‘Indeed, that is true, little sweetheart.’ I leaned to kiss my startled little girl. ‘Is there a point, Mrs Cornelius, to alienating the man upon whom all our fortunes now depend? We must surely be diplomatic.’
‘There’s a diffrence, in my opinion, between diplomacy an’ total surrendah.’ She shrugged, dismissing the topic.
I was not at that point especially interested in these social nuances. ‘I have astonishing news, Mrs Cornelius! I have seen my old friend - our old friend, Esmé - Count Nikolai Petroff!’
‘Kolya!’ Esmé’s eyes grew large first with delight and then, I thought, with alarm. She frowned. ‘Why is he here? With Sir Ranalf?’
‘He has nothing to do with Sir Ranalf. Shura mentioned his business in Cairo. I told you.’
‘He was not in Tripoli?’
‘No - in Alexandria. And now in Luxor. I will ask at the desk to see if he is staying here. Won’t it be marvellous if he is!’
Esmé seemed confused and before she could reply burst suddenly into smiles at someone else’s approach from behind me. ‘Sir Ranalf! How pleasant!’
‘My dear! My dears! My good companions! How perfectly wonderful to find you all together! My three stars! I have come to ask a favour.’ The weighty baronet paused to mop beneath his hat.
Mrs Cornelius withdrew into a cloud of perfumed pink silk, her cloche casting a shadow, like a veil, across her face until only her narrowed eyes were faintly distinguishable. Seemingly oblivious of her dislike Sir Ranalf again raised his panama, put away his handkerchief, kissed their fingers and clapped me upon my shoulder. For my part, I was impatient to leave, to discover Kolya’s whereabouts. ‘I have just come from our good Director’s company.’ Sir Ranalf waved a chubby hand to indicate how he had been communing with the somewhat difficult genius. ‘And we are to begin shooting tomorrow in the Valley of the Kings. Which means we must all be up by five in the morning and, I fear, on our way by six.’
‘For the light, I suppose,’ said Esmé with a miserable gasp.
‘My tender bud - for the heat! It will be unbearable by ten. Only the natives work after lunch. The light? The light is always perfect. Thanks to our influential friends we have received special permission to film in the Valley and its surrounds. This means we will not be troubled by random tourists. Some of my business partners in town have been of considerable help to us.’
Until now we had been unaware of Sir Ranalf’s partners, but were not particularly surprised to hear of them. His understanding of the politics and customs of this country was considerable and no doubt he had diplomatically included some local members of the Egyptian Society on his board, so ensuring us a carte blanche amongst the monuments. Our affairs were in the hands of a clever and practical man who, for all his dandyism and his affectation, clearly had a cool brain. I saw him as one of those people who like to present a misleading idea of themselves to the world. Mrs Cornelius, after all, supplied no evidence for her prejudice against him and I had not yet learned how much to respect her judgement. Today, I would follow it without question. Then, I was merely uncomfortable when she sniffed at Sir Ranalf’s statement that he was in a dilemma for the evening. He needed, he said, a female escort, someone to impress his partners with her wit, beauty and talent. His smile upon my little girl was the smile of a good-hearted patriarch. ‘We have to be up early tomorrow, of course, so the night would not go on for very long.’ He turned humorously pleading eyes to me. ‘I would bring her back before midnight, good Sir Max, I promise. She would be such an asset! She could double our budget.’
My mind upon Kolya, I was only too pleased to be relieved of my sweetheart’s company. After all, it might take me all evening to find Kolya.
‘It would make such a wonderful impression, if I could introduce my friends to our leading lady.’ He bowed. This brought Mrs Cornelius to her feet with a disgusted snort to rival a camel’s. ‘I think I’ll go back ter me cabin an’ git art o’ these cloves,’ she said. ‘It’s really gettin’ a bit niffy, orl in orl, doncha fink, Ivan?’
I wished I had given her more support, but I was in her wake, heading for the reception desk, as she moved with dignified fury towards the electric lift. I understood her fury. She, not Esmé, was the featured star. Now she saw she had lost her last chance to appear in a romance with Barrymore, Gilbert or Valentino. Doubtless because of confusing messages from Goldfish, Sir Ranalf seemed a little unclear about the man’s identity. Irené Gay’s part would be nothing like as large as Gloria Cornish’s. While I had every sympathy for Mrs Cornelius, my attention was still upon my missing comrade and I did not want to lose my momentum. By the time the receptionist was able to check the register for me and tell me with fulsome regret that Prince Petroff was not yet with the Winter Palace, Mrs Cornelius was gone. I turned back to ask where a gentleman might otherwise stay and after a pause it was suggested I try the Karnak or, failing that, perhaps the Grand.
Luxor is not a large town and consists primarily of her ruins and her tourist establishments. Most of the good hotels were close to one another along the corniche and it took no more than half-an-hour to enquire if they had Kolya as a guest. Soon it became clear that even if he were staying in Luxor, my old comrade was not registered under his own name. It then occurred to me he might well be staying with one of the British officials so I set off for the Consulate. This proved to be a fairly unremarkable house surrounded by a high wall. When I asked at the gate for the Consul, I was told he would not be available until the next day. When I asked if they had any news of a Count Nikolai Petroff the concierge scratched his head and let his jaw hang in a pantomime of idiocy which was the local way of bringing a line of enquiry to a halt. I told him I could not come back tomorrow morning, that I would be working, but this failed to impress him. Eventually I returned to the centre of the town to ask after my friend at the smaller pensions until an English police sergeant, who had been chatting with the Greek proprietor of a small rooming-house behind the Telegraph Office, had a joke with me about looking for a Russian spy, at which point I realised I was in danger of betraying my friend. I decided instead to seek Sir Ranalf Steeton’s help and refrained from visiting every steamboat moored at the various quays along the corniche. By now it was dark and most of the shops had closed. There was some sort of curfew the British insisted upon, although the cafes and more respectable places were allowed to remain open, their candle-lanterns and oil-lamps casting a wonderful glow across the little alleys and cobbled squares. A sort of lazy tranquillity settled upon the town and by ten o’clock the tourists were gone and the only white faces belonged to a few soldiers on leave. The cafes remained full of local men and I chose one of the cleanest whose view of the street went down as far as the corniche and the green glow of the river. I ordered coffee of the thick, sweet Turkish type, and forced myself to relax, to watch. But Kolya still did not pass by. Reluctant to get into conversation, I was nonetheless eventually joined by two fluent Egyptian English-speakers, in well-cut suits and neat tarbooshes. They were from Alexandria, with business in Aswan, and had a scheme to reproduce the ruins of Luxor in a special park in Cairo, ‘for those tourists without the time to go up the Nile’. This scheme has been initiated since in Italy and Greece, but the Egyptian Government, such as it was, never displayed much initiative in encouraging local enterprise. They preferred merely to talk, to engage in empty rhetoric blaming all their ills on the British as earlier they had blamed the Turks. Suez was the last attempt of a British government to follow the urges of idealism rather than expediency, but the Egyptian had to extend the blame to a more general conspiracy of ‘imperialists’. Their flirtations with the Bolsheviks were, I suppose, inevitable. But these people make and break alliances faster than a Borgia prince - faster, indeed, than Adolf Hitler, whose example they all once sought to follow. That was never a quality of Hitler’s I admired.