Nile Shadows

so far as London is concerned, so far as everybody is concerned.

Joe's hands were trembling. He gripped his knees and looked down at the water.

How'd I die, did you say?

In a fire. There's been a fire.

Oh.

Bletchley reached inside his jacket and pulled out several sheets of folded paper. He handed them to Joe, who leaned over to peer at them. With the moon and the reflections off the water, there was just enough light to make out the typed words.

***

At the top of the first sheet of paper there was a printed heading, the name and address of a Cairo news agency. The typed copy was in the form of a news story, marked for immediate release.

A fire had broken out in the Coptic Quarter of Old Cairo, destroying a small run-down hotel, the Hotel Babylon. The fire was thought to have started in the tiny cluttered courtyard behind the hotel, where the desk clerk, neighbors reported, had recently been in the habit of sitting up late at night beside a small campfire, along with the only guest who had been staying in the hotel during recent weeks.

The courtyard had been strewn with old newspapers and other inflammable debris. It was assumed a spark had settled into the debris and caused it to smolder until after the desk clerk and his guest had retired for the night, when a fire had broken out and ignited the decaying old structure just before dawn, quickly raging out of control and burning the hotel to the ground.

Fortunately, no other buildings had been damaged due to the alarm sounded by an alert neighbor, a retired belly dancer up the street who for the last thirty years or so had risen every morning before dawn to go in search of fresh chickens, which she roasted and sold locally to support herself.

Two men had perished in the fire, the desk clerk and his solitary guest, both of whose bodies had been recovered.

The desk clerk, a longtime employee of the hotel and an astute observer of the Cairo social scene, had been known as Ahmad the Poet on his little street, itself known colloquially as the rue Clapsius, a mere shadowy byway of an alley and a short stroll to nowhere. Yet although it led nowhere, it was also the place where a good part of nineteenth-century Cairo was said to have acquired an incurable dose of nostalgia during the long lazy siesta hours of yesteryear. This desk clerk's finely tuned social sense was the result of a thoughtful scrutiny of the Cairo scene over the years, particularly on Saturday evenings, which Ahmad the Poet was known to have devoted to undisturbed meditations on the roof of the Hotel Babylon. There in the darkness he had studied the city through a spyglass, aided by melancholy surges of music conjured up on an ancient dented trombone.

It was further recalled that the poet, Ahmad fils, had been a fiercely loyal supporter of Ahmad pere's idealistic nineteenth-century political cause, the Movement, a loosely spun Old World organization which had fearlessly advocated social progress from the there and the then, defying all opposition, in the general direction of the here and the now.

And although Ahmad fils had been in seclusion for decades, maintaining his privacy over bouts of solitaire and infusions of opera, he had once enjoyed a stunning reputation as a wildly charismatic figure in Cairo society, both in his professional duties as an interior decorator and in his more unpredictable role as an all-around boulevardier and dandy.

In particular, the poet was remembered for having served as the powerful stroke, and captain, of a racing crew of Cairo dragomen who had triumphantly swamped a racing shell rivered by the British naval establishment back before the First World War, the only time that astounding feat had ever been accomplished by an all-Egyptian crew, in what had been known in those days as the Annual Battle for the Fleshpots of the Nile.

In addition, Ahmad the Poet had once been famous for having introduced the racing tricycle to Cairo, around the turn of the century.

Sadly, it was Ahmad the Poet's fondness for recalling the remarkable exploits of his past glories, in the form of old newspaper stories, that had probably caused the hotel to ignite so quickly. Reference was made to a large closet just off the hotel lobby, a small room really, which had been heaped from floor to ceiling with dusty yellowing newspapers, none of them less than thirty years out of date.

This closet had become a brilliant torch when the fire reached it, causing the hotel to consume itself instantly in a towering pillar of the purest white smoke.

Little was known about the other victim, the lone guest in the hotel at the time of the fire. Through information routinely filed on all foreigners at local police stations, he was identified as a commercial traveler of Armenian extraction, a dealer in Coptic artifacts by the name of A. O. Gulbenkian, who had worn false teeth.

There was no further mention of the commercial traveler. But it was noted that an anonymous group of public-spirited Cairenes, calling themselves the Friends of Ahmad, had taken up a subscription to provide their once-renowned social leader with a proper funeral and full memorial services.

The former belly dancer up the street was acting as director general, coordinator, and secretary-treasurer of this anonymous ad hoc group.

Addresses and dates were given.

***

Joe took a deep breath. For several minutes he sat with the sheets of paper in his lap, gazing down at the river. Finally he handed them back to Bletchley and took a roll of money out of his pocket. He found the bill he was looking for and gave it to Bletchley.

For the Friends of Ahmad, he said.

Bletchley looked down at the bill

I know, said Joe, it's not much but it's all I have at the moment. And anyway, Ahmad would appreciate it. Behind that dour exterior of his, if you could find the secret panel in his wall of defenses, there was always a droll sense of humor lurking inside.

Suddenly, Joe shuddered. His voice sank to a whisper.

Was there really a second body in the ruins?

Yes.

Liffy wore false teeth.

Yes.

And no service for Gulbenkian, I suppose.

He wasn't that kind of man, said Bletchley. Gulbenkian was in transit here, just passing through. No one knew him.

No.

And if no one knew him, there can't be anyone to provide him with a service.

No, murmured Joe, it would only look strange, suspicious. He was just passing through after all.

Joe turned away from Bletchley and wiped his eyes, his head sinking lower.

Well if that's it for Gulbenkian's remains, he whispered, could you tell me what happened to that man Liffingsford-Ivy who used to work around here? A movable prop, he called himself. The local illusionist.

Bletchley stared straight ahead.

He's been reported missing while on assignment in the desert, said Bletchley. We've lost a great many of our intelligence agents like that, it's absolute chaos out there. Whole battalions just disappear. Back here, for convenience, we call it a line, a front, but it's not like that at all. Everybody's mixed up with everybody else and it's shifting all the time, a unit here and stragglers there, ours and theirs, back and forth and God knows where. There aren't even any sides out there. Just thirsty exhausted men covered with burns from their own weapons, fighting in any direction they can with no idea where they are, just men fighting desperately and going nowhere. Or wounded and dying in the terrible sun, lying where a shell or a mine went off, one of our shells or one of theirs, one of our mines or one of theirs. . . . The sand blows all night and buries everything except the burning tanks by morning, and the twisted skeletons of the other vehicles. It even covers open eyes by morning, but the one thing it can never cover is the smell, the stench. Radios sit all alone crackling, speaking to no one. . . . This is Coventry, come in please. . . .

You can be in a place so desolate it might as well be the end of the earth and suddenly there's a whine shrieking across the sky and the ground shakes and the intolerable silence descends as you wait, as you count, one two three. . . You drive over a ridge and all at once there are hands reaching out of