The Men Behind

by Michael Pearce

  The trackers began to work over the ground methodically, uncovering fragments, exposing bones, but leaving them lying.

  Roper watched for a time but then, bored, walked his camel off and began a wide circle in the desert studying the lie of the land.

  Owen bent over the remains of the bomb. It was exactly the same as the one used in the bombing of the café and the one thrown at Nuri. Standard, no doubt, as Plumley had said; but what was it doing down here?

  One of the trackers beckoned him over. There was a shoulder blade lying in the sand. The tracker directed his attention more closely. Half fused to the shoulder blade was a tiny, studlike thing. It took Owen a moment to realize that it was a button. Caught round the button were a few wisps of cloth.

  The tracker scraped away more sand and uncovered some smaller bones. One of them looked like a collarbone. As the tracker gently prised it out Owen saw that there was some more cloth sticking to it, preserved in the dry air and the sand.

  The tracker turned it over with his finger and thumb. It was about an inch square, yellowing and oddly shiny. There were some faint scratches on it, faded marks.

  Suddenly Owen realized what it was: the tailor’s label of the suit.

  “Would you like to borrow a magnifying glass?” Plumley offered diffidently. “I use it for examining rocks.”

  The scratches and marks became clearer. They were writing. Owen thought he could make out the letters “Guill—” Then the label was torn across.

  He gave the magnifying glass back to Plumley.

  “Thank you,” he said. “You have been very, very useful.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Yes,” said the tailor, “it’s one of ours.”

  “Would you be able to trace it?”

  “We have a list of all the suits we’ve sold and to whom they’ve gone. It helps getting the money.”

  “How far back do you go?”

  “Fifteen years,” said the tailor with a touch of pride.

  “Five would be enough.”

  The tailor ducked down some steps into an inner cellar in which half a dozen men were busy sewing. He returned with a bound leather book.

  “They’re all in here. Would you like to copy down the names?”

  Owen opened the book. It contained name, address and measurements.

  “Can I borrow it for a couple of days?”

  The measurements might help Nikos. The lab had been able to give them a rough indication of height and build, not precise enough to tally exactly but sufficient to rule out some combinations.

  “I promise it will come back,” he said, seeing the man hesitate.

  “I should hate to lose it. It’s—it’s, well I started it the day I started here. Fifteen years ago.”

  “You’ve done well,” said Owen, looking around.

  It was a small shop. Garments hung on racks around the walls leaving barely enough space for two men to stand in the middle. It was a tailor’s for men only, the sort of place which made suits for the hundreds of clerks and minor civil servants with which Cairo abounded.

  Every man who worked in an office wore a suit. It was a mark of social achievement. The dark suit, the little potlike hat with a tassel, were the badge which distinguished the educated professional, or semi-educated, semi-professional, from the galabeahed figures in the street.

  Students wore suits, even schoolboys in the secondary schools did. Though not usually when they went into the country. Owen was a little surprised at that. Of course there was no guarantee that the second boy, Salah, had been a student but somehow Owen had expected it.

  Perhaps he had simply not had a change of clothing.

  “Do you get many students?” he asked.

  “Not many. They are usually too poor. Or, if they are lawyers, too rich. It’s clerks, teachers, that sort of person, who use it.”

  The suit was, in fact, traced to a teacher, a Salah Foukhari, who taught in a Government primary school in one of the poorer parts of the city. Had taught, rather, for some eighteen months previously, at the end of the long summer term, he had walked out of the school and not come back.

  “I am afraid that happens occasionally,” said the headmaster apologetically. “It is not easy being a teacher, and there is not much money in it.”

  “Did you make any attempt to trace him?”

  “I went to his house. That was at the start of the next term when he didn’t appear. I thought he might simply have forgotten the date term started. That happens, too,” said the headmaster, “occasionally.”

  The house, or rather the simple room in the house that Foukhari had occupied, was now occupied by another. Owen asked what had become of Foukhari’s belongings.

  “There weren’t any,” said the landlord. Possibly truthfully.

  “Friends?”

  The headmaster thought.

  “He had made no friends while he was here. He kept himself very much to himself. But I think he had friends. Perhaps he made some at the Training College?”

  At the Training College they remembered Foukhari well.

  “After all, it’s only three years since he left.”

  Could they remember his friends?

  No, but they could put Owen in touch with someone who had been a student at the College at the same time as Foukhari, had indeed been a classmate.

  “Though not exactly a friend,” the former student said when they visited him at the primary school where he was now teaching. “Salah didn’t have many friends. Not among us, at any rate.”

  Among whom, then?

  “Well, he was always going off with somebody. To the Law School. I think. He was friendly with some law students. He used to go to meetings with them, that sort of thing.”

  Meetings?

  “Public meetings?”

  “Political meetings?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nationalist?”

  The former student hesitated. “Probably,” he said neutrally. “I’m afraid I really can’t remember.”

