The Snake Catcher's Daughter

by Michael Pearce

  “The Whore of Babylon!” she said. “Samira is most envious.”

  “What’s all this?”

  “They’ve been reading Al-Lewa. It is not, it must be confessed, a paper that they usually read but when they heard that I was in it…! ‘What company you keep, Zeinab’, Felicite said; ‘all those policemen! Still, someone must be the criminal, I suppose.’ And do you know what they say? There’s going to be more tomorrow.”

  “Oh, is there?” said Owen. “I’ll soon see about that.”

  “They don’t mind. Demerdash is paying all the fines, you see.”

  “Demerdash?”

  “Unlikely, I know. And I do take it amiss. Gets the paper to write the article and then blames me for appearing in it!”

  “Just a minute. Are you sure?”

  “That’s what Iolanthe says, and she should know since she’s sleeping with Daouad. They can hardly believe their luck, she says, and can only think Demerdash has never read the paper. Well, that’s quite possible, I suppose; he’s been out of the country a long time and I dare say that in Damascus or Constantinople or wherever he’s been he doesn’t get much chance to keep up with things. But I do think it’s nasty of him to get me put in the paper or, at least, not to object, and then to make all that fuss with my father! Still,” said Zeinab, thinking, “I prefer that to the other way round.”

  “What other way round?” said Owen, lost.

  “Denunciation to wooing,” said Zeinab. “At least, in Demerdash’s case.”

  ***

  “Got another one?” said the snake catcher, looking around Owen’s garden. “They do come thick and fast. It’s the heat, I expect.”

  “No, it’s not a snake this time,” said Owen. “It’s just that I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Oh!” said the snake catcher, disappointed, letting his bag drop on the ground.

  “Of course, I’ll make it worth your while. I know it’s your time.”

  “Ah, well, that’s different!” said the snake catcher, brightening up.

  The smell was, as Jalila had said, very distinct, the same as on her own arms but stronger, spicier, fresher.

  “I could have done with you the other day,” said Owen. “That business at the Bab-el-Khalk? Well, you’re getting into deep water there, you know.”

  “I would have sent for you, only they said you were visiting your son.”

  The snake catcher looked vague.

  “Yes,” he said. “I think so.”

  “I don’t,” said Owen, smiling. He gave an exaggerated sniff. “Funny smell,” he said.

  The snake catcher looked at him guardedly.

  “It’s once a year you go, isn’t it? There’s the balsam, of course. And then there’s the teryaq. And of course, it has to be done in the right way, in the right frame of mind. That’s why you need a teacher, I expect.”

  “It may be,” said the snake catcher non-committally.

  “Well, I’m not going to ask you about it because I know these things are secret. But I want to know the name of your teacher.”

  “I can’t tell you that!” said the snake catcher, aghast.

  “I think you can. The teacher is not secret. It’s what he teaches that’s secret.”

  It took Owen a long time to persuade him. It took a lot of promises and quite a lot of money. But eventually he got what he wanted.

  ***

  Owen found Mahmoud pacing about his office. He turned an angry face towards him.

  “The Khedive’s birthday!” he spat out. “What do I care about the Khedive’s birthday?”

  “What, indeed?” said Owen, taken aback.

  “Look at this!” said Mahmoud, with a fiery gesture towards his desk, piled high with papers. “I’m in court twice this week, three times next. Five cases to be finalized! How do they think I’m going to do it?”

  “Well—”

  “There’s always a lot of preparation at the last moment. Witnesses to be taken through their evidence, clerks to be chivvied—they always leave things till it’s almost too late, damn them. And then something like this happens!”

  “What exactly—?”

  “You haven’t heard? No, and nor has anyone else. And do you know why? Because he only made up his mind to do it this week. This week!”

  “Sorry, his birthday, you said? Surely—?”

  “Public holiday. He’s declared a public holiday for the day after tomorrow.”

  “Oh!”

  “Yes,” said Mahmoud. “Exactly!”

  He plunged into his chair and buried his face in his hands.

  “Lunacy!” he said. “Sheer lunacy!”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “It is,” said Mahmoud, refusing to be consoled. “How can you achieve anything when everything is so—so capricious?”

  “Well—”

  “It’s so inefficient!” he burst out in exasperation.

  The best thing, Owen knew from long experience of Mahmoud, was to change the subject.

  “That Philipides business,” he said; “how are you getting on?”

  “That’s an example,” said Mahmoud, declining to be sidetracked. “Not at all. I’ve been going through the records to check which police officers were in post at the time; I wanted to ask them what they knew about it, if they’d been approached in the same way as Bakri.”

  “And had they?”

  “They weren’t saying.”

  “It’s hardly surprising. They might find themselves incriminating their mates. Or even themselves.”

  “Yes.” Mahmoud, calm now, sat back in his chair. “Of course, there’s another explanation possible.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That Bakri was the only instance. And that Garvin made the most of it.”

  “According to Philipides, there were enough other ones to make Wainwright open an investigation.”

