The Mamur Zapt and the Return of the Carpet (16 page)

For
the tiniest flicker of a second Owen thought he saw the face register. Then it
returned to its normal impassivity.

“No,”
said the Syrian. “I don’t deal in arms. Except—” he smiled. “—Crusaders’ arms.
Was that what you meant?”

Owen
ignored him. He desperately needed something from Georgiades if he was to make
anything out of this exchange.
Out of the whole raid, for
that matter.
They had staked everything on being able to find something
incriminating.
If not the grenades, then at least something.
Now it all seemed to be evaporating.

The
Syrian’s air of expectancy had disappeared. He now knew what Owen had come for.
Knew, and was not bothered.

“And
now I have to ask you,” said the Syrian, “to what do I owe this outrageous
visit?”

Owen
said nothing.

The
Syrian leaned forward even more confidently.

“Even
the Mamur Zapt,” he said with emphasis, “cannot get away with this!”

And
now Owen’s ears caught what perhaps the Syrian had already heard. A new voice
had entered into debate with McPhee downstairs.

“I shall
complain to my consul,” said the Syrian. “It is not just as a private citizen
but also as a foreign national that I have rights.” Georgiades appeared at the
door.

“Wait
there!” said Owen to the Syrian. Outside, Georgiades showed him two revolvers,
new, still heavily greased from the store, of the same type as the one used by
Mustafa.

“That’s
all,” said Georgiades apologetically.

“Every
little helps,” said Owen, “and it helps quite a bit just at the moment.”

He
went back into the room.

“My
people have found British Army equipment,” he said coldly.
“Stolen
from British Army installations.
Now in your
possession.”
The Syrian spread his hands. “The guns?” he said. “They
were stolen? The man swore they had been officially disposed of as surplus to
Army needs.”

“New ones?”

The
Syrian shrugged apologetically. “I am afraid I do not know new ones from old
ones. I am not a military man, I bought them for protection. I have a lot of
valuable silver.”

Owen
could hear the man from the consulate coming up the stairs. “I am sorry if I
have done something illegal,” said the Syrian, “but I hardly think it warrants
an invasion on this scale.”

“This
is an outrage,” began the consular official as Owen brushed past him. “I shall
complain—”

A
grim-faced McPhee was waiting downstairs. They left the shop without a word.
Outside, a small crowd had gathered, sensing that something exciting was going
on.

“Make
way! Make way!” snapped McPhee, still upset.

The
bright white glare of the street was dazzling after the cool darkness of the
house and they stopped momentarily to adjust.

Georgiades
came running round the corner.

“The
roof!” he shouted.
“The roof!”

He
plunged back into the shop. Two of his men rushed in after him.

Abdul
Kassem appeared from a sidestreet.

“There’s
a man on the roof!” he said, and doubled back.

Owen
ran after him, closely followed by McPhee, closely followed by the entire
crowd.

The
sidestreet bent round into a wide square from which they could look back at the
roofline.

At
first they could see nothing.

Abdul
Kassem pulled them to one side and pointed.

“There!
There!”

Half
obscured by the small minaret of a mosque they saw a man on the flat roof of
one of the houses. He appeared to be dragging something.

“That’s
him!” cried McPhee exultantly. He pulled out his revolver.

“Don’t
shoot, for Christ’s sake!” said Owen. “It’s grenades up there!”

Another
man suddenly appeared on a roof some way to the right of the first man. It was
Georgiades. He began running across the roofs. Two other men emerged and raced
after him.

The
first man disappeared behind a parapet.

“He
could come down anywhere!” said Owen in agony.

He
looked around. He still had four men with him.

“You
take those two,” he said to McPhee, “and try and get round behind him on that
side. I’ll take the others!”

McPhee
ran off instantly.

Abdul
Kassem did not wait for Owen but set off through the backstreets on the near
side.

They
soon lost sight of the roofs.

“Christ!”
said Owen again. “He could come down anywhere.”

They
came out into a long street which ran roughly parallel to the man’s course.

“You
stay here,” Owen said to the other constable. “You can see the whole street.”

He himself ran on after Abdul Kassem. The
Egyptian was much better than he was at this sort of thing. He knew, or was
able to sense, the pattern of the tiny, twisting streets. Owen knew he was
holding him back.

“You go on,” he gasped. “Try and get in
front of him.”

Abdul Kassem shot off.

Owen came to a corner and stopped. His heart
was pounding and his eyes were blinded with sweat. He took out a handkerchief
to wipe his face and tried to think. There was no point in just running
aimlessly along the street. He needed to know where the man was. He had a vague
sense of him being to the right and heading northward, but in this warren of
tiny streets forever twisting back on themselves that did not help much.

He walked along until he came to a square
and then tried to look up at the roofs, but the square was small and the houses
which surrounded it so high that he could see very little. He needed to be up
higher.

At the corner of the square was a little
mosque with a minaret rising above it. He ran over to it and tried to go in but
the door was heavily bolted. Still, the idea was a good one, and as he ran on
he kept his eye open for a mosque that was not barred.

The street narrowed still further and then
opened out into a kind of piazza which did not seem to have any way out of it.
Exactly opposite him was a sebil, a fountain-house, whose steeply curved sides,
guarded with grilles of intricate metalwork, rose up high to an arcaded upper
storey. It was approached by a sweeping flight of steps with an ornate marble balustrade.

