'That's it,' said Rommel. 'We've opened a breach. Let's Go'
It was ten-thirty in the morning when Lieutenant Colonel Reggie Bogge poked his head around the door of Vandam's office and said: 'Tobruk is under siege.'
It seemed pointless to work then. Vandam went on mechanically, reading reports from informants, considering the case of a lazy lieutenant who was due for promotion but did not deserve it, trying to think of a fresh approach to the Alex Wolff case; but everything seemed hopelessly trivial. The news became more depressing as the day wore on. The Germans breached the perimeter wire; they bridged the antitank ditch; they crossed the inner minefield; they reached the strategic road junction known as King's Cross.
Vandam went home at seven to have supper with Billy. He could not tell the boy about Tobruk: the news was not to be released at present As they ate their lamb chops, Billy said that his English teacher, a young man with a lung condition who could not get into the Army, never stopped talking about how he would love to get out into the desert and have a bash at the Hun. 'I don't believe him, though,' Billy said. 'Do you?'
'I expect he means it,' Vandam said. 'He just feels guilty.' Billy was at an argumentative age. 'Guilty? He can't feel guilty it's not his fault.'
'Unconsciously he can.'
'What's the difference?'
I walked into that one, Vandam thought. He considered for a moment, then said: 'When you've done something wrong, and you know it's wrong, and you feel bad about it, and you know why you feel bad, that's conscious guilt. Mr. Simkisson has done nothing wrong, but he still feels bad about it, and he doesn't know why he feels bad. That's unconscious guilt. It makes him feel better to talk about how much he wants to fight.'
'Oh,' said Billy.
Vandam did not know whether the boy had understood or not. Billy went to bed with a new book. He said it was a 'tec,' by which he meant a detective story. It was called Death on the Nile.
Vandam went back to GHQ. The news was still bad. The 21 Panzers had entered the town of Tobruk and fired from the quay on to several British ships which were trying, belatedly, to escape to the open sea. A number of vessels had been sunk. Vandam thought of the men who made a ship, and the tons of precious steel that went into it, and the training of the sailors, and the welding of the crew into a team; and now the men were dead, the ship sunk, the effort wasted.
He spent the night in the officers' mess, waiting for news. He drank steadily and smoked so much that he gave himself a headache. Bulletins came down periodically from the Operations Room. During the night Ritchie, as commander of the Eighth Army, decided to abandon the frontier and retreat to Mersa Matruh. It was said that when Auchinleck, the commander in chief, heard this news he stalked out of the room with a face as black as thunder.
Toward dawn Vandam found himself thinking about his parents. Some of the ports on the south coast of England had suffered as much as London from the bombing, but his parents were a little way inland, in a village in the Dorset countryside. His father was postmaster at a small sorting office. Vandam looked at his watch: it would be four in the morning in Englandnow, the old man would be putting on his cycle clips, climbing on his bike and riding to work in the dark. At sixty years of age he had the constitution of a teenage farm boy. Vandam's chapel going mother forbade smoking, drinking and all kinds of dissolute behavior, a term she used to encompass everything from darts matches to listening to the wireless. The regime seemed to suit her husband, but she herself was always ailing.
Eventually booze, fatigue and tedium sent Vandam into a doze. He dreamed he was in the garrison at Tobruk with Billy and Elene and his mother. He was running around closing all the windows. Outside, the Germans-who had turned into firemen-were leaning ladders against the wall and climbing up. Suddenly Vandam's mother stopped counting her forged banknotes and opened a window, pointing at Elene and screaming: 'The Scarlet Woman' Rommel came through the window in fireman's helmet and turned a hose on Billy. The force of the jet pushed the boy over a parapet and he fell into the sea. Vandam knew he was to blame, but he could not figure out what he had done wrong. He began to weep bitterly. He woke up. He was relieved to discover that he had not really been crying. The dream left him with an overwhelming sense of despair. He lit a cigarette it tasted foul.
The sun rose. Vandam went around the mess turning out the lights, just for something to do. A breakfast cook came in with a pot of coffee. As Vandam was drinking his, a captain came down with another bulletin. He stood in the middle of the mess, waiting for silence.
He said: 'General Klopper surrendered the garrison of Tobruk to Rommel at dawn today.'
Vandam left the mess and walked through the streets of the city toward his house by the Nile. He felt impotent and useless, sitting in Cairo catching spies while out there in the desert his country was losing the war. It crossed his mind that Alex Wolff might have had something to do with Rommel's latest series of victories; but he dismissed the thought as somewhat farfetched. He felt so depressed that he wondered whether things could possibly get any worse, and he realized that, of course, they could.
When he got home he went to bed.
PART TWO
MERSA MATRUH
Chapter 11.
'The Greek was a feeler.
Elene did not like feelers. She did not mind straightforward lust; in fact, she was rather partial to it. What she objected to was furtive, guilty, unsolicited groping.
After two hours in the shop she had disliked Mikis Aristopoulos. After two weeks she was ready to strangle him.
The shop itself was fine. She liked the spicy smells and the rows of gaily colored boxes and cans on the shelves in the back room. The work was easy and repetitive, but the time passed quickly enough. She amazed the customers by adding up their bills in her head very rapidly. From time to time she would buy some strange imported delicacy and take it home to try: a jar of liver paste, a Hershey bar, a bottle of Bovril, ,a can of baked beans. And for her it was novel to do an ordinary, dull, eight-hours-a-day job.
But the boss was a pain. Every chance he got he would touch her arm, her shoulder or her hip; each time he passed her, behind the counter or in the back room, he would brush against her breasts or her bottom. At first she
