At last Owen managed to get away. He had just turned the corner when he heard himself hailed by Selim.
‘Effendi! Effendi!’
‘Yes?’
‘Effendi, there is much to report!’
‘Report away, then.’
‘Effendi, I saw those men last night. Including that little bastard who was one of those who attacked me the other day. And I said to myself: I will stave that man’s head in! But then, Effendi, I reflected. Am I not a policeman, I said to myself? Do not I serve the Mamur Zapt? And would he wish me to do a thing like that? Surely not. He would wish me to hold back until I could stave in the heads of all the bastards. So, Effendi,’ said Selim, swelling with pride, ‘I held back!’
‘Good for you. Now-’
‘Then, Effendi, I thought more. These are evil men, I said, and they will come again. And when they come again, by God, this time I will be ready and I will level the score. And the good thing is, I don’t have to go to them; they will come to me. All I have to do is sit here on my backside. That was pretty good thinking, wasn’t it, Effendi?’ said Selim anxiously.
‘Pretty good. Now-’
‘I put it to Babakr. That was Babakr up the street, Effendi. I think you saw him?’
‘Yes, indeed.’
‘Well, I put it to him and he thought it was a good idea too. He said, it’s better that the mountain should not go to Mohammed, especially if it’s very hot, but that Mohammed should come to the mountain. And then we can throw the bloody mountain at him. That was a good thought, wasn’t it, Effendi? I must say, I’d never thought of Babakr as a religious man before, but that was pretty good.’
‘Yes, well, thanks, Selim-’
‘But that is not all, Effendi. When the second man came, that little bastard who was here the other day, I said to myself: I will not stave his head in, but is it right that I should let him go? If I miss the chance, I may lose him forever. I may never see him again. But if one were to follow him home, so that I would know where to look for him-’
‘You followed him home?’
‘Well, no, Effendi, not I. I’m the one who has the ideas. It is for other people to do the walking. So I told Mekhmet-’
‘Mekhmet followed him?’
‘Yes, Effendi. He was at first unwilling-Effendi, the man is but a hollow reed-but I persuaded him. So if you would like to give him a piastre, no more, the man’s not worth it, but I wouldn’t mind a couple for myself, Effendi-’
‘Just a minute,’ said Owen. ‘Are you saying that Mekhmet followed this man all the way home?’
‘That’s right, Effendi. It was a bad place they went to, down in the Babylon-’
‘Fetch Mekhmet,’ said Owen.
Chapter 8
Babylon, or Bab-ei-On, the Old City, had been there before the Muslims came. Its original inhabitants had been the Copts, lineal descendants of the Egyptians in the time of the Pharoahs. Over the centuries they had become Christians and the Ders were essentially Christian enclaves against the Muslim invaders. The Muslim tide had swept over the original fortified churches destroying the forts but leaving the churches, and it was in their precincts that Christians had traditionally gathered. Over the years many Copts had moved out, up to the modern, more prosperous city of the Arabs, but in their place had come other Christians: Greek (which was why there were almost as many Greek churches as there were Coptic in Babylon), Macedonians, Montenegrins and Serbians. Most recently there had come Georgians. Here, too, a generation ago, had come the Mingrelians; and with them had come Sorgos.
It was in one of the Ders that, with the instinct for alliance characteristic of the new immigrant, he had settled when he had made the journey from his native Caucasus. There he had found his first job, incongruously, perhaps, as an apprentice bookbinder, although one should remember that he was familiar with leather-working. There, in time, he had opened his own workshop. In the same Der he had bought his house and it was there that his son had been born. The Der was where his roots lay; and the place in which, when the time came, he naturally looked to for allies.
Georgiades had been ferreting them out. The people who had known Sorgos in the early years were now mostly dead but acquaintance had been preserved in their families, was a kind of family matter, and Sorgos was still well known in the Der.
Yes, he came here often. Not, perhaps, as much as he did, for it was a long way to travel. When his son had opened the bookshop near the Clot Bey, he had moved with him.
It was in the bookshop that Katarina had been born. The world she had grown up in was very different from that of the Der. Her father, quickly literate, had slipped easily into the Europeanized culture which his trade had opened up to him. Mingrelian, he was still, but Cairo, now, and even Paris, was his intellectual home and not the Caucasus.
The mother? Mingrelian, of course, and apparently very beautiful. She had died giving birth to Katarina. Her daughter, after the earliest years, had grown up in a household without women, one in which she was actually closer to her father and his world than to her grandfather and the closed world of the Der.
The Der, said Georgiades, was the thing, not the Mingrelians. They were scattered now around Cairo and there were not many of them. Sorgos, as senior elder, commanded great prestige and the few Mingrelians left worked dutifully to preserve their language, but community they hardly were. Most of them had been assimilated into other communities which were now for them more important. Sorgos might still eat patriotic fire but the attention of the other Mingrelians had passed to other pursuits. A few had been disposed to join him in his Crusade against the Grand Duke but, said Georgiades, the fact that the original public meeting had been held in the Der was not coincidental. It was there, not amongst the Mingrelians, that Sorgos expected to find his allies.
‘Not among the Copts,’ said Nikos. The Copts, who had survived through the centuries by keeping their heads down, were not going to stick them up for the sake of parvenus. ‘And not among the Greeks, either,’ said Georgiades.
It was on the others that Georgiades had concentrated his enquiries and he had very soon found out the men Sorgos had recently been seeing.
‘He went round the lot, Serbs, Albanians, Caucasians, and most of them were prepared to join him on the platform for that first meeting. It was after the meeting that the problems began. They couldn’t work together. In the end he walked out in disgust.’
It was the Georgians, mostly, who had walked with him. Their wrongs were fresher in their minds, the wounds inflicted by the Russians still raw. The men were younger; and in Djugashvili, the man who had run after Sorgos when that first public meeting had ended, Georgiades thought that they might have found a leader.
‘Just a minute,’ said Nikos, frowning, ‘have you got anything definite?’
‘No,’ said Georgiades. ‘It was just that when I asked, everyone said that he was the man the Georgians naturally turned to.’
‘He wasn’t on the platform,’ said Owen.
‘No. They don’t really amount to a sizeable community. There are even fewer of them than there are of the Mingrelians. And there doesn’t seem to be any community leader. The fact is,’ said Georgiades, ‘I don’t think they want to become a community. They want to go back to Georgia.’
‘So the war against Russia is still real to them?’
‘That’s right. So far as they are concerned, it’s never ended. Retreat to Egypt is just a temporary tactical withdrawal.’
‘And the Grand Duke fair game?’
‘Undoubtedly.’
‘There’s still nothing definite,’ said Nikos.
Georgiades turned to him.
‘The gold?’ he said. ‘Isn’t that definite?’
‘All we know,’ said Nikos, ‘is that Sorgos is buying gold dust. Which might or might not be used to buy explosives. What’s the connection with the Georgians?’