The Snake Catcher's Daughter

by Michael Pearce

  “I’m sure.”

  “Nice chap. Straightforward.”

  “Straightforward?” said Paul. “Oh!”

  ***

  The voice sounded familiar.

  “Who are you?”

  “A friend of Philipides.”

  “Does Philipides wish to speak with me?”

  “No. I wish to speak with you.”

  “What about?”

  “Philipides.”

  He had placed the voice now. It was the girl who had been in his bed.

  “Come to my office.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Philipides would hear.”

  “Will he not hear if I come to your appartement?”

  “It is not my appartement. It belongs to a friend.”

  “If I come, you had better be sure I leave.”

  “I know, I know,” said the voice impatiently. “You will bring men. They will watch the house. You need not worry. There is only me.”

  “Very well. I will come.”

  “This evening, then.”

  He decided to take Selim. Selim was not the brightest but he was the biggest. Selim, spotting another rung on the ladder, was ecstatic.

  “Effendi,” he said, “you can rely on me.”

  “Give me an hour,” said Owen, “and then break in.”

  “Effendi, I will.”

  Selim’s confidence fell a little when he saw the building.

  “Effendi,” he said, in worried tones, “this is a bit high class. Are you sure I am to break in?”

  “After an hour,” said Owen, “you break in. There may be a chain on the door. Do you know how to handle that?”

  “Oh yes, effendi. There was a chain on the door of a House for the Girls we called on last week and that was no problem.”

  “An hour, then.”

  The appartement was on an upper floor and there was a chain.

  “Leave that,” said Owen, as she made to replace it after letting him in.

  The girl shrugged. She was dressed in the mixed way of many Levantine girls, in a European dress but with a heavy black veil which concealed her hair and the lower part of her face. Owen could not help remembering her as she had been without either.

  She led him into a dark inner room lavishly furnished with rich, thick carpets, on both floor and walls, and not much else apart from a low divan and an even lower table on which were coffee cups. Beside the table was a brazier with a coffee pot nestling in its top. Most of the light in the room came from the brazier but there was a small oil lamp in a niche in the wall.

  The girl sat down at one end of the divan, nearest the brazier, and motioned to Owen to sit at the other. She poured him some coffee. Owen thanked her and put his lips to the cup but did not drink until he had seen her do so.

  “My name is Mariam,” she said.

  “You know my name.”

  “Gareth.”

  “My friends call me that.”

  “Yes, Gareth.”

  Owen was a little taken aback. Their relationship had, indeed, begun on an intimate note; but he was surprised to find that it had already progressed so far.

  “You are also a friend of Philipides,” he said.

  “I am his wife.”

  “But—”

  “Why are you surprised? Do you think it strange that a woman should wish to do what she could for her husband?”

  “No, but I find it a little strange that she should wish to do what she could for someone else as well. Especially a casual stranger.”

  “But you are not a casual stranger. Our lives are bound up.”

  “I must admit that had escaped me up till now.”

  “You are new to Cairo. All our lives are bound together.”

  “Only up to a point.”

  “More than you think. You have power over my husband. You have power over me.”

  “I shall not exercise that power. Unless—”

  “Ah, you see! It is that ‘unless’.”

  “What your husband did is past, paid for. I had nothing to do with it. I wasn’t even here at the time. I only come into it if he does something new.”

  “No,” she said. “No. You have the power to alter the past. You can make things right.”

  “Right?”

  “They say you are a just man. A man of craft, yes, well, perhaps that is right, the Mamur Zapt has to be like that; Mustapha was—”

  “You know Mustapha Mir?”

  “Intimately. But that was in the past. But perhaps for him, too, it has to be put right.”

  “What are you saying? That your husband was unjustly treated? That he was not guilty of the charges of corruption that were brought against him?”

  “He was no more corrupt than anyone else.”

  “That is not the point.”

  “But it is the point. He was trying to change things from the inside. As Mustapha Mir was. It was a difficult position to be in. But he was honest. Corrupt, yes, but also honest. Wainwright Pasha had told Mustapha that things must be cleaned up, and that is what they were trying to do. But from the inside. It has to be from the inside if you wish to do anything in Egypt. You Effendis come and you sweep things away and put new things in their places, but the old things had their share of good and the new things do not work. Oh, you think they work, but they do not really. Your new ways only scratch the surface. If you want to get anywhere, you have to begin from within. That is what my husband was trying to do and you put him in prison—”

  “The case is being reinvestigated.”

  “I know. My husband said that you were there. But he said that you looked cold, that you did not understand. You see it through their eyes, the eyes of the Effendis, and not through our eyes, you do not see it as it was.”

  “I will try to see it honestly.”

  “No. That is not enough. You must see it sympathetically.”

  “But that would be to prejudge—”

  He stopped. Hadn’t McPhee said something like this?

  “I shall try to see with sympathy,” he concluded lamely.

  “I hope so. They say you have the gift. But I do not know how that can be,” she said despondently. “You are not part of Egypt.”

  “You speak passionately for your husband.”