  “He was politically active?”

  “I really couldn’t say. You’ll have to ask someone who knew him better.”

  Like whom?

  Here the former student actually was able to help. He remembered that in his final year at the College Salah Foukhari had become a member of a radical debating society. The society still existed and met regularly in a café near the Great Schools.

  “One for Georgiades, I think,” said Owen.

  He went along to the café himself, however, and sipped coffee and read a newspaper—a radical Arab weekly—while the innocent-eyed Georgiades engaged in fierce conversation with a group of students at an adjoining table.

  The upshot of that and several similar conversations was that Georgiades was invited to a meeting of the society, which took place in an upstairs room.

  “The End of Imperial Rule, the Necessity of Nationalism, the Coming Revolution,” he reported to Owen afterwards, “all that sort of stuff. Harmless.”

  “Just talk?”

  “It’s a debating society, after all.”

  Foukhari had continued to attend debates at the café for a year after he had left the Training College.

  “Then he drifted away, apparently,” said Georgiades. “He and a few friends. They said the debates weren’t getting anywhere. They wanted action.”

  “Real action? Or more talk?”

  “More talk at first. I got the name of someone who went with them. When it started moving towards action, this one pulled out and went back to the debating society. He wanted talk.”

  “Did you get any names?”

  “One name, Abdul Rashid. A lecturer at the School of Law.”

  “A lecturer? Then he would still be there.”

  “He might be.” Georgiades hesitated. “I
f he is, do we want to approach him directly? I mean, if he was involved in something then, he might be involved in something now. Do we want to put him on his guard?”

  “No. No direct questioning. Not at this stage. Discreet inquiries, that’s all. And they’d better not be by you. We don’t want anyone at the Law School finding out your links with us. I’ll put someone else on to it.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Go on hanging around the Law School?”

  Georgiades went on hanging around the Law School and other agents made the discreet inquiries. Nikos, who saw his role as analytical, especially in hot weather, collated the findings.

  “He is a radical and he’s almost certainly been involved in extremist attacks. But we’ve never been able to pin anything on him. The closest we came was four or five years ago—that was before your time, of course.”

  Nikos liked to remind Owen that he was a junior partner.

  “What happened then?”

  “A law student threw a bomb at the Sultan Hassan. Someone caught his arm and the bomb missed but it exploded in the street and several people were hurt. The student gave himself up. Said he was trying to kill Hassan and had no wish to injure ordinary decent Egyptians. He repeated it in court. They sentenced him to death of course, though it was later reduced to life imprisonment.”

  “How does Rashid come into it?”

  “There were associates, clearly, but the student refused to say who they were. Obviously we offered to do a deal over the death penalty but he refused to say anything. Said he was proud to die for Egypt. The Sultan reduced it anyway. He didn’t want a martyr.”

  “And Rashid was one of the associates?”

  “Almost certainly. There was a small group of them, extremists. The others fled but Rashid stayed on. Admitted the sentiments, denied the action. And while Elbawi kept quiet he was safe.”

  “Elbawi was the student?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Cutting stone in the quarries at Tura, presumably.”

  “Go on about Rashid.”

  “Elbawi had been one of Rashid’s students. There was a small group of them, as I said, all extremist. The others went abroad. Rashid said he wasn’t responsible for the actions of a few hotheads. The rest of the staff supported him. Academic freedom and all that. It was a cause célebre.”

  “And he became a hero, I suppose?”

  “That’s right. But a modest hero. And he’s stayed modest ever since. Puts out pamphlets, that kind of thing. Doesn’t do anything too obvious, nothing that we could really catch him on.”

  Among the things that Rashid could not really be caught on was membership in various radical groups: such as the debating society that Foukhari had belonged to.

  “In fact, he was the one who introduced Foukhari in the first place. Foukhari was a friend of one of his students. They’d met, talked in cafés, that kind of thing, and apparently Rashid had suggested they might both like to join the society. They went along to a few debates and then Rashid suggested it was all a bit tame and not really getting anywhere and wouldn’t they like to get involved in something more real?”

  “Which was?”

  “A cell of some kind. My informant—who was the law student friend of Foukhari I spoke about—never found out. He isn’t sure whether it actually existed. Rashid kept talking mysteriously about some ‘project’ they might get involved in but it never came to anything. Not in the informant’s case, anyway. He drifted away and lost touch. But Foukhari stayed.”

  “And later died messing about with bombs.”

  “While Rashid remained on the fringe, as usual.”

  “I wonder what he’s on the fringe of now? There’s nothing to link him with the café bombing, is there?”

  “Well,” said Nikos, “there might be. Those two students who were killed.”

  “Yes, but they came from the School of Engineering.”

  “And had a law student friend. Remember?”

  “You think it was Rashid?”

  “No. I don’t think he works like that. He does it indirectly through students, friends of students, friends of friends. My guess is he’s always on the lookout for potential recruits. He tries them out in something safe like the debating society. Then if they show promise he switches them to something more serious.”

