The Key to Rebecca

by Ken Follett

  "My brother, Tal'at," said Sadat.

  Vandam looked at Sadat. The Arab was calm and dignified, but he was hiding some tension. He's afraid, Vandam thought; but he's not afraid of me, and he's not afraid of going to prison; he's afraid of something else.

  What kind of deal had Kernel done with Wolff this morning? The rebels needed Wolff to help them get in touch with Rommel. Were they hiding Wolff somewhere?

  Vandam said: "Which is your room, Captain?"

  Sadat pointed. Vandam went into the room. It was a simple bedroom, with a mattress on the floor and a galabiya hanging from a hook. Vandam pointed to two British soldiers and an Egyptian policeman, and said: "All right, go ahead." They began to search the room.

  "What is the meaning of this?" Sadat said quietly.

  "You know Alex Wolff," Vandam said.

  "No."

  "He also calls himself Achmed Rahmha, but he's a European."

  "I've never heard of him."

  Clearly Sadat was a fairly tough personality, not the kind to break down and confess everything just because a few burly soldiers started messing up his house. Vandam pointed across the hall. "What's that room?"

  "My study--"

  Vandam went to the door.

  Sadat said: "But the women of the family are in there, you must let me warn them--"

  "They know we're here. Open the door."

  Vandam let Sadat enter the room first. There were no women inside, but a back door was open as if someone had just stepped out. That was okay: the garden was full of soldiers, no one would escape. Vandam saw an army pistol on the desk holding down some sheets of paper covered with Arabic script. He went to the bookshelf and examined the books: Rebecca was not there.

  A shout came from another part of the house: "Major Vandam!"

  Vandam followed the sound into the kitchen. A sergeant MP was standing beside the oven, with the house dog yapping at his booted feet. The oven door stood open, and the sergeant lifted out a suitcase-radio.

  Vandam looked at Sadat, who had followed him into the kitchen. The Arab's face was twisted with bitterness and disappointment. So this was the deal they had done: they warned Wolff, and in exchange they got his radio. Did that mean he had another? Or had Wolff arranged to come here, to Sadat's house, to broadcast?

  Vandam spoke to his sergeant. "Well done. Take Captain Sadat to GHQ."

  "I protest," Sadat said. "The law states that officers in the Egyptian Army may be detained only in the officers' mess and must be guarded by a fellow officer."

  The senior Egyptian policeman was standing nearby. "This is correct," he said.

  Once again Vandam cursed Bogge for bringing the Egyptians into this. "The law also states that spies are to be shot," he told Sadat. He turned to the sergeant. "Send out my driver. Finish searching the house. Then have Sadat charged with espionage."

  He looked again at Sadat. The bitterness and disappointment had gone from his face, to be replaced by a calculating look. He's figuring out how to make the most of all this, Vandam thought; he's preparing to play martyr. He's very adaptable--he should be a politician.

  Vandam left the house and went out to the jeep. A few moments later his driver came running out and jumped into the seat beside him. Vandam said: "To Zamalek."

  "Yes, sir." The driver started the jeep and pulled away.

  When Vandam reached the houseboat the divers had done their work and were standing on the towpath getting out of their gear. Two soldiers were hauling something extremely grisly out of the Nile. The divers had attached ropes to the body they had found on the bottom and then washed their hands of the affair.

  Jakes came over to Vandam. "Look at this, sir." He handed him a waterlogged book. The board covers had been torn off. Vandam examined the book: it was Rebecca.

  The radio went to Sadat; the code book went into the river. Vandam remembered the ashtray full of charred paper in the houseboat: had Wolff burned the key to the code?

  Why had he gotten rid of the radio, the book and the key, when he had a vital message to send to Rommel? The conclusion was inescapable: he had another radio, book and key hidden away somewhere.

  The soldiers got the body onto the bank and then stepped back as if they wanted nothing more to do with it. Vandam stood over it. The throat had been cut and the head was almost severed from the body. A briefcase was roped to the waist. Vandam bent down and gingerly opened the case. It was full of bottles of champagne.

  Jakes said: "My God."

  "Ugly, isn't it," Vandam said. "Throat cut, then dumped in the river with a case of champagne to weigh him down."

  "Cool bastard."

  "And damn quick with that knife." Vandam touched his cheek: the dressing had been taken off, now, and several days' growth of beard hid the wound. But not Elene, not with the knife, please. "I gather you haven't found him."

