Usher was moving round the bed with fussy efficiency. The shoes were back on now, the tie fixed. Finally Usher carefully replaced a number of papers from Pearson’s inside pocket.
“Poor chap. I’d forgotten his ulcer. Stomach wall must have very low tolerance for that kind of medicine. Went out so fast I barely caught him. Now I need your help. These knock-out drops will keep his curiosity at bay for forty-eight hours. I want to get him home to his wife in Zamalek. She doesn’t care for me; I think she may well come to hate me after tonight. But there’s no matter — the point is he’ll be too ill to file anything until we’re all out of here. And he certainly won’t get his ten o’clock news circuit to London this evening.”
Usher bent over him, lifted an eyelid, checked his breathing. He stood up like a policeman.
“Funny things, these new cough drops. You know what they do? — they give you an almighty go of Gyppy tummy. Appropriate, what? Just the same symptoms; clever fellows, those boffins. Like to get him home before that starts. Of course he was filing on Marcus. It was in his pocket — Informed sources here suggest’ sort of thing; he’s going to inconveniently mislay the cable; hope he loses his mind as well. Now, if you two could help me downstairs with him. I’m rather too old for much potato work.”
Cherry looked on hopelessly and I tried to find a cigarette.
“Downstairs how? Where? There’re no windows or doors. You’re not thinking of taking him back through the party?”
“Well, upstairs, really. Then downstairs. That’s why I needed you.”
Usher stood up on the bed, between Pearson’s feet, and pulled at a red silk canopy which covered the ceiling in folds. “Had no roof in the old days, this room. So I put in a false one when I converted the place. Now you get up there, Marlow — that’s right, you’ll have to use your arms.”
I had joined Usher on the bed and had started to pull myself up between the frame of an open trap-door immediately above us. When I was up and had turned round, bracing myself against the rafters, Cherry and Usher grasped Pearson by either arm, and the three of them commenced a brisk dance about the bed springs for some moments, trying to steady themselves, in a fearful drunken fandango, Pearson’s head lolling about between them, his dancing pumps dragging about the counterpane, marionette-fashion.
It struck me that Usher was doing something seriously stupid, that he’d kill the man, snap his neck or asphyxiate him with his antics. Then Cherry tried to steady himself by grasping the edge of the trap-door but instead managed to drag the entire canopy down over himself and Pearson.
“For God’s sake man,” Usher murmured. “Pull yourself together. Don’t tear the material.”
I lay down along the rafters burying my arms in the bouncing red shape, crooking my arms beneath two armpits. Then I pulled hard.
“Wrong one, old fellow,” Usher said after a moment. “Pull the other one.”
We got Pearson up. Cherry followed, and together we hauled Usher after us. We even managed to replace most of the canopy.
“A ladder would have been useful,” Cherry suggested, as we carried Pearson across the beams to some other part of the Mameluke warren.
“No doubt,” Usher puffed. “Never got round to it. I don’t normally use this exit myself. It’s really a direct entrance from the garage to my bedroom for some of my more limber acquaintances.”
We came to the end of the attic, moved through some angled joists, through a plywood door, and nearly fell headlong into a garage twenty feet below us. Here there was a ladder, and we moved more quickly now, with Pearson in a fireman’s hold over my shoulder.
Usher opened the back door of an immense old navy blue Rolls and I toppled Pearson straight in.
“This used to be the main entrance,” Usher said. “It gives straight out on to the street behind the mosque. Open the doors and I can run down hill as far as Abdin Palace without starting the engine. Very convenient.”
“This car is a bit much, though, isn’t it, Robin? Bit conspicuous for a job like this. I didn’t think you still used it.” Cherry was excusably nervous and was trying to work off his forebodings on Usher. “Doesn’t it rather irritate people out here?”
And it could well have done with its shapely arrogance, its immense spokeless wheels and tall coach-like box for the passengers behind. The radiator might have caused particular offence for instead of the usual winged angel there was some antique automobile club emblem — a wheel in the shape of a large Union Jack.
“It belonged to the editor of the Egyptian Mail in Alexandria. He had it specially made for him in the ’twenties. Why should it irritate anyone, Herbert? Envy, perhaps. But not irritation.”
“I didn’t think we wanted to draw attention to ourselves, that’s all.”
“One of the secrets of secret work is to be conspicuous; I’ve often told you. The more obvious you appear, the less suspicion is aroused. To slink round town in a Morris 8, in my position, would be to invite both mistrust and cramp. Come now, let’s not argue methods of approach at this juncture: I’ll prime the motor, open the doors, and I’ll drop our friend back home. You two go back to the party. If anyone asks you can tell them I’ve been helping the press in their inquiries. And I think one could hardly deny it. Drunken sods …”
Usher climbed aboard and began tinkering with various levers attached to the central rung of the steering wheel. Things whirred and clicked and groaned beneath the long bonnet. Cherry and I opened the two doors. The garage gave on to a narrow unlit side street, which ran across the hill, away from the El Rifai and Hassan Plaza on our left down towards the El Azhar mosque and the Mousky bazaar northwards to our right.
There was no one about, a moonless, close evening with the ticklish smell of pepper in the air, and no sound apart from the distant crash of traffic down in the city. Cherry saw them first, he was on that side of the door looking along to the Rifai Plaza a hundred yards away, though we had heard the sounds half a minute before, standing rooted to the spot: the groan of heavy diesel engines changing down through the gears as they came up the hill; a line of military vehicles circling now round the plaza and going on up to the higher road which led to the new entrance to Usher’s house; a small convoy of jeeps, followed by several police Fiats, and two Military Police lorries with bren-guns mounted on the cab roof.
Another historic ambush which would end a dynasty was under way: it was Mohammed Ali’s massacre of the Princes at the Citadel all over again; the remnants of the Saxon Raj as victims this time, rather than the last of the Mamelukes. Amongst the startled multitude damask and richest silk would have given way to cotton polka-dot print, chain mail to faded pin-stripe, and there would be no caparisoned chargers at the door, just a few ruined Hillmans; but the result would be the same: trapped in a narrow defile beneath the fortress walls there would be no escape for the lumbering Lords and Ladies as they sought vainly for release in stout Northampton boots.
Usher got down from his bridge on the Rolls and looked out with us.
“Pearson must have got something through after all,” I said.
“Or they may have just changed their minds about us. They’re like that.” Usher seemed unaffected by their arrival. Was there a hint of relief even in his voice, now that he realised he might not be seeing St. John’s Wood for some time?