Wolff said to Smith: “I knew Sonja’s late father.”
It was a lie, and Sonja knew why he had said it. He wanted to remind her.
Her father had been a part-time thief. When there was work he worked, and when there was none he stole. One day he had tried to snatch the handbag of a European woman in the Shari el-Koubri. The woman’s escort had made a grab for Sonja’s father, and in the scuffle the woman had been knocked down, spraining her wrist. She was an important woman, and Sonja’s father had been flogged for the offense. He had died during the flogging.
Of course, it was not supposed to kill him. He must have had a weak heart, or something. The British who administered the law did not care. The man had committed the crime, he had been given the due punishment and the punishment had killed him: one wog less. Sonja, twelve years old, had been heartbroken. Since then she had hated the British with all her being.
Hitler had the right idea but the wrong target, she believed. It was not the Jews whose racial weakness infected the world—it was the British. The Jews in Egypt were more or less like everyone else: some rich, some poor, some good, some bad. But the British were uniformly arrogant, greedy and vicious. She laughed bitterly at the high-minded way in which the British tried to defend Poland from German oppression while they themselves continued to oppress Egypt.
Still, for whatever reasons, the Germans were fighting the British, and that was enough to make Sonja pro-German.
She wanted Hitler to defeat, humiliate and ruin Britain.
She would do anything she could to help.
She would even seduce an Englishman.
She leaned forward. “Major Smith,” she said, “you’re a very attractive man.”
Wolff relaxed visibly.
Smith was startled. His eyes seemed about to pop out of his head. “Good Lord!” he said. “Do you think so?”
“Yes, I do, Major.”
“I say, I wish you’d call me Sandy.”
Wolff stood up. “I’m afraid I’ve got to leave you. Sonja, may I escort you home?”
Smith said: “I think you can leave that to me, Captain.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That is, if Sonja ...”
Sonja batted her eyelids. “Of course, Sandy.”
Wolff said: “I hate to break up the party, but I’ve got an early start.”
“Quite all right,” Smith told him. “You just run along.”
As Wolff left a waiter brought dinner. It was a European meal—steak and potatoes—and Sonja picked at it while Smith talked to her. He told her about his successes in the school cricket team. He seemed to have done nothing spectacular since then. He was very boring.
Sonja kept remembering the flogging.
He drank steadily through dinner. When they left he was weaving slightly. She gave him her arm, more for his benefit than for hers. They walked to the houseboat in the cool night air. Smith looked up at the sky and said: “Those stars ... beautiful.” His speech was a little thick.
They stopped at the houseboat. “Looks pretty,” Smith said.
“It’s rather nice,” Sonja said. “Would you like to see inside?”
“Rather.”
She led him over the gangplank, across the deck, and down the stairs.
He looked around, wide-eyed. “I must say, it’s very luxurious.”
“Would you like a drink?”
“Very much.”
Sonja hated the way he said “very” all the time. He slurred the
r
and pronounced it “vey.” She said: “Champagne, or something stronger?”
“A drop of whiskey would be nice.”
“Do sit down.”
She gave him his drink and sat close to him. He touched her shoulder, kissed her cheek, and roughly grabbed her breast. She shuddered. He took that as a sign of passion, and squeezed harder.
She pulled him down on top of her. He was very clumsy: his elbows and knees kept digging into her. He fumbled beneath the skirt of her dress.
She said: “Oh, Sandy, you’re so strong.”
She looked over his shoulder and saw Wolff’s face. He was on deck, kneeling down and watching through the hatch, laughing soundlessly.
8
WILLIAM VANDAM WAS BEGINNING TO DESPAIR OF EVER FINDING ALEX WOLFF. The Assyut murder was almost three weeks in the past, and Vandam was no closer to his quarry. As time went by the trail got colder. He almost wished there would be another briefcase snatch, so that at least he would know what Wolff was up to.
