E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten
Perry Cairo Gambit
Main
ISBN: 978-1-80546-065-7
Verlag: Corvus
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
The gripping, unputdownable historical thriller from the bestselling author of The Jackdaw Mysteries series
E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-80546-065-7
Verlag: Corvus
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
S W Perry worked as a broadcast journalist with several radio stations, including Independent Radio News and LBC, before retraining as an airline pilot. He then spent almost three decades flying holidaymakers to sunny climes before turning to writing novels. He is the author of six books in the highly acclaimed Jackdaw Mysteries series. His debut novel, The Angel's Mark, was shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger and was a Walter Scott Prize Academy Recommended Read 2019.
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One
Until the shooting, the only slaughter committed against the Nimrod Theatre had been confined to the review pages of the Cairo newspapers. A cosy but unimposing little auditorium off Kamil Street, The Nim, as its habitués preferred to call it, was known more for the brio of its productions than for their commercial success. Before that warm and otherwise agreeable Cairene night, an audience could rest safe in the knowledge that a pistol was nothing more lethal than a prop, that the shot that made them jump in their seats was merely a blank, the resulting blood comfortingly fake. But – as all theatre folk know only too well – even the best runs must come to an end some day.
The time of the attack, 10.27 p.m., was not in doubt, it being the solemn habit of the manager – an over-earnest young Egyptian named Moussa Bannoudi – to set the foyer clock in accordance with the start of Radio Cairo’s early-evening news broadcast. That night it took a fatal ricochet, stopping the hands dead and thus precluding any debate.
Outside, beyond The Nim’s Moorish archways, painted a lustrous red and gold in a European’s imagining of a caliph’s treasury, the city was taking its pleasures as it did on any other night. In the adjacent Ezbekia Gardens, a slice of belle-époque Paris transported to Egypt, the street lamps threw their warm light into the groves of banyan and acacia trees. Friends and lovers strolled along the pathways, around the lake and over the little wrought-iron footbridge. At nearby Santi’s a cosmopolitan mix of Egyptians, Lebanese, British and French queued noisily for a late table. In the Long Bar at Shepheard’s Hotel, and on the floating nightclubs moored along the Nile, the lounge-lizards were hard at work. At the Kit-Kat Club, officers from the British garrison vied with smooth young men from King Farouk’s court for the attention of the chorus girls. And at the Nimrod Theatre that evening’s performance of – already dismissed by the theatre critic of as ‘lacklustre’ – had just drawn to a close. Behind the safety curtain, the cast were rushing to cleanse themselves of greasepaint and sweat. In the auditorium the house-lights were up and the audience was already pushing for the exits.
Awaiting them in the lane outside was a small squadron of taxis, from which issued a growing hysteria of waving arms and blaring motor horns, the usual Cairo method of attracting trade. The more romantically inclined could choose instead a hantour, a horse-drawn carriage – there were several for hire that night – whose drivers, clad in traditional , sat cradling their long whips like fishermen at their rods. And while the Cairo police later took copious statements from them all, it was perhaps inevitable that their attention was focused more on those coming out of the theatre’s lobby rather than on the four men who entered it.
They came from the direction of Ibrahim Pasha Square, or so the driver of the hantour nearest the entrance said later to a white-jacketed Cairo police constable while his horse munched from its nosebag. And there were three of them, not four. Not so, claimed a motor-cab driver. They came from across the Gardens, and they were five in number. They were European gangsters… they were Egyptian nationalists… they were Jews… they were the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and they came by tram…
While the shaken witnesses inside the foyer each had their own recollection and guarded it jealously, all agreed there had been no warning given. ‘It wasn’t as if they came in brandishing tommy guns like mobsters from Chicago,’ said the redoubtable Madame Nasoul, who ran the front-of-house. And indeed had she been smoking one of her foul Kyriazi Frères, it is quite possible that in the resulting smokescreen no one could have described the assassins in any consistent detail at all.
