The car pressed forward into the crowd.
People, panic-stricken, began to fall out of its way. Those at the edge of the crowd started to run off up the sidestreets.
The car came to a halt. The policemen jumped out of the car and fanned out, guns at the ready.
‘Disperse!’ shouted McPhee. ‘At once.’
‘It’s all right,’ shouted Owen.
McPhee looked up, bewildered.
‘Owen! What are you doing here?’
What, indeed, thought Owen.
***
‘And when I arrived,’ said McPhee, ‘there was Owen orchestrating the crowd!’
‘Managing it,’ said Owen. ‘I was getting it to calm down.’
‘It didn’t look like that to me,’ said McPhee.
‘You should have been there a moment or two earlier!’
‘I came as quickly as I could,’ said McPhee, taking this as a reproach. ‘The car was being cleaned.’
Garvin sighed. He was the Commandant of the Cairo Police, weary in the ways of Egyptian policing.
‘As far as I can see, there was no actual violence.’
‘Three constables have lodged a complaint,’ said McPhee stiffly. ‘Undue violence perpetrated against their persons.’
‘She kicked them up the backside,’ said Owen.
‘That’s what I meant, sir,’ said McPhee, turning to Garvin. ‘Whose side is he on?’
‘If that was the extent of the violence,’ said Garvin, ‘I’ve seen worse cases: about twenty times a day.’
‘It’s the principle of the thing,’ said McPhee severely.
Garvin sighed again.
‘Is there any reason,’ he asked, ‘why we should give any time to this whatsoever?’
Owen hesitated. ‘Yes, there is.’
He told them about the possible development of the Derb Aiah area. McPhee, especially, listened with interest.
‘But that would take in the tekke,’ he said.
‘The little mosque with the blue tiles? All sparkle?’
‘Yes.’
McPhee knew his mosques. He was an enthusiast less about things architectural than about things religious and collected shrines and feast-days and old Cairo saints with avidity. Garvin tolerated this eccentricity as he tolerated Owen’s.
‘It would be terrible if that was to go,’ McPhee said.
‘You think it could cause trouble?’ Garvin asked Owen.
‘I think there’s something else that would cause more.’
He told them about the proposed north–south road.
‘Through the City!’ said McPhee, appalled.
‘It’ll never happen!’ said Garvin dismissively.
‘There’s a planning application in.’
‘Doesn’t mean a thing.’
‘The Khedive’s keen.’
‘Means even less.’
‘I don’t know about that. It could be another case like the Agricultural Society.’
‘What?’ said Garvin, caught off-balance and looking at Owen as if he had suddenly realized that he was suffering from sunstroke.
‘When he couldn’t get anywhere, he got on and did it himself.’
He told them about the founding of the Society.
Garvin looked at his watch.
‘Yes, well, thank you. Can I suggest you follow up other things? Both of you.’
***
‘Yussef,’ said Owen severely, ‘this is the second time in a month.’
‘This is the first time, effendi. The other time was last month.’
‘No, it wasn’t. I’ve written it down in my little book. See?’
Yussef, the office orderly, could not read but could recognize the large letter which began his name; and also, alas, the figures alongside it.
‘Effendi, I need it to buy seed.’
‘That’s what you told me last time. You said it was the planting season and that you needed the money to buy seed. What happened to it? What did you do with the money?’
‘I used it to buy seed. Some of it. But I owed my brother some money, effendi. And also my sister. And then there was my uncle and aunt—’
‘Look, I’m not supporting the whole family.’
He knew, however, that he was. Yussef, like many of the other orderlies, had left his native village and moved into the town in search of better paid employment. He still retained a strip of land in the village, however, which was now worked by his wife and children with occasional support from the rest of his family. The rest of the family were as much in debt as Yussef himself.
He regularly came to Owen for an advance on pay before the end of the month. Owen didn’t mind that as he thought a month was a long time to wait for people as lowly-paid as the orderlies. He did feel, however, a certain responsibility for Yussef and tried to see that he didn’t get too much into debt.
Unfortunately, the Government was not the only body to which Yussef owed money and there was not much Owen could do about the others. He lectured Yussef sternly and Yussef looked doleful but that was as far as it went.
‘Two advances in a month! Yussef, if I gave you that, what would you have left? We would come to the end of the month and then there would be nothing. You would have to borrow again.’
‘That’s right, effendi,’ said Yussef hopefully.
‘Think of your children: what would they live on?’
‘If you lend me the money, effendi, then with it I can buy hens and they will lay eggs. They can eat eggs.’
‘I thought you wanted to spend it on seed?’
‘Seed,’ said Yussef vaguely, ‘and hens.’
Owen gave up and agreed to advance Yussef a small sum. If they went on like this he would soon be paying him weekly.
That might be a good idea. He knew enough, however, about the state of Yussef’s finances to realize that whatever he did would not go far towards solving Yussef’s problem. The real problem was the huge backlog of debt that Yussef, like most fellahin, had accumulated over the years.
