Williams avoided the lifts, walked down the stairs and back into the gents on the ground floor next to the bar. He tidied himself a little and then returned to finish his whisky. He’d been gone more than five minutes. Too long, but he was sure no one had got near to following him, even if they had already started to tail him. It would have been almost impossible to pick him up in the crowded bar and lobby in any case — if they’d ever got that far: the place was full of stuffed shirts for some ball, in scarlet cummerbunds, lowering quick brandies while their women prepared themselves in the ladies’ cloaks.
Williams envied their vulgar ease, their next few irresponsible hours, before he decided he might as well match it. He ordered himself a third whisky, an expensive Malt which he took neat. He didn’t want to go back to Flood Street. Not yet. For the moment, like a child playing truant, he felt safety lay in luxury, anonymity, distance — being far from school, leaning over the rim of a Knickerbocker Glory.
Then he went home, walking briskly across the evening park, glancing at the pickups — an exaggerated blonde on a bench — an exotic flower in the night; the commoner strolling troopers looking for beer money and a bed till reveille — inspected them professionally with perfectly concealed interest Yes, but not now. Not yet.
He poured a small glass of sherry for his mother. He couldn’t bear the stuff, even the smell of it; yet he’d liked it long ago. Something to do with his father? Another way of getting at him? The locked tantalus in the Thames Valley library; the butler had a second key and they’d taken gulps, at it together; another conspiracy, not long after the Russian doll. Or was it just that, with age, one required the ultimate refinement of the grape: fine, mellowed brandy? Williams amused himself with these sybaritic reflections on long-ago tastes and present passions — fiddling with memory, the panorama of his life, to no purpose — like an idle man on a pinball machine: dabbing in the shallows of thought.
He’d done his thinking for that day, he decided, come clear of the dangerous passages. Now it was time to merge into the background again. You had to know when to switch off. He’d have a drink round the corner in the Wellington: there was a new Guards battalion in town and rumour of two Swedish frigates on a courtesy visit just berthed below Tower Bridge …
The great thing to remember, he thought, if they were on to you, was to keep the pattern — exactly; no panic, do the things you’d always done, stick to type. That was what saved you. When the others lost their heads, broke faith and started running for the night ferry — you just carried on as you’d always done, doing the obvious thing. And then, if they were looking for you, they looked right through you. They never saw you at all.
9
Colonel Hamdy shook hands with Edwards and then took a seat next to him on one side of the desk. Major Amin, who had first questioned Edwards, joined them.
“I am sorry, Mr. Edwards. An unfortunate mistake.” The Major spoke in Arabic. Edwards sighed, ruffling back his hair. Fine. He’d have to have the ritual cup of coffee with them and then he’d be on his way.
“I’d no idea you were with us,” the Major continued, “until Colonel Hamdy told me. I’m with Home Security as you’ve probably realized. We don’t always know what our Foreign section are up to. My apologies.”
Colonel Hamdy nodded a happy confirmation of this, eased himself in his chair.
“How are you, Henry? I didn’t expect you back so soon. What have they sent you on?”
Edwards looked at the other officer.
“Go ahead. You can speak quite freely.”
“Well, I don’t know what’s going on with Mohammed Yunis. The thing is that I was sent out to make contact with him. We met on the plane quite by chance …’
The two men seemed to look at him more closely than they listened, as though his face might give them more of a clue to what had been going on than his words, which already sounded hollow and unconvincing.
“I was to approach Yunis, sound him out on his real views about the President and the possibility of my section infiltrating his Union — the idea was to form a fifth column around Marxist dissidents in the UAR — ”
“With the idea of overthrowing the President?”
“Yes. Though of course it hadn’t got beyond the early stages — of finding out what way Yunis might go. That was my job. A wild idea, I thought. But I had to pretend to go along with it. I’d no intention of contacting Yunis. As I said, it was quite by chance. He got on at Munich and took a seat next to me. What have you picked him up for?”
“He’s been chattering, talking with Moscow, making ‘unauthorized arrangements’.” The Colonel looked at Edwards closely. “After what you’ve said about being told to contact him, you don’t really expect me to believe you met him quite by chance on that plane, do you? The two of you seem to have been involved in exactly the same scheme — an ASU takeover here, a Moscow puppet government.”
“How could Holborn be involved with Moscow in a plan like that?”
“Because they see things the same way over this. East and West — they’d both like to see Nasser fall. Their interests are identical there. Another bit of collusion, I’d say. You’d better think up a stronger reason than coincidence, Henry. What were you really doing on that plane with Yunis? Oughtn’t we to talk about it?”
He glared at Henry, and then at the Major. Getting Edwards away from him was like taking sweets off a child.
They drove to the new Military Hospital outside Cairo on the Nile road that led to Maadi. Colonel Hamdy sat in front, half turned towards Edwards, his arm stretched behind the driver’s back.
“Why the hospital, Hamdy? What’s the point? Truth drugs or something? I’ve told you the truth already.”
The Colonel looked out into the darkness, at the yellow light flickering here and there on the water from small fires built in the sterns of feluccas going southwards, their huge lateen sails just visible against the sky as they moved with infinite slowness upstream.
“This isn’t a matter for the ordinary police, or Home Security. It’s just between us for the moment.”
They pulled round to the back of the main hospital building and walked away from it to a group of smaller, half-finished buildings which ran down in two lines to one of the many irrigation canals which drained the area: a flat landscape of berseem fields and market vegetables, as far as Edwards could make out, a mile or two before Maadi, laid out beneath the white pile of the Mokattam Hills just visible with the lights of the Casino high up in the far background. Edwards knew exactly where he was; the canal almost certainly was the one that followed the Bab el LukHelwan railway, which went past the station at Maadi, bordered the playing fields at Albert College and dipped round half a mile to the west of Bridget’s house.
Edwards and the Colonel went inside one of the new buildings, with light flexes hanging out of the plaster and a smell of limewash everywhere. Two expensively dressed men in the hallway stood up, led them to a room more finished than the others (they’d already managed a photograph of the President on one wall) and coffees were ordered.