The Mingrelian Conspiracy mz-9

by Michael Pearce

  ‘Not until the Grand Duke’s visit is over, I hope,’ he said benignly.

  Once Mahmoud had got his teeth into something, he did not let go; and since the arrest of the gang he had been biting hard in the Fustat. On the fringes of the gang there were the usual supporters, friends and accomplices and one by one he had been pulling them in, making the most of this opportunity to clean up the criminal quarter around the Old Docks. One of the names mentioned by Omar, the man they had questioned together, had been that of Hussein al-Fadal, and Mahmoud had been giving him some attention.

  ‘He’s tough, all right. He works a fleet of boats out of the Old Docks. They go right up beyond Luxor, fuel and grain, mostly, though some stone from the quarries. In his father’s time they went further still, beyond Khartoum. It was said he used to bring back slaves. A tough old man and a tough son. I suppose you have to be, working on the river. Anyway-this is the point that will interest you-the father is not a native Egyptian. He comes from one of those countries up around the Caucasus, Muslim, so there was no great difficulty about settling here. The story goes that he was driven out by the Russians. That would have been about the time that Sorgos made his departure, too. It’s quite conceivable that they knew each other there and that the father came to ask Sorgos some kind of favour. In which case, of course, the son would have inherited the obligation.’

  ‘Any evidence of direct contact?’

  ‘No. Nor, previously, with Djugashvili, either. But, of course, working on the waterfront, he would have plenty of contact with the gangs, not just this one but all those working down by the docks. He would have been just the man to go to if you didn’t know any of the gangs yourself and wanted to be put in touch with one.’

  ‘Did he have any other role, do you think? Other than intermediary?’

  ‘Nothing has come out. He has the name of being a hard man. If you owe him a favour, you pay it. Mind you, if he owes you one, he pays too. But they say he sticks to his own business, which is boats. I don’t see him going much outside that. Unless, of course, it was part of returning a favour.’

  ‘A thief, a pimp, a liar and a vagabond,’ said the voice on the telephone; ‘deceitful, treacherous, conniving and immoral! Nothing bad goes on in these docks and he’s not there! On the fringes, perhaps, but there! And he says he’s a friend of yours.’

  ‘What’s his name?’ said Owen.

  ‘Sidi.’

  ‘Put him on.’

  There was a slight pause and then a voice said uncertainly: ‘Effendi?’

  ‘I am here.’

  ‘Effendi, this is a strange thing. I have not seen one of these before. Just where are you?’

  ‘In Cairo.’

  ‘Then you are not here?’

  ‘You speak into that and it goes all the way to Cairo. You speak and I can hear.’

  ‘Well, that is very remarkable. If it is true. Anyway, if this is the way you wish to talk, so let it be. Effendi, I have sad news to report.’

  ‘Sad news?’

  ‘The package you asked me to look out for has arrived.’

  ‘It has? And you have found it? Well, that is good news, not sad.’

  ‘That, unfortunately, Effendi, is not all. First, it was not I who found it. If it had been, all would have been simple. I would have told no one save you and you would have come. Unfortunately, it was Abou who found it. He told Ibrahim and Ibrahim told the men in the office, as you said. And perhaps a few other people. Or maybe it was that fool, Abou. Effendi, when I become rich, that is definitely one man I shall not employ. Even to lead the donkeys.’

  ‘Word has got out?’

  ‘That is right, Effendi. I said to Ibrahim, Ibrahim, this is foolish. Go to the man at the top! That is always the best course. But he would not listen to me, Effendi. He thinks I am too young. But, Effendi, intelligence is nothing to do with age, as I told him. Unfortunately, strength is, and he dealt me a blow and I thought it wisest to say nothing after that. But that meant I had to watch the box by myself-’

  ‘You were watching the box?’

  ‘Well, Effendi, someone had to. It was only prudent. There is a lot to the box. I suggested to Ibrahim that a watch be kept, but he said that was not necessary. So I decided I would watch by myself. Unfortunately, Effendi, the long hours-I woke up to find the box gone.’

  ‘Gone!’

