Wolff looked more closely at what Abdullah was doing. On the floor beside him was a pile of wallets, handbags, purses and watches. As he spoke he picked up a handsome tooled leather wallet. He took from it a wad of Egyptian banknotes, some postage stamps and a tiny gold pencil, and put them somewhere under his robe. Then he put down the wallet, picked tip a handbag and began to rifle through that.
Wolff realized where they had come from. 'You old rogue,' he said. 'You had your boys in the crowd picking pockets.'
Abdullah grinned, showing his steel tooth. 'To go to all that trouble and then steal only one briefcase..
'But you have got the briefcase.'
'Of course.'
Wolff relaxed. Abdullah made no move to produce the case. Wolff said:
'Why don't you give it to me?'
'Immediately,' Abdullah said. Still he did nothing. After a moment he said: 'You were to pay me another fifty pounds on delivery.'
Wolff counted out the notes and they disappeared beneath the grubby robe. Abdullah leaned forward, holding the baby to his chest with one arm, and with the other reached under the cushion he was sitting on and pulled out the briefcase.
Wolff took it from him and examined it. The lock was broken. He felt cross: surely there should be a limit to duplicity. He made himself speak calmly. 'You've opened it already.'
Abdullah shrugged. He said: 'Maaleesh.' It was a conveniently ambiguous word which meant both 'Sorry' and 'So what?'
Wolff sighed. He had been in Europe too long; he had forgotten how things were done at home.
He lifted the lid of the case. Inside was a sheaf of ten or twelve sheets of paper closely typewritten in English. As he began to read someone put a tiny coffee cup beside him. He glanced up to see a beautiful young girl. He said to Abdullah 'Your daughter?'
Abdullah laughed. 'My wife.'
Wolff took another look at the girl. She seemed about fourteen years old.
He turned his attention back to the papers.
He read the first, then with growing incredulity leafed through the rest.
He put them down. 'Dear God,' he said softly. He started to laugh. He had stolen a complete set of barracks canteen menus for the month of June.
Vandam said to Colonel Bogge: 'I've issued a notice reminding officers that General Staff papers are not to be carried about the town other than in exceptional circumstances.'
Bogge was sitting behind his big curved desk, polishing the red cricket ball with his handkerchief. 'Good idea,' he said. 'Keep chaps on their toes.'
Vandam went on. 'One of my informants, the new girl I told you about--'The tart.'
'Yes.'. Vandam resisted the impulse to tell Bogge that 'tart' was not the right word for Elene. 'She heard a rumor that the riot had been organized by Abdullah-' 'Who's he?'
'He's a kind of Egyptian Fagin, and he also happens to be an informant, although selling me information is the least of his many enterprises.'
'For what purpose was the riot organized, according to this rumor?'
'Theft.'
'I see.' Bogge looked dubious.
'A lot of stuff was stolen, but we have to consider the possibility that the main object of the exercise was the briefcase.'
'A conspiracy' Bogge said with a look of amused skepticism. 'But what would this Abdullah want with our canteen menus, eh?' He laughed.
'He wasn't to know what the briefcase contained. He may simply have assumed that they were secret papers.'
'I repeat the question,' Bogge said with the air of a father patiently coaching a child. 'What would he want with secret papers?' 'He may have been put up to it.'
'By whom?' 'Alex Wolff.'
'The Assyut knife man.'
'Oh, now really, Major, I thought we had finished with all that.' Bogge's phone rang, and he picked it up. Vandam took the opportunity to cool off a little. The truth about Bogge. Vandam reflected, was probably that he had no faith in himself, no trust in his own judgment; and, lacking the confidence to make real decisions, he played one-upmanship, scoring points off people in a smart-alee fashion to give himself the illusion that he was clever after all. Of course Rogge had no idea whether the briefcase theft was significant or not. He might have listened to what Vandam had to say and then made up his own mind: but he was frightened of that. He could not engage in a fruitful discussion with a subordinate, because he spent all his intellectual energy looking for ways to trap you in a contradiction or catch you in an error or pour scorn on your ideas: and by the time he had finished making himself feel superior that way the decision had been taken, for better or worse and more or less by accident, in the beat of the exchange.
Rogge was saying: 'Of course, sir, I'll get on it right away.' Vandam wondered how he coped with superiors. The colonel hung up he said: 'Now then, where were we?'
'The Assyut murderer is still at large,' Vandam said. 'It may be significant that soon after his arrival in Cairo
