The Men Behind (20 page)

“If it’s a choice between stopping a war in the Sudan and stopping a few terrorist attacks in Cairo, which is the more important?”

“It depends from whose point of view you’re seeing it. If you could stop people from taking pot shots at us as we’re going to work, I, personally, would regard that as a great achievement, Gareth.”

He regarded Owen compassionately.

“Tell you what: you can stop the war if you like. I mean, after you’ve put out the conflagration in Cairo. Only leave Roper alone. He’s too hot for you. There are other people in this, surely? Why don’t you go for them?”

“You should have let me kill him in the first place,” said Soraya, stretching out on the cushions. “I could still do it, you know,” she offered.

“Thank you. That won’t be necessary.”

“I would do it for love. To show how much I love you.”

“You can show me in other ways.”

“That too,” Soraya granted.

Afterwards, she said drowsily: “It might be better if you put me in your harem. Ghawazi girls do not usually join harems, but I would make an exception in your case.”

“Thank you. I foresee difficulties, however.”

“What difficulties?”

Owen hesitated. “I am not sure there would be room,” he said.

Soraya looked puzzled. “I do not understand,” she said. “Is your house not big enough?”

“No, no. It’s just that, well, my harem is already occupied.”

“Surely you have room for one more? How many wives have you got?” asked Soraya, interested.

“Well, it’s not so much a question… Actually, there’s only one. But I don’t think she’d like it.”

“We would fight,” said Soraya. “That is proper among wives.”

“I don’t think it would be very peaceful.”

“Well, no,” said Soraya. “But there would be lots of passion.”

“I think I’ve got plenty of that already.”

“Your wife is very passionate? Then we would get on,” said Soraya.

“I don’t think so.”

“She would be jealous, of course. But that would make her all the more passionate. Me too. It is good for there to be rivals in a harem.”

“I am not sure that I could cope. Thank you very much. It would be very nice, I am sure, but—”

“You do not love me!” Soraya sat up, eyes fiery.

“Of course I love you!”

He attempted to pull her down. She shook him off indignantly.

“No! You love her, you do not love me. I am nothing to you, she is all. I will kill her!”

“For Christ’s sake!”

He grabbed hold of her by the shoulders and forced her back upon the cushions.

“Just cool down a moment—”

For a moment Soraya stared furiously up at him. Then her eyes closed.

“That is better,” she said.

“Does Ali Osman know about the guns?” Owen asked.

“Of course. He is the person who arranges it all.”

“What do you mean, ‘arranges it all’?”

“He brings the two sides together. The traders let him know when they are coming up. He then lets the merchants in the north know. They send the guns down and Ali Osman arranges for the two sides to meet. Sometimes he has to store the guns.”

“In the Place of Salt?”

“Yes.”

“What about the slaves?”

“They are held in an oasis to the south. It is bad for them to be held there too long as it is hard to hide people. It is better to store the guns.”

“And Ali Osman takes a cut, presumably?”

“It is a good business,” said Soraya enviously. “Both sides pay well.”

Strangely, Zeinab’s reaction was not dissimilar from Soraya’s.

“Leave it to me,” she said immediately when Owen told her about his difficulties.

“Leave what to you?”

“Roper. I will have him killed.”

“Just a minute—”

“My father will supply me with assassins. There will be no difficulty.”

“I am sure there won’t. However—”

“You needn’t worry. No one will know. I can see you have to keep out of it. You are always telling me about these Liberal MPs in England. Perhaps,” said Zeinab reflectively, “I should have them killed too.”

“There are too many. Someone would be sure to notice.”

“Of course, it would be difficult at such a distance. Perhaps you could invite them all over here to a feast. Then we could poison them all.”

“No, no, no, no.”

“Or perhaps you could invite them to Paris!” Zeinab’s eyes sparkled. Complete Francophile, as so many of the upper-class Egyptians were, Paris was the center of her cultural universe. “I could arrange for the Zouaves to massacre them in the Champs-Elysées.”

She laughed merrily on seeing Owen’s face.

