Triple (1991) Read online

  Eila remembered her other guests. "I want to talk to you some more before you go," she said to Cortone. She went across the room to where Hassan was tying to open a pair of doors that gave on to the garden. Ashford brushed nervously at the wispy hair behind his ears. "The public hears about the big battles, but I suppose the soldier remembers those little personal incidents." Cortone nodded, thinking that Ashford clearly had no conception of whar war was like, and wondering if the professor's youth had really been as adventurous as Dickstein claimed. "Uter, I took him to meet my cousins-the family comes from Sicily. We had pasta and wine, and they made a hero of Nat. We were together only for a few days, but we were like brothers, you know?" "Indeed." "When I beard he was taken prisoner, I figured I'd never see him again." "Do you know what happened to him?" Ashford said. "He doesn't say much . . ." Cortone shrugged. "He survived the camps." "He was fortunate." "Was he?" Ashford looked at Cortone for a moment, confused, then turned away and looked around the room. After a moment he said, 'This is not a very typical Oxford gathering, you know. Dickstein, Rostov and Hassan are somewhat unusual students. You should meet Toby-he's the archetypal undergraduate." He caught the eye of a red-faced youth, in a tweed suit and a very wide paisley tie. "Toby, come and meet Dickstein's comrade-in-arms-Mr. Cortone." Toby shook hands and said abruptly, "Any chance of a tip from the stable? Will Dickstein win?" 'Tvrin whatr'Cortone said. Ashford explained, "Dickstein and Rostov are to play a chess match-they're both supposed to be terribly good. Toby think you might have inside information-he probably wants to bet on the outcome." Cortone said, "I thought chess was an old man's game." Toby said, "Ahl" rather loudly, and emptied his glass. He and Ashford seemed nonplussed by Cortone's remark. A little girl, four or five years old, came in from the garden carrying an elderly gray cat Ashford introduced her with the coy pride of a man who has become a father in middle age. 'This is Suza," he said. The girl said, "And this is Hezekiah." She had her mother's skin and hair; she too would be beautiful. Cortone wondered whether she was really Ashford's daughter. There was nothing of him in her looks. She held out the cats paw, and Cortone obligingly shook it and said,"How are you, Hezeldah?" Suza went over to Dickstein. "Good morning, Nat. Would you like to stroke Hezeklah?" "She's very cute," Cortone said to Ashford. "I have to talk to Nat. Would you excuse me?" He went over to Dickstein, who was kneeling down and stroking the cat. Nat and Suza seemed to be pals. He told her, "This is my friend Alan." "We've met," she said, and fluttered her eyelashes. Cortone thought: She learned that from her mother. "We were in the war together," Dickstein continued. Suza looked directly at Cortone. "Did you kill people?" He hesitated. "Sure." "Do you feel bad about it?" "Not too bad. They were wicked people." "Nat feels bad about it. Thairs why he doesn't like to talk about it too much." The kid had got more out of Dickstein than all the grown ups put together. I The cat jumped out of Suza's arms with surprising agility. She chased after it. Dickstein stood up. "I wouldn't say Mrs. Ashford is out of reach," Cortone said quietly. "Wouldn't you?" Dickstein said. "She can't be more than twenty-five. He's at least twenty years older, and I'll bet he's no pistol. If they got married before the war, she must have been around seventeen at the time. And they don't seem affectionate." "I wish I could believe you," Dickstein said. He was not as interested as he should have been. "Come and see the garden." They went through the French doors. The sun was stronger, and the bitter cold had gone from the air. The garden stretched in a green-and-brown wilderness down to the edge of the river. They walked away from the house. Dickstein said, "You don't much like this crowd." "The war's over," Cortone said. "You and me, we live, in different worlds now. All this-professors, chess matches, sherry parties ... I might as well be on Mars. My life is doing deals, fighting off the competition, making a few bucks. I was fixing to offer you a job in my business, but I guess I'd be wasting my time." "Alan. . ." Listen, what the hell. Well probably lose touch now-rm not much of a letter writer. But I wont forget that I owe you my life. One of these days you might want to call in the debt. You know where to find me." Dickstein opened his mouth to speak, then they heard the voices. I,Oh . . . no, not here, not now . . ." It was a woman. "Yesl" A man. Dickstein and Cortone were standing beside a thick box hedge which cut off a comer of the garden: someone had begun to plant a rnst e and never finished the job. A few steps from where they were a gap opened, then the hedge turned a right angle and ran along the river bank. The voices came clearly from the other side of the foliage. The woman spoke again, low and throaty. "Don't damn you, or I'll scream." Dickstein and Cortone stepped through the gap. Cortone would never forget what he saw there. He stared at the two people and then, appalled, he glanced at Dickstein. Dickstein's face was gray with shock, and he looked ill; his mouth dropped open as he gazed in horror and despair. Cortone looked back at the couple. The woman was Eila Ashford. The skirt of her dress VMS around her waist, her face was flushed with pleasure and she was kissing Yasif Hassan.

