‘It was under your — ’ he took up the passport, opening it at the end, and read out from the back page ‘—your Foreign Exchange Allowance. Why do you deny it? This sheet here — I see you brought in £200 with you as well.’ He spelled the figures out slowly. He seemed to have all the time in the world, an extraordinary confidence in the circumstances.
‘You were thinking of staying here for some time? What have they sent you out here to do, Mr. Marcus? Who was this message for?’
‘I told you. I didn’t bring any message. And my name is not Marcus, by the way, it’s Marlow. I don’t know anyone called Marcus.’
I’d like to have let him talk on. He was the cocky type and I’d probably have picked up a lot more. But I couldn’t afford to; if I learnt any more they couldn’t afford to let me go.
‘Are you sure you’ve got the right person? I didn’t have time to see that passport properly before your men took me away.’
The Major opened the passport again, this time at the front. He looked at the photograph, then at me. I showed him my air ticket by way of additional confirmation.
He was furious and apologetic by turns. He tried to order me some coffee and spent some time explaining how ‘these things happen’. But neither his English nor his temper was quite up to it and he was effusively relieved to drop the whole matter and see me back out into the Mercedes. The two men who had brought me were nowhere to be seen. They had disappeared — probably for a long time.
My own passport had been returned when I got back to the Semiramis. There was nothing I could do about Marcus, they’d have corrected their mistake over him during my drive back. I wondered how he’d make out with the Major. Probably not at all; effusive Security men are as dangerous as wounded animals.
Someone had framed Marcus. I took my wringing wet linen suit off, rang for some ice and soda to go with my bottle of whisky, and went into the shower. Someone had put him into it up to his neck. Or had he just been careless? — had he a message for someone in Cairo and they’d found it? It seemed unlikely. The Egyptians would hardly have checked every passport on the off chance. They must have been warned that he was coming, been tipped off by someone in London. The Spycatcher caught: who could have wanted that? Someone he was on to. That made sense. But that ‘someone’ would have to have had the opportunity to plant the microfilm. Passports needing visas went through the Staff Organizer’s department, a Miss Charlbury ran it on the floor beneath Williams’s office, and from there out to Cook’s, as if from a private person. There was room for planting something in that chain. Or had it been someone in the Egyptian Consulate, when they stamped their visa? — some devious plot-counter-plot? A possibility. But I preferred the idea of someone within our section tampering with it — someone who had sent Marcus out to get Henry, or me, or Colonel Hamdy, but who had really wanted to be rid of Marcus. Marcus wasn’t a courier, that was certain. The microfilm, that dangerous form of communication, was, with equal certainty, a plant.
I looked at the back of my own passport out of interest when I got out of the shower, pulling the gummed flap of the Exchange Allowance form away from the back page. It would have been quite simple, a matter of moments, to slip a piece of film under the gummed part and then stick it down again. Anything up to half a fingernail of negative would sit there very nicely and no one would ever spot it unless they’d been looking for it, unless they’d been told. I pushed the flap down again and started to close the passport.
A little fingernail of negative slipped across the page and into my lap.
Someone hammered on the door and I thought briskly of swallowing the thing until I remembered the ice and soda. The floor waiter came in.
Afterwards I stopped the automatic swivel on the fan, put it on top of the air-conditioning box pointing straight at the bed and lay down, stretched out in my pants and a snowstorm of talcum. It was getting far too hot. I drank a glass of soda and ice straight off before adding a finger of Scotch. “You should always start by drinking warm drinks when you first get to Egypt, tea and things.” I remembered Crowther’s advice in the Embassy the first time we met. The little foxy bastard, I thought. And all of them.
It had been me or Marcus but they’d gone for him, as the more necessary man to be rid of. Marcus had been the more pressing concern for someone, but they would have dumped me just as well and that must have been their first intention. Why hadn’t they? There could only be one reason. The two micro messages, whatever they were, must have been identical and wouldn’t have been believed if they’d turned up on two different Mid-East section men. Whoever it was that had planted them hadn’t had the time to take mine out and could never have thought I’d find it
And that was why I’d been sent to Cairo, not to chase Henry — that had been the excuse — but to be caught with the goods, to be sent down the hatch for some reason. But then Marcus had come into the firing line, had become the target — and then the carrier; the message had been duplicated in his passport and he’d been packed off. And the only man who’d been in a position to do all this posting, this cunning shuffling of the pack, was Williams. Of course. Thames Valley Williams with his violet shirts and polka-dot bow ties, bending down to his drinks cabinet, proffering me his thin pin-striped ass and a warm gin and tonic. “Drop into Groppi’s, I should. That’s where the gossip is …”
Drop into Siwa Oasis for ten years on beans and water more likely — the prison where Marcus was probably headed after a suitable show trial.
I looked at the colourless negative with the dark full stop in the centre. The print would probably be in white. I wasn’t very clear about microfilm but I thought I needed a projector.
As I turned to get up, my heel bit into something hard and sharp on the end of the bed. A long sliver of glass from the top of a soda bottle was sticking out from the back of my foot like a spear. The bloody floor waiter. I wondered if I’d swallowed any.
I pulled the glass out, a neat nasty hole, blood dripping in a trail all the way to the bathroom. I doused it under the bath tap. Every time the water cleared the blood away I could see a piece of glass still caught deep in the flesh. I needed a doctor too. Pearson’s Russian friend, Dr. Novak at the Kasr el Aini, might do very well. Two birds with one stone. Three perhaps — he might even have a projector I could borrow.
The Kasr el Aini Hospital lay on the north spur of Roda Island, up-river along the eastern corniche past Garden City — a complex of dun-coloured, featureless Victorian buildings with open terraces and one or two half completed new wings. Like most Egyptian hospitals it had the permanent air of a casualty station in bad times: bandaged figures moved around the main hall, groups of numbed country people had made temporary camp about the passages, seemingly paying court to their confined relatives; stretchers and trolleys were in constant traffic up and down, many of their occupants permanently stalled outside surgeries, operating theatres and dispensaries. There was a feeling of “maleesh”, an overpowering sense that the will of God was having it over the ways of man: a smell of leaking sores and the strongest sort of disinfectant.
I hobbled up to the reception desk, peering over a dozen chattering, frenzied heads all intent on extracting some vital information or permission from a single porter equally intent on withholding it. But the mention of Dr. Novak’s name had a steadying effect on him. He gave me a form to fill in where I had to give my own name: Henry Edwards I put. In a moment I had a response. Dr. Novak would see me at once.