The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [196]
procès. A thousand thanks for offering to go. As you can imagine, Nessim and I … it’s a question of witnessing only. And then per-haps my darling we could meet and you could give it back to me. Nessim has to fly to Cairo this afternoon on business. Shall we say in the garden of the Aurore at nine? That will give you time. I’ll wait in the car. So much want to speak to you. Yes. I must go now. Thank you again. Thank you.’
We sat once more to our meal, fellow bondsmen, heavy with a sense of guilt and exhaustion. Hamid waited upon us with solici-tude and in complete silence. Did he know what was preoccupying us both? It was impossible to read anything on those gentle pock-marked features, in that squinting single eye.
* * * * *
XI
t was already dark when I dismissed my taxi at Mohammed Ali Square and set out to walk to the sub-department of the Pre-I fecture where Nimrod’s office was. I was still dazed by the turn events had taken, and weighed down by the dispiriting possibilities they had raised in my mind — the warnings and threatenings of the last few months during which I had lived only for one person —
Justine. I burned with impatience to see her again.
The shops were already lit up and the money-changers’ counters were crowded with French sailors turning their francs into food and wine, silks, women, boys or opium — every kind of under-standable forgetfulness. Nimrod’s office was at the back of a grey old-fashioned building set back at an angle to the road. It seemed deserted now, full of empty corridors and open offices. All the clerks had gone off duty at six. My lagging footfalls echoed past the empty porter’s lodge and the open doors. It seemed strange to walk about so freely in a Police building unchallenged. At the end of the third long corridor I came to Nimrod’s own door and knocked. There were voices inside. His office was a large, indeed rather grandiose room befitting his rank, whose windows gave out on to a
bare courtyard where some chickens clucked and picked all day in the dried mud floor. A single tattered palm stood in the middle offering some summer shade.
There was no sign from within the room so I opened the door and stepped in — only to stop short; for the brilliant light and darkness suggested that a cinema-show was taking place. But it was only the huge epidiascope which threw upon the farther wall the blazing and magnified images of the photographs which Nimrod himself was feeding into it one by one from an envelope. Dazzled, I stepped forward and identified Balthazar and Keats in that phos-phorescent penumbra around the machine, their profiles mag-netically lighted by the powerful bulb.
‘Good’ said Nimrod, half-turning, and ‘sit you down’ as he abstractedly pushed out a chair for me. Keats smiled at me, full of a mysterious self-satisfaction and excitement. The photographs which they were studying with such care were his own flashlight pictures of the Cervoni ball. At such magnification they looked like grotesque frescoes materializing and vanishing again upon the white wall. ‘See if you can help on identification’ said Nimrod, and I sat down and obediently turned my face to the blaze in which sprawled the silhouettes of a dozen demented monks dancing to-gether. ‘Not that one’ said Keats. The white light of the mag-nesium had set fire to the outlines of the robed figures. Blown up to such enormous size the pictures suggested a new art-form, more macabre than anything a Goya could imagine. This was a new iconography — painted in smoke and lightning flashes. Nimrod changed them slowly, dwelling upon each one. ‘No com-ment?’ he would ask before passing another bloated facsimile of real life before our eyes. ‘No comment?’
For identification purposes they were quite useless. There were eight in all — each a fearful simulacrum of a death-feast celebrated by satyr-monks in some medieval crypt, each imagined by Sade!