  “Not quite. He may have feared there were other ones. The only one he may have actually known about was the Bakri case. That’s why it’s so important to get Wainwright out here. Only then can we know what prompted his action.”

  “Bakri said there were others.”

  “If you’re caught on a thing like this, you usually do.”

  “Are you saying there weren’t any others? That Bakri was the only one and that Garvin—”

  “Made the most of it. For his own ends.”

  “You still think it was a plot to get the Egyptians out and the British in?”

  “I think it may have been much more localized than it was made out to be at the time. And much less significant.”

  “You talked to the police: did you talk to the orderlies?”

  “No. Should I?”

  “There’s a man I would like you to meet.”

  ***

  “The Khedive’s birthday?” said Garvin in tones of disgust. “Another comic caper we could do without!”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” protested Owen, who had been looking forward to spending a complete day with Zeinab. “He can hardly help having a birthday, can he?”

  “Yes, but this is his second this year already!”

  “Well, it’ll be popular.”

  “Popular?” said Garvin dourly. “I hope so. Because the highlight of it is going to be a big parade in front of the Abdin Palace at which my job will be to see that one of those subjects with whom he’s so popular doesn’t take a potshot at him!”

  “Keep them at a distance.”

  “And put plenty of soldiers between them and him, yes, I know. I tell you,” said Garvin bitterly, “the amount of money and time wasted on a thing like this is immense.”

  He sat down heavily in his chair.

  “What was it you were going to ask me?”

  “The Philipides business
. His orderly was a man named Hassan.”

  “Oh. I remember him,” said Garvin. “A nasty piece of work. He got out just in time. Otherwise he’d have been in the dock along with the others.”

  “It may only have been deferred. Can you tell me anything about him?”

  “Not much. He was a gobetween, the man who put the bite on. There were rumours of violence and coercion. I was sufficiently bothered to put a guard on Bakri.”

  “Very wise. Anything else?”

  “It’s a while ago now,” said Garvin, shaking his head.

  “I’m trying to track him down. You’ve no idea where I might look, have you?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “He’s been seen in the Gamaliya.”

  “He used to know that district, certainly. He was at the substation there for several years before he moved to the Citadel. I remember, because I checked to see if there was anyone else like Bakri.”

  “And was there?”

  “If there were,” said Garvin, “they weren’t saying.”

  ***

  As Owen walked through the city the following day, there were signs of the coming celebrations. Bunting hung across some of the streets and clusters of brightly-coloured balloons dangled from the overhanging windows. Little boys were decorating their sheep before the open doors of their houses.

  As soon as he penetrated into the older part, however, the bunting disappeared. In these medieval streets the Khedive was a parvenu. The allegiances they acknowledged were older.

  “The sheikh? Certainly, effendi. I will show you.”

  ‘Sheikh’ was a courtesy title extended to anyone of venerable years and a reputation for piety or learning. Genuine scholars—Sheikh Musa, for instance—might have challenged this particular application on both counts. Ordinary people, however, thought it prudent to recognize with respect the peculiar knowledge that the ‘sheikh’ laid claim to. He was the man who supervised the spiritual exercises of the Rifa’i when they withdrew for their annual period of repreparation.

  “I have heard about you,” said the sheikh. “You are no friend of the Rifa’i.”

  “On the contrary,” said Owen, “I have come because I am their friend.”

  “You are the Mamur Zapt?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Mamur Zapt is the friend of the great. He can never be the friend of the Rifa’i.”

  “Because he is the friend of the great, he can sometimes avert the wrath of the great.”

  “Why should the wrath of the great be turned on the Rifa’i?”

  “Because one of the Rifa’i has done a bad thing.”

  “If he has, then the fault belongs to him and not to the Rifa’i.”

  “That is true, and that is what I think, too. And so I am anxious to separate the man from the Rifa’i.”

  “How might that be done?”

  “It would need your help.”

  “Tell me what you want,” said the sheikh, “and then I will tell you if I will help you.”

  “Men come to you for preparation,” said Owen. “Some have come to you recently. I would like you to give me their names.”

  “That is a secret.”

  “Think for a moment,” said Owen. “A snake catcher is known by repute. If I wish, I can find out the names of all the snake catchers in the city. I can find out, too, those that were away at the time. Such knowledge is no secret. I could find it out myself.”

  “If you can find it out for yourself,” said the sheikh, “why ask me?”

  “So that I can find out more quickly. Before more harm is done.”

  The sheikh considered.

  “It is true,” he said after a while, “that there are bad men among the Rifa’i.”

  “Let us separate the two,” said Owen, “so that I look at the men and not at the Rifa’i.”

  The sheikh regarded him thoughtfully.

  ***

  “The Khedive’s birthday!” said McPhee the next day. “Splendid!”

  The parade had passed off without anyone taking a potshot at their sovereign. The reception, held safe behind the iron railings of the palace, had been undergone. The Khedive had at last retired thankfully to his private apartments; and everybody else had taken to the streets.

