World War II Thriller Collection (5 page)

“Five o'clock, for tea.”

Vandam was professionally interested: it was an occasion at which Egyptians might pick up service gossip, and service gossip sometimes included information useful to the enemy. “I'll come,” he said.

“Splendid. I'll see you there.” She turned away.

“I look forward to it,” Vandam said to her back. He watched her walk away, wondering what she wore under the hospital coat. She was trim, elegant and self-possessed: she reminded him of his wife.

He entered his office. He had no intention of organizing a cricket practice, and he had no intention of forgetting about the Assyut murder. Bogge could go to hell. Vandam would go to work.

First he spoke again to Captain Newman, and told him to make sure the description of Alex Wolff got the widest possible circulation.

He called the Egyptian police and confirmed that they would be checking the hotels and flophouses of Cairo today.

He contacted Field Security, a unit of the prewar Canal Defense Force, and asked them to step up their spot checks on identity papers for a few days.

He told the British paymaster general to keep a special watch for forged currency.

He advised the wireless listening service to be alert for a new, local transmitter; and thought briefly how useful it would be if the boffins ever cracked the problem of locating a radio by monitoring its broadcasts.

Finally he detailed a sergeant on his staff to visit every radio shop in Lower Egypt—there were not many—and ask them to report any sales of parts and equipment which might be used to make or repair a transmitter.

Then he went to the Villa les Oliviers.

 

The house got its name from a small public garden across the street where a grove of olive trees was now in bloom, shedding white petals like dust onto the dry brown grass.

The house had a high wall broken by a heavy, carved wooden gate. Using the ornamentation for footholds, Vandam climbed over the gate and dropped on the other side to find himself in a large courtyard. Around him the white-washed walls were smeared and grubby, their windows blinded by closed, peeling shutters. He walked to the center of the courtyard and looked at the stone fountain. A bright-green lizard darted across the dry bowl.

The place had not been lived in for at least a year.

Vandam opened a shutter, broke a pane of glass, reached through to unfasten the window, and climbed over the sill into the house.

It did not look like the home of a European, he thought as he walked through the dark cool rooms. There were no hunting prints on the walls, no neat rows of bright-jacketed novels by Agatha Christie and Dennis Wheatley, no three-piece suite imported from Maples or Harrods. Instead the place was furnished with large cushions and low tables, handwoven rugs and hanging tapestries.

Upstairs he found a locked door. It took him three or four minutes to kick it open. Behind it there was a study.

The room was clean and tidy, with a few pieces of rather luxurious furniture: a wide, low divan covered in velvet, a hand-carved coffee table, three matching antique lamps, a bearskin rug, a beautifully inlaid desk and a leather chair.

On the desk were a telephone, a clean white blotter, an ivoryhandled pen and a dry inkwell. In the desk drawer Vandam found company reports from Switzerland, Germany and the United States. A delicate beaten-copper coffee service gathered dust on the little table. On a shelf behind the desk were books in several languages: nineteenth-century French novels, the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, a volume of what appeared to Vandam to be Arabic poetry, with erotic illustrations, and the Bible in German.

There were no personal documents.

There were no letters.

There was not a single photograph in the house.

Vandam sat in the soft leather chair behind the desk and looked around the room. It was a masculine room, the home of a cosmopolitan intellectual, a man who was on the one hand careful, precise and tidy and on the other hand sensitive and sensual.

Vandam was intrigued.

A European name, a totally Arabic house. A pamphlet about investing in business machines, a book of Arab verse. An antique coffee jug and a modern telephone. A wealth of information about a character, but not a single clue which might help find the man.

The room had been carefully cleaned out.

There should have been bank statements, bills from tradesmen, a birth certificate and a will, letters from a lover and photographs of parents or children. The man had collected all those things and taken them away, leaving no trace of his identity, as if he knew that one day someone would come looking for him.

Vandam said aloud: “Alex Wolff, who are you?”

