World War II Thriller Collection (24 page)

Wolff hoped so.

I cut the man, he thought. Quite badly, probably. I wonder where? The face?

I hope it was Vandam.

He turned his mind to his immediate problem. They had Sonja. She would tell them she hardly knew Wolff—she would make up some story about a quick pickup in the Cha-Cha Club. They would not be able to hold her for long, because she was famous, a star, a kind of hero among the Egyptians, and to imprison her would cause a great deal of trouble. So they would let her go quite soon. However, she would have to give them her address; which meant that Wolff could not go back to the houseboat, not yet. But he was exhausted, bruised and disheveled: he had to clean himself up and get a few hours' rest, somewhere.

He thought: I've been here before—wandering the city, tired and hunted, with nowhere to go.

This time he would have to fall back on Abdullah.

He had been heading for the Old City, knowing all along, in the back of his mind, that Abdullah was all he had left; and now he found himself a few steps from the old thief's house. He ducked under an arch, went along a short dark passage and climbed a stone spiral staircase to Abdullah's home.

Abdullah was sitting on the floor with another man. A nargileh stood between them, and the air was full of the herbal smell of hashish. Abdullah looked up at Wolff and gave a slow, sleepy smile. He spoke in Arabic. “Here is my friend Achmed, also called Alex. Welcome, Achmed-Alex.”

Wolff sat on the floor with them and greeted them in Arabic.

Abdullah said: “My brother Yasef here would like to ask you a riddle, something that has been puzzling him and me for some hours now, ever since we started the hubble-bubble, speaking of which . . .” He passed the pipe across, and Wolff took a lungful.

Yasef said: “Achmed-Alex, friend of my brother, welcome. Tell me this: Why do the British call us wogs?”

Yasef and Abdullah collapsed into giggles. Wolff realized they were heavily under the influence of hashish: they must have been smoking all evening. He drew on the pipe again, and pushed it over to Yasef. It was strong stuff. Abdullah always had the best. Wolff said: “As it happens, I know the answer. Egyptian men working on the Suez Canal were issued with special shirts, to show that they had the right to be on British property. They were Working On Government Service, so on the backs of their shirts were printed the letters W.O.G.S.”

Yasef and Abdullah giggled all over again. Abdullah said: “My friend Achmed-Alex is clever. He is as clever as an Arab, almost, because he is almost an Arab. He is the only European who has ever got the better of me, Abdullah.”

“I believe this to be untrue,” Wolff said slipping into their stoned style of speech. “I would never try to outwit my friend Abdullah, for who can cheat the devil?”

Yasef smiled and nodded his appreciation of this witticism.

Abdullah said: “Listen, my brother, and I will tell you.” He frowned, collecting his doped thoughts. “Achmed-Alex asked me to steal something for him. That way I would take the risk and he would get the reward. Of course, he did not outwit me so simply. I stole the thing—it was a case—and of course my intention was to take its contents for myself, since the thief is entitled to the proceeds of his crime, according to the laws of God. Therefore I should have outwitted him, should I not?”

“Indeed,” said Yasef, “although I do not recall the passage of Holy Scripture which says that a thief is entitled to the proceeds of his crime. However . . .”

“Perhaps not,” said Abdullah. “Of what was I speaking?”

Wolff, who was still more or less compos mentis, told him: “You should have outwitted me, because you opened the case yourself.”

“Indeed! But wait. There was nothing of value in the case, so Achmed-Alex had outwitted me. But wait! I made him pay me for rendering this service; therefore I got one hundred pounds and he got nothing.”

Yasef frowned. “You, then, got the better of him.”

“No.” Abdullah shook his head sadly. “He paid me in forged banknotes.”

Yasef stared at Abdullah. Abdullah stared back. They both burst out laughing. They slapped each other's shoulders, stamped their feet on the floor and rolled around on the cushions, laughing until the tears came to their eyes.

