The Camel of Destruction (8 page)

‘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?’

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 impressed 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.

This time, however, Paul was gone for a long time; so long that Owen decided he was not coming back and passed the contents of his glass into his own. Whereupon Paul, of course, came back.

He saw his empty glass and stopped, astounded.

‘Even here?’

Owen hastily signalled to the waiter.

‘Even here what?’

‘The liquidity base is shrinking. Or, as I suspect, the liquidity is shrinking and the base is taking over.’

‘What’s going on?’ asked Owen. ‘Why are you rushing away all the time?’

‘It’s what I told you: cotton prices and all that.’

‘You’d better explain. I need to know how the Agricultural Bank fits in.’

‘Banks! I’ve had it up to here with banks lately. To start with, they work the wrong hours. Whenever you go along they’re closed and whenever you go to bed they start working. It’s all wrong. And do you know what’s at the bottom of it?’ He sipped his glass and then, remembering that he might be called away at any minute, took another sip. ‘Modernization!’ he said.

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘It’s all these damned cables lying along the bottom of the ocean. Very dangerous, and not just for those unfortunate enough to be down there, the fish and the crabs and the lugs and so forth, but even for the rest of us up here. It’s all telegrams these days. You can’t get a decent gap between crises. Governments are crumbling because of it.’

A telephone rang. Paul flinched and hastily took another sip. It was not for him, this time, however.

‘The banks are the worst,’ he said. ‘Especially right now. The cables are coming all the time.’

‘What are they coming
about
?’

‘Money, lack of; lending, too much of; borrowing, too much of. Belts needing to tighten. Bootlaces you need to pull yourself up by. I do find it provoking when banks take on this moral tune. It’s bad enough in church or in the Assembly. Coming from banks it’s, well, I was going to say, a bit rich, but that’s the one thing they claim they’re not.’

‘Paul. I need to know about the Agricultural Bank.’

‘The same as all the other banks: lent more than it’s got. Most of what it’s got it’s borrowed from somebody else. The trouble is that, with the general squeeze, the somebody else wants it back now.’

‘Who’s the somebody else?’

‘Other banks. Here and abroad. Hence the cables.’

‘Who
owns
the Agricultural Bank?’

‘You do.’

‘Oh no, now come on—’

‘I do. We all do. The Government does.’

‘You mean Zokosis, Singleby Stokes, that bunch of tricksters, work for the Government?’

‘The Government set it up. They manage it.’

‘They report to a Minister?’

‘Ah no. Well, perhaps at arm’s length. The length of the arm is particularly important because the Bank has to raise money in order to lend it to other people, it raises it from other banks, and banks trust banks and not governments. Why, I don’t know, unless it is that they trust them more not to ask questions and not complain about charges.’

‘They don’t seem to trust Zokosis and crew,’ objected Owen. ‘Not over this new loan, at any rate. They want a guarantee from the Ministry of Agriculture.’

‘Just at the moment,’ said Paul, ‘it’s a question of finding someone with the capacity to foot the bill. And financiers are always prepared to trust governments for that!’

‘I’m surprised the Government is even faintly interested.’

Paul stared at him.

‘Don’t you realize?’ he said. ‘The whole of Egyptian agriculture is tied to the Bank. If the Bank goes under, so does just about everything else.’

‘It’s crazy to let yourself be put in that situation.’

‘It may seem crazy now,’ Paul admitted, ‘but when it was set up it was actually a very good idea. The fellahin had got so in debt to local moneylenders that the whole system was in danger of collapsing. The Bank was set up to make loans to small farmers at low rates of interest. It worked, too, until the recession came along.’

‘You think the Bank’s a good thing.’

‘I certainly do.’

‘The opposition don’t.’

‘Sidki and Abdul Aziz? They’re all in favour of lending the fellahin money. What’s upset them is that the Bank’s started calling loans in.’

‘They don’t like this deal with the Ministry over a guarantee.’

‘If the Bank doesn’t get that,’ said Paul, ‘it’s going to be calling in a lot more loans, I can tell you.’

Barclay was waiting for Owen in a Lebanese restaurant just off the Clot Bey. He was sitting at an outside table and there was a young Egyptian with him.

‘You remember Selim?’

Owen recognized the architect who had been working on the restoration of the blue-tiled mosque the day they had visited it.

‘He’s the one who put me on to it.’

