The Men Behind (12 page)

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 expensive, 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 hard-working 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 sugar-cane 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 mud-brick 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, “getting 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.

He stayed with the trackers for two more days and then returned to Cairo. He couldn’t, he really couldn’t, allow himself to be absent from the city for longer at such a time.

He almost pulled the trackers out, too, but decided to reprieve them for another week. After that he would offer the small boys of the village a reward if they found the remains and reported them to him. Owen was a great believer in small boys.

He was not, however, entirely guileless in the matter and knew that if a reward was offered then it would be claimed. Plausible bones would suddenly appear in just the right spot. He would have to find some realist to vet the claims locally.

That would not be the Mamur, for he was probably corrupt and certainly incompetent. Nor would it be one of the villagers, for they would have a vested interest and would pronounce the claims valid in return for a share in the reward.

When the time came he would have to go to Ali Osman’s household. The villagers, and certainly the boys, would be wary about going there, however, so another solution would be preferable.

For the moment the decision could wait. The trackers would continue. Perhaps they would make the decision unnecessary.

He returned to Cairo and was relieved to find that nothing had happened in his absence. He had feared some further outrage. There had been no progress either, but this, as Nikos pointed out with asperity, did not mean that people had not been working hard.

The fact was that in terrorist cases all one usually had to go on were the circumstances. It was no good researching, for instance, the background of the victims since motivation was not located in the personal context.

The circumstances, however, typically yielded little data. While Owen had been away the forensic lab had done a complete analysis on the spent bullets and confirmed that they had come from two guns and that the guns had not been used in previous terrorist offenses. They had found nothing distinctive about the picric or nitric acid used in the two bombs, nor really in the bombs themselves.

No further eyewitnesses had been found and no further details had emerged from questioning of the eyewitnesses they already had.

“We’ll just have to wait until more data is available,” said Nikos.

“You mean until there is another killing?”

“That’s right,” said Nikos.

Owen found it difficult to take such a calm view of things and instructed Nikos to analyze reports of current followings in the hope that, having sifted out possibles from totally unlikely ones, they might be able to second-guess the terrorists and anticipate where the next attack might come. This was not very fruitful because of the highly subjective nature of the reports. However, it made Owen feel better.

He also got Georgiades to check the background of the boys killed in the explosion at Hamada. It was easy to find out about Hamid, but about the other boy, Salah, at this distance in time little could be established.

He had definitely not been a student of the School of Engineering, nor had he shared a room with Hamid. One or two people thought they might remember seeing him; but that was all.

On Hamid himself the details gleaned were rather similar to those obtained about Abu, the boy from Hamada killed in the café bombing. He had been a quiet boy who had not stood out in any way, certainly not for academic merit. Like Abu, he appeared to have been lost at first in the great city, overawed and bewildered by it. But this was no different from the countless other country boys sent up by their Pashas to be educated in the High Schools.

There was, however, one difference between Hamid and Abu. Hamid had definitely been interested in politics. There was a report of his having participated in a student demonstration outside the Abdin Palace. Nikos checked and there had indeed been a demonstration at about the time reported.