Wolff forced a smile. It was just the kind of funny story that appealed to Arab businessmen, with its chain of double crosses. Abdullah would be telling it for years. But it sent a chill through Wolff. So Abdullah, too, knew about the counterfeit notes. How many others did? Wolff felt as if the hunting pack had formed a circle around him, so that every way he ran he came up against one of them, and the circle drew tighter every day.

Abdullah seemed to notice Wolff's appearance for the first time. He immediately became very concerned. “What has happened to you? Have you been robbed?” He picked up a tiny silver bell and rang it. Almost immediately, a sleepy woman came in from the next room. “Get some hot water,” Abdullah told her. “Bathe my friend's wounds. Give him my European shirt. Bring a comb. Bring coffee. Quickly!”

In a European house Wolff would have protested at the women being roused, after midnight, to attend to him; but here such a protest would have been very discourteous. The women existed to serve the men, and they would be neither surprised nor annoyed by Abdullah's peremptory demands.

Wolff explained: “The British tried to arrest me, and I was obliged to fight with them before I could get away. Sadly, I think they may now know where I have been living, and this is a problem.”

“Ah.” Abdullah drew on the nargileh, and passed it around again. Wolff began to feel the effects of the hashish: he was relaxed, slow-thinking, a little sleepy. Time slowed down. Two of Abdullah's wives fussed over him, bathing his face and combing his hair. He found their ministrations very pleasant indeed.

Abdullah seemed to doze for a while, then he opened his eyes and said: “You must stay here. My house is yours. I will hide you from the British.”

“You are a true friend,” Wolff said. It was odd, he thought. He had planned to offer Abdullah money to hide him. Then Abdullah had revealed that he knew the money was no good, and Wolff had been wondering what else he could do. Now Abdullah was going to hide him for nothing. A true friend. What was odd was that Abdullah was not a true friend. There were no friends in Abdullah's world: there was the family, for whom he would do anything, and the rest, for whom he would do nothing. How have I earned this special treatment? Wolff thought sleepily.

His alarm bell was sounding again. He forced himself to think: it was not easy after the hashish. Take it one step at a time, he told himself. Abdullah asks me to stay here. Why? Because I am in trouble. Because I am his friend. Because I have outwitted him.

Because I have outwitted him. That story was not finished. Abdullah would want to add another double cross to the chain. How? By betraying Wolff to the British. That was it. As soon as Wolff fell asleep, Abdullah would send a message to Major Vandam. Wolff would be picked up. The British would pay Abdullah for the information, and the story could be told to Abdullah's credit at last.

Damn.

A wife brought a white European shirt. Wolff stood up and took off his torn and bloody shirt. The wife averted her eyes from his bare chest.

Abdullah said: “He doesn't need it yet. Give it to him in the morning.”

Wolff took the shirt from the woman and put it on. Abdullah said: “Perhaps it would be undignified for you to sleep in the house of an Arab, my friend Achmed?”

Wolff said: “The British have a proverb: He who sups with the devil must use a long spoon.”

Abdullah grinned, showing his steel tooth. He knew that Wolff had guessed his plan. “Almost an Arab,” he said.

“Good-bye, my friends,” said Wolff.

“Until the next time,” Abdullah replied.

Wolff went out into the cold night, wondering where he could go now.

 

In the hospital a nurse froze half of Vandam's face with a local anesthetic, then Dr. Abuthnot stitched up his cheek with her long, sensitive, clinical hands. She put on a protective dressing and secured it by a long strip of bandage tied around his head.

“I must look like a toothache cartoon,” he said.

She looked grave. She did not have a big sense of humor. She said: “You won't be so chirpy when the anesthetic wears off. Your face is going to hurt badly. I'm going to give you a painkiller.”

“No, thanks,” said Vandam.

“Don't be a tough guy, Major,” she said. “You'll regret it.”

He looked at her, in her white hospital coat and her sensible flatheeled shoes, and wondered how he had ever found her even faintly desirable. She was pleasant enough, even pretty, but she was also cold, superior and antiseptic. Not like—

Not like Elene.

“A painkiller will send me to sleep,” he told her.

