Rezk took note of this discreet appeal to his attention and asked in a respectful tone:
“What is it, Excellency?”
“Nothing, my son. I was just wondering if you were cold?”
“Thank you, Excellency,” answered Rezk, moved by the old man’s kindness toward him. “I feel just fine.”
“We’ll have to think about buying you a coat. You cannot go around dressed as you are now. The winter will be harsh.”
Rezk smiled sadly in the shadows. Unlike Hillali — warmly wrapped in a roomy coat of black wool — he had nothing to protect him from the cold, damp wind coming off the river except his usual woolen scarf tied casually around his neck. This wind felt like a sharp blade perforating his lungs, but he refrained from uttering the least complaint. Until now he had even abstained from coughing so as not to disturb the police chief in his meditation. The methodical slowness with which Hillali carried out his investigations, preferring the most destitute neighborhoods, as if poverty necessarily hid traps of some kind, seemed unproductive and pointless to Rezk. He had a strong intuition that the old man took pleasure in awaiting danger and that his effort to apprehend the tragic event in all its searing truth masked a more daring plan: to serve as bait for a terrorist attack. This heroic and totally unexpected aspect of their venture made it even more insane. Was Hillali, motivated by some childish and imperious vanity, expecting to see those young men — whom his imagination had dubbed revolutionaries and whom he wrongly suspected of planning a widespread upheaval of some kind — suddenly appear? An illusion of this sort would surely lead them to catastrophe, for if ever they were attacked, it would be by ordinary criminals who thought only of robbing them and whose preoccupations were far from political. These shameless crooks would not differentiate between the chief of police and any other passerby with the appearance of a well-off bourgeois venturing into the streets at this late hour. Rezk was sure of this, but how could he admit his certainty to Hillali without offending him? Hillali persisted — through a phenomenon that defied analysis — in seeing in this whole business nothing but the perpetual plot against the government. It would never occur to him that no one in this city cared about the government and that some did not even know it existed.
Hillali withdrew his hand, numbed by the cold, from Rezk’s shoulder and stuffed it in his coat pocket. Then he said, as if he were thinking aloud:
“Really, they are acting very strangely!”
“Who, Excellency?”
“What are you thinking about, my son? I’m talking about our young revolutionaries. Yesterday they bought a schoolgirl’s smock in a notions shop. I learned this from one of my men who was following them. I confess I find it quite eccentric. A schoolgirl’s smock! Can you tell me what on earth for?”
Rezk pondered the clean-shaven, ascetic profile, and he was saddened to realize how such a trifling matter could defeat the knowledge and intelligence reflected on this face. He smiled compassionately, then quickly repressed the smile, and answered in a mischievous tone quite unusual for him:
“No doubt they are preparing some prank. I know them; they spend their time having fun.”
“You are mistaken. They pretend to be having fun, but it’s a trick. In reality they are plotting against the government. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they be working?”
“Maybe they find life more pleasant when they do nothing. It’s a new philosophy. They’ve decided to put it into practice.”
“These young men are educated,” said Hillali. (He hesitated a moment, feeling that what he was about to say might present an attitude that would be, to all appearances, pessimistic for a police chief. Nonetheless he continued in the bitter tones of someone rather embarrassed to subscribe to his own opinion.) “They cannot remain idle without finding out that this world is abject and revolting.”
“Why, Excellency?” asked Rezk, struck by this rather worrisome tenet. It seemed to him that something very fundamental was being touched upon.
“Because they have time to reflect,” answered Hillali, with a hint of anger in his voice.
“As far as they are concerned, I think they must indeed find this world abject and revolting, but they have no desire to change it. At least that’s the impression they give me.”
“Are you saying that they scorn this world too much to change it?”
“I’d say it’s more indifference than scorn.”
“So, according to you, what is it they hope for?”
“They’re not hoping for anything. Life, Excellency, life alone interests them.”
“It’s not possible that they lack ambition to such an extent. One of them, from a very honorable family, has just come back from abroad where he studied for six years. You’re not going to tell me that he wasted six years getting a degree if he had no ambition!”
“I think that even if at some point he had any, he’s given it up now. His behavior is the opposite of an ambitious man’s.”
“How can you know that?”
“By the serene way he looks at the vilest things. There is love in his gaze.”
“His gaze is what’s most pernicious about him,” Hillali affirmed. “It’s the very gaze of rebellion!”
Rezk felt a joy mixed with remorse at the mention of the aristocratic student recently returned from abroad. His affection for Teymour and his friends was marred by guilt. These representatives of a strange sect were unstinting in their camaraderie and their human kindness, even toward him, the least of men. This had always surprised and frightened him a little, for he knew he was unworthy of their trust. Forgetting for a moment his lungs ravaged by the unhealthful night air, he thought longingly about those witty and carefree young men who possessed the magical gift of dodging all the constraints and taboos of a repugnant society that they seemed to find totally absurd. The information with which Hillali had just provided him — the purchase of a schoolgirl’s smock the previous day — allowed him to catch a glimpse of some romantic, slightly scabrous adventure in which he would have liked to participate rather than having to deal with these insane forays into potential revolutionary intrigues. To be one of them and to share in their magnificent plans seemed the pinnacle of happiness. Unfortunately, he carried within himself the crime of a contemptible profession and it would have been dishonest to join their group without revealing his relation to the police. It was these scruples that had kept him from going to get the books Teymour had promised him, preferring to sacrifice his passion for reading rather than be accused of duplicity.
“Tell me,” Hillali began again. “Have you ever seen girls with them?”
“Not that I recall. But that doesn’t mean they’re not sleeping with them. In fact, that’s all they want to do. What other use would they have for a girl?
“You are too naïve, my son. You have no idea what’s going on in the world. Girls today are just as dangerous as men. They are capable of doing terrible things. I’m sure they have a female accomplice.”
“But why dress her like a schoolgirl?”
“No doubt to attract their next victim. No one is suspicious of a schoolgirl. She can carry a bomb in her schoolbag without arousing the slightest suspicion. The purchase of this smock is very serious; it points to a new operation ahead.”
Rezk found this theory dazzlingly stupid. Still, he did not want to seem resolutely hostile to the police chief’s reasoning, first out of deference to him, and then because he sympathized with the solitude of the old man mired in his faulty conclusions.