‘You know who Sorgos meets.’
‘I know you have seized Djugashvili.’
‘It’s someone else.’
‘Why do you keep coming to me? I will not help you. I have told you, I am with my grandfather.’
‘In everything?’
‘Yes!’
‘In explosives?’
‘Yes!’
‘Please help me.’
Katarina looked around wildly. A man came forward out of the darkness at the back of the shop.
‘Can I help, my dear?’
‘The Mamur Zapt!’ said Katarina. ‘My father!’ she said to Owen.
‘Your father!’
‘The Mamur Zapt!’
‘I thought you were in Paris!’ said Owen.
The man recovered and came forward with outstretched hand.
‘I was. I have only just returned. Two days ago.’
He shook hands with Owen.
‘And not a moment before time,’ he said, ‘if what I hear is true.’
‘I wrote to him,’ said Katarina.
‘I came at once. How could I not? My father-what can I say? He is an old man and, not to put too fine a point upon it, no longer responsible for his actions.’
‘He has always seemed to me exceptionally alert.’
‘That is kind of you. But he has, I know, caused you considerable alarm. At a time when, I imagine, you would have preferred to have been preoccupied by more serious matters.’
‘You think the alarm was unnecessary?’
‘Well…’ Katarina’s father spread his hands. ‘Passions are running high over the Grand Duke, I know, and I daresay my father’s passions have been running higher than most, but I feel you may have been mistaking rhetoric for action-’
‘I know what the gold was for,’ said Owen.
Katarina’s father went still.
Then he sighed.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘why deny it? Since you know so much? But, Captain Owen, can I plead with you to make allowances? He is a very old man. I thought he could defy time forever but, coming back, after an absence, I see…Captain Owen, will you allow me to take the blame for whatever my father has done? I am the man responsible. I should not have left him. If I had been here, none of this would have occurred.’
‘He would have felt differently?’
Katarina’s father made a gesture of hopelessness.
‘He would have felt exactly the same. But I would have restrained him. Captain Owen, is it too late? I promise that I will see he is no trouble to you. He will not leave the house until the Grand Duke’s visit is over. I promise you that. That is the least I can do and I assure you that it will be done.’
‘That may be for the best. My concern, I should say, is less about him than about others.’
‘Concentrate on them, Captain Owen, and leave me to take care of my father. He will be no further trouble to you, I assure you. Let me be his guarantor.’
‘Very well.’
‘Thank you. And thank you for your sympathy and understanding. My father, as I am sure you know, speaks very warmly of you.’
‘Even now?’
Katarina’s father smiled.
‘Less warmly, perhaps.’ He glanced at the book Owen was holding in his hand. ‘Can I help you?’
He took the book.
‘The Mabinogion?. Oh, of course, I was forgetting: my father told me you were Welsh.’
‘I am afraid the impression your father has of Wales may not be altogether accurate.’
‘No. Katarina has been telling me!’ He laughed. ‘He is right, though; the parallels are there. What makes a people? Language, as my father believes? Language is certainly significant but it is not all there is to Wales. Land? Important, too, but what about the Jews? Culture? I quite favour that myself, but’-he looked at the book again-‘culture can sometimes be a thing of the past. Oh, I know you will point to the Eisteddfod, you will say that things are still being written in Welsh, but-’
‘You make culture too narrow a thing.’
‘I tie it to language. That, perhaps, is my mistake. But even so, Captain Owen, I have a problem with Wales. The English came and took away the politics. What they left was the culture. But can there be culture without politics? I ask that because that in a way is the debate you are having with my father.’
He smiled.
‘I can say that because I am having the debate, too. I am for culture as opposed to politics. All the same, I cannot quite escape my father’s question. General question, that is.’
‘Are the Welsh a nation?’
‘You make it particular again. But, yes, that is the question. However, let us not go to war over it. There have been too many wars over such things already.’
Chapter 12
The first part of the Grand Duke’s visit had passed off without incident. He had arrived at Alexandria, transferred to the Khedivial Yacht and sailed to Suez; entrained to Cairo, spent two happy days, everyone was sure, with the Khedive in the Abdin Palace, and then embarked in a dahabeeyah, especially done up for the occasion at expense which made the Financial Comptroller tear his hair, for Luxor. All without being assailed.
So far, thought Owen, so good. It was the next bit, though, after his return to Cairo, that would be crucial. The time when he would be most exposed would be during the procession and it was then, if anywhere, thought Owen, that the attack would come. He had delegated responsibility, a shrewd political move, no doubt, but one that left him slightly uncomfortable. Passing the formal buck was all very well, but at the end of the day there was still the question of real responsibility and Owen had a disagreeable feeling that it was his.
He had salved his conscience by doing all he could. His agents were everywhere in force. If there had been any whisper of a threat it would have been picked up by them. In the bazaars, however, which Owen regarded as the only accurate source of information in Cairo, there was no whisper. The initial barrage of protests made by ex-citizens of countries he had never heard of had died away. The only real follow-up his spies had detected had been that of Sorgos and his adherents in the Der of Babylon.
There, too, he had done what he could. Sorgos, if Katarina’s father was to be believed, and, certainly, so far he had kept his word, was safely confined to his house. Djugashvili was under lock and key. Other Georgians, most notably the restorers, were under constant observation. If it had not been for the explosives he would have felt he had things more or less under control.
But they were out there somewhere. And there, too, somewhere, was the other player in this game, the man or men whom Djugashvili knew but who somehow operated independently of him and the other people in the Der. Where were the explosives now, he wondered? In the Der, very probably. He had considered a search but Nikos had warned him in unusually strong terms against any such thing. It would provoke a riot, he said. The Copts in the Der, he said- and, after all, they were his own kind-discriminated imperfectly between one invader and another. Intrusion was a thing they would resist, whether it was by Saladdin, the Mamelukes, the Turks or the British. Keep out, he had advised. And Georgiades had reinforced this by pointing to the extreme difficulty of finding anything concealed in so labyrinthine a place. Tunnels, caves, pits, passages, he said, you’d need an army to get anywhere.
So Owen had ruled out a search. He was still, however, unhappy and had even gone to the lengths of tracing on foot the route the procession was going to take, noting carefully points at which explosives might be placed. On the day itself he would have men placed in as many of these points as he could. Cairo was Cairo, however, and although the procession would keep to the wider streets as far as it could, inevitably there were places where the old houses crowded in and the heavy, box-like meshrebiya windows overhung the route, which made it a nightmare to guard against bomb-throwing.
Again, he did what he could. Still, at the end, though, the doubt remained. Something still nagged.
He realized at last what it was. The question he had asked himself before still remained unanswered. Why had they chosen explosives in the first place? A bullet would have been much easier and was, if his impression of the life Sorgos and his friends had led in the Caucasus was at all accurate, a much more natural thing for them to use. Why go to all this trouble?