“And a jolly good thing, too,” she said. “If you sleep we can be sure the stitches will be undisturbed for a few hours.”

“I'd love to, but I have some important work that won't wait.”

“You can't
work
. You shouldn't really walk around. You should talk as little as possible. You're weak from loss of blood, and a wound like this is mentally as well as physically traumatic—in a few hours you'll feel the backlash, and you'll be dizzy, nauseous, exhausted and confused.”

“I'll be worse if the Germans take Cairo,” he said. He stood up.

Dr. Abuthnot looked cross. Vandam thought how well it suited her to be in a position to tell people what to do. She was not sure how to handle outright disobedience. “You're a silly boy,” she said.

“No doubt. Can I eat?”

“No. Take glucose dissolved in warm water.”

I might try it in warm gin, he thought. He shook her hand. It was cold and dry.

Jakes was waiting outside the hospital with a car. “I knew they wouldn't be able to keep you long, sir,” he said. “Shall I drive you home?”

“No.” Vandam's watch had stopped. “What's the time?”

“Five past two.”

“I presume Wolff wasn't dining alone.”

“No, sir. His companion is under arrest at GHQ.”

“Drive me there.”

“If you're sure . . .”

“Yes.”

The car pulled away. Vandam said: “Have you notified the hierarchy?”

“About this evening's events? No, sir.”

“Good. Tomorrow will be soon enough.” Vandam did not say what they both knew: that the department, already under a cloud for letting Wolff gather intelligence, would be in utter disgrace for letting him slip through their fingers.

Vandam said: “I presume Wolff's dinner date was a woman.”

“Very much so, if I may say so, sir. A real dish. Name of Sonja.”

“The dancer?”

“No less.”

They drove on in silence. Wolff was a cool customer, Vandam thought, to go out with the most famous belly dancer in Egypt in between stealing British military secrets. Well, he would not be so cool now. That was unfortunate in a way: having been warned by this incident that the British were on to him, he would be more careful from now on. Never scare them, just catch them.

They arrived at GHQ and got out of the car. Vandam said: “What's been done with her since she arrived?”

“The no-treatment treatment,” Jakes said. “A bare cell, no food, no drink, no questions.”

“Good.” It was a pity, all the same, that she had been given time to collect her thoughts. Vandam knew from prisoner-of-war interronations that the best results were achieved immediately after the capture, when the prisoner was still frightened of being killed. Later on, when he had been herded here and there and given food and drink, he began to think of himself as a prisoner rather than as a soldier, and remembered that he had new rights and duties; and then he was better able to keep his mouth shut. Vandam should have interviewed Sonja immediately after the fight in the restaurant. As that was not possible, the next best thing was for her to be kept in isolation and given no information until he arrived.

Jakes led the way along a corridor to the interview room. Vandam looked in through the judas. It was a square room, without windows but bright with electric light. There were a table, two upright chairs and an ashtray. To one side was a doorless cubicle with a toilet.

Sonja sat on one of the chairs facing the door. Jakes was right, Vandam thought; she's a dish. However she was by no means pretty. She was something of an Amazon, with her ripe, voluptuous body and strong, well-proportioned features. The young women in Egypt generally had a slender, leggy grace, like downy young deer: Sonja was more like . . . Vandam frowned, then thought: a tigress. She wore a long gown of bright yellow which was garish to Vandam but would be quite
à la mode
in the Cha-Cha Club. He watched her for a minute or two. She was sitting quite still, not fidgeting, not darting nervous glances around the bare cell, not smoking or biting her nails. He thought: She will be a tough nut to crack. Then the expression on her handsome face changed, and she stood up and began pacing up and down, and Vandam thought: Not so tough.

He opened the door and went in.

He sat down at the table without speaking. This left her standing, which was a psychological disadvantage for a woman: Score the first point to me, he thought. He heard Jakes come in behind him and close the door. He looked up at Sonja. “Sit down.”

She stood gazing at him, and a slow smile spread across her face. She pointed at his bandages. “Did he do that to you?” she said.

Score the second point to her.