‘Bales and bales of gum arabic?’ said the Greek. ‘And trocchee shells?’
‘And other things, too.’
‘Pretty slave girls?’ prompted Georgiades.
‘I should be so lucky!’ said the clerk. He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘no such luck. But sometimes there is a special consignment.’ He put up his hand. ‘Don’t ask me what it is,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. Clarke Effendi keeps all that to himself.’ He laid a finger along his nose. ‘He handles it all himself. Everything! The goods come in and then go out and neither I nor anyone else is allowed to go near them. Nor even the paperwork. Especially not the paperwork. Clarke Effendi does it all. “The less you know about it, the better,” he says. “If you don’t know anything, you can’t tell anyone anything. It’s better like that.” And,’ said the clerk, ‘I think it is better. Because the old bastard is up to something, you can be sure. And the less I know about it, the better.’
‘There is wisdom,’ said the Greek admiringly. ‘It’s a wise man who knows when it’s best not to know something!’
‘Of course, I have to know a bit,’ said the warehouse clerk. ‘I have to know when a consignment like that is coming in, so that I can make space for it. And it’s not just any sort of space; it’s got to be over in a corner, where people don’t come upon it by mischance. And it’s got to be in the usual place in case he wants to move it by dark. In fact, he usually does want to move it by dark. That’s another thing, you see. What people don’t see, they don’t think about, he says.
‘But once or twice I’ve had to be there to see to the moving — make sure the right boxes are collected. It would never do to have the wrong box picked up. And that would be easy to do in the dark. Of course, we’ve got torches, but still, it helps if someone who knows about it is there to see to it. Actually, he likes to see to that himself. Never trusts anybody else when it’s important. I suppose that’s why he does so well. Why he’s a rich man and I am not!’
‘There are costs to being rich,’ said the Greek. ‘That’s what I always tell my wife. You’ve got to be thinking about your money all the time.’
‘The risk!’ said the warehouse clerk.
‘Suppose it went wrong?’ said the Greek.
‘Ah, then you’re in trouble!’ said the clerk.
‘I’ll bet you didn’t say that to Clarke Effendi, though!’
‘You’d win your bet!’ said the clerk. ‘That’s another thing he says. “No silly questions, no sharp answers!”’
‘And that’s true, too,’ said the Greek.
‘Still, there are things that I know and that he doesn’t know. How to get hold of a reliable porter in Cairo, for example.’
‘Can’t trust the buggers!’ said the Greek.
‘You’ve got to stand over them. And although he’d prefer to do that himself, that’s not always possible.’
‘So you have to do it?’
‘That’s it!’
‘Even at night!’
‘Even at night. Especially at night!’
‘Because of the temptation to wander off and have a drink?’
‘He’d go mad!’
‘I’ll bet he would. But that’s what they’d do if you weren’t standing right behind them.’
‘You can’t afford for it to go wrong.’
‘Not when there’s a Pasha involved.’
‘Oh, so that’s the way the land lies, is it? I don’t envy you.’
‘Just occasionally. I don’t do it every time, of course, and I don’t know about the other times. But I know what I know.’
‘And you’re not saying!’ said the Greek, chuckling.
‘Too true, I’m not!’
‘Well I think he’s a lucky man to have you to call on.’
‘Well, I think he is, too. It’s not easy to get things done the way he likes them done. There’s more to it than he thinks. Just getting the stuff here is not that straightforward. It comes in by train, you see, and has to be fetched from the station. Nothing to it, you might think. Just a matter of porters. But porters have to be found, and porters have to be stood over, like I said, or else they’ll get it wrong. And then he’d go mad!’
‘Do you use the same porters every time?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘I should think you would. If he’s like you say, you’d want to be sure of your porters. And if you’ve found some you know to be reliable, I think you’d stick with them.’
‘Well, I do, as a matter of fact.’
‘Go to the same ones every time?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I reckon you’ve done well if you’ve found some reliable ones.’
‘It’s not easy. In a place like Cairo. Where porters are always drifting away. Offer them some money and they’re off!’
‘Does he pay well?’
‘No.’
Georgiades pursed his lips. ‘That makes it tricky,’ he said.
‘It does. That’s what I always tell him. “You don’t know the half of it,” I say.’
‘He’s a lucky man to have you to rely on.’
Further along the street was a barber’s shop. Well, not quite a shop — this was a poor area — but certainly a barber. He worked from the pavement, where he had put a chair, an old cane chair, on which he sat his clients. His equipment was on the ground beside him: two pairs of scissors, one for hard work, the other for fine: a razor, of the cut-throat variety, a shaving brush, a tin bowl and a large pewter jug containing the hot water he had to fetch from the cafe up the road where Georgiades and the warehouse clerk went for their coffee. And there was a length of cloth, not overly clean, which he tied round the neck of his client. From time to time he shook it into the gutter.
There was always a circle of onlookers gathered round the chair, sitting on the pavement, offering advice or critical judgement or just generally chatting. The barber was good at chatting and the people who came to join him were regulars. Some passed the day there.
The Greek ambled along the street, paused when he saw the barber and hovered uncertainly. The chair was empty at the moment and the barber spread his apron cloth invitingly. Georgiades sat down. ‘Short back and sides,’ he said.
‘It’s pretty short already,’ said the barber doubtfully. ‘Are you sure you want a haircut?’
‘My wife says I need one.’
‘Perhaps she was thinking of your beard?’
‘I haven’t got one!’ protested Georgiades.
‘Maybe that’s the problem. You’ve got a lot of stubble there.’
‘My hair grows quickly!’
‘It does on some people.’
‘I shave every morning, you know, and by ten o’clock it looks as if I haven’t touched it.’
‘It’s the jowls — they hide the hair, and you can’t cut closely, and then as the day wears on, the hairs come back from behind the flesh.’
‘This is getting personal!’ said Georgiades.
‘No, no, it’s just a technical observation. I’m right, aren’t I?’ he appealed to the onlookers.
‘It’s true he’s a bit fleshy,’ one observer piped up.
‘I can’t help that!’
‘No, he can’t. And stop going on at him. Some people carry a lot of weight. It’s the way they are.’
‘It’s certainly the way I am,’ said Georgiades.
‘All he needs is a shave!’ someone else shouted.
‘You could be right,’ said the barber.
‘All right, a shave, then.’
‘Go on,’ the crowd advised. ‘Make it nice for his wife. She doesn’t want to be scraping herself against his bristles all the time. That’s the problem. It’s not his hair.’
‘A shave, then,’ said the barber. ‘As smooth as a baby’s bottom.’
After this promising beginning, the conversation flowed, and soon the Greek was in a position to ask about the porters.
‘Reliable ones,’ he stipulated.
‘You’ll be lucky!’
‘I know, but a chap who works in one of the warehouses here was telling me that he reckoned he’d found some.’
‘All the warehouses use porters!’
‘Yes, but some are better than others. This bloke I was talking to seemed to need especially good ones. He worked for a foreign Effendi, you see, who was always on to him.’