He got up from the chair and left the study. He walked through the house and across the hot, dusty courtyard. He climbed back over the gate and dropped into the street. Across the road an Arab in a green-striped galabiya sat cross-legged on the ground in the shade of the olive trees, watching Vandam incuriously. Vandam felt no impulse to explain that he had broken into the house on official business: the uniform of a British officer was authority enough for just about anything in this town. He thought of the other sources from which he could seek information about the owner of this house: municipal records, such as they were; local tradesmen who might have delivered there when the place was occupied; even the neighbors. He would put two of his men on to it, and tell Bogge some story to cover up. He climbed onto his motorcycle and kicked it into life. The engine roared enthusiastically, and Vandam drove away.

FULL OF ANGER AND DESPAIR WOLFF SAT OUTSIDE HIS HOME AND WATCHED THE British officer drive away.

He remembered the house as it had been when he was a boy, loud with talk and laughter and life. There by the great carved gate there had always been a guard, a black-skinned giant from the south, sitting on the ground, impervious to the heat. Each morning a holy man, old and almost blind, would recite a chapter from the Koran in the courtyard. In the cool of the arcade on three sides the men of the family would sit on low divans and smoke their hubble-bubbles while servant boys brought coffee in long-necked jugs. Another black guard stood at the door to the harem, behind which the women grew bored and fat. The days were long and warm, the family was rich and the children were indulged.

The British officer, with his shorts and his motorcycle, his arrogant face and his prying eyes hidden in the shadow of the peaked uniform cap, had broken in and violated Wolff's childhood. Wolff wished he could have seen the man's face, for he would like to kill him one day.

He had thought of this place all through his journey. In Berlin and Tripoli and El Agela, in the pain and exhaustion of the desert crossing, in the fear and haste of his flight from Assyut, the villa had represented a safe haven, a place to rest and get clean and whole again at the end of the voyage. He had looked forward to lying in the bath and sipping coffee in the courtyard and bringing women home to the great bed.

Now he would have to go away and stay away.

He had remained outside all morning, alternately walking the street and sitting under the olive trees, just in case Captain Newman should have remembered the address and sent somebody to search the house; and he had bought a galabiya in the souk beforehand, knowing that if someone did come they would be looking for a European, not an Arab.

It had been a mistake to show genuine papers. He could see that with hindsight. The trouble was, he mistrusted Abwehr forgeries. Meeting and working with other spies he had heard horror stories about crass and obvious errors in the documents made by German Intelligence: botched printing, inferior-quality paper, even misspellings of common English words. In the spy school where he had been sent for his wireless cipher course the current rumor had been that every policeman in England knew that a certain series of numbers on a ration card identified the holder as a German spy.

Wolff had weighed the alternatives and picked what seemed the least risky. He had been wrong, and now he had no place to go.

He stood, picked up his cases and began to walk.

He thought of his family. His mother and his stepfather were dead, but he had three stepbrothers and a stepsister in Cairo. It would be hard for them to hide him. They would be questioned as soon as the British realized the identity of the owner of the villa, which might be today; and while they might tell lies for his sake, their servants would surely talk. Furthermore, he could not really trust them, for when his stepfather had died, Alex as the oldest son had got the house as well as a share of the inheritance, although he was European and an adopted, rather than natural, son. There had been some bitterness, and meetings with lawyers; Alex had stood firm and the others had never really forgiven him.

He considered checking in to Shepheard's Hotel. Unfortunately the police were sure to think of that, too: Shepheard's would by now have the description of the Assyut murderer. The other major hotels would have it soon. That left the pensions. Whether they were warned depended on how thorough the police wanted to be. Since the British were involved, the police might feel obliged to be meticulous. Still, the managers of small guesthouses were often too busy to pay a lot of attention to nosy policemen.

