Book specifically mentions the small park next to Egyptian embassy, in nw, an Italian restaurant near there, Penn ave....
Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean – review
In 1949, Donald Maclean, then a senior diplomat at the British embassy in Cairo, and his American wife, Melinda, arranged to take some friends on a picnic. Two feluccas were booked to sail the party, who would eat in the moonlight as they travelled up the Nile to the grand house of a double-barrelled British businessman. There, they would drink port and coffee with his guests, and perhaps play party games, after which they would return to Cairo by road. What could be lovelier? On paper, it must have sounded like a recipe for perfect happiness.
Alas, it was precisely the opposite. Things went wrong from the start, among them the failure of one of the feluccas to appear; the party having crowded on to a single vessel, its progress was slowed dramatically by the weight of its cargo. There was no breeze, and no moonlight. Worst of all, Maclean was drinking even more purposefully than usual: on this occasion, a lethal combination of whisky and zebib, an Egyptian version of arak. By the time they all came ashore, he was smashed. In full sight of the rest of the group he first put his hands around Melinda’s neck and made as if to throttle her. A little later, following a furious argument, he grabbed the rifle of the armed guard who had been employed to patrol the riverbank and began beating him with it. Fearing a diplomatic incident, Lees Mayall, the first secretary at the embassy, nervously tackled his superior to the floor – a move that resulted, when Maclean fell on him, in the double fracture of his ankle. Contrite but still sodden, Maclean offered the poor man gin as an anaesthetic.
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