The Key to Rebecca (20 page)

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 far-fetched. 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.

MERSA MATRUH

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 had thought it was accidental, because he did not look the type: he was in his twenties, quite good-looking, with a big smile that showed his white teeth. He must have taken her silence for acquiescence. She would have to tread on him a little.

She did not need this. Her emotions were too confused already. She both liked and loathed William Vandam, who talked to her as an equal, then treated her like a whore; she was supposed to seduce Alex Wolff, whom she had never met; and she was being groped by Mikis Aristopoulos, for whom she felt nothing but scorn.

They all use me, she thought; it’s the story of my life.

She wondered what Wolff would be like. It was easy for Vandam to tell her to befriend him, as if there were a button she could press which made her instantly irresistible. In reality a lot depended on the man. Some men liked her immediately. With others it was hard work. Sometimes it was impossible. Half of her hoped it would be impossible with Wolff. The other half remembered that he was a spy for the Germans, and Rommel was coming closer every day, and if the Nazis ever got to Cairo ...

Aristopoulos brought a box of pasta out from the back room. Elene looked at her watch: it was almost time to go home. Aristopoulos dropped the box and opened it. On his way back, as he squeezed past her, he put his hands under her arms and touched her breasts. She moved away. She heard someone come into the shop. She thought: I’ll teach the Greek a lesson. As he went into the back room, she called after him loudly, in Arabic: “If you touch me again I’ll cut your cock off!”

There was a burst of laughter from the customer. She turned and looked at him. He was a European, but he must understand Arabic, she thought. She said: “Good afternoon.”

He looked toward the back room and called out: “What have you been doing, Aristopoulos, you young goat?”

Aristopoulos poked his head around the door. “Good day, sir. This is my niece, Elene.” His face showed embarrassment and something else which Elene could not read. He ducked back into the storeroom.

“Niece!” said the customer, looking at Elene. “A likely tale.”

He was a big man in his thirties with dark hair, dark skin and dark eyes. He had a large hooked nose which might have been typically Arab or typically European-aristocratic. His mouth was thin-lipped, and when he smiled he showed small even teeth—like a cat’s, Elene thought. She knew the signs of wealth and she saw them here: a silk shirt, a gold wristwatch, tailored cotton trousers with a crocodile belt, handmade shoes and a faint masculine cologne.

Elene said: “How can I help you?”

He looked at her as if he were contemplating several possible answers, then he said: “Let’s start with some English marmalade.”

“Yes.” The marmalade was in the back room. She went there to get a jar.

“It’s him!” Aristopoulos hissed.

“What are you talking about?” she asked in a normal voice. She was still mad at him.

“The bad-money man—Mr. Wolff—that’s him!”

“Oh, God!” For a moment she had forgotten why she was here. Aristopoulos’ panic infected her, and her mind went blank. “What shall I say to him? What should I do?”

“I don’t know—give him the marmalade—I don’t know—”

“Yes, the marmalade, right ...” She took a jar of Cooper’s Oxford from a shelf and returned to the shop. She forced herself to smile brightly at Wolff as she put the jar down on the counter. “What else?”

“Two pounds of the dark coffee, ground fine.”

He was watching her while she weighed the coffee and put it through the grinder. Suddenly she was afraid of him. He was not like Charles, Johnnie and Claud, the men who had kept her. They had been soft, easygoing, guilty and pliable. Wolff seemed poised and confident: it would be hard to deceive him and impossible to thwart him, she guessed.

“Something else?” “A tin of ham.”

She moved around the shop, finding what he wanted and putting the goods on the counter. His eyes followed her everywhere. She thought: I must talk to him, I can’t keep saying, “Something else?” I’m supposed to befriend him. “Something else?” she said.

“A half case of champagne.”

The cardboard box containing six full bottles was heavy. She dragged it out of the back room. “I expect you’d like us to deliver this order,” she said. She tried to make it sound casual. She was slightly breathless with the effort of bending to drag the case, and she hoped this would cover her nervousness.

He seemed to look through her with his dark eyes. “Deliver?” he said. “No, thank you.”

She looked at the heavy box. “I hope you live nearby.”

“Close enough.”

“You must be very strong.”

“Strong enough.”

“We have a thoroughly reliable delivery man—”

“No delivery,” he said firmly.

She nodded. “As you wish.” She had not really expected it to work, but she was disappointed all the same. “Something else?”

“I think that’s all.”

She began to add up the bill. Wolff said: “Aristopoulos must be doing well, to employ an assistant.”

Elene said: “Five pounds twelve and six, you wouldn’t say that if you knew what he pays me, five pounds thirteen and six, six pounds—”

“Don’t you like the job?”

She gave him a direct look. “I’d do anything to get out of here.”

