“… I’m afraid the economic outlook is not bright — a hard currency crisis … I feel our real hope lies with Moscow. Unfortunately they are not prepared to consider any more barter deals. They want something better than that, nearly all our cotton, which of course would give them a financial stranglehold, something which the President naturally is not prepared to consider. The canal and tourist currency …? No one knows where it goes to — to the Army in some shape or form, for sure. They get everything in Egypt nowadays. We are in trouble …”
Edwards nodded his head sagely, still thinking about other times, as if he were chatting with some knowledgeable but boring economist from the Financial Times in El Vino: until he realized that no Egyptian, least of all someone in Yunis’s position, had ever talked to him with such bluntness, and would never do so, except for the most appalling reason.
He looked round at Yunis sharply, sensing in his words, not the scoop that would have otherwise occurred to him, but something dangerously candid, a frantic upset in the whole temper of Egyptian official life, in the rigidly secretive attitudes of Cairo officialdom with which he was so familiar.
Yunis looked at Edwards quizzically, as though he’d failed to understand something very simple, something obvious, behind his words.
“What do you mean — ‘We’re in trouble’?”
Edwards was calm, but only through an effort born of long practice; the empty, windless feeling in his stomach and the sudden consciousness of sweat rising up the back of his neck giving him sure warning before his mind had told him anything.
“Just what I said. The doors are locked. I’m sure they are. They do it from the outside.”
The questions in Yunis’s face disappeared in crinkly lines which spread up his cheek and over his eyes, just the beginnings of a wan smile, as though he were congratulating himself on having at last made himself clear to Edwards.
When thought flooded back a moment later it was about Williams. Why had he arranged for Yunis to pick him up? And he saw Yunis in a policeman’s uniform for a second, as a London bobby in a tall black helmet: it wasn’t possible. And then as the car drew in past the main gates of the Armour depot and barracks in Heliopolis and Yunis was frog-marched in front of him towards a group of old Nissen huts, he realized that Yunis was the victim, not he, that he’d just been taken along for the ride.
Certainly Edwards was more than an embarrassment to the Major who met them at the entrance of the building, which must have been exactly Yunis’s intention, the partitions in the hut were far too thin to allow any immediate rough stuff to go undetected.
“Who is he?” the Major spoke abruptly in Arabic to one of a group of men in civilian clothes who had drawn up behind them in a car a few minutes afterwards. Edwards had noticed the man among the crowd of journalists who’d flocked around Yunis’s car at the airport — a particularly compact, tough little man with an acid expression and tooth-brush moustache: an upright swagger — one of the President’s personal security men, Edwards thought, an élite corps of some fifty or so people, most of them junior colleagues of the President during his Army days, and now his Praetorian guard.
“Well? Who is it?”
“A British journalist. We’ve got his papers.”
“What’s his connection — with — ” the Major paused, but admitted — “His Excellency?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who does he work for?”
“There’s no mention of any paper. Visa through the Press section of the London Embassy. He’s been here often before. Arab affairs. Middle East expert …”
The officer looked across at Edwards with a completely blank expression, as if attempting some complex mental arithmetic which would connect Edwards with Yunis, and failing to add up the figures he became angry.
“A journalist? Middle East expert — but how? Why here at this moment? Explain.”
“Yunis joined him on the flight. After Munich. Wanted him along for protection. He must have known we were going to pick him up. It’s obvious.”
The swagger man licked his moustache and pursed his lips aggressively, pulling his rank in Nasser’s secret army; he wasn’t going to be browbeaten by any mere officer in uniform.
“There was nothing to do about it. Yunis offered him a lift back to the city. We had to let him go along with him. There would have been trouble — passengers, the press — he was surrounded; we couldn’t have pulled him at the airport. You knew that. And it doesn’t matter. Just a freelance. They won’t be looking for him in London. We can keep him. We’ll have to.”
Edwards looked across to where Yunis was standing by the opposite wall, between two officers, his neat black briefcase by his feet, mopping his face, still holding a copy of the Economist under his arm like any weary stockbroker waiting for the 5:25 at Waterloo. A weary but somehow contented man as he returned Edwards’s look with another of his brief miniature smiles.
Behind him was a window and through it Edwards could see a group of soldiers in singlets and black underpants playing soccer in the first coolness of the day and some others hanging up their laundry and boxing each other good-naturedly about the ears. It was evening and in another half hour it would be quite dark with stars, and Edwards longed with sharpness for the bath and the terraced room smelling of hot plaster looking out over the river in the Semiramis, and the meal on the roof restaurant later on, at one of the small tables with their Edwardian lamps next to the parapet: the first taste again, which he missed even after a few weeks, of the spongy flat bread, the moist tartness of the local cheese which he ordered specially, and the purple Omar Khayyam from Gianaclis’s vineyards outside Alexandria — wanted it sharply, for he knew it wasn’t going to happen that night and, like sex, he wanted it then, right away.
He thought how he’d tailored his pleasures in life to the few he knew without question he could always have, to unadventurous things he could rely on: not happiness or girls in night clubs or the long-awaited letter. He’d accepted long ago that these things didn’t work: the letter never came, the girl had someone else. And it was happiness enough just to know that these things were so, to be sure of them.
The intense flavour of certain tastes and places — and the feeling of ease in a strange land, these were the diversions he’d come to take for granted, which depended on him alone, which were really his life, and he cursed again the profession which had encouraged such dilettante pursuits in him over the years and had now, just as haphazardly, withdrawn them.
His mouth was dry and salty and he felt dizzy as if he’d swum a long way without pleasure. He began to wonder what role he should play now and the thought made him feel sick. But when he spoke it was with bruised conviction, an actor coming midway into the lines of an old and well-remembered character.
“Do you think I might have a drink of water?” His tone was pompous and old-fashioned and very English, jumping a class into the outraged accents of someone who believed wogs began at Dover and had never known another tongue. It was as well to preserve that fiction as long as possible. The Major turned from the doorway and gestured to the man next to Yunis.
“Take him.” Yunis was led away down a corridor.
“I’m sorry. There has been a mistake. Come.” The Major pointed to a seat in his own room, without ceremony or abruptness, but mystified, thinking.
“A mistake …” He pushed a bell on his desk.
“That’s what I was going to say. You’ve taken the words out of my mouth.”