  “I love him.”

  “And yet you would have slept with me.”

  “Because I love him.”

  “That is not the way,” Owen reproved her; and he felt he sounded oddly like Garvin.

  ***

  Selim was disappointed.

  “I was just getting ready to come in,” he said.

  “It wasn’t necessary.”

  Selim fell in step beside him.

  “They say she’s a beautiful woman,” he said enviously.

  “Who?”

  “Mustapha Mir’s woman.”

  “Not just Mustapha Mir’s,” said Owen.

  ***

  As they were walking back to the Bab-el-Khalk, Owen fancied he heard the sound of bagpipes. One of the Scottish regiments, he presumed; but, no, as he drew nearer he realized that it was the Egyptian sort. They turned a corner and saw a small crowd in front of them. The music was coming from the other side of the crowd. He could just see the pipes sticking up above the heads of the people before him. There was a sudden roll of a drum and a man began speaking.

  “It is the Mohabazin,” said Selim delightedly.

  They stopped to look. Cairo was a great place for street entertainment. There were dancers, jugglers, acrobats, snake charmers, of course, poets and singers. There were also the Mohabazin. These were small groups of actors who played in the streets and specialized in scurrilous farce. They were a kind of living Punch and Judy, often taking f
amily life as their subject but also, not infrequently, offering a political commentary on the state of the nation and the ways of the great which was usually ribald and sometimes true.

  There were, he could now see, two actors apart from the bagpipes player. One, whom he had not seen at first, was sitting on a chair. The actor, who was standing and doing most of the talking, was flourishing a big stick.

  “Oh ho!” said Selim, “it’s the police this time, is it?”

  The man with the stick strutted round and banged a few people with it. He was evidently a Selim sort of policeman. The crowd responded with repartee and jibes and some lively exchanges developed. Selim was splitting his sides some time before Owen got the hang of what they were saying. The ‘policeman’ was affecting to be a great hero; the crowd, egged on by the facial expressions of the man sitting on the chair, voiced doubts.

  The policeman took their remarks as aspersions on his virility and responded indignantly, using the stick now to indicate his physical capacity. Female members of the audience were invited to put the matter to the test. They replied with derision, one lady producing a matchstick which was compared delightedly with the policeman’s big stick. The policeman, hurt, announced that he was going home.

  As he went, heroism and virility oozed away with every step until, after much hesitation, he brought himself to knock timidly on his front door, whereupon his wife came out in true Judy fashion and belaboured him thoroughly with his stick.

  “Very good!” said Selim. “Oh, very good!”

  The man with the bagpipes made a collection while the actors prepared for the next piece by putting on different garb. It mostly concerned the man on the chair and did not amount to much: a tarboosh on his head, a red jacket with yellow pipes, which might have belonged to a bandsman, and a rag round his neck which conceivably represented a tie.

  The bagpiper gave a skirl on his pipes and the next skit began. It had a different theme and centred this time on the man in the chair. He began turning round on his chair and pretending to peep at something over his shoulder. The peeps became longer and his eyes seemed about to pop out of his head. Affecting shock, horror—and delight—he covered his eyes with his hand and turned hastily away; only, a second or two later, for his head to swivel round once more and his eyes to pop again.

  After the process had been repeated several times, the figure began to show signs of mounting sexual excitement. When he spun round now, he rose halfway up the chair and made exaggerated pelvic thrusts. He pantomimed heat, mopping his brow, loosening his tie and undoing his jacket.

  It was not enough. He called for drink. The bagpipes player proffered him a bowl and he drank from it greedily. Evidently, it was alcoholic liquor, for he began, very funnily, to suggest growing intoxication. The crowd was in stitches as he swayed about, nearly falling off the chair, getting into a tangle with his tie and missing his buttons. Finally, highly excited by whatever it was that was behind him, he tried to take off his trousers—Selim liked this bit especially—tripped himself up over the legs, collapsed in a heap on the chair and promptly fell asleep.

  The other actor and the bagpipes player seized the chair and held him aloft; and it was only then that Owen realized whom the figure on the chair was intended to represent: McPhee.

  ***

  The next morning, Owen sat in his office thinking about it. Ordinarily, it wouldn’t have bothered him. People were entitled to their bit of fun, after all, and the Cairo poor didn’t get much of it. A little ridicule was healthy; not so nice, perhaps, when it was you that was being ridiculed but basically something that anyone in office ought to be tough enough to put up with. He was pretty sure that the Mamur Zapt figured in the Mohabazin’s repertoire.

  It meant, however, that his efforts to contain the episode through his control of the press had failed. Perhaps they were bound to. Owen had no illusions about the limits to his power in that respect. Things would always get out in the end. The most you could hope to do was to delay them.

  That was what he had tried to do; that, and put a spoke in their wheel if there genuinely was somebody who was running a campaign against McPhee. Was that the case? Did the fact that the McPhee story was now being played on the streets mean there was somebody deliberately trying to put it about?

