City of Gold. Len Deighton

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