  Chapter One

  The public-address system at Cairo airport made a noise like a doorbell, and then the arrival of the Alitalia flight from Milan was announced in Arabic, Italian, French and English. Towflk el-Masiri left his table in the buffet and made his way out to the observation deck. He put on his sunglasses to look over the shimmering concrete apron. The Caravelle was already down and taxiing. Towfik was there because of a cable. It had come that morning from his "uncle" in Rome, and it had been in code. Any business could use a code for international telegrams, provided it first lodged the key to the code with the post office. Such codes were used more and more to save moneyby reducing common phrases to single words-than to keep secrets. Towfiks uncWs cable, transcribed according to the registered code book, gave details of his late aunt's will. However, Towflk. had another key, and the message he read was:

  OBSERVE AND FOLLOW PROFESSOR FRIEDRICH SCHULZ ARRIVING CAIRO FROM MILAN WEDNESDAY 28 FEBRUARY 1968 FOR SEVERAL DAYS. AGE 51 HEIGHT 180 CM WEIGHT 150 POUNDS HAIR WHITE EYES BLUE NATIONAL. ITY AUSTRIAN COMPANIONS WIFE ONLY.

  The passengers began to Me out of the aircraft, and Towfik spotted his man almost immediately. There was only one tall, lean white-haired man on the flight. He was wearing a light blue suit, -a white shirt and a tie, and carrying a plastic shopping bag from a duty-free store and a camera. His wife was much shorter, and wore a fashionable mini-dress and a blonde wig. As they crossed the airfield they looked about them and sniffed the warm, dry desert air the way most people did the &at time they landed in North Africa. The passengers disappeared into the arrivals hall. Towfik waited on the observation deck until the baggage came off the plane, then he went inside and mingled with the small crowd of people waiting just beyond the customs barrier. He did a lot of waiting. That was something they did not teach you-how to wait. You learned to handle guns, memorize maps, break open safes and kill people with your bare hands, all in the first six months of the training course; but there were no lectures in patience, no exercises for sore feet, no seminars on tedium. And it was beginning to seem like There is something wrong here beguming to seem Lookout lookout beginning to-- There was another agent in the crowd. Towfik's subconscious bit the fire alarm while he was thinking about patience. The people in the little crowd, waitIng for relatives and friends and business acquaintances off the Milan plane, were impatient. They smoked, shifted their weight from one foot to the other, craned their necks and fidgeted. There was a middle-class family with four children, two men in the traditional striped cotton galabiya robes, a businessman in a dark suit, a young white woman, a chauffeur with a sign saying FORD MOTOR COMPANY, and- And a patient Like Towfik, he had dark skin and abort hair and wore a European-style suit. At first glance he seemed to be with the middle-class family-just as Towfik would seem, to a casual observer, to be with the businessman in the dark suit. The other agent stood nonchalantly, with his hands behind his back, facing the exit from the baggage hall, looking unobtrusive. There was a streak of paler skin alongside his nose, like an old war. He touched it, once, in wha
t might have been a nervous gesture, then put his hand behind his back

  question was, had he spotted Towfik? Towfik turned to the businessman beside him and said, "I never understand why this has to take so long." He smiled, and spoke quietly, so that the businessman leaned closer to hear him and smiled back; and the pair of them looked like acquaintances having a casual conversation.

