The Mamur Zapt and the Return of the Carpet (2 page)

“Don’t
really need to,” he said. “Smell it a mile away.
Hashish.”

He
began searching the man methodically.

“I
expect you’ve already done this,” he said apologetically.

“Police
job,” said Mahmoud.

“And
I don’t expect they’ve done it,” said McPhee.

Most
of the ordinary constables were volunteers on a five-year contract and were
recruited from those who had finished their conscript service, again five
years, with the Egyptian Army. They tended to come from the poorer villages and
were nearly all illiterate. They were paid three pounds a month.

“He
wasn’t like this when he was caught, surely?” said Owen, puzzled.

“Pretty
well,” said Mahmoud. “That’s why they caught him. He more or less fell over.”

“Then
how—?”

“How
did he fire the shot?” Mahmoud shrugged. “My guess is he took the hashish to
stiffen himself up. He just about managed to fire the shot, and then it caught
up with him. That’s why he shot so poorly.”

“Maybe,”
said Owen.

The
other smiled.

“The
other explanation is, of course, that he was drugged up to the hilt, someone
else fired the shot—equally, poorly—and then put the gun in his hand.”

McPhee
looked up. “The gun was definitely in his hand at some point.”

He
took up the Arab’s limp hand, smelled it and then offered it to the other two.

“No,
thanks,” said Owen.

“Distinct smell of powder.”

“I’m
surprised you can pick it out among the other things.”

McPhee
let the hand drop and rose to his feet.

“Nothing
else,” he said.

“Did
you find the gun?” Owen asked Mahmoud.

Mahmoud
nodded. “On the ground,” he said.

He
signed to the constable, who went away and returned a moment later gingerly
carrying a large revolver in a fold of dirty white cloth.

“Standard
Service issue, I think,” said McPhee, “but you’ll know better than I.”

He
looked at Owen.

“New
model,” said Owen.
“Only started being issued here last
February.
Wonder where h£ got that?”

“I’ll
have to check,” said Mahmoud.

“You’ll
have something to go on at any rate,” said McPhee.

He
was always pleased
tc
> put the Parquet in its
place.

“More
than that,” said Owen. “I think we’ve got a witness for you.”

Mahmoud
looked at him inquiringly.

“Blue
galabeah,” Owen said to McPhee.

He
turned to go.

“Have
a word with Fakhri Bey,” he said as they went.

Afterwards,
Owen and McPhee went to the Sporting Club for lunch, and then Owen had a swim-
In the summer working hours were from eight-thirty till two. The whole city had
a siesta then, from which it did not stir until about six o’clock. Then the
shops reopened, the street stall holders emerged from under their stalls, the
open air cafés filled up, and the narrow streets hummed with life until nearly
three in the morning.

Owen
had got used to (he pattern in India and it did not bother him. However, he
never found it possible to sleep in the afternoon. Usually he read the papers
at the club and then went for a swim in the club pool. The mothers with their
children did not come until after four, so he had the pool to himself and could
chug up and down practising the new crawl stroke.

Usually,
too, he would return to his office about six and work for a couple of hours in
the cool of the evening, undisturbed by clerks and orderlies, agents and
petitioners. It was a good time for getting things done.

That
evening he had intended to get to grips with the estimates, but when he arrived
in his office he found a note on his desk from McPhee, asking him to drop along
as soon as he got in.

“Oh!
Hullo!” said McPhee when he stuck his head round the door. “Just as well you’re
here. The Old Man wants to see us.”

Garvin,
the professional policeman who had relatively recently been appointed
commandant of the Cairo police, was, if anything, a little younger than McPhee,
but McPhee always liked to refer to him in what Owen considered to be a
prep-school manner. McPhee had spent twelve years teaching in the Egyptian
equivalent of a minor public school before Garvin’s idiosyncratic, and amateur,
predecessor had recruited him as assistant commandant at the time of the
corruption business.

The choice was not, in fact, as eccentric as
might appear. McPhee was patently honest, a necessary qualification in the
circumstances and one comparatively rare in worldly-wise Cairo; he spoke Arabic
fluently, which was a prime prerequisite for the post so far as the British
Agent, Cromer, was concerned; and he possessed boundless physical energy,
which, although irritating at times, fitted him quite well for some of the
tasks a policeman was called on to do.

He was, however, an amateur, and, Owen
considered, would not have stood a cat’s chance in hell of getting the job if
Garvin had been making the appointment.

The same was probably true of his own
appointment as Mamur Zapt, head of the Political Branch and the Secret Police.