‘I thought they were waiting for someone,’ Madame Nasoul told the fiercely moustachioed detective inspector who took her statement – being four gentlemen in overcoats and fedoras. ‘They came in over there,’ she said, pointing at the left-hand brass-edged swing door that led to the street, ‘maybe two minutes before the inner doors opened.’ And then, turning, with an imperious sweep of her hand she gave the inspector a rapid visual tour of the foyer. Look up to the gallery, please, Inspector. Observe the ottoman couches, thoughtfully provided for those who need to sit while chatting during the interval, and where we laid out some of the wounded. Follow the curving red-carpeted stairs – admittedly a little worn, but do you know what carpet costs these days? – down to the ground floor and the box office – note the interesting arabesque lattice-front dating from the Khedive era – and finally to the stalls: one double door on each side, hidden away beneath the circle’s overhang like the private booths in one of the naughtier clubs on Emad al-Din Street. And, all the while, studiously ignoring the sticky pools of drying blood.
When the swing door first opened and the four men entered, Madam Nasoul had asked herself why anyone would wear an overcoat on such a warm night. But if her suspicions were aroused, it was only because she feared they might be gentlemen from the bank, come to serve a foreclosure notice, which – given the precarious nature of the Nimrod’s financial health – was a constant possibility.
At first they did nothing very much at all. Adopting a nonchalance that, with hindsight, Madame Nasoul agreed should have provided a warning, they made a casual pretence of studying the various photographs on the lobby wall: portraits of some of those who had appeared at the Nimrod since its opening late in the previous century, when it had been known as the Karnak. Some of these faces were Egyptian, including Rose al-Youssef and Zaki Rostom, while the others belonged mostly to second-tier English repertory actors seeking relief and employment after the mildewed trials of end-of-the-pier stages and provincial boarding houses. If the four men found anything to excite them in this collection, they did not reveal it. Indeed, on later reflection Madam Nasoul thought they might have been using the glass to ensure their fedoras were pulled well down over their brows. She considered asking them if she might be of assistance. But by that time the departing audience was already streaming out of the auditorium. This diversion drew her away and may very well have saved her life.
It was over almost before anyone realized what was happening – a sudden fusillade of shots. Maybe ten. Some said more. Some said fewer. Those whom the bullets struck were mostly not in any position to count.
From the cab rank it sounded like little more than the backfiring of a motorcycle engine. But inside the confined space of the Nimrod’s foyer, it had the deafening brutality of an artillery barrage.
It stopped almost as abruptly as it began. For a moment there was silence, the stunned quiet of incomprehension broken only by the wet slither of blood-soaked clothing on stone as people sought to crawl away from the danger, or from their own pain. Someone moaned, a deep groan of anguish rising from the depths of damaged flesh. Then the screaming started.
The swing doors all but flew off their ornate brass hinges as terrified people fled out into the street, causing the usually placid hantour horses to startle. Once freed from the theatre’s interior, panic turned truth into wild speculation, and the four gunmen into twenty. In a dozen breathless exchanges it was declared, with absolute certainty, that the assassins were still inside, stalking at will through the auditorium; that they had accomplices in the street ready to take potshots; that they were on the roof or rampaging through the nearby Hotel Bristol; that at this very moment they were gunning down people at the Alhambra Music Hall.
In fact they had calmly disappeared into the Ezbekia Gardens before the cordite smoke dissipated, leaving their discarded overcoats and fedoras in a neat pile beneath a bush by the lake, there to be discovered at daybreak by the police.
Moussa Bannoudi and Madame Nasoul tended to the injured as best they could, joined by the braver members of the cast and the backstage crew courageous enough not to lock themselves into cupboards or the dressing rooms. By the time the first police officer arrived, the polished tiles of the lobby were a kaleidoscopic picture of bloody footprints. The constable, a gangly Sudanese boy of barely twenty in a white tunic and fez, took one look at the carnage and began blowing his whistle. He went on doing so until Madame Nasoul told him brusquely to take the wretched instrument outside because the noise wasn’t helping anyone.
The death toll was less than the number of prostrate bodies might at first have suggested: six fatalities and eight wounded. Amongst them was an assistant master from the English School at Heliopolis. The English-language newspapers, while giving him a glowing obituary, referred to the Egyptian casualties – amongst whom were a doctor from the Kasr al-Ainy hospital and his wife – only as .
The attack was naturally the subject of much speculation and many column inches in the next day’s newspapers and over the days that followed. , being Englishowned, stated confidently that it was a terrorist outrage, staged by nationalists for whom the implementation...
