The Point in the Market Read online

  ‘Zeinab.’

  They went on talking for several minutes but he couldn’t quite tell: had she cooled?

  He felt a sudden surge of resentment. Who or what was Mrs Cunningham? It wasn’t even as if Cunningham was superior to him. Owen was the Head of the Sultan’s Secret Police, not of the High Commissioner’s.

  Unless that was another thing that had changed when England had unilaterally declared a Protectorate.

  Some other people joined them and then after a while the Cunninghams moved out into the garden.

  The line had stopped coming in now. MacMahon had moved away from the door and was talking to Prince Faruq, one of the Sultan’s brothers. The Sultan himself, of course, wasn’t there. Faruq was representing him. Owen didn’t know Faruq. He had been out of the country for a while.

  Paul Trevelyan materialised beside them.

  ‘Hello, Zeinab! Lovely to see you. Can I borrow you for a moment! There’s someone I’d like you to meet.’

  He took her over to MacMahon and Faruq.

  Again Owen felt grateful. There was no hesitation about Paul. Once he’d made up his mind to go down a certain route, there was no turning back. Zeinab was his friend and the wife of his friend and he would see she was bound in, no matter the Mrs Cunninghams.

  MacMahon moved away, leaving Faruq and Zeinab. They were deep in conversation. Owen wondered if they had known each other in the past. It was unlikely, since when Faruq had last been in the country, Zeinab would probably have been still in harem. But not impossible. Her father had once moved in such circles.

  Faruq moved closer to Zeinab. It was the Arab way, Arabs could hardly talk unless they were touching each other. All the same, Owen felt a flicker of uneasiness. Faruq had a reputation as a womaniser.

  Zeinab edged away. Owen began to drift across the room towards them.

  He was forestalled by Paul, who in a minute had somehow bestowed Faruq on the Cunninghams—that would be a treat for him!—and got Zeinab talking to the director of the National Opera House. Zeinab was fond of opera and knew Lamoretti. They were soon talking happily.

  Again, Owen felt grateful; but he also felt that uneasiness again. What was Paul up to? Why had he introduced Zeinab to Faruq in the first place? Was he, perhaps, trying to bind him in, too?

  When, soon after the start of the war, the British had deposed the Khedive because of his pro-Turk sympathies and declared a protectorate over Egypt, they had installed in his place a man from a different branch of the ruling family, Hussein, in whom they felt more confidence. But with the man had come the family, about whose members much less was known. Perhaps all that Paul was trying to do was make sure of them, and using Zeinab for that purpose. If that was all it was, Owen didn’t mind. Up to a point.

  She seemed to be getting on all right now, the centre of an admiring group from the French Consulate. To the French, he thought cynically, the fact that she was a pretty woman mattered much more than her nationality. How did the British get to be so wrong?

  He went out on to the balcony. Through the bougainvillaea, bright with red and pink, he could see the Nile sparkling in the sun. Feluccas were tacking to and fro and a little group had gathered at the end of the garden to watch them.

  Someone raised a hand. It was Lawrence, a little, fair-haired man, who before the war had been an archaeologist and now was something in Intelligence. He was talking to the new Sirdar. Maxwell, new, that was, in terms of occupancy of the post of Commander in Chief, but not, God be praised, in terms of Egypt.

  ‘Owen’s the chap you want to talk to, if that’s what you’re worried about,’ he said to Maxwell, and then moved off.

  ‘What are you worried about, Conky?’ asked Owen.

  ‘Drink,’ said Maxwell. ‘The bloody Australians. They drink like fishes. At any one time half the army’s unconscious and the other half’s incapacitated with a hangover. What if the Turks come over the Canal? I’ll be on my bloody own!’

  ‘I don’t think I’d worry too much,’ said an Australian officer standing nearby. ‘Australians have a great capacity for fighting. Drunk or sober. Drunk, perhaps, especially.’

