps I shall."

  "Matter of fact, I was toying with the idea of going on to the Cha-Cha Club myself. Care to join me?"

  "Let's have another drink first," said Smith.

  Watching Smith put away the liquor Wolff reflected that the major was, at least on the surface, a highly corruptible man. He seemed bored, weak-willed and alcoholic. Provided he was normally heterosexual, Sonja would be able to seduce him easily. (Damn, he thought, she had better do her stuff.) Then they would have to find out whether he had in his briefcase anything more useful than menus. Finally they would have to find a way to get the secrets out of him. There were too many maybes and too little time.

  He could only go step by step, and the first step was to get Smith in his power.

  They finished their drinks and set out for the Cha-Cha. They could not find a taxi, so they took a gharry, a horse-drawn open carriage. The driver mercilessly whipped his elderly horse.

  Smith said: "Chap's a bit rough on the beast."

  "Isn't he," Wolff said, thinking: You should see what we do to camels.

  The club was crowded and hot, again. Wolff had to bribe a waiter to get a table.

  Sonja's act began moments after they sat down. Smith watched Sonja while Wolff watched Smith. In minutes the major was drooling.

  Wolff said: "Good, isn't she?"

  "Fantastic," Smith replied without looking around.

  "Matter of fact, I know her slightly," Wolff said. "Shall I ask her to join us afterwards?"

  This time Smith did look around. "Good Lord!" he said. "Would you?"

  The rhythm quickened. Sonja looked out across the crowded floor of the club. Hundreds of men feasted their eyes greedily on her magnificent body. She closed her eyes.

  The movements came automatically: the sensations took over. In her imagination she saw the sea of rapacious faces staring at her. She felt her breasts shake and her belly roll and her hips jerk, and it was as if someone else was doing it to her, as if all the hungry men in the audience were manipulating her body. She went faster and faster. There was no artifice in her dancing, not any more; she was doing it for herself. She did not even follow the music--it followed her. Waves of excitement swept her. She rode the excitement, dancing, until she knew she was on the edge of ecstasy, knew she only had to jump and she would be flying. She hesitated on the brink. She spread her arms. The music climaxed with a bang. She uttered a cry of frustration and fell backward, her legs folded beneath her, her thighs open to the audience, until her head hit the stage. Then the lights went out.

  It was always like that.

  In the storm of applause she got up and crossed the darkened stage to the wings. She walked quickly to her dressing room, head down, looking at no one. She did not want their words or their smiles. They did not understand. Nobody knew how it was for her, nobody knew what she went through every night when she danced.

  She took off her shoes, her filmy pantaloons and her sequined halter, and put on a silk robe. She sat in front of the mirror to remove her makeup. She always did this immediately, for the makeup was bad for the skin. She had to look after her body. Her face and throat were getting that fleshy look again, she observed. She would have to stop eating chocolates. She was already well past the age at which women began to get fat. Her age was another secret the audience must never discover. She was almost as old as her father had been when he died. Father ...

  He had been a big, arrogant man whose achievements never lived up to his hopes. Sonja and her parents had slept together in a narrow hard bed in a Cairo tenement. She had never felt so safe and warm since those days. She would curl up against her father's broad back. She could remember the close familiar smell of him. Then, when she should have been asleep, there had been another smell, something that excited her unaccountably. Mother and father would begin to move in the darkness, lying side by side; and Sonja would move with them. A few times her mother realized what was happening. Then her father would beat her. After the third time they made her sleep on the floor. Then she could hear them but could not share the pleasure: it seemed so cruel. She blamed her mother. Her father was willing to share, she was sure; he had known all along what she had been doing. Lying on the floor, cold, excluded, listening, she had tried to enjoy it at a distance, but it had not worked. Nothing had worked since then, until the arrival of Alex Wolff ...

  She had never spoken to Wolff about that narrow bed in the tenement, but somehow he understood. He had an instinct for the deep needs that people never acknowledged. He and the girl Fawzi had recreated the childhood scene for Sonja, and it had worked.

  He did not do it out of kindness, she knew. He did these things so that he could use people. Now he wanted to use her to spy on the British. She would do almost anything to spite the British--anything but go to bed with them ...

  There was a knock on the door of her dressing room. She called: "Come in."

  One of the waiters entered with a note. She nodded dismissal at the boy and unfolded the sheet of paper. The message said simply: "Table 41. Alex."

  She crumpled the paper and dropped it on the floor. So he had found one. That was quick. His instinct for weakness was working again.

  She understood him because she was like him. She, too, used people--although less cleverly than he did. She even used him. He had style, taste, high-class friends and money; and one day he would take her to Berlin. It was one thing to be a star in Egypt, and quite another in Europe. She wanted to dance for the aristocratic old generals and the handsome young Storm Troopers; she wanted to seduce powerful men and beautiful white girls; she wanted to be queen of the cabaret in the most decadent city in the world. Wolff would be her passport. Yes, she was using him.

