The Fig Tree Murder mz-10

by Michael Pearce

  But she had said that about Ibrahim, not about Ali.

  ‘And Ibrahim, too, did he used to talk to you about such things?’

  ‘At first, yes, but then his father would not let him. He said such talk was bad, that the Pasha would hear of it and be down on us. I think Fazal would have talked.’

  ‘Fazal?’

  ‘Ibrahim’s brother.’

  The difficult one. The one that Owen had thought might have looked for revenge for his brother’s killing.

  He still didn’t think he was wrong. Only he had seen it all too simply. He had seen just the enmity, just the possible revenge relationship. He had not seen the relationships between the families. But relationships there were, of which the marriage between Leila and Ibrahim had been just one.

  ‘And were they all still going to such meetings, Ali and Ibrahim?’

  She was silent. Then she said:

  ‘Mustapha Kamil is dead.’

  ‘But there are others. Others now speak in his place.’

  ‘There has been no time for meetings,’ she said, ‘not since Ibrahim began working for the Belgians.’

  ‘They did not meet?’

  ‘Only occasionally. Sometimes they would walk back to the village together.’

  Suddenly she seemed to be far away. Perhaps she was remembering the past. Perhaps it was the first time since Ibrahim’s death that she had allowed herself to.

  ‘He was a good man,’ Owen prompted gently.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But a hot-headed one, you said?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She laughed, remembering.

  ‘And too quick of tongue. How was he too quick of tongue?’

  ‘That time when he spoke up for the railwaymen. They were angry but no one would speak. Ibrahim was angry, too, but he said he would speak. His father wanted to beat him when he heard. Ali, too,’ she said, surprisingly.

  ‘Ali wanted to beat him?’

  ‘Not beat him. But he said it was foolish to step forward. “Let others do that,” he said.’

  ‘Why did he say that?’

  ‘He said it would do Ibrahim no good if he were to let himself be singled out. The job was not forever. Put up with it, he said, take the money, and then speak if you must.’

  Owen was again surprised. Ali, the moderate? The man who had run for his gun that day?

  ‘But Ibrahim did not take his advice,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was Ali angry?’

  ‘No. He said it was on his own head. But afterwards he came to him again and said: “There are men better at this than you.” “Let them come forward, then,” said Ibrahim. Well, Ali knew a man who wanted to work on the railway line and who was good at speaking and they let him come forward instead.’

  ‘Was his name Wahid?’ asked Owen.

  As Owen approached the station he saw that a train was in. It was coming from Cairo, however, and no use to him. He was surprised, though, to see Mahmoud getting off.

  Mahmoud, too, was disconcerted. He hesitated, gave Owen a slight bow with his head, and hurried past.

  Owen was annoyed. Surely they had been friends for too long to mess about like this? On an impulse he turned and hurried after Mahmoud. Mahmoud heard the footsteps and looked round guardedly.

  ‘Are you going to the village? I have just come from there. I picked up one or two things-perhaps I could discuss them with you?’

  Mahmoud instantly warmed. Quick to perceive a slight, especially when it came from the British, he was also quick to respond to a sympathetic initiative. In fact, he tended to overrespond, especially when it came from Owen.

  ‘I will stop. Where I was going does not matter. No, it does not matter at all. You are going back to Cairo? I will come with you!’

  ‘No, no!’ protested Owen. ‘I will walk a little of the way with you. You were going to the village?’

  ‘To the Tree. But I cannot allow you-’

  After some while it was agreed that it was easier for Owen to accompany Mahmoud rather than vice versa and they set out across the fields. Owen looked to see if Leila was still there but she was not.

  He was relieved to find that Mahmoud was still taking an interest in the village end of things. It had seemed that his attention was entirely on the railway and Owen felt that was unlikely to be productive.

  He told Mahmoud what he had learned from his conversation with Leila. He hesitated for a moment over whether to tell him about the Nationalist meetings, but then decided that he would.

