The Men Behind Page 12

  “Did Hamid speak to you of him?”

  Owen addressed the question to the man but it was aimed at the woman. It was the woman who answered.

  “He said only that he was his friend. That was enough for us.”

  “And so you took him in?”

  “We took him in,” said the man.

  Owen considered.

  “He did not speak of his family?”

  The man looked at his wife.

  “No,” said the woman.

  The man shook his head.

  “No,” he said.

  “Nor where he came from?”

  “No. In the house he said little.”

  “But outside?”

  “He and Hamid were always talking. They talked together, though, not with others.”

  “The young are like that,” said Owen.

  “I wish the boy had never come.” The woman lifted her voice. “It was a black day for us when he came to Hamada. Had he not come my son would have been still alive.”

  “You said it was his fault?”

  “And so it was. My son was a quiet boy, a good boy. The whole village knows that. What happened to him when he went to the great city? When he came back to us he was changed.”

  “In what way—changed?”

  The woman hesitated. “He was different. He was—bitter.”

  “Against the Pasha?”

  The woman drew her burka over her face.

  “Yes,” she said, “to our shame.”

  “And this other boy?”

  “Like him.”

  “They talked together of this?”

  “I think so. I did not hear them. Only once, when they were by the house. I upbraided them and after that they went into the fields. They always went into the fields.”

  The woman’s voice broke. The other women in the doorway muttered among themselves. One of them began to ululate softly. Owen knew he would have to stop.

  “In the fields,” he said, “the men saw iron. Did the boys have iron with them in the house?”

  “No,” said the woman. “If they had I would have seen it and I would not have allowed it.”

  “Then how—”

  “It was the brigands,” said the Mamur. “It must have been the brigands.”

  The women began to ululate together.

  ***

  The sugar cane ended abruptly and gave way first, briefly, to thorn scrub and then to sand. Close to the fields the sand was red and gravelly but almost at once, within twenty yards, it became thin and silvery. It washed over the feet and into Owen’s shoes. It was too hot for the villagers to walk barefoot.

  The Mamur led them to the edge of the sand and then stopped.

  “Wasn’t it somewhere around here?” he said to the villagers.

  “Surely not!” objected one of the villagers. “We came the other way.”

  “Did we? It was a long time ago.”

  “Show me,” said Owen.

  The little procession turned right and walked back along the edge of the sugar cane. After some time another track emerged onto the desert.

  “We came up this one.”

  “So it was somewhere around here?”

  “I think so.” The villager suddenly sounded less confident.

  Owen looked out across the sand. The desert stretched out to the horizon, empty and featureless except for the occasional stunted thorn tree.

  The trackers had already begun patrolling the sand. They walked in line abreast, a few yards apart, their eyes fixed on the ground ahead of them. They had already marked off in their minds a stretch of desert extending from one track to the other and a little beyond.

  The villagers watched from the sugar cane.

  Twilight came early in this part of Egypt. The trackers worked until then and then came to Owen.

  “OK,” he said resignedly. They would have to carry on the next day. He cursed the Mamur under his breath. This was taking more time than he wanted.

  The trackers came for him even before the sun had risen and they went up together through the sugarcane fields. The sun was just beginning to tinge the desert red as the trackers set to work.

  This early in the morning it was not only pleasant, it was beautiful. Owen felt a twinge of nostalgia for his first few months in Egypt when he had been posted up to Alexandria to learn the ropes under Garvin and had ridden on desert patrols.

  It was only a twinge, for Owen was not really a desert man. There were men in the Government’s service who liked to spend all their time in the desert. Funny little Plumley might even be one of these. They were in the tradition of the great English Arabists, who were typically more at home among the simple Bedawin of the desert than among the more sophisticated people of the town.

  Owen, however, was a town man through and through. He was a sociable Welshman who liked talking to people and enjoyed the bustle and variety and complexity of the big city. For him the life of the boulevard café, not that of the campfire.

  All the same he loved the early morning in Egypt, the cool, the quiet, the staggeringly beautiful colors. And this morning, as he walked alongside the sugar cane, and watched the sparrows dodging in and out, he felt he might almost settle for a comfortable provincial office.

  This indulgent feeling wore off as the sun rose. By mid-morning it was baking hot. Even through his shoes he could feel the heat of the sand. He moved in closer to the shade of the sugar cane but even here the warmth trapped in the dense vegetation seeped out at him making the sweat run down his face and turning his shirt into a sodden mass. The birds stopped singing.

  The trackers walked up and down, impervious, apparently, to the heat, oblivious of the birds. But when the sun had risen until it was directly overhead even they retreated into the shade.

  The shade was where the Mamur and some old men from the village were already to be found. The active men were at work in the fields. Owen went round the old men individually, talking to them, checking the account of the explosion that had emerged the previous day.

  He asked them about the boy, Hamid. After the almost ritual “he was a good boy,” Owen sensed qualifications. The qualifications referred to the somewhat changed Hamid who had returned from the city after his first year at the School of Engineering to spend the summer back at home.

