to know more about them.
She looked round her. Yellow lights from the boats moored along this stretch of riverbank made patterns on the water. One boat nearby had its windows open to let in the night air. Through them came loud voices, with posh English accents, and the sound of a scratchy record on a wind-up record player: Bing Crosby singing ‘Just a Gigolo’.
She consulted her watch; it was almost midnight. She wondered how long Solomon would keep her waiting. There was someone with him. She knew that from the silver tray with its half-eaten sandwiches, used plates and coffee cups that she’d spied in the galley on her way past. Judging by the remains it must have been a long session: negotiations of some sort. He’d told her that he liked making deals. I was born in a bazaar, he’d said. She didn’t know whether he meant it literally, for he’d once told her his father had been a wealthy resident of Cairo. Whatever the details of his birth, Solomon was a Jew, but of that he’d made no secret. Otherwise she knew little except what was obvious: that he was a highly intelligent, much-travelled businessman who spoke a dozen languages, including excellent Egyptian Arabic and English that was distinctly American in syntax and accent. She knew nothing else about him and she took care not to appear inquisitive. Solomon had offered to bring for her each month the money that her absent husband sent from faraway places. The wartime British restrictions on money transfers of any kind made her wonder how she would have managed without Solomon’s unofficial courier service. The money she earned working for the British army in the base hospital was not enough for even her modest lifestyle. Almost all the others were young inexperienced army nurses from England, living in quarters and glad of a chance to be in a city full of women-chasing men. They didn’t need any money. But Peggy lived in a hotel and so far resisted the temptations and propositions. Peggy needed Karl’s money, so it was necessary to put up with Solomon’s quirks and eccentricities.
Solomon had even renamed this boat Medina al Dahabiya: City of Gold. It was a pun. Dahabiya means shallow-draft Nile houseboat, as well as meaning gold. Before he took it over and refitted it, it had been little more than a hulk owned by a drunken South African airline pilot, and appropriately named Flying Fish. Houseboats moored along the west side of Gezira Island had acquired a new chic reputation since the war started. The boats were of all shapes and sizes; some – like this one – were in good condition while others were leaking and derelict. Everyone had colourful stories about this weird fleet. Black marketeers, British army deserters, and even Italian prisoners of war were said to be here, throwing amazing parties with every variety of drink and drug freely available. But Cairo loved rumours, the more flamboyant the better.
‘Will you come this way, madam.’
‘Yes.’ She never called him Yusef. He was familiar enough already.
When she was finally invited down into the well-appointed drawing room on the deck below, Solomon greeted her warmly. The irritation that had built up while she was being kept waiting, disappeared. She came under his spell. If Solomon al-Masri was rich he was certainly not one of the well-bred, well-spoken, cultured figures so frequently found in Cairo’s best hotels, bars and nightclubs. Solomon was good-looking in that tough-guy way that Hollywood had recently discovered in Cagney and Bogart. He was short and muscular, with a tanned weathered face, black moustache and bushy eyebrows, and wavy black hair that resisted his efforts with comb and brush. His custom-made silk shirt and trousers fitted perfectly, unlike so much of the clothing produced by Cairo’s tailors. Anyone could see he was a man who demanded things done exactly the way he wanted them. In everything he did she recognised the single-minded drive she’d found in other self-made men, her father for one.
Now Solomon sat her down and fussed over her as if this was the moment he’d waited all day to enjoy. ‘You’ll have some whisky?’ He remembered exactly how she liked it – soda and whisky in equal amounts, no ice – and selected a heavy cut-glass tumbler for it. He brandished the Johnny Walker bottle as if to prove it was not one of the bogus local distillations that were now in such abundance.
He watched her, as she sat down and crossed her legs, and handed her the drink. ‘Are you cold, Peggy?’ She felt better now. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror: smooth skin, reddish hair and large green eyes. She was reassured. She still looked fresh and young; few of the younger nurses outshone her.
The room was warm and hazy with cigar smoke. ‘No, not now,’ she said. ‘But boats are never warm, are they? I don’t know how you bear it on the water in winter.’
‘You get used to it, Peggy. My father had a fine house here on the island. Each morning, having said his prayers, he looked at the water flowing past. The Nile is long, he used to tell me, as long as our people’s exile.’
‘And what did you say?’ She wondered how many of the Arabs with whom he had dealings recognised him as a Jew. Perhaps, if there were goods to be traded, and money to be made, they did not care. Money speaks all tongues; that was what they said in the Cairo souks.
‘I would tell my father to look north and remember that here in Cairo, we are almost at the end of the Nile,’ Solomon said. He smiled briefly as he suddenly recalled telling her this little parable before: he liked parables. She had dutifully provided him with his cue.
‘You are a Jew, Peggy.’ It wasn’t a question, it was a statement of fact, a reminder.
‘My father was…’
‘I don’t want to know about your father. I want to know about you.’ He said it firmly and sat down on the sofa and looked at her as if expecting a long answer.
She knew what he was expecting. He was very like Karl in some ways and Karl loved to discuss his ‘roots’ and the essence of race and religion; the Jewish homeland and the pioneers who struggled to create it.
‘I suppose I am,’ she said. She’d grown up in a family where religion was never mentioned. She had been about to say that her father was an atheist until Solomon interrupted her. She knew little or nothing about religion before meeting Karl. Her father had told her that Jewish descent goes through the female line, and anyway Peggy found it difficult to become a believer in any sort of God. Lately her work at the hospital watching so many young men bleed and die had made her less, rather than more, religious. But she didn’t want to argue. ‘Karl is a Jew. Once, long ago, I promised that if we ever had any children they would be brought up as Karl wished.’
‘Exactly. Karl told me the same thing. Karl said you would say that.’
‘When is Karl coming back?’
‘Not yet. He has a lot of work to do.’ Solomon got up and walked to the electric fan and moved it so that its airflow rippled the curtain. It was stuffy in the room and the smell of cigar smoke remained faintly in the air. He could have cleared the air by opening one of the windows, but she knew he didn’t want to risk being overheard. The noisy fan was no doubt part of his desire for privacy. He turned to her and said casually, ‘In fact, Karl has run afoul of the British authorities in Baghdad. Until we can sort it out for him, it is better if he is not anywhere where he’d be recognised.’
‘What do you mean?’ She could not keep the alarm from her voice. ‘What has he done?’
Solomon chuckled. There was a certain brutality in his laugh that did not encourage her to join in. He looked at his watch. ‘Why should you think he has done anything? Karl will be all right.’ He got up again and switched on the radio. He had judged it perfectly: he was a man of method. The time signal sounded and then came the BBC news. It was an hour earlier in London – eleven PM – she could never get over the fact that the man reading the news would afterwards go outside and be in Langham Place, sniff the London air, and be able to see the red double-decker buses going across Oxford Circus.
They listened to the news. The voice of the BBC announcer was dry and solemn. There was only a perfunctory reference to Rommel’s advance. Soon the newsreader was telling of the Red Army’s valiant counterattacks, but even on that subject his buoyant tones could not make up for the fact that the Germans were close to occupying both Moscow and Leningrad. The Japanese advances across the Pacific continued unabated. All the news was ominous. After the first few minutes Solomon switched