The Mamur Zapt & the Return of the Carpet

by Michael Pearce

  “No, thanks,” said Owen.

  “Distinct smell of powder.”

  “I’m surprised you can pick it out among the other things.”

  McPhee let the hand drop and rose to his feet.

  “Nothing else,” he said.

  “Did you find the gun?” Owen asked Mahmoud.

  Mahmoud nodded. “On the ground,” he said.

  He signed to the constable, who went away and returned a moment later gingerly carrying a large revolver in a fold of dirty white cloth.

  “Standard Service issue, I think,” said McPhee, “but you’ll know better than I.”

  He looked at Owen.

  “New model,” said Owen. “Only started being issued here last February. Wonder where he got that?”

  “I’ll have to check,” said Mahmoud.

  “You’ll have something to go on at any rate,” said McPhee.

  He was always pleased to put the Parquet in its place.

  “More than that,” said Owen. “I think we’ve got a witness for you.”

  Mahmoud looked at him inquiringly.

  “Blue galabeah,” Owen said to McPhee.

  He turned to go.

  “Have a word with Fakhri Bey,” he said as they went.

  ***

  Afterwards, Owen and McPhee went to the Sporting Club for lunch, and then Owen had a swim. In the summer working hours were from eight-thirty till two. The whole city had a siesta then, from which it did not stir until about six o’clock. Then the shops reopened, the street stall-holders emerged from under their stalls, the open air cafés filled up, and the narrow streets hummed with life until nearly three in the morning.

  Owen had got used to the pattern in India and it did not bother him. However, he never found it possible to sleep in the afternoon. Usually he read the papers at the club and then went for a swim in the club pool. The mothers with their children did not come until after four, so he had the pool to himself and could chug up and down practising the new crawl stroke.

  Usually, too, he would return to his office about six and work for a couple of hours in the cool of the evening, undisturbed by clerks and orderlies, agents and petitioners. It was a good time for getting things done.

  That evening he had intended to get to grips with the estimates, but when he arrived in his office he found a note on his desk from McPhee, asking him to drop along as soon as he got in.

  “Oh! Hullo!” said McPhee when he stuck his head round the door. “Just as well you’re here. The Old Man wants to see us.”

  Garvin, the professional policeman who had relatively recently been appointed commandant of the Cairo police, was, if anything, a little younger than McPhee, but McPhee always liked to refer to him in what Owen considered to be a prep-school manner. McPhee had spent twelve years teaching in the Egyptian equivalent of a minor public school before Garvin’s idiosyncratic, and amateur, predecessor had recruited him as assistant commandant at the time of the corruption business.

  The choice was not, in fact, as eccentric as might appear. McPhee was patently honest, a necessary qualification in the circumstances and one comparatively rare in worldly-wise Cairo; he spoke Arabic fluently, which was a prime prerequisite for the post so far as the British Agent, Cromer, was concerned; and he possessed boundless physical energy, which, although irritating at times, fitted him quite well for some of the tasks a policeman was called on to do.

  He was, however, an amateur, and, Owen considered, would not have stood a cat’s chance in hell of getting the job if Garvin had been making the appointment.

  The same was probably true of his own appointment as Mamur Zapt, head of the Political Branch and the Secret Police.

  McPhee himself had been responsible for this. The post of Mamur Zapt had become vacant at the time when McPhee, pending Garvin’s arrival, had been appointed acting commandant. The post was considered too sensitive to be left unfilled for long and McPhee had been asked to advise the Minister. Not a professional soldier himself, he had been over-impressed by Owen’s service on the North-West Frontier in India, and Owen’s facility with languages had clinched the matter.

  The shrewd, unsentimental Garvin, thought Owen, would have appointed neither of them; neither the eccentric McPhee nor the inexperienced Owen. He would probably have got on better, Owen thought, with the previous Mamur Zapt: the one who knew the underworld of Cairo just a little too well.