  Nothing very explicit was said but Hamid had obviously picked up some of the radical notions current among the students and said enough about them to disturb the conservative villagers. Perhaps realizing that, after a while he had stopped saying anything and with his friend, the other boy, Salah, had taken to going for long walks up beside the sugar cane and out on to the desert.

  About the other boy the villagers said even less. Again Owen sensed reservation. “He did not come from our village,” was about the most the men would say, but in that expression of difference Owen detected condemnation and rejection. “It was the other boy’s fault,” Hamid’s mother had said. Whether that was true or not, the blame generally was placed on him.

  After the afternoon break the trackers went back to their patrolling. Owen walked down to the village and found someone who would take him by boat to a village a couple of miles upstream. The village was also on the estate and counted as Hamada; and it was where the most recent boy to leave the estate for education in the great city had come from: Abu, one of the boys killed in the café.

  The parents were still numb from the shock. This boy had grown up with them for all these years and then had gone to the great city. And there he had died. It was remote, unbelievable.

  The remoteness, the unbelievableness, was about all that they could express. They had not seen their son since he had left for the city. He had not written—he could write but they could not read. Others would have read the letter to them, but the boy had not written. It would have been exp
ensive, anyway, to send a letter. They had heard nothing of him. And then this.

  The other villagers confirmed what there was to confirm. Abu had been a hardworking boy, not interested in politics, not interested in very much, plucked out by the Pasha and sent up to the city with the same bewilderment as his parents now shared in their loss.

  Owen asked the question he had come to ask. Had Abu known Hamid? The villagers could not recollect that he had. He might have met him but the difference in age between them—Abu would have been three years younger than Hamid—mattered at that point in their lives and they would not have been close.

  Besides, in walking terms, in the heat, the distance between the villages was significant. To people on horseback, on camels, to the Pasha and his men, the villages were close together, hardly distinguishable as separate parts of the estate. To fellahin in the fields, working all their lives near their own village, the other village was in a different country.

  Abu would, however, have heard of the explosion; might, indeed, have heard the explosion.

  Owen stayed on in the village until the young men came back from the fields. He wanted to talk to boys who had known Abu, were part of the young men’s grapevine. He asked them the same question.

  They thought it possible that the two had at least spoken. Again, though, there was the gap in age. What would they have spoken about? Hamid at that time, over two years ago, would have been an exalted creature, singled out by the Pasha to go up to the great city. Abu would have been a small boy, not knowing yet that he would take the same path, not even quite understanding in what the distinction might lie, knowing only that Hamid was a remarkable man and remarkably fortunate.

  The other boy, Salah? They did not remember him. Perhaps the two, Hamid and Salah, had come to the village on one of their long walks. Who knew?

  Who might they have spoken to? Owen asked. Were there other boys of Hamid’s age? Or might they have spoken to the teacher? They might have spoken to the teacher but he could not recollect it. As for the other boys, well, they thought they could remember Hamid but certainly nothing of what he said. It was not anything special.

  Political? They looked at the ground and shuffled their feet.

  Political, then. But it could have been only brief. And at this distance in time they could remember no names.

  Owen had to take his boat back. No boatmen like traveling by dark. He had, anyway, he felt, got all that he was likely to get.

  It wasn’t much. It was not much at all that he had gained from his visit to Hamada. Down there in the vast, monotonous sugarcane fields and the intense, dripping heat, with the great desert stretching out on the sides into a void, definiteness had a habit of seeping away. A boy killed in an explosion had become two boys. The place of the explosion, so obvious in Cairo, had slipped way into uncertainty here. The evidence it might contain might now be buried under the sand.

  How long could he afford to spend down here? He himself would soon have to go back. Who knew what might be happening?

  The trackers, too, how long could he leave them? They were expensive and there was work for them to do elsewhere. How long could he afford to have them combing the desert fruitlessly?

  He had expected to come down, find the spot and make his inquiries at the most in the space of a couple of days. It was already certain that it would take longer.

  And what did he hope to gain? From a few fragments of metal he hoped to be able to tell whether the bomb was of a type similar to the one thrown at Nuri Pasha and the one left in the café. What would that tell him?

  From a few whitened bones he hoped to find out—what?

  Was it worth it?

  And yet, and yet, the parallels had become sharper, if anything. In each case a student—two students, in fact—and a bomb. If the bomb was of the same type it could not be coincidence. And Hamada was the common ingredient. He would not leave it yet.

  When he stepped out of the boat he found the Mamur waiting for him.

  “You must come quickly,” the Mamur said agitatedly. “The Pasha is expecting you.”

  High up on the bank a man was waiting with two horses. He led one of the horses over to Owen.

  “The Pasha bids you welcome. His house and all he has is yours. He is waiting to receive you.”

