Michael Pearce - The Fig Tree Murder

He felt a gun being pushed into his hand.

Suddenly, things were different.

‘Line: Halt!’ he shouted. And then, in a moment of inspiration: ‘Prepare to fire!’

The constables halted, obedient but confused. Batons were all they had.

‘This is the Mamur Zapt,’ he called out to the dark mass in front of him. ‘I order you to disperse! If you do not, I shall open fire. I shall fire one shot into the air to show you that I am armed.’

The sharp crack came almost at once.

There was a sudden silence in the square.

‘Disperse immediately! Or I shall open fire.’

He would, too.

But there was no need. The dark line ahead of him wavered and broke. In an instant men were running.

The constables moved in. A man came reeling back, dazed and nursing an arm. Owen caught him by the galabeah and then, as that would tear, by the hair.

The square was emptying rapidly now, as the crowd fled in panic.

‘Not good, though,’ said Owen, as he sat in the bar of the Sporting Club at lunchtime the next day.

‘Not good at all,’ Paul agreed. ‘It’s given Mr Rabbiki his publicity triumph on a plate.’

The veteran politician had not waited long to capitalize on the disaster. Early the next morning he had appeared in Owen’s office, stern but undisguisedly cheerful.

‘An outrage!’ he said. ‘We demand a public apology.’

‘You can have one from me,’ said Owen. ‘I’m damned annoyed at what happened.’

‘Oh, we don’t want one from you,’ said Mr Rabbiki. ‘We want one from the government.’

‘You’ll be lucky!’

‘Well, it doesn’t really matter,’ said Mr Rabbiki, catching the smell of coffee-all meetings in Cairo, whether adversarial or convivial, required coffee-and relaxing, ‘since we’ve got what we wanted.’

‘All went according to plan, did it?’ said Owen sourly. Rabbiki gave him a quick look.

‘No,’ he said, ‘it did not. We had planned a straightforward demonstration. Large, but peaceful. What happened? Who were those men?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Owen, ‘but I’m damned well going to find out!’

‘They weren’t police, I know that.’

‘No, I sent the police in afterwards. Once the fighting had started. I wanted to break it all up before it had a chance of spreading.’

‘You took a risk,’ said Mr Rabbiki accusingly. ‘With all those people, someone might have got killed.’

‘I know that. That’s why I’m so annoyed.’

‘I can tell you who the men were,’ said Mr Rabbiki. ‘They were Syndicate men.’

‘I doubt that. What would be the point?’

‘They know we want to stop the railway from getting to Heliopolis on time. This was intended as a warning.’

‘If it was,’ said Owen, ‘then it was a very stupid one.’

‘We are dealing with some very stupid people.’

‘Are we? I’m not so sure about that.’

‘Nor am I, on second thoughts,’ Mr Rabbiki admitted. ‘Stupid, possibly. Ruthless, certainly.’

‘Well-’

‘As they have shown in the case of that poor man whose body was found on the railway line. I hope, Captain Owen, that while you’re grappling with these wider political issues, you won’t lose sight of what happened to that poor man.’

‘If I did, Mr Rabbiki,’ said Owen, smiling, ‘I’m sure you would put down a question. Coffee?’

‘But was it wise?’ asked the man from the Syndicate, half an hour or so after Mr Rabbiki had gone.

‘Wise?’

‘To break up the demonstration so, well, firmly? I know we’ve asked you to take a strong line but, well, frankly, we’d prefer a little more finesse just at the moment, with the line so near completion. Only another couple of weeks to go! You don’t think you could lie low for that period, do you? We really do appreciate your efforts on our behalf, believe me, we know you’re doing your best, but-you couldn’t handle things with a bit more sensitivity, could you?’

‘Sensitivity!’ he said to Paul indignantly. ‘Those bastards! Me!’

‘They were just having fun,’ said Paul confidendy. ‘Trying to provoke you!’

‘No, they weren’t. They meant it!’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really. That was the message: hold back! Show a bit more sensitivity! Let’s have a bit more finesse! Those brutal sods!’

‘Well,’ said Paul, reflecting, ‘I suppose they think they’ve almost got there. Brutality is what you need on the way; sensitivity and finesse is what it’s called once you’ve got there.’

He signalled to the waiter for another drink.

‘But why,’ he said, ‘would they have taken that line if all the time they were behind it?’

‘To cover up,’ said Owen.

‘You think they were just trying to put you off?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Owen, ‘but I’m going to find out. And when I do, I’ll show them some bloody sensitivity!’

Most shops in Cairo closed for the afternoon. Most police stations did, too, their inhabitants arguing, reasonably, that if it was too hot for work it was also too hot for crime. Not, however, the police headquarters at the Bab-el-Khalk, where Owen had his office. Some men had been arrested the night before at the demonstration and lodged in the local police station. This morning they had been transferred up, and now Owen meant to interview them himself.

The first three, however, were ordinary members of the crowd. Not entirely ordinary citizens, perhaps, since they had all been armed and had attempted to use their weapons against the constables, which accounted first for their battered appearance and then for their arrest. Owen, though, was not interested in them. What he wanted was someone from the invading wedge. He remembered the man he had himself arrested and went down to the cells to find him.

On the way back to his room they passed Garvin, the Commandant, who cast a professional eye over the prisoners.

‘Oh, Abbas,’ he said, ‘it’s you, is it?’

‘I wasn’t doing anything this time, Effendi,’ protested the man indignantly.

‘Got arrested by accident? Well, blow me!’

‘What were you doing near the Pont de Limoun, then?’ asked Owen, when he had got the man settled in his room.

‘Nothing!’

Owen pointed to the man’s arm, which was in a rough sort of sling.

‘How come you got hit on the arm, then?’

‘The fact is, Effendi, I wasn’t looking. At least, not on that side, I’d got this bloke lined up, a big, fat policeman he was, and I thought, Right, my beauty, I’ll have you! And then, damn me, someone comes at me from the side and catches me a crack, I thought it had broke my arm, and then before I could do anything about it, the other one turns round and gives me a crack over the head! I tell you, in future I’m always going to make sure I’m paired up with someone, it’s better that way, one of you can keep a lookout while the other’s doing the hitting. Then you can take turn and turn about. Hosayn’s the man, I think, he’s quite quick and not stupid-’

He had an attitude to the fighting that was purely technical and Owen soon put him down as a professional heavy, a member of a gang most likely, brought in for occasions.

Had he been brought in on this occasion?

Certainly, the man replied with pride. Word had gone round that good men were required and he and several others had put their names forward. They had worked with Figi before- Figi?

‘He’s our boss. We don’t work with him all the time, but lately he’s been getting some good contracts-’

Like?

‘Well, this one. Go in and break them up. Very straightforward. And they probably wouldn’t even be armed! Well, I mean-’

And that was all?

Well, it was enough, wasn’t it? The reward had to be matched against the risk, after all. In this case there hadn’t seemed to be much risk so they’d settled for something quite low. And then the Mamur Zapt had come along and started shooting!