McPhee himself had been responsible for
this. The post of Mamur Zapt had become vacant at the time when McPhee, pending
Garvin’s arrival, had been appointed acting commandant. The post was considered
too sensitive to be left unfilled for long and McPhee had been asked to advise
the Minister. Not a professional soldier himself, he had been over-impressed by
Owen’s service on the North-West Frontier in India, and Owen’s facility with
languages had clinched the matter.

The shrewd, unsentimental Garvin, thought Owen,
would have appointed neither of them; neither the eccentric McPhee nor the
inexperienced Owen. He would probably have got on better, Owen thought, with
the previous Mamur Zapt: the one who knew the underworld of Cairo just a little
too well.

Now, when he and McPhee took up their
accustomed chairs before the large desk, Owen felt the usual
small-boy-about-to-be-disciplined feeling creeping up on him. He guessed that
McPhee felt it, too, but they reacted in different ways. McPhee sat up ramrod-straight
and barked, “Yes, sir!” Owen lolled back in what he suspected was an absurdly
exaggerated manner and said nothing. He suspected that Garvin found him far too
easy-going.

The suspicion was soon reinforced.

“Nuri Pasha,” said Garvin.

“Nasty shock, sir,” said McPhee. “But he’s
recovering. We have the man who did it.”

“Oh,” said Garvin.

McPhee
described the circumstances.

Garvin did
not seem much interested.

“So
that’s all buttoned up,” McPhee concluded.

“Buttoned
up?” Garvin regarded him incredulously. “You haven’t bloody begun!”

He turned
to the Mamur Zapt.

“Did you
get any warning of this?”

“No.”

“Why
not?”

Owen
thought that was an unfair question.

“We get any
number of warnings,” he began defensively. “Three or four a day—”

Garvin cut
across him.

“Did you
get one about this?
About Nuri Pasha?”

“Not
specifically,” Owen admitted.

“Worrying.”

“Nine-tenths
of them are baloney.”

“The
other tenth isn’t,” said Garvin.

He brooded
for a moment.

“What do
you do about those?
The ones that aren’t baloney?”
“We check them all out,” said Owen.
“Baloney or no
baloney.
The ones that look as if they might have something in them we
take action over.”

“What
action.”

“Notify
the appropriate people. Stick a man on. Stay with the source.”

“Sometimes
it works,” said Garvin.

“It nearly
always works,” said McPhee loyally.

Garvin
ignored him.

“But those
are the cases where you hear something. You didn’t even pick up a whisper this
time?”

“No.”

“Slip-up,”
said Garvin.

Owen fought
back.

“Not
necessarily,” he said. “Anyone who’s plotting an assassination isn’t going to
broadcast the fact. There may have been nothing to pick up.”

“There’s
always something to pick up in Cairo,” said Garvin dismis-sively.

He turned
his attention back to McPhee.

“Buttoned
up!’’ he repeated. “You haven’t bloody even started! Whose man was he? What’s
behind this? What are they after?”

“The
Parquet—” Owen began.

Garvin
swung round on him.

“For
Christ’s sake!” he said. “Stop messing around! You know damned well this is
nothing to do with them. It’s political.”

Garvin’s
eyes bored into his.

“So
you’d better bloody get on with it,” he said. “Mamur Zapt.”

CHAPTER 2

Owen
was at the Place de l’Opéra shortly before seven the following morning. Early
though he was, the Parquet was there before him. Mahmoud was surprised.

“The
Mamur Zapt?” he said.

He
broke into a smile.

“They
have been leaning on you, too?”

“They
told me to stop messing around and bloody get on with it,” said Owen.

“Moi aussi
. ”

They
both laughed.

“It
must be political,” said Mahmoud.

“What
isn’t?” said Owen.

“And big.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re here.”

“I
honestly don’t know anything that makes it big,” said Owen.
“Nuri
Pasha?”

“I
thought he’d retired from active politics.”

“Those
bastards never retire from active politics,” said Mahmoud. He looked at Owen
curiously. “Don’t you know?
Really?”

“No,”
said Owen.

“I
don’t really know, either,” said Mahmoud. “I just assumed—” He broke off.

“What did you assume?”

Mahmoud hesitated.

“I’ve got no particular reason for
assuming,” he said at last. “I just took it for granted.”

“What?”

“That it was to do with Denshawai.”

“Why should it be to do with Denshawai?”

“Because Nuri Pasha
was an under-secretary in the Ministry of Justice at that time.”

The Denshawai Incident had happened in 1906,
just before Owen was transferred to Egypt and took up the post of Mamur Zapt.

