World War II Thriller Collection (28 page)

The mother was right, Elene thought: they would catch Alex one day.

She was relaxing. She wondered whether Wolff was carrying the knife he had used in Assyut, and that made her tense again. The situation was so normal—a charming man taking a girl on a picnic beside the river—that for a moment she had forgotten she wanted something from him.

She said: “Where do you live now?”

“My house has been . . . commandeered by the British. I'm living with friends.” He handed her a slice of smoked salmon on a china plate, then sliced a lemon in half with a kitchen knife. Elene watched his deft hands. She wondered what
he
wanted from
her,
that he should work so hard to please her.

 

Vandam felt very low. His face hurt, and so did his pride. The great arrest had been a fiasco. He had failed professionally, he had been outwitted by Alex Wolff and he had sent Elene into danger.

He sat at home, his cheek newly bandaged, drinking gin to ease the pain. Wolff had evaded him so damn
easily.
Vandam was sure the spy had not really known about the ambush—otherwise he would not have turned up at all. No, he had just been taking precautions; and the precautions had worked beautifully.

They had a good description of the taxi. It had been a distinctive car, quite new, and Jakes had read the number plate. Every policeman and MP in the city was looking out for it, and had orders to stop it on sight and arrest all the occupants. They would find it, sooner or later, and Vandam felt sure it would be too late. Nevertheless he was sitting by the phone.

What was Elene doing now? Perhaps she was in a candlelit restaurant, drinking wine and laughing at Wolff's jokes. Vandam pictured her, in the cream-colored dress, holding a glass, smiling her special, impish smile, the one that promised you anything you wanted. Vandam checked his watch. Perhaps they had finished dinner by now. What would they do then? It was traditional to go and look at the pyramids by moonlight: the black sky, the stars, the endless flat desert and the clean triangular planes of the pharaohs' tombs. The area would be deserted, except perhaps for another pair of lovers. They might climb a few levels, he springing up ahead and then reaching down to lift her; but soon she would be exhausted, her hair and her dress a little awry, and she would say that these shoes were not designed for mountaineering; so they would sit on the great stones, still warm from the sun, and breathe the mild night air while they watched the stars. Walking back to the taxi, she would shiver in her sleeveless evening gown, and he might put an arm around her shoulders to keep her warm. Would he kiss her in the taxi? No, he was too old for that. When he made his pass, it would be in some sophisticated manner. Would he suggest going back to his place, or hers? Vandam did not know which to hope for. If they went to his place, Elene would report in the morning, and Vandam would be able to arrest Wolff at home, with his radio, his code book and perhaps even his back traffic. Professionally, that would be better—but it would also mean that Elene would spend a night with Wolff, and that thought made Vandam more angry than it should have done. Alternatively, if they went to her place, where Jakes was waiting with ten men and three cars, Wolff would be grabbed before he got a chance to—

Vandam got up and paced the room. Idly, he picked up the book
Rebecca,
the one he thought Wolff was using as the basis of his code. He read the first line: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” He put the book down, then opened it again and read on. The story of the vulnerable, bullied girl was a welcome distraction from his own worries. When he realized that the girl would marry the glamorous, older widower, and that the marriage would be blighted by the ghostly presence of the man's first wife, he closed the book and put it down again. What was the age difference between himself and Elene? How long would he be haunted by Angela? She, too, had been coldly perfect; Elene, too, was young, impulsive and in need of rescue from the life she was living. These thoughts irritated him, for he was not going to marry Elene. He lit a cigarette. Why did the time pass so slowly? Why did the phone not ring? How could he have let Wolff slip through his fingers twice in two days? Where was Elene?

Where was Elene?

He had sent a woman into danger once before. It had happened after his other great fiasco, when Rashid Ali had slipped out of Turkey under Vandam's nose. Vandam had sent a woman agent to pick up the German agent, the man who had changed clothes with Ali and enabled him to escape. He had hoped to salvage something from the shambles by finding out all about the man. But the next day the woman had been found dead in a hotel bed. It was a chilling parallel.

