Presently the car dropped us and the soldier led me on foot through a straggle of small streets and alleys near the Rue Des Soeurs. If the object here was to make me lose myself it succeeded almost immediately. He walked with a light self-confident step, humming under his breath. Finally we debouched into a suburban street full of merchants’ stores and stopped before a great carved door which he pushed open after having first rung a bell. A courtyard with a stunted palm-tree; the path which crossed it was punctuated by a couple of feeble lanterns standing on the gravel. We crossed it and ascended some stairs to where a frosted electric light bulb gleamed harshly above a tall white door. He knocked, entered and saluted in one movement. I followed him into a large, rather elegant and warmly-lighted room with neat polished floors enhanced by fine Arab carpets. In one corner seated at a high inlaid desk with the air of a man riding a penny-farthing sat Scobie, with a scowl of self-importance overlapping the smile of welcome with which he greeted me. ‘My God’ I said. The old pirate gave a Drury Lane chuckle and said: ‘At last, old man, at last.’ He did not rise however but sat on in his uncomfortable high-backed chair, tarbush on head, whisk on knee, with a vaguely impressive air. I noticed an extra pip on his shoulder, betokening heaven knows what increase of rank and power. ‘Sit down, old man’ he said with an awkward sawing movement of the hand which bore a faint resemblance to a Second Empire gesture. The soldier was dismissed and departed grinning. It seemed to me that Scobie did not look very much at ease in these opulent surroundings. He had a slightly defensive air. ‘I asked them to get hold of you’ he said, sinking his voice to a theatrical whisper ‘for a very special reason.’ There were a number of green files on his desk and a curiously disembodied-looking tea-cosy. I sat down.
He now rose quickly and opened the door. There was nobody outside. He opened the window. There was no one standing on the sill. He placed the tea-cosy over the desk telephone and reseated himself. Then, leaning forward and speaking carefully, he rolled his glass eye at me as with a conspiratorial solemnity he said: ‘Not a word to anyone, old man. Swear you won’t say a word’. I swore. ‘They’ve made me head of the Secret Service.’ The words fairly whistled in his dentures. I nodded in amazement. He drew a deep sucking breath as if he had been delivered of a weight and went on. ‘Old boy, there’s going to be a war. Inside information.’ He pointed a long finger at his own temple. ‘There’s going to be a war. The enemy is working night and day, old boy, right here among us.’ I could not dispute this. I could only marvel at the new Scobie who confronted me like a bad magazine illustration. ‘You can help us scupper them, old man’ he went on with a devastating air of authority. ‘We want to take you on our strength.’ This sounded most agreeable. I waited for details. ‘The most dangerous gang of all is right here, in Alexandria’ the old man creaked and boomed, ‘and you are in the centre of it. All friends of yours.’
I saw through the knotted eyebrows and the rolling excited eye the sudden picture of Nessim, a brief flash, as of intuition, sitting at his huge desk in the cold steel-tube offices watching a telephone ring while the beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. He was expecting a message about Justine — one more twist of the knife. Scobie shook his head. ‘Not him so much’ he said. ‘He’s in it, of course. The leader is a man called Balthazar. Look what the censorship have been picking up.’
He extracted a card from a file and passed it to me. Balthazar writes an exquisite hand and the writing was obviously his; but I could not help smiling when I saw that the reverse of the postcard contained only the little chessboard diagram of the boustrophedon. Greek letters filled up the little squares. ‘He’s got so much damn cheek he sends them through the open post.’ I studied the diagram and tried to remember the little I had learned from my friend of the calculus. ‘It’s a nine-power system. I can’t read this one’ I said. Scobie added breathlessly: ‘They have regular meetings, old man, to pool information. We know this for a fact.’ I held the postcard lightly in my fingers and seemed to hear the voice of Balthazar saying: ‘The thinker’s job is to be suggestive: that of the saint to be silent about his discovery.’
Scobie was leaning back in his chair now with unconcealed self-satisfaction. He had puffed himself out like a pouter-pigeon. He took his tarbush off his head, looked at it with an air of complaisant patronage, and placed it on the tea-cosy. Then he scratched his fissured skull with bony fingers and went on — ‘We simply can’t break the code’ he said. ‘We’ve got dozens of them’ — he indicated a file full of photostatic reproductions of similar postcards. ‘They’ve been round the code-rooms: even to the Senior Wranglers in the Universities. No good, old man.’ This did not surprise me. I laid the postcard on the pile of photostats and returned to the contemplation of Scobie. ‘That is where you come in’ he said with a grimace, ‘if you will come in, old man. We want you to break the code however long it takes you. We’ll put you on a damn good screw, too. What do you say?’
What could I say? The idea was too delightful to be allowed to melt. Besides during the last months my schoolwork had fallen off so much that I was sure my contract was not going to be renewed at the end of the present term. I was always arriving late from some meeting with Justine. I hardly bothered to correct papers any more. I had become irritable and surly with my colleagues and directors. Here was a chance to become my own man. I heard Justine’s voice in my head saying: ‘Our love has become like some fearful misquotation in a popular saying’ as I leaned forward once more and nodded my head. Scobie expelled a breath of relieved pleasure and relaxed once more into the pirate. He confided his office to an anonymous Mustapha who apparently dwelt somewhere in the black telephone — Scobie always looked into the mouthpiece as he spoke, as if into a human eye. We left the building together and allowed a staff car to take us down towards the sea. Further details of my employment could be discussed over the little bottle of brandy in the bottom of the cake-stand by his bed.
We allowed ourselves to be dropped on the Corniche and walked together the rest of the way by a brilliant bullying moonlight, watching the old city dissolve and reassemble in the graphs of evening mist, heavy with the inertia of its surrounding desert, of the green alluvial Delta which soaked into its very bones, informing its values. Scobie talked inconsequently of this and that. I remember him bemoaning the fact that he had been left an orphan at an early age. His parents had been killed together under dramatic circumstances which gave him much food for reflection. ‘My father was an early pioneer of motoring, old man. Early road races, flat out at twenty miles an hour — all that sort of thing. He had his own landau. I can see him now sitting behind the wheel with a big moustache. Colonel Scobie, M.C. A Lancer he was. My mother sat beside him, old man. Never left his side, not even for road races. She used to act as his mechanic. The newspapers always had pictures of them at the start, sitting up there in bee-keeper’s veils — God knows why the pioneers always wore those huge veils. Dust, I suppose.’