Some British soldiers had been marching from
Cairo to Alexandria and en route five officers had gone to the village of
Denshawai to shoot pigeons. Round ever^Egyptian village were flocks of
semi-wild pigeons kept for food and manure. No one was allowed to shoot them
without permission from the head man of the village. The officers had
misunderstood a guide who was with them and, thinking they were free to shoot,
did so. The infuriated villagers had attacked the officers. Two had been
wounded and one had died, of sunstroke it was thought, as he lay on the ground.
The British-controlled Administration had taken exemplary action against the
villagers. Four had been sentenced to death, others sent to prison, and seven
had received fifty lashes.

The incident had sparked off widespread
protests throughout Egypt. It had not been too popular with the new British
Government, either. Word went that Cromer had been, in effect, forced out over
the issue. He had been replaced as Consul-General by the more pliable Sir Eldon
Gorst, something which hadn’t, in the view of old hands, helped matters one
little bit.

“Denshawai flavours most things,” said Owen
slowly. “I don’t know that it is particularly important in this case. How
closely was Nuri Pasha involved?”

“Not very,” said Mahmoud. “
Which is why my assumption may be quite wrong.
”

He looked around him.

“And also why,” he went on breezily, “I
should get on with my reconstruction before the remaining half million of the
Cairo population arrive on the scene to help me.”

The number of people on the Place was indeed
beginning to grow. The first water-cart was coming down the Sharia el Maghrabi
spraying water behind it to keep down the dust. The first forage camels were
weaving their way along the Ezbekiyeh Gardens, great stacks bobbing precariously
on their backs. The cab-men and donkey-boys lunched their animals on green
forage, and from dawn a steady train of camels slouched over the Nile
bridge
to supply them. The first donkeys, laden with heavy
blocks of ice wrapped in dirty sacking, were making their way to the hotels.
People who had slept on the
pavement,
or on the wall
next to the railings of the Gardens, or in the gutter (which was probably safer
since they could not fall off) were beginning to stir. In the early morning it
was sometimes quite difficult to get along because of the number of men lying
about with their faces covered like corpses, sleeping as soundly as the dead.
Now, as he watched some of the white or blue-gowned figures get to their feet,
Owen was suddenly reminded of apocalyptic accounts of Judgement Day that he had
heard from Welsh preachers. Not normally given to such visions himself, he
thrust it out of his mind and concentrated on Mahmoud’s reconstruction. The
Parquet followed French practice and usually required a “reconstruction”
of a crime by its investigators, and Owen, whose knowledge of standard police
procedures was limited, was interested in seeing how Mahmoud approached it.
Briskly, it appeared. The Egyptian went over to a mark he had scuffed in the
dust. “Nuri Pasha,” he said, “was about here, facing out across the Place
towards the Ezbekiyeh Gardens.”

“According to
Fakhri?”

“And others.”

Mahmoud pointed to where a man was relieving
himself in the road.

“Fakhri’s arabeah was about there.”

“He would have had a good view,” said Owen.

“Yes,” said Mahmoud, “I think he did. Though
between him and Nuri Pasha there were a lot of people.”

“Did you find any of them?”

“Yes. The first they knew of it was a loud
bang. They looked round to see Nuri Pasha falling—”

“Why was he falling?” asked Owen. “He wasn’t
hit.”

“Don’t know,” said Mahmoud. “I’ll have to
ask him. Reflex, perhaps.”

He darted back and affected to stumble.

“An old man,” he said.
“Dazed,
winded and scared.
Perhaps halfstunned.
Anyway,
he lay approximately here until about five hundred people took it upon
themselves to carry him into the hotel.”

“Who took the initiative?”

“As
I was saying,” said Mahmoud, “about five hundred of them. Each one says.”

He
looked up and down the road and then walked over to another mark.

“Meanwhile,
an ordinary fellah who had attempted to run away immediately after the shot was
seized and brought to the ground, or tripped, or just fell over, about here.
Definite, because he stayed there, unconscious, till the police
came and one constable, brighter than most, marked the spot.”

“That’s
where he was taken,” said Owen. “Where was he when he fired the shot?”

“Or when the shot was fired.
Don’t know. Fakhri
Bey said he moved to the right, so if we move to the left—” He counted out four
paces. “He might have been standing here.”

“About twelve feet from Nuri.”

“In
which case,” said Mahmoud, “why didn’t he hit him?”

“It’s
more difficult than you might think,” said Owen, “even at twelve feet.
Especially if you’ve never fired a revolver before.”
“Which might well have been the case,” said Mahmoud. “Why is it so
difficult?”

“It
kicks back in your hand when you fire,” said Owen. “If you’re not holding it
properly the barrel jerks upward.”

“If
the shot went upward,” said Mahmoud, “how did it hit the lemonade-seller?”

“Could have ricocheted.”

“Off what?”

Mahmoud
moved back to where Nuri Pasha had been standing. Owen took up the position
they had guessed at for the assailant. “Off the statue,” said Owen.
“Maybe.”

