‘ ’Alo?’ It was a woman’s voice.
Bond took a deep breath and started to speak. ‘Good afternoon. My name is James Bond. I believe you were expecting me to ring about a business matter?’ There was silence at the other end of the Line. ‘Hello?’ Perhaps she did not understand English.
‘You will come at six o’clock. Apartment fourteen, Scmi- ramis Palace.’ The voice sounded worried. Like a child repeating a message over the telephone when its parents have gone out for the evening. ‘Do you know Cairo well? It is near the Citadel.’
‘Not terribly well, but I’ll find it. Do you - ?’
The continuous whine told him that the telephone had been put down.
‘Were you cut off, sir?’
Bond wondered if the girl had been listening to the call. Probably. The Egyptian Intelligence Service would have an agent on the switchboard of every hotel in Cairo. ‘No, it’s all right, thank you.’
He replaced the receiver slowly and picked up his jacket. The slight padding in the shoulder was in fact a substitute for a holster, which he now considered it unwise to carry when exposed to the attentions of hijack-happy security guards. The ‘padding* could be easily removed and re-zipped under the arm pit, or inside the waist band of the trousers, to form a serviceable holster for the Walther. Some speed of draw was inevitably lost. Bond had been capable of hitting a man at twenty feet in three-fifths of a second with a conventional holster draw. With the reinforced nylon, he had never broken the magic second. Still, it was better than being held up at an airport for hours while his credentials were checked out and he was eventually released with grudging apologies - or at some airports, where he might be driven away to a small room with no windows and padded walls to suffocate the screams. Bond unzipped the padding, turned it inside out and zipped it against the armpit. He put on the jacket, inserted the Walther and checked his appearance in the looking-glass above the writing desk. Only a professional would notice the faint bulge. Still, he was up against professionals.
With this thought in mind, he tapped a small amount of talcum powder into the palm of his hand and applied it circumspectly to the locks of his travel-weary Vuitton suitcase and attaché case. He then wedged one of his hairs into the door of the cupboard which contained his clothes and, returning the talcum powder to the bathroom, lifted the cover of the lavatory cistern and made a small scratch at water level on the copper ball-cock, which he was pleased to see had been manufactured by Allcock and Hardisty, Bilston, Staffordshire, England. Bond knew that the tension of breaking into a man’s room could reveal itself in the simplest way.
Satisfied that if anyone searched his suite he would know about it, Bond descended to the foyer and walked into the heat that even at five o’clock was striking down like a hammer. He ignored the three taxis waiting outside the hotel and turned right and then left over the El Gama’a Bridge. A hundred suffocating yards down the Shariel Corniche he found a taxi, a battered Buick that looked as if it was being driven to the scrapyard. He told the driver that he wanted to go to the Citadel and settled back uncomfortably against the imitation leather, scuffed down to its sun-bleached cross-weave. As far as he knew, he had not been followed.
The driver spoke fractured English, like a central European in an American situation comedy, and on the way Bond inquired about the imaginary address of a number of nonexistent friends in Cairo. Into this list he slipped the Semi- ramis Palace. The driver’s face lit up in recognition. Yes, it was very near. That tall block of flats silhouetted against the dome of the Sultan Hassan Mosque. Bond pinpointed the building in his mind and looked ahead admiringly to the vast complex of mosques, palaces and fortifications built just below the crest of the Mokkatam Hills. This was the Citadel of Saladin, so the guidebooks told you, built over a period of seven hundred years and half a dozen conquests.
Bond paid off the driver at the outer wall and resolutely refused the blandishments of a crowd of beggars, trinket salesmen and potential guides. It was now half past five and, at a guess, it would take a ten-minute saunter to reach the Semi- ramis Palace. Just time to take advantage of the panorama from the ramparts of the Citadel. Bond climbed three flights of steps and leaned against a warm, sandstone balustrade. Below him sprawled the largest city on the continent of Africa, an untidy jumble of buildings stretching away into the heat haze like second hand furniture at an auction, the sky line pricked by the towers of minarets and the domes of mosques.
The sky was now tinged with red, which would quickly become purple, violet and then night. Bond watched the shadows creeping across the face of the Mohammed Ali mosque and filled his nostrils with the alien smells that wafted up to him. To Bond, who travelled widely, smells could pinpoint a place and a mood better than sights or sounds. What was in this bitter-sweet odour tonight? Spices, jasmine, detritus, corruption, history? Mostly tonight, thought Bond, it was danger - and perhaps death. He felt the reassuring pressure of the Walther PPK beneath his left shoulder-blade and began to retrace his steps down to the wide, worn staircase.
The Sound of Music
The lift was like a beautiful bird-cage; an exquisite prison of thin horizontal bars interlaced with a petit point of ironmongery by a craftsman who was obviously a frustrated flower-arranger. It probably dated from the time of the French occupation.
The lift carried Bond graciously and smoothly past exotic cooking smells and the plaintive wails of small children. It stopped with a decorous lurch, like an old lady steadying herself before she crossed the road, on the fourth floor. Bond slid back the two sets of metal doors and stepped out of the lift. He Listened for a moment and wondered if anyone else had been listening to the telltale noise of the lift coming up. There was no sound beyond that of a wireless in one of the apartments playing some monotonous Arab dirge.
Bond moved swiftly down the stone corridor following a wavy line down the wall that looked as if it had been made by a child walking along with a pencil. He passed the door with fourteen on it and continued to the end of the corridor, where there was a door which looked as if it was not used very often. As he had surmised, this led out on to a fire-escape. Worth remembering in case there was any unpleasantness. He retraced his footsteps down the corridor and stopped outside the door with fourteen on it. No sound. He knocked and waited. There was a spyhole in the middle of the door and as the seconds ticked by he wondered whose eye would be glued to the other side. He was about to knock again when the door opened eight inches to release a whiff of unfamiliar scent.
‘Bond,’ he said. ‘James Bond. You don’t answer the door any faster than you do the telephone.’
The girl opened the door wide and looked past him down the corridor to right and left. At a guess she was Egyptian mixed with something else, French probably. She was beautiful but not in a way that had ever appealed to Bond. Everything about her was slightly too big. Her mouth, her breasts, her behind - even her eyes. She reminded Bond of an overripe tropical fruit. The eyes, admittedly a devastating feature, wore too much mascara, and the bruised plum lipstick overspilled its territory by a profligate couple of millimetres. Bond looked with disapproval at the too-large gypsy earrings and the rather ridiculous sheath dress, plucked in at the waist and spreading out with false lapels to accentuate the already overlarge breasts. She looked what she probably was - a high- class whore.
‘I came alone,’ said Bond.