The Mingrelian Conspiracy

by Michael Pearce

  To the left of the sanctuary was a low arch, so low that Katarina had to stoop deeply to go through it and Owen had to go down almost on to his knees. There was no light and for a moment or two he could not tell where he was. But then he saw the top of a very large tank and realized that he was in the baptismal room. Copts baptized by immersion.

  He advanced cautiously to the tank and looked down, expecting to see water. There was, however, only a dry, cold musty smell. The tank had not been used for many years.

  On one side of the tank, going down into it, there were wooden meshrebiya steps, slippery smooth to the touch. Katarina directed his hand down beneath them. He groped uncertainly but found nothing.

  Katarina put her own hand down, gave a little surprised gasp and then clambered down into the tank. He could feel her scrabbling at the bottom.

  Then she stood up.

  ‘They’ve gone,’ she said.

  ***

  In the church a priest was lighting candles.

  ‘The restorers!’ said Owen. ‘Where are they?’ The priest looked up, surprised.

  ‘Aren’t they here? They were here. The workshops, perhaps?’ Owen ran down the stairs. In the courtyard a donkey was contentedly cropping the foliage that pushed through the trellis. The workshop was empty.

  Back in the courtyard he found the donkey’s owner washing his face in the fountain.

  ‘Peace be with you!’ he said.

  ‘And with you, peace!’

  ‘I am looking for two men. They work in the church here.’

  ‘Do they wear boots?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The donkey’s owner nodded.

  ‘I know them.’

  ‘They are neither Arab nor Copt.’

  ‘They wear boots,’ said the man, picking out the—for him—salient thing.

  ‘That is so. And I look for them.’

  ‘You are fortunate, then, for I have seen them.’

  ‘This morning?’

  ‘But shortly. As I was coming in at the gate.’

  ‘Were they carrying anything?’

  ‘Not they, but their donkey. Two heavy bags that made the donkey groan.’

  ‘They would go slowly, then.’

  ‘Slower still, were it not for the donkey.’

  ***

  The gate was still the tremendous gate of the Roman builders. Its columns dwarfed the steady stream of passers-through below and were large enough to admit even heavy stone carts, although what happened to them once they had entered, and how they managed with the low arches and tunnels, Owen could not think. There was the usual crowd of beggars at the gate and to them Owen made application.

  Two men with a donkey? Alas, there were many men with donkeys, too many to recall, Effendi. With boots? Ah, that was a different matter. Two men, neither Copt nor Arab, had passed through the gate scarcely more than an hour since.

  The direction? As, in the Fustat, you would expect. The Effendi was not in the Der now. All roads in the Fustat led not to Babylon but to the river.

  And there was the river ahead of him, glinting in the sunlight, with a felucca stooping and skimming—and then it disappeared, and as always near the docks, he lost his way in the medieval alleys as the houses crowded together overhead and he lost sight even of the masts rising up along the river bank. He had to ask the way, yet again, to the ferry.

  Two men, neither Arab nor Copt, in boots and with a donkey? There was the usual crowd of onlookers at the ferry, but this time he drew a blank.

  Well, they had not gone over the ferry, then. He walked along the waterfront, repeating his question.

  And then he saw two men ahead of him whom he recognized. They were not the Georgians but his own men, the men who had been keeping them under observation. They were gazing stupidly out across the water.

  ‘Effendi, they got on to a boat! And another with them!’

  ‘Another?’ said Owen.

  ***

  Boats, on the river, were as distinguishable as donkeys in a village. Other men had seen the boat put out and some of them were knowledgeable waterfront men. They were able to identify the boat immediately.

  ‘It belongs to Hussein al-Fadal, Effendi,’ they said.

  ‘Hussein al-Fadal? Ah, I have heard of him.’

  ‘Who has not heard of him, Effendi? In this part of the Fustat, anyway.’

  ‘Where is the boat bound for?’

