He had his surgery in another, more modern wing some distance away at the back of the main building, and the single ward which we passed on the way was full of sturdy Russian gentlemen. Most of them were moving about the beds in baggy underpants listening to Borodin on a radio and reading luridly coloured Soviet engineering journals. It was ferociously hot and unpleasant in the corridor, with wafts of illness coming from somewhere, and I had qualms. If Henry really was running over to the other side it was his business, his affair if he wanted to change one toy-town for another, not mine. If there was any mistake and Novak happened to know what Henry looked like, then he would never get out. And neither might I. But I went on.
Dr. Novak had a round bouncy face, hair cut en brosse, a curling moustache and a good-natured expression which rather surprised me. He looked like a provincial baker from some French film of the ’thirties. He gestured to a chair in his tiny office, looking at me with an uncertain interest.
“I didn’t expect you so soon,” he said.
“I had the opportunity. I’ve cut myself — so I thought I’d come straight away.” I started to take off my shoe and sock. “A piece of glass. I wonder if you could take a look at it.”
There was a perfectly appropriate casual doctor-patient relationship between us. But Dr. Novak remained puzzled.
“Can you get up here?” He pointed to a raised couch in one corner and I clambered up on it.
“Yes, I can see it.” He swabbed the wound and went away to get some probes. “Would you like a local?” He seemed to have a remarkable grasp of English.
“I’ll try without.”
“How did it happen? Can you turn round and lie down flat on your stomach?” I twisted away from him so I couldn’t see anything of his face.
“A splinter from the top of a soda bottle.”
“You shouldn’t have come round here just now, you know.” He lowered his voice. I felt some steel implement clip the top of the wedge of glass, nudging it a fraction further into the flesh so that I jumped forward in pain, the sweat coming out in rivers all over me. “Jesus!”
“Sorry.” He took the probe or whatever it was out, it clattered in a dish and he went away for something else. “Have you been able to make some arrangements? Have you changed your mind?” It was just as well he couldn’t see my face. I was puzzled now.
“No — not yet. I was — hoping you could help me …”
“How?” he said urgently. “You mean I should come round to your Embassy? Tell me. Every moment is urgent. I cannot be sure of things here much longer. You said before on the phone could I help you? — I don’t understand what you mean. I have already contacted your people here, at the Consulate. I was expecting you — someone from London, they said — to make the final arrangements.”
“You will have to wait. A little longer. I came to tell you. A day or two.”
“When do you think you can get me out?”
Dr. Novak had a pained insistence in his voice now.
“It’s difficult, we haven’t an Embassy here now. We have to make different arrangements — Oooch! Christ Almighty!”
A knife, it must have been this time, cut into the skin again, through inches of it.
“You should have had a local. Keep still now for one moment. I’m getting it out.” The knife came again. I shuddered.
“Have confidence, Dr. Novak. Do nothing for the moment.”
“But I must get out of here, Mr. Edwards. I must have some firm arrangements from you. It was promised me. You are from London. We must talk. I have committed myself.” I felt something grate inside my heel, as if he’d reached the bone.
“I know,” I said miserably. “But we’ve had some difficulties on our side too.”
“I’m not interested in the Americans. Or the French. I explained that. I want to go to England. That is what I have prepared. I have prepared my de-briefing.”
“I know you have. But it’s just not as easy as that to get out of Cairo at the moment. You’ll have to take my word for it. Be patient.”
He seemed to have started to scoop the flesh out now with some kind of apple corer.
“For how long must I wait then?” S-c-o-o-p. “What will be the arrangements?” Grind. “When will be the de-briefing?” I thought I was going to faint.
“I think I’d better have that local. Dr. Novak, you have me at your disposal. If I — if we — were double crossing you I’d hardly have come here and let you go through all this with me.”
“I’m sorry. It’s finished. I was just tidying it up. You can get down now.” I hobbled back to my chair.
What, indeed, would the “arrangements” be? Who was going to run Dr. Novak out of Cairo — who was going to de-brief him? There was no counter-intelligence interrogator in Egypt. And then it was clear. The man Novak had been expecting, waiting for, was Marcus. No wonder Henry looked ill at the Omar Khayyam Hotel. His contact man was a defector himself. They had both been looking for the same sort of help. Of course, it was farcical.
The little bouncy face was crestfallen. I could see the horror this whole business had for him — looking for a bolt-hole, never knowing where trust lay.
“Well, what shall we do?”
He was fiddling with his probes and forceps. I wondered if he was more doctor than KGB man, or the other way round. What would he do in England? Where was his family? What made a man like him drop everything and run like this — and why to England? An overwhelming belief in fish and chips and a few broken down carriers east of Suez? It didn’t make much sense. Perhaps he had distant relatives in Highgate. I almost asked him, and thought of telling him the truth about what had happened to Marcus.
“Do nothing. One of us will contact you again in a few days. It might be longer. In the meantime, do nothing.”
It wasn’t until after I’d left that I realized why I hadn’t been forthcoming with him — an unconscious reticence from my years in Holborn: I couldn’t trust him; Dr. Novak might simply have been an infiltrator, a Trojan horse. That’s why we had men like Marcus in our section, to check such people out before they got into the citadel.
One checked everything and trusted nobody. It was a dull, grubby business. Going over to the “other side” was worse than staying put, not because you’d broken trust with a country or an organization but because you’d really betrayed all human contact. No one would ever be sure of Dr. Novak again, whether he was playing a double game or not. The guilty can look just as crestfallen as the innocent
The microfilm was a more difficult matter to unravel. I needed special equipment, a projector not easily come by outside a security organization. But there might be another way of deciphering it, I thought — with a good microscope and a strong light beam under the slide: a science lab would have done, the American University off El Trahir Square for example. But I needed an excuse. Microscopes … Wednesday afternoons at school. Botany, stamens and petals … Yes, the identification of rare wild flowers. Egypt had been famous for that in previous days — the fabulous carpet of spring flowers on the limestone spur beyond Lake Mariout at Alexandria. That would serve as my background and such flowers as I needed I might pick up from the dazed herbaceous border by the fountain in the Hilton forecourt.
I went round to the University at five o’clock having slept fitfully through the afternoon and picked up some dusty weeds at the Hilton. The University was an impossible building to find anyone in and the porter completely misunderstood my interest so that I found myself, in following his directions to the Science department, at the back of the University theatre. A rehearsal was just getting under way managed by a middle-aged American, shouting quickly at a lot of students standing open-mouthed on the stage. They were doing Charley’s Aunt. I’d seen the poster in the hall.