should have been asleep, there bad been another smell, something that excited her unaccountably. Mother and father would begin to move in the darkness, lying side by side; and Sonja would move with them. A few times her mother realized what was happening. Then her father would beat her. After the third time they made her sleep on the floor. Then she could hear them but could not share the pleasure: it seemed so cruel. She blamed her mother. Her father was willing to share, she was sure; he had known 0 along what she had been doing. Lying on the floor, cold, excluded, listening, she had tried to enjoy it at a distance, but it had not worked. Nothing had worked since then, until the arrival of Alex Wolff...
She had never spoken to Wolff about that narrow bed in the tenement, but somehow be understood. He had an instinct for the deep needs that people never acknowledged. He and the girl Fawzi had re-created the childhood scene for Sonia, and it had worked.
He did not do it out of kindness, she knew. He did these things so that he could use people. Now he wanted to use her to spy on the British. She would do almost anything to spite the British-anything but go to bed with them...
There was a knock on the door of her dressing room. She called: 'Come in.' One of the waiters entered with a note. She nodded dismissal at the boy and unfolded the sheet of paper. The message said simply: 'Table 41. Alex.' She crumpled the paper and dropped it on the floor. So he had found one.
That was quick. His instinct for weakness was working again.
She understood him because she was like him. She, too, used people although less cleverly than he did. She even used him. He had style, taste, high-class friends and money; and one day he would take her to Berlin. It was one thing to be a star in Egypt, and quite another in Europe. She wanted to dance for the aristocratic old generals and the handsome young Storm Troopers; she wanted to seduce powerful men and beautiful white girls; she wanted to be queen of the cabaret in the most decadent city in the world. Wolff would be her passport. Yes, she was using him.
It must be unusual. She thought, for two people to be so close and yet to love each other so little.
He would cut her lips off.
She shuddered, stopped thinking about it and began to dress. She rut on a white gown with wide sleeves and a low neck. The neckline showed off her breasts while the skirt slimmed her hips. She stepped into white high- heeled sandals. She fastened a heavy gold bracelet around each wrist, and around her neck she hung a gold chain with a teardrop pendant which lay snugly in her cleavage. The Englishman would like that. They had the most coarse taste.
She took a last look at herself in the mirror and went out into the club.
A zone of silence went with her across the floor. People fell quiet as she approached and then began to talk about her when she had passed. She felt as if she were inviting mass rape. Onstage it was different: she was separated from them by an invisible wall. Down here they could touch her, and they all wanted to. They never did, but the danger thrilled her.
She reached table 41 and both men stood up.
Wolff said: 'Sonja, my dear, you were magnificent, as always.'
She acknowledged the compliment with a nod.
'Allow me to introduce Major Smith.'
Sonja shook his hand. He was a thin, chinless man with a fair mustache and ugly, bony hands. He looked at her as if she were an extravagant dessert which had just been placed before him.
Smith said: 'Enchanted, absolutely.'
They sat down. Wolff poured champagne. Smith said: 'Your dancing was splendid, mademoiselle, just splendid. Very ... artistic.'
'Thank you.'
He reached across the table and patted her hand. 'You're very lovely.' And you're a fool, she thought. She caught a warning look from Wolff - he knew what was in her mind. 'You're very kind, Major,' she said. Wolff was nervous, she could tell. He was not sure whether she would do what he wanted. In truth she had not yet decided.
Wolff said to Smith: 'I knew Sonja's late father.'
It was a lie, and Sonja knew why he had said it. He wanted to remind her. Her father had been a part-time thief. When there was work he worked, and when there was none he stole. One day he had tried to snatch the handbag of a European woman in the Shari el-Koubri. The woman's escort bad made a grab for Sonja's father, and in the scuffle the woman had been knocked down, spraining her wrist. She was an important woman, and Sonja's father bad been flogged for the offense. He had died during the flogging. Of course, it was not supposed to kill him. He must have had a weak heart, or something. The British who administered the law did not care.
The man had committed the crime, he had been given the due punishment and the punishment had killed him: one wog less. Sonja, twelve years old, had been heartbroken. Since then she had hated the British with all her being.
Hitler had the right idea but the wrong target, she believed. It was not the Jews whose racial weakness infected the world-it was the British. The Jews in Egypt were more or less like everyone else: some rich, some poor, some good, some bad. But the British were uniformly arrogant, greedy and vicious. She laughed bitterly at the high-minded way in which the British tried to defend Poland from German oppression while they themselves continued to oppress Egypt.
Still, for whatever reasons, the Germans were fighting the British, and that was enough to make Sonja pro- German.
She wanted Hitler to defeat, humiliate and ruin Britain.
She would do anything she could to help.
She would even seduce an Englishman.
She leaned forward. 'Major Smith,' she said, 'you're a very attractive man.'
