The Major was still standing beside the kitchen table. The Colonel glanced up at him and smiled sadly.
He shrugged.
Just my mind wandering, he said, it has nothing to do with this. Anyway, I'll call Bletchley as soon as I get to the office and explain the situation. I'm sure he'll agree to a meeting.
The Major nodded eagerly.
Very good, sir.
Yes, well. . . .
The Colonel groaned and heaved himself up from the table. For a moment he stood there tottering on his false leg, getting his balance, gazing down at his books.
Well that's it for now, Harry, it's time to get on with the day. And I hate to say it but I already feel as if I weighed a thousand pounds. Somehow the good things in life always seem to be over almost before we knew they were there. . . .
***
The Major was at his desk when his private telephone rang exactly at noon. He picked it up and said hello.
A wandering minstrel here, Major. Any news of a meeting with the local pharaoh before the sun sets?
The Major gave Joe a time and a place.
After the sun sets, you say? Well that's all right with me. Most of my business seems to have been conducted at night since I've been in Cairo. Nature of the business maybe, wouldn't you say?
The Major laughed, adding that he was sorry the location of the meeting wouldn't be as dramatic as the Sphinx had been the night before.
No, well, we can't always have such sweeping views of the night-tide sky, now can we, Major? Life has to go on in its little ways and the Sphinx is just too big a concept for any of us to be visiting it every night.
Too big and then some, too hard to understand too. An inscrutable notion after all, like life and a lot of things. Until the appointed time and place then. . . .
The line went dead. The Major hung up the phone and looked across the room at the Colonel, who was sitting in the corner watching him. The Colonel nodded, rose.
That's it, said the Colonel. We've done what we could and it's up to Bletchley now.
The Colonel went limping back to his office.
Shameless, he thought, Harry using a private code like that right in front of me. The Sphinx, indeed. It's easy enough to understand how he was taken with Joe, but all the same charm isn't really what's wanted in wartime. It turns heads. . . .
And abruptly an image came to the Colonel from before the war, during the Arab revolt in Palestine. An image of Colly arriving at night at a Jewish outpost manned by settlers above Galilee, near the Lebanese border, Colly turning up in one of his disguises to train the settlers and to organize what would later become the Special Night Squads of the Palmach.
A taxi with its headlights off, its taillights on the front of the car to confuse the enemy. And Colly's two young future deputies, Dayan and Allon, approaching the mysterious taxi and seeing a small lean figure come jumping out of the car with two rifles and a Bible and a drum, an English-Hebrew dictionary and five gallons of New England rum.
Flair, thought the Colonel, there's no other word for it. Colly had flair. . . .
He smiled at the memory, then thought of Joe and lost his smile, recalling a saying Stern had once been fond of repeating.
The Panorama Has Moved.
Finished, he thought. What a shame. It's all over for Joe and Liffy died for nothing, but of course there can't be any other resolution to the Stern case. With the secret of Enigma at the heart of it, there's no other way. None. Bletchley can only do what has to be done. End the case and close the file with those terrible words, No surviving witnesses. But still. . . .
The Colonel closed his door and leaned against it, recalling the strange account of a voice that had come booming out of the Sphinx under a full moon.
. . . Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?
Well the Sphinx surely, thought the Colonel. The Sphinx finally, but which one out of all of them was really the Sphinx in the end? Or is everyone, finally. . . ?
-22-
Bernini's Bag
They sat on the narrow shaded balcony that opened off Maud's living room, on the far side of the building away from the fierce sinking sun, a promise of twilight gathering in the corners of the alley below.
. . . and when the Major let me know there was truly a meeting on with Bletchley, said Joe, I couldn't stop myself from doing a little dance in place for about five minutes. I tried to call you here but there was no answer, so I made my way back to the public garden where old Menelik's crypt lies buried, and I found a sheltered little spot to sit in the shade by the river, and that's what I did. Just sat and watched the currents and let my mind drift.
Joe's hair was wet from the shower he had just taken. His left ear was newly bandaged.
But it wasn't just anyplace by the Nile, he went on. It was the very same spot where Strongbow and old Menelik had once spent a silent afternoon together toward the end of their long lives, just before the First World War, the place where there had once been a cheap open-air restaurant with beautiful trellises and vines and hanging flowers, with a pool where ducks paddled and a cage where peacocks squawked, that very same rendezvous where Strongbow and old Menelik and Crazy Cohen had met for their dreaming and drinking bouts on Sunday afternoons so long ago, when they were three young men starting out. A place for forty-year conversations and then some, the same spot where a famous sign had stood years later in the midst of emptiness, all by itself in a vacant lot . . . THE PANORAMA HAS MOVED. And I guess I got to thinking about that sign and its worlds within worlds, and before I knew it I'd just dozed off to the murmuring spell of the river.
There hasn't been much sleep for me lately, he added, despite my being officially dead. . . . A case of the restless dead, I guess you'd have to call it.
Maud smiled.
Was that really where the sign used to be?
Oh that was the spot all right. Stern pointed it out to me when we were leaving the crypt that night. So I dozed off without meaning to, and by the time I woke up it was late afternoon, so I came straight here.
The Colonel told me I might have a visitor waiting for me at home. Oh Joe, I was so excited. I was sure it meant things were going to turn out all right for you.
And was that all he said?
Yes, but it was enough. I knew what it meant.
Well I'm glad you did, but it was still cryptic of him and that's the trouble with this business. Nobody says more than he has to and you miss a lot that way. Me, I just wanted to shout because I was alive again.
Maud laughed.
Can I get you something to eat? she asked. You must be starved.
I must be, but I don't feel it. I think I might have a drink though.
Have it then. Do you want me to get it?
No, don't bother yourself, I can manage. Where do you keep it?
In the kitchen. In the cabinet over the broom closet.
Swept away, said Joe, and disappeared inside.
Maud heard the cabinet door bang in the kitchen. It swelled and stuck sometimes in the heat, and then flew back against the wall unless you were expecting it. She heard Joe muttering to himself. Glass clinked and there was the sound of ice being broken out of an ice tray.
I forgot to mention the cabinet door, she said when he came back.
Joe smiled.
It makes a racket all right when there's somebody as clumsy as me around. It just goes to show I'm not cut out for this kind of work. The moment I feel a little safe I go crashing around as if I didn't have a care in the world.
He took a long drink from his glass and sat down on the low wall of the balcony. Maud was bent over her knitting. She spoke without looking up.