Michael Pearce - The Mingrelian Conspiracy

‘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.

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?’

‘They provide the excuse. Sorgos would never have thought of it. It had to be someone who knew about working on ikons. And these people do.’

‘It’s not enough,’ said Owen. ‘Yet.’

‘Why are you pursuing me?’ demanded Katarina.

‘I’m not pursuing you,’ said Owen.

‘It’s just an accident that you’re here, is it?’

‘That’s right. There are a lot of them about.’

Katarina moved on to the next stall and began to finger the water melons.

‘Is he bothering you, lady?’ asked the stallkeeper.

‘I’m her brother,’ Owen assured him.

Katarina tossed her head indignantly. She was dressed in shapeless black but the shapelessness failed to deny entirely the shape that was beneath and it was this, perhaps, though he hoped not, that had originally caught his attention. Her hair, that most provocative of features for the Muslim, was completely covered and she wore a long veil over the lower part of her face. However independently she might dress at home, going to the suk she took care to dress in exactly the same way as her sisters. Invisibility, at least in public, was what was required of women.

Naturally enough, in the circumstances, they all observed it. The suk was full of at first sight indistinguishable black-clad forms. Naturally, too, though, most of them subtly denied it. If their hair was covered, their ankles were bare and, as in the goldsmiths’ bazaar, around every shapely ankle was a ton of hardware. Not, of course, in the case of Katarina, and was the face quite as fully covered as in the case of the other women? It was her eyes which, close to, had finally given her away.

Somewhat to Owen’s surprise, another man approached her as she stood at the stall. He appeared to know her, for he greeted her warmly.

‘You haven’t been to see us for a long time, Abbas,’ she chided him.

‘Well, no. I’ve not been working anywhere near the shop, and with your father away-’

Owen had worked out now that he was a storyteller. He wore the mukleh, the unusually wide, rather formal turban which in old times had marked out the men of letters, a status which storytellers, sometimes unjustifiably, always claimed, but other items of his dress, the rather worn farageeyah, or top robe, suggested a man of letters fallen on hard times.