  ‘I ran at once to the loading bay and found them putting it into a cart. And then I ran to the man in the office. But he would not listen to me, he said: “What do you know about it, foolish boy? What business is it of yours? Begone, or I shall have you beaten!” And I said: “I am not the one who will be beaten when the Mamur Zapt finds out.” And then he agreed to go with me but by the time we got to the bay it was too late. The cart had gone-’

  A voice cut in over Sidi’s.

  ‘Effendi, what the boy says is, alas, on this one occasion, true. It was an unfortunate misunderstanding-’

  ‘You have let the explosives go?’

  ‘Effendi, I-’

  Chapter 11

  Owen, considerably less relaxed and feeling not at all benign, sat in his office wondering where it had all gone wrong. He had been so sure of a number of things. He had been sure, for a start, that he had identified the potential troublemakers: Sorgos rousing the rabble and raising money; the Georgians down in the Der, handy when it came to action; Djugashvili, committed to the anti-Russian cause and capable, their likely leader. His agents had brought him reports of no others. They were all under constant observation and could not, positively could not, have gone to Suez and collected the explosives. There must be someone else involved.

  He had been sure, too, that there was a connection between the gold-gathering and getting hold of the explosives. It all hung together. Why else had Sorgos been scratching around for gold? Why else go to the lengths of commissioning a gang to screw money out of a cafe? He had been so sure that by seizing the gold they had collected he would put a spoke in their wheel. Now someone had definitely put a spoke in his!

  Had he been wrong all along? Was there no connection at all between the gold and the explosives? Were the explosives simply being imported for some other purpose, still, probably, nefarious but of a lesser order of criminality, at least as far as the Mamur Zapt was concerned? Tomb-robbing, say? A matter for the Parquet, not him. Perhaps he should have passed the whole thing over to Mahmoud!

  But where did that leave the Grand Duke? Were Sorgos and the others completely innocent of any designs on his life? Not from what Sorgos had said. But was what Sorgos said to be trusted? Wasn’t he just a crazy, cracked old man? But if so, what was he collecting gold for? Mingrelian wedding rings? And these Georgians: innocent? Well, not entirely, if Omar’s identification of Djugashvili as the man who had commissioned the raid on Mustapha’s cafe was to be trusted. But was that necessarily connected with the explosives? Maybe Djugashvili was involved in some other kind of racket.

  But no, there was a connection between the gold and the explosives, he was sure. He was sure that was what Sorgos had been raising gold for; and he was almost sure now that that was what the raid on the cafe had been about, to raise money to pay for the gold.

  No, that bit was right. Where he had gone wrong was in his assumption that if the plotters were prevented from paying, they would not be able to get their hands on the explosives.

  Perhaps they had intended to pay, to buy the explosives in the normal commercial way. Perhaps they were, as Georgiades and Nikos kept saying, criminal naifs, doing it for the first time. Perhaps that had genuinely been their plan. And then, because of his own daft action in seizing the gold, they had altered it. They had gone for the explosives directly.

  That was all he could think. What it meant, though, was that the explosives were now in their hands. In their hands and there for use. Only a day ago he had been making a joke of it, mentioning the explosives only out of devilment, just to put the fear of God into Shearer. Well, he had certainly done that. Only now it h
ad turned out not to be a joke at all but very, very real!

  And he was the man who had done it.

  He was the man, therefore, who must do his best to undo it. He knew what he had to do. He hated taking action like this, he was as bad as Mahmoud about preventive detention. It always seemed to him merely coercive, the antithesis of the way he normally liked to proceed, which had some sort of relation to justice.

  There was no help for it, however. He got up and went into the outer office. Nikos was at his desk working. Georgiades was sitting in a corner, depressed. He looked up as Owen entered.

  ‘Fetch me Djugashvili,’ said Owen.

  ‘What is the charge?’ said Djugashvili.

  ‘I will be handing you over to Mr. El Zaki shortly,’ said Owen, ‘and he will be presenting charges of inducing and inciting in connection with a raid on a cafe.’

  He caught the quick look of relief on Djugashvili’s face. ‘Meanwhile, I shall be holding you under my powers with relation to security.’

