She said: “Where are we going?”
“A few miles out of town, to a little spot on the riverbank where we can watch the sun go down. It’s going to be a lovely evening.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I hardly know you.”
“Don’t be silly. The driver will be with us all the time—and I’m a gentleman.”
“I should get out of the car.”
“Please don’t.” He touched her arm lightly. “I have some smoked salmon, and a cold chicken, and a bottle of champagne. I get so bored with restaurants.”
Elene considered. She could leave him now, and she would be safe—she would never see him again. That was what she wanted, to get away from the man forever. She thought: But I’m Vandam’s only hope. What do I care for Vandam? I’d be happy never to see him again, and go back to the old peaceful life—
The old life.
She did care for Vandam, she realized; at least enough for her to hate the thought of letting him down. She had to stay with Wolff, cultivate him, angle for another date, try to find out where he lived.
Impulsively she said: “Let’s go to your place.”
He raised his eyebrows. “That’s a sudden change of heart.”
She realized she had made a mistake. “I’m confused,” she said. “You sprung a surprise on me. Why didn’t you ask me first?”
“I only thought of the idea an hour ago. It didn’t occur to me that it might scare you.”
Elene realized that she was, unintentionally, fulfilling her role as a dizzy girl. She decided not to overplay her hand. “All right,” she said. She tried to relax.
Wolff was studying her. He said: “You’re not quite as vulnerable as you seem, are you?”
“I don’t know.”
“I remember what you said to Aristopoulos, that first day I saw you in the shop.”
Elene remembered: she had threatened to cut off Mikis’ cock if he touched her again. She should have blushed, but she could not do so voluntarily. “I was so angry,” she said.
Wolff chuckled. “You sounded it,” he said. “Try to bear in mind that I am not Aristopoulos.”
She gave him a weak smile. “Okay.”
He turned his attention to the driver. They were out of the city, and Wolff began to give directions. Elene wondered where he had found this taxi: by Egyptian standards it was luxurious. It was some kind of American car, with big soft seats and lots of room, and it seemed only a few years old.
They passed through a series of villages, then turned onto an unmade road. The car followed the winding track up a small hill and emerged on a little plateau atop a bluff. The river was immediately below them, and on its far side Elene could see the neat patchwork of cultivated fields stretching into the distance until they met the sharp tan-colored line of the edge of the desert.
Wolff said: “Isn’t this a lovely spot?”
Elene had to agree. A flight of swifts rising from the far bank of the river drew her eye upward, and she saw that the evening clouds were already edged in pink. A young girl was walking away from the river with a huge water jug on her head. A lone felucca sailed upstream, propelled by a light breeze.
The driver got out of the car and walked fifty yards away. He sat down, pointedly turning his back on them, lit a cigarette and unfolded a newspaper.
Wolff got a picnic hamper out of the trunk and set it on the floor of the car between them. As he began to unpack the food, Elene asked him: “How did you discover this place?”
“My mother brought me here when I was a boy.” He handed her a glass of wine. “After my father died, my mother married an Egyptian. From time to time she would find the Muslim household oppressive, so she would bring me here in a gharry and tell me about ... Europe, and so on.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
He hesitated. “My mother had a way of spoiling things like that. She was always interrupting the fun. She used to say: ‘You’re so selfish, just like your father.’ At that age I preferred my Arab family. My stepbrothers were wicked, and nobody tried to control them. We used to steal oranges from other people’s gardens, throw stones at horses to make them bolt, puncture bicycle tires ... Only my mother minded, and all she could do was warn us that we’d get punished eventually. She was always saying that—‘They’ll catch you one day, Alex!’ ”
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 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 comer, Wolff started walking toward the river.