  ‘It is one of his ordinary boats. They go up to Assuan.’ Which seemed at first not to be particularly helpful. Why would the Georgians want to take explosives up to Assuan? Was it, perhaps, after all, that they merely intended to take them further, to sell them, perhaps, to potential insurgents in the Sudan? If so, that would be reprehensible, certainly, and must be stopped; but it was nothing to do with the Grand Duke.

  Unless…

  ***

  In other circumstances Owen would have relished the journey. Views differed about the best way to travel on the Nile; some favoured Mr. Cook’s new steamers, which were certainly very comfortable, others the traditional dahabeeyah, which was how most tourists had made the journey upriver until comparatively recently. For Owen, though, there was nothing like a felucca. It was a much smaller craft than most of those on the river, taking only three or four men, and with its low sides and its tall mast—most of the sailing boats on the Nile had tall masts to lift their sails above the palm trees which lined the river in some places—it seemed to plane over the water.

  Speed was what decided it. The Georgians were travelling in a gyassa, a heavy grain boat but one which carried a lot of sail and, going before the wind, could travel with surprising speed. Going by steamer was out of the question since they were tied to a tourist timetable. In the end, Owen had decided to go by train for the first part of the journey, as far as Minia, and then switch to felucca.

  The train, too, had its timetable but it was faster than going by boat and when they went down to the port they found that the gyassa had not yet arrived.

  Towards evening it crept in and tied up to the landing stage. No one disembarked. Owen had not really expected them to. The gyassa was on its outward journey and would pick up the cargo somewhere beyond Assuan. It was, of course, possible that the Georgians might choose this as the place but somehow he did not expect them to. The Grand Duke’s boat was still some way upriver.

  In the morning the gyassa pulled out and set sail; and this time Owen set sail with it.

  With him in the felucca were Georgiades and Selim, apart from the crew. That was all the felucca could take. Owen had other men but he had sent them on to Assyut by train.

  It was at Assyut that he thought that the attack might take place for it was there that Duke Nicholas’s dahabeeyah would tie up for the night preparatory to his visit the following day to the monuments at Beni Hassan and the cat cemetery at Speos Artemides. The stop at Assyut the Georgians might know about, since the Grand Duke’s itinerary would be common talk on the river, and they might be able to guess at the excursions on the following day, although they would not be sure of them. The Duke might have had enough of visits by then.

  For the moment Owen was content to keep the gyassa in view as they skimmed gently up the river. The wind, from the north as usual, had died down and the gyassa laboured. The lighter felucca soon overtook it but Owen would not let it get too far ahead.

  ***

  With the wind light and the flow of the river against them strong, it took two days for the gyassa to get to Assyut. They passed the night tied up to the bank with only the mosquitoes to keep them company, although Owen enjoyed the pelicans next morning. Georgiades did not. He was a city man and such excursions as this only served to confirm his prejudice. Selim, a country boy, breathed in the air as if he had forgotten what it was.

  ‘These peasants!’ he said scornfully, however,
as they passed some fellahin working in the fields. ‘Not bad!’ he said appreciatively though as they came upon some women walking down to the river with large jars balanced on their heads, an opportunity for them to display and Selim to evaluate.

  As they approached Assyut he saw ahead of him the outlines of the new barrage. The ends springing out from the banks had been joined the previous year and the barrage was just about operational though there was still building on it to be completed. Part of the idea of the Grand Duke’s visit (or the Khedive’s idea of the Grand Duke’s visit) was to see the works of modern Egypt and this was one of the most remarkable. The Khedive had considered asking the Grand Duke to officially open it, until it was pointed out that he himself was going to open it later on in the year. Besides, if Duke Nicholas opened it, the Khedive himself would have to be present and that meant travelling south at the hottest time of the year. The Khedive decided to postpone the pleasure.

