The Men Behind

by Michael Pearce

  The explosion had demolished the entire corner of a building. A wall swayed drunkenly. Even as Owen watched, it crumbled down to join the pile of rubble which lay in a slanting heap against what was left of the building.

  A fresh cloud of dust rose up. When it cleared, Owen saw that men were already picking at the rubble. A sharp-eyed, intelligent workman was directing operations, getting the men to pile the rubble to one side.

  “Is anyone under there?” asked Owen.

  “God knows,” said the man. “But it was a café.”

  A woman started ululating. Through the ululation and the shouting and the screaming the whistle was still blowing. Owen looked up. A police constable was standing in a corner of the square, his eyes bulging with shock. He had a whistle in his mouth which he kept blowing and blowing.

  “Enough of that!” said Owen. “Go to the Bab el Khalk and see the Bimbashi and tell him to bring some men.”

  The constable stayed where he was. Owen gave him a push. The man collected himself and ran off.

  There were more galabeahed figures pulling at the rubble now. The subsidiary pile of debris was growing. A few broken parts of furniture had joined the stones.

  Owen suddenly became aware that there were other people in the square besides the workers. A peanut-seller lay on his back in the dust with a little crowd around him. He was moaning slightly.

  Not far from him an injured water-carrier had been dragged into the shade. His bags of water had left watery trails behind them as they had been dragged with him. Presumably the sellers had been passing when the explosion had occurred.

  There were youngsters in European-style clothes, students from the Law School probably. Some were supporting fellow students, others pulling at the rubble.

  A large man in a blue galabeah, his face white with dust, went past holding his head in his hands. Two men went up to him but he shook them off and continued wandering around the square in a daze.

  A young man in a suit knelt beside a man bleeding from the leg. He was tearing strips from the man’s undershirt and binding them round the wound: fairly expertly.

  “Are you a doctor?” Owen asked.

  “Student,” the man said briefly over his shoulder.

  “What happened?”

  “An explosion. There, in the café.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “Heard it. We were on our way there.”

  “It’s a student café, is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Christ!” Owen had a sudden vision of a crowded café and bodies buried under the rubble.

  “It shouldn’t have been too bad. The café’s empty at this time of day. A lecture was just finishing.”

  “What’s your name?” asked Owen.

  “Deesa.”

  Owen took note of the name and then went over to help the rubble-workers. They were pulling at a huge beam. He got men to hold the beam while he organized others to pull away the stones which were trapping it. It came clear and they lifted it away.

  A large fair-haired man came into the square with a small troop of constables.

  “Good heavens!” the man said.

  “Hello,” said Owen. “It was a café with students. There may be some under here.”

  “Right,” said the man, and began organizing his constables. They formed a chain and began passing debris along it. The constables were simple peasants from the villages and used to this sort of work. One of them, incongruously, began to sing.

  After a while Owen left the rubble work. McPhee, a Boy-Scoutish sort of man, was better at this kind of thing than he was. The work of clearing the debris was now proceeding systematically. The sharp-faced, intelligent workman who had got started in the first place was now burrowing deep into the rubble.

  The square was filling up with people, eager to help but getting in the way. Owen pulled a constable out and sent him for more help. He tried to get the crowd to keep back. Then, seeing that was useless, he borrowed McPhee’s idea and formed them into chains, getting them to clear away the subsidiary pile, which was threatening to topple back onto the rubble.

  So far he had seen very few injured people.

  The student he had been talking to had finished his bandaging and came over to stand beside Owen.

  “Are you sure it was empty?” Owen asked.

  “Not empty,” said the student. “Emptyish.”

  He interrupted the large man with the white, dusty face as he went past for the umpteenth time.

  “Ali,” he said. “Come here.”

  Ali stopped obediently. The student took hold of his head and stared into his eyes. Then he released him.

  “Concussed,” he said.

  “You’re not a law student,” said Owen.

  “No, medical. I was visiting friends.”

  “Why,” said Ali, in a tone of surprise, “it’s Deesa.”

  “Yes,” said the student, “it’s Deesa. What happened, Ali?”

  “I don’t know,” said the man. “I came to the door to take some air and then suddenly it was as if a giant put his hand to my back and pushed me. I fell into the street and lay there and when I looked up the building had gone. Where did it go to, Deesa?”

  “It fell down, Ali,” said Deesa. “That is all that is left.” He pointed to the rubble.

  The big man shook his head disbelievingly.

  “When I looked up, it had gone,” he repeated. “Where did it go to, Deesa?”

  “Ali,” said Deesa. “Try to remember. How many people were there inside?”

  Ali shook his head blankly.

  “Try to remember, Ali. How many people were there inside? Was Karim inside?”

  “No. He is at the mosque.”

  “God be praised. And Mustafa?”

  “Mustafa is at the souk.”

  “It looks as if Ali was on his own,” the student said to Owen. “And if he was standing at the door he couldn’t have been too busy.”

  There came a shout from the rubble. The sharp-faced man had reemerged and was beckoning urgently. McPhee began to organize a special group.

