stood over it. The throat had been cut and the head was almost severed from the body. A briefcase was roped to the waist. Vandarn bent down and gingerly opened the case. It was full of bottles of champagne. Jakes said: “My God.” “Ugly, isn’t it,” Vandarn said. “Throat cut, then dumped in the river with a case of champagne to weigh him down.” “Cool bastard.” “And damn quick with that knife.” Vandarn touched his cheek: the dressing had been taken off, now, and several days’ growth of beard hid the wound. But not Elene, not with the knife, please. “I gather you haven’t found him.” “I haven’t found anything. I’ve had Abdullah brought in, just on general principles, but there was nothing at his house. And I called in at the Villa les Oliviers on the way backsame story.” “And at Captain Sadat’s house.” Suddenly Vandam felt utterly drained. It seemed that Wolff outwitted him at every turn. It occurred to him that he might simply not be smart enough to catch this sly, evasive spy. “Perhaps we’ve lost,” he said. He rubbed his face. He had not slept in the last twentyfour hours. He wondered what he was doing here, standing over the hideous corpse of Major Sandy Smith. There was no more to be learned from it. “I think III go home and sleep for an hour,” he said. Jakes looked surprised. Vandam added: “It might help me think more clearly. This afternoon we’ll interrogate all the prisoners again.” “Very good, sir.” Vandarn walked back to his vehicle. Driving across the bridge from Zamalek to the mainland, he recalled that Sonja had mentioned one other possibility: Wolff’s nomad cousins. He looked at the boats on the wide, slow river. The current took them downstream and the wind blew them upstream-a coincidence of enormous importance to Egypt. The boatmen were still using the single triangular sail, a design which had been perfected . . . How long ago? Thousands of years, perhaps. So many things in this country were done the way they had been done for thousands of years. Vandarn closed his eyes and saw Wolff, in a felucca, sailing upriver, manipulating the triangular sail with one hand while with the other he tapped out messages to Rommel on the transmitter. The car THE KEY TO REBECCA 299
stopped suddenly and Vandam opened his eyes, realizing he bad been daydreaming, or dozing. Why would Wolff go upriver? To find his nomad cousins. But who could tell where they would be? Wolff might be able to find them, if they followed some annual pattern in their wanderings. The jeep had stopped outside Vandam’s house. He got out. “I want you to wait for me,” be told the driver. “You’d better come in.” He led the way into the house, then directed the driver to the kitchen. “My servant, Gaafar, will give you something to eat, so long as you don’t treat him like a wog.” “Thank you very much, sir,” said the driver. There was a small stack of mail on the hall table. The top envelope had no stamp, and was addressed to Vandam in a vaguely familiar hand. It had “Urgent” scribbled in the top left-hand corner. Vandarn picked it up. There was more he should do, be realized. Wolff could well he heading south now. Roadblocks should be set up at all major towns on the route. There should be someone at every stop on the railway line, looking for Wolff. And the river itself … There had to be some way of checking the river, in case Wolff really had gone by boat, as in the daydream. Vandam was finding it hard to concentrate. We could set up riverblocks on the same principle as roadblocks, he thought; why not? None of it would be any good if Wolff had simply gone to ground in Cairo. Suppose he were hiding in the cemeteries? Many Muslims buried their dead in tiny houses, and there were acres of such empty buildings in the city: Vandam would have needed a thousand men to search them all. Perhaps I should do it anyway, he thought. But Wolff might have gone north, toward Alexandria; or east or west into the desert . . . He went into the drawing room, looking for a letter opener. Somehow the search bad to be narrowed down. Vandam did not have thousands of men at his disposal-they were all in the desert, fighting. He had to decide what was the best bet. He remembered where all this had started: Assyut. Perhaps he should contact Captain Newman in Assyut. That seemed to be where Wolff had come in from the desert, so maybe he would go out that way. Maybe his cousins were in that vicinity. Vandam. looked indecisively at the telephone. 300 Ken Follett