The Men Behind (11 page)

“You think Abu knew of him before he came to the city?”

“Yes.”

“He did not come from Abu’s village?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Are there others from Abu’s village here?”

“No. There was once but that was some time ago. I think the last one lost the Pasha’s pleasure and so for a time he did not send anyone.”

“Why did he lose the Pasha’s pleasure?”

The boy shrugged. “Who knows? It is easy to lose a great one’s pleasure.”

Owen asked what the Pasha was like.

Again the boy shrugged. “Pashas are Pashas,” he said. “They are the great and they hold us in their hand.”

“What happens after you have finished your studies? Do you go back to the Pasha?”

“I would prefer to work for the Khedive. But I do not think I am clever enough. I shall probably go back. Hamada is not such a bad place, after all.”

“Hamada?” said Nikos, when Owen told him. He went back into his office and began to burrow through his files.

Ali had had two men working for him in the café. Their names were Karim and Mustafa. When the café was bombed, they had both been out, Karim at the mosque, Mustafa at the souk, where he had been buying things for the café. That was definite; Owen’s men had checked.

They had also discovered that the two men slept every night on the floor of the café. It counted towards their wages. They had slept there the night before the bombing.

The door was kept locked and they were sure no one could have forced their way in without waking them.

“That takes care of the setting-it-up-during-the-night theory,” said Georgiades. “I never did think much of it.”

Attention now focused on the time between the café‘s opening in the morning and the point about halfway through the morning when the bomb exploded. Gradually Owen’s men traced all the people who had been in the café during that period. All except one were students.

Owen himself questioned them very carefully. They were eager to help. The killings had shocked students generally. At the end, though, Owen was none the wiser. Nobody had seen anything suspicious: no strange package lying around, no one fiddling with anything that might resemble a bomb, no one carrying anything or doing anything untoward.

The evidence was even a little more negative. About fifteen minutes before the bomb exploded, and ten minutes before Ali took up his position at the door, the last two students—apart from Abu and Musa who had been in the back room—had left the café. Before doing so they had made a “sweep” of the café looking for some books one of them had lost. That was, in fact, the reason why they were the last of their group to leave. They had seen nothing out of the ordinary.

Nikos came into Owen’s room.

“Hamada,” he said. “Remember it?”

“It’s where the student came from. Abu. And I’ve heard of it lately in some other connection. I’ve got it. Fairclough. That’s where he’d been to check the salt contraband. He thought someone might have seen him there and remembered it later.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Nikos, “but Hamada was the scene of an interesting event about two years ago. There was an explosion. A boy blew himself up. Or that’s what they think happened. It was out in the desert and not a lot was found. He was a local boy and they couldn’t understand it. The Prosecutor down there investigated it but didn’t get anywhere. So they reported it and forgot about it.”

“Hamada?”

“Yes, Hamada.”

“Well,” said Owen, “we’re not getting anywhere here, either. So why not go down to Hamada?”

There were two ways of getting to Hamada. One was by the river, the other by the desert. Approached by the river, Hamada was a clearing surrounded by fields of sugar cane. But in Upper Egypt cultivation was restricted to the Nile banks, and two or three miles from the water the vegetation ceased and became sand. Approached from the desert, Hamada was a brief thread of green in a thousand miles of brown.

Owen went by river, his felucca skimming gracefully across the blue water, three Bedawin trackers sitting uneasily beside him. He had left Georgiades behind. The Greek was a city man and outside the city his expertise dwindled to incapacity. Besides, in the city there were things to do.

There was no landing stage, just a bare stretch of bank which Owen would have taken for a chance interruption of the cultivation had it not been for the little group of figures waiting above the water.

As the felucca nosed in, two of the figures splashed out and took the rope. One of the crew joined them and the captain guided the boat to the side with a paddle.

One of the figures on the bank was dressed in a suit.

This was the local Mamur, or Police Inspector. He shook Owen’s hand warmly but looked anxious. It was not every day—in fact, it was never—that he received a visit from one of the Cairo élite and who knew what errors of commission or omission might be discovered?

Owen gathered the impression as they talked, though, that he was not more than ordinarily stupid—that is, for a country Mamur—and there was an easy camaraderie between him and the villagers that Owen found reassuring. In remote areas the Mamur could not but be the Pasha’s man and Owen had feared, after talking to the student, that the Pasha’s hand might lie heavily on the village. Although the use of the
curbash
, or whip, had been abolished by Cromer some years before, it was often still used in the country; and too often it was the Mamur who used it.

The Mamur led him up to the village. It consisted of a single irregular street with mud-brick houses loosely grouped about it. The houses were single-story and flat-topped. Poking over the tops Owen could see the piles of brushwood for the household fires and occasional heaps of onions or melons or other garden produce.

This meant that the village was not one of the most desperately poor ones. There was food here, perhaps not much, but enough. Several of the houses had rabbit hutches on top. Rabbits were bred for food and that again was a sign of a slight margin between living and subsistence.

