“Come around seven.”
I WALKED NORTH, with the Nile and the British embassy on my left. In front of the embassy, British soldiers stood in sentry boxes looking slightly embarrassed at the size and grandeur of the building, a great white wedding cake of a place set in lush green gardens that looked as big as, and a lot nicer than, Buckingham Palace. For a while it seemed that a dark green sedan was following me. But after I had crossed the road, close to the Cairo Museum of Antiquities, and walked east along Aldo Street toward Opera Square, I looked back and saw that it had gone.
Not that I felt at all nervous. Cairo was still wide awake. Despite the late hour, shops remained open, clinging on to life like moss-covered shellfish in some ancient aquarium, their shabby owners surveying me with a mixture of amusement and toothless fascination. Old men in turbans dozed on street corners. Families sat in gutters and talked and pointed at me. And from an open window in a building, what sounded like a party was under way: rhythmic hand-clapping and women ululating like a war party of Cherokee Indians. Dogs barked, trams whined, car horns blared. That night, Cairo seemed like the most magical city on earth.
I walked past Groppi’s, the Turf Club, and Sha’ar Hashmayim-Heaven’s Gate, the largest synagogue in Cairo and instantly recognizable from the Hebrew inscriptions on the wall. The black sky above my head was swept by the cones of searchlights, hunting for German bombers that would never come. In Opera Square, near Shepheard’s, neon lights advertised the existence of Madame Badia’s Opera Casino. I looked at the place, remembered Coogan, and smiled. I thought I saw a man in a tropical suit step smartly sideways into a shop doorway.
Curious to see if I was being followed, I retraced my steps a few yards, but was forced to make a retreat when I encountered a whole posse of fly-whisk sellers, shoe-shine boys, flower sellers, and unshaven men selling razor blades (mostly used), at the edge of the open-air movie theater in Ezbekiah Gardens. There was a movie showing. Or rather, it was just ending, and I found myself walking against a human current made up of hundreds of people on their way out of the gardens.
I had removed my jacket to walk home. And now I dropped it on the grass. As I bent down to retrieve it I felt and heard a smallish object zip over my head. It sounded like a thick rubber band flying through the air and then striking something. I straightened up again and found myself face-to-face with an Egyptian wearing a tarboosh and a surprised expression on his face. His mouth was wide open as if he had been trying to catch the largish red fly that was crawling on his forehead. Almost immediately he dropped onto his knees in front of me, and then collapsed onto the ground. I glanced down and the red fly seemed to settle on the man’s head; then I saw that it was not a fly at all, but a very distinct hole from which six small leglike threads of blood were now running. The man had been shot between the eyes.
I knew that the shot had been meant for me. I put my hand in the specially tailored pocket of my tux and on the grip of the little. 32-caliber hammerless Colt they had given us at Catoctin Mountain for evening wear. I was ready to put a hole through the lining if I saw what I was looking for. A man with a silencer on the end of a small- caliber pocket pistol like my own. At the same time, I walked quickly away from the body, which no one had yet noticed belonged to a dead man. Cairo wasn’t the kind of place where it was uncommon for people to lie on the ground. Even dead ones.
I walked back toward Shepheard’s Hotel, my tux jacket wrapped around my hand like a large black bandage, my finger on the trigger of the little Colt. Ahead of me I saw a man walking almost as quickly. He was wearing a beige tropical suit, a straw hat, and two-tone wingtips. I couldn’t see his face, but as he went by a shop window, I saw that he had a newspaper in his hand. Or rather he had a newspaper folded over his hand, and pressed close to his chest, like a bath towel. He didn’t run. But he was on his toes, and I knew that this was my man.
I wanted to shout after him but guessed that this would only have made him run or draw his fire. I had no idea what he was going to do. I didn’t expect him to run smartly up the red-carpeted steps of my own hotel, neatly sidestepping the man who had been there all day working a dirty postcard pitch. The street hawker had his reputation to consider. He wasn’t about to be sidestepped so easily again. Not when he had a living to make. As soon as I neared the edge of the red carpet, he saw me and calculated my likely route. Wheeling around, he held up his obscene wares in front of my face and brought me to a standstill, using his malodorous body to block me first one way and then the other. The third time he did it, I swore and pushed him roughly out of my way, which earned me a mild rebuke from a British officer sitting behind the safety of the brass rail on the terrace.
Entering the lobby of the hotel, I glanced around and saw that my quarry was nowhere in sight. I went to the desk. The clerk sprang to my assistance, smiling handsomely.
“Did you see a man come in here a second ago? A European, about thirty, beige suit, panama hat, brown- and-white shoes? Carrying a folded newspaper.”
The desk clerk shrugged and shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir, no. But there is a message for you, Professor Mayer.”
“All right. Thanks.”
I checked the bar. I checked the Long Bar. I checked the dining room. I even checked the men’s room off the lobby. But there was no sign of the man with the newspaper. I went outside and back down the steps. The man with the postcards saw me and backed away nervously. I smiled and apologized and handed him a fistful of the greaseproof paper he called money. He grinned back at me, with absolute forgiveness. I had made his evening. He had sold another stupid American some dirty postcards.
XX
Coogan picked me up from Shepheard’s at eight-fifteen and we drove west. There were police milling about in Ezbekiah Gardens. With the green grass, and the men in their white uniforms, it looked more like a game of cricket than a murder investigation, and was probably just as baffling.
“Shot right between the eyes, so he was, about two-thirty last night, just after the pictures was finished,” said Coogan. “Local businessman, apparently. Nobody saw or heard a thing, of course. And the police don’t know anything. But that’s not very surprising.” He laughed. “The police never know anything in Cairo. There are five million people live in Cairo. Finding a murderer in this city is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”
There were a number of reasons I had decided that it was best to keep my mouth shut about what had happened the previous night. One was that I didn’t think FDR, Hopkins, or Donovan would have welcomed any member of the American delegation getting involved with the local police. Another was that after my run-in with the Secret Service in Tunis, I wanted to keep a low profile. But the main reason I had kept silent was that I had no evidence for what I now believed: that the attempt on my life was connected with the death of Ted Schmidt. Ted’s killer must surely have reasoned that suspicions would have been raised by another death aboard the Iowa. Killing me in Cairo would have been a lot easier than trying to kill me on the ship.
We drove across the English Bridge, and then south, toward Giza. Cairo’s city buildings gave way to mud- brick villages, strong-smelling canals, and fields recently harvested of their beans. We passed the university and the Cairo Zoo, as well as a caravanserai of domesticated animals on the Giza Road: donkeys adorned with blue beads to ward off the evil eye, nervous flocks of sheep, scrawny horses that pulled ancient open-topped carriages, the gharries that plied the tourist trade all over Cairo, and, once or twice, camels carrying so many palm branches they looked like Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane. It would have been a colorful scene except for the flat white light that lay on the city like a layer of dust, draining the color out of almost everything. I felt a little drained myself. Being shot at wasn’t good for my plumbing. But then again maybe that was just Cairo.
Mena House stood a stone’s throw from the Pyramids. The former hunting lodge of the Egyptian khedive, it was now a luxurious hotel where Churchill, Roosevelt, and Chiang Kai-shek were meeting. The whole area bustled with troops, armored cars, tanks, and antiaircraft guns, and the strictest cordons guarded all of the approaches to the hotel and its extensive grounds.
Mena House looked very different from Shepheard’s. Surrounded by lawns and palm trees and shrubberies, only the Great Pyramid spoiled the view. From the outside, it resembled some grand movie star’s Hollywood mansion. I preferred the more cosmopolitan atmosphere of Shepheard’s. But it was easy to see why the British
