Читать книгу City of Gold - Len Deighton - Страница 15

No one claimed to remember when or where or why the little gatherings began, but it had become a custom that, early on Friday evenings, a glass or two of chilled white wine and some tempting snacks, were freely available on the top floor to the residents of the Magnifico and any hangers-on.

‘Happy days, Piotr,’ said Peggy West nodding to the prince as more wine was offered to her by Sammy, his Egyptian servant dressed in a long black galabiya with elaborate gold facings. ‘What do you think of your neighbours, Alice?’

‘It’s so good of you to let me have the room,’ said Alice, also taking a second glass of wine.

Peggy smiled and looked round the room. Captain Robin Darymple, in starched khaki shirt and pants, was always among the first to arrive. Talking to him there was a sleekly beautiful Egyptian girl, Zeinab el-Shazli, and her brother, Sayed. There were strangers too. Some of them must have started drinking in the afternoon, for there was a loud buzz of talk and laughter.

Peggy smiled across the room at the two Egyptians. She described them briefly to Alice. They were both students at the American University and living on the first floor of the Magnifico. Sayed was a handsome young man. His light-coloured healthy skin and clear blue eyes were said in Cairo to be the legacy of Circassian concubines, women renowned for their beauty. Captain Darymple was holding forth about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, using his free hand to bomb his wineglass. America’s entry into the war had been the predominant topic of conversation for weeks. Sayed, an Egyptian army reserve officer, was listening to Darymple with a patient look on his face. Peggy pushed past them and, raising her glass to the prince, said, ‘Thank you, Piotr.’

Alice looked him: this was the man who was said to be Rommel’s spy in Cairo.

The prince dwarfed everyone in the room. He was a tall, large-framed man dressed in a black velvet smoking jacket and white trousers. At his neck there was a patterned silk cravat, fastened by a gold pin set with diamonds. Ever since the war started, Piotr Nikoleiovich Tikhmeibrazoff had been calling himself Colonel Piotr. If challenged – as once he had been by Captain Darymple, who lived on the second floor – he calmly pointed to a photo of a smart infantry regiment marching past the Rossisskaya cotton mill during the disturbances in St Petersburg in January 1913. His father, Prince Nikolei, had owned that regiment, lock, stock and barrel. When his father was killed in action in 1916, Piotr Nikoleiovich inherited it along with vast acreages of land, farms and villages, the grand townhouse, and the seaside summer palace in the Crimea. The title of ‘Colonel – retired’ was a modest enough claim under the circumstances.

Piotr Nikoleiovich had been studying archeology at Oxford University at the time of his father’s death. He remained there during the revolution, which came soon after it. In 1925 he’d visited Russian friends in Cairo and decided to make it his home. Some of the treasures to be seen here in his apartment had been in the twenty-seven packing cases of clothes, furniture, carpets, paintings, icons and ornaments that his mother had selected and sent from Russia as essential to him while he was at university in England. He liked to talk about his days at Oxford and lately was apt to call himself ‘a student of world affairs’. This was to account for the way in which he spent most of his mornings reading newspapers and many of his afternoons in the cafés and bazaars, drinking coffee with a large and cosmopolitan collection of leisured cronies.

‘Peggy, darling, don’t tell me this is our new neighbour. I heard there was a quite ravishing young lady living here.’ The prince spoke in the astringent and exaggerated accent of long-ago Oxford.

Alice smiled shyly.

‘How do you do, my dear. How wonderful that you were able to attend my little gathering.’ He took Alice’s hand and bent over to kiss it.

Peggy had always seen him as a huge and cuddly Saint Bernard, but tonight, as he spoke in that amazing English voice, he reminded her more of an Afghan hound.

‘Alice Stanhope,’ Peggy told him. ‘I found a job for her at the hospital.’

The prince nodded. ‘That’s what I heard.’ He was a trifle peeved. He called Peggy his ‘liaison officer’ with the day-to-day proceedings of the hotel. She should have told him straightaway. The prince was no longer on good terms with the owner, Lucia Magnifico. She had been up here, making a fuss this afternoon, and left only just before the guests were due. Despite his apparent composure, Peggy knew he was frightened of Lucia and what she might do to get his rooms. He was especially scared when she arrived accompanied by her diminutive Armenian lawyer, poised at her heel like a beady-eyed Chihuahua.