  ‘I’d just like to be sure they could stand up if need be. Can’t you do something about it?’ he said to Owen. ‘Shut down the liquor houses or something?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Owen, ‘they’re all owned by foreigners.’

  And under the peculiarities of the Egyptian legal system, foreigners were virtually safe from prosecution. They could unduly insist on being tried by their own Consular courts and in a place as far away from Egypt as possible. The police could not even enter their premises without the permission of their consuls, much less close them down.

  ‘That right?’ said the Australian officer.

  ‘Gambling dens, too,’ said Owen.

  ‘Jesus, they’ve certainly got it worked out here!’

  ‘The trouble is, it affects the condition of the men,’ said a British Officer primly.

  ‘It’s not so much that,’ said another officer. ‘It’s the security aspect.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Owen. ‘Not spies again!’

  ‘You may laugh, Owen, but it’s a serious matter. Other ranks go to these places—’

  ‘Officers don’t go there too?’ asked the Australian innocently.

  Owen found himself warming to him.

  ‘I think you need to be aware, Connolly,’ said the British Officer, jaw set, ‘that Cairo leaks like a sieve. Let slip something, and the next moment it’s all round the place. You can’t depend on people’s loyalty, you see. They’re all foreigners—’

  ‘They are?’

  ‘Cairo’s got more foreigners than any other city in the world. One eighth of the population is foreign-born. Did you know that, sir?’ he said, turning to Maxwell. ‘I came across the fact yesterday. One eighth! It gives you some idea,’ he said, addressing Connolly again, ‘of our difficulties.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know—’

  ‘All sorts. Greeks. Italians. Serbians. Montenegrins. Syrians. Armenians. Moroccans. Tunisians. Maltese—’

  ‘British?’ suggested the Australian.

  ‘They’re not the ones I’m worried about,’ said Maxwell. ‘They’ve been here a long time and whatever allegiances they have, they’re not usually to the other side. No, what worries me is the Turkish element. You see,’ he said to Connolly, ‘before we took over, Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire. Been so for centuries. The Khedives were Turks. So were the Pashas. The whole Egyptian ruling class is still largely Turkish. The officers in the Army are Turkish. The police inspectors are Turkish. So are the mudirs, the local governors. Broadly, anyone who tells someone else what to do, is Turkish. Except when he’s British, of course.’

  ‘Turks everywhere,’ said the British officer.

  ‘And which way they’ll jump when the Turks cross the Canal—’

  ‘We’re in enemy territory,’ said the British officer. ‘Virtually.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ said the Australian. ‘Let’s get this straight. You’ve got all these foreigners in Egypt, Armenians, Montenegrins and so on. You’ve got the ruling classes, who are Turkish. You’ve got the British here in droves, running the place. Now where the hell in all this are the Egyptians?’

  ***

  Owen went up the front steps of the Bab el Khalk, the police headquarters, and in at the main door. He passed the orderly office, with all its bearers, exchanging salaams with the man on duty, and then climbed up the steps to the top corridor, which was where he had his office. As he walked along the corridor, he passed the offices of Garvin, the Commandant of the Cairo Police, due for retirement but asked to stay on, and McPhee, the eccentric Deputy Commandant. In the past these posts had both been held by Turks; but these days it was the British who told the Turks who told the…

  At the end of the corridor
, round a corner and slightly separate from the main building, was the office of the Special Secret Clerk, Nikos. Nikos was a Copt. The Copts had been in Egypt since the time of the Pharaohs and looked on the Arabs as foreigners too. And for about the whole of that time they had been embedded in the bureaucracy. They were masters of the arts of managing administrative information, and Owen sometimes surmised that, behind it all, they were the real rulers of Egypt.

  Owen nodded ‘good morning’ to Nikos and went on through to his own office. As he passed Nikos, the Copt looked up.

  ‘Sabri is dead,’ he said.

  Owen stopped.

  ‘Sabri?’

  The name was familiar.

  ‘One of our men,’ said Nikos. ‘He was out at Farafreh.’

  ‘What was he doing there?’