He knew he was becoming a little obsessed with the man. He would wake up in the night, around 3 A.M. when the booze had worn off, and worry until daybreak. What bothered him was something to do with Wolff’s style: the sideways manner in which he had slipped into Egypt, the suddenness of the murder of Corporal Cox, the ease with which Wolff had melted into the city. Vandam went over these things, again and again, all the time wondering why he found the case so fascinating.
He had made no real progress, but he had gathered some information, and the information had fed his obsession—fed it not as food feeds a man, making him satisfied, but as fuel feeds a fire, making it burn hotter.
The Villa les Oliviers was owned by someone called Achmed Rahmha. The Rahmhas were a wealthy Cairo family. Achmed had inherited the house from his father, Gamal Rahmha, a lawyer. One of Vandam’s lieutenants had dug up the record of a marriage between Gamal Rahmha and one Eva Wolff, widow of Hans Wolff, both German nationals; and then adoption papers making Hans and Eva’s son Alex the legal child of Gamal Rahmha ...
Which made Achmed Rahmha a German, and explained how he got legitimate Egyptian papers in the name of Alex Wolff.
Also in the records was a will which gave Achmed, or Alex, a share of Gamal’s fortune, plus the house.
Interviews with all surviving Rahmhas had produced nothing. Achmed had disappeared two years ago and had not been heard from since. The interviewer had come back with the impression that the adopted son of the family was not much missed.
Vandam was convinced that when Achmed disappeared he had gone to Germany.
There was another branch of the Rahmha family, but they were nomads, and no one knew where they could be found. No doubt, Vandam thought, they had helped Wolff somehow with his reentry into Egypt.
Vandam understood that now. Wolff could not have come into the country through Alexandria. Security was tight at the port: his entry would have been noted, he would have been investigated, and sooner or later the investigation would have revealed his German antecedents, whereupon he would have been interned. By coming from the south he had hoped to get in unobserved and resume his former status as a born-and-bred Egyptian. It had been a piece of luck for the British that Wolff had run into trouble in Assyut.
It seemed to Vandam that that was the last piece of luck they had had.
He sat in his office, smoking one cigarette after another, worrying about Wolff.
The man was no low-grade collector of gossip and rumor. He was not content, as other agents were, to send in reports based on the number of soldiers he saw in the street and the shortage of motor spares. The briefcase theft proved he was after top-level stuff, and he was capable of devising ingenious ways of getting it. If he stayed at large long enough he would succeed sooner or later.
Vandam paced the room—from the coat stand to the desk, around the desk for a look out of the window, around the other side of the desk, and back to the coat stand.
The spy had his problems, too. He had to explain himself to inquisitive neighbors, conceal his radio somewhere, move about the city and find informants. He could run out of money, his radio could break down, his informants could betray him or someone could quite accidentally discover his secret. One way or another, traces of the spy had to appear.
The cleverer he was, the longer it would take.
Vandam was convinced that Abdullah, the thief, was involved with Wolff. After Bogge refused to have Abdullah arrested, Vandam had offered a large sum of money for Wolff’s whereabouts. Abdullah still claimed to know nothing of anyone called Wolff, but the light of greed had flickered in his eyes.
Abdullah might not know where Wolff could be found—Wolff was surely careful enough to take that precaution with a notoriously dishonest man—but perhaps Abdullah could find out. Vandam had made it clear that the money was still on offer. Then again, once Abdullah had the information he might simply go to Wolff, tell him of Vandam’s offer and invite him to bid higher.
Vandam paced the room.
Something to do with
style.
Sneaking in; murder with a knife; melting away; and ... Something else went with all that. Something Vandam knew about, something he had read in a report or been told in a briefing. Wolff might almost have been a man Vandam had known, long ago, but could no longer bring to mind. Style.
The phone rang.
He picked it up. “Major Vandam.”
“Oh, hello, this is Major Calder in the paymaster’s office.”
Vandam tensed. “Yes?”
“You sent us a note, a couple of weeks ago, to look out for forged sterling. Well, we’ve found some.”
That was it—that was the trace. “Good!” Vandam said.
“Rather a lot, actually,” the voice continued.
Vandam said: “I need to see it as soon as possible.”
