The suffragi went into one of the most ruined of these. There was not even a proper door, just a gap in the wall.
The trackers waited at a discreet distance. Georgiades and Owen came up with them. Georgiades looked at Owen and made a face.
“Nothing else for it!” Owen said resignedly. He waved the trackers in.
They were holding the suffragi when Owen stepped into the room. The suffragi was putting up no resistance; indeed, there was a smile on his face.
Owen went across to the case and snapped it open.
It was empty.
“It was a decoy,” said Owen bitterly, “just a decoy.”
“And you fell for it,” said Garvin, with a certain grim satisfaction.
“You’ve got the man, though,” said McPhee, loyal to the last.
“Yes, but I can’t hold him. What’s he done?”
“He has deceived us,” said McPhee stiffly.
“The way you’re conducting this investigation, that’ll be true of half the population by the time you’ve finished,” said Garvin.
“Anyway, that doesn’t constitute a crime.”
“Stolen a case.”
“He’s not stolen a case,” said Owen. “It’s his case.”
“Not Berthelot’s?”
“No. Like Berthelot’s. Exactly like.”
“What absolute nonsense! What is a suffragi doing with a case like that?”
“He says he uses it to take his supper to the club. Anton won’t give him any food, so he has to take his own. He used to take it wrapped in a newspaper but Anton didn’t like that. He said it lowered the tone. So now he takes it in a posh case.”
“Just like Berthelot’s?”
“Just like Berthelot’s. Pure coincidence.”
“Coincidence!” McPhee fumed.
“And meanwhile the real case went somewhere else, I suppose,” said Garvin.
“No. It’s still in the cloakroom, where Berthelot left it. The attendant says he can’t give it to us unless we produce a receipt.”
“Oh really!”
Garvin laughed. “I take it the money is no longer in it?” he said.
“There never was any money in it. According to Berthelot.”
“Just a case, which he properly left in the cloakroom?”
“And the cloakroom has properly looked after it.”
“Well,” said Garvin, “they’re certainly running rings around you.”
“They’re just laughing at us,” said Owen. “Everyone’s laughing at us. The donkey-boys are laughing, the bazaar’s laughing, even you’re laughing.”
“I’m not laughing,” said Garvin, “not any more. The French-”
“Ah yes,” said Owen uncomfortably.
“-are not laughing either. They’re hopping mad. They say it’s all our fault. If we’d not messed things up the exchange would have gone ahead as planned and Moulin would now be a free man.”
“It’s hardly fair-”
“Isn’t it?” Garvin cut in. “You were at Anton’s, weren’t you? Well…”
He tossed a piece of paper on the table in front of them. Owen read:
Because you’ve broken your side of the agreement and told the Mamur Zapt, we are breaking our side of the agreement.”
“When they got to the address Berthelot was given,” said Garvin, “they found the house empty. There was just this note left on a table.”
“No Moulin?”
“No Moulin,” said Garvin.
Owen poured out his troubles to Mahmoud, who listened sympathetically and then took him out for a coffee to restore him. They chose a cafe in one of the small streets opposite Shepheard’s: the Wagh el Birket, in fact. It was just after midday, however, and the ladies of the night were still sleeping off the effects of their labors. The shuttered doors on the balconies were closed, the cheap bands in the arcade opposite stilled. Only a few of the cafes were open and these were the traditional Arab ones which catered for the humble local clientele. They picked a table outside one of these and sat down in the shade.
Mahmoud had problems too. He had only just finished questioning all potential witnesses. The list had been a long one, including as it did the staff of the hotel, guests who had been on the terrace, and an assortment of donkey-boys, arabeah-drivers, street-vendors, and general bystanders, of whom, as was usual in Cairo, there were a lot. These latter were especially eager to contribute their impressions and it was only after much patient sifting that Mahmoud was able to establish whether they had actually been present on the day or not.
An additional difficulty was the fact that the incident had been the main topic of conversation in the neighborhood ever since Monsieur Moulin had been reported missing. Whatever may have been the original perceptions, by the time they were reported they had long been confused by a mass of eager embroidering, ill-informed conjecture and plain fantasy. By the end Mahmoud was in despair.
“I’ve got to find a way of going back to the beginning,” he said. “This is hopeless.”
Owen commiserated.
“How about a reconstruction?” he suggested.
Mahmoud at once brightened. The Parquet, French-trained and French in style, adhered to French methods of investigation, of which the “reconstruction” of the crime was usually part.
“That’s a good idea!” he said enthusiastically. “I might try that.”
Owen, whose own training was limited to a brief exposure to English police methods while serving under Garvin at Alexandria, was less convinced in general of the value of “reconstructing.” How could one re-enact an event as fluid as Moulin’s disappearance, with so many holes and loopholes? He could, however, see a case for it on this occasion. Seeing even a crude dramatization of the incident might jog the memories of people as inclined to the dramatic as most Egyptians were.
Mahmoud, happy now, could turn back to Owen’s problems. He sipped the iced water which came with the coffee and thought hard.
“Anton’s,” he said after a while. “Why did it happen there?”
“No special reason. That’s just where it happened to happen.”
“It’s a surprising place for it to happen to happen.”
“Why?”
“If they’ve Senussi connections, as Nikos thought. That sort of Islamic fundamentalist wouldn’t go near a gambling salon. He wouldn’t even have heard of Anton’s.”
“There’s no real evidence that they have Senussi connections. It was just the name that suggested it to Nikos-‘Zawia’.”
“‘Zawia’ can mean a lot of things.”
“I thought it might be Nationalist. You know, ‘turning-point,’ that sort of thing.”
Mahmoud, who was himself a member of the Nationalist Party, laughed.
“You see Nationalist influence in all sorts of funny places,” he said drily.
“I know. There’s nothing much to suggest it in this case. Except that it was aimed at foreigners.”
“They kidnapped a foreigner,” said Mahmoud, “on this particular occasion. That doesn’t mean their target is foreigners in general. Next time it could be an Egyptian.”
“Even if it was an Egyptian, there could still be a Nationalist group behind it. Most of the kidnapping in Cairo is done to raise money for political purposes.”
“So they say.”
Owen sensed he had better move off the topic. Mahmoud and he got on very well together but there were some issues it was best to steer clear of. The Egyptian Nationalist movement was one.
“I agree with you,” he said. “If they’re Senussi, Anton’s is a funny place to use.”
“If they’re fundamentalist at all it’s a funny place to use. It’s not just they’d avoid it, it’s that they wouldn’t know enough about it to be able to use it.”
“Maybe it’s not a fundamentalist group.”
“There’s another thing. You said that in their note they didn’t tell Berthelot how to get to Anton’s. They knew he already knew. How did they know that?”