  ‘In what connection?’ asked Djugashvili.

  ‘In connection with a projected attempt on the life of Grand Duke Nicholas.’

  Djugashvili shrugged.

  ‘It’s all beside the point now, isn’t it?’ he said bitterly.

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘It’s all effectively come to an end, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Has it?’

  ‘You’ve got the gold. We won’t be able to raise another lot in time.’

  Owen deliberated.

  ‘What did you intend to do with the gold?’ he said at last. Djugashvili laughed.

  ‘Buy explosives, of course.’

  ‘You would still buy them?’

  ‘I certainly would.’

  ‘Why?’ said Owen. ‘When you already have them?’

  Djugashvili stared at him.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The explosives,’ said Owen. ‘They came into Suez, didn’t they? And you were going to collect them. When you’d got the money. Only it had to be in gold, so it was taking a bit of time. But there the explosives were, at Suez, just waiting for you and the money.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘You almost make me think,’ said Owen, ‘that you are not the ones who took them.’

  Djugashvili looked stunned.

  ‘Someone else?’ he whispered. Then he recovered. ‘Someone else!’ he said. ‘And they’ve got the explosives already?’ He laughed triumphantly. ‘Then it will go ahead! You cannot stop it now!’

  ‘If not you,’ said Owen, ‘then who? Have you got any idea?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Djugashvili. ‘I’ve got an idea!’

  ‘I want to know,’ said Owen.

  Djugashvili laughed, and was still laughing as he was taken to the cells.

  The men had come at four o’clock in the afternoon when only the most alert of Cairo’s citizens had risen from their post-prandial beds, and even these were still shaking the sleep from their eyes. The Nubian wrestler was possibly not one of the most alert and it was this, Selim had supposed, that had accounted for the slight delay before he arrived on the scene. In the interval Selim had fought like a lion. This was not just his own view but the view of the considerable number of spectators that gathered outside Mustapha’s cafe in a remarkably short space of time.

  According to Selim, he had been partaking of refreshment in the kitchen with Mustapha’s wife when the sound of splintering wood had drawn his attention to the main room at the front. He had entered it to find two men engaged in breaking up the furniture and Mustapha prudently scuttling for the stairs. Selim had drawn his baton and laid into the two men. A lucky blow on the elbow had virtually disabled one and Selim was left free to concentrate on giving the other a taste of justice. This was proceeding very satisfactorily when three other men had burst into the room.

  Things had then livened up appreciably. The expert Selim had found himself confronted by other experts. Had he been the average Cairo constable he would at this juncture sensibly have made for the back door. Selim, however, as he pointed out to Owen afterwards, was not the average Cairo constable. He was, first, bigger and, second, inclined to the robust. A melee with fists, feet, and furniture flying was exactly the situation in which he felt himself most at home, which was why, in fact, the inhabitants of his home village, after much experience, had pointed him strongly to a career in the Cairo constabulary and gone so far as to promise to supplement his wages if he stayed there. Faced with a challenge, and still smarting from Mustapha’s taunts over what he considered his failure on the previous occasion, the last thing Selim had in mind was retreating.

  Nevertheless, there were three of them, not to mention the two already lying groaning on the floor, and they were all, Selim soon recognized, as used as he was to this kind of thing. It was now, however, that his true colours were valiantly revealed. For he fought like a demented lion (lion, according to Selim, demented, according to the spectators). Furniture flew, chairs crashed, both on him and on his assailants, and after a hectic interval, his assailants stepped back to regroup.

  Two more men appeared.

  Mustapha’s wife ran back into the kitchen for boiling water. Selim, still defiant, but now breathing heavily and already somewhat battered, prepared to make his last stand.

  At which point the Nubian wrestler, risen, apparently, at last from his slumbers, waddled into the cafe.

  He picked up the two men nearest him, cracked their skulls together and threw them into opposite corners of the room. He picked up another and tied his arms and legs and, possibly, his neck-or so it looked to Owen when he came upon the scene shortly afterwards-into a knot. He bounced the fourth man first off the wall, then off the ceiling and finally off himself (it was the latter that proved the coup de grace); and then advanced happily on the last man, who was by this time looking for the nearest exit.