The Mamur led Owen to a house at the end. They did not go inside. Instead, the Mamur produced his cane chairs and they sat outside in the shade where it was cooler.

The three trackers slumped down in the shadow of the wall and looked at the villagers disdainfully.

Within moments of sitting down Owen found himself covered with flies. The warm, stagnant heat of the cane fields produced them in profusion. In the desert it would be better. But Owen had no intention of spending longer than he could help in either the cane fields or the desert; or the village, for that matter.

“Tell me about the boy,” he said.

“He was a good boy,” said the Mamur. He looked across the street to a man sitting patiently on the ground in an outer ring of observers. “That is his father,” he said. Behind them in the shadow of a doorway stood a group of women. “And there is his mother.”

“If he was a good boy,” said Owen, “how was it that he came to blow himself up?”

The Mamur scratched his head.

The wife called something across to her husband. Reluctantly he stood up.

“It was not his fault, effendi.”

“Why was it not his fault?”

The man seemed confused. He started to say something, then stopped and looked at the ground.

The woman called out something. The man lifted his head.

“It was the other boy’s fault,” he said.

“What other boy was this?” asked Owen, surprised.

“There was another boy with him,” said the Mamur.

“Why was this not in the Report?”

“Wasn’t it in the Report?” The Mamur looked alarmed.

“No, it wasn’t. There was no mention of any other boy.”

“There must have been,” said the Mamur, looking worried.

“I have it here.” Owen tapped the paper on his knee. “It says nothing of any other boy.”

The Mamur looked completely flummoxed. He shrugged his shoulders in bewilderment and turned the palms of his hands outwards as if appealing to the heavens.

Owen sighed. The Reports that came from the provinces were often next to useless. Compiled by people who wrote only with difficulty, they often consisted of a few illiterate scrawls, formulaic clichés scrambled together. They did, however, usually contain the basic facts.

He glanced down at the piece of paper, smudged almost to the point of unreadability by the Mamur’s original sweaty labors, crumpled by the journey down in Owen’s pocket.

“It says here that one afternoon when the village was still sleeping there was a mighty clap as of thunder.” The semicircle of observers nodded vigorously.

“That is true, effendi.”

“It woke me from my slumbers,” said one.

“And me. I went outside and, lo, in the sky a hundred birds were circling.”

“They were beyond the fields. I remember them.”

“We wondered what it might be. So we woke the Mamur.”

“I had heard it,” said the Mamur defensively, “but I thought it was some miracle of nature.”

“You thought it was brigands in the sugar cane,” said one of the villagers tartly.

“And so you did nothing?”

“Not at first, effendi. But then we made him come with us. We went to the edge of the fields where the birds were circling. And there we found Hamid lying.”

“Hamid?”

“My son,” said the man.

“We went to Hamid at once but he was already dead.”

“So was the other boy.”

“The other boy’s body was the more broken,” said an older villager, “so I think it was he who had been carrying it.”

Owen considered for a moment.

“What was it that he was carrying?” he asked.

The villagers were silent.

“We do not know,” one of them said.

“What did you see?”

“A piece of iron.”

“Other pieces, too.”

“What happened to them?”

“We left them lying.”

“You didn’t bring them back?” said Owen, looking at the Mamur, who was supposed to collect the pieces of evidence.

“They were still too hot.”

“You did not go back later for them?”

The Mamur shrugged.

“Well,” said Owen, “perhaps they are still there. If they are, we shall find them. Let us continue. You saw the bodies and you saw the iron. What then did you do?”

“We bore Hamid back to the village.”

“And the other boy?”

“We left him there. The body was much broken.”

“The boy had a family, too,” said Owen reprovingly.

“He did not come from our village.”

“From a nearby one?”

“No. He came from the city. When Hamid came home— that was in the summer when all the Great Schools close—this boy was with him.”

“Was he, too, at the Great School?”

The villagers were silent.

“I do not think so,” said the woman across the street.

“I do not think so,” her husband echoed obediently.

“Did Hamid speak to you of him?”

Owen addressed the question to the man but it was aimed at the woman. It was the woman who answered.

“He said only that he was his friend. That was enough for us.”

“And so you took him in?”

“We took him in,” said the man.

Owen considered.

“He did not speak of his family?”

The man looked at his wife.

“No,” said the woman.

The man shook his head.

“No,” he said.

“Nor where he came from?”

“No. In the house he said little.”

“But outside?”

“He and Hamid were always talking. They talked together, though, not with others.”

“The young are like that,” said Owen.

“I wish the boy had never come.” The woman lifted her voice. “It was a black day for us when he came to Hamada. Had he not come my son would have been still alive.”

“You said it was his fault?”

“And so it was. My son was a quiet boy, a good boy. The whole village knows that. What happened to him when he went to the great city? When he came back to us he was changed.”

