The Girl in the Nile Page 11

  Mahmoud came out of the Mixed Tribunals and crossed the street towards him. He was carrying a huge bundle of papers and didn’t want to walk far, so they went into the Arab café beside the Post Office.

  Mahmoud dumped the papers on a chair and sat down with relief. He had, he told Owen, been on his feet all morning.

  “Did you get anywhere?”

  “No,” said Mahmoud. “The usual.”

  The Egyptian system of courts was one of the most complicated in the world. Foreigners in Egypt received considerable legal privileges. In some cases they could be tried only by their own national courts and cases had to be remitted to Smyrna or Ankara or wherever it was. In other cases, where an Egyptian national was involved as well as a foreigner, the case had to be sent to the Mixed Courts, where the law was different from that in the ordinary Egyptian courts. The possibilities for evasion were endless.

  Owen commiserated.

  Mahmoud shrugged his shoulders.

  “You get used to it,” he said.

  He was, understandably, not very cheerful this morning.

  “Yes,” he said, “they told me yesterday.”

  “What did they tell you? To drop it?”

  “No, no. They wouldn’t do that. If a case is closed, you’ve got to say why. Sometimes,” said Mahmoud, “bureaucracy has its uses.”

  “What did they tell you, then?”

  “Basically, to leave it alone for a while. A long, long while. To concentrate on something else. That’s why,” said Mahmoud, tapping the bundle of papers, “they’ve given me this. I had to get it all up last night. I’ve got another one for tomorrow. And the day after. I don’t think,” he said, “they trust me to do nothing.”

  He laughed, but it was an injured, bitter laugh. If you were a Parquet lawyer you got used to cases getting nowhere; but that didn’t mean you liked it.

  “It’s Narouz, isn’t it?” he said. “He’s fixed it.”

  Owen nodded.

  “Well,” said Mahmoud, “it was always on the cards. He’s a member of the Royal Family. They wouldn’t want to go too close to the Khedive. What I can’t understand, though, is why the British should want to get involved.”

  “They don’t want to get involved. All they want to do is make sure it doesn’t blow up into anything.”

  “For the sake of the Khedive?”

  “Certainly not for the sake of Narouz.”

  Mahmoud, fortunately, did not probe.

  “I wouldn’t have thought they’d have bothered,” he said.

  ***

  It was the custom in Egypt, on the Friday after a body had been interred, for the women of the family to visit the tomb, where they would break a palm branch over the grave and distribute cakes and bread to the poor.

  When Ali Marwash’s daughter died the custom was followed to the letter since the girl was Ali Marwash’s only child and he cared for her more than he probably would have had done had there been sons in the family.

  The mourners went to the tomb and a fiki, a professional holy reader, especially hired for the occasion, chanted the appropriate verses from the Koran. The palm branch was broken and placed on the grave and the cakes and bread distributed.

  The party was about to depart when the mother of the dead girl noticed that the earth over the entrance to the tomb had been disturbed, and when she looked more closely she saw that one of the roofing stones had been moved.

  Graverobbing in Egypt was a traditional pursuit and she immediately feared the worst. Ali Marwash was not a rich man, but he had loved his daughter and had wrapped her in a Kashmir shawl before interring her.

  It was normal to tear the shawl first so that its value would not tempt a profane person to violate the tomb; but the shawl had been a beautiful one and he had not been able to bring himself to do that. His wife now feared that they had been punished for his presumption.

  Her screams attracted a large crowd and the fiki, taking control, sent someone to fetch her husband. A sheikh was summoned and with his authority and before a vast concourse of onlookers the tomb was reopened.

  The mother’s fears were realized, for the tomb had indeed been violated. Her daughter’s body had been removed altogether. And in its place, stacked high in the subterranean vault, was a large pile of guns and ammunition.

  The police were called at once and the District Chief of Police, whose recent experiences had reinforced a strong natural tendency towards caution, sent immediately for the Mamur Zapt.

  By the time Owen arrived the crowd was sixty deep and he had to get his constables to clear a way through.

  The tomb consisted of an oblong brick vault with an arched roof high enough to allow a person buried in it to sit up with care when visited by the two examining angels, Munkar and Nekeer. On top of this was a solid brick monument with an upright stone. The entrance was through a small separate cell to the northeast, and it was this which had been tampered with.

  Owen stepped down into the cell, bent and looked through the doorway into the burial vault. At first he could not see anything, but then someone pushed a lighted torch in front of him and he caught the gleam of the bluish-gray metal inside.

  It was a large cache of arms. He pulled one out. It was a rifle in pristine condition, still greasy from the packing case and with the heavy, cold distinctive smell he knew so well.

  The man holding the torch was, he saw now, one of the local constables he had used on the arms search.

  “Is this it, effendi?” said the man excitedly.

  Owen slipped his hand in again and felt around on the floor. His hand closed around an object. He pulled it out and looked at it. It was a clip of ammunition, exactly similar to those left behind in the kuttub in the fountain house.