  Since the Grand Duke would be passing, however, he could have the pleasure at least of inspecting the barrage. His dahabeeyah had arrived the previous evening and there it was, tied up at the entrance to the vast new lock which the steamers would use. His Royal Highness had spent the day seeing over the works and, no doubt, would shortly be returning to his dahabeeyah to collapse in comfort.

  The gyassa had arrived in the afternoon when all work, indeed, life, was at a standstill and there were few people about to see the three men, in boots and carrying two heavy bags, walk down the gangway and on to the bank. From there they made their way into the town and entered a low house near the mile-long bazaar. They did not emerge from it until well after the sun had set in glorious red and gold upon the river and the Duke was already on his third ice-cooled vodka.

  There was some delay while a donkey was obtained but once it was loaded they set off through the dark streets. If there was anything unusual about the scene it was only that men were working.

  When they came to the entrance of the lock they sat down and waited. Some twenty yards from the shore the Grand Duke’s great dahabeeyah turned slowly in the flow of the river, reached the limit of its mooring ropes and then turned back again. There were lights on the vessel and occasionally through the windows one caught the flash of tureens and the scurrying white of suffragis—the Duke had gone native to the extent that while on board he had allowed himself to be served by local Egyptians. Fairly local, that was, for crew, suffragis and servants belonged, like the boat itself, to a Levantine millionaire who had lent it to the Khedive for the occasion.

  The men on the bank sat on in silence until gradually the activity on the dahabeeyah subsided and one by one the lights went out.

  Then they stirred.

  Two of them went off along the river bank and a little later returned in a small boat, inexpertly but quietly paddled, nudging its way along the river’s edge. The third man, meanwhile, had been bent over the bags.

  One of the men got out of the boat and came up the bank. He and the man left on shore picked up one of the bags and began to carry it down to the water.

  And then dark figures were all around them.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘Before you depart,’ said Owen, ‘there are one or two things I would like to know. Small things first: how did you know the explosives had arrived in the docks?’

  ‘The man in the office was looking out for them,’ said Katarina’s father.

  ‘Abdulla Arbat? What was he looking out for?’

  ‘A consignment from Aleppo marked Baking Powder. He had the names, fictitious, of course, of consigner and consignee.’

  ‘You were paying him, naturally?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘And then you collected them yourself. Unwise, surely?’

  ‘Unwise,’ Katarina’s father agreed. ‘But then, time was short and there were so few people I could trust. And I was in Suez myself, having just disembarked.’

  ‘It gave us a positive identification.’

  ‘The boy?’ Katarina’s father looked glum. ‘The problem was that time was so short! I would have had to get people from Cairo and I knew that you were having them watched. Besides, by that time I felt that I had better do it myself. So many things had gone wrong. Mishandled! I’m not blaming my father, but there were so many things he didn’t know. Gold, for instance! My God, when I heard—! And Djugashvili was not much better. They’d never done anything criminal in their lives before.’

  ‘Whereas you—?’ Katarina’s father laughed.

  ‘The trouble was that I was in Paris. It all blew up very suddenly, you see: the Grand Duke’s visit, the idea that this might give us a chance to strike back—’

  ‘Whose was the idea?’

  Katarina’s father looked at him.

  ‘I shan’t tell you,’ he said. ‘At first I thought, well, a good idea but I’m too far away and there isn’t time to organize anything. But then when I heard there was support—’

  ‘Not as much support as you supposed.’

  ‘No,’ Katarina’s father agreed, ‘not as much as I supposed.’

  ‘Your father’s enthusiasm ran away with him.’

  ‘Perhaps. His letters at first were optimistic and confident. Good young men, he said, men of action. Well, we know, don’t we,’ said Katarina’s father, looking at Owen, ‘that men of action are a lot rarer than men of words. Intelligent action, at any rate. And so it proved.’ He shook his head. ‘At first I thought I could stay out of it, that they would manage without me. I thought it might even be better if I stayed in Paris, doing things from afar. I knew by that time that you were interested in my father. I thought it would be better for me to stay behind the scenes.’

