The Men Behind (7 page)

“He was all right too. He didn’t mind students. Some people don’t like them, you know. You go into a café sometimes and you know at once that they don’t want you there.”

“But Ali wasn’t like that?”

“No. He wasn’t bothered. He would leave you alone. You had to pay your bill, of course, he made sure of that. But nobody minds that.”

“How did he handle quarrels?”

“Quarrels? I don’t think there were any, not while I was there, anyway. Arguments, of course, there were always lots of those, and they sometimes became heated. But coming to blows, is that what you mean? It didn’t usually come to that. Ali would have stopped it, I suppose.”

“You ask yourself about that sort of thing,” said Owen. “I just wondered if those two boys could have quarreled with anybody?”

“Them? They’re not the sort. Much too quiet. Anyway, if they had, that doesn’t mean anyone would want to throw a bomb at them!”

“Of course it might not have been them. I mean, not them particularly. The bomb was left so it could have been anybody.”

Deesa shook his head. “That is what I cannot understand. How anyone could do a thing like that!”

“I suppose,” said Owen tentatively, “it couldn’t have been anything to do with the Societies, could it?”

Deesa stared at him. “Societies?” he said. “Why should it be anything to do with the Societies?”

“A bomb is aimed at a group,” said Owen, “or at any rate anyone who throws or plants a bomb knows it’s likely to hit more than one or two. I just wondered if one Society could be trying to hit another.”

“I don’t know,” said Deesa. “I wouldn’t know anything like that.”

“Was the café used by Societies?”

“Not as far as I am aware. I dare say some of the people in it belong to Societies, but that’s not something that anyone’s going to tell you.”

“They didn’t talk about it?”

“About Societies? No.”

“Indirectly?”

“There was a lot of talk about politics. There always is. But about Societies, no.”

“There were no obvious groups in the café?”

“There were groups of friends. You could say I was in a group. But none of us in a Society.”

“Well, if you didn’t get the feel that it was a Society café, it probably wasn’t one.”

“There aren’t many Societies,” said Deesa, half accusingly. “Not as many as you might think.”

Owen laughed. “I know,” he said. “It’s just that the ones there are do things like this.”

He steered the conversation onto safer ground, asking Deesa about his medical studies and telling him about his recent encounter with Ali. Deesa said that he would make sure Ali had actually gone to the hospital.

“It sounds as if he ought to see a proper doctor,” he said, “not one like me.”

“You’re all right,” said Owen, “or you will be when you’re qualified. Still, I’m not sure that Ali’s troubles are purely medical. He’s still suffering from shock. But other things are hitting him as well. He’s still trying to make sense of the whole business.”

“Can anyone make sense of it?” asked Deesa. “Who could do an awful thing like that?”

It was the British,” said a tall student fiercely. He had tribal scars and came from the south.

Owen at first thought that no one was going to demur but then a fat Greek said mildly: “The British are to blame for most things. But not this, surely?”

“They are, by God!” said the student, banging his hand on the table.

“How so?”

“If the British hadn’t been here this wouldn’t have happened,” another student said.

“We’d still have had to have got rid of the Khedive,” a third student objected.

“Yes, but that would have been easy,” the second student declared. “He’s only there now because he’s kept there by British bayonets.”

“We’d still have had to have got rid of him. He wouldn’t have gone easily. Those old men around him would have seen to that. We’d have had to force him out.”

“With bombs?” asked the Greek. He seemed on good terms with the students even though he plainly wasn’t one himself. He had come with them and they were already discussing the incident when they entered the café.

“If necessary,” the third student said.

“We’d have used arguments first.” This was the second student, who was clearly more moderate than the others.

“They never work,” said the third student contemptuously.

“You’ve got to do it by argument,” said the fat Greek. “Otherwise you can’t object if they throw bombs at you when you’re in power.”

“If we were in power they wouldn’t
want
to throw bombs at us.”

The Greek smiled gently.

“That wasn’t what I meant,” said the tall student who had spoken first, the one with the tribal scars.

“What did you mean?” inquired the Greek.

“The British did it. No, really did it. They planted the bomb.”

“In a student café?”

“Yes, yes,” the earnest faces chorused.

“Why would they want to do that?”

“Because we’re the people they fear.”

“We are in the front rank of the revolutionary struggle.”

“We are the point of the knife,” said the student with tribal scars.

“Yes, but even so—”

“Don’t you see? If they break us, they break the revolution.”

“And so they planted the bomb?”

“Yes.”

“It seems a drastic solution.”

“We’ve got them worried.”

“I’m sure you have. Even so! A bomb!”

“The British are bastards.”

“They certainly are,” agreed the Greek. “Even so, a bomb!”

“We’ll pay them back.”

The Greek, though, was still doubtful.

“Why did they pick that café? he asked. ”Was it a headquarters or something?”

“I don’t think so. It was just where we went between lectures.”

