City of Gold

Picture me, a scruffy tourist in bush shirt and slacks, trudging along Cairo’s wide and dusty boulevards and through its grimy alleys. It is hot and I am weary, my old shoes are buffed to a glass-like sheen because I find it difficult to turn away the shoe-shine ‘boys’ of all ages who guard every street corner. In my hand there is a map. It is not a modern coloured map with adverts for discos and five star hotels; it is a hand-drawn one showing the city as it was in 1941. It is the work of Victor Pettitt and his wife Margaret, whose dedication and unique experience are helping me bridge the years. I look at Victor’s notes and thrust the map under the noses of appropriately aged passers-by and indicate what I am looking for but it is not easy to find someone who remembers a past that they would rather forget. Sometimes I am lucky, and this book was the result of the kindness and help of many people; friends and strangers. I hope you will enjoy it.

This story of World War Two is set in a short specific period when the city was threatened by the tanks and guns of General Rommel’s Afrika Korps. It was not only the future of Cairo that hung in the balance; a German occupation of the city would have cut Britain off from its vast supporting Imperial complex that stretched from India to Australia. And the greater part of the story I tell is closely based upon historical fact.

Cairo is the world’s oldest city. It has always been the cultural centre of the Arab world and so remains. It sits astride the Eastern Mediterranean and the Suez Canal. It is cosmopolitan in a way that few other cities – and certainly no other Arab city – comes near to being. The unique way in which the River Nile mixed the minerals of the Blue Nile and the rotting vegetation carried by the White Nile made Egypt’s flooded lands exceptionally fertile and fed its population for more than four thousand years.

I find it awesome that in the time of Jesus Christ, visitors came to see the pyramids which had been built two thousand years earlier. Cairo has always known visitors. Cairo controls the only practical route between Europe and the Orient and is the most attractive stopover between Europe and Africa. Travellers are likely to settle permanently in such stopover places, as any New Yorker will confirm. And so Cairo, amid its Muslim millions, is home to a most amazing mixture of races and religions from Copts and Catholics and Jews to Hindus and Buddhists. This diverse array was especially apparent during World War Two.

It was World War Two that made Cairo into a strategic prize, capture of which would have changed history. It is early 1942, when City of Gold begins. Hitler’s armies are occupying the greater part of the continent of Europe from northern Norway to France’s border with Spain. In June 1941 the German army had invaded communist Russia and advanced all the way to the outskirts of Leningrad and Moscow. As the year ended the USA suffered a crippling surprise attack on its Navy in the Pacific; and Germany – fulfilling its agreement with Japan – had declared war upon America.

France had capitulated to the Germans, and French soldiers and sailors in North Africa had also decided to stop fighting. The Italian forces in Libya – an Italian colony – had been waging an unsuccessful battle with the British forces in neighbouring Egypt. To shore up their Italian allies the Germans had sent elements of its armed forces under an obscure but singularly ambitious General named Erwin Rommel, who owed his position to being a favourite of Hitler. As the story opens Rommel’s armoured units were coming uncomfortably close to Cairo.

It is Cairo in that period of early 1942 that I wanted to depict as accurately and dispassionately as I could manage. When I first visited the city, World War Two had been over for ten years. There was plenty of evidence of the earlier times but before starting to plan this book I needed much more. I went back to look afresh. I talked with Egyptian friends and enjoyed the immense benefit of a wife who had lived in Cairo with her parents, who had studied there and speaks and writes Arabic. I scoured diaries and letters, memoirs and endless photo albums. I had become friends with Walther Nehring (who as a Gen-Lt. had commanded the Afrika Korps). Other German desert veterans also provided their viewpoints. But more riches were to be found on my doorstep, for England was packed with people who had spent some wartime years in Egypt. And could they remember!