“Perhaps, on the whole, it would be better to stick to our first plan. I will go round and speak to my father at once.”

“No you don’t. You stay here. And leave Roper alone. I’ll look after him.”

“Will you fight him?”

“In a manner of speaking,” said Owen.

“Congratulations, Pasha!” said Owen.

Ali Osman smiled graciously.

“Thank you,” he said. “But what precisely,” he asked cautiously, “are you congratulating me on?”

“Your new-found success with the Khedive.”

The Pasha waved a plump forefinger at him. “You are anticipating, my friend. Just a little. But you are anticipating.”

“It has not been announced yet?”

“No. Unless,” said Ali Osman with sudden eagerness, “you have heard something that I have not?”

“No. But it is so much in the air—”

Ali Osman sat back on his cushions, a little disappointed. “I am assured it is a matter of hours,” he said.

“To have come back to this extent after so many setbacks!”

“Well,” said Ali Osman modestly, “a statesman is resilient if nothing else.”

“When I remember how it was when I first came to see you—”

“After I had been so brutally attacked,” said Ali Osman, shuddering at the memory.

“And your rivals seemed so advantageously placed! Well, I congratulate you on such a turnabout.”

“Experience,” said Ali Osman, “experience is what tells in the end.”

“Indeed. It is experience which tells you at just what point it is timely to deploy the money.”

“Well, I wouldn’t put it quite like that,” Ali Osman protested. “You are taking too cynical a view.”

“I am sure it was the winning factor. Especially with the Khedive.”

“Let us say that,” said Ali Osman, smiling broadly, “after we have won.”

“What puzzles me, though, Pasha, is how it was possible to find such a considerable sum at that point in the campaign? Surely even your great resources had been strained by so protracted a battle?”

“An immense drain. The money some people spend!”

“Then how?”

“Friends. Friends rallied around. One is not without support. Particularly when people saw how things were going. When they saw some of the possibilities they shuddered, positively shuddered. And then they said: ‘Let us go for the man we know.’ ” Ali Osman’s eyes twinkled. “The devil we know.”

Owen chuckled sympathetically.

“It is a tribute to your personality, Pasha, that so many suddenly realized that you were the man they could trust.”

“Well…” Ali Osman waved a deprecating hand.

“No doubt the money from the traders helped.”

“Traders?”

“The slave-traders. And, of course, the arms merchants. What puzzles me, though, as I said before, was the timing. Surely it was not coincidence? And was not the arms shipment an unusually large one? Two separate deliveries? I feel the coincidence must have been prompted. And therefore, Pasha, I offer my congratulations.”

Ali Osman was silent. The bonhomie leaked out as from a punctured balloon, leaving a very sharp, concentrated, birdlike man behind: not a friendly sparrowlike bird but a big, formidable, predatory hawklike bird.

“Your meaning is not altogether clear,” said Ali Osman.

“The money,” Owen explained. “That is where you got it from. The merchants paid you and the slavers paid you. A lot.”

“Even if they had,” said Ali Osman, “the commission on such exchange hardly amounts to a fortune.”

“No. And that was another thing that puzzled me. But then I thought: these men have an interest in continuing trade. In perhaps expanding it. What better guarantee of the right conditions than a Prime Minister in office? Might not a loan have been offered? A large one, longterm, repayable—well, let us not say
repayable
, let us say
discountable
in terms of your future support?”

“My friends rallied around, as I was saying, and offered such a loan. It is not unusual.”

“These were your friends?”

“Hardly. Slave-trading, as I am sure you know, is illegal in Egypt. The arms trade is, well, confined to the British.”

“I think I must ask you for the names of your friends.”

“I would be glad to oblige. I must first, however, check that my friends are willing for their names to be produced. You see, there are some eminent British names among them. Well-known firms, famous in the City.”

“Represented on the delegation, perhaps?”

“Why,” said Ali Osman, beaming, “you have understood!”

The wave of student anger over the dismissal of Mahmoud rose to a great height, quivered ominously—there were several noisy protests in front of the Abdin Palace, which provoked more angry letters from the Khedive—and then, surprisingly, subsided.

