The Men Behind

by Michael Pearce

  A woman came in from the other room and placed little dishes of olives beside them. She wore her veil over her face but only over half her face. Intelligent, interested eyes regarded Owen curiously. She observed the proper forms but there was an independence about her which went with that of her husband.

  The husband’s name was Ibrahim and he was a mechanic; one of a new breed of workman which was growing up in the city. He worked at the transport depot repairing trams. It was a skilled job and he received good wages.

  “I know you, of course,” he said to Owen. “I saw you the other day. You are the Mamur Zapt.”

  Owen bowed his head in acknowledgment.

  “And I know you,” he said. “It was easy to find your house. Everyone knows Ibrahim and speaks well of him.”

  Deliberately he spoke loudly enough for the wife to hear in the other room.

  Ibrahim now inclined his head.

  “We have been here a long time,” he said.

  “I would like to ask you some questions. But first I wish to thank you for all you did that day.”

  “It was nothing. Who would not have wished to help? I was there first, that was all.”

  “Not all. Not all, by any means. But tell me, how was it you came to be there first?”

  “I was passing when it happened. I had just come into the square when I was struck by a puff of wind. It was like a blow in the face. I stopped in surprise and then there was a great roar and the house began to crumble. Ali was standing in the doorway and he was thrown forward. He was on hands and knees in the street and great stones were bounding all over the square. I saw a man struck, a water-carrier, I think, but then there was dust everywhere, it was like a haboob, and I couldn’t see anything. When the dust cleared there was just the great pile of rubble where the café had been and I ran forward in case people lay buried.”

  “That was brave of you and quick. For the rubble would have been unstable and when such things happen one is stunned for a time.”

  “Well,” said Ibrahim modestly. “I don’t know about quick. But the rubble was certainly unstable. As I reached it, it was still moving. Then it seemed to collapse and steady.”

  “Were there any cries?”

  “From inside? No. I think it happened too suddenly. The boys were killed at once. But sometimes people are trapped in spaces where they can breathe and if you get to them quickly they can be pulled out alive. I have helped before when a house has fallen. It is not uncommon in Cairo—it is the way the houses are built. I sometimes fear about this one. That is why, when we have saved enough, we shall move to another. Also we shall want a bigger house for our children.”

  Owen looked around.

  “You have good children,” he said. “They are very quiet. Or are they playing outside by the pump?”

  “If they are still playing,” said Ibrahim, “it is inside. For as yet they are still in my wife’s stomach.”

  There was a stifled laugh from the other room.

  “God grant you a fine boy.”

  “A boy first. But then I would like a girl to help her mother.”

  This too was unusual. In most families girls were unsought for, if accepted when they arrived.

  “One first, then the other. Not both together,” said Owen. Again there was a laugh from the other room.

  Something Ibrahim had said came back to him.

  “You said that Ali was standing in the doorway of the café when you came into the square?”

  “That is so.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Ibrahim thought for a moment.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And then, almost at the same moment, there was the explosion?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was there anyone else by the door?”

  Again Ibrahim thought.

  “No,” he said.

  “Did you see anyone running away?”

  “No.” Ibrahim looked at Owen. “I do not think anyone would have thrown anything,” he said, “if that’s what you’re asking. They would have had to have thrown it in through the doorway and I do not think Ali would have been standing there so calmly if they had.”

  “In that case it must have been left there beforehand. I have spoken with Ali. He says that there had been people in the café earlier that morning.”

  “There is always somebody in there.”

  “The trouble is Ali can’t remember who it was.”

  “The students will know.”

  “It might not have been students.”

  “It usually is. It’s mostly students who use that café.”

  There was a wail from outside in the courtyard. Ibrahim’s wife stuck her head into the room and said something to him. Ibrahim half started to get up, then stopped.

  “It is the pump,” he said. “It has got stuck again. Someone must have jammed it.”

  “Let me not hinder a man who is called on for help,” said Owen politely, and stood up.

  “The fact is, they’re always calling on me,” said Ibrahim.

  They went out into the courtyard. It took Ibrahim only a moment to strip the pump down.

  “I tried to do that, Ibrahim,” said one of the boys tearfully, “but when I put it back together again it wouldn’t work.”

  “That is because you put this bit back the wrong way round. Otherwise it would have.”

  He showed the boy and they put it back together.

  “You can be the first to try it,” said Ibrahim.

  There was a gush of water from the spout and a cry of triumph went up from the assembled children. Within a moment they were all playing happily again.

  “The young are God’s gift,” said Ibrahim, watching them.