  ***

  “Oh, good,” said Garvin, “I was afraid you’d forgotten about things like that, with your recent preoccupations.”

  He was, nevertheless, in a genial mood this morning. A bearer slipped in behind Owen and stood up a gun in the corner behind Garvin’s desk. That accounted for it. It was a sporting gun.

  “Bag anything this morning?”

  “Two hare and a hoopoe.”

  “Hoopoe?”

  “It happened to be there so I potted it.”

  It was possible to get good, though restricted, shooting within an hour’s ride from Cairo and sometimes Garvin went out in the early morning before coming to the office. For duck you needed really to go north, to the big lakes around Alexandria and, of course, for big game you had to go south. But hare and even the odd gazelle were available locally.

  Like many of the British, Garvin brought his past with him. He was the son of a “squarson,” a country parson who had the standing and habits of a squire. Garvin had been brought up to hunting and shooting, skills which in the opinion of the Consul-General exactly equipped a young man for a career in the Ministry of the Interior.

  Those and one other: facility at learning Arabic. Cromer had expected all his staff to speak Arabic fluently and Garvin, after twenty years in Egypt, spoke the language like a native. He also knew the country like a native.

  “Oh, good,” said Owen.

  “Foolish of them,” said Garvin. “They must have known the women would be back.”

  “I don’t think they meant to leave them there,” said Owen. “They had to move them in a hurry when my people started going through the district and it was just intended as a temporary hiding place. My guess is that they meant to come back, only with so much police activity they didn’t like to risk it.”

  “So all that faffing around actually achieved something?”

  “The operation was successful, yes. The trouble is,” said Owen, “that it was only partly successful. We got the arms but not the men.”

  “Well, at least it means that if we’re shot, it’ll be by another lot of guns. T
hat’s something.”

  “There’ll be other shipments. We’ve got to get the men. So I’m keeping some people down in Al-Gadira.”

  “They’ll be miles away by now,” said Garvin.

  “I don’t know that they will. My hunch is that they’re local. Why did they move the arms in the first place? Because they saw the search coming their way. That suggests they were in the area. What did they do? They moved them out of the way but not out of the district, just to somewhere handy where they could easily pick them up. That suggests they were local, too.”

  Garvin nodded his head in acknowledgment.

  “Who have you got down there?”

  “Georgiades.”

  “He’s all right,” said Garvin.

  “Yes. There’s another thing, too. While he’s down there he can keep his eyes open generally. There seems to be a lot happening in Al-Gadira just now.”

  He told Garvin about Leila.

  “That girl?” said Garvin. “I thought you were dropping that?”

  “I’m distancing myself. But I couldn’t help noticing that was Al-Gadira too.”

  “Coincidence,” said Garvin dismissively.

  “Maybe. But she lived there and she died there.”

  “Her body was washed up there. That’s not the same thing.”

  “It’s what happened to her body.”

  “Halfway to Alexandria by now, I would say.”

  “Well,” said Owen, “it might not be.”

  “Does it matter?” asked Garvin.

  “Yes,” said Owen. He found it difficult to pick the right words. Everything that came to mind seemed inappropriate. He wanted to say “untidy” but that was ridiculously inappropriate. Then he wanted to say that you couldn’t have bodies floating around but “floating,” in the circumstances, was hardly the word.

  “It might pop up at an awkward moment,” he said, which was hardly any better.

  “We’ll have to risk that,” said Garvin briskly.

  Owen was deliberating whether this was the moment. Garvin seemed fairly amenable this morning. He might never have a better chance.

  “I wonder if we’re handling this in the right way,” he said cautiously.

  He didn’t need to work through Garvin. Although Garvin was shown as his formal superior in terms of the office organization chart, that was to some extent a convenient fiction and the Mamur Zapt had his own lines of communication to the powers that were.

  Garvin, however, played bridge with the Consul-General and was a member of his social circle. The habit of the British overseas was to replicate the governing patterns of the Establishment in London, with its loose formal structure and very tight informal one, articulated through a wide variety of social occasions, and Egypt was no exception.

  Owen was, he was aware, a hired man and not a member of the charmed social circle and if he wanted to get things done he had to do it indirectly by tweaking the inner social system.

  “What do you mean?” said Garvin, looking at him sharply.

  “Letting Narouz block it. It’s bound to get out and then it will look as if we’re helping the Khedive to cover up. Is that a good idea?”

  “He’s the Government, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, but this kind of thing gives the Government a bad name. Do we want to be all that closely identified with the Government over a thing like this?”

  “A thing like what?”

  “Corruption. Possible murder.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying we should let Mahmoud go on investigating this case. Seriously, I mean.”

  Garvin looked at him searchingly, then looked away.

  “There are one or two things on at the moment,” he said.

  “I know. The Agreement.”

  “Well, then.”

  “I don’t see that the two have to go together.”

