'So did L' She had a low, precise voice and a great deal of confidence.
'Shall we see you on Friday?'
'Where?'
'The reception at the Union.'
'Ah.' The Anglo-Egyptian Union, a club for bored Europeans, made occasional attempts to justify its name by holding a reception for Egyptian guests. 'I'd like that. What time?'
'Five o'clock, for tea.'
Vandam was professionally interested: it was an occasion at which Egyptians -night 'pick up service gossip, and service gossip sometimes included information useful to the enemy. 'I'll come,' he said.
'Splendid. I'll see you there.' She turned away.
'I look forward to it,' Vandam said to her back. He watched her walk away, wondering what she wore under the hospital coat. She was trim, elegant and self-possessed: she reminded him of his wife. He entered his office. He had no intention of organizing a cricket practice, and he had no intention of forgetting about the Assyut murder. Bogge could go to hell. Vandam would go to work.
First he spoke again to Captain Newman, and told him to make sure the description of Alex Wolff got the widest possible circulation. He called the Egyptian police and confirmed that they would be checking the hotels and flophouses of Cairo today.
He contacted Field Security, a unit of the pre-war Canal Defense Force, and asked them to step up their spot checks on identity papers for a few days.
He told the British paymaster general to keep a special watch for forged currency.
He advised the wireless listening service to be alert for a new, local transmitter; and thought briefly how useful it would be if the boffins ever cracked the problem of locating a radio by monitoring its broadcasts.
Finally he detailed a sergeant on his staff to visit every radio shop in Lower Egypt--there were not many and ask them to report any sales of parts and equipment which might be used to make or repair a transmitter. Then he went to the Villa lea Oliviers.
The house got its name from a small public garden across the street where a grove of olive trees was now in bloom, shedding white petals like dust on to the dry, brown grass.
The house had a high wall broken by a heavy, carved wooden gate. Using the ornamentation for footholds, Vandam climbed over the gate and dropped on the other aide to find himself in a large courtyard. Around him the whitewashed walls were smeared and grubby, their windows blinded by closed, peeling shutters. He walked to the center of the courtyard and looked at the stone fountain. A bright green lizard darted across the dry bowl.
The place had not been lived in for at least a year.
Vandam opened a shutter, broke a pane of glass, reached through to unfasten the window, and climbed over the sill into the house. It did not look like the home of a European, he thought as he walked through the dark cool rooms. There were no hunting prints on the walls, no neat rows of bright-jacketed novels by Agatha Christie and Dennis Wheatley, no three-piece suite imported from Maples or Harrods. Instead the place was furnished with large cushions and low tables, hand woven rugs and hanging tapestries.
Upstairs he found a locked door. It took him three or four minutes to kick it open. Behind it there was a study.
The room was clean and tidy, with a few pieces of rather luxurious furniture: a wide. low divar- covered in velvet, a hand-carved coffee table, three matching antique lamps, a bear-skin rug, a beautifully inlaid desk and a leather chair.
On the desk were a telephone, a clean white blotter, an ivory-handled pen and a dry inkwell. In the desk drawer Vandam, found company reports from Switzerland, Germany and the United States. A delicate beaten- copper coffee service gathered dust on the little table.
On a shelf behind the desk were books in several languages: nineteenth-century French novels, the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, a volume of what appeared to Vandam to be Arabic poetry, with erotic illustrations, and the Bible in German.
There were no personal documents.
There were no letters.
There was not a single photograph in the house.
Vandam sat in the soft leather chair behind the desk and looked around the room. It was a masculine room, the home of a cosmopolitan intellectual, a man who was on the one hand careful, precise and tidy and on the other hand sensitive and sensual.
Vandam was intrigued.
A European name, a totally Arabic house. A pamphlet about investing in business machines, a book of Arab verse. An antique coffee jug and a modern telephone. A wealth of information about a character, but not a single clue which might help find the man.
The room had been carefully cleaned out
There should have been bank statements, bills from tradesmen, a birth certificate and a will, letters from a lover and photographs of parents or children. The man had collected all those things and taken them away, leaving no trace of his identity, as if he knew that one day someone would come looking for him.
Vandam said aloud: 'Alex Wolff, who are you?'
He got up from the chair and left the study. He walked through the house and across the hot, dusty courtyard. He climbed back over the gate and dropped into the street. Across the road an Arab in a green-striped galabiya sat cross-legged on the ground in the shade of the olive trees, watching Vandam incuriously. Vandam felt no impulse to explain that he had broken into the house on official business: the uniform of a British officer was