  “Who, then, would wish to harm them?” asked Owen.

  “You are thinking of the students?”

  “Yes.”

  Ibrahim hesitated.

  “I have asked myself that,” he said. “I said to myself: who could do such a terrible thing.”

  “And did you find an answer?”

  “Yes. Other students.”

  “Other students?” said Owen, taken by surprise.

  “Yes. For they were too young to have other enemies.”

  Owen did not reply at once. He and Ibrahim began walking slowly across the courtyard towards the exit.

  “If it was a quarrel,” said Owen, “then it was a terrible revenge.”

  Ibrahim spread his hands. “The young are immoderate in their hates,” he said, “as in their loves.”

  “I still find it hard to understand,” said Owen. “Revenge on an individual, yes. But this would have blown up everyone in the café!”

  “I wondered,” said Ibrahim diffidently, “if it might be one Society lifting its hand against another.”

  Owen stopped in his tracks.

  “Was it a café used by Societies?”

  Ibrahim shrugged.

  “I do not know,” he said. “But where there are students, there are Societies. I don’t know what’s come over them these days.” He looked back at the pump and at the children playing. “We could do with more good workmen,” he said, “and fewer Societies.”

  ***

  “I hardly knew them,” said Deesa. “Of course, I had seen them, often. They came most days and they always sat in the same place, in the back room. But they didn’t join in much. You know, if there was a general argument they didn’t say anything. They kept themselves to themselves. We thought they were rather dull. You know, typical engineering students.”

  Owen picked up Deesa at the Medical School after morning lectures and they had gone on to a café. Deliberately Owen had chosen one some distance from the Schools so that there would be less likelihood of interruption; and it was not a student café.

  He did
not think Deesa would mind being seen talking to the Mamur Zapt, but in the tricky world of student politics, especially just at that time, such conversations were liable to be misinterpreted.

  Deesa had impressed him at the scene of the bombing and he had made a mental note to talk to him again. When he had approached him, Deesa had agreed readily enough. “Though there won’t be much I’ll be able to tell you,” he had warned. “I wasn’t even in the café that morning. I was just passing.”

  In fact, Deesa had been the first person Owen had talked to who had been in the habit of using the café, and, as a student, the perspective he afforded was doubly useful.

  “Why did they come to Ali’s cafe anyway?” asked Owen. “It’s quite a distance from the Engineering School.”

  “There’s a lot of crossing over,” Deesa said. “Take me. What was I doing at Ali’s? I’m a medical student. Well, I’ve got friends at the Law School and they often go to Ali’s—it’s very handy for them—and if I want to see them, I know I’ve a good chance of finding them there.”

  “Yes, but you said these two didn’t mix in much. Did they have any friends? Who came in the café, I mean?”

  “I can’t say I ever noticed,” Deesa admitted. “If they did have any friends, they were as quiet as themselves. Anyway, that might not have been the reason for their coming to Ali’s. They might have come for the opposite reason—to get away from other Engineering students. I sometimes feel like that,” said Deesa, laughing.

  “What did they do in the café?”

  “Do? Drink coffee, talk, read. They used to read a lot. They brought their books with them. They used to go through them together.”

  “What sort of books?”

  “I don’t really know. Engineering books, I suppose. Now I come to think of it,” said Deesa, “I did once see one of their books. We were at the next table. It had a lot of drawings in it, diagrams, that sort of thing.”

  “It seems very sad,” said Owen. “Ordinary students, getting on with their work. And then to die like this!”

  “I know,” said Deesa. “We’re all very upset.”

  What Deesa had told him tallied with what he had already heard. The two students had been in their second year. They had completed their first year successfully, though without being outstanding in any way. Their teachers remembered them as being very quiet. Both had come up from the country, though from different parts, and had been overawed at first by life in the city. Perhaps that was what had drawn them together, for the staff remembered them as inseparable from the first.

  Owen had not yet had time to look into their families. If they were from the country it was unlikely that they were the children of the professional families whose offspring filled most of the Higher Schools. Very few professionals were prepared to work for long in country districts.

  More probably they were here by virtue of the patronage of some local Pasha, exercised as the consequence of some operation of the intricate network of favor and obligation that bound Egyptian society together.

  Someone would miss them, though. Some uncomprehending family in Upper Egypt would have learned by now and would be grieving.

  “What sort of café was Ali’s?” asked Owen.

  “It was all right. Nothing special. It was handy for the law students, that was all.”

  “What about Ali himself?”

  “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?”

  Chapter Five

  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 hav
e 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 cafë?”

  “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?”