  ‘Getting camels.’

  Owen came back into the room.

  ‘Did he get them?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Where did he die?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘What did he die of?’

  ‘He was stabbed.’

  ‘A quarrel?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. The Parquet are looking into it.’

  ‘Well, well.’ It was not unusual for his agents to die. Nor even unusual for them to be stabbed in quarrels, particularly if they were Bedawin or rode with the Bedawin. All the same…

  ‘We need to look into this,’ he said.

  ‘It happened at the Camel Market,’ said Nikos. ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘Yesterday? At the Camel Market? I was there.’

  He suddenly remembered.

  ‘Was the body found in a fiki’s booth?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Nikos, surprised.

  Owen thought.

  ‘Are we looking after the family?’ he said.

  ‘I’ll see to them.’

  Agents were not exactly Government employees so their widows were not entitled to a pension. Nevertheless, Owen liked to do something for the family if he could, especially if they had been killed on Government business. But was that the case this time?

  ‘We need to look into this,’ he said.

  Chapter Two

  ‘Leaks like a sieve,’ said the Army representative, looking at Owen accusingly.

  Overhead, the huge fan whirled silently, stirring the papers on the table. The French windows leading into the Residency garden were open, as was the door into the corridor, to secure a through draught. There had been some argument about that. ‘I thought these meetings were supposed to be secret?’ the Army man had said. ‘Which would you prefer?’ Paul Trevelyan had said wearily. ‘Secrecy, or not to die of heat?’ The meeting had elected for survival.

  ‘That’s hardly Owen’s fault,’ said Cavendish. Cavendish was chairing.

  ‘Well, I know,’ said the Army, ‘but isn’t he supposed to be doing something about it?’

  ‘There’s nothing you can do about it,’ said Beevor. ‘Given the nature of the country.’

  Beevor was rather older than the rest of them. He was another ex-archaeologist and before the War he had travelled extensively in the Near East.

  ‘Yes, but at the moment it’s impossible to do anything without the enemy knowing. We had a convoy going out to Kantara yesterday and some of the trucks lost their way. They stopped to ask where they were. “You want Kantara,” said some ragged urchin playing in the gutter. “First left!”’

  ‘Egypt is a very open country,’ said Owen. ‘You can’t hope to keep things secret.’

  ‘Yes, but, Christ,’ said the Army representative, ‘that means that Johnny Turk will know exactly where we’re concentrating our troops!’

  ‘If it’s any consolation,’ said Lawrence, who was also a member of the Committee, ‘we know exactly where he’s concentrating his troops, too.’

  It was all right, but he was a bit too fond, thought Owen, of reminding other people of how good he was.

  ‘Maybe,’ said the Army man sharply, ‘but—’

  That’s what always happened. The little, fair-haired man always rubbed people up the wrong way.

  ‘We can all see the problem,’ said Cavendish swiftly, smoothing it over. ‘But that’s the nature of war out here, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Owen, ‘they’re just as likely to be getting false information as they are true information.’

  Paul laughed; then began to tap his pencil thoughtfully. Around his hand, as it rested on the blotter, a large damp smudge began to spread out from his sweat.

  ‘Couldn’t we build on that?’ he said.

  Cavendish looked at him quickly.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said.

  ‘Issue more false information?’ said the Army representative bitterly. ‘We’ve got enough of that as it is!’

  ‘We can’t hope to conceal things completely,’ said Paul. ‘I agree with you, the place leaks like a sieve. But maybe we can deceive the Turks about our intentions.’

  ‘Some form of decoy?’

  ‘Roughly, yes. Establish a false base. Or maybe more than one. At any rate it would plant a seed of doubt in their minds.’

  There were nods all round the table and it was agreed that the Army would create dummy bases on the Egyptian side of the Canal.

  ‘But that won’t be enough,’ said Cavendish. ‘It needs to be backed up by other things. Roads, depots. False movements, fake paper-work. Misinformation.’ He looked at Owen. ‘Deliberate leaks?’