  "I haven't found anything. I've had Abdullah brought in, just on general principles, but there was nothing at his house. And I called in at the Villa les Oliviers on the way back--same story."

  "And at Captain Sadat's house." Suddenly Vandam felt utterly drained. It seemed that Wolff outwitted him at every turn. It occurred to him that he might simply not be smart enough to catch this sly, evasive spy. "Perhaps we've lost," he said. He rubbed his face. He had not slept in the last twenty-four hours. He wondered what he was doing here, standing over the hideous corpse of Major Sandy Smith. There was no more to be learned from it. "I think I'll go home and sleep for an hour," he said. Jakes looked surprised. Vandam added: "It might help me think more clearly. This afternoon we'll interrogate all the prisoners again."

  "Very good, sir."

  Vandam walked back to his vehicle. Driving across the bridge from Zamalek to the mainland, he recalled that Sonja had mentioned one other possibility: Wolff's nomad cousins. He looked at the boats on the wide, slow river. The current took them downstream and the wind blew them upstream--a coincidence of enormous importance to Egypt. The boatmen were still using the single triangular sail, a design which had been perfected ... How long ago? Thousands of years, perhaps. So many things in this country were done the way they had been done for thousands of years. Vandam closed his eyes and saw Wolff, in a felucca, sailing upriver, manipulating the triangular sail with one hand while with the other he tapped out messages to Rommel on the transmitter. The car stopped suddenly and Vandam opened his eyes, realizing he had been daydreaming, or dozing. Why would Wolff go upriver? To find his nomad cousins. But who could tell where they would be? Wolff might be able to find them, if they followed some annual pattern in their wanderings.

  The jeep had stopped outside Vandam's house. He got out. "I want you to wait for me," he told the driver. "You'd better come in." He led the way into the house, then directed the driver to the kitchen. "My servant, Gaafar, will give you something to eat, so long as you don't treat him like a wog."

  "Thank you very much, sir," said the driver.

  There was a small stack of mail on the hall table. The top envelope had no stamp, and was addressed to Vandam in a vaguely familiar hand. It had "Urgent" scribbled in the top left-hand comer. Vandam picked it up.

  There was more he should do, he realized. Wolff could well be heading south now. Roadblocks should be set up at all major towns on the route. There should be someone at every stop on the railway line, looking for Wolff. And the river itself... There had to be some way of checking the river, in case Wolff really had gone by boat, as in the daydream. Vandam was finding it hard to concentrate. We could set up riverblocks on the same principle as roadblocks, he thought; why not? None of it would be any good if Wolff had simply gone to ground in Cairo. Suppose he were hiding in the cemeteries? Many Muslims buried their dead in tiny houses, and there were acres of such empty buildings in the city: Vandam would have needed a thousand men to search them all. Perhaps I should do it anyway, he thought. But Wolff might have gone north, toward Alexandria; or east or west into the desert ...

  He went into the drawing room, looki
ng for a letter opener. Somehow the search had to be narrowed down. Vandam did not have thousands of men at his disposal--they were all in the desert, fighting. He had to decide what was the best bet. He remembered where all this had started: Assyut. Perhaps he should contact Captain Newman in Assyut. That seemed to be where Wolff had come in from the desert, so maybe he would go out that way. Maybe his cousins were in that vicinity. Vandam looked indecisively at the telephone. Where was that damned letter opener? He went to the door and called: "Gaafar!" He came back into the room, and saw Billy's school atlas on a chair. It looked mucky. The boy had dropped it in a puddle, or something. He picked it up. It was sticky. Vandam realized there was blood on it. He felt as if he were in a nightmare. What was going on? No letter opener, blood on the atlas, nomads at Assyut ...

  Gaafar came in. Vandam said: "What's this mess?"

  Gaafar looked. "I'm sorry, sir, I don't know. They were looking at it while Captain Alexander was here--"

  "Who's they? Who's Captain Alexander?"

  "The officer you sent to take Billy to school, sir. His name was--"

  "Stop." A terrible fear cleared Vandam's brain in an instant. "A British Army captain came here this morning and took Billy away?"

  "Yes, sir, he took him to school. He said you sent him--"

  "Gaafar, I sent nobody."

  The servant's brown face turned gray.

  Vandam said: "Didn't you check that he was genuine?"

  "But, sir, Miss Fontana was with him, so it seemed all right."

