The man I finished up facing was taller, broader and a bit older than me. He had a black lip-liner moustache, and black hair like his minders. He was handsome in a Clark Gable sort of way. I had hoped that these might have been French, but up close there’s no mistaking an Egyptian.
He asked me, ‘I know that you are alone, but are you armed?’
‘I have a small pistol. Right jacket pocket.’
‘But not in your hand.’
‘Obviously. There’s no point. I couldn’t get all three of you.’
He smiled, nodded and asked me, ‘Name?’
‘Charles Bassett. You?’
He smiled again. I reckoned he was one of these guys who liked being talked back to.
‘Gamal.’ He said the word fast: I almost didn’t hear the g.
‘Pleased to meet you. What does that mean?’
‘My mother said it meant handsome; but my father insisted it meant camel. As I watched my nose grow to dominate my face, I realized that my father was right.’ He gave a short chuckle – two sounds – as if the memory amused him. ‘Your name, Charles, means manly.’
‘I didn’t know that, sir. They should have called me something which meant small . . .’ Why did I call him sir? I’ve told you I have had problems with that before. He wore absolutely no badges of rank, but I was certain he outranked me a thousand times over.
‘I am very interested in names. You can tell much from names. I study the names of Englishmen. Your General Montgomery had a picture of his adversary general, Rommel, in his caravan. He stared at it every day in order to get inside Rommel’s mind: he achieved that eventually, and beat him. I study English names. One day they will take me inside the minds of your generals and politicians.’
‘I don’t think you’ll find much there, sir. They mess up almost everything they try to do.’
He smiled again, as if he had learned something useful. Maybe he had. ‘Do most English soldiers think as ill of your leaders as you do?’
‘I don’t know about English soldiers, sir: English airmen do.’
‘Ah. You are in the RAF.’
‘Pilot officer.’
‘I am a colonel.’
‘I guessed you were paid more than me: you have a better uniform.’
This time he laughed aloud. I sensed his two men paying attention. He walked away from me, and sat on the stub of a column. There was another near it; he motioned me to it with a wave of his left hand. The moon threw our shadows on the flagstones beneath our feet. They bent like gargoyles on an English church.
He asked me, ‘What are you doing here?’
Tell the truth, or make something up? Does here mean Egypt, or this bloody ruin?
‘The truth is, Colonel, that I hate your bloody country and will leave it soon, but I have not seen any of your great antiquities. We are camped a couple of ridges back, and I walked here because I was informed that there was a Roman ruin. I wished to have something to tell my sons about when I returned home. Your turn.’
‘My turn?’
‘What are you doing here? I was under the impression that this particular empty piece of your country was out of bounds to all military units except the Brits.’
‘Ah, yes. But my family used to come out here, and picnic, you see – before the World War. Our parents were teaching us that there was more to history than pyramids and temples . . . and this is not Roman, by the way. It is Greek, and it is a theatre – the Ptolemies built it. They were great pharaohs, a wonderful dynasty, but unfortunately they were also Greek. The Greeks are like your generals and politicians . . .’
‘In what way?’
‘Sooner or later they mess things up.’ He smiled surprisingly gently as he delivered the punch line. I laughed, and he explained, ‘I come out here sometimes – with a bodyguard alas. We can no longer move freely in our own country because of you. I come out here when I want to think. When I have difficult decisions to make.’
‘It would be a good place for that,’ I told him. ‘Is one of your difficult decisions what to do with me, now that you’ve captured me?’
He didn’t answer me directly; merely leaned one elbow on his knee, and his chin in the palm of his hand. He had unconsciously adopted the pose of Rodin’s Thinker. He really had come out here to make a decision.
He glanced up at me, and asked, ‘Will you tell anyone that we have met?’
‘I don’t think that would be a good idea, sir, do you? Anyway I don’t know who you are, so what would be the point?’
‘What if I became an important man in several years’ time? Appeared on your cinema newsreels?’
‘I should remind my boys of the Greek ruin in Egypt I had already described to them, and tell them I once met a man there who was making a difficult decision.’
‘Even if you realized then that I was not a friend of Britain?’
‘I wouldn’t let that worry you, Colonel; neither is anyone else.’
He snorted again, and asked, ‘Do you know what I think, Englishman?’
‘No, sir.’