“What did you have in mind?” He was very quick.

She shrugged, and went back to her addition. Eventually she said: “Thirteen pounds ten shillings and fourpence.”

“How did you know I’d pay in sterling?”

He was quick. She was afraid she had given herself away. She felt herself begin to blush. She had an inspiration, and said: “You’re a British officer, aren’t you?”

He laughed loudly at that. He took out a roll of pound notes and gave her fourteen. She gave him his change in Egyptian coins. She was thinking: What else can I do? What else can I say? She began to pack his purchases into a brown-paper shopping bag.

She said: “Are you having a party? I love parties.”

“What makes you ask?”

“The champagne.”

“Ah. Well, life is one long party.”

She thought: I’ve failed. He will go away now, and perhaps he won’t come back for weeks, perhaps never; I’ve had him in my sights, I’ve talked to him, and now I have to let him walk away and disappear into the city.

She should have felt relieved, but instead she felt a sense of abject failure.

He lifted the case of champagne onto his left shoulder, and picked up the shopping bag with his right hand. “Good-bye,” he said.

“Good-bye.”

He turned around at the door. “Meet me at the Oasis Restaurant on Wednesday night at seven-thirty.”

“All right!” she said jubilantly. But he was gone.

 

It took them most of the morning to get to the Hill of Jesus. Jakes sat in the front next to the driver, Vandam and Bogge sat in the back. Vandam was exultant. An Australian company had taken the hill in the night, and they had captured—almost intact—a German wireless listening post. It was the first good news Vandam had heard for months.

Jakes turned around and shouted over the noise of the engine. “Apparently the Aussies charged in their socks, to surprise ’em,” he said. “Most of the Italians were taken prisoner in their pajamas.”

Vandam had heard the same story. “The Germans weren’t sleeping, though,” he said. “It was quite a rough show.”

They took the main road to Alexandria, then the coast road to El Alamein, where they turned onto a barrel track—a route through the desert marked with barrels. Nearly all the traffic was going in the opposite direction, retreating. Nobody knew what was happening. They stopped at a supply dump to fill up with petrol, and Bogge had to pull rank on the officer in charge to get a chitty.

Their driver asked for directions to the hill. “Bottle track,” the officer said brusquely. The tracks, created by and for the Army, were named Bottle, Boot, Moon and Star, the symbols for which were cut into the empty barrels and petrol cans along the routes. At night little lights were placed in the barrels to illuminate the symbols.

Bogge asked the officer: “What’s happening out here? Everything seems to be heading back east.”

“Nobody tells me anything,” said the officer.

They got a cup of tea and a bully-beef sandwich from the NAAFI truck. When they moved on they went through a recent battlefield, littered with wrecked and burned-out tanks, where a graveyard detail was desultorily collecting corpses. The barrels disappeared, but the driver picked them up again on the far side of the gravel plain.

They found the hill at midday. There was a battle going on not far away: they could hear the guns and see clouds of dust rising to the west. Vandam realized he had not been this near the fighting before. The overall impression was one of dirt, panic and confusion. They reported to the command vehicle and were directed to the captured German radio trucks.

Field intelligence men were already at work. Prisoners were being interrogated in a small tent, one at a time, while the others waited in the blazing sun. Enemy ordnance experts were examining weapons and vehicles, noting manufacturers’ serial numbers. The Y Service was there looking for wavelengths and codes. It was the task of Bogge’s little squad to investigate how much the Germans had been learning in advance about Allied movements.

They took a truck each. Like most people in Intelligence, Vandam had a smattering of German. He knew a couple of hundred words, most of them military terms, so that while he could not have told the difference between a love letter and a laundry list, he could read army orders and reports.

There was a lot of material to be examined: the captured post was a great prize for Intelligence. Most of the stuff would have to be boxed, transported to Cairo and perused at length by a large team. Today’s job was a preliminary overview.

Vandam’s truck was a mess. The Germans had begun to destroy their papers when they realized the battle was lost. Boxes had been emptied and a small fire started, but the damage had been arrested quickly. There was blood on a cardboard folder: someone had died defending his secrets.

Vandam went to work. They would have tried to destroy the important papers first, so he began with the half-burned pile. There were many Allied radio signals, intercepted and in some cases decoded. Most of it was routine—most of everything was routine—but as he worked Vandam began to realize that German Intelligence’s wireless interception was picking up an awful lot of useful information. They were better than Vandam had imagined—and Allied wireless security was very bad.

At the bottom of the half-burned pile was a book, a novel in English. Vandam frowned. He opened the book and read the first line: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” The book was called Rebecca, and it was by Daphne du Maurier. The title was vaguely familiar. Vandam thought his wife might have read it. It seemed to be about a young woman living in an English country house.