The Mingrelian Conspiracy Page 17

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The explosives,’ said Owen. ‘They came into Suez, didn’t they? And you were going to collect them. When you’d got the money. Only it had to be in gold, so it was taking a bit of time. But there the explosives were, at Suez, just waiting for you and the money.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘You almost make me think,’ said Owen, ‘that you are not the ones who took them.’

  Djugashvili looked stunned.

  ‘Someone else?’ he whispered. Then he recovered. ‘Someone else!’ he said. ‘And they’ve got the explosives already?’ He laughed triumphantly. ‘Then it will go ahead! You cannot stop it now!’

  ‘If not you,’ said Owen, ‘then who? Have you got any idea?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Djugashvili. ‘I’ve got an idea!’

  ‘I want to know,’ said Owen.

  Djugashvili laughed, and was still laughing as he was taken to the cells.

  ***

  The men had come at four o’clock in the afternoon when only the most alert of Cairo’s citizens had risen from their post-prandial beds, and even these were still shaking the sleep from their eyes. The Nubian wrestler was possibly not one of the most alert and it was this, Selim had supposed, that had accounted for the slight delay before he arrived on the scene. In the interval Selim had fought like a lion. This was not just his own view but the view of the considerable number of spectators that gathered outside Mustapha’s café in a remarkably short space of time.

  According to Selim, he had been partaking of refreshment in the kitchen with Mustapha’s wife when the sound of splintering wood had drawn his attention to the main room at the front. He had entered it to find two men engaged in breaking up the furniture and Mustapha prudently scuttling for the stairs. Selim had drawn his baton and laid into the two men. A lucky blow on the elbow had virtually disabled one and Selim was left free to concentrate on giving the other a taste of justice. This was proceeding very satisfactorily when three other men had burst into the room.

  Things had then livened up appreciably. The expert Selim had found himself confronted by other experts. Had he been the average Cairo constable he would at this juncture sensibly have made for the back door. Selim, however, as he pointed out to Owen afterwards, was not the average Cairo constable. He was, first, bigger and, second, inclined to the robust. A mêlée with fists, feet, and furniture flying was exactly the situation in which he felt himself most at home, which was why, in fact, the inhabitants of his home village, after much experience, had pointed him strongly to a career in the Cairo constabulary and gone so far as to promise to supplement his wages if he stayed there. Faced with a challenge, and still smarting from Mustapha’s taunts over what he considered his failure on the previous occasion, the last thing Selim had in mind was retreating.

  Nevertheless, there were three of them, not to mention the two already lying groaning on the floor, and they were all, Selim soon recognized, as used as he was to this kind of thing. It was now, however, that his true colours were valiantly revealed. For he fought like a demented lion (lion, according to Selim, demented, according to the spectators). Furniture flew, chairs crashed, both on him and on his assailants, and after a hectic interval, his assailants stepped back to regroup.

  Two more men appeared.

  Mustapha’s wife ran back into the kitchen for boiling water. Selim, still defiant, but now breathing heavily and already somewhat battered, prepared to make his last stand.

  At which point the Nubian wrestler, risen, apparently, at last from his slumbers, waddled into the café.

  He picked up the two men nearest him, cracked their skulls together and threw them into opposite corners of the room. He picked up another and tied his arms and legs and, possibly, his neck—or so it looked to Owen when he came upon the scene shortly afterwards—into a knot. He bounced the fourth man first off the wall, then off the ceiling and finally off himself (it was the latter that proved the coup de grâce); and then advanced happily on the last man, who was by this time looking for the nearest exit.

  All this was very satisfactory, especially as there were two further men lying stunned outside. If only it had stopped there! Unfortunately, the Nubian wrestler, slow to rouse, was hard to quieten down again, and he was still throwing the men around when Owen arrived on the spot quite some minutes later, by which time, as Mustapha bitterly pointed out, the damage done to the café was far in excess of what it would have been if the gang had been allowed a free hand in the first place.

  Owen was only able to bring things to a halt by the expedient of removing the bodies one by one as they hit the wall, so that in the end the Nubian was left with nothing else to throw. He stood for a few moments looking around him in baffled surprise and then shambled out.

  ***

  Thus (roughly), was Selim’s perception of events, recounted afterwards as he stood covered with gore and glory in the kitchen with Mustapha’s wife sponging his wounds. It was not, however, entirely as he supposed. For one thing, the Nubian wrestler had not, in fact, been buried in his slumbers when the gang arrived; he had been sent on an errand by Mustapha.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t going to let that little twit go on his own, was I?’ said Mustapha, defending himself. ‘That tooth cost a lot of money.’

  The tooth was the one he had lost in the initial fracas at the café. Mustapha had made up his mind that the time had come to restore it to its rightful position and had sent Mekhmet with it to see the dentist with instructions to prepare it for reinsertion.

  ‘No sense in getting a new one, is there? Gold is gold.’

  In view of the tooth’s value, he had decided to provide Mekhmet with an escort, a factor which, as Selim, aggrieved, observed, had weakened the café’s defences at a crucial point and contributed in no small measure to the damage the café had sustained. Mustapha’s wife added in support that Mustapha had only himself to blame, for he had sent the two men out in the hottest part of the day when any reasonable man knew they could not be expected to hurry.

