Williams must have been the fourth man who had come into British Intelligence before Philby and the others, who had outlasted them all, and who now worked alone at the heart of it. Marcus had somehow stumbled on this. And Williams had somehow got him out to Cairo — to interrogate Dr. Novak, but to be picked up before he got near him. It didn’t matter that the circle out here would be broken up as a consequence of this highpowered tit for tat; it mattered not at all. All that was necessary was that Williams should survive. And he would, with increased credit in Holborn, as the “war maker”, the man who did for Nasser at last — until the Russians made the real capital out of that disaster. For the West certainly never would; we’d be selling arms to South Africa by then. And to Rhodesia.
The Egyptians would be the only ones really to suffer in it all; they, and people like Herbert and Usher who would get ten years apiece in Siwa. They would have to be warned. God knows how many contacts Usher had about the city — innocuous old clerks and waiters who remembered the British affectionately — or how quickly he would turn them over to ease whatever pains Egyptian Intelligence might have in store for him.
“What will you do, Herbert, when — things come to an end here? Go back to Greystones?”
I was wondering how Cherry might do in Information and Library: a quiet job on £2,380 plus the London weighting. Ten to five, leaving just enough time for an easy stroll down to the wine bar in the Strand before it opened. They were going to need one or two replacements in Holborn.
“Why? Why should things be coming to an end?”
“They are, I’m pretty sure. Though there’s no point in giving you details. But if I told you to get out — now, this moment, go and buy tickets tomorrow — would you do it? Would you believe me?”
“She can’t move.”
“Yes. I see that.” Of course, it was hopeless.
“That’s all there is then, isn’t it? No point in telling me anything. Talk to Usher. Perhaps he’ll have some ideas. He’s been getting out of things successfully all his life.”
I’d never seen Usher’s genuine Mameluke house beneath the Citadel. I’d not fancied his collection of desert bric-à-brac, or the boys of the same sort that I’d been told went with it. And I’d thought of Usher himself as a punishing old rogue the few times I’d met him: an agreeable monster by the Embassy pool dabbling in champagne and running a circle with almost criminal insouciance. Now I could almost look on him with affection.
By comparison with Williams, Henry, Colonel Hamdy and perhaps Bridget, Usher had the outlines of a straightforward man — of someone whose intense sexual preoccupations over the years, his indulgence and irresponsibility suggested a kind of loyalty: he was true to his proclivities, and indeed, from what one knew, to his country. He was a patriot — but a scoundrel in the last resort. That was his honesty. And at that moment I was prepared to admire something certain and unchanging in a man, even if they were characteristics based on the slimmest sort of belief, sustained by the grossest appetites.
9
The house lay in a narrow, steeply sloping alleyway right under the wall of the Citadel — between the fortress and the towering wall of the El Rifai mosque which was perched further down the hill on a large plaza where half a dozen other streets merged into it. Few people lived up here, in this high corner of the mediaeval city. The streets were deserted and lit only by one huge art nouveau lamp-standard with a clover of frosted globes on top. Herbert knew the way, otherwise one would never have found the place in the confusing shadows and different levels of the terrain: an arched doorway in almost total blackness except for the flicker of firelight coming from somewhere behind it.
Inside was a rough ante-chamber like a cow byre, with soil underfoot and smoky beams high overhead. A woman was squatting over a fire of tinder and desert brush, Gagool-like, in rags, warming herself in the acrid smelling mist. She seemed to have sunk to her knees a long time ago and never bothered to get up; deformed by her own ill will rather than by any natural or unnatural process. She held out her hand. I had stepped past, thinking we had not yet come to the proper entrance to the house, but Herbert gave her some coins.
“She looks after the place. Storyteller, sorcerer, witch, fortune teller, jester — the whole pack rolled into one; you mustn’t pass without some financial attention. Otherwise the place falls down. Or you do. She has friends in all the shadows.”
I gave her a coin myself.
We stumbled up some steps and along a passageway towards a jaundiced light. At the end was a stained-glass door, in brown and yellow, like the window in a Victorian lavatory. From beyond came a smell of sizzling onions and mince, and from somewhere else, it seemed in the far distance, the subdued roar of party chatter.
“We’re on the high level here, next to the kitchens and the old harem. Usher had it converted. Normally one would have come into the building from the other side, where it faces the mosque. But he’s turned the proper hall on that side into a garage. You’ll see, we’ll look down on the multitude, like the girls did.”
Cherry opened the glass door and we stepped on to one side of a gallery which ran right round the building, with shadowed haphazard passages leading off it, and a marvel-lousy delicate wooden filigree harem screen built up from the outside ledge. Twenty feet below us was the reception room, the formal Mameluke Salamlek, the size of half a tennis court, paved in blue mosaic, a fountain in the middle, and set about with a quantity of divans, silk bolsters, cushions and half a dozen small pearl-inlaid coffee tables, each with its elaborate silver hookah beside it Everything was as it might have been in Saladin’s Cairo seven hundred years before — except for the people, who, from their uncomfortable dress and apologetic demeanor, were clearly the remains of another and different dynasty, the descended remnants of those northern Caliphs, the last of their kind, who had once usurped and ruled the city.
Usher I could see at one end, dressed in fine cottons and a scarlet cummerbund, draped over the only proper seat in the room, a high-backed mock-Jacobean affair in velvet with tasselled heads, one of his billowy sleeves extending far out over the arm, balancing a crystal goblet between the clutch of fingers. Scattered about him — and having to stand so that they inevitably seemed to be paying court to him — were his friends. In deference, no doubt, to the semi-official nature of the occasion few of these appeared blatantly to suffer, or enjoy, any sexual inversion. Apart from several young suffragis in richly embroidered galibeahs and dazzling emerald cummerbunds serving drinks, there couldn’t have been more than half a dozen Egyptians present — among them Leila and Morsy Tewfik. The other guests were clearly English: just as their faces exhibited a distinct lack of thought, so one could identify their provenance without thinking: several military men, thin and old, with tobacco-stained faces, arrayed in wide pin-stripe suits, double-breasted in the pre-war fashion; several substantial ladies in polka-dot navy blue dresses and cumbersome, sensible shoes; and several thin ladies, dressed like black pencils, in Empire-line silk and gilded slippers; a clergyman in a smart grey lightweight worsted, and a red-haired priest in a soutane who moved one hand about constantly beneath its drapes, as though tightening, or loosening, something of vital importance beneath; some serious, awkward, hunted-looking men and their wives, obviously the skeleton staff from the Consulate; two long-locked youths and a scrubbed girl in a pony tail, a trio probably doing a little volutary work overseas, made up the more noticeable guests. Mr. Pearson was there too, but David Marcus had obviously been delayed.