Looking back, I see that City of Gold had some things in common with my other two books about men and women fighting World War Two. Bomber and Goodbye Mickey Mouse, like City of Gold, were dominated by the environment in which the stories were set. All three books demanded a sympathetic understanding, and persuasive depiction, of foreigners. All three books were subjected to a long period of consideration as I researched time and place. Cairo in 1942, threatened from the desert by German tanks, and in its streets by rioting Egyptians, was undermined by corruption and theft on a massive scale (only to be equalled in scale and audacity during the Vietnam war.) To cover such a complex period, with any chance of reflecting the way it really was, required a large cast of characters: many different people with many different motives tugging in different directions. Only by this means could the bewildering atmosphere of Cairo 1942 be demonstrated. While the other two books also show dissension and dismay they are about unified casts of characters. There is little or no unification of the people in my wartime Cairo. The streets were crowded with Arabs, Italians, Greeks, French and British. There were many different uniforms worn by soldiers, sailors and airmen, South African servicemen and Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians, Indian soldiers and Poles. There were men of the Egyptian army too, although their country remained technically neutral and their declared enemy was the British ‘occupiers’ rather than the Germans at the gates of the city. To add to this social confusion there were countless sub-divisions. Most conspicuous among the civilians were the rich: Egyptian, Greek, French and Italian families, many of whom had lived there for several generations and were determined to keep their elegant lifestyle and privileges. The British enjoyed special social divisions: the most exclusive were civilians permanently employed in the administration, soldiers of Britain’s pre-war regular army were distinguished from men who joined the army simply to fight the war. Combat soldiers from the desert looked with scorn upon the ‘chairborne’ warriors who manned the desks, and of course there always remained the steep class divide between British officers and ‘other ranks’. At the bottom of the heap there was Egypt’s vast population of ragged, half-starved peasantry, of which a sizable proportion was crippled or diseased.

Several of my characters are based upon real people but since no one in the story comes out of it with glory I have not used any real names apart from General Rommel and ‘Ambassador’ Lampson, for whom no one with whom I spoke had a good word. More than one person with firsthand experience thought that many aspects of present-day troubles in the ‘Muddle East’ were largely a legacy of the well-publicised bullying of King Farouk. Some of the episodes here, such as Lampson’s visit to the Palace, are based upon eye-witness descriptions. Most of the places are depicted as accurately as I am able.

Len Deighton, 2011

Prologue

In the final months of 1941, General Erwin Rommel – commander of the Axis armies in North Africa – began to receive secret messages about the British armies that faced him. The source of this secret intelligence was not identified to Rommel. In fact, the contents of the messages sent to him were carefully rewritten to prevent anyone guessing the source of these secrets and how they were obtained. But the messages were startling in their completeness; the dates of arrival of supply ships and their cargoes, the disposition of the Allied armies and air forces, the state of their morale and their equipment, and even what their next operations might be were provided promptly and regularly to Rommel’s intelligence officer.

Said one specialist historian, ‘And what messages they were! They provided Rommel with undoubtedly the broadest and clearest picture of enemy forces and intentions available to any Axis commander throughout the whole war … In the see-saw North African warfare, Rommel had been driven back across the desert by the British … but beginning on January 21, 1942, he rebounded with such vigour that in seventeen days he had thrown the British back 300 miles.’

1

Cairo: January 1942

‘I like escorting prisoners,’ said Captain Albert Cutler, settling back and stretching out his legs along the empty seats. He was wearing a cream-coloured linen suit that had become rumpled during the journey. ‘When I face a long train journey, I try and arrange to do it.’

He was a florid-faced man with a pronounced Glasgow accent. There was no mistaking where he came from. It was obvious right from the moment he first opened his mouth.

The other man was Jimmy Ross. He was in khaki, with corporal’s stripes on his sleeves. He was that rarest of Scots, a Highlander: from a village in Wester Ross. But they’d tacitly agreed to bury their regional differences for this brief period of their acquaintanceship. It was Ross’s pocket chess set that had cemented their relationship. They were both at about the same level of skill. During the journey they must have played fifty games. At least fifty. And that was not counting the little demonstrations that Cutler had pedantically given him: openings and endings from some of the great games of the chess masters. He could remember them. He had a wonderful memory. He said that was what made him such a good detective.

It was an old train, with all the elaborate bobbins and fretwork that the Edwardians loved. The luggage rack was of polished brass with tassels at each end. There was even a small bevelled mirror in a mahogany frame. In the roof there was a fan that didn’t work very well. According to the wind and the direction of the train, the ventilator emitted gusts of sooty smoke from the locomotive. It did it now, and Ross coughed.