  ‘So you see,’ he said, ‘there is this connection between Ibrahim and Ali.’

  ‘The fact that they were friends,’ said Mahmoud, thinking, ‘wouldn’t stop the brothers from exacting revenge. Revenge overrides everything in the Arab code of honour.’

  ‘All the same-’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mahmoud, ‘I am glad you told me.’

  ‘And then there is the bit about the dispute, you know, the one on the railway that you are interested in, when Ibrahim acted as spokesman. I had been wondering why Ibrahim had acted as spokesman and not Wahid.’

  ‘I made too much of that,’ muttered Mahmoud.

  ‘Well, I’ve probably been making too much of Wahid.’

  ‘You were right, though. About the Nationalist connection.’

  ‘But how important is it? So Wahid is a Nationalist. So are half a million other Egyptians.’

  The mutual concessions restored their old relationship and by the time they reached the village they were talking happily.

  ‘But you were going on to the Tree?’

  ‘Well, yes. I wanted to see the place without so many people there.’

  ‘I’m afraid-’ began Owen guiltily.

  But then Mahmoud saw the Tree with its guarding legions.

  ‘What-?’

  Owen explained.

  ‘And they are guarding the Tree against the French?’ said Mahmoud, amazed.

  ‘And each other, yes.’

  The guarding cohorts seemed for the time being, however, to have struck up an amicable alliance. They had found a brazier from somewhere and fuelled it with dried dung from around the well. The bitter fumes drifted across towards them. Daniel, the Copt, emerged from the balsam trees leading a donkey.

  ‘Well, I’m off now,’ he said, perching himself on the back of his donkey. ‘Otherwise I won’t get home in the light. There may be bad men about. Keep your eyes open!’ he said to the Copts. ‘I’ll be back in the morning.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said the Copts. ‘It will still be here.’

  They watched him go.

  ‘Mean bastard,’ they said. ‘You’d think he’d have found us a chicken or two!’

  ‘Isa’s a mean bastard, too,’ said one of the Sons of Islam. ‘I reckon he’s forgotten about us entirely.’

  ‘The government’s mean bastard, too,’ said the policeman, looking at Owen.

  ‘All right,’ said Owen, ‘I’ll get somebody from the village to bring you up something.’

  The men settled down around the brazier.

  Mahmoud shrugged, then turned and walked a little way away and began looking round him. Owen knew he was trying to visualize what had happened.

  But it had happened at night, thought Owen. There had been nothing to see. There had only been sounds in the darkness.

  Over in the balsam trees around the well there was a little scurry and two goats came bounding out. Owen went across and found the old goatherd lying under a tree.

  ‘Still here, then?’

  ‘We’ve been over to Tel-el-Hasan for a couple of days,’ said the old man. ‘We’d have stayed longer but somebody had been there before us.’

  ‘Eaten all the food, had they?’

  ‘They’ve taken the lowest shoots. We can do better here.’

  Owen sat down beside him. The heat had gone out of the sun now and the shadows were creeping over the sand.

  ‘Tel-el-Hasan? Not many people go between there and here, do they?�
�

  ‘Only the Copt.’

  ‘You remember the night the man was found on the railway line?’

  The old man nodded.

  And you heard voices up here by the Tree?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Earlier that night, perhaps just when it was getting dark, did you see anyone coming over here from Tel-el-Hasan?’

  The old man shook his head.

  ‘A man, perhaps, or two men?’

  ‘I saw no one.’

  ‘Or even,’ Owen persisted, ‘a man and a woman? You said you had heard a man and a woman talking up by the Tree.’

  ‘I heard. I did not see.’

  ‘But earlier?’

  The old man considered.

  ‘I remember seeing no one,’ he said finally.

  Owen nodded. Mahmoud had probably already asked the questions.

  ‘The goats were restless,’ said the old man. ‘It was a bad night.’