  Now, when he and McPhee took up their accustomed chairs before the large desk, Owen felt the usual small-boy-about-to-be-disciplined feeling creeping up on him. He guessed that McPhee felt it, too, but they reacted in different ways. McPhee sat up ramrod-straight and barked, “Yes, sir!” Owen lolled back in what he suspected was an absurdly exaggerated manner and said nothing. He suspected that Garvin found him far too easy-going.

  The suspicion was soon reinforced.

  “Nuri Pasha,” said Garvin.

  “Nasty shock, sir,” said McPhee. “But he’s recovering. We have the man who did it.”

  “Oh,” said Garvin.

  McPhee described the circumstances.

  Garvin did not seem much interested.

  “So that’s all buttoned up,” McPhee concluded.

  “Buttoned up?” Garvin regarded him incredulously. “You haven’t bloody begun!”

  He turned to the Mamur Zapt.

  “Did you get any warning of this?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Owen thought that was an unfair question.

  “We get any number of warnings,” he began defensively. “Three or four a day—”

  Garvin cut across him.

  “Did you get one about this? About Nuri Pasha?”

  “Not specifically,” Owen admitted.

  “Worrying.”

  “Nine-tenths of them are baloney.”

  “The other tenth isn’t,” said Garvin.

  He brooded for a moment.

  “What do you do about those? The ones that aren’t baloney?”

  “We check them all out,” said Owen. “Baloney or no baloney. The ones that look as if they might have something in them we take action over.”

  “What action.”

  “Notify the appropriate people. Stick a man on. Stay with the source.”

  “Sometimes it works,” said Garvin.

  “It nearly always works,” said McPhee loyally.

  Garvin ignored him.

  “But those are the cases where you hear something. You didn’t even pick up a whisper this time?”

  “No.”

  “Slip-up,” said Garvin.

  Owen fought back.

  “Not necessarily,” he said. “Anyone who’s plotting an assassination isn’t going to broadcast the fact. There may have been nothing to pick up.”

  “There’s always something to pick up in Cairo,” said Garvin dismissively.

  He turned his attention back to McPhee.

  “Buttoned up!” he repeated. “You haven’t bloody even started! Whose man was he? What’s behind this? What are they after?”

  “The Parquet—” Owen began.

  Garvin swung round on him.

  “For Christ’s sake!” he said. “Stop messing around! You know damned well this is nothing to do with them. It’s political.”

  Garvin’s eyes bored into his.

  “So you’d better bloody get on with it,” he said. “Mamur Zapt.”

  Chapter Two

  Owen was at the Place de l’Opéra shortly before seven the following morning. Early though he was, the Parquet was there before him.

  Mahmoud was surprised.

  “The Mamur Zapt?” he said.

  He broke into a smile.

  “They have been leaning on you, too?”

  “They told me to stop me
ssing around and bloody get on with it,” said Owen.

  “Moi aussi.”

  They both laughed.

  “It must be political,” said Mahmoud.

  “What isn’t?” said Owen.

  “And big.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re here.”

  “I honestly don’t know anything that makes it big,” said Owen.

  “Nuri Pasha?”

  “I thought he’d retired from active politics.”

  “Those bastards never retire from active politics,” said Mahmoud. He looked at Owen curiously. “Don’t you know? Really?”

  “No,” said Owen.

  “I don’t really know, either,” said Mahmoud. “I just assumed—” He broke off.

  “What did you assume?”

  Mahmoud hesitated.

  “I’ve got no particular reason for assuming,” he said at last. “I just took it for granted.”

  “What?”

  “That it was to do with Denshawai.”

  “Why should it be to do with Denshawai?”

  “Because Nuri Pasha was an under-secretary in the Ministry of Justice at that time.”

  The Denshawai Incident had happened in 1906, just before Owen was transferred to Egypt and took up the post of Mamur Zapt.

  Some British soldiers had been marching from Cairo to Alexandria and en route five officers had gone to the village of Denshawai to shoot pigeons. Round ever Egyptian village were flocks of semi-wild pigeons kept for food and manure. No one was allowed to shoot them without permission from the head man of the village. The officers had misunderstood a guide who was with them and, thinking they were free to shoot, did so. The infuriated villagers had attacked the officers. Two had been wounded and one had died, of sunstroke it was thought, as he lay on the ground. The British-controlled Administration had taken exemplary action against the villagers. Four had been sentenced to death, others sent to prison, and seven had received fifty lashes.

