“And Bridget”
“Yes.”
“But she was just sustenance. Lemons at half time. To keep you going. I know. But what about me?” He lowered his voice. “I’ve been working for you for twenty years, for your Egyptian office. Why did you never tell them that in London?”
“Because it didn’t matter. Nothing I got from you ever went beyond me. I needed you for my own cover with the Egyptians. Don’t you see? I had to be able to show them that I had control of at least one man in Holborn, that I’d turned him. It was a crucial point. That way they were never likely to suspect that I worked for Holborn too. But I shouldn’t talk about it. She doesn’t know.”
Bridget came back with a tray and some whisky. Edwards sighed. It made sense. like so many things did which you’d least suspected: it was the longest shot in the world, that the Colonel worked for London. But that was what the whole business was about; seeing who could be the cleverest.
And he realized how it explained Bridget’s ease, even her light-headedness, over his arrivaclass="underline" it wasn’t the danger of the situation which had occurred to her, it was the fact that the three of them were now being “true” to each other at last, in really knowing about each other. And just as she’d welcomed Marlow into the “British camp” ten years before — with a sudden overwhelming joy because the pretence of their threefold relationship was over, so now she was inviting Edwards to join the celebration of a similar “truth” which she had obviously enjoyed for a long time with the Colonel. This time Edwards was the guest — at a reception of a marriage that must have occurred years before.
She handed Edwards his whisky almost formally, smiling hugely, as though he was the first man in a receiving line at a lucky late wedding, the Colonel behind her, flapping about the place like an embarrassed groom.
For Bridget the grubby, deceitful days were over and she was celebrating.
Celebrating what? That the Colonel had been a loyal British agent all along and that he’d just been used to give him cover, while really believing Hamdy was working for the Egyptians. That was worth a drink. And perhaps if one day the three of them really got to know each other, Edwards thought, he’d tell them he actually worked for Moscow.
The telephone rang again. Bridget picked it up.
“‘A message from Hassenein,’” she repeated the words at the other end. “‘Would I tell my friend he can pick up his car now. The brakes have been fixed.’ Right, I’ll do that.” She put the receiver back. “Someone from the Semiramis. Who’s ‘my friend’? Is that your car, Hamdy — is that you?”
So Henry had done for him after all, long before, on the plane, with Yunis. The Colonel wondered why he didn’t go for him there and then, kill him, wipe him out — wondered why he just stood there patting his pockets absentmindedly. Because of his togs, he thought — the ridiculously billowy shorts and blazer, the Chaplin plimsolls, the rakish clotted hair and mended spectacles: one didn’t go for a man so obviously down. There wasn’t the air of a traitor about Henry, it was useless. He looked, he had been behaving, like the second lead in a marital farce, the cuckolded husband, bursting through the French windows, intent on hopeless revenge; so it was that the Colonel couldn’t contemplate a similar role. He thought of the message from the Semiramis instead.
The suffix “now” meant just what it said. “The brakes have been fixed” stood for “get clear at all costs” and “Hassenein” was the code name for a man he’d never met: one of the other men — he’d no idea how many there were — who, like him, worked for Tel Aviv in Egyptian intelligence. He had never been given any method of contacting these people; they were pilot fish, infiltrated into various sections of the Cairo apparat over the years — as cypher clerks, secretaries, telephonists, messengers — almost solely for the purpose of warning him of impending disaster. They contacted the telephonist at the Semiramis who had his home number, and Bridget’s, and she had passed the message on.
The form of the message had been agreed many years before, the Colonel remembered, just after the war when the British Army had still been in the Kasr el Nil barracks and he’d managed to buy a pre-war Morris 8 with perfect brakes from a major of a returning regiment The major, a Jew, had been his initial contact with the Israeli underground. Subsequently he had left the army and gone to Palestine. The Colonel had worked for him ever since. They’d drunk themselves silly together in Shepheard’s all afternoon before he got the train to Port Said to join his men and the ship home. Gin and limes. Gin and everything. “Let’s hope your brakes never fail,” the major had said, and he’d stumbled into a gharry, the harness bells tinkling away into the flare-lit alleys beyond Opera Square.
Well, the brakes had gone now, and with them twenty years, many more than a thousand and one nights. He’d betrayed a country and he’d come to love it — to love it greatly in exact proportion to his treachery. He was bored by the grip this cliché had had on him, appalled now that it had held him in Egypt so blindly, for so long. He ought to have seen from the beginning that he would one day have to accept an equally banal ending: that he wouldn’t get away with it for ever. If he’d come to hate Egypt he would almost certainly have survived, he thought. Hate protected you from clichés.
“It’s a ‘get clear’ message, Hamdy, isn’t it?” Edwards said. “No one’s really phoning you about your brakes. And you can’t have much time if they’re prepared to use an open line to you.”
Bridget didn’t wait for him to answer.
“What is it, Hamdy? What’s happened?”
The Colonel had only moments to make up his mind. He could agree that it was a code message, but simply from his own section in Cairo — leave them, and try and get clear. Or he could take them with him. The first choice was the obvious one. Yet he prevaricated with himself for a second, found himself arguing the toss against his will. And the moment he began that he knew he was finished. He might get clear of Egypt with luck, as an ordinary man; he would never again survive as a professional. He didn’t mind. He argued; he delayed; he thought of Bridget. It was impossible to get clear of Egypt without going through a number of elaborate pre-arrangements, he reminded himself — which needed time to organize and a place to do that from. He had the place, the top floor apartment in Gezira. It was where he took Bridget when they were in town together, when they “had a moment” …
It was really only a matter of whether he brought Edwards with him too, he thought, since he’d now established that he wasn’t going to leave Bridget behind. And then he realized that he had no alternative but to take Henry — if he wanted Bridget. From her point of view, after all, they were now three British agents on the run: like an old British film.
“Henry’s right, isn’t he?” Bridget said. “Intelligence here has found out you’re with London. Someone from the Consulate — or that man at the airport — they’ve warned you?”
The Colonel nodded. “Come on. Don’t pack. But get Henry one of your father’s coats or something. And a pair of trousers. It’s not the moment for squash.”
The house was a dry oven smelling of orange blossom and cedar when they left. The clock which had been made in Bath chimed the first quarter after eleven slowly, four bell-like notes in a scale, the bull of Taurus moving round a semi-circle at the bottom, and a large Humpty-Dumpty moon bouncing over the blue-starred horizon above. Bridget took a couple of copies of Country Life with her as she went.