I thought of death. I thought of my own death, and assured myself that it seemed a long way off when I was with Elena.
For a while I slept and dreamed of Elena. When I did wake, she was in the bathroom, singing quietly. I sat up, switched on the bedside light, lit a cigarette, and looked around for something to read. On a large chest of drawers were several leather-bound photograph albums, and thinking that these might contain some pictures of our old times together in Berlin, I opened one and started turning the pages. Mostly the album was full of pictures of Elena in various Cairo nightclubs with her late husband, Freddy, and, once or twice, with King Farouk himself. But it was a page of photographs taken in the roof garden at the Auberge des Pyramides (Elena captioned all of her pictures in a neat, penciled hand) that, for the second time that day, left me feeling as if a camel had kicked me in the stomach.
In the photographs, Elena was seated beside a handsome man in a cream linen suit. He had his arm around her and she looked to be on the most intimate terms with him. What was surprising was that this was a man currently occupying a cell at Grey Pillars, less than half a mile away. The man in the photograph was Major Max Reichleitner.
I told myself these pictures could hardly have been taken before the war. Hadn’t Coogan told me that the Auberge des Pyramides had opened just a few months before? Hearing Elena coming out of the bathroom, I quickly put aside the album and retrieved my hardly smoked cigarette from its ashtray.
“Light me one, will you, darling?” she said. She was wearing nothing but a gold watch.
“Here, you can have this one,” I said, moving to her side.
I watched her closely as she took a puff, then put it out. Unpinning her blond hair, which was long enough to come past her waist, she began to brush it absently. Thinking that I was looking at her with desire, she smiled and said, “Do you want to have me again? Is that it?”
She climbed onto the bed and held her arms open expectantly. Taking a deep breath, I knelt over her but I could not help but consider the possibility that she herself was working for the Germans. Given the intimacy in the photograph of her with Reichleitner, was it at all possible that he would have come to Cairo and not tried to see her? Elena simply had to be his contact. After all, she wouldn’t know that Reichleitner had been captured by the Allies.
I put myself inside her, drawing a long, shuddering gasp from her.
Only now did the speed with which she had gone to bed with me again seem at all suspicious. I began to thrust hard, almost as if I were trying to punish her for the duplicity I now strongly suspected. Elena came with equal force, and for a moment I abandoned myself to pleasure. Then she snuggled into my side, and my doubts returned. Was it possible that she was more than just a contact?
But if she was a German spy, when had she been recruited? Casting my mind back to Berlin in the summer of 1938, I tried to recall the Elena Pontiatowska with whom I’d been intimate.
Elena had hated the Bolsheviks, that much was easy to remember. I recalled one particular conversation we had had when news of Stalin’s Ukrainian terror began to reach the West. Elena, whose father had fought in the Russo-Polish war of 1920, had insisted that the whole edifice of Soviet communism was based on mass murder, but Stalin was no worse than Lenin in that respect.
“My father always said that Lenin ordered the extermination of the entire Don Cossack people-a million men, women, and children,” she had told me. “It’s not that I like the Nazis. I don’t, as it happens. It’s just that I fear the Russians more. I know that however stupid and cruel the Nazis can be, the Russians are far worse. If Hitler wants the Sudetenland, it’s because he thinks he needs it as a bulwark against another Russian invasion. Perhaps the Czechs have forgotten what Trotsky did to them, in 1918, when he tried to turn their army into slave-labor battalions. Mark my words, Willy, they wouldn’t hesitate to do the same thing again. The Nazis are a bad lot, but the Bolsheviks are evil. That’s why Hitler got elected in the first place. Because people were terrified that the Reds might gain control in Germany. So you won’t convince me that there is anything good to be said about communism. Perhaps it sounds good in principle, as an ideal. But my family has seen it in practice, and it’s nothing short of bestial.”
Disliking the Russians was one thing; spying for the Nazis was another. There was only one thing for it. In order to be sure, one way or the other, I was going to have to search Elena’s house. If there were photographs of Major Reichleitner in an album, then there might easily be other evidence that would prove one way or the other if Elena were working for the Abwehr.
Elena roused herself, gave me a brief kiss, and returned to the bathroom.
I picked up the photo album. I wanted to see what she would say when she found me looking at it. At the pictures of her with Reichleitner. It would be instructive to see exactly how she tried to explain them. But when she emerged from the bathroom, she didn’t bat an eye.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t resist having a peek. I suppose I thought there might be one or two pictures of you and me, back in Berlin.”
“They’re in another album,” she said coolly, her only concern seeming to be that we dress and find some dinner. “I’ll show you later. It’s time you got ready. I thought we could go to the club. But you’ll need to change. We can stop at your hotel on the way.”
“Who’s the man in the white suit?” I asked, putting aside the album and going into the bathroom.
“Don’t tell me you’re jealous,” she said, pulling on her underwear.
“Of course I’m jealous. You’re the best thing that’s happened to me since this war started. And now I see I have yet another rival.”
“Take my word for it, he’s no threat to you.”
“I don’t know. You and he seem pretty close in those pictures. Good-looking fellow, too.”
“Max? Yes, I suppose so.” Elena shrugged and, sitting down on the edge of the bed, began to roll on a pair of stockings. “For a while we were, you know. Close, like you say. But it didn’t last long. He was a Polish officer from Sikorski’s staff. From Posen. A rare bird.”
“Oh? How do you mean?”
“A German-speaking Pole who fought for the Polish army. That’s how rare.”
“And where is he now?”
“I’m not sure. I haven’t seen him in several months. Since the summer, I think. Max did a lot of work for SOE. In Yugoslavia. At least that’s what he told me.”
I nodded, thinking that these were good answers-they had the merit of being possibly true.
Elena finished fastening her stocking to its garter and, opening her closet, stared at an armory of devastating gowns. She pulled one out and put it on. Then she looked at her watch again. “Hurry up,” she said.
XXI
In its southern part, the streets of Teheran were narrow and tortuous; in the northern part, there were broad avenues. Misbah Ebtehaj, the wrestler who was acting as North Team’s guide and translator, said that much of the character of the city had been destroyed by the previous shah. But North Team’s commander, Captain Oster, thought that Reza Shah’s modernization could hardly have altered the fact that it was not a good location for a city. The nearest river was forty kilometers away, which meant that potable water was always in short supply. Two of Oster’s men were already sick from drinking the local water.
It was cold, too, much colder than they had expected, which Oster felt Berlin ought to have known about, given that Shimran, the northern part of Teheran, was built on the slopes of a mountain more than 5,600 meters high. But apart from a lack of warm clothing, everything had gone as planned.
North Team had parachuted into the remote foothills of the Alborz Mountains, northeast of Qazvin, where they had been met on the ground by Kashgai tribesmen, the backbone of the local resistance movement to the joint British and Soviet rule of Iran. The team had spent the first night in the countryside, hiding in a castle fortress that
