The Mamur Zapt and the Girl in Nile. Michael Pearce
way up the street was a tall sebil, or fountain-house. It was, like the hammam, an old building, clearly predating the other buildings since the street curved back specially to accommodate it.
It was a delightful building. Its totally curved sides were fenced with grilles of exquisite metalwork and its upper storey was graciously arcaded. There was a little parapet going round the arcade and it suddenly occurred to Owen that it might provide a vantage-point from which he could more pleasantly monitor proceedings.
He climbed up the outside staircase past the fountains surrounded by black-veiled women filling their pots with water and out on to the little parapeted promenade which crowned the second storey.
From inside the arcade came the murmur of children’s voices. As with many of the larger sebils, the arcaded upper storey was occupied by a kuttub, a school where little children received their first lessons on the Koran.
Owen smiled. It was an unexpectedly tender insight on the part of the Arabs to accommodate their infants up here where it was airy and cool.
He walked to the parapet and looked over. Down in the street he could see some of his men. They approached a house and went in. Not long afterwards, watching, he saw them appear on the roof. They looked around for a moment and then went down.
From where he stood, high up, he could look down on the roofs of the houses. Most of them were flat and empty, save for the occasional bundle of firewood, the heap of vegetables, the pile of corn-stalks. One or two of the larger houses, though, had roof gardens; and, as he watched, two women came up on to one of these and began watering the plants.
It was a house about two along from the one he had been looking at previously. He hoped the women would have completed their task and departed before his men arrived. Servants would probably warn them but if there was an outside staircase and his men dashed up—?
He watched anxiously. The men went into the next house and worked through it. The women went on watering.
The men finished the house and came out into the street. And at that moment, fortunately, the women left the roof of their own accord.
Owen breathed a sigh of relief. It wouldn’t have done for the women to be met by his men. That, yet again, could have caused trouble.
What a country this was to police in! Mosques, bathhouses, roofs—you could offend someone’s susceptibilities by searching any of them. What were you to do? If it wasn’t religion, it was women!
His men, searching both sides of the street, had covered that block of houses and were now coming up the street towards the fountain-house. He went down to meet them.
‘That one next?’ said one of the men, indicating the fountain-house with his hand.
‘Of course!’
The women watched them curiously as they mounted the stairs. Owen was about to move away when one of his men appeared above the parapet and waved to him urgently.
He ran up.
In an inner room, beyond the chanting class, were some sacks and packaging. The men had picked up the sacks and shaken them out. And out had fallen two new live clips of ammunition.
‘Of course, we’re holding the teacher,’ said Owen.
‘That won’t do much good,’ said Garvin scornfully.
‘They moved the guns this morning right in front of him.’
‘This morning?’
Owen swallowed.
‘Yes, this morning. When we started searching.’
‘I thought you had people on the lookout?’
‘Well, we did. But—’
‘You seem to be mislaying a lot of things lately,’ said Garvin. ‘First, the body. Now the guns.’
‘He says that all he knows is that the men came this morning and took away the guns,’ said Nikos, Owen’s Official Clerk and Office Manager.
‘He must know more than that,’ protested Owen. ‘Where the guns were hidden, for a start.’
‘He says he was told not to use the room.’
‘Who told him?’
‘A man.’
‘What sort of man?’
‘The usual. Galabeeyah and head-dress. The head-dress held across his face.’
‘No description?’
‘No description.’
‘Keep him,’ said Owen. ‘It may help him to see better. And send Georgiades down. See if he can find out anything.’
But this was bolting the door after the horse had gone. The teacher was unimportant and probably genuinely knew nothing. Georgiades questioned several other people: the kuttub’s watchman, a fiki who taught there, people in the neighbouring shops, but to no avail. The fact was that the guns had been there and Owen had missed them twice. The first time because he had allowed himself to be called away in the middle of things and hadn’t been able to supervise the men properly. The second time because—well, because they had been smart enough to smuggle the guns away right under the noses of the men he had posted to make sure that didn’t happen.
He was back where he had started. Only this time without the guns.
And still there were distractions! Mahmoud had traced the girls who had been on the Prince’s dahabeeyah and wanted Owen’s help in interviewing them. Owen could guess why that was. They must be foreign.
Because of treaty concessions imposed on Egypt over the centuries, the nationals of certain foreign powers had legal privileges. Their houses could not be entered by the police, for instance; they had to be tried by courts of their own country, not by Egyptian courts, and so on.
The definition of nationality, already elastic in this cosmopolitan country, was easily stretched and all kinds of dubious people claimed benefit of the Capitulations, as the privileges were called.
It was common practice, for example, for a brothel-keeper brought before a court to claim that he or she belonged to a privileged nationality. It was possible, if the police applied to the Consul of a country, to get the exemptions waived. But by the time the police had secured the exemption and got back to the brothel, the keeper would have changed his nationality and they would have to start all over again.
It was another of those things, like religion and women, that required policing to be resourceful in Cairo.
If you were dealing with a foreign national it often paid to have a representative of a Great Power, like Britain, at your back. But it was probably for another reason that Mahmoud had called on him. In a sensitive case like this, where action against foreign nationals might have diplomatic repercussions, it was wise to get the British on your side first.
Owen knew this and didn’t mind it. There were even advantages in that he might be able to ‘manage’ the affair better from the inside. All the same, just now it was a distraction.
However, he went. The two girls, it transpired, did not work in a cabaret but assisted at a gambling salon. Owen thought he knew what kind of assistance that was but Mahmoud said it was not like that, or not like that entirely.
‘It’s a very high-class salon,’ he said, ‘and the people who go there are more interested in gambling. They tend to be European, though, or Europeanized Egyptians and expect the social style of a club on the Riviera. There’s a reception area where they can sit and talk and the girls sit in there too and help the conversation along.’
At the request of the salon’s owner they met the girls not at the salon but in a hotel nearby. The salon was in the Ismailia quarter where all the best hotels were. They met in the Hotel Continental.
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