  It must be unusual, she thought, for two people to be so close and yet to love ea
ch other so little.

  He would cut her lips off.

  She shuddered, stopped thinking about it and began to dress. She put on a white gown with wide sleeves and a low neck. The neckline showed off her breasts while the skirt slimmed her hips. She stepped into white high-heeled sandals. She fastened a heavy gold bracelet around each wrist, and around her neck she hung a gold chain with a teardrop pendant which lay snugly in her cleavage. The Englishman would like that. They had the most coarse taste.

  She took a last look at herself in the mirror and went out into the club.

  A zone of silence went with her across the floor. People fell quiet as she approached and then began to talk about her when she had passed. She felt as if she were inviting mass rape. Onstage, it was different : she was separated from them by an invisible wall. Down here they could touch her, and they all wanted to. They never did, but the danger thrilled her.

  She reached table 41 and both men stood up.

  Wolff said: "Sonja, my dear, you were magnificent, as always."

  She acknowledged the compliment with a nod.

  "Allow me to introduce Major Smith."

  Sonja shook his hand. He was a thin, chinless man with a fair mustache and ugly, bony hands. He looked at her as if she were an extravagant dessert which had just been placed before him.

  Smith said: "Enchanted, absolutely."

  They sat down. Wolff poured champagne. Smith said: "Your dancing was splendid, mademoiselle, just splendid. Very ... artistic."

  "Thank you."

  He reached across the table and patted her hand. "You're very lovely."

  And you're a fool, she thought. She caught a warning look from Wolff: he knew what was in her mind. "You're very kind, Major," she said.

  Wolff was nervous, she could tell. He was not sure whether she would do what he wanted. In truth she had not yet decided.

  Wolff said to Smith: "I knew Sonja's late father."

  It was a lie, and Sonja knew why he had said it. He wanted to remind her.

  Her father had been a part-time thief. When there was work he worked, and when there was none he stole. One day he had tried to snatch the handbag of a European woman in the Shari el-Koubri. The woman's escort had made a grab for Sonja's father, and in the scuffle the woman had been knocked down, spraining her wrist. She was an important woman, and Sonja's father had been flogged for the offense. He had died during the flogging.

  Of course, it was not supposed to kill him. He must have had a weak heart, or something. The British who administered the law did not care. The man had committed the crime, he had been given the due punishment and the punishment had killed him: one wog less. Sonja, twelve years old, had been heartbroken. Since then she had hated the British with all her being.

  Hitler had the right idea but the wrong target, she believed. It was not the Jews whose racial weakness infected the world--it was the British. The Jews in Egypt were more or less like everyone else: some rich, some poor, some good, some bad. But the British were uniformly arrogant, greedy and vicious. She laughed bitterly at the high-minded way in which the British tried to defend Poland from German oppression while they themselves continued to oppress Egypt.

  Still, for whatever reasons, the Germans were fighting the British, and that was enough to make Sonja pro-German.

  She wanted Hitler to defeat, humiliate and ruin Britain.

  She would do anything she could to help.

  She would even seduce an Englishman.

  She leaned forward. "Major Smith," she said, "you're a very attractive man."

  Wolff relaxed visibly.

  Smith was startled. His eyes seemed about to pop out of his head. "Good Lord!" he said. "Do you think so?"

  "Yes, I do, Major."

  "I say, I wish you'd call me Sandy."

  Wolff stood up. "I'm afraid I've got to leave you. Sonja, may I escort you home?"

  Smith said: "I think you can leave that to me, Captain."

  "Yes, sir."

  "That is, if Sonja ..."

  Sonja batted her eyelids. "Of course, Sandy."

  Wolff said: "I hate to break up the party, but I've got an early start."

  "Quite all right," Smith told him. "You just run along."

  As Wolff left a waiter brought dinner. It was a European meal--steak and potatoes--and Sonja picked at it while Smith talked to her. He told her about his successes in the school cricket team. He seemed to have done nothing spectacular since then. He was very boring.

  Sonja kept remembering the flogging.

  He drank steadily through dinner. When they left he was weaving slightly. She gave him her arm, more for his benefit than for hers. They walked to the houseboat in the cool night air. Smith looked up at the sky and said: "Those stars ... beautiful." His speech was a little thick.

  They stopped at the houseboat. "Looks pretty," Smith said.

  "It's rather nice," Sonja said. "Would you like to see inside?"

  "Rather."

  She led him over the gangplank, across the deck, and down the stairs.

  He looked around, wide-eyed. "I must say, it's very luxurious."

  "Would you like a drink?"

  "Very much."