  The house was about three miles away through the sugar cane and it was quite dark by the time they reached it. They rode through a gate in a high mudbrick wall and dismounted in an enclosed courtyard.

  Servants with lamps escorted Owen into a long inner room with divans, on one of which a man was lying.

  “Why, Captain Owen, it is you!” a familiar voice said in surprised tones. “What brings you to these uncomfortable, oh, so uncomfortable, parts?”

  It was Ali Osman Pasha.

  ***

  “I followed your advice,” said Ali Osman, “and retired to my estate.”

  “This is your estate?”

  Ali Osman looked around with an expression of distaste.

  “Yes,” he said, “unfortunately.”

  The room was if anything slightly larger than the corresponding one in the Pasha’s Cairo house. Because of the heat there were fewer carpets on the walls, but the floor was as elaborately tiled, and over in the darkness a fountain was playing. Among the silk and leather cushions occasional little silver boxes caught the light from the lamps the servants were holding.

  “It is so awful here,” Ali Osman complained. “The people are barbarous, there is nothing to do, no one to talk to.” He looked at Owen hopefully. “And what are you doing here, my friend? Surely you have not come here for your health too?”

  Owen decided to tell him only half the truth.

  “I am working on a case,” he said.

  “A case? Down here? Alas, my friend, you must have fallen out of favor. Like me,” said the Pasha gloomily.

  “The case concerns someone on your estate. A boy.”

  “A boy?” said Ali Osman, reviving. “How interesting!”

  “A student, Hamid, who killed himself with a bomb two years ago.”

  “That is much less interesting,” said Ali Osman. “In fact that is not interesting at all.”

  “You remember the boy?”

  “Barely. Is he worth remembering?”

  “You paid for his education.”

  “A big mistake,” said Ali Osman. “Obviously.”

  “What led you to select him?”

  “Did I select him?”

  “Someone selected him.”

  “It was probably one of my servants.”

  “You had nothing to do with it yourself?”

  “I probably saw him,” Ali Osman granted. He frowned in concentration. “Did he have large ears?”

  “You sent him to the School of Engineering.”

  “Where apparently the only thing he learned was how to make a bomb.”

  “Why did you send him to the School of Engineering?”

  “I send them all there. In the hope that they might learn something useful. Useful to me, of course, not to them.”

  “Do you send someone every year?”

  “After that unfortunate incident,” said Ali Osman drily, “a gap seemed advisable.”

  “A strange incident,” said Owen, “especially strange in that it happened at Hamada. In Cairo, yes, it would be nothing out of the ordinary. But in Hamada!”

  “It just goes to show,” said Ali Osman, “that even on your estate you can’t be safe. I should have remembered that when you suggested coming here.”

  “It was surely not intended for you.”

  “Wasn’t it? Who else in Hamada is worth bombing?”

  “Were you here at the time?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then—”

  “They were preparing,” said Ali Osman, “g
etting ready for the next time I came.”

  “They knew you would be coming.”

  “Some time I would come,” said Ali Osman. “It might be years—I visit Hamada as infrequently as possible—but they would be ready. You don’t know these people. They are terrible people, backward. They store things in their hearts. For years. And then one day—poof!” He spread his hands.

  “They would surely not be making a bomb just on the off chance—”

  “Education,” said Ali Osman, “that’s at the root of it. It’s a big mistake trying to educate these people. It just fills their heads with idle nonsense. Or worse. And then they come back to places like Hamada and there’s nothing for them to do, so they have time to think about the terrible things they have heard. And then if they are particularly inclined they turn to making bombs.”

  “Invariably?”

  “In my experience. Yes,” said Ali Osman. “Education’s at the root of it. It must be stopped.”

  “Surely—”

  “That’s why I’ve given it up. Educating these boys from the estate. It’s wasted on them. It only spoils them.”

  “Actually,” said Owen, “you haven’t given it up. You only stopped it for a year or two.”

  “Really? Don’t tell me I’ve sent another boy up to the School?”

  “Yes. He—”

  “He must be brought back. I’ll have him sent home at once.”

  “It’s too late. He’s dead.”

  “Really?”

  “A student café was bombed. He was one of the victims.”

  “Another one! This is frightful!”

  “It’s slightly different. In this case the boy was merely a victim.”

  “All the same,” said Ali Osman, “we can’t have this sort of thing. I don’t want my people mixed up in anything to do with bombs. It gives them the wrong ideas.”

  Owen went on to explain the circumstances. Ali Osman was already slightly bored, however. He clapped his hands and servants started bringing in supper: soup, curried fowl, quail, fish stuffed with crab, mutton and salad, beef with eggplants, asparagus, macaroni, grapes, figs, pears, Camembert and coffee.

  ***

  The desert was less featureless than it appeared. From time to time the trackers pointed out objects to him: the carcass of a bird or dog, the ribcage sticking up through the sand; a broken jar, the remains of a cane basket, an ant-eaten saddle belt. They did not find any human bones, however, nor any metal.