Free Donkey-Vous by Michael Pearce Page B

the cafés were open and these were the traditional Arab ones which catered for the humble local clientele. They picked a table outside one of these and sat down in the shade.
    Mahmoud had problems too. He had only just finished questioning all potential witnesses. The list had been a long one, including as it did the staff of the hotel, guests who had been on the terrace, and an assortment of donkey-boys, arabeah-drivers, street-vendors, and general bystanders, of whom, as was usual in Cairo, there were a lot. These latter were especially eager to contribute their impressions and it was only after much patient sifting that Mahmoud was able to establish whether they had actually been present on the day or not.
    An additional difficulty was the fact that the incident had been the main topic of conversation in the neighborhood ever since Monsieur Moulin had been reported missing. Whatever may have been the original perceptions, by the time they were reported they had long been confused by a mass of eager embroidering, ill-informed conjecture and plain fantasy. By the end Mahmoud was in despair.
    “I’ve got to find a way of going back to the beginning,” he said. “This is hopeless.”
    Owen commiserated.
    “How about a reconstruction?” he suggested.
    Mahmoud at once brightened. The Parquet, French-trained and French in style, adhered to French methods of investigation, of which the “reconstruction” of the crime was usually part.
    “That’s a good idea!” he said enthusiastically. “I might try that.”
    Owen, whose own training was limited to a brief exposure to English police methods while serving under Garvin at Alexandria, was less convinced in general of the value of “reconstructing.” How could one re-enact an event as fluid as Moulin’s disappearance, with so many holes and loopholes? He could, however, see a case for it on this occasion. Seeing even a crude dramatization of the incident might jog the memories of people as inclined to the dramatic as most Egyptians were.
    Mahmoud, happy now, could turn back to Owen’s problems. He sipped the iced water which came with the coffee and thought hard.
    “Anton’s,” he said after a while. “Why did it happen there?”
    “No special reason. That’s just where it happened to happen.”
    “It’s a surprising place for it to happen to happen.”
    “Why?”
    “If they’ve Senussi connections, as Nikos thought. That sort of Islamic fundamentalist wouldn’t go near a gambling salon. He wouldn’t even have
heard
of Anton’s.”
    “There’s no real evidence that they have Senussi connections. It was just the name that suggested it to Nikos—‘Zawia’.”
    “‘Zawia’ can mean a lot of things.”
    “I thought it might be Nationalist. You know, ‘turning-point,’ that sort of thing.”
    Mahmoud, who was himself a member of the Nationalist Party, laughed.
    “You see Nationalist influence in all sorts of funny places,” he said drily.
    “I know. There’s nothing much to suggest it in this case. Except that it was aimed at foreigners.”
    “They kidnapped a foreigner,” said Mahmoud, “on this particular occasion. That doesn’t mean their target is foreigners in general. Next time it could be an Egyptian.”
    “Even if it was an Egyptian, there could still be a Nationalist group behind it. Most of the kidnapping in Cairo is done to raise money for political purposes.”
    “So they say.”
    Owen sensed he had better move off the topic. Mahmoud and he got on very well together but there were some issues it was best to steer clear of. The Egyptian Nationalist movement was one.
    “I agree with you,” he said. “If they’re Senussi, Anton’s is a funny place to use.”
    “If they’re fundamentalist at all it’s a funny place to use. It’s not just they’d avoid it, it’s that they wouldn’t know enough about it to be able to use it.”
    “Maybe it’s not a fundamentalist group.”
    “There’s another thing. You said that in