“Well, you’re out of Major Amin’s tender care. Now, tell me, what did Williams send you here for?”
“To see if Yunis would jump. I’ve told you, for God’s sake. A mad idea. I knew Williams was on to me — ”
“But if he was on to you, he’d hardly have let you go like that, straight back to your friends. Unless he wanted to be rid of you — I mean, dispose of you, kill you — if, as you say, he’d found out you were really working for us. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Perhaps he expected somebody else to get rid of me. The Israelis perhaps. He could have blown me to the Israelis — they have their men in Cairo after all. They’d have willingly done the job for him — if he’d told them I had their names here or something.”
“So, what happened?”
“I met Yunis, of course — or rather, he met me, latched on to me as a kind of hostage, arranged to stick with me all the way: on the plane, at the airport, then the bullet-proof car to Heliopolis. They haven’t had a chance to get me yet.”
The Colonel nodded his head, thinking how exactly that had been the plan. Edwards had been the target all right; the Holborn defector with the names of his circle in Egypt, the tip-off he’d had from Tel Aviv. And he was playing it well now, suggesting the truth in the most off-hand way imaginable so that it would appear entirely unlikely. He still had those names and even if his involvement with Yunis had been pure coincidence, it meant simply that the names were for someone else.
Perhaps Edwards, staring with such a bewildered look across the table at him now, had his own name, trembling for utterance on his lips. And then again, the Colonel thought, perhaps he’s given Yunis my name already. One should always assume the worst in this business. And the immediate corollary was that he should get clear at all costs, this instant, run for his life out of Egypt.
And then he knew what had been in the back of his mind all the time, what he hadn’t been facing: he didn’t want to leave Egypt, and the logic of that followed equally quickly: he was a bad double. Tel Aviv wasn’t getting value any more, the goods they’d agreed on years before were shoddy now, not the same quality. He hadn’t changed sides; he hadn’t betrayed Israel, he just wasn’t really interested in it any more and he felt he’d only managed to betray himself with any real skill over the years.
It simply hadn’t been worth it, he thought. In his sort of work you had to have an anvil of belief — in a people better than others, in one country above another, in a first idea against a second. But one could lose faith in a country like a dripping tap and find the tank quite empty one morning. Whatever was fine in it hadn’t helped you — as an exile, living outside its borders, its spirit hadn’t come across to make one day better than another; the days had got worse and you knew the land you worked for wasn’t in your bones.
He’d worked for the British, as an intelligence officer attached to the Eighth Army. He was Jewish, he’d been born in Egypt and after the war he had worked for the Israelis. But he’d spent his life in Egypt and had never ceased to enjoy the place: the people and the river, the remains of so many empires, so much crumbling thought. He’d liked it better, far better, than the few glimpses he’d had of his own adopted country — which he remembered mostly as a new and raw place, full of emptiness and ambition. The land had reeked of fresh concrete: the fine grey powder blew everywhere around the new buildings. It grated against one’s hands when one washed them and left a tide mark round everything. It was uncomfortable and disconcerting, like a pair of spectacles worn for the first time.
He believed in his own people all right, in their belief and their suffering, but he enjoyed the other things, in Egypt; he loved them, he realized — why pretend otherwise?
The whole business was a bad book about history. Belief required something better than an ideal, or a story they made up about you after you were dead. It was the drink before lunch with friends — something in that direction at least. It was a selfish, deprecating thing — not this crushing self-importance which was the only return he had got from the necessarily secret nature of his work — work which he knew now was simply a foil against loneliness. It was better not to be lonely, if it was at all possible to do anything about it, he thought.
“How did you leave things with London — what about the others in your section? They’ll be wondering about you. Marcus for example, the new man you told me about. No one else knew of course — that you were coming here — besides Williams?”
“No. Not as far as I know. I only dealt with Williams.”
“No friends …? The grocer — the milkman? You still have your milk delivered in England, don’t you?”
“I buy it from the corner shop — and cream, for horseradish sauce. You know all about that too, I suppose …”
“Nobody? You were just going to leave London forever — and you told nobody?”
“What are you getting at? You mean I’d have risked telling someone in the face of an ‘overwhelming temptation’—wanting to leave some memorial behind me?”
“That sort of temptation goes with a bad conscience, after all. Let’s get back to the beginning — you may have run too soon. That’s what I’m getting at It’s possible Williams wasn’t on to you at all.”
“Of course he was. You know the Yunis plan would never have worked. It was a trap.”
“So you were going to ‘retire’—come home to Mama? You were running surely? Isn’t that all?”
“Not running away. I was running towards something.”
“Here — in Egypt?”
“Yes.”
“Your friends are all here, you mean — and there’s nobody in London that would miss you. You reckoned on just walking out of that life as if it had never existed?”
“People tire of their jobs, you know. Others in the London section talked about it. About getting out. It’s a fiction — that bit about never being able to leave work like this. I talked with Marlow about it the other day, said he ought to get out, that the whole thing was a toytown.”
“You what?”
“A toytown — a pretence — for children.”
“No, you talked to someone. Who did you say — ?”
“Marlow — you remember Marlow. He’s in the Library. You approached him once, to work for you. He was worried about it.”
The Colonel remembered Marlow. Or rather he remembered him through Bridget. She had loved him and left him, like cheap fiction; they had even got married. He had never understood how she had become involved with him in the first place, what she had seen in him. And here he was again, waving his arms about inexplicably in the firing line; the Jester or thirteenth guest, fate’s toy who upset every calculation. You could never make sufficient allowance for people like Marlow; their innocence was the most dangerous of all imponderables. It gave them a talismanic gift: no matter how distant, they could ruin your own careful dispositions, as polar storms affect tropic weather.
With Edwards, for example: Edwards had told Marlow he was getting out of Holborn, or as good as told him, the Colonel was sure of it. Thus, among all the others and against all the laws of probability, Marlow would be the one chosen to look for him, to stop him before he got to Moscow. And with Bridget; Marlow’s relationship with her was not necessarily dead, but sleeping. The Colonel resented Marlow ten years before; a case of sheer envy at his marriage to Bridget — even though it hadn’t lasted, and their own affair had begun again soon afterwards. He had as well, he remembered, tried to break up their relationship by implicating Marlow with Egyptian intelligence, and having him packed off home as a result.