He headed for the Old City. Passing a sign saying, OUT OF BOUNDS TO TROOPS, he entered the Birka. In the narrow streets and alleys the women sat on steps and leaned from windows, smoking and waiting for customers, chatting to the military police. Some of them spoke to Vandam, offering their bodies in English, French and Italian. He turned into a little lane, crossed a deserted courtyard and entered an unmarked open doorway.
He climbed the staircase and knocked at a door on the first floor. A middle-aged Egyptian woman opened it. He paid her five pounds and went in.
In a large, dimly lit inner room furnished with faded luxury, he sat on a cushion and unbuttoned his shirt collar. A young woman in baggy trousers passed him the nargileh. He took several deep lungfuls of hashish smoke. Soon a pleasant feeling of lethargy came over him. He leaned back on his elbows and looked around. In the shadows of the room there were four other men. Two were pashas—wealthy Arab landowners—sitting together on a divan and talking in low, desultory tones. A third, who seemed almost to have been sent to sleep by the hashish, looked English and was probably an officer like Vandam. The fourth sat in the comer talking to one of the girls. Vandam heard snatches of conversation and gathered that the man wanted to take the girl home, and they were discussing a price. The man was vaguely familiar, but Vandam, drunk and now doped too, could not get his memory in gear to recall who he was.
One of the girls came over and took Vandam’s hand. She led him into an alcove and drew the curtain. She took off her halter. She had small brown breasts. Vandam stroked her cheek. In the candlelight her face changed constantly, seeming old, then very young, then predatory, then loving. At one point she looked like Joan Abuthnot. But finally, as he entered her, she looked like Elene.
5
ALEX WOLFF WORE A GALABIYA AND A FEZ AND STOOD THIRTY YARDS FROM THE gate of GHQ-British headquarters—selling paper fans which broke after two minutes of use.
The hue and cry had died down. He had not seen the British conducting a spot check on identity papers for a week. This Vandam character could not keep up the pressure indefinitely.
Wolff had gone to GHQ as soon as he felt reasonably safe. Getting into Cairo had been a triumph; but it was useless unless he could exploit the position to get the information Rommel wanted—and quickly. He recalled his brief interview with Rommel in Gialo. The Desert Fox did not look foxy at all. He was a small, tireless man with the face of an aggressive peasant: a big nose, a downturned mouth, a cleft chin, a jagged scar on his left cheek, his hair cut so short that none showed beneath the rim of his cap. He had said: “Numbers of troops, names of divisions, in the field and in reserve, state of training. Numbers of tanks, in the field and in reserve, state of repair. Supplies of ammunition, food and gasoline. Personalities and attitudes of commanding officers. Strategic and tactical intentions. They say you’re good, Wolff. They had better be right.”
It was easier said than done.
There was a certain amount of information Wolff could get just by walking around the city. He could observe the uniforms of the soldiers on leave and listen to their talk, and that told him which troops had been where and when they were going back. Sometimes a sergeant would mention statistics of dead and wounded, or the devastating effect of the 88-millimeter guns—designed as antiaircraft weapons—which the Germans had fitted to their tanks. He had heard an army mechanic complain that thirty-nine of the fifty new tanks which arrived yesterday needed major repairs before going into service. All this was useful information which could be sent to Berlin, where. Intelligence analysts would put it together with other snippets in order to form a big picture. But it was not what Rommel wanted.
Somewhere inside GHQ there were pieces of paper which said things like: “After resting and refitting, Division A, with 100 tanks and full supplies, will leave Cairo tomorrow and join forces with Division B at the C Oasis in preparation for the counterattack west of D next Saturday at dawn.”
It was those pieces of paper Wolff wanted.
That was why he was selling fans outside GHQ.
For their headquarters the British had taken over a number of the large houses—most of them owned by pashas—in the Garden City suburb. (Wolff was grateful that the Villa les Oliviers had escaped the net.) The commandeered homes were surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. People in uniform were passed quickly through the gate, but civilians were stopped and questioned at length while the sentries made phone calls to verify credentials.
There were other headquarters in other buildings around the city—the Semiramis Hotel housed something called British Troops in Egypt, for example—but this was GHQ Middle East, the power-house. Wolff had spent a lot of time, back in the Abwehr spy school, learning to recognize uniforms, regimental identification marks and the faces of literally hundreds of senior British officers. Here, several mornings running, he had observed the large staff cars arriving and had peeked through the windows to see colonels, generals, admirals, squadron leaders and the commander in chief, Sir Claude Auchinleck, himself. They all looked a little odd, and he was puzzled until he realized that the pictures of them which he had burned into his brain were in black and white, and now he was seeing them for the first time in color.
The General Staff traveled by car, but their aides walked. Each morning the captains and majors arrived on foot, carrying their little briefcases. Toward noon—after the regular morning conference, Wolff presumed—some of them left, still carrying their briefcases.
Each day Wolff followed one of the aides.
Most of the aides worked at GHQ, and their secret papers would be locked up in the office at the end of the day. But these few were men who had to be at GHQ for the morning conference, but had their own offices in other parts of the city; and they had to carry their briefing papers with them in between one office and another. One of them went to the Semiramis. Two went to the barracks in the Nasr el-Nil. A fourth went to an unmarked building in the Shari Suleiman Pasha.
Wolff wanted to get into those briefcases.
Today he would do a dry run.
Waiting under the blazing sun for the aides to come out, he thought about the night before, and a smile curled the comers of his mouth below the newly grown mustache. He had promised Sonja that he would find her another Fawzi. Last night he had gone to the Birka and picked out a girl at Madame Fahmy’s establishment. She was not a Fawzi—that girl had been a real enthusiast—but she was a good temporary substitute. They had enjoyed her in turn, then together; then they had played Sonja’s weird, exciting games ... It had been a long night.
When the aides came out, Wolff followed the pair that went to the barracks.
A minute later Abdullah emerged from a café and fell into step beside him.
“Those two?” Abdullah said. “Those two.”
Abdullah was a fat man with a steel tooth. He was one of the richest men in Cairo, but unlike most rich Arabs he did not ape the Europeans. He wore sandals, a dirty robe and a fez. His greasy hair curled around his ears and his fingernails were black. His wealth came not from land, like the pashas‘, nor from trade, like the Greeks’. It came from crime.
Abdullah was a thief.
Wolff liked him. He was sly, deceitful, cruel, generous, and always laughing: for Wolff he embodied the age-old vices and virtues of the Middle East. His army of children, grandchildren, nephews, nieces and second cousins had been burgling houses and picking pockets in Cairo for thirty years. He had tentacles everywhere: he was a hashish wholesaler, he had influence with politicians, and he owned half the houses in the Birka, including Madame Fahmy’s. He lived in a large crumbling house in the Old City with his four wives.