The Key to Rebecca - Ken Follett [44]
She pulled him down on top of her. He was very clumsy: his elbows and knees kept digging into her. He fumbled beneath the skirt of her dress.
She said: “Oh, Sandy, you’re so strong.”
She looked over his shoulder and saw Wolff’s face. He was on deck, kneeling down and watching through the hatch, laughing soundlessly.
8
WILLIAM VANDAM WAS BEGINNING TO DESPAIR OF EVER FINDING ALEX WOLFF. The Assyut murder was almost three weeks in the past, and Vandam was no closer to his quarry. As time went by the trail got colder. He almost wished there would be another briefcase snatch, so that at least he would know what Wolff was up to.
He knew he was becoming a little obsessed with the man. He would wake up in the night, around 3 A.M. when the booze had worn off, and worry until daybreak. What bothered him was something to do with Wolff’s style: the sideways manner in which he had slipped into Egypt, the suddenness of the murder of Corporal Cox, the ease with which Wolff had melted into the city. Vandam went over these things, again and again, all the time wondering why he found the case so fascinating.
He had made no real progress, but he had gathered some information, and the information had fed his obsession—fed it not as food feeds a man, making him satisfied, but as fuel feeds a fire, making it burn hotter.
The Villa les Oliviers was owned by someone called Achmed Rahmha. The Rahmhas were a wealthy Cairo family. Achmed had inherited the house from his father, Gamal Rahmha, a lawyer. One of Vandam’s lieutenants had dug up the record of a marriage between Gamal Rahmha and one Eva Wolff, widow of Hans Wolff, both German nationals; and then adoption papers making Hans and Eva’s son Alex the legal child of Gamal Rahmha ...
Which made Achmed Rahmha a German, and explained how he got legitimate Egyptian papers in the name of Alex Wolff.
Also in the records was a will which gave Achmed, or Alex, a share of Gamal’s fortune, plus the house.
Interviews with all surviving Rahmhas had produced nothing. Achmed had disappeared two years ago and had not been heard from since. The interviewer had come back with the impression that the adopted son of the family was not much missed.
Vandam was convinced that when Achmed disappeared he had gone to Germany.
There was another branch of the Rahmha family, but they were nomads, and no one knew where they could be found. No doubt, Vandam thought, they had helped Wolff somehow with his reentry into Egypt.
Vandam understood that now. Wolff could not have come into the country through Alexandria. Security was tight at the port: his entry would have been noted, he would have been investigated, and sooner or later the investigation would have revealed his German antecedents, whereupon he would have been interned. By coming from the south he had hoped to get in unobserved and resume his former status as a born-and-bred Egyptian. It had been a piece of luck for the British that Wolff had run into trouble in Assyut.
It seemed to Vandam that that was the last piece of luck they had had.
He sat in his office, smoking one cigarette after another, worrying about Wolff.
The man was no low-grade collector of gossip and rumor. He was not content, as other agents were, to send in reports based on the number of soldiers he saw in the street and the shortage of motor spares. The briefcase theft proved he was after top-level stuff, and he was capable of devising ingenious ways of getting it. If he stayed at large long enough he would succeed sooner or later.
Vandam paced the room—from the coat stand to the desk, around the desk for a look out of the window, around the other side of the desk, and back to the coat stand.
The spy had his problems, too. He had to explain himself to inquisitive neighbors, conceal his radio somewhere, move about the city and find informants. He could run out of money, his radio could break down, his informants could betray him or someone could