“I think,” said Elena, getting up from the table, “that this conversation has gone far enough.”
We listened to one of the British officers play the piano after that. This did little to improve anyone’s spirits. Just before midnight, Elena’s servants stopped serving alcohol. And gradually she was able to shoo her guests away. I would have left, too, but she asked me to stay on for a while, to talk about old times. Our old times. Which sounded just fine. So I went outside and told Coogan that I was staying on for a while and after that I would probably walk home.
“Be careful, sir,” he told me.
“I’ll be all right,” I said. “I have my pistol.”
“If you were thinking of going anywhere on your own, sir, then the nicest chorus girls in Cairo are at Madame Badia’s, sir. There’s a belly dancer called Tahia Carioca who’s first rate, if you like that sort of thing.”
“No, thanks.”
“Or if you was with a lady, sir, there’s a new place on the Mena Road, on the way to the Pyramids. The Auberge des Pyramides, it’s called. Opened in the summer. Very flash. Young King Farouk goes there a lot, so it must be good on account of how that boy knows how to enjoy himself.”
I grinned. “Coogan. Go home.”
Back in the house, the servants had disappeared, the way good servants do when they’re not wanted anymore. Elena made us some mint tea, just to prove that she could still boil a kettle, and then showed me back into the drawing room.
“Where do you find these guys?” I was feeling kind of sore about the way the evening had gone so far.
“Wlazyslaw can be quite charming sometimes,” she said. “But I’ll admit, tonight was not one of those occasions.”
“Just sitting next to him made me want to look for some life insurance.”
“He was jealous of you, that’s all.”
“‘He was jealous, that’s all’? Elena, a guy like that gets jealous, you’re liable to end up with a pillow over your face. And me taking an early-morning plunge in the Nile.”
She sipped her tea from a glass, snuggled up next to me on the sofa, and crossed her legs, carelessly.
“Did you ever do this with him?”
“Now who’s jealous?”
“That means yes. In which case no wonder he’s pissed. If you were my girl, I’d be pissed myself.”
“I’m nobody’s ‘girl,’ Willy. He knows that. Anyway, whatever happened between me and Wlazyslaw happened right here on this sofa. He’s never seen the wallpaper in my bedroom. Nobody has. Not since Freddy died.”
“That’s a long time to spend on the sofa. Even in Egypt.”
“Isn’t it? A long time.” She sighed, and for a moment we were both silent. “Why did you leave Berlin?”
“I’m half-Jewish, remember?”
“Yes, but the Nazis didn’t know that.”
“Maybe so, but I did. It took a while for my Jewish half to wrestle my Catholic half to the floor. Longer than it should have, perhaps.”
“So it wasn’t me.”
I shrugged. “But for you, I’d probably have left a lot earlier. It’s all your fault.”
“It sounds like you’re going to punish me.”
“Right now I’m having a lot of fun thinking about it.”
For a moment Elena’s eyes grew more distant, as if she were trying to visualize something important. “What’s she like? The girl in Washington.”
“Did I mention a girl anywhere?”
“Not specifically. But I can tell that there is one. I always could with you.”
“All right. There is and there isn’t. Not anymore.”
“Sounds like Wlazyslaw.”
“We got further than the sofa.”
“What happened?”
“She wanted me to care when I was pretending not to.”
“Sounds complicated.”
“Not really.”
“Tell me about it. And don’t think you have to make a joke about it. I can see it still hurts.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Only when I look in your eyes.”
So I told her about Diana. Everything there was. Including my betrayal of her. It took a while, but when I had finished I felt better. I had lifted something from my shoulders. Like a couple of hundred tons of self-pity. It helped that she kissed me, of course. For quite a long time. The way old friends do sometimes. But for now, we kept it to the sofa.
“Do you want to stay?” she asked at about two A.M. “There are plenty of spare rooms.”
“Thanks, but I have to get back to my hotel. In case there are any messages from my boss.”
“Would you like Ahmed to take you in the car?”
“No, thanks, I’ll walk. It will feel nice to put one foot in front of the other without breaking into a sweat.”
“Tomorrow evening,” she said. “Let’s do something.”
“Something sounds good,” I said.
“Come around seven.”
I WALKED NORTH, with the Nile and the British embassy on my left. In front of the embassy, British soldiers stood in sentry boxes looking slightly embarrassed at the size and grandeur of the building, a great white wedding cake of a place set in lush green gardens that looked as big as, and a lot nicer than, Buckingham Palace. For a while it seemed that a dark green sedan was following me. But after I had crossed the road, close to the Cairo Museum of Antiquities, and walked east along Aldo Street toward Opera Square, I looked back and saw that it had gone.