Without stopping to think, Owen ran straight
up the steps. At the top, set in among the arcades where it would be cool, was
an open recess obviously used as a kuttub, a place where little children
received their first lessons in the
Koran.
The kuttub
was empty, but an old man lay sleeping against a pillar.

Besides him another flight of stairs, much
narrower, led up to the roof. Owen leaped up them and came out on to the flat
top of the arcades.

To one side, behind him, he could see out
over modern Cairo as far as the Nile and the brown desert beyond it. To the
other was the fantastic skyline of old Cairo, with its minarets and cupolas,
the high towers of the mosques, the arcades and domes of the old houses, and in
among them the flat spaces where people came up to take the evening air.

Now,
with the sun still very hot, the roofs were deserted. There was no movement,
anywhere.

He
felt a hand plucking at his sleeve. It was the old man. Owen could see now that
he was blind. He had found him by hearing alone.

“I
will show you the way down, father,” he said.

But
the old man could get down without his aid. He kept asking Owen what he wanted.
Owen explained lamely that he was looking out over the roofs in search of a
thief. The old man shook his head, whether in disbelief or commiseration at the
world’s iniquity. He kept touching Owen’s arm. He was obviously puzzled.
Something about Owen, the accent, perhaps just the bodily presence, told him
that Owen was a foreigner.

Owen
apologized again, excused himself, and descended to the ground. Half way down
he met a black-veiled woman carrying a bowl for the old man. She shrank back
against the wall as Owen passed.

Little
streets, so little they were hardly streets, ran off from the piazza on every
side. There seemed nothing to tell one from another. It came over Owen how
pointless it was trying to intercept a man in this maze.

He
made his way back to the Syrian’s shop.

McPhee
arrived at almost the same moment.

“Like
looking for a needle in a haystack,” he said. “Useless!”

One
of the men who had been with Georgiades on the roof came out of the shop
carrying a large box.

“Thank
Christ for that!” said McPhee. “At least we’ve got something.”

A
moment later Georgiades himself appeared. He was mopping his face with a large
blue handkerchief.

“The
next time we do this,” he said to Owen, “it had better be in the cooler part of
the day.”

“You
didn’t get him,” said Owen.

Georgiades
shook his head regretfully.

“No,”
he said. “What a waste!
After running over the roofs of half
Cairo!”

He
looked down at the big box.

“We
got this, though,” he said. “When I got close to him he put it down and ran.”

The
Syrian came out of the shop with the man from the consulate in attendance.

“
This your
property?” asked Owen, indicating the box.

“Yes,”
said the man from the consulate.

“I
have never seen it on my life before,” declared the Syrian solemnly.

“It’s
a box of grenades,” said Owen.

“You
heard my client,” said the man from the consulate. “He has never seen this in
his life before. You have made a mistake.”

“And
so have you,” said McPhee, taking the Syrian by the arm. “What are you doing?”
said the man from the consulate, stepping between them.

“Taking
him to the police headquarters,” said McPhee.

“You
cannot do that,” said the man from the consulate. “He is a Syrian citizen.”

“Caught
redhanded,” said McPhee indignantly, “with the arms in his possession.”

“He
knows nothing about the arms!” said the man from the consulate. “Someone else
had put them there!”

“Oh,
yes,” said McPhee sarcastically.
“Who?”

“I
don’t know,” said the man from the consulate. “It’s not my job to find out.
It’s your job.”

“We
have found out,” said McPhee.

“I
don’t know about that,” said the man. “It would have to be tested in a court.”

“That’s
exactly what I’m planning,” said McPhee.

“A
Consular Court,” said the man.

“A
Consular Court?” said McPhee incredulously. “The man’s been caught with arms in
his possession.”

“A Mixed Tribunal, then.”

Even
when a foreigner could be proved to have transgressed against the law of his
own country he had the right to be tried by his own Consular Court. Where there
was a dispute between
foreigners,
or between
foreigners and Egyptians, the case was heard by a Mixed Tribunal, on which the
majority of the judges were foreign. But that applied only to civil cases, and
it had yet to be established whether this fell into that category. It almost
certainly did not.

“Anyway,”
said the man from the consulate, “you certainly cannot arrest him.”

“We’ll
see about that,” said McPhee grimly, producing a pair of handcuffs.

“I
protest!” said the consular official. “My client is a native Syrian and is
outside your jurisdiction.”

Owen
was tempted to let McPhee go ahead. At any rate, it might give the Syrian a
shaking. But it was not worth the trouble. They would have to release him at
once.

“Leave
him for the time being,” he said to McPhee. “We shall be taking this up,” he
said to the official.

It
was possible, in certain circumstances, which included a threat to security, to
expel a foreigner from the country; but it took a long time.

“I
shall be taking this up, too,” said the man. “This is a gross invasion of
Syrian territory. I shall be lodging an official complaint.”

“Do!”
said
Owen.

The
consular official took the Syrian by the arm and they went back into the shop.
McPhee was purple with fury.

“It
makes you lose heart,” said Georgiades.

“We’ve
got the grenades anyway,” said Owen.

“Not
all of them,” said Georgiades.

“What?”

“Haven’t
you looked?” He flipped back the top of the box. Three grenades were missing.

McPhee
swore.

“When
did he take them?” asked Owen. “Or were they missing before?”