  Owen made sympathetic noises. Up by the Tree, Mahmoud had walked off at a tangent and now was looking back at the spot where, according to the tracker, the attack had taken place. Owen guessed he was trying to work out how the two, the man and the woman, had approached. They must have been waiting by the Tree. But why had Ibrahim gone there anyway?

  ‘It was a bad night,’ said the old man again. ‘The goats were restless. There was no quieting them down. First, the people. Then the bird.’

  ‘Bird?’ said Owen.

  ‘There was a bird about. An ostrich.’

  ‘You saw it?’

  ‘No. But the goats knew. That was why they were restless.’

  ‘When was this? About the time that you heard the people talking?’

  ‘No. After.’

  Puzzled, Owen went to join Mahmoud.

  It was getting dark now and if they did not leave soon they might find it difficult to trace their way back across the fields to the station.

  As they left the village behind they saw a long line of people coming across the desert. They were leading donkeys and camels heaped high with packs and some of them were carrying banners.

  Owen and Mahmoud stopped to watch them pass.

  ‘Have you thought,’ said Mahmoud, ‘that the concentration of pilgrims will be at its highest at just the moment that the new railway reaches Heliopolis?’

  Chapter 10

  Owen had not; but other people, it soon appeared, had. One of the Mamur Zapt’s duties was to read the press for material of a politically inflammatory nature. Splashed across the front page of one of the most popular Nationalist newspapers the following morning was a heavy-breathing article drawing attention to the fact and making much of the insensitivity of the government and of foreign businessmen in allowing such a thing to happen. ‘Surely,’ the article concluded, ‘someone could have foreseen how greatly traditional religious susceptibilities would be offended by such an untimely intrusion at an important moment of spiritual preparation.’

  Owen had just put the newspaper down when the phone rang. It was the Syndicate.

  ‘Have you seen-?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Owen wearily.

  ‘We wouldn’t want everything to go wrong now. Not when we’re so close to completion.’

  ‘ Are you so close to completion?’

  ‘Another couple of weeks. Working Fridays will make all the difference.’

  The railwaymen had in the end decided not to strike. They were too near the end of their contracts to want to lose money.

  The railway, then, would be finished on time; and that would certainly be while the pilgrims were still congregated at Birket-el-Hadj. It took them several weeks to gather, not as long as in the past, when the first pilgrims would arrive months before departure, but long enough for them to be a considerable presence in the neighbourhood for some time.

  But how close would the terminus of the railway actually be to Birket-el-Hadj?

  ‘Not very close,’ said the man from the Syndicate. ‘We’re ending it in Heliopolis. Quite near to the racecourse, as it happens.’

  But distance, like so many other things, was blurred by the paper’s feverish prose, and the next day another article appeared recording, with satisfaction, the volume of protest the paper had received about the foreigners’ determination to press ahead and calling for a public demonstration at the Pont de Limoun the following evening.

  The demonstration, coincidentally, was timed to start at exactly the moment that Mr Rabbiki, the veteran Nationalist politician, was due to initiate debate in the Assembly on the question he had put. The question, of course, was to do with Ibrahim and not with the arrival of the railway at Heliopolis, but Owen had no doubt that Mr Rabbiki’s broad brush would tar widely.

  ‘Any problems?’ he asked Paul.

  ‘Nothing that we can’t handle,’ said Paul confidently, ‘if you can handle it at your end.’

  Owen’s end was the demonstration. It was far larger than the previous one. The Nationalist Party had pulled out all the stops and there were banners everywhere, a properly constructed platform for speakers, speakers of stature and a bodyguard of even greater stature to protect them, together with cohorts of supporters marched in for the occasion.

  Owen, too, had pulled out all the stops and had policemen at all street corners and lots more policemen close at hand but tucked away discreetly out of sight.

  He had stationed himself on the roof of one of the houses, from where he soon saw first that the number of demonstrators was greater than he had anticipated and then that the policemen he had left on the street corners had noticed this and prudently withdrawn into the cafes with their fellows.

