World War II Thriller Collection (10 page)

When the aides came out, Wolff followed the pair that went to the barracks.

A minute later Abdullah emerged from a café and fell into step beside him.

“Those two?” Abdullah said.

“Those two.”

Abdullah was a fat man with a steel tooth. He was one of the richest men in Cairo, but unlike most rich Arabs he did not ape the Europeans. He wore sandals, a dirty robe and a fez. His greasy hair curled around his ears and his fingernails were black. His wealth came not from land, like the pashas', nor from trade, like the Greeks'. It came from crime.

Abdullah was a thief.

Wolff liked him. He was sly, deceitful, cruel, generous, and always laughing: for Wolff he embodied the age-old vices and virtues of the Middle East. His army of children, grandchildren, nephews, nieces and second cousins had been burgling houses and picking pockets in Cairo for thirty years. He had tentacles everywhere: he was a hashish wholesaler, he had influence with politicians, and he owned half the houses in the Birka, including Madame Fahmy's. He lived in a large crumbling house in the Old City with his four wives.

They followed the two officers into the modern city center. Abdullah said: “Do you want one briefcase, or both?”

Wolff considered. One was a casual theft; two looked organized. “One,” he said.

“Which?”

“It doesn't matter.”

Wolff had considered going to Abdullah for help after the discovery that the Villa les Oliviers was no longer safe. He had decided not to. Abdullah could certainly have hidden Wolff away somewhere—probably in a brothel—more or less indefinitely. But as soon as he had Wolff concealed, he would have opened negotiations to sell him to the British. Abdullah divided the world in two: his family and the rest. He was utterly loyal to his family and trusted them completely; he would cheat everyone else and expected them to try to cheat him. All business was done on the basis of mutual suspicion. Wolff found this worked surprisingly well.

They came to a busy corner. The two officers crossed the road, dodging the traffic. Wolff was about to follow when Abdullah put a hand on his arm to stop him.

“We'll do it here,” Abdullah said.

Wolff looked around, observing the buildings, the pavement, the road junction and the street vendors. He smiled slowly, and nodded. “It's perfect,” he said.

 

They did it the next day.

Abdullah had indeed chosen the perfect spot for the snatch. It was where a busy side street joined a main road. On the corner was a café with tables outside, reducing the pavement to half its width. Outside the café, on the side of the main road, was a bus stop. The idea of queuing for the bus had never really caught on in Cairo despite sixty years of British domination, so those waiting simply milled about on the already crowded pavement. On the side street it was a little clearer, for although the café had tables out here too, there was no bus stop. Abdullah had observed this little shortcoming, and had put it right by detailing two acrobats to perform on the street there.

Wolff sat at the corner table, from where he could see along both the main road and the side street, and worried about the things that might go wrong.

The officers might not go back to the barracks today.

They might go a different way.

They might not be carrying their briefcases.

The police might arrive too early and arrest everyone on the scene.

The boy might be grabbed by the officers and questioned.

Wolff might be grabbed by the officers and questioned.

Abdullah might decide he could earn his money with less trouble simply by contacting Major Vandam and telling him he could arrest Alex Wolff at the Café Nasif at twelve noon today.

Wolff was afraid of going to prison. He was more than afraid, he was terrified. The thought of it brought him out in a cold sweat under the noonday sun. He could live without good food and wine and girls, if he had the vast wild emptiness of the desert to console him: and he could forego the freedom of the desert to live in a crowded city if he had the urban luxuries to console him: but he could not lose both. He had never told anyone of this: it was his secret nightmare. The idea of living in a tiny, colorless cell, among the scum of the earth (and all of them men), eating bad food, never seeing the blue sky or the endless Nile or the open plains . . . panic touched him glancingly even while he contemplated it. He pushed it out of his mind. It was not going to happen.

At eleven forty-five the large, grubby form of Abdullah waddled past the café. His expression was vacant but his small black eyes looked around sharply, checking his arrangements. He crossed the road and disappeared from view.

