The Mamur Zapt and the Return of the Carpet (6 page)

“If
he does,”
said
Owen, “he’s not going to tell us.”

“He
has his own people,” said Mahmoud.

“Guzman?”

“And
others.”

A
forage mule made its way soporifically towards them. Its load was so huge as
almost to span the narrow street. Owen wondered if they would have to move, but
at the last moment the mule was twitched aside and the load, bowing almost to
the ground, grazed the table.

They
were meeting at Mahmoud’s request. Later that morning he had rung Owen
proposing a coffee before lunch.

Mahmoud
waited until the mule had passed on down the street and then said: “I have been
checking on the gun.”

“Find
anything?”

“Part of a consignment missing last March
from the barracks at Kantara.
They suspected a sergeant but nothing was
ever proved. All they could get him for was negligence—he was in charge of the
store. He’s done six months and is due out about now.”

“Probably
sold them,” said Owen.

Mahmoud
nodded. “That’s what they thought.”

“No
lead?”

“He
wouldn’t talk.”

“He
won’t talk now,” said Owen, “especially if he’s due out.”

“If
he was told he’d be all right?”

“Out of the goodness of his heart?
No chance.” “If he
thought he was just shopping an Egyptian—” suggested Mahmoud tentatively.

His
eyes met Owen’s.

He
could be right, Owen was forced to admit. In the obscure code of the ordinary
Tommy, shopping a mere Egyptian might not count.

“Just worth trying.”

“I
was wondering—” began Mahmoud, and then hesitated.

Owen
knew what he was thinking. It would have to be an Englishman and would probably
need to be Army rather than civilian.

“Would
you like me to have a go?”

“It
might be best,” said Mahmoud.

Owen
lunched at the Gezira and then, unusually, went back to his office. Late in the
afternoon, when the sun’s fierce heat had softened, he went again into the
Place Bab el Khalk.

He
was in a light linen suit and wore a tarboosh, the pot-like hat of the
Egyptian, on his head. With his dark Celtic colouring and the years of sunburn
he looked a Levantine of some sort. He carried an Arabic newspaper.

He
chose a tea-stall on the eastern side of the Place and perched himself on a
stool. The tea-seller brought him a glass of Russian tea.

From
where he sat he could see along the Sharia Taht er Rebaa to where the massive
battlemented walls of the Mosque el Mouayad rose on the left. One or two little
bunches of black-gowned figures were already beginning to spill out on to the
sharia. From somewhere behind the Mosque came a confined noise which, as he
listened, began to settle down into a rhythmic chanting.

“Wa-ta-ni.
Wa-ta-ni.
Wa-ta-ni.”

The
tea-seller came out from the other side of the counter and looked uneasily down
the street.

“There
will be trouble,” he said.

On
the pavement behind him a barber was shaving a plump, sleepy-looking Greek. The
barber put his razor in the bowl beside the chair and came out on to the street
also.

“Yes,”
he said, peering towards the mosque, “there will be trouble.”

The
Greek opened one eye. “What trouble?”

“Students,”
said the barber, wiping the soapsuds off his hands on to his gown.

“Again?”
said the Greek. “What is it this time?” “I don’t know,” said the barber. “What
is it this time?” he called to a-bean-seller at an adjoining stall.

The
bean-seller was serving some hungry-looking students with bowls of ful
madammas, red fava beans cooked in oil and garlic.

“What
is it this time?” he asked of them.

“We
don’t know,” said the students. “It is the students of el Azhar, not us.”

“They
are going to Abdin Square,” volunteered one of the students, “to demonstrate
against the Khedive.”

“Much
good that will do,” said the bean-seller. “They will just get their heads
busted.”

“Someone
has to,” said the student.

“But
not you,” said the bean-seller firmly.

“You
sound like my father,” said the student.

“Your
father and I,” said the bean-seller, “are men of experience. Learn from us.”

“Anyway,
I cannot go with them today,” said the student. “I have my exams tomorrow.”

“Have
not the el Azhar students exams also?” called the Greek.

The
students shook their heads.

“They’re
not like us,” they said.

Owen
guessed them to be engineering students. Engineering, like other modern
subjects, was studied at the governmental higher schools. At el Azhar, the
great Islamic university of Cairo, the students studied only the Koran.

The
students finished their bowls and left. The bean-seller began clearing away his
stall. At the far end of the Taht er Rebaa a crowd was coming into view.

“You
carry on shaving,” the Greek ordered. “I don’t want you running away before
you’ve finished.”

“Who
is running away?” said the barber. “There is still plenty of time.”

“I
am running away,” said the bean-seller.
“Definitely.”

At
this time in the afternoon the Place Bab el Khalk was fairly empty. A few
women, dressed in black and heavily veiled in this part of the city, were
slip-slopping across the square, water-jars on heads, to fetch water for the
evening meal. Men sat in the open air cafés or at the street-stalls drinking
tea. Children played on the balconies, in the doorways, in the gutter.

The
bean-seller apart, no one appeared to be paying much attention to the
approaching demonstrators, though Owen knew they were well aware of them. When
the time came, they would slip back off the streets—not too far, they wouldn’t
want to miss anything—and take refuge in the open-fronted shops or in the
houses. Every balcony would be crowded.