Lucia Magnifico wanted the prince out. She’d already had an architect prepare drawings to convert the top floor into seven separate rooms. Cairo was teeming with staff officers and civilian advisers, American businessmen and Australian purchasing officials: all of them loaded with their government’s money. They all wanted a place to stay. She was a woman of the world. Lucia knew that such men didn’t want big hotels or official accommodations, with a guard in the lobby to watch their comings and goings. They wanted a small discreet hideout, in a fashionable area near the river, a friendly, anonymous, comfortable pied-à-terre like this hotel. Lucia could no longer afford to let the ‘Russian poseur’ occupy the whole top floor, no matter what her foolish father may have promised back in peacetime.

‘Life must go on,’ Lucia had told him with simple directness. ‘I have to pay my bills.’ She was a slim woman who delighted in good jewellery and Paris dresses. She exemplified the fact that the Italians living in Cairo were the best-dressed and most sophisticated of the foreign contingents. It was in recognition of this that the Egyptian king surrounded himself with Italian courtiers. Everyone knew that the British were ugly, coarse and ill-dressed. Their soldiers – in huge baggy shorts, threadbare woollen sweaters and slouch hats – looked like circus clowns. Worst of all, as she’d told the prince that afternoon, they were always pleading poverty.

Having said it, Lucia had looked down at her black silk dress and plucked a hair from it. She frowned. She should never have sat down on his sofa. She’d had enough of his horrid Abyssinian cats, and of his using precious hot water in the middle of the night, and trying to tune to Radio Moscow on his antiquated wireless set, and blowing fuses to black out all the lights in the building.

The prince closed his eyes to repress the memory of this afternoon. He smiled at Peggy and at Alice. He liked having attractive women to his parties, although they held no attraction for him personally. And Peggy was an old friend. The rapport between them was based on the fact that they had both been living in Cairo before the war started. Robin Darymple was treated in the same way because he held a peacetime commission. They were real residents – permitted to call the prince Piotr – the others were just wartime visitors.

Alice was swept away by a young staff officer who claimed to have met her in Alexandria. As the prince watched her go he turned to Peggy and in a more serious voice said, ‘Tell me how you met the alluring Alice Stanhope, darling.’ He offered her a brass bowl of pistachio nuts but didn’t bring it very near, knowing she would decline.

‘Her father is some kind of political adviser in the Gulf,’ said Peggy who had found out very little in the brief and hectic rides on a crowded bus to the Midan Ismail and then an even more crowded streetcar to the hospital. ‘Her mother got some wretched bug and had to come to Egypt. Mummy lives in Alex.’ The final part was in a passable imitation of Alice Stanhope’s proper English accent.

Piotr gave a tiny smile to acknowledge the joke. ‘Yes, the mother is a well-known society hostess. The Stanhopes know everyone worth knowing.’ There was a note of envy in his voice. ‘Does Alice play bridge?’

‘I’ll ask her.’

‘We so need someone,’ he said plaintively.

‘You ask her, then.’

‘No, you. Don’t say for money,’ he said. ‘Just for the sheer pleasure of the game.’

It was his conceit that he played bridge well. In fact he usually lost. Luckily he paid up with good grace. Had he not done so, Robin Darymple would have stopped coming. Darymple was a demon gambler and kept accounts in a small black notebook, worrying about whether he was making a profit.

‘I think it will all depend upon her boyfriend,’ said Peggy watching Alice as a group of young men gathered round her. ‘They see a lot of each other.’

‘Does he play bridge?’ said the prince.

‘Are we talking about the corporal?’ said Robin Darymple, who had learned in the mess how to listen to two or three conversations at once. He came closer. ‘A gormless fellow with baggy trousers? I saw him … It would make things damned awkward, spending an evening playing cards with an OR.’ Darymple made sure he didn’t share any social activities with ‘other ranks’, even female ones.

‘Why would it?’ said Peggy. ‘I thought the war was being fought to do away with class distinction and all that rubbish.’

‘Do you have soldiers and officers in the same wards at the hospital?’ said Piotr, who always liked to stir a dispute.

‘Corporals are worst of all,’ said Darymple, smiling provocatively. ‘They can’t hold their drink as well as the sergeants, and they lack the fawning subservience of the privates. I would never sit down for a game of bridge with a corporal.’

‘I hope he plays and beats you hollow,’ said Peggy.

Darymple chortled.

‘What’s this I hear about you leaving us, Robin?’ the prince asked him.

‘Ah, that’s all very hush-hush, Piotr,’ said Darymple and lowered his voice. ‘I met an old chum in Shepheard’s bar last week. Toby Wallingford, RNVR, a very good pal. I thrashed him countless times at school; he says he still has the scars. Now the lucky brute has got himself lined up with some gangster outfit that chases the Hun way out in the blue. They raise a little hell and come back to town to raise hell again.’