“It’s on its way. I’m sending a chap round—he should be there soon.”
“Do you know who paid it in?”
“There’s been more than one lot, actually, but we’ve got some names for you.”
“Marvelous. I’ll ring you back when I’ve seen the notes. Did you say Calder?”
“Yes.” The man gave his phone number. “We’ll speak later, then.”
Vandam hung up. Forged sterling—it fitted: this could be the breakthrough. Sterling was no longer legal tender in Egypt. Officially Egypt was supposed to be a sovereign country. However, sterling could always be exchanged for Egyptian money at the office of the British paymaster general. Consequently people who did a lot of business with foreigners usually accepted pound notes in payment.
Vandam opened his door and shouted along the hall. “Jakes!”
“Sir!” Jakes shouted back equally loudly.
“Bring me the file on forged banknotes.”
“Yes, sir!”
Vandam stepped to the next office and spoke to his secretary. “I’m expecting a package from the paymaster. Bring it in as soon as it comes, would you?”
“Yes, sir.”
Vandam went back into his office. Jakes appeared a moment later with a file. The most senior of Vandam’s team, Jakes was an eager, reliable young man who would follow orders to the letter, as far as they went, then use his initiative. He was even taller than Vandam, thin and black-haired, with a somewhat lugubrious look. He and Vandam were on terms of easy formality: Jakes was very scrupulous about his salutes and sirs, yet they discussed their work as equals, and Jakes used bad language with great fluency. Jakes was very well connected, and would almost certainly go further in the Army than Vandam would.
Vandam switched on his desk light and said: “Right, show me a picture of Nazi-style funny money.”
Jakes put down the file and flicked through it. He extracted a sheaf of glossy photographs and spread them on the desk. Each print showed the front and back of a banknote, somewhat larger than actual size.
Jakes sorted them out. “Pound notes, fivers, tenners and twenties.”
Black arrows on the photographs indicated the errors by which the forgeries might be identified.
The source of the information was counterfeit money taken from German spies captured in England. Jakes said: “You’d think they’d know better than to give their spies funny money.”
Vandam replied without looking up from the pictures. “Espionage is an expensive business, and most of the money is wasted. Why should they buy English currency in Switzerland when they can make it themselves? A spy has forged papers, he might as well have forged money. Also, it has a slightly damaging effect on the British economy if it gets into circulation. It’s inflationary, like the government printing money to pay its debts.”
“Still, you’d think they would have cottoned on by now to the fact that we’re catching the buggers.”
“Ah—but when we catch ‘em, we make sure the Germans don’t
know
we’ve caught ’em.”
“All the same, I hope our spies aren’t using counterfeit reichs marks.”
“I shouldn’t think so. We take Intelligence rather more seriously than they do, you know. I wish I could say the same about tank tactics.”
Vandam’s secretary knocked and came in. He was a bespectacled twenty-year-old corporal. “Package from the paymaster, sir.”
“Good show!” Vandam said.
“If you’d sign the slip, sir.”
Vandam signed the receipt and tore open the envelope. It contained several hundred pound notes.
Jakes said: “Bugger me!”
“They told me there were a lot,” Vandam said. “Get a magnifying glass, Corporal, on the double.”
“Yes, sir.”
Vandam put a pound note from the envelope next to one of the photographs and looked for the identifying error.
He did not need the magnifying glass.
“Look, Jakes.”
Jakes looked.
The note bore the same error as the one in the photograph.
“That’s it, sir,” said Jakes.
“Nazi money, made in Germany,” said Vandam.
“Now
we’re on his trail.”
Lieutenant Colonel Reggie Bogge knew that Major Vandam was a smart lad, with the kind of low cunning one sometimes finds among the working class; but the major was no match for the likes of Bogge.
That night Bogge played snooker with Brigadier Povey, the Director of Military Intelligence, at the Gezira Sporting Club. The brigadier was shrewd, and he did not like Bogge all that much, but Bogge thought he could handle him.
They played for a shilling a point, and the brigadier broke.