  All this was very satisfactory, especially as there were two further men lying stunned outside. If only it had stopped there! Unfortunately, the Nubian wrestler, slow to rouse, was hard to quieten down again, and he was still throwing the men around when Owen arrived on the spot quite some minutes later, by which time, as Mustapha bitterly pointed out, the damage done to the cafe was far in excess of what it would have been if the gang had been allowed a free hand in the first place.

  Owen was only able to bring things to a halt by the expedient of removing the bodies one by one as they hit the wall, so that in the end the Nubian was left with nothing else to throw. He stood for a few moments looking around him in baffled surprise and then shambled out.

  Thus (roughly), was Selim’s perception of events, recounted afterwards as he stood covered with gore and glory in the kitchen with Mustapha’s wife sponging his wounds. It was not, however, entirely as he supposed. For one thing, the Nubian wrestler had not, in fact, been buried in his slumbers when the gang arrived; he had been sent on an errand by Mustapha.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t going to let that little twit go on his own, was I?’ said Mustapha, defending himself. ‘That tooth cost a lot of money.’

  The tooth was the one he had lost in the initial fracas at the cafe. Mustapha had made up his mind that the time had come to restore it to its rightful position and had sent Mekhmet with it to see the dentist with instructions to prepare it for reinsertion.

  ‘No sense in getting a new one, is there? Gold is gold.’

  In view of the tooth’s value, he had decided to provide Mekhmet with an escort, a factor which, as Selim, aggrieved, observed, had weakened the cafe’s defences at a crucial point and contributed in no small measure to the damage the cafe had sustained. Mustapha’s wife added in support that Mustapha had only himself to blame, for he had sent the two men out in the hottest part of the day when any reasonable man knew they could not be expected to hurry.

  Hurried they had not, for the wrestler found it necessary to stop at various points to refresh himself with cheap Sudanese marissa beer, with the result that as they were approach
ing home on their return journey he had been obliged to go up a side street to relieve his bladder. It had thus been Mekhmet alone who had entered the street just as the storyteller was pointing out the cafe to the gang. He had run back at once to fetch the wrestler but by then precious time had been lost.

  ‘Just a moment,’ said Owen. ‘Pointing out the cafe?’

  Nonsense, said the storyteller. He had just been passing the time of day. Alternatively, supposing that they were in search of somewhere they could sit down and have a cup of coffee, he had merely been responding politely to their enquiries. Anyway, that little twit had got it wrong.

  ‘Would you like to talk to me here?’ asked Owen. ‘Or shall I send you with Selim to the Bab-el-Khalk and talk to you there?’

  After one glance at Selim, the storyteller decided that he would prefer to talk to Owen here, so Owen took him to an upstairs room-the room in which Mustapha had been lying when he had first seen him, posted Selim on the stairs to keep out the curious, and told Mustapha to get on with clearing up the cafe.

  Then he turned to the storyteller.

  ‘So, my friend,’ he said, ‘how does it work?’

  The storyteller looked around him desperately, swallowed and then decided there was nothing else for it.

  ‘It works,’ he said, ‘in all sorts of ways. Sometimes they come to us, sometimes we go to them. Usually, they come to us. “Know any good places?” they say. Well, of course, we know all the cafes and, sitting out the front as we do, we see who goes in and have a pretty good idea of how much money the cafe is taking. We might say: “That one’s been doing well lately, it’s come on a bit.” Or we might say: “I wouldn’t try that one, it’s not worth your while.” Or sometimes,’ said the storyteller, waxing, ‘ “Don’t go there, it’s just a poor old woman on her own, lame and suffering, plagued with boils-” ’

  ‘I weep,’ said Owen.

  The storyteller looked hurt.

  ‘I’m just telling you the way it is,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t want you to think we are hard of heart or unjust. We spare the poor and charge the rich. We see some fat man growing fatter, and we say: “Pick on him! He can stand it.” If it wasn’t for us,’ said the storyteller virtuously, ‘they might pick on the wrong people.’