Snapping at the bait again, I thought. I wondered how they would handle it.
Cherry, Whelan and Mr. Khoury came down the drive with us and sat on the balcony of one of the little wooden pavilions which ran along one side of the four floodlit courts. A suffragi flustered round them and they ordered coffee; drinks weren’t allowed near the field of play. Many Egyptians took this game very seriously, as something mystical, second in importance only to the Koran, and I’d picked up some slight skill in it myself when I’d lived here. They’d never taken to cricket, as had other former British “Dominions”, seeing it as pointless, long drawn out nonsense which denied any really individual nastiness. But croquet, perhaps because it specifically allowed for this, had some great magic for these upper-class Cairenes and they played it with a passion they gave to few other things in their life.
Mrs. Moustafa partnered Morsy and I played with Pearson.
We knocked the four coloured balls round the first three hoops with the mildest of chatter. Pearson wasn’t all that good at the game, I was worse, and the others were several hoops ahead of us as we turned up the back straight.
“You’re not looking for Edwards yourself, are you?” Pearson said, studiously and suddenly, lining up a shot for the fourth hoop.
“No. Why should I be?”
He smacked the ball up court, passing the wire and going off the edge at the far end, leaving me an impossible angle to get back on.
“Just a little worried about him, that’s all. Someone was seen at the airport with Yunis three days ago, just before he was arrested. A journalist, my contact at the airport said. Someone he’d seen out here quite often before. But he couldn’t describe him exactly — except for the hair. He said the man had a lot of hair. Henry usually drops in to see me when he’s here. That’s what made me wonder.”
I tapped my shot back to the far side of the wire, giving Pearson a straight through on his next turn.
“You think there’s a story in it?”
“Whoever was with Yunis at the time has a story. No one has any firm details on his arrest or what it’s all about We’re scratching around trying to fill them in.”
“You mean if it was this man Edwards — he’d tell you what happened?”
“He used to let me know odd things when I saw him out here. Straight news, agency stuff, things he didn’t use himself. If it was Edwards, that is …”
We’d nearly caught up with the others. Mrs. Moustafa had failed at a hoop and, if played right — it wasn’t difficult — Pearson’s next shot should croquet her. He’d then have an easy passage through the iron and, once through, could take her on down with him to the pole at the end. He missed. On purpose I’d have said. The others went ahead of us.
I said, “Who else could it have been then, with Yunis?”
“It wasn’t any of the regular correspondents — something would have broken on the story by now.”
“Why a journalist in any case?”
“Passport control. We have a little money on the right horse there. The man who came through with Yunis had a British passport — profession was marked as ‘Journalist’. That narrows it down fairly.”
The others were two hoops and a pole ahead of us. I tried to pull back a few shots but without success. Olive was playing like a demon and Pearson was fudging everything. He put his foot on his mallet like a big game hunter on a lion while the others streamed ahead up the home straight.
“We’ll make it worth your while. Very much so. Unless of course you’re contracted already. Anything you know about the Yunis business.”
“I’m not doing that sort of work out here, Mr. Pearson. I was telling Mrs. Moustafa — just background stuff.”
“That’s what I thought — ”
“I haven’t got any hard news and I didn’t come on that flight. I came in last night.”
Pearson nodded impatiently. These were preliminaries for him. I could see he believed me — as I didn’t believe him. What he wanted was to talk to me, to pretend I was a serious journalist, while searching out my real business in Cairo. And he had to have a good reason for broaching the subject of Edwards with me at all, one that would give the impression that he was interested in Edwards and myself purely from the professional point of view — as journalists who might be on to a good story: he had to cover what I was sure now was his real interest in the whole matter — that he believed Henry was running in the Philby stakes, that he’d used Yunis in some way to get into Egypt, and that I’d been sent out from London to stop him before he went over to Moscow. He’d never really bought the idea that Henry was a Fleet Street man, or that I was even a serious freelance. Pearson had made a reasonable job of the bluff, but he’d left a loophole, intentionally no doubt, knowing I’d go for it, which I shouldn’t have done; it was just his cockiness.
“You must have known who was on that flight with Yunis then. If you had his profession and nationality — your contact could hardly have overlooked the name.”
Pearson belted his shot wildly to the pavilion, smiling. The game was over, the others had tipped the post We walked back after them slowly.
“Now I’m telling you something,” he said.
“Why not? What’s the mystery?”
“You don’t know yourself?”
“Of course not. Was it Edwards?”
“Yes. It was. That was the name on the passport”
“Why the elaborate front then?”
“I couldn’t put it directly, you’d have shied away. I had to get you to ask the questions. You’re looking for Edwards too, aren’t you? We could probably help each other.”
“We probably couldn’t, Mr. Pearson. I doubt that very much.” And I left it at that.
Pearson had got his sights on Edwards all right: Edwards, out of the hole and on the run, in the light for a moment before disappearing again. They’d missed it all with Philby in Beirut and they weren’t going to miss it with Edwards in Cairo. It was the same thing all over again. But was it? It was just possible that Henry had become involved with Yunis somehow, on a job which had gone wrong, and had been picked up with him by Egyptian Intelligence — by Colonel Hamdy, the other man in Pearson’s crossword.
Either way he was somewhere in the city. I knew that now and I’d no doubt that Pearson would try and make me pay for the information. He wouldn’t have given it to me unless he had been confident I had got something for him in return.
Pearson had a hunch, his network about the city had given him a lucky break, and he was going to play it for all it was worth. At this distance I couldn’t read him the Official Secrets Act or slap a D notice on him. There wasn’t enough to go on. It was a question now of who would find Edwards first; probably Pearson would. It seemed he was several steps ahead in the chase and he was also in the best sort of position to use me. All he had to do was have one of his Egyptian contacts keep an eye on me — not a difficult exercise in Cairo where every shoeshine boy, kiosk vendor and porter were keeping their eyes on somebody — for somebody else’s money.
After the croquet we all walked down the back drive, round past the Omar Khayyam Hotel and along the corniche to Morsy’s apartment It was in an old turn of the century building on the third storey. At the back there was a balcony that looked on to the Club’s cricket pitch while the main entrance on Gezira Street faced out over the river: a long narrow apartment with the usual pseudo second Empire furniture caked in gilt, cracked family portraits, heavy carpets and very few windows. It must have been awfully dark in the daytime.