  He wasn’t sure. There was a gap between the culture of the written word, written though it might be in popular newspapers, and the life of the streets. Many people, perhaps most people, in Cairo could not read. The people who were inflamed by what they read in the newspapers were mostly students. It was they who came out on demonstrations. The ordinary Cairene-in-the-street went along to see the fun but unless religion came into it was not much involved.

  Religion did come into it here, or could come into it if they weren’t careful. But no one was going to get a fit of religion from watching one of the Mohabazin’s plays. So even if someone was putting it about, was it worth bothering with? A little ridicule didn’t hurt anyone and McPhee had bloody asked for it.

  However, there was Garvin’s point. There were, all told, only a handful of British in Egypt. The country was ruled, in effect, by a very tiny group of men. It was in a way a bluff; and it worked only as long as the bluff wasn’t called. All right, there was an army offstage, but it was the fervent intention of every member of the Administration that that was exactly where it should stay. Bluff was the thing on which the Administration really depended; the kind of bluff that allowed three foreigners to run the Police Force and maintain order in a country the size of Egypt.

  But one of the men was McPhee. And was McPhee the sort of man who could maintain the bluff convincingly? Not on present form. Garvin was right. Credibility was all.

  Or was it? Hell, what did it matter if McPhee had become a bit of a joke? He was in danger of taking it all too seriously. It was this damned heat. You lost perspective. He decided he would go out for a coffee in an attempt to regain it.

  He took the papers with him. As he went out, Nikos clapped another one on top of the pile.

  “What’s this?”

  “Al-Lewa.”

  “I’ve got it already.”

  “You haven’t got this one. This one is the one that actually came out this morning.”

  “‘Actually came out’? You mean it was not the one I approved?”

  “Take a look,” said Nikos. “I think you’ll find it interesting.”

  ***

  The article took up most of the front page. It was an attack on the Cairo Police Force. It began with general charges of inefficiency and incompetence (plenty of examples, including, yes, the one about the whole Police Force out one day recently looking for, wait for it, a donkey!) and then moved swiftly to the suggestion that this was the fault not of the ordinary constable (fine, upstanding, brave, true, diligent, conscientious to a fault, decent, highly moral—Selim?) but of his superiors, in particular those who had been imposed on the Police Force from overseas.

  It was not just that they were corrupt, though there was abundant evidence of that, some of it going back a long time (earrings), some of it more recent (jewels given to whores), nor just that they were personally immoral; it was that they had been imposed by powers overseas for a purpose. That purpose was the systematic repression of the population. It was hardly surprising, then, that the police paid so little attention to crime; they had other jobs to do.

  So far, so fairly normal (for Al-Lewa). The next bit was the new departure. This was the sharply personalized form of attacks. There were detailed references to the bizarre, eccentric behaviour of a senior member of the Police Force, culminating recently in open affront to Egyptian womanhood and natural religious feeling (was this part of a deliberate attempt to subvert what had for centuries been the country’s orthodox religion?). There were references to the concupiscence of another senior figure, who had for long maintained one whore and who had recently been seen visiting ano
ther.

  The most detailed reference, however, was to a third (yes, yet another!) even more senior figure whose practices were so blatant that a case he had been involved in had recently been reopened by the Parquet. Al-Lewa would not prejudice possible judicial review based on the Parquet’s findings but it would venture to suggest that the world would be shocked by the naked political manipulation that would be revealed. At least injuries done to the original native Egyptian incumbents would be exposed.

  And that, really, was the point. A perfectly acceptable system had been set aside at the behest of a foreign power. Perfectly capable, decent men had been superseded. What was required was a return to old virtues. Only then would the Police Force be able to lift its head again with pride. But that would require the wholesale and immediate departure of the present holders of office.

  “There you are!” said McPhee triumphantly, back in the office. “A return to the old virtues. Exactly what I’ve been calling for.”

  “And the old personnel,” Owen pointed out.

  “Well—”

  “That doesn’t mean you. It means Mustapha Mir and Philipides.”

  “Old virtues!” said Garvin contemptuously. “Old vices, more like: bribery, corruption, personal favour, brutality, flogging—”

  “It’s not Al-Lewa’s usual line,” said Owen thoughtfully. “They’re a radical paper. They don’t usually go for old virtues. They’re in favour of new ones.”

  “Well, I can see that,” said Garvin. “That call for efficiency, for instance.”

  “I don’t think their efficiency is quite the same as yours.”

  “Efficiency is efficiency,” said Garvin. “And, talking of efficiency, how does it come about that they’re able to publish something like this? I thought you approved everything beforehand?”

  “I didn’t this.”

  “So how come?”

  “They inserted it afterwards.”

  “Well, you’ve got them, then, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, I’ve got them. Only—”

  “Well, what are you waiting for?”

  “I’m surprised. They don’t usually carry things this far. They huff and puff and hint and push things just about as far as they think they can go, but they don’t usually cross the line. And they don’t openly disobey by inserting things afterwards. It’s not worth it, you see. They know I’ll ban the paper for a spell. They’ll lose readers, lose influence. People will read other papers. Their rivals.”