  By the time Owen emerged from the palace, the Midan was full of little stalls. There were two sorts of stall. There were the ones in which the well-to-do sat and consumed Turkish delight or sherbet. These were carpeted enclosures; only the carpets were on the walls not on the floor. The walls were about four feet high so that those inside could see and be seen.

  The other sort of stall was the ordinary selling stall which normally blocked most of Cairo’s streets. Usually they sold vegetables. Today they sold sweets, a source of friction between them and the ordinary sweetmeat vendors. Cairo had a sweet tooth and the chief point of occasions like this, it seemed, was to indulge it. For the very poorest there were sticks of sugar cane, to be sucked with audible gusto. Even a few milliemes, however, would purchase a bag of boiled or a jar of jellied or, more likely, a shapeless, sticky, multi-coloured mess of mucked about sugar. Young, old, Copt, Arab, Greek, Turk, Albanian, Montenegrin, all in their best boots and traditional finery, walked up and down among the stalls guzzling sweets.

  “Splendid!” said McPhee, with deep satisfaction.

  “They could be doing worse things, I suppose,” said Owen. “Killing each other, for example.”

  “In a country like Egypt,” said McPhee seriously, “where there is so much ethnic and religious tension, it is important to relieve the tensions occasionally.”

  “By eating sweets?”

  “Well—?”

  “A country glued together with sugar?”

  “You may scoff, Owen, but traditional festivity serves a purpose and does more for social order than any amount of efficiency in the Police Force.”

  “Hello!” said Garvin, coming up beside them.

  “Oh, hello. We were just talking about efficiency.”

  Garvin looked a little surprised.

  “Well,” he said, “it didn’t go off too badly, I must admit. I brought the band forward and that screened off one side. It was a good idea, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, very good.”

  McPhee slipped off. Garvin and Owen strolled down between the lines of stalls.

  Suddenly Garvin ducked away. Owen pushed after him and found him standing over an old, scantily-dressed Arab, from the Western deserts, it looked, who was squatting beside a pile of twigs. As Owen looked, Garvin picked up a twig and put the end in his mouth.

  “Haven’t had any of this since, oh, eighteen ninety-seven,” he said happily, “when I was in the Desert Patrol.”

  “What is it?”

  “A kind of liquorice root. Try some.”

  Owen declined and left Garvin chatting away to the old Arab. One of the disconcerting things about Garvin was that when he could remember to forget about efficiency he actually knew quite a lot about Egypt.

  He caught up with McPhee.

  “I’ll give you an example,” said McPhee, harking back to their previous conversation, on which he had evidently been brooding. “I’m sure the C-G shouldn’t have been so cavalier over the Molid-en-Nebbi.”

  “Things were getting out of hand.”

  One of the highlights of the Molid-en-Nebbi, the Birthday of the Prophet, had been for the devoted to lie down in the street in scores so that the Descendant of the Prophet could ride over them. The British, possibly concerned about the risk to the horses, had decreed that the practice should no longer continue.

  “Or take the Ashura as an example.”

  “Well, yes, take the Ashura.”

  One of the features of the Ashura procession was that it was preceded by hundreds of dervishes slashing themselves w
ith knives and scourging their bare backs with chains.

  Banned, too.

  “Well, I don’t know—” McPhee began.

  “I do,” said Mahmoud, who had just joined them. “It is a disgusting practice.”

  “Centuries old!”

  “Time it was stopped. What impression of us do you think it gives to tourists? That we go in for self-mutilation?”

  “Incidental,” said McPhee. “Incidental.”

  Owen fell in beside Mahmoud and they drifted away together.

  “How is it that you’re here?” asked Owen. “Joining them if you can’t beat them?”

  “Passing through,” said Mahmoud. “I’ve just been at a big meeting at the École de Droit.”

  Owen didn’t ask after the nature of the meeting, but if it had been timed so as to clash with the festivities it was unlikely to be a gathering of supporters of the regime, and if it was being held in the Law School, it was almost certainly a Nationalist meeting of some sort.

  “The trouble with festivities,” said Mahmoud, “is that they are a kind of popular obscurantism.”

  Owen was still trying to work out what this meant when he saw Garvin directly ahead of them. He wondered for a moment if he should pilot Mahmoud the other way. It was too late; they were on him.

  They greeted each other with reserve, but politely.

  “Mahmoud was just saying that all this is a kind of popular obscurantism.”

  Garvin understood the point in a flash.

  “Distracts from the struggle, does it?”

  “It’s the circus that goes with the bread,” said Mahmoud.

  “McPhee would disagree with you,” said Owen. “He believes that the sugar sweetens the tensions.”

  “That’s the same point,” said Garvin.

  “And dissolves them.”

  “Well—”

  Garvin and Mahmoud looked at each other and laughed and walked on beside each other for a little while. Owen got held up by a camel. When he caught up with them they were deep in conversation.

  “The second time he’s done it,” said Garvin. “Twice in a year!”

  “Well, yes. I suppose with all the preparation—”

  “Exactly. But it knocks on all the way back. Government offices—”