He left the Garden City and headed downtown: The streets were even more busy and noisy than when he had left Cairo. There were countless uniforms—not just British but Australian, New Zealand, Polish, Yugoslav, Palestinian, Indian and Greek. The slim, pert Egyptian girls in their cotton frocks and heavy jewelry competed successfully with their red-faced, dispirited European counterparts. Among the older women it seemed to Wolff that fewer wore the traditional black robe and veil. The men still greeted one another in the same exuberant fashion, swinging their right arms outward before bringing their hands together with a loud clap, shaking hands for at least a minute or two while grasping the shoulder of the other with the left hand and talking excitedly. The beggars and peddlers were out in force, taking advantage of the influx of naïve Europeans. In his galabiya Wolff was immune, but the foreigners were besieged by cripples, women with fly-encrusted babies, shoeshine boys and men selling everything from secondhand razor blades to giant fountain pens guaranteed to hold six months' supply of ink.

The traffic was worse. The slow, verminous trams were more crowded than ever, with passengers clinging precariously to the outside from a perch on the running board, crammed into the cab with the driver and sitting cross-legged on the roof. The buses and taxis were no better: there seemed to be a shortage of vehicle parts, for so many of the cars had broken windows, flat tires and ailing engines, and were lacking headlights or windshield wipers. Wolff saw two taxis—an elderly Morris and an even older Packard—which had finally stopped running and were now being drawn by donkeys. The only decent cars were the monstrous American limousines of the wealthy pashas and the occasional prewar English Austin. Mixing with the motor vehicles in deadly competition were the horse-drawn gharries, the mule carts of the peasants, and the livestock—camels, sheep and goats—which were banned from the city center by the most unenforceable law on the Egyptian statute book.

And the noise—Wolff had forgotten the noise.

The trams rang their bells continuously. In traffic jams all the cars hooted all the time, and when there was nothing to hoot at they hooted on general principles. Not to be outdone, the drivers of carts and camels yelled at the tops of their voices. Many shops and all cafés blared Arab music from cheap radios turned to full volume. Street vendors called continually and pedestrians told them to go away. Dogs barked and circling kites screamed overhead. From time to time it would all be swamped by the roar of an airplane.

This is my town, Wolff thought; they can't catch me here.

There were a dozen or so well-known pensions catering for tourists of different nationalities: Swiss, Austrian, German, Danish and French. He thought of them and rejected them as too obvious. Finally he remembered a cheap lodging house run by nuns at Bulaq, the port district. It catered mainly for the sailors who came down the Nile in steam tugs and feluccas laden with cotton, coal, paper and stone. Wolff could be sure he would not get robbed, infected or murdered, and nobody would think to look for him there.

As he headed out of the hotel district the streets became a little less crowded, but not much. He could not see the river itself, but occasionally he glimpsed, through the huddled buildings, the high triangular sail of a felucca.

The hostel was a large, decaying building which had once been the villa of some pasha. There was now a bronze crucifix over the arch of the entrance. A black-robed nun was watering a tiny bed of flowers in front of the building. Through the arch Wolff saw a cool quiet hall. He had walked several miles today, with his heavy cases: he looked forward to a rest.

Two Egyptian policemen came out of the hostel.

Wolff took in the wide leather belts, the inevitable sunglasses and the military haircuts in a swift glance, and his heart sank. He turned his back on the men and spoke in French to the nun in the garden. “Good day, Sister.”

She unbent from her watering and smiled at him. “Good day.” She was shockingly young. “Do you want lodgings?”

“No lodgings. Just your blessing.”

The two policemen approached, and Wolff tensed, preparing his answers in case they should question him, considering which direction he should take if he had to run away; then they went past, arguing about a horse race.

“God bless you,” said the nun.

Wolff thanked her and walked on. It was worse than he had imagined. The police must be checking
everywhere
. Wolff's feet were sore now, and his arms ached from carrying the luggage. He was disappointed, and also a little indignant, for everything in this town was notoriously haphazard, yet it seemed they were mounting an efficient operation just for him. He doubled back, heading for the city center again. He was beginning to feel as he had in the desert, as if he had been walking forever without getting anywhere. ,