  ‘Owen ought to be good at that,’ said Lawrence. ‘He seems to have such difficulty in stopping them.’

  ***

  The meeting of the Committee, which was the country’s senior intelligence-gathering body, had taken place at the British Residency. Not at the Abdin Palace, where the Sultan had his office and where his Prime Minister held Cabinet meetings. Nor at any of the large Ministerial buildings which Owen could see from the garden as he came out. Which said something, he reflected, about the location of power in Egypt.

  In a way there was nothing new about that. For thirty years a British Adviser had stood at the elbow of every Minister, just as the Consul-General himself had stood beside the Prime Minister shaping everything he did. But although that had been the reality, the British had been careful to preserve the forms: they were, they maintained, in Egypt as advisers only, assisting an independent, fully sovereign Government.

  And it hadn’t been completely a pretence, thought Owen. There had always been an obligation to work through the formal system. It was the Minister who signed things and not the Adviser. And in that obligation had lain a kind of recognition. He himself, for instance, had always seen himself as working for the Khedive, as the ruler had then been called, and only incidentally for the British; resolving any discrepancies between the two by telling himself that he worked for Egypt.

  The declaration of a British Protectorate over Egypt, and the brutal replacement of the ruler by one more sympathetic to British interest, had changed all that. What had been veiled was now unveiled; and it forced not only British officials like Owen to confront uncomfortable truths, but also, and much more importantly, the Egyptians.

  ***

  As Owen was crossing the street, he heard the violent clanging of a bell and one of the new fire engines dashed out from the main fire brigade station just off the Ataba-el-Khadra. ‘Dash’ is perhaps putting it a little strongly since the engine was drawn by four cart-horses specially imported from England for the purpose. The cart-horses, much larger than the usual Egyptian horse, were new in Cairo and people, including Owen, drew aside to look. The horses pounded off in the general direction of Ezbekiya Square.

  Owen continued on his way back to the Bab-el-Khalk. He had just reached the junction with el Torba when he saw an Englishman coming towards him on a little white donkey. It was McPhee, the Deputy Commandant
of Police. He seemed in a hurry.

  ‘Fire,’ he called to Owen as he went past.

  ‘Want any help?’ McPhee wouldn’t ordinarily be going to a fire.

  ‘Possibly,’ he called back over his shoulder. ‘Wagh el Birket. Soldiers.’

  Owen hurried after him. Behind him he heard another bell and a moment later another fire engine passed him.

  Soon he could see the smoke ahead of him. It billowed up in a large dark cloud above the houses.

  Already the streets were full of people running in that direction. Blocking up the streets, of course, so that nothing could get through. It was a good job the fire engines had had a start on them.

  Now he could smell the fire and occasionally, in the dark heavy cloud of smoke, he could see sparks. When he rounded a corner he could see flames.

  It wasn’t actually in the Wagh el Birket itself but in one of the little streets off it. That would make it harder for the firemen. Still, there would be water nearby in the Ezbekiya Gardens.

  He came to a stop. The street ahead was totally blocked with people. That was the way of things in Cairo. Anything like this was treated as a public spectacle. Still, they wouldn’t just be watching, there’d be plenty of people there to help.

  If they didn’t get in the way. That was another thing. People would be milling about all over the place, eager to help, no doubt, but making things difficult for the firemen. Crowd control became important on occasions like this. McPhee would be doing his best but it would be better if he had a few people helping him.

  He tried to force a way through the dense press of people but it was solid. He scanned the street in front. He was taller than most of the people in the crowd and could see over their heads. A little way up, on the left, there was what seemed to be a small passage going off at right angles. He pressed himself against the wall and began to work his way along. It took frustratingly long but at last he managed it and dived into the passage. There were people in that, too, but not so many and he was able to push through them.

  It was dark in the passage but ahead he could see a glow and when he came to it, he found an even smaller passage, hardly a passage, more a ditch, going off to his right. It was filled with a strange, flickering red light and at the end he could see flames.