There came the sounds of passengers picking their way along the corridor. They stumbled past with their kit and baggage and rifles and equipment. They spoke in the tired voices of men who have not slept; the train was very crowded. They couldn’t see in. All the blinds were kept lowered on this compartment, but there was enough sunlight getting through the linen. It made a curious shadowless light.

‘Why would you like that?’ said Jimmy Ross. ‘Escorting prisoners. Why would you like that?’ He had a soft Scots accent that you’d only notice if you were looking for it. Jimmy Ross was slim and dark and more athletic than Cutler, but both men were much the same. Their similarities of upbringing – bright, working-class, grammar school graduates without money enough to go up to university – had more than once made them exchange looks that said, There but for the grace of God go I, or words to that effect.

‘I wear my nice civvy clothes, and I get a compartment to myself. Room to put my feet up. Room to stretch out and sleep. No one’s bothered us, have they? I like it like that, especially on these trains.’ Cutler tugged at the window blind and raised it a few inches to look out at the scenery. On the glass, as on the windows to the corridor, there were large gummed-paper notices that bore the royal coat of arms, the smudged rubber stamps, the scrawled signatures of a representative of the provost marshal, and the words RESERVED COMPARTMENT in big black letters. No one with any sense would have intruded upon them.

Bright sunlight came into the compartment as he raised the blind. So did the smell of excrement, which was spread on the fields as fertiliser. Cutler blinked. Outside, the countryside was green: dusty, of course, like everything in this part of the world, but very green. This was Egypt in winter: the fertile region.

The train clattered and groaned. It was not going fast; Egyptian trains never went fast. Scrawny dark-skinned men, riding donkeys alongside the track, stared back at them. In the fields, women were bending to weed a row of crops. They stepped forward, still in line, like soldiers. ‘A long time yet,’ pronounced Cutler, looking at his watch. He lowered the blind again. When the train reached Cairo the two men would part. Cutler, the army policeman, would take up his nice new appointment with Special Investigation Branch Headquarters, Middle East. Jimmy Ross would be thrown into a stinking army ‘glasshouse’. He knew he could expect a very rough time while awaiting court-martial. The military prison in Cairo had a bad reputation. After he’d been tried and found guilty, he might be sent to one of the army prisons in the desert. Ross smiled sadly, and Cutler felt sorry for him. It hadn’t been a bad journey; two Scotsmen can always find something in common.

‘Have you never been attacked?’ said Ross.

‘Attacked?’

‘By prisoners. Don’t men get desperate when they are under arrest?’

Cutler chuckled. ‘You wouldn’t hurt me, would you?’ There was not much difference in their ages or their builds. Cutler wasn’t frightened of the prisoner. Potbellied as he was, he felt physically superior to him. In Glasgow, as a young copper on the beat, he’d learned how to look after himself in any sort of rough-house.

‘I’m not a violent man,’ said Ross.

‘You’re not?’ Cutler laughed. Ross was charged with murder.

Reading his thoughts, Jimmy Ross said, ‘He had it coming to him. He was a rotten bastard.’

‘I know, laddie.’ He could see that Jimmy Ross was a decent enough fellow. He’d read Ross’s statement, and those of the witnesses. Ross was the only NCO there. The officer was an idiot who would have got them all killed. And he pulled a gun on his men. That was never a good idea. But Cutler was tempted to add that his victim’s being a bastard would count for nothing. Ross was an ‘other rank’, and he’d killed an officer. That’s what would count. In wartime on active service they would throw the book at him. He’d be lucky to get away with twenty years’ hard labour. Very lucky. He might get a death sentence.

Jimmy Ross read his thoughts. He was sitting handcuffed, looking down at the khaki uniform he was wearing. He fingered the rough material. When he looked up he could see the other man was grimacing. ‘Are you all right, captain?’

Cutler did not feel all right. ‘Did you have that cold chicken, laddie?’ Cutler had grown into the habit of calling people laddie. As a police detective-inspector in Glasgow it was his favoured form of address. He never addressed prisoners by their first names; it heightened expectations. Other Glasgow coppers used to say sir to the public but Cutler was not that deferential.