They
went over to the statue of Ibrahim Pasha and examined it. Mahmoud put his
finger on a mark.

“Yes?”
he said.

“Yes.”

They
became aware that a small crowd was watching them with interest.

“I
think your half million is beginning to arrive,” said Owen.

“It’s
unreal to reconstruct without a crowd,” said Mahmoud. “It’s impossible with
one.”

He
walked across the Place to where Fakhri might have observed the scene from his
arabeah. For a moment he stood there looking. Then he walked slowly back to
Owen.

“Just fixing it in my mind,” he said,
“before I talk to them.”

Two heavily laden brick carts emerged at the
same time from adjoining streets and then continued across the Place abreast of
each other. A car coming out of the Sharia el Teatro was obliged to brake
suddenly and skidded across in front of two arabeahs which had just pulled out
of the pavement. All three drivers jumped down from their vehicles and began to
abuse the drivers of the brick carts, who themselves felt obliged to descend to
the ground, the better to put their own point of view. Other vehicles came to a
halt and other drivers joined in. Some Passover sheep, painted in stripes and
with silver necklaces around their necks, which had been trotting peacefully
along beside the Ezbekiyeh Gardens, abandoned the small boy who was herding
them and wandered out into the middle of the traffic. In a moment all was
confusion and uproar. The Place, that is, had returned to normal.

“That,” said Mahmoud resignedly, “is
that.”

The
two had taken a liking to each other and Mahmoud, unusually for the Parquet,
invited Owen to be present at his interrogation. It took place in the Police
Headquarters at the Bab el Khalk. They were shown into a bare, green-painted
room on the ground floor which looked out on to an enclosed square across which
the prisoner was brought from his cell.

He looked dishevelled and his eyes were
bloodshot but otherwise he seemed to have completely recovered from his heavy
drugging. He looked at them aggressively as the police led him in. In Owen’s
experience a fellah, or peasant, caught for the first time in the toils of the
alien law tended to respond either with truculent aggression or with helpless
bewilderment. This one was truculent.

After the preliminaries Mahmoud got down to
business.

“Your name?”

“Mustafa,” the man growled.

“Where are you from?”

“El Deyna is my village,” he said
reluctantly.

El Deyna was a small village on the
outskirts of old Cairo just beyond the Citadel.

“You have work in the fields,” said Mahmoud.
“What brought you to the city yesterday?”

“I came to kill Nuri Pasha,” said the other
uncompromisingly.

“And why did you want to kill Nuri Pasha?”

“He dishonoured my wife’s sister.”

“Your
story will be checked,” said Mahmoud.

He
waited to see if this had any effect on the man but it did not.

“How
did he dishonour your wife’s sister?”

Mustafa
did not reply. Mahmoud repeated the question. Again there was no response. The
fellah just sat, brawny arms folded.

Mahmoud
tried again.

“Others
will tell us if you do not,” he said.

The
man just sat stubbornly there.

“Come,
man,” said Mahmoud, not unkindly. “We are only trying to get at the truth that
lies behind this business.”

“There
is one truth for the rich,” the villager said bitterly, “and another for the
poor.”

“The
truth we seek,” said Mahmoud, “is not necessarily that for the rich.”

“The
rich have all the weapons,” the man said, “and you are one of the weapons.”

Unexpectedly,
Mahmoud seemed to flinch.

“I
would not have it so,” he said mildly.

The
man had noticed Mahmoud’s reaction. It seemed to mollify him.

“Nor
I,” he said, mildly, too. “I would not have it so.”

He
rubbed his unshaven chin.

“Others
will tell you,” he said. “My wife’s family works in the fields for Nuri Pasha.
One day Nuri went by. He saw my wife’s sister. He said: “Tell her to bring some
melons to the house.” She brought the melons and a man took her in. He took her
to a dark room and Nuri came to her.”

“That
was wrong,” said Mahmoud, “but it was wrong also to try to kill for that.”

“What
was I to do?” the man said passionately. “I am a poor man and it is a big
family. Now she is with child. Before, there was one mouth and she could work
in the fields. A man wanted her and would have taken her at a low price. Now
there are two mouths and she has been dishonoured. No one will take her now
except at a large price. And how can I find a large price for her?”

Unconsciously
he had laid his hand on the table palm uppermost as if he was pleading with
Mahmoud.

“How?”
he repeated vehemently.
“How?
I have children of my
own.”

Mahmoud
leaned across the table and touched him sympathetically on the arm.

“There
is worse, friend,” he said. “How will they manage without you when you
whcn
»^teti
are gone?”

The
passion went out of the man’s face.

“There
will be money,” he said, and bowed his head, “without me.”