  7be businessman said, "The formalities take longer than the fliOV Towfik stole another glance at the other agent. The man stood in the same position, watching the exit. He had not attempted any camouflage. Did that mean that he had not spotted Towfik? Or was it just that he had second-guessed Towfik, by deciding that a piece of camouflage would give him away? The passengers began to emerge, and Towfik realized there was nothing he could do, either way. He hoped the people the agent was meeting would come out before Professor Schulz. It was not to be. Schulz and his wife were among the first little knot of passengers to come through. The other agent approached them and shook hands. Of course, of course. The agent was there to meet Schulz. Towfik watched while the agent summoned porters and ushered the Schulzes away-, then he went out by a different exit to his car. Before getting in he took off his jacket and tie and put on sunglasses and a white cotton cap. Now he would not be easily recognizable as the man who had been waiting at the meeting point. He figured the agent would have parked in a no-waiting zone right outside the main entrance, so he drove that way. He was right. He saw the porters loading the Schulz baggage into the boot of a five-year-old gray Mercedes. He drove on. He steered his dirty Renault on to the main highway which ran from Heliopolis, where the airport was, to Cairo. He drove at 60 kph and kept to the slow lane. The gray Mercedes passed him two or three minutes later, and be accelerated to keep it within sight. He memorized its number, as it was always useful to be able to recognize the opposition's cam The sky began to cloud over. As he sped down the straight, palm-lined highway, Towfik considered what he had found out so far. The cable had told him nothing about Schulz except what the man looked like and the fact that he was an Austrian professor. The meeting at the airport meant a great deaI, though. It had been a kind of clandestine VIP treatment. Towfik had the agent figured for a local: everything pointed to that-his clothes, his car, his style of waiting. That meant Schulz was probably here by invitation of the government, but either he or the people he had come to see wanted the visit kept secret. It was not much. What was Schulz professor of? He could be a banker, arms manufacturer, rocketry expert or cotton buyer. He might even be with Al Fatah, but Towfik could not quite see the man as a resurrected Nazi. Still, anything was possible. Certainly Tel Aviv did not think Schulz was important: if they had, they would not have used Towfik, who was young and inexperienced, for this surveillance. It was even possible that the whole thing was yet another training exercise. They entered Cairo on the Shari Ramses, and Towfik closed the gap between his car and the Mercedes until there was only one vehicle between them. The gray car turned right on to the Comiche al-Nil then crossed the river by the July Bridge and entered the Zamalek district of Gezira island. There was less traffic in the wealthy, dull suburb, and Towfik became edgy about being spotted by the agent at the wheel of the Mercedes. However, two minutes later the other car tamed into a residential street near the Officers' Club and stopped outside an apartment block with a jacaranda, tree in the garden. Towfik immediately took a right turn and was out of sight before the doors of the other car could open. He parked, jumped out, and walked back to the corner. He was in time to see the agent and the Schulzes disappear into the building followed by a caretaker in galabtya struggling with their luggage. Towfik looked up and down the street. There was nowhere a man could convincingly idle. He returned to his car, backed it around the corner and parked between two other cars on the same side of the road as the Mercedes. Half an hour later the agent came out alone, got into his car, and drove off. Towfik settled down to wait.

  It went on for two days, then it broke. Until then the Schulzes behaved like tourists, and seemed to enjoy it. On the first evening they had dinner in a nightclub and watched a troupe of belly-dancers. Next'day they did the Pyramids and the Sphinx, with lunch at Groppi!s and

  dinner at the Nile Hilton. In the morning on the third day they got up early and took a taxi to the mosque of Ibn Tulun. Towflk left his car near the Gayer-Anderson Museum and followed them. They took a perfunctory look around the mosque and headed east on the Shari al-Salibah. They were dawdling, looking at fountains and buildings, peering into dark tiny shops, watching baladi women buy onions and peppers and camers feet at street stalls. They stopped at a crossroads and went into a tea-shop. Towfik crossed the street to the sebeel, a domed fountain behind windows -of iron lace, and studied the baroque relief around its walls. He moved on up the street, still within sight of the tea-shop, and spent some time buying four misshapen giant tomatoes from a white-capped stallholder whose feet were bare. The Schulzes came out of the tea-shop and turned north, following Towfik, into the street market. Here it was easier for Towft to idle, sometimes ahead of them and sometimes behind. Frau Schulz bought slippers and a gold bangle, and paid too much for a sprig of mint from a haff-naked child. Towflk got far enough in front of them to drink a small cup of strong, unsweetened Turkish coffee under the awning of a cafe called Nasif 9. They left the street market and entered a covered souq specializing in saddlery. Schulz glanced at his wristwatch and spoke to his wife-giving Towfik the first faint tremor of anxiety-and then they walked a little faster until they emerged at Bab Zuweyla, the gateway to the original walled City. For a few moments the Schulzes were obscured from TowWs view by a donkey pulling a'cart loaded with Ali-Baba jars, their mouths stoppered with crumpled paper. When the cart passed, Towfik saw that Schulz was saying goodbye to his wife and getting into an oldish gray Mercedes. Towflk cursed under his breath. The car door slammed and it pulled away. Fran Scbulz waved. Towfik read the license plate-it was the car he had followed from Heliopolis-and saw it go west then turn left Into the Shari Port Said. Forgetting Frau Schulz, he turned around and broke into a run.

