“Do you know,” Abigail’s asking him, “what happened when we went past Gizah on the steamer? Well, I’ll tell you: at exactly half past four the dragoman came below deck and said: ‘Ladies and gentlemen…’ ” She slips into a mock-Egyptian accent and repeats: “ ‘La-dies and gentle-men. If you care to as-cent un-to the main deck now, the mar-vel of the Pyra-mids will be re-vealed to you.’ So we as-cented, and the Pyramids were there, just like in the photographs that I’d already seen in all those bloody books but not looking so nice and aesthetic; and people got their cameras out and started photographing them, although I don’t know why, because their photos won’t turn out as nice as the ones in the books and brochures either. And they didn’t even photograph the things for very long, because there was a buffet laid out on the deck, and they all wanted to get at it before the sandwiches and lemonade ran out; but then of course they realised that they had to show a certain reverence towards the Pyramids, while still not missing out on lunch, so they revered and ate and photographed and drank all at once. And our dragoman said: ‘Please don’t for-get your tem-ple tick-et, as it’s valid for the Sphinx tour too.’ ”
“And what did you do?” Serge asks.
“What could I do?” her voice goes high and squeaky and her neck flushes again. “I looked at the Pyramids, and tried to revere them, and photographed a little. Then I looked at the others looking at the Pyramids, and photographed these people too. I tried to eat a little, but I felt sick. It was obscene-like a pornographic film: this dirty entertainment laid on for us all to gape at.”
“I had that impression in the war,” Serge says.
“You were in the war?” she asks, looking straight at him for the first time. “Doing what?”
“Observing,” he says. “Gaping from a plane.”
“That sounds quite exciting,” she says. “Tell me more.”
He takes her back to his place. During sex, her gasps have the same high and squeaky pitch as her voice during conversation, as though arousal, for her, were a heightened form of indignation. Kneeling behind her, he watches the flushes move from her neck down her spine and out along her rib-lines. Afterwards, they lie in silence for a while; then she asks him:
“So, did you kill anyone?”
She leaves the next day-on another steamer, heading down to Luxor and Assuan. He thinks of her two days later, though, when, leaving his flat by foot and turning the corner into Rue de Paris, he hears two gunshots and, looking down the street to where they came from, sees two black figures running from a growing patch of white that’s spreading across the pavement. It’s milk: their victim, an English professor at the Law School, had stepped outside his front door to collect it when they shot him-they were lying in wait. The man’s already dead by the time Serge reaches him. His blood, trickling from his head and abdomen, is running into the milk, marbling its pool with deltaed strands, like natron on a lake of soda.
iii
The Central Station has its own building, a much more modern one than that housing the other ministries. Antennae sprout from its roof; soldiers guard the compound that surrounds it: Imperial Communications are indeed, as Ferguson intimated, “protected.” Its rooms are full of people and equipment, its corridors of well-directed bustle. Macauley leads Serge past rows of desks at which men sit with headphones on, transcribing letter sequences while other men move up and down the rows gathering the transcriptions and depositing them in front of yet more men who mark them up on blackboards. In a corner two more men are working their way through a pile of newspapers-Gazette, Wady et Nil, al-Ahram, al-Balagh, al-Jumhur, al-Akbar-underscoring certain words, then tearing out the pages on which these have been highlighted and passing them to the gatherers, who convey them to the marker-uppers, who, in turn, copy them out to mingle with the letters on the boards.
“They use all kinds of channels,” Macauley says to Serge, obscurely.
“Who do?” Serge asks.
“Everyone!” Macauley answers. “We’re at the crossroads here, the confluence of all the region’s interest groups’ transmissions. We’re listening to the Wafdists and the Turks; they’re listening to Ulamáists and Zionists; the French are listening to us, and we to them-but we share info on the Russians, who we both hate, although not as much as we all hate the Germans, who we listen to as well. Or is it the Spartacans? In any case, we listen to them all. Telegrams, radio messages, acrostics and keywords lurking within print: we try to pick as much of it up as we can. A thankless task, of course; who knows what tiny fraction of it all we actually get?”
“And that’s what all these men are doing?” Serge asks.
“All these men and more: my décryptage department. Headed up by Egyptologists. Got the right minds: used to cracking New Kingdom texts or something. Rebus logic. It all goes above my head, to tell you the truth. This stuff,” he continues, leading Serge through a door into the next room, “I can understand a little better: at least it looks like something vaguely recognisable.”
He’s pointing to a wall on which a huge map, as big as eight or so of the other room’s blackboards, is painted: a map extending from Izmir down to Khartoum and from Tunis to Baghdad. Pins of various colours have been jabbed into this-some small and some with heads as large as ping-pong balls, some all alone and some in clusters. More pins are being added all the time, by men consulting photographs, hand-written notes and smaller maps.
“ImagInt,” Macauley says. “Aerial, terrestrial, snapped, painted, scribbled on some scrap of fabric: it’s all there. Even livestock movements, locust swarms, what have you. All adds up-or at least, it’s supposed to. HumInt too, of course.”
“What’s humming?” Serge asks.
“HumInt: Human Intelligence. Got agents everywhere: here; Suq Al-Shuyukh, where the sheiks all meet; Nasiriyah, from whence sedition seems to spread down the Euphrates to the Arab tribes; the Shia holy cities, hotbeds of intrigue and points, if memory serves me rightly, of contact with Damascus, which, via them, can exercise remote control of Persia… or is it the other way round? Either way, we’ve got to keep an eye and ear out for what’s brewing. We have men doing the Hajj, or wandering around with herdsmen, or hanging out in mosques, bazaars, communal washhouses, village meetings…”
“Folklore?” Serge asks, pointing to a table labelled with this word, across whose surface lies a mish-mash of handwritten pages crudely illustrated with pictures of lions and eagles.
“Supposed to contain useful information,” Macauley responds. “Stories of curses going round, or afrits haunting districts, may be telling us something… or not…” He sighs. “It’s all pretty intangible: whispers and rumours drifting like some kind of vapour across swathes of desert…”
“Back in London,” Serge says, “I was reading about some chap named Laurice, Lorents, Laudence…”
“That fucking twit,” Macauley snorts. “Bombards us all the time with useless information. Not just him: every two-bit traveller, ‘adventurer,’ ‘novelist’ or general man of leisure who’s inherited more money than sense… ladies of leisure too: they’re just as bad… Sending us their ‘reports,’ briefing their friends on Fleet Street to extol their bravery and cunning to readers who aren’t any the wiser, then expecting knighthoods when they get home… Fantasists and frauds, the lot of them! The worst part of it is, they’re actually quite useful.”