There was no point in staying in the house. He could not possibly sleep, and there was nothing else he could do there. He would go and join Jakes and the others, despite Dr. Abuthnot's orders. He put on a coat and his uniform cap, went outside, and wheeled his motorcycle out of the garage.

 

Elene and Wolff stood together, close to the edge of the bluff, looking at the distant lights of Cairo and the nearer, flickering glimmers of peasant fires in dark villages. Elene was thinking of an imaginary peasant—hardworking, poverty-stricken, superstitious—laying a straw mattress on the earth floor, pulling a rough blanket around him, and finding consolation in the arms of his wife. Elene had left poverty behind, she hoped forever, but sometimes it seemed to her that she had left something else behind with it, something she could not do without. In Alexandria when she was a child people would put blue palm prints on the red mud walls, hand shapes to ward off evil. Elene did not believe in the efficacy of the palm prints; but despite the rats, despite the nightly screams as the moneylender beat both of his wives, despite the ticks that infested everyone, despite the early death of many babies, she believed there had been
something
there that warded off evil. She had been looking for that something when she took men home, took them into her bed, accepted their gifts and their caresses and their money; but she had never found it.

She did not want to do that anymore. She had spent too much of her life looking for love in the wrong places. In particular, she did not want to do it with Alex Wolff. Several times she had said to herself: “Why not do it just once more?” That was Vandam's coldly reasonable point of view. But, each time she contemplated making love with Wolff, she saw again the daydream that had plagued her for the last few weeks, the daydream of seducing William Vandam. She knew just how Vandam would be: he would look at her with innocent wonder, and touch her with wide-eyed delight; thinking of it, she felt momentarily helpless with desire. She knew how Wolff would be, too. He would be knowing, selfish, skillful and unshockable.

Without speaking she turned from the view and walked back toward the car. It was time for him to make his pass. They had finished the meal, emptied the champagne bottle and the flask of coffee, picked clean the chicken and the bunch of grapes. Now he would expect his just reward. From the backseat of the car she watched him. He stayed a moment longer on the edge of the bluff, then walked toward her, calling to the driver. He had the confident grace that height often seemed to give to men. He was an attractive man, much more glamorous than any of Elene's lovers had been, but she was afraid of him, and her fear came not just from what she knew about him, his history and his secrets and his knife, but from an intuitive understanding of his nature: somehow she knew that his charm was not spontaneous but manipulative, and that if he was kind it was because he wanted to use her.

She had been used enough.

Wolff got in beside her. “Did you enjoy the picnic?”

She made an effort to be bright. “Yes, it was lovely. Thank you.”

The car pulled away. Either he would invite her to his place or he would take her to her flat and ask for a nightcap. She would have to find an encouraging way to refuse him. This struck her as ridiculous: she was behaving like a frightened virgin. She thought: What am I doing—saving myself for Mr. Right?

She had been silent for too long. She was supposed to be witty and engaging. She should talk to him. “Have you heard the war news?” she asked, and realized at once it was not the most lighthearted of topics.

“The Germans are still winning,” he said. “Of course.”

Why ‘of course'?”

He smiled condescendingly at her. “The world is divided into masters and slaves, Elene.” He spoke as if he were explaining simple facts to a schoolgirl. “The British have been masters too long. They've gone soft, and now it will be someone else's turn.”

“And the Egyptians—are they masters, or slaves?” She knew she should shut up, she was walking on thin ice, but his complacency infuriated her.

“The Bedouin are masters,” he said. “But the average Egyptian is a born slave.”

She thought: He means every word of it. She shuddered.

They reached the outskirts of the city. It was after midnight, and the suburbs were quiet, although downtown would still be buzzing. Wolff said: “Where do you live?”

She told him. So it was to be her place.