“In what way—changed?”

The woman hesitated. “He was different. He was—bitter.”

“Against the Pasha?”

The woman drew her burka over her face.

“Yes,” she said, “to our shame.”

“And this other boy?”

“Like him.”

“They talked together of this?”

“I think so. I did not hear them. Only once, when they were by the house. I upbraided them and after that they went into the fields. They always went into the fields.”

The woman’s voice broke. The other women in the doorway muttered among themselves. One of them began to ululate softly. Owen knew he would have to stop.

“In the fields,” he said, “the men saw iron. Did the boys have iron with them in the house?”

“No,” said the woman. “If they had I would have seen it and I would not have allowed it.”

“Then how—”

“It was the brigands,” said the Mamur. “It must have been the brigands.”

The women began to ululate together.

The sugar cane ended abruptly and gave way first, briefly, to thorn scrub and then to sand. Close to the fields the sand was red and gravelly but almost at once, within twenty yards, it became thin and silvery. It washed over the feet and into Owen’s shoes. It was too hot for the villagers to walk barefoot.

The Mamur led them to the edge of the sand and then stopped.

“Wasn’t it somewhere around here?” he said to the villagers.

“Surely not!” objected one of the villagers. “We came the other way.”

“Did we? It was a long time ago.”

“Show me,” said Owen.

The little procession turned right and walked back along the edge of the sugar cane. After some time another track emerged onto the desert.

“We came up this one.”

“So it was somewhere around here?”

“I think so.” The villager suddenly sounded less confident.

Owen looked out across the sand. The desert stretched out to the horizon, empty and featureless except for the occasional stunted thorn tree.

The trackers had already begun patrolling the sand. They walked in line abreast, a few yards apart, their eyes fixed on the ground ahead of them. They had already marked off in their minds a stretch of desert extending from one track to the other and a little beyond.

The villagers watched from the sugar cane.

Twilight came early in this part of Egypt. The trackers worked until then and then came to Owen.

“OK,” he said resignedly. They would have to carry on the next day. He cursed the Mamur under his breath. This was taking more time than he wanted.

The trackers came for him even before the sun had risen and they went up together through the sugar-cane fields. The sun was just beginning to tinge the desert red as the trackers set to work.

This early in the morning it was not only pleasant, it was beautiful. Owen felt a twinge of nostalgia for his first few months in Egypt when he had been posted up to Alexandria to learn the ropes under Garvin and had ridden on desert patrols.

It was only a twinge, for Owen was not really a desert man. There were men in the Government’s service who liked to spend all their time in the desert. Funny little Plumley might even be one of these. They were in the tradition of the great English Arabists, who were typically more at home among the simple Bedawin of the desert than among the more sophisticated people of the town.

Owen, however, was a town man through and through. He was a sociable Welshman who liked talking to people and enjoyed the bustle and variety and complexity of the big city. For him the life of the boulevard café, not that of the campfire.

All the same he loved the early morning in Egypt, the cool, the quiet, the staggeringly beautiful colors. And this morning, as he walked alongside the sugar cane, and watched the sparrows dodging in and out, he felt he might almost settle for a comfortable provincial office.

This indulgent feeling wore off as the sun rose. By mid-morning it was baking hot. Even through his shoes he could feel the heat of the sand. He moved in closer to the shade of the sugar cane but even here the warmth trapped in the dense vegetation seeped out at him making the sweat run down his face and turning his shirt into a sodden mass. The birds stopped singing.

The trackers walked up and down, impervious, apparently, to the heat, oblivious of the birds. But when the sun had risen until it was directly overhead even they retreated into the shade.

The shade was where the Mamur and some old men from the village were already to be found. The active men were at work in the fields. Owen went round the old men individually, talking to them, checking the account of the explosion that had emerged the previous day.

He asked them about the boy, Hamid. After the almost ritual “he was a good boy,” Owen sensed qualifications. The qualifications referred to the somewhat changed Hamid who had returned from the city after his first year at the School of Engineering to spend the summer back at home.

Nothing very explicit was said but Hamid had obviously picked up some of the radical notions current among the students and said enough about them to disturb the conservative villagers. Perhaps realizing that, after a while he had stopped saying anything and with his friend, the other boy, Salah, had taken to going for long walks up beside the sugar cane and out on to the desert.

About the other boy the villagers said even less. Again Owen sensed reservation. “He did not come from our village,” was about the most the men would say, but in that expression of difference Owen detected condemnation and rejection. “It was the other boy’s fault,” Hamid’s mother had said. Whether that was true or not, the blame generally was placed on him.

After the afternoon break the trackers went back to their patrolling. Owen walked down to the village and found someone who would take him by boat to a village a couple of miles upstream. The village was also on the estate and counted as Hamada; and it was where the most recent boy to leave the estate for education in the great city had come from: Abu, one of the boys killed in the café.