  ‘And so it would have been.’ Katarina’s father spread his hands.

  ‘But then things began to go wrong. They had problems finding money for the explosives—’

  ‘You had money,’ said Owen. ‘Why didn’t you pay?’

  ‘I would have done. But at that time I thought it wasn’t a problem. My father assured me—’

  ‘Ever optimistic!’ said Owen.

  ‘Yes, ever optimistic. Besides’—he broke off and gave Owen a quick look—‘you may not believe this, but I thought of the money as not being mine but the storytellers’. What I was in it for was for the stories, not for the money. The money I meant to be theirs. It was a genuine Benefit Society—’

  ‘Criminal,’ said Owen.

  ‘Well, yes, criminal. But—’

  ‘Tell me about the explosives. Why did you hit on them in the first place?’

  ‘Why not a bullet, you mean?’ Katarina’s father sighed.

  ‘Their idea, not mine. They wanted the Duke to go out with as big a bang as possible. The bigger the bang, they thought, the greater the attention that would be paid—to the Mingrelians, to what Russia had been doing in the Caucasus. They seemed so pleased with the idea that I did not intervene. Besides, I thought there was more chance of them succeeding with a bomb. You have to get it just right with a bullet, and already I was beginning to have doubts—’

  ‘One thing that puzzles me,’ said Owen: ‘Djugashvili. I pulled him in, as you know, and when I spoke to him he did not seem to know that you had already got hold of the explosives.’

  ‘He didn’t know. When I landed at Suez I found a message from my father awaiting me. He was in despair. You had just seized the gold and he thought this was the end. Well, I was in Suez and I knew Abdulla Arbat of old, so I decided to act. No one knew about it till later.’

  Owen nodded.

  Katarina’s father hesitated.

  ‘May I ask when you knew?’

  ‘About you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was looking for someone else. Near Sorgos. I ruled you out, first because you were abroad and then because, well, I got the impression from your father that you were bookish—’
/>   ‘Ineffectual?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  Katarina’s father smiled.

  ‘He still thinks I’m ineffectual.’

  ‘And not greatly interested in the kinds of battles he wants to fight.’

  ‘Well, in a way he’s right. I wasn’t altogether misleading you when I said in the shop the other day that the battles I wanted to fight were cultural ones.’

  ‘Nevertheless, you came down on his side in the end.’

  ‘On the side of political action?’

  ‘Violence.’

  ‘Yes. I’m still not happy about it.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to think it over, won’t you?’

  Katarina’s father shrugged.

  ‘Actually,’ said Owen, ‘you did not mislead me. Rather the reverse. You see, I already knew about you and the storytellers. If I had had any notion that you were merely bookish, in your father’s sense, that had already been dispelled. I had been looking for a manager, someone who was giving the whole thing direction. At first I thought it might be Djugashvili but he always seemed too limited, a man of the Der. When I met you and realized that you were here, back in Cairo, I began to wonder. And when you went to such pains to direct attention away from yourself, even at the expense of your father, I began to suspect.’

  ‘I should have stayed behind the scenes.’

  ‘Or out of it.’

  ‘What will you do with my father?’

  ‘Release him.’

  ‘And Katarina?’

  ‘Leave her alone.’

  ‘Not too alone, I hope,’ said Katarina’s father politely. Sorgos’s son and Mingrelian to the last.

  ***

  The procession wheeled left at the Bab-el-Louk. Ahead of him Owen could see the wide open space of Abdin Square. Once there he could afford to relax. The square was lined with soldiers and anyway, the procession, crossing straight across the middle, would be sufficiently far from the crowd for only the steadiest shot to succeed, and in Cairo assassins’ hands were often fervent but seldom steady. At the other end of the square was Abdin Palace and once there, behind its iron railings, the Khedive and the Grand Duke would be safe.