  Hurried they had not, for the wrestler found it necessary to stop at various points to refresh himself with cheap Sudanese marissa beer, with the result that as they were approaching home on their return journey he had been obliged to go up a side street to relieve his bladder. It had thus been Mekhmet alone who had entered the street just as the storyteller was pointing out the café to the gang. He had run back at once to fetch the wrestler but by then precious time had been lost.

  ‘Just a moment,’ said Owen. ‘Pointing out the café?’ Nonsense, said the storyteller. He had just been passing the time of day. Alternatively, supposing that they were in search of somewhere they could sit down and have a cup of coffee, he had merely been responding politely to their enquiries. Anyway, that little twit had got it wrong.

  ‘Would you like to talk to me here?’ asked Owen. ‘Or shall I send you with Selim to the Bab-el-Khalk and talk to you there?’

  After one glance at Selim, the storyteller decided that he would prefer to talk to Owen here, so Owen took him to an upstairs room—the room in which Mustapha had been lying when he had first seen him, posted Selim on the stairs to keep out the curious, and told Mustapha to get on with clearing up the café.

  Then he turned to the storyteller.

  ‘So, my friend,’ he said, ‘how does it work?’

  The storyteller looked around him desperately, swallowed and then decided there was nothing else for it.

  ‘It works,’ he said, ‘in all sorts of ways. Sometimes they come to us, sometimes we go to them. Usually, they come to us. “Know any good places?” they say. Well, of course, we know all the cafés and, sitting out the front as we do, we see who goes in and have a pretty good idea of how much money the café is taking. We might say: “That one’s been doing well lately, it’s come on a bit.” Or we might say: “I wouldn’t try that one, it’s not worth yo
ur while.” Or sometimes,’ said the storyteller, waxing, ‘“Don’t go there, it’s just a poor old woman on her own, lame and suffering, plagued with boils—”’

  ‘I weep,’ said Owen.

  The storyteller looked hurt.

  ‘I’m just telling you the way it is,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t want you to think we are hard of heart or unjust. We spare the poor and charge the rich. We see some fat man growing fatter, and we say: “Pick on him! He can stand it.” If it wasn’t for us,’ said the storyteller virtuously, ‘they might pick on the wrong people.’

  ‘All you are doing is making the world a juster place?’

  ‘Exactly!’ agreed the storyteller, pleased.

  ‘For a suitable fee, no doubt?’

  ‘Not much of one. Enough to buy a crust of bread, perhaps. Or a bowl of durra when things go hard and we can’t get a job. Times are often hard,’ said the storyteller sadly, ‘for storytellers.’

  ‘I weep again. But tell me; you say “we”. Do all storytellers, then, do as you do?’

  ‘No, no, no. Only those of us who are—’ The storyteller stopped.

  ‘Organized?’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘There is an organization, then, for storytellers?’

  ‘Only for some storytellers,’ said the man reluctantly.

  ‘And who are they?’

  The storyteller swallowed.

  ‘If I went to a storyteller who was not organized,’ prompted Owen gently, ‘no doubt he would tell me who were organized. So why don’t you tell me?’

  ‘We’re trying to break in,’ said the storyteller reluctantly.

  ‘Ah!’ said Owen. ‘Now I think I begin to understand. You are the storytellers who are telling the new stories?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You tell neither the stories of Abu Zeyd nor the stories of the Sultan Baybars?’

  ‘That is correct.’

  ‘I have heard some of your stories,’ said Owen, ‘and like them.’

  ‘You do?’ said the storyteller, pleased. ‘Well, they are rather good. Take, for instance, the story of—’

  ‘Well, not just now, perhaps. We are talking of other matters. The stories you tell: where do they come from?’

  ‘They are old stories. They are the ones we heard as children, the ones that were on our mother’s lips.’

  ‘You are remembering them, then?’

  ‘Well, it’s not always easy to remember them when you are old. You remember pieces of them, fragments.’

  ‘So what do you do?’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘You go to someone, perhaps, who has a store of these old stories?’

  ‘Well, yes. It’s not quite as simple as that, though. We have a piece of an old story and we give it in, and it may be that another man has a different piece, so that the two pieces can be put together and perhaps fitted into a third—’

  ‘And then you share the complete story?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which is written out for you?’

  ‘Well, you can get a copy, and I’m not saying that some storytellers don’t do that. But I don’t like that myself. It’s not the proper way. No, you hear the story, you hear it once or twice, and then you’ve more or less got it. You take it away and, well, you do things with it, you sort of make it your own.’

  ‘A storyteller of distinction,’ said Owen, ‘always tells his own story.’

  ‘Absolutely right! That’s what I always say. And that’s why there ought to be different prices for different storytellers. The trouble is,’ said the storyteller, eloquent on this particular subject at least, ‘that there are too many people in the market right now. It brings the prices down. Oh, they’re not bad, some of them, but the worst ones drag the prices down. People are prepared to settle for any old sort of rubbish these days.’

