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By Root 1054 0

unable to move away (because everyone else had stopped too) and they had to lock their doors and roll up their windows while men, women and children, Arabs and Greeks and Syrians and Jews and Australians and Scotsmen, jumped on their roofs and fought on their hoods and fell on their running boards and bled all over their paintwork. Somebody fell through the window of the tailor’s shop next to the café, and a frightened goat ran into the souvenir shop which flanked the café on the other side and began to knock down all the tables laden with china and pottery and glass. A baboon came from somewhere—it had probably been riding the goat, in a common form of street entertainment—and ran across the heads in the crowd, nimble-footed, to disappear in the direction of Alexandria. A horse broke free of its harness and bolted along the street between the lines of cars. From a window above the café a woman emptied a bucket of dirty water into the melee. Nobody noticed.

At last the police arrived.

When people heard the whistles, suddenly the shoves and pushes and insults which had started their own individual fights seemed a lot less important. There was a scramble to get away before the arrests began. The crowd diminished rapidly. Wolff, who had fallen over early in the proceedings, picked himself up and strolled across the road to watch the dénouement. By the time six people had been handcuffed it was all over, and there was no one left fighting except for an old woman in black and a one-legged beggar feebly shoving each other in the gutter. The café proprietor, the tailor and the owner of the souvenir shop were wringing their hands and berating the police for not coming sooner while they mentally doubled and trebled the damage for insurance purposes.

The bus driver had broken his arm, but all the other injuries were cuts and bruises.

There was only one death; the goat had been bitten by the dog and consequently had to be destroyed.

When the police tried to move the two crashed cars, they discovered that during the fight the street urchins had jacked up the rear ends of both vehicles and stolen the tires.

Every single lightbulb in the bus had also disappeared.

And so had one British Army briefcase.

Alex Wolff was feeling pleased with himself as he walked briskly through the alleys of Old Cairo. A week ago the task of prizing secrets out of GHQ had seemed close to impossible. Now it looked as if he had pulled it off. The idea of getting Abdullah to orchestrate a street fight had been brilliant.

He wondered what would be in the briefcase.

Abdullah’s house looked like all the other huddled slums. Its cracked and peeling façade was irregularly dotted with small misshapen windows. The entrance was a low doorless arch with a dark passage beyond. Wolff ducked under the arch, went along the passage and climbed a stone spiral staircase. At the top he pushed through a curtain and entered Abdullah’s living room.

The room was like its owner—dirty, comfortable and rich. Three small children and a puppy chased each other around the expensive sofas and inlaid tables. In an alcove by a window an old woman worked on a tapestry. Another woman was drifting out of the room as Wolff walked in: there was no strict Muslim separation of the sexes here, as there had been in Wolff’s boyhood home. In the middle of the floor Abdullah sat cross-legged on an embroidered cushion with a baby in his lap. He looked up at Wolff and smiled broadly. “My friend, what a success we have had!”

Wolff sat on the floor opposite him. “It was wonderful,” he said. “You’re a magician.”

“Such a riot! And the bus arriving at just the right moment—and the baboon running away ...”

Wolff looked more closely at what Abdullah was doing. On the floor beside him was a pile of wallets, handbags, purses and watches. As he spoke he picked up a handsome tooled leather wallet. He took from it a wad of Egyptian banknotes, some postage stamps and a tiny gold pencil, and put them somewhere under his robe. Then he put down the wallet, picked up a handbag and began to rifle through