‘It sounds very dangerous, Robin,’ said Peggy. She knew it was what any woman was expected to say when men were bragging. They were all like that: concerned with their little bits of coloured ribbon and their absurd egos. They had to tell you how brave they were, and it had to be done by means of infantile jokes. War seemed to bring out a man’s most tiresome side.

The prince said, ‘We have their measure now, I think. We’ll stop them before they get very far. Benghazi is my bet.’

‘Yes, and I’m just shuffling bits of paper all day. It makes me livid to miss it all. And look at what those Eye-tie frogmen did last month; it’s all coming out now. Got right into Alex and blew the bottoms out of HMS Valiant and Queen Elizabeth too.’

‘Were they badly damaged?’

‘Damned right they were. The dark blue jobs are going through the motions of pretending the ships are in one piece – saluting the quarterdeck, raising the flags, and holding church services every Sunday – but the fact is that both those battleships are resting their hulls on the bottom of the harbour.’

‘Yes, that’s what I’d heard,’ said the prince.

‘I’ve got to get into the fight soon,’ said Darymple reaching over to the bowl of nuts and sifting them to find good ones. ‘A chap has to have a decent gong if he wants a career in the postwar army. Wally’s outfit is my big chance.’ He put a nut into his mouth and crunched on it.

‘Congratulations, old boy,’ said the prince.

‘And I’d go up a rank immediately, that’s the drill for anyone accepted by one of those mobs; major.’

‘Splendid. I wish I was young enough –.’

‘Combined services: soldiers, sailors, and bloody airmen too, they tell me. My pal Wally is a sailor. But that’s the way the war is going. We’ve got to give them a taste of their own blitzkrieg games. That’s the way I see it.’

‘What will you do with your room?’ asked the ever-practical Peggy.

‘Steady on, old girl. Don’t pick over my carcass yet.’

‘I’ve put the new girl – Alice, I mean – into that room Lieutenant Anderson said he wanted kept for him. I’m frightened he’ll suddenly appear.’

‘Andy was in the Tobruk show,’ said the prince.

‘Tobruk?’ said Darymple. ‘That was a sticky do.’ Darymple did not admire one-time Sergeant Anderson and the way in which he’d earned a Military Medal, a commission and then the Military Cross in the course of twelve months’ fighting. More than once he’d found reason to give Anderson a blistering rocket. One lunchtime, here in the hotel dining room, he’d admonished the lieutenant for his appalling table manners. And the night before Andy went into the blue, Darymple had summoned the military police here to quell his noisy drunken bottle party. All kinds of riffraff had gone wandering through the Magnifico that night: singing lewdly on the stairs, vomiting in one of the amphorae and breaking the chain in the downstairs toilet. Darymple had brought that celebration to a sudden conclusion and bawled Anderson out in front of his pals.

‘Yes,’ said the prince. ‘He’s with armoured cars, and they are always at the very front. He was supporting the New Zealanders. They took Ed Duda and linked up with the garrison. Andy did one of his lunatic acts and took his cars forward without waiting for orders. He was one of the first ones to break through the perimeter.’ Blank-faced, the prince looked at Peggy and looked at Darymple again. Everyone knew how jealous he was of Anderson.

‘How do you know that?’ said Darymple petulantly. ‘None of the official communiqués said who broke through.’ He reached for a handful of black olives.

‘Andy owed me a fiver,’ explained the prince. ‘One of his chaps – a delicious young lieutenant – had to bring captured enemy documents back to GHQ Cairo. Andy told him to pop in to see me. He brought me a crate of Italian brandy and a whole Parmesan cheese captured from an Italian headquarters. Lovely cheese; it’s on these biscuits you’ve been eating. And the brandy is not too bad. They live well, even in the desert. The Italians keep a sense of proportion: I’ve always said so.’

This aside was calculated to prove that the prince had not suffered at the hands of Lucia.

‘And there was a scribbled note from Andy to say we were quits. It took me about an hour to decipher his writing, but that’s what I made it. He’s a good fellow, Andy. But I don’t think he’ll be back in the Magnifico for a bit. He’s probably capturing Rommel single-handed by now. His confrere said Andy had been made up to captain – acting, temporary and unpaid – and his divisional commander has put him in for a DSO.’

Darymple had been chewing his way through the olives. Now he straightened up to stifle a sigh of exasperation. The prince gave Peggy a little wink. Peggy smiled. Piotr was an unsurpassed troublemaker.

‘The flowers on your balcony are lovely, Piotr,’ Peggy said, to change the subject. ‘The little orange bush is doing well: the blossom gives off such a perfume. Cairo is so glorious at this time of year.’