He could pick out the head of the column
distinctly now. They were marching in disciplined, purposeful fashion behind
three large green banners and were setting a brisk pace. Behind them the Sharia
was packed with black-gowned figures.

Some of the more nervous café-owners were
beginning to fold up chairs and tables and move them indoors. Obliging
customers picked up their own chairs and took them into the shops and doorways,
where they sat down again and continued their absorbing conversations. There
were no women on the street now, and children were being called inside.

The barber wiped the last suds from the
Greek’s face with a brave flourish.

The Greek felt his chin.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “What about here?”

“Perfect,” said the barber.

“Show me!” commanded the Greek.

The barber reluctantly produced a tin mirror
and held it before him.

“It’s lop-sided,” complained the Greek.
“You’ve done one side and not the other!”

“Both sides I have done,” said the barber,
casting an uneasy glance down the street. “It is just that one side of your
face is longer than the other.”

The Greek insisted, and the barber began to
snip and scrape at the offending part.

The tea-seller lifted his huge brass urn off
the counter and took it up an alleyway. Owen felt in his pocket for the
necessary millièmes.

The procession was about a hundred yards
away now. At this stage it was still fairly orderly. The students had formed up
into ranks about twenty abreast and were marching in a disciplined column,
though with the usual untidy fringe around the flanks, which would melt away at
the first sign of trouble.

The barber dropped his scissors into a metal
bowl with a clang and hurriedly pulled the protective cloth from off the Greek.
The Greek stood up and began to wipe his face. The barber threw his things
together and made off down a sidestreet. As he went, the Greek dropped some
millièmes in the bowl.

Owen folded his newspaper and stepped back
into the protective cover of a carpet shop. The shop was, like all the shops,
without a front, but the carpets might prove a useful shield if things got
really nasty.

The Greek came over and stood beside him.

“Not long now,” he said.

The head of the procession entered the
Place. Owen’s professional eye picked out among the black gowns several figures
in European clothes. These were almost certainly not students but full-time
retainers of the various political parties, maintained by them to marshal their
own meetings and break up those of their rivals.

As the column marched past, the students
seemed to become progressively younger. El Azhar took students as young as
thirteen, and some of the students at the back of the column could have been no
more than fourteen or fifteen.

The procession was now strung out across the
Place, the bulk of it in the open space in the middle and the head approaching
the street which led up to Abdin Square.

An open car suddenly shot out of a street at
right angles to the procession, cut across in front of it and stopped. In it
was McPhee.

He stood up and waited for the marchers to
halt. The four armed policemen in the car with him leaned over the side of the
car and trained their rifles on the front row of the demonstrators.

The procession hesitated, wavered and then
came to a stop. Those behind bumped into those in front, spread round the sides
and formed a semi-circle around the car.

McPhee began to speak.

The crowd listened in silence for a brief
moment and then started muttering. One or two shouts were heard, and then more,
and the chanting started up again. The crowd began to press forward at the
edges.

Owen saw the first missiles and heard the
warning shots.

Then, to the right, came the sound of a
bugle and Owen looked up, with the crowd, to see a troop of mounted policemen
advancing at the trot.

This was the pride of the Cairo Police: all
ex-Egyptian Army cavalry men all with long police service, experienced, tough
and disciplined, mounted on best quality Syrian Arab stallions expertly trained
for riot work.

They advanced in three rows, spaced out to
give the men swinging room.

Each man had a long pick-axe handle tied to
his right wrist by a leather thong.

At an order the handles were raised.

And then the troop was among the crowd.
Handles rose and fell. The crowd opened up, and there were horses in the gaps,
forcing them open still further. They split the crowd into fragments, and round
each fragment the horses wheeled and circled, and the sticks rose and fell.

Whenever a group formed, the horses were on
to them.

Students fell to the ground and either
scrabbled away from the horses’ hooves or lay motionless. All over the Place
were little crumpled heaps.

And now there were very few groups, just
people fleeing singly, and no matter how fast they fled, the horses always
outpaced them.

All this while, McPhee had stayed in the
car, watching. Now he signalled with his hand, and out of the street behind him
emerged a mass of policemen on foot.

They spread out into a long, single line and
began to work systematically across the Place.

Anyone who was standing they clubbed. Behind
them, in an area of the Place which steadily became larger, there was no one
standing at all, just people sitting, dazed, holding their heads, or black
gowns stretched out.

The last groups broke and fled, harried by
the horses.

“Very expertly done,” said the Greek.

A student darted in among the stalls and
tables close by them, a rider in hot pursuit. The student threw himself on the
ground behind a stack of chairs. The horse halted and the policeman leaned over
and hit the student once or twice with his stick. Then he rode away.

The student got to his feet, panting and
sobbing. He looked back across the Place and saw the line of foot policemen
approaching. In a second he had shot off again.

He reminded Owen of a hare on the run, the
same heaving sides, panicked eyes, even, with his turban gone and his shaven
head, the hare’s laid-back ears.

Another student rushed along behind the row
of deserted street-stalls. He brushed right past Owen and then doubled back up
an alleyway.

“That one!” snapped Owen. “Follow him! Find
out where he goes!”

Georgiades,
the Greek, who was one of Owen’s best agents, was gone in a flash.

The
student was Nuri Pasha’s secretary and son, the difficult Ahmed.