“I wasn’t thinking of you. I was wondering if someone else used the café. You know, someone they might want to get rid of.”

“Such as?”

“Well, a Society, say.”

“Lots of Societies use it.”

“Yes, but was there a particularly active one?”

“What do you mean—active?”

“Well, there have been a lot of incidents lately. Was there anyone at the café who was particularly involved?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because that would explain it,” said the Greek. “I mean, if the British thought there was somebody dangerous there, that might explain why they left the bomb.” Sympathetic brown eyes gazed trustingly at the students. He was obviously a bit naïve but didn’t seem to intend any harm.

“It would explain it,” said the more moderate student. “I don’t think there was anyone there like that, though.”

“We wouldn’t tell you if there was,” said the scarred student.

“Oh? No, of course not. Quite right, too.”

The Greek backed off hurriedly. He wasn’t really nosey, he was just a bit childlike.

“Well,” he said, “one thing’s certain anyway. You won’t be using that café again.”

“No,” said the scarred student, “we’ve got to use places like this.” He waved a dismissive hand.

“What’s wrong with this?” demanded one of the other customers, lowering his newspaper.

“Nothing’s wrong with it,” said one of the other students hurriedly. “It’s just not our kind of place.”

The customer disappeared again behind his newspaper. There were several other newspaper-readers in the café, among them Owen. In his light, Cairo-made suit, dark glasses and
tarboosh
, there was little to distinguish him from the Levantines at the other tables. There were a lot of them. The café, though near the Law School, was on a boulevardlike main street and its cosmopolitan clientele included businessmen, civil servants, journalists and teachers, as well, of course, as plenty of people who it seemed had absolutely nothing to do.

Quite a few people spent most of the day in the café. They came first thing in the morning, picked up a newspaper and ensconced themselves in their favorite seat. At some point in the morning coffee and perhaps a roll would appear before them and just before lunch the coffee would be supplemented by aniseed.

The café would empty at lunchtime and begin to fill up again once siesta was over. In the evening it was so crowded that its tables spilled out into the road. It had a vigorous life of its own and the students were invaders.

“I kept thinking about those boys,” said the fat Greek, “the poor boys who were killed. How their parents must have felt! They had families, presumably?”

The students weren’t sure.

“They kept themselves very much to themselves.”

“They must have had families, though,” said one of them.

“They came from the country, didn’t they?”

“I don’t know. I never really spoke to them.”

“They weren’t law students, you see,” one of the students explained.

“They weren’t?”

“No. They were at the School of Engineering.”

“What were they doing over here?”

“We get around a lot. They had a friend, I expect.”

“If they had, he hasn’t come forward.”

“Perhaps he’s under the rubble. They’re still looking, aren’t they?”

“I thought they’d finished,” said the Greek.

“You’d have expected them to have finished.”

“They’re not really trying. Shocking, isn’t it? They don’t really care.”

“When are they being buried?”

“It’s not known yet. The British haven’t released the bodies.”

“When they do we ought to see that it doesn’t go unnoticed.”

“We ought to have a procession.”

“Yes!”

The students blazed up.

“That’s what we’ll do! We will go to the British and show them the bodies and say: ‘These are the corpses of the men you have murdered.’”

“Yes!”

“Yes!”

Newspapers rustled.

“What is it now?” asked someone wearily.

“We are going to have a procession.”

“Another one? Don’t you ever do any work?”

“What is work?” said one of the students. “This is our work.”

“Don’t you ever have any exams?”

“They’re not for a bit yet.”

“They ought to have them more often,” said another newspaper-reader.

The scarred student sprang to his feet.

“This is what we’re fighting against!” he declared, with a dramatic sweep of his arm. “You are what holds us back!”

“I’m not holding you back,” a newspaper-reader objected. “I’m all for study.”

“We all are,” someone else said. “It’s just that we’d like you to do it a bit more.”

“You don’t care about Egypt, do you?” said the scarred student in a fury.

Someone lowered a newspaper.

“Egypt? What do you know about Egypt? You’re a Sudani by the look of you.”

“I come from Haifa,” said the student with dignity.

“There you are! That’s the Sudan. It’s a bit hot down there. Perhaps it’s affected your head.”

Friends pulled the student down. Other friends sprang up in his place.

“Haifa belongs to Egypt,” they shouted.

“He’s as good an Egyptian as you are!”

“Better! At least he tries to do something about what is wrong!”

“You just accept it! Slave!”

“You are all slaves! Slaves to the British!”

Not a newspaper was batted.

“One day we’ll sweep you all away!”

“One day the examiner will sweep
you
all away,” retorted a newspaper-reader. “And that day’s likely to come first.”

“Slaves!”

“Tyrants!”

Despite the turmoil around the students’ table, the rest of the café was surprisingly calm.

Suddenly, through the uproar, there came the sound of a bell. The students looked at each other in consternation. “It’s the next lecture!”