It was the responsibility of the paying off that sum from his earnings on the land that had driven Yussef to seek work in the City: that and the fact that work on the land was hard and he would much rather his wife did it than him.
A job in Government service was the great prize for which everyone strove. The hours were short, the work, to men accustomed to labouring long hours in the fields, easy; the pay, though not high, was certain and regular. It was a meal-ticket for life; and quite a lot of people lived on every meal-ticket.
Yussef went off happily, while Owen thought about seed.
***
‘You’d better speak to my father,’ said Zeinab.
***
Nikos was on the phone when Owen entered his office. He glanced up.
‘The Parquet,’ he said.
It was Mr. Fehmi.
‘About the, um, diary,’ he said.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s been, um, found.’
‘Found?’
‘Yes. In one of the filing cabinets. We must have missed it.’
There was a little silence.
‘I see,’ said Owen.
***
Mr. Fehmi met him with an apologetic smile.
‘These things happen,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders.
No pages had been cut out, as Owen had half expected, nor, at cursory glance, were there any erasures. Crossings out, though vigorous and complete, might have been Fingari’s own. Nevertheless, Owen knew now that he would not find the diary particularly helpful. All the same…
‘I would like my people to work on it,’ he said.
‘Of course. I would like mine to, too,’ said Fehmi. ‘Here, perhaps?’
The next time Owen looked in there
were three men working in the office: Georgiades, sitting at Osman Fingari’s desk with the Appointments Diary open in front of him; Mr. Fehmi, beside him, peering over his shoulder: and a third man, whom Owen did not know, one of Fehmi’s presumably, taking notes.
‘A working lunch,’ said Mr. Fehmi. ‘The same people.’
Georgiades noted the date.
‘The twenty-third,’ said Mr. Fehmi, clicking his fingers. The third man wrote it down.
‘Any new names?’ asked Owen.
‘A few.’
He looked over Georgiades’s shoulder.
‘Perkiades?’
‘Bank,’ said Mr. Fehmi.
‘I have him already,’ said Georgiades.
‘He’s all right,’ said Mr. Fehmi. ‘He works for the Bank.’
‘Does that make him all right?’ asked Georgiades.
Mr. Fehmi smiled.
Georgiades went on to the next page. Every time he made a note, Mr. Fehmi clicked his fingers and his minion recorded it too.
‘You are noting the crossings-out?’
‘Of course!’ said Georgiades, wide-eyed.
‘Mere accidents,’ said Mr. Fehmi, a little sharply.
‘Perhaps,’ said Georgiades.
‘Any references to Jabir?’ asked Owen.
Georgiades nodded.
‘Twice. Just the name. Written separately, not with the others. Occurs once with another name but it’s a bit separate and could be chance.’
‘What’s the name?’
‘Tufa.’
Mr. Fehmi clicked his fingers.
Georgiades came to the end of the entries and looked up.
‘Not much there,’ he said.
‘Only what you would expect,’ said Mr. Fehmi softly.
‘Then why was it taken?’ asked Owen.
Mr. Fehmi raised eyebrows.
‘Taken?’
‘Entre nous.’
‘Ah!’ Mr. Fehmi smiled and brushed the matter aside with his hand. ‘Are you not expecting too much?’ he asked. ‘A young man commits suicide. Personal pressure. Family pressure, perhaps. Would that appear in his diary? His Appointments Diary?’
‘If they were work pressures, perhaps.’
Mr. Fehmi gestured towards the diary.
‘Not much evidence of that, surely? Of course, it’s only appointments that appear in the diary. We don’t know what he did with the rest of his time. But, somehow, I do not get the impression that Mr. Fingari was collapsing from overwork.’
‘There are different kinds of pressure. Perhaps it was one big thing that he was worried about.’
‘Perhaps. But would you find evidence of that in his diary?’
‘There’s a lot of appointments to do with the Agricultural Bank,’ said Georgiades.
‘Is that surprising? It was an important part of his work. But perhaps you’re right, Captain Owen. Maybe he was worried about that. It was the first time he had worked on anything as big. It would not be surprising. But…’
He stopped and spread his hands.
‘If you’re right, Captain Owen, why continue the prying? A young man. Heavy responsibility for the first time. Difficulties, perhaps. Conscientious. Worries about it. It gets on top of him. Sad, tragic, the Department should ask itself questions. But do we need to go into it any more, Captain Owen? Why pry? Cannot we just leave it at that?’
‘We could,’ said Owen, ‘were it not for the diary. Why was it taken?’
‘I have a suggestion about that,’ said Mr. Fehmi.
‘Yes.’
‘Prudence. Excessive, misguided prudence. Just that.’
‘I never like these office jobs,’ complained Georgiades as they left together. ‘I never feel I get the hang of what’s really going on. They go about things in a different way. I’ve got these names, right? I’ll take them away and check them out. But that’s not the way they’d go about it.’
‘No?’
‘No. What they would do is put them into the files. Or something. That’s what we ought to be doing.’
‘Checking them against the files? Well, why not?’