  “They go together,” said Garvin, “because the only legal basis we have for being in Egypt is that we’re here by the Khedive’s invitation. It’s a personal thing, there’s no formal treaty or anything like that. It’s just his invitation. And he’s prepared to renew it, provided we’re prepared to look after him and see he stays in power.”

  “Would a thing like this stop him from staying in power?”

  “It might.”

  “We don’t have to do everything he wants,” said Owen, exasperated.

  “Certainly not. But we do have to do everything he wants for the next month or so.”

  “I was hoping,” said Owen, “that you might be able to have a word—”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Garvin.

  ***

  “This is unreasonable,” said Owen.

  “On the contrary,” said Zeinab. “You don’t love me; so why should we make love?”

  “I do love you.”

  “You don’t listen to me,” said Zeinab, “let alone love me.”

  “I am doing what I can. I’ve been trying to persuade them—”

  “Persuade them?” said Zeinab incredulously. “Do you have to persuade people to do what is obviously right?”

  “They don’t see it like that. They—”

  “Why do you always have to take their point of view?”

  “I am not taking their point of view. I am working within it.”

  “I do not follow these sophistries,” said Zeinab.

  “If I do it too directly they won’t listen to me.”

  “They don’t listen to you. You don’t listen to me. It is time,” said Zeinab, “that the whole lot of you started listening.”

  “Listen—”

  “I,” said Zeinab, “always listen.”

  “No, you don’t. Try and hear what I am saying. I am doing something about it, I am trying to get them to change their mind. I am spending about all my time on the bloody thing—”

  “Leila,” said Zeinab. “Is that what you mean?”

  “The case. And it’s not even my case. I am not really on it. It’s not really anything to do with me.”

  “An injustice occurs,” said Zeinab, “and it’s not really anything to do with you?”

  “I’m just trying to do a job. I am not trying to put the whole world right. That’s something God can do.”

  “The old Mamur Zapt,” said Zeinab, “would have listened.”

  “The old Mamur Zapt was a crook.”

  “And had a weakness for women. There are,” said Zeinab, “many similarities between you. Nevertheless—”

  “Look, in the old days the Mamur Zapt was responsible for bloody everything in the city. My role is more circumscribed.”

  “Call yourself Mamur Zapt and you can’t do anything when the woman you claim you love pleads to you for justice?”

  “Look, I’m just concerned with political things—”

  “Ah!” said Zeinab. “There we have it!”

  “Yes. And that’s not the same thing as ordinary criminal offenses. Why don’t you go to the Parquet?”

  “The Parquet,” said Zeinab, “is not political, no? I thought you told me they were a bunch of political, fix-it lawyers? I thought you told me that everything is in the end political? Ah, I see! It is another of these now-it-is, now-it-isn’t things. Like your love!”

  “No,” said Owen. “Not like my love at all.”

  “Ah, but I think it is! And so,” said Zeinab, “since you do not love me, properly, not truly, not the way I love you, it would not be right for us to make love.”

  “All right, then,” said Owen, getting up. “If you feel like that.”

  “I do feel like that. And my feelings are not changeable like yours. I shall feel the same tomorrow.”

  “Bloody hell!”

  “And every day, in fact. Until you have made your mind up. The ri
ght way, of course.”

  ***

  “Well, that is a problem!” said Paul. “Should it have priority over the future of the British Empire, though? Ordinarily I would say yes without hesitation. On this occasion, however—”

  They were sitting outside on the verandah. Stretching into the distance were the various sports fields of the Club. Far away a hockey match was in progress. The standard of hockey was good. Most officials in Egypt and all the army had served in India.

  Because of the heat, matches were played in the late afternoon. They had to start promptly at four, however, since the twilight came early in Egypt and by six it was getting too dark to see.

  There were tennis courts as well. Because you lost so much body water in the heat, small boys brought tumblers of iced water at the end of every set. Even so, by the end of a match you were seriously depleted and most players repaired to the bar to rebuild their resources.

  “We must look for a compromise,” said Paul.

  “I don’t think Zeinab goes in for compromises much,” said Owen gloomily. “It’s all or nothing with her. At the moment it’s nothing.”

  “You mustn’t give up,” said Paul firmly. “We’ve got the best brains in Egypt on this. Yours and mine.”

  “Where politics is concerned,” said Owen, “that is probably true. In your case, at any rate. In things like this, though—”

  “All problems are in the end political. Wasn’t that what you said she said?”

  “She said I said it.”

  “And it was very perceptive of you. So let’s treat this as a political problem and look for a political solution.”

  “No, no, no, no. It won’t work, I tell you. The only thing that would help would be if we could finish off this Leila business.”

  “There you are! I told you the problem was a political one.”

  “Yes, and you also told me, yesterday, that you couldn’t do a thing about it.”

  “That was yesterday and I was solving a different problem then.”

  Paul, looking over the fields, considered the matter. There was an indignant shout from the hockey players. A hawk had swooped low over the field of play, picked up the ball in its claws and flown off with it. The ball, however, was too big for it and dropped from its clutch. The referee retrieved it and ordered a bully-off.