At five past twelve Wolff spotted two military caps among the massed heads in the distance.

He sat on the edge of his chair.

The officers came nearer. They were carrying their briefcases.

Across the street a parked car revved its idling engine.

A bus drew up to the stop, and Wolff thought: Abdullah can't possibly have arranged
that
: it's a piece of luck, a bonus.

The officers were five yards from Wolff.

The car across the street pulled out suddenly. It was a big black Packard with a powerful engine and soft American springing. It came across the road like a charging elephant, motor screaming in low gear, regardless of the main road traffic, heading for the side street, its horn blowing continuously. On the corner, a few feet from where Wolff sat, it plowed into the front of an old Fiat taxi.

The two officers stood beside Wolff's table and stared at the crash.

The taxi driver, a young Arab in a Western shirt and a fez, leaped out of his car.

A young Greek in a mohair suit jumped out of the Packard.

The Arab said the Greek was the son of a pig.

The Greek said the Arab was the back end of a diseased camel.

The Arab slapped the Greek's face and the Greek punched the Arab on the nose.

The people getting off the bus, and those who had been intending to get on it, came closer.

Around the corner, the acrobat who was standing on his colleague's head turned to look at the fight, seemed to lose his balance, and fell into his audience.

A small boy darted past Wolff's table. Wolff stood up, pointed at the boy and shouted at the top of his voice: “Stop, thief!”

The boy dashed off. Wolff went after him, and four people sitting near Wolff jumped up and tried to grab the boy. The child ran between the two officers, who were staring at the fight in the road. Wolff and the people who had jumped up to help him cannoned into the officers, knocking both of them to the ground. Several people began to shout “Stop, thief!” although most of them had no idea who the alleged thief was. Some of the newcomers thought it must be one of the fighting drivers. The crowd from the bus stop, the acrobats' audience, and most of the people in the café surged forward and began to attack one or other of the drivers—Arabs assuming the Greek was the culprit and everyone else assuming it was the Arab. Several men with sticks—most people carried sticks—began to push into the crowd, beating on heads at random in an attempt to break up the fighting which was entirely counterproductive. Someone picked up a chair from the café and hurled it into the crowd. Fortunately it overshot and went through the windshield of the Packard. However the waiters, the kitchen staff and the proprietor of the café now rushed out and began to attack everyone who swayed, stumbled or sat on their furniture. Everyone yelled at everyone else in five languages. Passing cars halted to watch the melee, the traffic backed up in three directions, and every stopped car sounded its horn. A dog struggled free of its leash and started biting people's legs in a frenzy of excitement. Everyone got off the bus. The brawling crowd became bigger by the second. Drivers who had stopped to watch the fun regretted it, for when the fight engulfed their cars they were unable to move away (because everyone else had stopped too) and they had to lock their doors and roll up their windows while men, women and children, Arabs and Greeks and Syrians and Jews and Australians and Scotsmen, jumped on their roofs and fought on their hoods and fell on their running boards and bled all over their paintwork. Somebody fell through the window of the tailor's shop next to the café, and a frightened goat ran into the souvenir shop which flanked the café on the other side and began to knock down all the tables laden with china and pottery and glass. A baboon came from somewhere—it had probably been riding the goat, in a common form of street entertainment—and ran across the heads in the crowd, nimble-footed, to disappear in the direction of Alexandria. A horse broke free of its harness and bolted along the street between the lines of cars. From a window above the café a woman emptied a bucket of dirty water into the melee. Nobody noticed.

At last the police arrived.

When people heard the whistles, suddenly the shoves and pushes and insults which had started their own individual fights seemed a lot less important. There was a scramble to get away before the arrests began. The crowd diminished rapidly. Wolff, who had fallen over early in the proceedings, picked himself up and strolled across the road to watch the dénouement. By the time six people had been handcuffed it was all over, and there was no one left fighting except for an old woman in black and a one-legged beggar feebly shoving each other in the gutter. The café proprietor, the tailor and the owner of the souvenir shop were wringing their hands and berating the police for not coming sooner while they mentally doubled and trebled the damage for insurance purposes.