  “Yes, but I don’t think that would have been the case with those students killed in the café. I mean, they were victims, not—”

  “Were they?” asked Nikos. “Are you sure about that?”

  ***

  “Look at it this way,” said Georgiades. “No one threw the bomb into the café. So someone must have taken it in. Ali’s two men slept in the café overnight and swear blind it wasn’t taken in then. And we’ve gone through all the people who used it the next morning and drawn a blank there too. The only way a bomb could have got in there was if those two students took it in themselves.”

  Georgiades had been invited to join the discussion and had sided with Nikos.

  “With the aim of blowing themselves up, along with everybody else?” said Owen skeptically. “I don’t believe it.”

  “That might not have been their intention. They might merely have gone there to hand the bomb over to someone. Say that law student friend of theirs.”

  “Yes, but to take a live bomb into a crowded café. For Christ’s sake!”

  “It wasn’t a crowded café. They picked a time when they knew it wouldn’t be.”

  “Yes, but a live bomb!”

  “Engineers are casual about such things. Think of Plumley.”

  “They may be casual but they’re not bloody daft.”

  “It fits,” Nikos insisted. “You see, it’s where they come in. As engineers, I mean. They made the bombs. They knew how to do it and had access to the materials and equipment. That’s what they were used for.”

  “They weren’t politically active.” said Georgiades, “not in the ordinary sense. They didn’t go to meetings, speak up, carry banners, march in demonstrations, distribute leaflets. They weren’t the type. What they could do was make bombs.”

  “Not well enough: they blew themselves up.”

  “It often happens,” said Nikos. “Look at the records. Look at that business at Hamada for a start.”

  “What the hell were they doing with a bomb down there?”

  “Trying it out. Trying to make a better one. And, incidentally, that was another engineering student.”

  “Let’s get this straight,” said Owen. “What you’re suggesting is that the explosion in the café was an accident?”

  “That’s right. And that the people killed were the people who’d planted the bomb. Only the bomb wasn’t really planted. It was taken in probably to be handed over to somebody.”

  “Somebody from the Law School.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, it’s an idea,” said Owen reluctantly. “What do we do with it?”

  “It doesn’t seem to me to alter anything much,” said Georgiades. “It’s just another thing to tie in with the Law School and possibly Rashid.”

  “We should be looking at Rashid,” said Nikos.

  “Go back a minute,” said Owen, “to what you were saying earlier. That Elbawi fellow—the one who was sent to prison for throwing a bomb at Sultan Hassan, and who might have been a friend of Rashid: oughtn’t we to take a look at him as well?”

  “We could take a look, certainly,” said Nikos, “but don’t expect to get anything out of him. They tried at the time.”

  “That was four years ago. He’s been cutting stones since then. He might have changed his mind.”

  ***

  Elbawi had indeed changed his mind; interestingly.

  Conditions in the Khedive’s prisons had i
mproved greatly over the past decade—Cromer’s reforming hand was felt even there—but remained harsh. Forced labor had always been part of the Egyptian penal system and, indeed, had its good side. It was better for prisoners to be out in the open air and removed from the unsanitary and unhealthy conditions which usually prevailed in prisons.

  But for prisoners like Elbawi, who had made an attempt on the life of one of the royal family, the labor was kept deliberately hard. It did not come much harder than working in the stone quarries at Tura.

  Elbawi might have been broken; but he was neither broken nor set permanently in defiance. He was bitter, understandably, but his bitterness was not now directed just or even, it seemed to Owen, primarily at the Khedive and the British; it extended to those who had induced an inexperienced young student to commit what he now regarded as a crazy act.

  “They used me,” he said to Owen at their third meeting, when he had got to know Owen a little and seemed inclined to trust him. “They got me to do the dirty work and stayed comfortably out of trouble themselves.”

  “Did they actually suggest a target?”

  “I don’t know now,” Elbawi confessed. “We talked and talked. At the time I thought it was I who had had the great idea but now I am not so sure. I think they may have made me think that.”

  “They provided the means, presumably?”

  “The bomb. Yes.”

  Elbawi, carried back, stayed sunk in thought for a while.

  “Perhaps if they’d not actually given me the bomb I wouldn’t have done it,” he said suddenly. “I was wavering. I couldn’t make up my mind. To do it or not. But then when I actually had the bomb in my hands—I mean, it was hard to go back on it.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Seventeen.” Elbawi shrugged. “I’m not blaming them entirely. I did it. I meant to do it. I saw it as a great blow for freedom. Something that would help Egypt. Well, perhaps it would have. But I think now that, well, one doesn’t have to be so drastic. There are other ways, after all. Of course, there’s a Nationalist Party now, which there wasn’t then.” He looked at Owen. “Do you think they’ll make it?”

  “Into the Government? Not this time.”