Wolff said: “We must do this again.”

“I'd like that.”

They reached the Sharia Abbas, and he told the driver to stop. Elene wondered what was going to happen now. Wolff turned to her and said: “Thank you for a lovely evening. I'll see you soon.” He got out of the car.

She stared in astonishment. He bent down by the driver's window, gave the man some money and told him Elene's address. The driver nodded. Wolff banged on the roof of the car, and the driver pulled away. Elene looked back and saw Wolff waving. As the car began to turn a corner, Wolff started walking toward the river.

She thought: What do you make of that?

No pass, no invitation to his place, no nightcap, not even a good-night kiss—what game was he playing, hard-to-get?

She puzzled over the whole thing as the taxi took her home. Perhaps it was Wolff's technique to try to intrigue a woman. Perhaps he was just eccentric. Whatever the reason, she was very grateful. She sat back and relaxed. She was not obliged to choose between fighting him off and going to bed with him. Thank God.

The taxi drew up outside her building. Suddenly, from nowhere, three cars roared up. One stopped right in front of the taxi, one close behind, and one alongside. Men materialized out of the shadows. All four doors of the taxi were flung open, and four guns pointed in. Elene screamed.

Then a head was poked into the car, and Elene recognized Vandam.

“Gone?” Vandam said.

Elene realized what was happening. “I thought you were going to shoot me,” she said.

“Where did you leave him?”

“Sharia Abbas.”

“How long ago?”

“Five or ten minutes. May I get out of the car?”

He gave her a hand, and she stepped onto the pavement. He said: “I'm sorry we scared you.”

“This is called slamming the stable door after the horse has bolted.”

“Quite.” He looked utterly defeated.

She felt a surge of affection for him. She touched his arm. “You've no idea how happy I am to see your face,” she said.

He gave her an odd look, as if he was not sure whether to believe her.

She said: “Why don't you send your men home and come and talk inside?”

He hesitated. “All right.” He turned to one of his men, a captain. “Jakes, I want you to interrogate the taxi driver, see what you can get out of him. Let the men go. I'll see you at GHQ in an hour or so.”

“Very good, sir.”

Elene led the way inside. It was so good to enter her own apartment, slump on the sofa, and kick off her shoes. The trial was over, Wolff had gone, and Vandam was here. She said: “Help yourself to a drink.”

“No, thanks.”

“What went wrong, anyway?”

Vandam sat down opposite her and took out his cigarettes. “We expected him to walk into the trap all unawares—but he was suspicious, or at least cautious, and we missed him. What happened then?”

She rested her head against the back of the sofa, closed her eyes, and told him in a few words about the picnic. She left out her thoughts about going to bed with Wolff, and she did not tell Vandam that Wolff had hardly touched her all evening. She spoke abruptly: she wanted to forget, not remember. When she had told him the story she said: “Make me a drink, even if you won't have one.”

He went to the cupboard. Elene could see that he was angry. She looked at the bandage on his face. She had seen it in the restaurant, and again a few minutes ago when she arrived, but now she had time to wonder what it was. She said: “What happened to your face?”

“We almost caught Wolff last night.”

“Oh, no.” So he had failed twice in twenty-four hours: no wonder he looked defeated. She wanted to console him, to put her arms around him, to lay his head in her lap and stroke his hair; the longing was like an ache. She decided—impulsively, the way she always decided things—that she would take him to her bed tonight.

He gave her a drink. He had made one for himself after all. As he stooped to hand her the glass she reached up, touched his chin with her fingertips and turned his head so that she could look at his cheek. He let her look, just for a second, then moved his head away.

She had not seen him as tense as this before. He crossed the room and sat opposite her, holding himself upright on the edge of the chair. He was full of a suppressed emotion, something like rage, but when she looked into his eyes she saw not anger but pain.

He said: “How did Wolff strike you?”

She was not sure what he was getting at. “Charming. Intelligent. Dangerous.”