It was nothing to do with Owen. It seemed to happen all of its own accord. One moment the students were rampant in the streets. The next they were quietly going about their lectures, books tucked dutifully under their arms. It was as if they had suddenly lost interest.

“Can’t understand it,” said Georgiades. “I woke up and went in one morning and it was as if they had all switched off.”

“Students are like that,” said Owen. “One morning something is of absolutely overwhelming importance to them. The next they have forgotten about it entirely.”

“I felt it a bit myself,” Georgiades admitted. “When I got in and everybody was talking about something else, all that protest stuff suddenly seemed a long time ago. I quite enjoyed talking about something else. Still, I hadn’t forgotten about it entirely, the way they had.”

“Ah well, you see, they’re young.”

“And I’m old. That’s what my wife keeps telling me. Still, I’ll tell you one thing. It’s a good life being a student. You go in to a few classes, you sit around talking for hours, it takes a long time before it matters that you don’t work. I think I could settle for being a student.”

“Of course you don’t get paid if you’re a student.”

“For once,” said Georgiades, “I seem to have the best of both worlds.”

The small radical faction had broken up. For some days there had been increasing tension between the moderates, of whom Georgiades was perhaps representative, and a tiny extremist fragment grouped around Mahmoud.

The moderates had eventually walked out in disgust from one of the meetings, bearing Georgiades with them, a little bewildered by it all, poor fellow, but ever obliging.

That left the extremists in even greater isolation. They drifted away from the Law School altogether and were seen just occasionally huddled in cafés. One or two came back after a while. Mahmoud seemed to have dropped out of things altogether.

Owen, sitting in his room, was feeling aggrieved.

He had gone to Paul hoping that Paul would help him nail Roper and Paul had more or less told him to forget about it. That was bad enough. Worse, though, Paul had suggested that there were bound to be other people involved and that he might go for them instead.

But when he had done so, when he had started putting his hands round Ali Osman’s throat, Ali Osman had promptly played the same trick as Roper!

It was unfair. Well, no, it wasn’t exactly unfair, because Egyptians should certainly be able to play the same cards as Europeans; but what stuck in Owen’s gullet was that anyone should be able to play the cards at all.

He didn’t believe that anyone should be allowed to place themselves beyond the reach of the law.

Certainly not Roper.

And, while he was thinking about it, certainly not Ali Osman.

It was unfair, yes, dash it, it was unfair, that he, Owen, should have put so much time into it, only for it all to come to nothing.

Paul had said that it was just a sideshow. Well, maybe it was, but it was an important sideshow. Running guns into an area like the Sudan where they might be used to start a war
was
important, not something you could disregard just like that.

And so was the slave trade. The British had thought they had eradicated that and here it was, going on as if the British had never existed, and Ali Osman making a bloody living out of it, no, more than a living, enough to bloody tip the national political scales! And
that
took real money.

Owen, chair tipped back on its rear legs, shoulders resting against the wall, feet on his desk, coffee in his hand, felt aggrieved.

Gradually, though, a sense of proportion began to reassert itself; loath though he was to admit it, Paul had been right. The gunrunning, the slave traffic too, was really a sideshow. Important though it was—and he certainly ought to do something about it—it was not as important as what was going on in Cairo, which was, after all, his main job.

Paul was right. What had Ali Osman got to do with students throwing bombs in Cairo?

Except that—he
did
have something to do with it.

Two of those students throwing bombs—not one,
two
, on two separate occasions—had come from the Pasha’s estate at Hamada.

That could not be coincidence.

The front legs of Owen’s chair came down with a crash.

Ali Osman
did
have something to do with the bombing!

Owen had gone down to Hamada not knowing who the local Pasha was, knowing only that a bomb had exploded there and killed its bearers, and wondering if the roots of the similar explosion in the café, which had killed another boy from Hamada, might somehow lie in the village.

When he had learned that Ali Osman was the local Pasha he had been surprised but had thought nothing of it.