  ‘And then, of course,’ said Owen, ‘the old storytellers, the Abu Zeyd ones and the Sultan Baybars ones, are so established! It must be hard to break in.’

  ‘Oh it is! That’s why—’ He stopped.

  ‘That’s why you have to join together?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘It is like a sort of club, isn’t it? By joining together you can help each other.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me, when you say to a gang: “Such and such a place would be a good one to try,” do they pay you directly or does the money go to the club?’

  ‘It goes to the club.’

  ‘And then the club pays you?’

  ‘Yes. Not all the money. Some is put aside for us to draw on when we are old or sick.’

  ‘You think that? You think that it will really be there?’

  ‘Some was given to Faroukh when he was sick.’

  ‘Ah! So it is really there. At the moment. Tell me who is the master of the club?’

  The storyteller was silent.

  ‘He who keeps the store of stories?’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘I marvel,’ said Owen. ‘I had always thought those who lived by story were upright men.’

  ‘It may have been so,’ said the storyteller, ‘in the time of Sultan Baybars.’

  ***

  The bookshop was in a small street off the Clot Bey. The street was near the Coptic church and some of the other shops dealt in relics. Owen looked to see and, yes, one or two stocked ikons. The bookshop contained some Coptic books, displayed prominently at the front in an effort to tap the Coptic custom, but since the books were chiefly theological and in Old Coptic, Owen thought it unlikely that sales were prolific. Inside the shop, the books were lined on shelves, as in a European bookshop. There was a musty smell in the air and the books, too, were old and musty: French and Arabic equivalents of the Coptic works seen from outside. European in style the shop might be; nevertheless, it came as something of a shock to see that the assistant was a woman. Despite the veil, Owen recognized Katarina.

  He went inside and began to look along the shelves. Katarina came up to him.

  ‘Why can’t you leave us alone?’ she hissed.

  ‘I need your help.’

  ‘I’ve told you—’

  ‘They’ve got hold of explosives. I thought they would be safe in Suez docks until they were paid for. That’s why I took the gold. I hoped I could stop it all without it coming to anything. But the explosives have slipped through. Someone’s got hold of them. I must find out who that someone is.’

  ‘Why ask me?’

  ‘You know who Sorgos meets.’

  ‘I know you have seized Djugashvili.’

  ‘It’s someone else.’

  ‘Why do you keep coming to me? I will not help you. I have told you, I am with my grandfather.’

  ‘In everything?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘In explosives?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Please help me.’

  Katarina looked around wildly. A man came forward out of the darkness at the back of the shop.

  ‘Can I help, my dear?’

  ‘The Mamur Zapt!’ said Katarina. ‘My father!’ she said to Owen.

  ‘Your father!’

  ‘The Mamur Zapt!’

  ‘I thought you were in Paris!’ said Owen.

  The man recovered and came forward with outstretched hand.

  ‘I was. I have only just returned. Two days ago.’ He shook hands with Owen.

  ‘And not a moment before time,’ he said, ‘if what I hear is true.’

  ‘I wrote to him,’ said Katarina.

  ‘I came at once. How could I not? My father—what can I say? He is an old man and, not to put too fine a point upon it, no longer responsible for his actions.’

  ‘He has always seemed to me exceptionally alert.’

  ‘That is kind
of you. But he has, I know, caused you considerable alarm. At a time when, I imagine, you would have preferred to have been preoccupied by more serious matters.’

  ‘You think the alarm was unnecessary?’

  ‘Well …’ Katarina’s father spread his hands. ‘Passions are running high over the Grand Duke, I know, and I daresay my father’s passions have been running higher than most, but I feel you may have been mistaking rhetoric for action—’

  ‘I know what the gold was for,’ said Owen. Katarina’s father went still.

  Then he sighed.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘why deny it? Since you know so much? But, Captain Owen, can I plead with you to make allowances? He is a very old man. I thought he could defy time forever but, coming back, after an absence, I see…Captain Owen, will you allow me to take the blame for whatever my father has done? I am the man responsible. I should not have left him. If I had been here, none of this would have occurred.’

  ‘He would have felt differently?’

  Katarina’s father made a gesture of hopelessness.

  ‘He would have felt exactly the same. But I would have restrained him. Captain Owen, is it too late? I promise that I will see he is no trouble to you. He will not leave the house until the Grand Duke’s visit is over. I promise you that. That is the least I can do and I assure you that it will be done.’

  ‘That may be for the best. My concern, I should say, is less about him than about others.’

  ‘Concentrate on them, Captain Owen, and leave me to take care of my father. He will be no further trouble to you, I assure you. Let me be his guarantor.’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘ Thank you. And thank you for your sympathy and understanding. My father, as I am sure you know, speaks very warmly of you.’

  ‘Even now?’

  Katarina’s father smiled.

  ‘Less warmly, perhaps.’ He glanced at the book Owen was holding in his hand. ‘Can I help you?’

  He took the book.

  ‘The Mabinogion? Oh, of course, I was forgetting: my father told me you were Welsh.’

  ‘I am afraid the impression your father has of Wales may not be altogether accurate.’