  Sonja hated the way he said "very" all the time. He slurred the r and pronounced it "vey." She said: "Champagne, or something stronger?"

  "A drop of whiskey would be nice."

  "Do sit down."

  She gave him his drink and sat close to him. He touched her shoulder, kissed her cheek, and roughly grabbed her breast. She shuddered. He took that as a sign of passion, and squeezed harder.

  She pulled him down on top of her. He was very clumsy: his elbows and knees kept digging into her. He fumbled beneath the skirt of her dress.

  She said: "Oh, Sandy, you're so strong."

  She looked over his shoulder and saw Wolff's face. He was on deck, kneeling down and watching through the hatch, laughing soundlessly.

  8

  WILLIAM VANDAM WAS BEGINNING TO DESPAIR OF EVER FINDING ALEX WOLFF. The Assyut murder was almost three weeks in the past, and Vandam was no closer to his quarry. As time went by the trail got colder. He almost wished there would be another briefcase snatch, so that at least he would know what Wolff was up to.

  He knew he was becoming a little obsessed with the man. He would wake up in the night, around 3 A.M. when the booze had worn off, and worry until daybreak. What bothered him was something to do with Wolff's style: the sideways manner in which he had slipped into Egypt, the suddenness of the murder of Corporal Cox, the ease with which Wolff had melted into the city. Vandam went over these things, again and again, all the time wondering why he found the case so fascinating.

  He had made no real progress, but he had gathered some information, and the information had fed his obsession--fed it not as food feeds a man, making him satisfied, but as fuel feeds a fire, making it burn hotter.

  The Villa les Oliviers was owned by someone called Achmed Rahmha. The Rahmhas were a wealthy Cairo family. Achmed had inherited the house from his father, Gamal Rahmha, a lawyer. One of Vandam's lieutenants had dug up the record of a marriage between Gamal Rahmha and one Eva Wolff, widow of Hans Wolff, both German nationals; and then adoption papers making Hans and Eva's son Alex the legal child of Gamal Rahmha ...

  Which made Achmed Rahmha a German, and explained how he got legitimate Egyptian papers in the name of Alex Wolff.

  Also in the records was a will which gave Achmed, or Alex, a share of Gamal's fortune, plus the house.

  Interviews with all surviving Rahmhas had produced nothing. Achmed had disappeared two years ago and had not been heard from since. The interviewer had come back with the impression that the adopted son of the family was not much missed.

  Vandam was convinced that when Achmed disappeared he had gone to Germany.

  There was another branch of the Rahmha family, but they were nomads, and no one knew where they could be found. No doubt, Vandam thought, they had helped Wolff somehow with his reentry into Egypt
.

  Vandam understood that now. Wolff could not have come into the country through Alexandria. Security was tight at the port: his entry would have been noted, he would have been investigated, and sooner or later the investigation would have revealed his German antecedents, whereupon he would have been interned. By coming from the south he had hoped to get in unobserved and resume his former status as a born-and-bred Egyptian. It had been a piece of luck for the British that Wolff had run into trouble in Assyut.

  It seemed to Vandam that that was the last piece of luck they had had.

  He sat in his office, smoking one cigarette after another, worrying about Wolff.

  The man was no low-grade collector of gossip and rumor. He was not content, as other agents were, to send in reports based on the number of soldiers he saw in the street and the shortage of motor spares. The briefcase theft proved he was after top-level stuff, and he was capable of devising ingenious ways of getting it. If he stayed at large long enough he would succeed sooner or later.

  Vandam paced the room--from the coat stand to the desk, around the desk for a look out of the window, around the other side of the desk, and back to the coat stand.

  The spy had his problems, too. He had to explain himself to inquisitive neighbors, conceal his radio somewhere, move about the city and find informants. He could run out of money, his radio could break down, his informants could betray him or someone could quite accidentally discover his secret. One way or another, traces of the spy had to appear.

  The cleverer he was, the longer it would take.

  Vandam was convinced that Abdullah, the thief, was involved with Wolff. After Bogge refused to have Abdullah arrested, Vandam had offered a large sum of money for Wolff's whereabouts. Abdullah still claimed to know nothing of anyone called Wolff, but the light of greed had flickered in his eyes.

  Abdullah might not know where Wolff could be found--Wolff was surely careful enough to take that precaution with a notoriously dishonest man--but perhaps Abdullah could find out. Vandam had made it clear that the money was still on offer. Then again, once Abdullah had the information he might simply go to Wolff, tell him of Vandam's offer and invite him to bid higher.

  Vandam paced the room.

  Something to do with style. Sneaking in; murder with a knife; melting away; and ... Something else went with all that. Something Vandam knew about, something he had read in a report or been told in a briefing. Wolff might almost have been a man Vandam had known, long ago, but could no longer bring to mind. Style.