  “It looks as if they’ve found someone,” said Deesa. “I’d better see if I can help.” As he went across, he looked back over his shoulder at Owen. “I’m only in my third year, though.”

  “You’re doing fine.”

  Ali sat down and put his head on his knees. Suddenly he looked up at Owen.

  “Two,” he said. “There were two.”

  “Sure?”

  “At the back. The table at the back.”

  Owen called across to McPhee. “There are two of them. At least.”

  “We’ve found one.”

  More constables came into the square. They formed into a loose ring holding back the crowd. The crowd had grown so large that it was spilling back down the side streets. Unusually for a Cairo crowd, it was silent.

  There was a ripple among the men working on the rubble. A white-dusted form was lifted out. Deesa bent over it.

  McPhee came across, inspected the pile of rubbish and shook his head.

  “An angrib,” he said, “has anyone got an angrib?”

  Someone shouted acknowledgment from the back of the crowd and a moment or two later some men appeared carrying a low, rope-matting bed. The form was lifted onto it. Then it was hoisted up and borne off to the hospital.

  Deesa started to walk beside it, then turned and came back. “It’s no use,” he said to Owen.

  He stationed himself at the top of the hole down which the sharp-faced workman was already burrowing. The man began to pull at the stones again.

  ***

  “It was a bomb,” said Owen. “I heard it.”

  The three of them were sitting in Garvin’s office—Garvin himself, McPhee, the Assistant Commander, and Owen.<
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  “It had been planted at the back of the café. Probably left under a table or chair. It would have been easy. There weren’t many people there that early in the morning.”

  “How many?”

  “Two definitely. That’s all Ali, the owner of the café, remembers. There could have been more. Others had been in and out.”

  “It could have been worse, then.”

  “Yes. A lot worse. If it had gone off half an hour later the café would have been full.”

  “Why would anyone want to do it?” asked McPhee. “It’s monstrous. All those youngsters!”

  “No idea. You wonder if you’re dealing with a lunatic.”

  Garvin turned to Owen.

  “Presumably you’ve got people on it?”

  “Yes. I’ve got them all on it. I hope to Christ nothing else turns up for a day or two.”

  “What about Fairclough?” asked McPhee.

  Owen shrugged.

  “The Parquet are supposed to be handling it. Not very well, though. They’d prefer to steer clear.”

  “It’s the possible Faircloughs I’m worried about,” said Garvin.

  “A note’s come round from the CG asking people to lie low,” said McPhee. “That might help a bit.”

  “Do you think the two are connected? The Fairclough business and this bombing?” asked Garvin.

  “No. I’d reckoned that the Fairclough business was the work of a specialist group. Specializing in civil servants. The students don’t fit into that.”

  “Maybe they’re not so specialized.”

  “Bombing is a specialist thing too. I reckon we’ve got two groups,” said Owen.

  Garvin sighed. “We’ll have the whole bloody lot taking a hand if we don’t look out,” he said.

  “Or if the Khedive doesn’t make up his bloody mind soon,” said Owen.

  He felt aggrieved. He had warned Garvin at the Reception and Garvin had more or less turned his back. Now this had happened. If the Khedive had made up his mind earlier it probably wouldn’t.

  “I don’t think that’s much to do with it,” said Garvin.

  “Two groups operating simultaneously would stretch us,” said McPhee. “There’s all the general policing as well.”

  “You’ll have to look after that,” said Garvin. “And you’ll have to look after the bombers,” he said to Owen. “And the Fairclough business, of course.”

  “It’s a lot,” said McPhee, looking at Owen. “I’ve got some men moving the rubble. Would you like me to carry on with that? We won’t find anybody alive now but we’ll know how many dead there were.”

  “Thanks,” said Owen. “That would be a help. I’ll be going through the witnesses.”

  “Have you cleared it with the Parquet?” asked Garvin.

  “The Parquet can go hang,” said Owen. “This is plainly political.”

  “I suppose it must be,” said McPhee. “But why students?”

  “Any bombing is political,” said Owen, “because you’re almost bound to hit other people, people who’ve got nothing to do with it.”

  “It’s terrorist, all right,” said Garvin. “Part of the general picture. The trouble is, it means we’ve got on to a new stage. Your people haven’t picked up anything, have they?”

  “In the bazaars? No, no talk of bombs. I saw Nuri Pasha the other day, though, and he said there had been rumors.”

  “There’ll be more rumors now. That won’t make things any easier.” He frowned. “I don’t like bombing,” he said. “It’s hard to handle. And this will have an effect on people. Worse than that following business, even. They’re going to need reassuring.”

  He looked at Owen.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to think again? About bringing in the Army, I mean?”

  “Quite sure,” said Owen.

  ***

  The lemonade-seller was only too willing to tell all he knew; which wasn’t much.

  “I had stopped to relieve myself,” he explained, “when I heard a mighty roar. I ran around the corner and the square was full of dust. A great cloud enveloped me and all was dark and I couldn’t breathe. I gave myself up for lost,” said the lemonade-seller with relish.

