You expected more sense from Mahmoud. This kind of thing was ridiculous. To fly off the handle over a thing like this! It was only a suggestion, damn it all, and not such a bad one at that. It was all very well for Mahmoud to go on about it just being to do with the name but the names terrorist groups chose for themselves often were significant. OK, some of the student groups chose names straight out of the Boy’s Own Paper, they were very young after all, fifteen, sixteen, though that didn’t stop them kidnapping and garrotting. But the names of the serious groups often really did tell you something about the groups. It was a sort of declaration of their allegiances and purposes. Nikos knew more about this sort of thing than Mahmoud did. It was all very well for Mahmoud to talk so dismissively of Nikos’s crazy associations, but Nikos spent all his time dealing with Cairo’s uneasy political underworld and knew the way it worked. Mahmoud was just a straight crime man.
Not only that, Mahmoud was hardly a neutral in these matters. He was himself a Nationalist. OK, the Nationalist Party was fairly moderate and committed to legitimate constitutional change, but it was often hard to draw the line between moderate nationalism, and the sort of crazy stuff that Owen often encountered. Mahmoud was a reasonable guy and thought that everyone else was a reasonable guy.
Well, they weren’t, they certainly weren’t. For a start, anyone who kidnapped two elderly men from the terrace at Shepheard’s was hardly moderate and committed to legitimate processes.
Why had they gone to the lengths of taking them from to the terrace, anyway? It would have been much easier from have done it somewhere else, in the bazaars, perhaps. OK, then you would have had to kidnap someone else because neither Moulin nor Colthorpe Hartley went to the bazaars, but if you were just after money it wouldn’t really matter who you took, there were plenty of rich Europeans, or rich Egyptians, for that matter. They could have kidnapped Nuri, for a start. No, perhaps they’d better not take him, Christ knows how Zeinab would react, but there were plenty of others. It would have been easy. But to do it from the terrace at Shepheard’s, in full view of everybody, that wasn’t easy, in fact it was going out of your way to make it difficult. Why had they done that?
There could be only one answer. They had done it precisely because it was difficult, because it was in the public eye. They had wanted to show that it could be done, that all these fine people strutting up there on the terrace were just as vulnerable as anyone else. And why was it important to show that? Because those people up there were those who ruled, those who governed Egypt. OK, not directly. They were merely representative. But what they represented were Britain and France.
That was it! Why Moulin? Because he was French. Why Colthorpe Hartley? Because he was British. Why Shepheard’s? Because everyone could see.
You could strike back at the oppressors. That was the lesson. That was what they wanted to show. And they wanted to show it in the most conspicuous way possible. Shepheard’s! The very symbol of foreign privilege! The terrace! The most conspicuous place in Cairo.
And if that wasn’t a nationalist lesson, Owen was a Dutchman.
Mahmoud was up the creek. For all that fancy French reasoning of his, he was missing the point. He had his blind spots and nationalism was one of them. There were some things he didn’t like to face. The fact that there was a continuum between legitimate nationalist activity and illegitimate nationalist activity was something he could not accept.
Well, you could understand that. But it was a blind spot all the same. It meant there were some things you could work with Mahmoud on and some things you couldn’t. That was the plain fact of it. He had gone on about trusting, made a big thing of it. Well, Owen did trust him, in that he believed him to be completely sincere and honest. He would stake his life on that. But that didn’t mean accepting that he had no blind spots. Nationalism was one of them and on anything to do with nationalism, well, no, at the end of the day you couldn’t trust him. That wasn’t because he was disloyal or dishonest, it was just that, well, he couldn’t be relied on. His judgment wasn’t as good on that as it was on other things. He was too emotionally involved.
That was another thing. Mahmoud was too emotional. Underneath that cool, French, Parquet-style logic Mahmoud was still very much an Arab, emotional, intuitive, hypersensitive. Owen often thought he could understand Mahmoud, and perhaps Arabs in general, better than most Englishmen because he himself was not really an Englishman but a Welshman and Welshmen were supposed to be a bit like that themselves. Usually he got along well with Mahmoud but there were times…
He sighed and sipped his coffee. On the opposite side of the street little boys were putting out tables for the evening. The cafes on that side of the street filled up in the evenings because the tables gave a good view of the ladies of the night in the rooms above Owen. They bent over the balconies in their filmy gowns, giving observers opposite a great deal more pleasure, Owen suspected than they actually obtained when they plucked up enough courage to cross the street and go inside.
Why had Mahmoud chosen this moment of all moments to fly off the handle, just when it was particularly necessary to keep a clear head? OK, he had been working hard and it was damned hot and he was probably a bit on edge anyway. Maybe he’d heard some of the criticism. Well, Christ, Owen had heard some of the criticism too. You had to put up with these things. It was no good being thin-skinned.
Of course, it wasn’t so easy for an Egyptian, there were other things in it as well for them, the fact that the British were their bosses and foreigners, for instance. It wasn’t easy to take-he didn’t find it easy himself that bit about Garvin coming in over him for a start-but you hadn’t got to let it rattle you. You just had to get on with the job. God knows, they weren’t doing too well in that line just at the moment.
The thought came to him that maybe that was why Mahmoud was so rattled. It wasn’t like him, though.
Then another thought struck him. Perhaps the reason why Mahmoud had blown his top was that he had not wanted to admit, not even to himself, that there might be truth in what Owen had said, that there was, indeed, a nationalist connection.
The thought occurred to other people, too. Along with the earlier whispers about Mahmoud came a new one. If Mahmoud was so good, why hadn’t he found out more? Because he wasn’t trying to, came the answer.
Chapter 9
Owen’s relations with the Army were not universally unfriendly. He sometimes played tennis with one of the Commander-in-Chief’s aides-de-camp and had been doing so that afternoon. Afterward they had gone to the bar. This was not purely a matter of conviviality. Playing in that heat meant that the body lost water heavily and it was necessary to replenish it. They were, in fact, drinking pints of lemonade, which was certainly not the case with all the other people in the bar at the Sporting Club.
Among these was a group of young Army officers. They included Naylor. He and Owen nodded to each other politely and Naylor looked curiously at John, whom he knew to be a pukka Army officer and therefore, in his view, surprising company for the Mamur Zapt. One of the other subalterns actually knew John and it was not long before they were drawn into a common conversation.
“Bad show, this kidnapping business,” one of the group remarked to Owen, on learning from John who his companion was. “How are you getting on?”
“Slowly.”
“Not easy,” said the other sympathetically, “not with all these Egyptians having a finger in the pie.”
Owen muttered something noncommittal.
“Is it true that the Senussi are involved?” another officer asked.