‘You know what I had,’ said Ross. ‘I had a cheese sandwich.’

‘Something’s giving me a pain in the guts,’ said Cutler.

‘It was the bottle of whisky that did it.’

Cutler grinned ruefully. He’d not had a drink for nearly a week. That was the bad part of escorting a prisoner. ‘Get my bag down from the rack, laddie.’ Cutler rubbed his chest. ‘I’ll take a couple of my tablets. I don’t want to arrive at a new job and report sick the first minute I get there.’ He stretched out on the seat, extending his legs as far as they would go. His face had suddenly changed to an awful shade of grey. Even his lips were pale. His forehead was wet with perspiration, and he looked as if he might vomit.

‘It’s a good job, is it?’ Jimmy Ross pretended he could see nothing wrong. He got to his feet and, with his hands still cuffed, got the leather case. He watched Cutler as he opened it.

Cutler’s hands were trembling so that he had trouble fitting the key into the locks. With the lid open Ross reached across, got the bottle and shook tablets out of it. Cutler opened his palm to catch two of them. He threw them into his mouth and swallowed them without water. He seemed to have trouble getting the second one down. His face hardened as if he was going to choke on it. He frowned and swallowed hard. Then he rubbed his chest and gave a brief bleak smile, trying to show he was all right. He’d said he often got indigestion; it was the worry of the job. Ross stood there for a moment looking at him. It would be easy to crack him over the head with his hands. He could bring the steel cuffs down together onto his head. He’d seen someone do it on stage in a play.

For a moment or two Cutler seemed better. He tried to overcome his pain. ‘I’ve got to find a spy in Cairo. I won’t be able to find him, of course, but I’ll go through the motions.’ He closed the leather case. ‘You can leave it there. I will be changing my trousers before we arrive. That’s the trouble with linen; it gets horribly wrinkled. And I want to look my best. First impressions count.’

Ross sat down and watched him with that curiosity and concerned detachment with which the healthy always observe the sick. ‘Why won’t you be able to find him?’ Being under arrest had not lessened his determined hope that Britain would win the war, and this fellow Cutler should be trying harder. ‘You said you were a detective.’

‘Ah! In Glasgow before the war, I was. CID. A bloody good one. That’s why the army gave me the rank straight from the force. I never did an officer’s training course. They were short of trained investigators. They sent me to Corps of Military Police Depot at Mytchett. Two weeks to learn to march, salute, and be lectured on military law and court-martial routines. That’s all I got. I came straight out here.’

‘I see.’

Cutler became defensive. ‘What chance do I stand? What chance would anyone stand? They can’t find him with radio detectors. They don’t think he’s one of the refugees. They’ve exhausted all the usual lines of investigation.’ Cutler was speaking frankly in a way he hadn’t spoken to anyone for a long time. You could speak like that to a man you’d never see again. ‘It’s a strange town, full of Arabs. This place they’re sending me to: Bab-el-Hadid barracks – there’s no one there … I mean there are no names I recognise, and I know the names of all the good coppers. They are all soldiers.’ He said it disgustedly; he didn’t think much of the army. ‘Conscripts … a couple of lawyers. There are no real policemen there at all; that’s my impression anyway. And I don’t even speak the language. Arabic; just a lot of gibberish. How can I take a statement or do anything?’ Very slowly and carefully Cutler swung his legs round so he could put his feet back on the floor again. He leaned forward and sighed. He seemed to feel a bit better. But Ross could see that having bared his heart to a stranger, Cutler now regretted it.

‘So why did they send for you?’ said Ross.

‘You know what the army’s like. I’m a detective; that’s all they know. For the top brass, detectives are like gunners or bakers or sheet-metal workers. One is much like the other. They don’t understand that investigation is an art.’

‘Yes. In the army, you are just a number,’ said Ross.

‘They think finding spies is like finding thieves or finding lost wallets. It’s no good trying to tell them different. These army people think they know it all.’ A sudden thought struck him. ‘Not a regular, are you?’

‘No.’