Free The Men Behind by Michael Pearce Page B

his hands. “The young are immoderate in their hates,” he said, “as in their loves.”
    “I still find it hard to understand,” said Owen. “Revenge on an individual, yes. But this would have blown up everyone in the café!”
    “I wondered,” said Ibrahim diffidently, “if it might be one Society lifting its hand against another.”
    Owen stopped in his tracks.
    “Was it a café used by Societies?”
    Ibrahim shrugged.
    “I do not know,” he said. “But where there are students, there are Societies. I don’t know what’s come over them these days.” He looked back at the pump and at the children playing. “We could do with more good workmen,” he said, “and fewer Societies.”
     
    “I hardly knew them,” said Deesa. “Of course, I had seen them, often. They came most days and they always sat in the same place, in the back room. But they didn’t join in much. You know, if there was a general argument they didn’t say anything. They kept themselves to themselves. We thought they were rather dull. You know, typical engineering students.”
    Owen picked up Deesa at the Medical School after morning lectures and they had gone on to a café. Deliberately Owen had chosen one some distance from the Schools so that there would be less likelihood of interruption; and it was not a student café.
    He did not think Deesa would mind being seen talking to the Mamur Zapt, but in the tricky world of student politics, especially just at that time, such conversations were liable to be misinterpreted.
    Deesa had impressed him at the scene of the bombing and he had made a mental note to talk to him again. When he had approached him, Deesa had agreed readily enough. “Though there won’t be much I’ll be able to tell you,” he had warned. “I wasn’t even in the café that morning. I was just passing.”
    In fact, Deesa had been the first person Owen had talked to who had been in the habit of using the café, and, as a student, the perspective he afforded was doubly useful.
    “Why did they come to Ali’s café anyway?” asked Owen. “It’s quite a distance from the Engineering School.”
    “There’s a lot of crossing over,” Deesa said. “Take me. What was I doing at Ali’s? I’m a medical student. Well, I’ve got friends at the Law School and they often go to Ali’s—it’s very handy for them—and if I want to see them, I know I’ve a good chance of finding them there.”
    “Yes, but you said these two didn’t mix in much. Did they have any friends? Who came in the café, I mean?”
    “I can’t say I ever noticed,” Deesa admitted. “If they did have any friends, they were as quiet as themselves. Anyway, that might not have been the reason for their coming to Ali’s. They might have come for the opposite reason—to get away from other Engineering students. I sometimes feel like that,” said Deesa, laughing.
    “What did they do in the café?”
    “Do? Drink coffee, talk, read. They used to read a lot. They brought their books with them. They used to go through them together.”
    “What sort of books?”
    “I don’t really know. Engineering books, I suppose. Now I come to think of it,” said Deesa, “I did once see one of their books. We were at the next table. It had a lot of drawings in it, diagrams, that sort of thing.”
    “It seems very sad,” said Owen. “Ordinary students, getting on with their work. And then to die like this!”
    “I know,” said Deesa. “We’re all very upset.”
    What Deesa had told him tallied with what he had already heard. The two students had been in their second year. They had completed their first year successfully, though without being outstanding in any way. Their teachers remembered them as being very quiet. Both had come up from the country, though from different parts, and had been overawed at first by life in the city. Perhaps that was what had drawn them together, for the staff remembered them as inseparable from the first.
    Owen had not