  He eased the tray around his middle to allow himself to squat more comfortably.

  “But then the cloud went from me and I saw Hussein lying. Like this!” The lemonade-seller clasped his hands dramatically and quite implausibly. “And I said to myself: ‘Surely Hussein is dead.’ But then one said to me: ‘Not so. He moves.’ And I looked again and it was so. And the other said: ‘Let us carry him to the side, for if he lies where he is, further harm may befall him.’ And one carried him aside and I said—”

  Here Owen stopped him.

  “Let us go back to the beginning,” he said. “You were around the corner?”

  “Yes. I was relieving myself. God works in mysterious ways. Had I not stopped I would have been in the square and the house might have fallen upon me.”

  “The hand of God is in everything,” said Owen.

  “That is exactly what I said to my wife.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “Not to count upon it when I came to her bed that evening.”

  “While you were relieving yourself,” said Owen, “did anyone run past you coming out of the square?”

  “I do not think so. Afterwards, though,” offered the lemonade-seller, “many people were running hither and thither.”

  “But beforehand?”

  What Owen was trying to find out was whether anyone had seen a thrower. Terrorist bombs were typically primitive affairs. They tended to be the sort that exploded on concussion and were therefore usually thrown, not left.

  “No one came past me.”

  It was one of the few hard pieces of information that Owen was able to extract. What all the witnesses wanted to do was tell him about their part in the drama, the narrowness of their own escape, their thoughts and reflections, what they had said to Abdul, etc. What they did not want to do was confine themselves to anything as mundane as the bare facts of the affair.

  Facts, if they emerged at all, were thrown out rather at random. In order to catch them, therefore, one had to sit patiently by while the story was unfolded in all its glory. Which, with a number of witnesses, took rather a long time.

  After a while Owen handed it over to his men and walked round the square to where a group of interested onlookers was watching McPhee’s men at work clearing the rubble.

  “I am looking for Ali,” he said.

  The group exchanged glances and then one of them got up, touched Owen on the arm, and led him off to one side of the square.

  Ali was sitting in the dust with his back against a wall, his eyes staring unseeingly before him. By his knee there was a bowl of food, untouched.

  “He is not well,” said the man who had brought Owen over. “He may not hear you.”

  Owen dropped into a squat.

  “Ali,” he said softly. “Ali, do you remember me?”

  Ali gave no sign of having heard.

  “I was with Deesa, if you remember. That day.”

  Ali stirred. “I remember,” he said.

  “You helped me that day,” Owen said. “You told me there were two inside.”

  “Yes,” said Ali. “There were two.”

  “Can you help me some more? Just before it happened, did anyone throw anything?”

  “I cannot remember.”

  “Into the café? And run away, perhaps?”

  Ali frowned. “I cannot remember,” he said. “There was a mighty wind. It threw me to the ground. My head aches.”

  “Just before the mighty wind. Did anyone throw anything?”

  Ali looked puzzled. “I do not understand,” he said. “Why should anyone throw anything?
” He put his head in his hands and rocked to and fro. “I do not understand,” he said. “I do not understand anything.”

  “He is sick,” whispered the man who had brought Owen.

  “It is the shock,” said Owen. “Get him to the English hakim at the hospital. Tell him the Mamur Zapt sends him.”

  “I will take him,” said the man.

  Ali had stopped rocking.

  “Ali,” said Owen. “I shall ask you only one more thing. Then you are to go to the English hakim and he will make you better. That morning, when it happened, there were two inside. But had there been others? Had others come and gone that morning?”

  “My head aches.”

  “Try,” said Owen. “Try to remember, Ali.”

  Ali put his head on his hands again and frowned with concentration. Some inner pain made him wince and close his eyes.

  “I am trying,” he said. “I am trying to remember.”

  “Good. That morning. Before. Were there others?”

  Ali bowed his head in concentration.

  “Yes,” he said suddenly. “There were others.”

  “Many? Do you remember them?”

  “Not many.”

  Ali’s head came up. “I do not remember them,” he whispered. “I was working.”

  “But you saw them?”

  “I cannot remember.”

  “Can you remember one of them? One I could ask about the others?”

  Ali frowned with concentration. Suddenly he burst into tears.

  ***

  Owen managed to find a small boy who knew the way. The boy took him down a dark alleyway which opened out into a small courtyard completely enclosed by crumbling blocks of flats. There was a pump in the middle of the courtyard round which small children were playing. A strong smell of fried onions came from one of the houses.

  A man in a galabeah and skullcap came out of the house. It was the sharp-faced workman who had organized things at the scene of the bombing. He greeted Owen politely and led him inside. In an inner room a woman was busy cooking.

  There were no chairs but the man produced a worn leather cushion for Owen to sit on. He himself sat on the bare floor.

  The floor was clean, which was not always the case in the houses of the poor. But then, as poor went, perhaps this man was not so very poor. The flat seemed to have at least two rooms and the furnishings, though sparse, were of good quality and well looked after.