  "Oh, my God." Vandam looked at the envelope in his hand. Now he knew why the handwriting was familiar: it was the same as that on the note that Wolff had sent to Elene. He ripped open the envelope. Inside was a message in the same hand:

  Dear Major Vandam,

  Billy is with me. Elene is taking care of him. He will be quite all right as long as I am safe. I advise you to stay where you are and do nothing. We do not make war on children, and I have no wish to harm the boy. All the same, the life of one child is as nothing beside the future of my two nations, Egypt and Germany; so be assured that if it suits my purpose I will kill Billy.

  Yours truly,

  Alex Wolff

  It was a letter from a madman: the polite salutations, the correct English, the semicolon, the attempt to justify the kidnapping of an innocent child ... Now Vandam knew that, somewhere deep down inside, Wolff was insane.

  And he had Billy.

  Vandam handed the note to Gaafar, who put on his spectacles with a shaky hand. Wolff had taken Elene with him when he left the houseboat. It would not have been difficult to coerce her into helping him: all he had to do was threaten Billy, and she would have been helpless. But what was the point of the kidnap, really? And where had they gone? And why the blood?

  Gaafar was weeping openly. Vandam said: "Who was hurt? Who was bleeding?"

  "There was no violence," Gaafar said. "I think Miss Fontana had cut her hand."

  And she had smeared blood on Billy's atlas and left it on the chair. It was a sign, a message of some kind. Vandam held the book in his hands and let it fall open. Immediately he saw the map of Egypt with a blotted red arrow roughly drawn. It pointed to Assyut.

  Vandam picked up the phone and dialed GHQ. When the switchboard answered he hung up. He thought: If I report this, what will happen? Bogge will order a squad of light infantry to arrest Wolff at Assyut. There will be a fight. Wolff will know he has lost, know he is to be shot for spying, not to mention kidnapping and murder--and what will he do then?

  He is insane, Vandam thought; he will kill my son.

  He felt paralyzed by fear. Of course that was what Wolff wanted, that was his aim in taking Billy, to paralyze Vandam. That was how kidnapping worked.

  If Vandam brought the Army in, there would be a shoot-out. Wolff might kill Billy out of mad spite. So there was only one option.

  Vandam had to go after them alone.

  "Get me two bottles of water," he told Gaafar. The servant went off. Vandam went into the hall and put on his motorcycle goggles, then found a scarf and wound it around his mouth and neck. Gaafar came from the kitchen with the bottles of water. Vandam left the house and went to his motorcycle. He put the bottles in the pannier and climbed on the bike. He kicked it into life and revved the engine. The fuel tank was full. Gaafar stood beside him, still weeping. Vandam touched the old man's shoulder. "I'll bring them back," he said. He rocked the bike off its stand, drove into the street and turned south.

  26

  MY GOD, THE STATION WAS A SHAMBLES. I SUPPOSE EVERYONE WANTS TO GET out of Cairo in case it gets bombed. No first-class seats on the trains to Palestine--not even standing room. The wives and children of the British are running like rats. Fortunately southbound trains are less in demand. The booking office still claimed there were no seats, but they always say that; a few piasters here and a few more there always gets a seat, or three. I was afraid I might lose Elene and the boy on the platform, among all the hundreds of peasants, barefoot in their dirty galabiyas, carrying boxes tied with string, chickens in crates, sitting on the platform eating their breakfast, a fat mother in black handing out boiled eggs and pita bread and caked rice to her husband and sons, cousins and daughters and in-laws; smart idea of mine, to hold the boy's hand--if I keep him close by, Elene will follow; smart idea, I have smart ideas, Christ I'm smart, smarter than Vandam, eat your heart out, Major Vandam, I've got your son. Somebody had a goat on a lead. Fancy taking a goat on a train ride. I never had to travel economy with the peasants and their goats. What a job, to clean the economy coach at the end of the journey, I wonder who does it, some poor fellah, a different breed, a different race, born slaves, thank God we got first-class seats, I travel first class through life, I hate dirt, God that station was dirty. Vendors on the platform: cigarettes, newspapers, a man with a huge basket of bread on his head. I like the women when they carry baskets on their heads, looking so graceful and proud, makes you want to do it to them there and then, standing up, I like women when they like to do it, when they lose their minds with pleasure, when they scream, Gesundheit! Look at Elene, sitting there beside the boy, so frightened, so beautiful, I want to do it with her again soon, forget Sonja, I'd like to do it with Elene right now, here on the train, in front of all these people, humiliate her, with Vandam's son watching, terrified, ha! Look at the mud-brick suburbs, houses leaning against one another for support, cows and sheep in the narrow dusty streets, I always wondered what they ate, those city sheep with their fat tails, where do they graze? No plumbing in those dark little houses beside the railway line. Women in the doorways peeling vegetables, sitting cross-legged on the dusty ground. Cats. So graceful, the cats. European cats are different, slower and much fatter; no wonder cats are sacred here, they are so beautiful, a kitten brings luck. The English like dogs. Disgusting animals, dogs: unclean, undignified, slobbering, fawning, sniffing. A cat is superior, and knows it. It is so important to be superior. One is a master or a slave. I hold my head up, like a cat; I walk about, ignoring the hoi polloi, intent on my own mysterious tasks, using people the way a cat uses its owner, giving no thanks and accepting no affection, taking what they offer as a right, not a gift. I'm a master, a German Nazi, an Egyptian Bedouin, a born ruler. How many hours to Assyut, eight, ten? Must move fast. Find Ishmael. He should be at the well, or not far away. Pick up the radio. Broadcast at midnight tonight. Complete British defense, what a coup, they'll give me medals. Germans in charge in Cairo. Oh, boy, we'll get the place into shape. What a combination, Germans and Egyptians, efficiency by day and sensuality by night, Teutonic technology and Bedouin savagery, Beethoven and hashish. If I can survive, make it to Assyut, contact Rommel; then Rommel can cross the last bridge, destroy the last line of defense, dash to Cairo, annihilate the British, what a victory that will be. If I can make it. What a triumph! What a triumph! What a triumph!