Grim-faced, Barclay led them through the tiny streets towards the Derb Aiah. Owen thought he recognized some of the places. Was not that the mosque itself just over there? Behind the houses? But the buildings pressed in, the heavy meshrebiya windows closed above him all aspect, even all light, was lost.

It came as something of a relief when they emerged into a small square and saw the sky above them once again. There were some delightful old buildings in the square. One of them was so like the mosque that for a moment Owen was puzzled.

‘Surely—?’

‘No, no,’ said Barclay. ‘It’s a
hammam
.’

A public bath house. But not unlike a small mosque. The façade was ancient and faced with the same blue tiles as the mosque had been. The design was not as intricate, the tiles not quite as gem-like. They did not collect the light and sparkle as those on the mosque had done. But to Owens untutored eye the buildings were of the same period and in the same spirit.

When he came close, however, he could see that it was a
hammam
. The entrance was narrow and sunk below ground level. And a towel was hung across the door, which indicated that it was being used by women.

Barclay led him past, turned abruptly up a side-street and then turned again so that they were, Owen judged, now behind the
hammam
and facing a tall derelict building.

The smell hit Owen even before he got inside. It was an indescribable compound of rotting cabbage, sulphur, excrement and animal corruption. It was so awful that Owen could hardly breathe. He put his hand up over his mouth.

‘Sorry, old man,’ said Barclay, ‘but you’d better see it.’

It was not very easy to see anything. At the far end, however, some daylight came down what might have been stairs and when their eyes grew accustomed to the gloom they edged towards it.

Edged, because at every step their feet sank into something soft and rotten and foul, in which there were occasional little pieces of what felt like wire, which caught at them and threatened to trip them.

The stairs at the end were not quite stairs because they were packed solid with the same sort of rotting material, so that they formed an upward plane rather than stairs.

They went up and came out in the room alone. It had no roof, which accounted for the light. They could now see properly.

The room was packed feet-deep with rubbish. There was household waste, green leaves, faded flowers, the offal of poultry and rabbits, broken pots and pans, rags and tatters of all kinds, peelings.

In one corner of the room the rubbish appeared to be moving. And then Owen saw that there were dozens of cats, all tearing at something.

A man came into the room with a wheelbarrow and tipped out some more rubbish.

‘What the hell is this?’ said Owen.

Barclay led him on. In the next room some goats were picking over the rubbish and there were more cats. Crouched down in the ordure were some legless beggars feeling over the slime.

There was room upon room of rubbish and still the men were bringing more in. Some of the rooms were already full to shoulder height.

The wall of one of the upper rooms had crumbled away and gave on to the roofs around. They went across to it and looked out. Immediately below, right next to them, was a series of domes from which puffs of steam were emerging.

‘It’s the baths,’ said Barclay.

There were strange objects lying on top of the domes and it took Owen a moment to realize that they were cats. There were scores of them, stretched out, enjoying the warmth which came up from the baths below.

There were also heaps of rags.

One of the heaps got to its feet. It was a small boy, who greeted Owen warmly.

‘Effendi! We meet again! It is I, Ali!’

‘Ali?’

‘I arrange your meetings with Aisha.’

‘What?’ said Barclay.

‘It’s nothing,’ said Owen hastily.

Ali came and took Owen by the hand.

‘Do you want a look?’

‘Look?’

Ali gestured towards the domes.

‘You can look down through the holes where the steam comes out,’ he said. ‘You get quite a good view. Try this one! There’s a girl just down there…’

‘Thank you, Ali,’ said Owen firmly. ‘No!’

A man, hearing voices, came up some stairs on the other side of the domes. He shouted indignantly.

Several of the heaps of rags jumped up and ran off.

The man shook his fist at them.

‘Those boys!’ he said furiously. ‘Always at it!’

He saw the men through the wall and looked at them curiously.

‘A word with you,’ said Barclay.

The man climbed out on to the roof and walked across. ‘Effendi?’

‘This,’ said Barclay, almost unable to speak. ‘All this!’

He waved his hand at all the rubbish.

‘Keep me going for a long time,’ said the man.

‘It’s foul!’

The man shrugged. ‘It’s handy,’ he said. ‘It’s not so easy to get wood these days. And by the time it’s got to you, it’s not cheap, either. Now this stuff, well, it’s not agreeable, I know, but it burns like wood and it’s a lot cheaper.’