  The square below was full of people, their faces ruddy in the light of the torches that many of them held. They were listening quietly and attentively. Owen was always impressed by this, more impressed than he usually was by what was served out to them. They had a kind of hunger, the same hunger that Ali and Ibrahim had shown.

  And patience, too, the long patience of the Egyptian fellahin, patience enough to listen for hours to the inflated rhetoric, the got-up emotion, about issues that were in the end unreal. What did they care about when the new railway would get to Heliopolis? What, for that matter, did the Nationalists care, either? The whole thing was being stage-managed just in order to create difficulty for the government.

  But perhaps, thought Owen, listening with half an ear as the speeches entered their third hour, that was where the real issue came in. For what the political manoeuvring was ultimately about was who was going to govern Egypt. Who was going to do the stage-managing-Mr Rabbiki with his doomed question or Paul, behind the scenes, getting the Khedive and his Ministers to act to a script that was written in London?

  But, hello, what was this? Something was going wrong with the script, or at least with his part of it! Over at the back of the crowd, in one corner, something was going on. The crowd was swirling around, breaking apart. Fighting? Was that fighting? He trained his field glasses.

  Yes, fighting. He could see the clubs and sticks. But not among themselves. Someone was coming in from outside. It looked as if a great wedge had suddenly been driven into the back of the crowd. Surely his men had not come out without orders?

  He’d have their blood for this! He turned and made for the outside steps leading down from the roof.

  But wait! It wasn’t them. They weren’t in uniform. Who the hell were they? What the hell was going on?

  Owen had his runners at the bottom of the steps, waiting for instructions. Each one knew the cafe where he had to go. They went at once. Within minutes, policemen were pouring out of the cafe.

  The Cairo constables were for the most part country boys, chosen for their size and strength and, some alleged, their simplicity. Given orders to clear a square, they would.

  They had, moreover, the advantage of surprise. The crowd, confused already by the disturbance at the rear, split apart under their charge and the separate parts were forced back upon the exits from the square. Many of t
he torches fell down or were extinguished and in the darkness it was hard to see anything. There was only the pressure of bodies driving people to the edges of the square, the confused shouting and screaming and the incessant blast of the police whistles.

  There was hardly any resistance. The crowd was largely unarmed. There were the usual few with knives and clubs but, hemmed in by people and in the darkness, they were unable to use them.

  Only in one part of the square, where the original wedge had burst into the crowd, was there serious fighting. The men there were armed and were holding the constables back.

  Owen gathered a few extra men and ran across. There were no torches here, but in the dim light from a nearby cafe he could see a struggling throng of men.

  ‘Police!’ he shouted. ‘Back!’

  There was a moment’s uncertainty and then men detached themselves from the throng and came back towards him.

  ‘Form into line!’ he shouted.

  The men spread out on both sides of him. For a moment they stood breathing heavily and looking at the dark mass of men ahead of them.

  ‘Line: Advance!’

  The line moved forward. This was the moment when training and discipline told. Or so Owen hoped.

  Someone pushed up beside him.

  ‘You might need this.’

  He recognized the voice. It was one of his plainclothesmen, a Greek.

  He felt a gun being pushed into his hand.

  Suddenly, things were different.

  ‘Line: Halt!’ he shouted. And then, in a moment of inspiration: ‘Prepare to fire!’

  The constables halted, obedient but confused. Batons were all they had.

  ‘This is the Mamur Zapt,’ he called out to the dark mass in front of him. ‘I order you to disperse! If you do not, I shall open fire. I shall fire one shot into the air to show you that I am armed.’

  The sharp crack came almost at once.

  There was a sudden silence in the square.

  ‘Disperse immediately! Or I shall open fire.’

  He would, too.

  But there was no need. The dark line ahead of him wavered and broke. In an instant men were running.