***
‘I’ll tell you why not,’ said Georgiades late the next day, pushing away the file in front of him. ‘Because it makes my head ache, because I’m not getting anywhere, because I feel as if I’m in a quicksand, sinking, sinking. The sand is up to here!’ He clutched his throat dramatically. ‘Here!’ he clasped his hand to his mouth. ‘Here!’ He held his hand above his head and pounded his head heavily with the other. He began to cough and splutter.
‘For God’s sake!’ said Owen, and fetched him a glass of water.
‘Well, are you getting anywhere?’ Georgiades challenged.
‘Not really,’ Owen admitted. ‘I can tie names to particular parts of the Agricultural Bank stuff but I don’t know that that gets us much further. This chap Perkiades, for example, appears to be concerned with debt collection. This chap Iskander is something to do with capital bids. But what does that tell us?’
‘Exactly!’ said Georgiades. ‘It tells us nothing. And you know why? It’s because we don’t think like them. We’re normal, decent people. We go home at the end of the day and love our wives. These blokes don’t. They just stay here, working—’
‘Fingari wasn’t like that,’ Owen objected.
‘He was just a beginner. He’d have soon learned. No, I tell you what it is. We’re the wrong blokes to be doing this sort of thing. You need somebody who thinks like them, you need somebody like—’
He stopped. His eyes met Owen’s
‘Well, it takes one to catch one, doesn’t it?’
Chapter Eight
Nikos, once he had recovered from the shock of being asked to set foot outside the Bab el Khalk, was like a fish in water.
He approached the office in a quite different way from Owen and Georgiades. For them there was the action then there was the recording of it. The recording went into the files so what the files were, essentially, was history.
For Nikos, the files were part of the action. They fed into the flows of which, at bottom, the office was constituted.
Nikos saw everything in terms of flows. The first thing he did when he sat down at Osman Fingari’s desk was to call for the office clerk.
‘Reconstitute Fingari’s in-tray,’ he commanded.
‘It has been redistributed,’ said the clerk snootily.
‘You can redistribute it afterwards,’ said Nikos.
Next, he wanted to see all the papers that had passed through Fingari’s in-tray since he had joined the office.
‘All?’ gasped the clerk.
‘All,’ said Nikos, settling himself more firmly in Osman Fingari’s chair.
The clerk swallowed. ‘It will take time,’ he said weakly.
‘Not too much time,’ snapped Nikos, relishing his new role. In the Bab el Khalk he did not often get the opportunity to exercise absolute power.
The files began to accumulate on Nikos’s desk. Owen was surprised to see how many there were.
‘That is because the paper comes in and the paper goes out,’ said Nikos. ‘Only the exceptional thing is kept in Fingari’s own files: the things he was working on, perhaps.’
‘Like the Agricultural Bank?’
Nikos nodded.
‘Anything he’d finished working on would have been passed out. And that would include most of the routine stuff that he handled.’
The routine stuff was such things as applications for grants for land improvement, requests to register change of land use, complaints about water rights, notification of work required on levees, the high banks which enclosed the river and prevented flooding, orders to village headmen to undertake necessary repairs to local irrigation systems and so on.
Owen was i
mpressed at the volume; Nikos wasn’t.
‘Take him five minutes,’ he sniffed. He picked up a grant application.
‘See this? All he’d do would be glance at it, initial it and pass it on. One minute if he read slowly.’
‘What about that initialling? Would it be enough to authorize payment?’
‘Yes. But look at the size of the sum.’
Three pounds.
‘No one’s going to get rich on that, if that’s what you were thinking,’ said Nikos. ‘He’d only have limited signing authority. Anything big would have to go higher up.’
He rummaged through the files and produced a request to register change of land use.
‘Now this,’ he said, ‘is what they really have to watch. Somebody owns some land. It’s poor quality land, which in this country means it’s been assessed as unsuitable for growing cotton on. Change the assessment and the land value rockets immediately.’
‘Who does the assessing?’
‘A surveyor. But if you pay him enough you can get a surveyor to say anything. It’s the approval of the assessment that’s significant.’
‘And that’s done by—?’
‘The Ministry. It used to be done by the Land Commission but the volume of applications became so great—everyone in the country started trying it on—that they passed it to the Ministry.’
‘Do they have the expertise?’ asked Owen, thinking of the difference between the Department of Agriculture and the Khedivial Agricultural Society.
‘You don’t need expertise. Somebody owns a bit of desert. One day it rains, for the first time in a hundred years, and the next morning they’re at the Ministry asking for the land to be classified as permanently irrigated! Ninety per cent of the claims can be turned down automatically. But it still needs someone senior to turn them down.’
‘And that’s why it would come to Fingari?’
Nikos nodded.
‘And why it takes him only a couple of minutes.’
Owen felt, however, slightly relieved, both from Osman Fingari’s point of view and for the sake of the Ministry, that at least he had something to do.
Apart, that was, from what he did for the Agricultural Bank.
***
‘Will you stop jumping up and down like a yo-yo?’ Owen complained.
The Camel of Destruction Page 10