They rushed out.

“
Ah, ces révolutionnaires
!” muttered someone.

“Why students?” said the fat Greek. “The British, I can understand. Pashas, I can understand. But students?”

He and Owen were walking back to the office together. His name was Georgiades and he was one of Owen’s most useful agents. People would pour out their soul to Georgiades. He had a most remarkable capacity for eliciting confidences. One glance of those soulful, sympathetic brown eyes and people were ready to confide their innermost secrets.

Particularly their problems. Everybody had problems and Georgiades somehow was the sort of person you wanted to talk to about them. He seldom came up with solutions, as Nikos pointed out, but for pure sympathetic listening Georgiades had few equals.

He had spent the last two or three days listening in the Law School and already seemed to have been part of the place forever. No one was quite sure what he was doing there. He didn’t quite seem to be a student—he was a bit old for that. He certainly wasn’t a lecturer.

People rather gathered the impression that he was a student from a previous year. Perhaps, if the truth be known, several previous years, one of those unfortunates who regularly came unstuck when it got to exam time.

No one quite liked to ask him because that would have been unkind. The truth, actually, was obvious, though no one wished to press it. The poor chap was none too bright.

You had to explain a lot of pretty obvious things to him. He didn’t seem to have even heard of them. Not just legal things, the sort of points that came up in lectures, but ordinary things you took for granted, like the fact that Cairo was clearly in a revolutionary situation, or the tensions between evolutionary determinism and the autonomous “I,” or the roots of crime in neo-imperialist substructures.

Mind you, he was quite able to pick them up when you explained them to him, which only went to show how unjust and partial the examination system was. The poor chap was a victim. That’s what he was: a victim.

So Georgiades was not only tolerated, he was actually the object of considerable sympathy in the Law School. People talked about taking another look at his case and seeing whether something couldn’t be done for him. But that, of course, would have to wait on the whole system being put right, which, fortunately, was just around the corner.

“You’re making the assumption they’re connected,” said Owen. “They might not be.”

“Two groups?”

“Yes. One shooting and following, the other bombing.”

“Perhaps.” Georgiades was unconvinced.

“There’s only one thing they’ve got in common,” said Owen, “apart from timing and the fact they’re all acts of terrorism. And even that’s pretty tenuous. Make the assumption that the two men who followed Jullians are in some way connected with, or the same as, the two men who followed and shot at Fairclough. Where our trackers lost sight of those two men was the Law School. And the Law School is right by Ali’s café.”

“The Law School is what they’ve got in common?”

“It might be.”

“Pretty tenuous,” said Georgiades, “as you said.”

“It’s not so nutty. We know, or at any rate we’re pretty sure, that we’re dealing with at least one Society. Societies are strong among students. The sightings we’ve had always report the men as being in European dress. That rules out El-Azhar, and makes it more likely they’re from one of the Higher Schools. If they’re from one of the Schools, it’s more likely to be the Law School, not just because that’s the one we’ve got the most pointers to, but because that’s the one that always causes the most trouble.”

“One of the things that always puzzles me,” said Georgiades, “is how it is that all the lawyers I know are loving, conventional, rather dull people, whereas law students are rebellious, troublesome and a general pain in the ass. What happens to them?”

“The bright ones are too busy making money to make trouble. The next brightest go into the Parquet. The dimmest become Public Prosecutors in country districts. Oh, and the troublesome ones become politicians.”

“There ought to be more politicians,” said Georgiades. “What about that lot in the café?”

“Parquet, I think.”

“There was a lot of big talk.”

“That’s right—big talk.”

“They said they were members of Societies.”

“There are Societies and Societies. The ones we’re bothered about are not the ones that do the talking.”

“You don’t reckon there’s anything in it?”

“I don’t reckon there’s anything in it. Nor, incidentally, do I reckon there’s much in your notion of Ali’s café being a Society headquarters. I thought they ruled that out.”

“It was only an idea. And it provided a reason for somebody to bomb it. Without that we don’t have any reason at all.”

“As I said,” said Georgiades. “Why students?”

“You think so?” said Ali Osman doubtfully.

“I’m sure of it, Pasha,” Owen said heartily. If he could get Ali Osman out of his hair it was worth any amount of deceit.

For the last few days his messengers had been coming every day. One day it was a sinister-looking man lurking at his gates; the next it was a complaint about troublemakers being allowed to gather across the street from him and shout abusive words and threats.

Owen replied soothingly to all the messages and otherwise did nothing about them. This morning, however, he had secured a message which made him pause.

Ali Osman reported that he had been followed.

“He’s just heard that other people have been,” said Nikos scathingly. “Take no notice.”

Owen, these days, was reluctant to take a chance on it, not just because of the Khedive’s solicitousness on behalf of Ali Osman. He took the message and went down into the yard, where, as he had hoped, the messenger was still waiting.