  I will not be sick, I will not be sick, I will not be sick. The train says it for me, rattling on the tracks. I'm too old t
o throw up on trains now, I used to do that when I was eight. Dad took me to Alexandria, bought me candy and oranges and lemonade, I ate too much, don't think about it, it makes me ill to think about it, Dad said it wasn't my fault it was his, but I always used to feel sick even if I didn't eat, today Elene bought chocolate but I said no, thanks, I'm pretty grown-up to say no to chocolate, kids never say no to chocolate, look, I can see the pyramids, one, two, and the little one makes three, this must be Giza. Where are we going? He was supposed to take me to school. Then he got out the knife. It's curved. He'll cut off my head, where's Dad? I should be in school, we have geography in the first period today, a test on the Norwegian fjords, I learned it all last night, I needn't have bothered, I've missed the test. They've already finished it by now, Mr. Johnstone collecting up the papers, You call that a map, Higgins? Looks more like a drawing of your ear, boy! Everybody laughs. Smythe can't spell Moskenstraumen. Write it fifty times, lad. Everyone is glad he isn't Smythe. Old Johnstone opens the textbook. Next, the Arctic tundra. I wish I was in school. I wish Elene would put her arm round me. I wish the man would stop looking at me, staring at me like that, so pleased with himself, I think he's crazy, where's Dad? If I don't think about the knife, it will be just as if it wasn't there. I mustn't think about the knife. If I concentrate on not thinking about the knife, that's the same as thinking about the knife. It's impossible to deliberately not think about something. How does anyone stop thinking of something? Accidentally. Accidental thoughts. All thoughts are accidental. There, I stopped thinking about the knife for a second. If I see a policeman, I'll rush up to him and yell Save me, save me! I'll be so quick that he won't be able to stop me. I can run like the wind, I'm quick. I might see an officer. I might see a general. I'll shout, Good morning, General! He'll look at me, surprised, and say Well, young fellow-me-lad, you're a fine boy! Pardon me, sir, I'll say, I'm Major Vandam's son, and this man is taking me away, and my father doesn't know, I'm sorry to trouble you, but I need help. What? says the general. Look here, sir, you can't do this to the son of a British officer! Not cricket, you know! Just clear off, d'you hear? Who the devil d'you think you are? And you needn't flash that little penknife at me, I've got a pistol! You're a brave lad, Billy. I'm a brave lad. All day men get killed in the desert. Bombs fall, Back Home. Ships in the Atlantic get sunk by U-boats, men fall into the icy water and drown. RAF chaps shot down over France. Everybody is brave. Chin up! Damn this war. That's what they say: Damn this war. Then they climb into the cockpit, hurry down the air-raid shelter, attack the next dune, fire torpedoes at the U-boats, write letters home. I used to think it was exciting. Now I know better. It isn't exciting at all. It makes you feel sick.