Finally he detailed a sergeant on his staff to visit every radio shop in Lower Egypt—there were not many—and ask them to report any sales of parts and equipment which might be used to make or repair a transmitter.
Then he went to the Villa les Oliviers.
The house got its name from a small public garden across the street where a grove of olive trees was now in bloom, shedding white petals like dust onto the dry brown grass.
The house had a high wall broken by a heavy, carved wooden gate. Using the ornamentation for footholds, Vandam climbed over the gate and dropped on the other side to find himself in a large courtyard. Around him the white-washed walls were smeared and grubby, their windows blinded by closed, peeling shutters. He walked to the center of the courtyard and looked at the stone fountain. A bright-green lizard darted across the dry bowl.
The place had not been lived in for at least a year.
Vandam opened a shutter, broke a pane of glass, reached through to unfasten the window, and climbed over the sill into the house.
It did not look like the home of a European, he thought as he walked through the dark cool rooms. There were no hunting prints on the walls, no neat rows of bright-jacketed novels by Agatha Christie and Dennis Wheatley, no three-piece suite imported from Maples or Harrods. Instead the place was furnished with large cushions and low tables, handwoven rugs and hanging tapestries.
Upstairs he found a locked door. It took him three or four minutes to kick it open. Behind it there was a study.
The room was clean and tidy, with a few pieces of rather luxurious furniture: a wide, low divan covered in velvet, a hand-carved coffee table, three matching antique lamps, a bearskin rug, a beautifully inlaid desk and a leather chair.
On the desk were a telephone, a clean white blotter, an ivory-handled pen and a dry inkwell. In the desk drawer Vandam found company reports from Switzerland, Germany and the United States. A delicate beaten-copper coffee service gathered dust on the little table. On a shelf behind the desk were books in several languages: nineteenth-century French novels, the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, a volume of what appeared to Vandam to be Arabic poetry, with erotic illustrations, and the Bible in German.
There were no personal documents.
There were no letters.
There was not a single photograph in the house.
Vandam sat in the soft leather chair behind the desk and looked around the room. It was a masculine room, the home of a cosmopolitan intellectual, a man who was on the one hand careful, precise and tidy and on the other hand sensitive and sensual.
Vandam was intrigued.
A European name, a totally Arabic house. A pamphlet about investing in business machines, a book of Arab verse. An antique coffee jug and a modem telephone. A wealth of information about a character, but not a single clue which might help find the man.
The room had been carefully cleaned out.
There should have been bank statements, bills from tradesmen, a birth certificate and a will, letters from a lover and photographs of parents or children. The man had collected all those things and taken them away, leaving no trace of his identity, as if he knew that one day someone would come looking for him.
Vandam said aloud: “Alex Wolff, who are you?”
He got up from the chair and left the study. He walked through the house and across the hot, dusty courtyard. He climbed back over the gate and dropped into the street. Across the road an Arab in a green-striped galabiya sat cross-legged on the ground in the shade of the olive trees, watching Vandam incuriously. Vandam felt no impulse to explain that he had broken into the house on official business: the uniform of a British officer was authority enough for just about anything in this town. He thought of the other sources from which he could seek information about the owner of this house: municipal records, such as they were; local tradesmen who might have delivered there when the place was occupied; even the neighbors. He would put two of his men on to it, and tell Bogge some story to cover up. He climbed onto his motorcycle and kicked it into life. The engine roared enthusiastically, and Vandam drove away.
3
FULL OF ANGER AND DESPAIR WOLFF SAT OUTSIDE HIS HOME AND WATCHED THE British officer drive away.
He remembered the house as it had been when he was a boy, loud with talk and laughter and life. There by the great carved gate there had always been a guard, a black-skinned giant from the south, sitting on the ground, impervious to the heat. Each morning a holy man, old and almost blind, would recite a chapter from the Koran in the courtyard. In the cool of the arcade on three sides the men of the family would sit on low divans and smoke their hubble-bubbles while servant boys brought coffee in long-necked jugs. Another black guard stood at the door to the harem, behind which the women grew bored and fat. The days were long and warm, the family was rich and the children were indulged.
The British officer, with his shorts and his motorcycle, his arrogant face and his prying eyes hidden in the shadow of the peaked uniform cap, had broken in and violated Wolff’s childhood. Wolff wished he could have seen the man’s face, for he would like to kill him one day.
He had thought of this place all through his journey. In Berlin and Tripoli and El Agela, in the pain and exhaustion of the desert crossing, in the fear and haste of his flight from Assyut, the villa had represented a safe haven, a place to rest and get clean and whole again at the end of the voyage. He had looked forward to lying in the bath and sipping coffee in the courtyard and bringing women home to the great bed.
Now he would have to go away and stay away.
He had remained outside all morning, alternately walking the street and sitting under the olive trees, just in case Captain Newman should have remembered the address and sent somebody to search the house; and he had bought a galabiya in the souk beforehand, knowing that if someone did come they would be looking for a European, not an Arab.
It had been a mistake to show genuine papers. He could see that with hindsight. The trouble was, he mistrusted Abwehr forgeries. Meeting and working with other spies he had heard horror stories about crass and obvious errors in the documents made by German Intelligence: botched printing, inferior-quality paper, even misspellings of common English words. In the spy school where he had been sent for his wireless cipher course the current rumor had been that every policeman in England knew that a certain series of numbers on a ration card identified the holder as a German spy.
Wolff had weighed the alternatives and picked what seemed the least risky. He had been wrong, and now he had no place to go.
He stood, picked up his cases and began to walk.
He thought of his family. His mother and his stepfather were dead, but he had three stepbrothers and a stepsister in Cairo. It would be hard for them to hide him. They would be questioned as soon as the British realized the identity of the owner of the villa, which might be today; and while they might tell lies for his sake, their servants would surely talk. Furthermore, he could not really trust them, for when his stepfather had died, Alex as the oldest son had got the house as well as a share of the inheritance, although he was European and an adopted, rather than natural, son. There had been some bitterness, and meetings with lawyers; Alex had stood firm and the others had never really forgiven him.
He considered checking in to Shepheard’s Hotel. Unfortunately the police were sure to think of that, too: Shepheard’s would by now have the description of the Assyut murderer. The other major hotels would have it soon. That left the pensions. Whether they were warned depended on how thorough the police wanted to be. Since the British were involved, the police might feel obliged to be meticulous. Still, the managers of small guesthouses were often too busy to pay a lot of attention to nosy policemen.