The Mingrelian Conspiracy. Michael Pearce

don’t you join us?’ suggested Owen. ‘You must be tired after carrying all that lot. Tell you what, you sit down and have a cup of coffee, and I’ll pay for an arabeah to take you home.’

      ‘Well –’ said Rosa, weakening.

      But only for a moment.

      ‘Take us both home,’ she stipulated. ‘I don’t want to carry all these damned packages up the stairs. Besides,’ she said generously, ‘he’ll be tired after all this work he’s been doing.’

      Owen held a chair for her. Rosa sat down, pleased. She had a soft spot for Owen. In fact, she told herself, she might well have decided to marry him, not Georgiades, at the time of the wretched business of her father’s kidnapping, had she not known about him and Zeinab. Rosa stood rather in awe of Zeinab, not because she was a great lady, the daughter of a Pasha, no less, but because she had somehow solved, or seemed to have solved, the problem of being an independent woman in a man’s world. She took Zeinab secretly as her model. Zeinab, for instance, would have made no bones about sitting down in this café, populated as it was entirely by men. Rosa sat and lifted her chin.

      She could only, Owen thought, be about sixteen even now. She had married Georgiades (and this was exactly the way to put it, since he had not had much say in the matter) when she was only fourteen. Rosa had sworn blind that she was fifteen, although her parents had been equally convinced that she was fourteen. Fourteen was, in any case, quite allowable in Cairo and Rosa had received unexpected support from her grandmother, who was a little vague about when she herself had married but thought it was young and thoroughly approved Rosa’s following tradition. This was exactly what Rosa had no intention of following. Her grandmother would certainly not have approved of her sitting here; which made it, of course, all the more enjoyable.

      ‘He really is working, you know, when he’s in these cafés,’ said Owen, determined to do his best for Georgiades.

      Rosa nodded, and then thought. She was as sharp as a knife, an implement which she had threatened to use on Georgiades if she caught him straying, and it didn’t take her long to work out that two and two make four.

      ‘It’s protection, is it?’ she said. The cafés?’

      Rosa knew all about the protection racket. Her family had a business. They dealt in such things as lacquered boxes, old jewellery, Assiut shawls and ancient Persian amulets. One day the gangs had called.

      ‘You’re going about it the wrong way,’ she said. ‘Sending him round the cafés. They’ll be too frightened to talk. You’ve got to be able to offer them something.’

      ‘We are offering them something: defence.’

      Rosa shook her head.

      ‘It’s too risky,’ she said. ‘You might catch the gang, you might not. If you don’t, and they’ve talked to you, then they’re in trouble. Why take a chance?’

      ‘Because otherwise they have to pay. And go on paying.’

      ‘You ought to go about it in a different way. Don’t let them think they’re talking to you. Why don’t you have him go round pretending to sell insurance? Insurance against loss? They’ll all be interested in that. They’ll want to know what it covers. It would at least get them talking. And then he might be able to lead them on. He’s good,’ said Rosa, looking unforgivingly at the pile of packages beside her, ‘at leading people on.’

      Owen sent them off in an arabeah, the universal one-horse cab of Cairo, and settled down to wait for the bill. You could wait a long time for that and meanwhile his eyes wandered relaxedly over the scene in front of him. The Ataba-el-Khadra was the meeting place of two worlds. The Musky led straight up from the Old City and you went down it if you were a European wanting to visit the bazaars, or came up it if you were a native intending to visit the shops in the European quarter or, more likely, catch a tram. The Ataba was the terminus for most of Cairo’s tram routes and at any hour of the day or night the square was full of trams, native horse-drawn buses, arabeahs and camels bringing forage for the horses. It was also full of street hawkers selling brushes (why?), ice-cream, lemonade, water, sponges, loofahs, canes (no young effendi from one of the big offices was properly dressed unless he carried a cane), hats (the pot-like tarboosh of the Egyptian) and sugar for instant consumption. The two biggest industries, however, were selling pastries and selling Nationalist newspapers. Cairenes, lacking confidence, perhaps, in their public-transport system, believed in stocking up before embarking on a journey. But they also believed in not making a journey at all but just sitting around, and when they sat around, they liked to sit in a café and read scurrilous Nationalist newspapers. Just behind the Ataba were the big offices of Credit Lyonnais and the Mixed Tribunals and beyond them the headquarters of the Anglo-Egyptian Bank, and the countless young men who worked in them were all avid Nationalists.

      Owen looked around at the crowded café and thought: if other cafés, why not this one?

      He knew the proprietor of the café and beckoned him over.

      ‘Tell me, Yasin,’ he said. ‘Do you pay protection?’

      ‘Not yet,’ said the proprietor.

      ‘Is that because they have not asked? Or because you have not agreed?’

      ‘If they asked,’ said Yasin, diplomatically but evasively, ‘I would reply: I need no protection, for the Mamur Zapt sits every night at my tables.’

      The first stage of the café evening was coming to an end and at several tables people were standing up and shaking hands. It was time to be firm about that bill. Or perhaps, just before he left, an apéritif?

      ‘How about an apéritif?’ said a familiar voice, and Paul dropped into a chair beside him.

      ‘I reckon you owe me one,’ said Owen, ‘after that meeting this morning.’

      ‘Bloody awful, wasn’t it? It’s high time the Army went on manoeuvres. Preferably at the bottom of the Red Sea.’

      ‘What’s all this business about unifying the policing? I don’t like the sound of it.’

      ‘It won’t get anywhere. The Old Man will kill it dead.’

      Paul was one of the Consul-General’s aides and frequently, as this morning, chaired meetings on his behalf.

      ‘Will he, though? If they really push?’

      ‘They’ll only get his back up. He’ll see it as trespassing.’

      ‘Yes, but –’

      ‘It won’t get anywhere. At the end of the day, the Old Man’s a politician, and the one empire politicians will really fight for is their own. You can go back to sleep.’

      Paul sipped his apéritif.

      ‘All the same,’ he said reflectively, ‘on something like this it might be best if you didn’t.’

      ‘The gangs?’ Owen was surprised. ‘I really don’t think, Paul, you need worry too much about the guns. It’s pretty small –‘

      ‘Guns?’ said Paul, so steeped in the ways of the city that he considered himself a born-again Cairene. ‘Who the hell cares about guns? It’s the cafés I’m thinking of.’

2

      Later the same day Owen had moved on to the second stage of the café evening and was comfortably enjoying an after-dinner coffee outside a crowded Arab café when an orderly, who knew his habits, brought him a hurried message from the Deputy Commandant of Police. It said:

       Can you get down to the Ezbekiyeh quick? Trouble at a café. I’ve got my hands full at the Citadel. McPhee.

      Trouble at a café, thought Owen. Christ, they’re keeping on the go. But when he got to the place he found it was nothing to do with protection but just an ordinary common