Nile Wiles

By Michael Demarest

THE KEY TO REBECCA by Ken Follett; Morrow 381 pages; $12.95

"Fast is my normal speed," says Ken Follett, 31, who mastered his tempo at a Fleet Street typewriter. Fast is also the pace of the annual Follett bestseller. His latest thriller, The Key to Rebecca, streaks through the sands of plot with all the surprising velocity of one of General Erwin Rommel's panzer divisions in the North African desert--which happens to be where much of the novel takes place.

In the summer of 1942, Rommel's Afrika Korps has punched to within 15 miles of Alexandria. The Germans are now only a Heil away from British-ruled Egypt and the Suez Canal, the Allies' strategic lifeline to the Middle East and Asia. Though outnumbered and outgunned by General Sir Claude John Eyre Auchinleck, the German commander consistently outmaneuvers the Brits, even to the point of seizing the key bastion of Tobruk. For Rommel has a secret weapon: Alex Wolff, a.k.a. Achmed Rahmha, German-born, Berlin-trained spy, who early in life had been adopted by an Arab stepfather.

If Rommel is the Desert Fox, Alex-Achmed becomes the Cairo Rat. Like Henry Faber, the Nazi spy in Follett's Eye of the Needle, Alex proves to be a demmed elusive character. With typical guile, he manages to extract the precise details of every Allied position and plan from the briefcase of an alcoholic British headquarters officer while the silly sod makes love to a kinky belly dancer named Sonja. While Sonja wriggles, Alex scribbles, relaying this trove of vital and invaluable information to Rommel from a houseboat on the Nile, using a wireless code based on Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel Rebecca.

The English officer charged with tracking down Wolff is Major William Vandam, a non-U widower in military intelligence. Vandam's strategy starts with a well-baited hooker. Her name is Elene Fontana (nee Abigail Asnani), a 23-year-old Jewish courtesan who--after the characteristic Follett sexual intermezzos--rises quickly to become the star of the Wolff hunt. One of Vandam's problems is his toffee-nosed superior, Lieut. Colonel Reggie Bogge, who spends most of his time polishing a precious cricket ball and refusing to accept his subordinate's theory of the spy's existence. Vandam's pursuit is also thwarted by the Egyptian nationalist movement, which would prefer a German occupation to continued British rule. A leader of the movement is a young army officer named Anwar Sadat who announces with premonitory pride "I am going to be a hero."

Since his wife's death in Crete, Vandam has struggled manfully to pull himself together and raise his son Billy. He guns a BSA 350 motorcycle through the clotted streets of Cairo and chases his adversary in one memorable scene worthy of a Steve McQueen cop-pursuit flick. He also drinks a lot of gin. Humiliated and frustrated in his confrontations with the Egyptian Nazi sympathizers, he presents Follett's simple but valid editorial: "Yes. We're not very admirable, especially in our colonies, but the Nazis are worse . . . It is worth fighting. In England decency is making slow progress; in Germany it's taking a big step backward. Think about the people you love, and the issues become clearer."

Rebecca, Follett's 13th novel (several were written under pen names), combines the authentic tension of the times with breathless high adventure and breathers of low comedy. Sonja's Nile-blue bisexual capers aboard her houseboat Jihan do not exactly resemble the mild erotica enacted aboard Travis McGee's Busted Flush in Florida. And one wild street donnybrook introduces a hilarious Cairene Fagin whose thievery steals more scenes than secrets.

Still, Follett's true strength remains an acute sense of geographical place, and the age-old knowledge that character is action. In Rebecca, as in Needle and Triple, he brilliantly reproduces a distant terrain, complete with sounds and smells and tribal rites. The most romantic of all the top espionage thriller writers, he understands and sensitively portrays the women who come in and out of his cold. When the belly dancer and the courtesan appear onstage, Rommel seems almost irrelevant.

--By Michael Demarest

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