The bus driver had broken his arm, but all the other injuries were cuts and bruises.

There was only one death; the goat had been bitten by the dog and consequently had to be destroyed.

When the police tried to move the two crashed cars, they discovered that during the fight the street urchins had jacked up the rear ends of both vehicles and stolen the tires.

Every single lightbulb in the bus had also disappeared.

And so had one British Army briefcase.

 

Alex Wolff was feeling pleased with himself as he walked briskly through the alleys of Old Cairo. A week ago the task of prizing secrets out of GHQ had seemed close to impossible. Now it looked as if he had pulled it off. The idea of getting Abdullah to orchestrate a street fight had been brilliant.

He wondered what would be in the briefcase.

Abdullah's house looked like all the other huddled slums. Its cracked and peeling façade was irregularly dotted with small misshapen windows. The entrance was a low doorless arch with a dark passage beyond. Wolff ducked under the arch, went along the passage and climbed a stone spiral staircase. At the top he pushed through a curtain and entered Abdullah's living room.

The room was like its owner—dirty, comfortable and rich. Three small children and a puppy chased each other around the expensive sofas and inlaid tables. In an alcove by a window an old woman worked on a tapestry. Another woman was drifting out of the room as Wolff walked in: there was no strict Muslim separation of the sexes here, as there had been in Wolff's boyhood home. In the middle of the floor Abdullah sat cross-legged on an embroidered cushion with a baby in his lap. He looked up at Wolff and smiled broadly. “My friend, what a success we have had!”

Wolff sat on the floor opposite him. “It was wonderful,” he said. “You're a magician.”

“Such a riot! And the bus arriving at just the right moment—and the baboon running away . . .”

Wolff looked more closely at what Abdullah was doing. On the floor beside him was a pile of wallets, handbags, purses and watches. As he spoke he picked up a handsome tooled leather wallet. He took from it a wad of Egyptian banknotes, some postage stamps and a tiny gold pencil, and put them somewhere under his robe. Then he put down the wallet, picked up a handbag and began to rifle through that.

Wolff realized where they had come from. “You old rogue,” he said. “You had your boys in the crowd picking pockets.”

Abdullah grinned, showing his steel tooth. “To go to all that trouble and then steal only one briefcase . . .”

“But you have got the briefcase.”

“Of course.”

Wolff relaxed. Abdullah made no move to produce the case. Wolff said: “Why don't you give it to me?”

“Immediately,” Abdullah said. Still he did nothing. After a moment he said: “You were to pay me another fifty pounds on delivery.”

Wolff counted out the notes and they disappeared beneath the grubby robe. Abdullah leaned forward, holding the baby to his chest with one arm, and with the other reached under the cushion he was sitting on and pulled out the briefcase.

Wolff took it from him and examined it. The lock was broken. He felt cross: surely there should be a limit to duplicity. He made himself speak calmly. “You've opened it already.”

Abdullah shrugged. He said:
“Maaleesh.”
It was a conveniently ambiguous word which meant both “Sorry” and “So what?”

Wolff sighed. He had been in Europe too long; he had forgotten how things were done at home.

He lifted the lid of the case. Inside was a sheaf of ten or twelve sheets of paper closely typewritten in English. As he began to read someone put a tiny coffee cup beside him. He glanced up to see a beautiful young girl. He said to Abdullah: “Your daughter?”

Abdullah laughed. “My wife.”

Wolff took another look at the girl. She seemed about fourteen years old. He turned his attention back to the papers.

He read the first, then with growing incredulity leafed through the rest.

He put them down. “Dear God,” he said softly. He started to laugh.