He turned back to the snake charmer.
“And then it happened again,” he said.
“Yes.”
“The Englishman came down the steps. And again you knew that something bad was happening. And again you heard the bells.”
“I was confused,” said the old man, “troubled. And then I heard the bells.”
“It would be possible to check,” said Owen. “Possible, not easy. ”
“Perhaps you-I have no standing in this case. Officially.”
“OK. I’ll check.”
“If I were you,” said Mahmoud, “I wouldn’t check with the donkey-boys.”
“No? Why not?”
“Because,” said Mahmoud, “if anything happened at the foot of the steps, and it did, they must have seen it.”
“Weddings,” said Owen, “weddings. Do you remember their jokes about weddings? I thought it was because one of them, Daouad, wasn’t it, was getting married?”
“Cheeky!” said Mahmoud. “It would have been cheeky of them. But typical!”
“I’ll check,” said Owen.
“Don’t talk to anyone too closely connected with the front of the terrace!” Mahmoud warned him.
Owen endured, on this occasion, Mahmoud telling his grandmother how to suck eggs.
“We don’t want another Farkas,” said Mahmoud, rubbing it in.
“I’ll look out for the postcard-seller too.”
They pushed their way back across the street.
“Even so,” said Owen, “it wouldn’t have been easy.”
“It would have been easy to take him. The problem was always getting him away.”
“You reckon they put him in the palanquin?”
“Yes. Surround him when he gets to the foot of the steps, throw a blanket over his head and bundle him into the palanquin. Then you can take your time.”
“Might have been seen bundling.”
“It would have been very quick. The camels would have blocked out anyone seeing from the street side. Mirrors, banners, people everywhere. A small man in the middle of a lot of big men.”
“Possible,” Owen conceded.
“Why did they come down the steps? That’s still the question.”
They parted when they got to the other side of the street. “I’ll get on with that checking,” said Owen.
“Palanquins are not that easily come by,” said Mahmoud. “You could start there.”
Owen put Nikos to work on the palanquin, Georgiades to work on the weddings. They operated in complementary ways. Georgiades would shamble through the crowd, chatting to all and sundry, young and old, beggar and businessman, inviting confidence with his soulful eyes and sympathetic manner. Nikos shrank from the messy business of individuals and pursued the abstract and organizational. Whereas Georgiades would have set about tracing the palanquin by going first to the user and then deciding where a person like that was likely to go to get his hands on a palanquin, Nikos immediately went through a list of palanquin suppliers.
The Georgiades way would probably have worked better in the present situation but they did not have a known person to start from. Owen hoped that if he picked up the “wedding” the other might follow. Cairo was a personal city. Set any group to walk along the street and at least one of its members was sure to be recognized by at least one of those who witnessed it.
Nikos, confronted with what he regarded as a simple organization problem, was ticking along happily. Once he had taken on a problem, however, his mind refused to let it go and he was still thinking about Zawia and the Senussi.
Midway through the morning, and through his pursuit of the palanquin, he stuck his head in at Owen’s door.
“It might not be Senussi,” he said.
“Might not be Senussi!” Owen was enraged. “Christ, you tell me now, when the whole place has got itself in an uproar about the Senussi.”
“What I was thinking,” said Nikos equably, “was that it might not be the Senussi themselves but an associated sect. Other sects have religious centers too which they call by the same name.”
“Like what sect?”
“The Wahabbi. There has always been a link between the Wahabbi and the Senussi. They are very similar. Both are extremely fundamentalist. And that brings me,” said Nikos, “to another point. I was going through the files of the dragomans yesterday.”
“Mahmoud and I went through them.”
“Yes,” said Nikos, unimpressed. “And what I found was that Abdul Hafiz is a Wahabbi.”
“I think we noted that too,” said Owen.
“Yes. Well, it fits, doesn’t it? The Wahabbis are very fundamentalist, just the sort of people to be infuriated by anything to do with gambling. And all the more so if the gambling is anything to do with foreigners, since, like the Senussi, they object strongly to foreigners. Suppose Berthelot was right, and the reason why they picked Moulin was that they had learned that the Khedive intended to build a gambling salon and wanted to frighten him off? Abdul Hafiz might have been the way they learned.”
“Berthelot swears he kept things very quiet.”
“OK. Suppose they heard about it another way. Quite possible, because there are Wahabbis close to the Khedive. Abdul Hafiz might have been the man they put in to keep an eye on things. Also to take a hand. Remember what the strawberry-seller said. Either Abdul Hafiz or Osman was on the terrace at the time Moulin disappeared.”
“The flower-seller thought it was Osman.”
“I think it was Abdul Hafiz. The strawberry-seller remembered it because it surprised him. That rings true to me. He was surprised because Abdul Hafiz was not the sort of man who normally talked to people like the postcard-seller. That was because he was a Wahabbi. Strict people like that object to profane images, all the more if they’re the sort of images the postcard-seller was carrying around.”
“I don’t see how the postcard-seller fits in.”
“Nor do I. A minor figure, I should think. Perhaps he was the link with the men who were actually going to do the kidnapping. Perhaps what Abdul Hafiz was doing was telling him to give them the go-ahead.”
“If it was Abdul Hafiz. Mahmoud thought it was more likely to be Osman. Osman is more Western, more the sort of man you would expect to be au fait with internal arrangements at Anton’s. And he’s got the religious background, if that’s significant. He was at El Azhar.”
Nikos was not the only one who could pick things up from files.
“Yes,” said Nikos. “I saw that too. But that was a long time ago and there’s nothing on the files to suggest either that he’s had anything to do with El Azhar since or that he is strongly religious. From what you say he’s the other way around, if anything. Westernized and secular. That doesn’t fit.”
“It fits with what Mahmoud thinks. He thinks it was done just for the money.”
“Osman does very nicely out of the tourist trade. He wouldn’t want to damage that.”
“It was Berthelot who thought there might be a religious or moral explanation.”
“I think that’s more likely. If it was just a straight money job they’d want to do it the easy way. Why go to the trouble of picking somebody off the terrace at Shepheard’s? More risky, much more likely to go wrong. You’d do that only if you wanted to be conspicuous, to strike a blow which you wanted everyone to see. That makes the religious explanation more likely.”
“Or the nationalist one,” said Owen.
Nikos went back to the palanquins. Georgiades now appeared. He, too, had been thinking of other things.
“Are you going to leave it?” he asked.
“Leave what?”
“The Tsakatellis business. Do what the girl said. Keep out of it.”
“I haven’t made up my mind.”
“You see,” said Georgiades, settling down comfortably- Owen suspected he just wanted to come in out of the heat- “there are two views. Either we can do as the girl said, stay out of it, on the grounds that we’ll only make matters worse. Or else we might feel that matters were coming to a head anyway, that the mother’s money will soon run out, that they’ll have to bring the old lady in, and that she’s likely to put the stopper on the whole business.”