  They had been walking for about an hour, but they had covered only a mile. Towfik sprinted through the saddlery souq and the street market, dodging around the stalls and bumping into robed men and women in black, dropping his bag of tomatoes in a collision with a Nubian sweeper, until he reached the museum and his car. He dropped into the driver's seat, breathing hard and grimacing at the pain in his side. He started the engine and pulled away on an interception course for the Shari Port Said. The traffic was light, so when be hit the main road he guessed he must be behind the Mercedes. He continued southwest, over the island of Roda and the Giza Bridge onto the Giza Road. Schulz had not been deliberately trying to shake a tall, Towflk decided. Had the professor been a pro he would have lost Towfik decisively and finally. No, he had simply been taking a morningwalk through the market before meeting someone at a landmark. But Towfik was sure that the meeting place, and the walk beforehand, had been suggested by the agent. They might have gone anywhere, but it seemed likely they were leaving the city--otherwise Schulz could simply have taken a taxi at Bab Zuweyla-and this was the major road westward. Towfik drove very fast. Soon there was nothing in front of him but the arrow-straight gray road, and nothing either side but yellow sand and blue sky. He reached the Pyramids without catching the Mercedm Here the road forked, leading north to Alexandria or south to Faiyum. From where the Mercedes had picked up Schulz, this would have been an unlikely, roundabout route to Alexandria; so Towfik plumped for Faiyum. When at last he saw the other car it was behind him, coming up very fast. Before it reached him it turned right, off the main road. Towflk braked to a halt and reversed the Renault to the turnoff. The other car was already a mile ahead on the side road. He followed. This was dangerous, now. The road probably went deep into the Western Desert, perhaps all the way to the oil field at Qattara. It seemed little used, and a strong wind might obscure it under a layer of sand. The agent in the Mercedes was sure to realize
he.was being followed. If he were a good agent, the sight of the Renault might even trigger memories of the journey from Heliopolis. This was where the training broke down, and all the careful camouflage and tricks of the trade became useless; and you had to simply get on someone's tail and stick with him whether he saw you or not, because the whole point was to find out where he was going, and if you could "anage that you were no use at all. So he threw caution to the desert wind and followed; and still he lost them. The Mercedes was a faster car, and better designed for the narrow, bumpy road, and within a &w minutes it was out of sight. Towfik followed the road, hoping he might catch them when they stopped or at least come across something that might be their destination. Sixty kilometers on, deep in the desert and beginning to worry about getting gasoline, he reached a tiny oasii village at a crossroads. A few scrawny animals grazed in sparse vegetation around a muddy pool. A jar of fava beans and three Fanta cans on a makeshift table outside a hut signified the local cafe. Towfik got out of the car and spoke to an old man watering a bony buffalo. "Have you seen a gray Mercedes?" The peasant stared at him blankly, as if he were speaking a foreign language. "Have you seen a gray car?" The old man brushed a large black fly off his forehead and nodded, once. "ften?" "Today." That was probably as precise an answer as he could hope for. "Which way did it go?" The old man pointed west, into the desert. Towflk said, "Where can I get petrol?" The man pointed east, toward Cairo. Towfik gave him a coin and returned to the car. He started the engine and looked again at the gasoline gauge. He had enough fuel to get back to Cairo, just; if he went farther west he would run out on the return journey. He had done all he could, he decided. Wearily, he turned the Renault around and headed back toward the city.