  The incident had sparked off widespread protests throughout Egypt. It had not been too popular with the new British Government, either. Word went that Cromer had been, in effect, forced out over the issue. He had been replaced as Consul-General by the more pliable Sir Eldon Gorst, something which hadn’t, in the view of old hands, helped matters one little bit.

  “Denshawai flavours most things,” said Owen slowly. “I don’t know that it is particularly important in this case. How closely was Nuri Pasha involved?”

  “Not very,” said Mahmoud. “Which is why my assumption may be quite wrong.”

  He looked around him.

  “And also why,” he went on breezily, “I should get on with my reconstruction before the remaining half million of the Cairo population arrive on the scene to help me.”

  The number of people on the Place was indeed beginning to grow. The first water-cart was coming down the Sharia el Maghrabi spraying water behind it to keep down the dust. The first forage camels were weaving their way along the Ezbekiyeh Gardens, great stacks bobbing precariously on their backs. The cab-men and donkey-boys lunched their animals on green forage, and from dawn a steady train of camels slouched over the Nile bridge to supply them. The first donkeys, laden with heavy blocks of ice wrapped in dirty sacking, were making their way to the hotels. People who had slept on the pavement, or on the wall next to the railings of the Gardens, or in the gutter (which was probably safer since they could not fall off) were beginning to stir. In the early morning it was sometimes quite difficult to get along -because of the number of men lying about with their faces covered like corpses, sleeping as soundly as the dead. Now, as he watched some of the white or blue-gowned figures get to their feet, Owen was suddenly reminded of apocalyptic -accounts of Judgement Day that he had heard from Welsh preachers. Not normally given to such visions himself, he thrust it out of his mind and concentrated on Mahmoud’s reconstruction. The Parquet followed French practice and usually required a “reconstruction” of a crime by its investigators, and Owen, whose knowledge of standard police procedures was limited, was interested in seeing how Mahmoud approached it. Briskly, it appeared.

  The Egyptian went over to a mark he had scuffed in the dust.

  “Nuri Pasha,” he said, “was about here, facing out across the Place towards the Ezbekiyeh Gardens.”

  “According to Fakhri?”

  “And others.”

  Mahmoud pointed to where a man was relieving himself in the road.

  “Fakhri’s arabeah was about there.”

  “He would have had a good view,” said Owen.

  “Yes,” said Mahmoud, “I think he did. Though between him and Nuri Pasha there were a lot of people.”

  “Did you find any of them?”

  “Yes. The first they knew of it was a loud bang. They looked round to see Nuri Pasha falling—”

  “Why was he falling?” asked Owen. “He wasn’t hit.”

  “Don’t know,” said Mahmoud. “I’ll have to ask him. Reflex, perhaps.”

  He darted back and affected to stumble.

  “An old man,” he said. “Dazed, winded and scared. Perhaps half-stunned. Anyway, he lay approximately here until about five hundred people took it upon themselves to carry him into the hotel.”

  “Who took the initiative?”

  “As I was saying,” said Mahmoud, “about five hundred of them. Each one says.”

  He looked up and down the road and then walked over to another mark.

  “Meanwhile, an ordinary fellah who had attempted to run away immediately after the shot was seized and brought to the ground, or tripped, or just fell over, about here. Definite, because he stayed there, unconscious, till the police came and one constable, brighter than most, marked the spot.”

  “That’s where he was taken,” said Owen. “Where was he when he fired the shot?”

  “Or when the shot was fired. Don’t know. Fakhri Bey said he moved to the right, so if we move to the left—” He counted out four paces. “He might have been standing here.”

  “About twelve feet from Nuri.”

  “In which case,” said Mahmoud, “why didn’t he hit him?”

  “It’s more difficult than you might think,” said Owen, “even at twelve feet. Especially if you’ve never fired a revolver before.”

  “Which might well have been the case,” said Mahmoud. “Why is it so difficult?”

  “It kicks back in your hand when you fire,” said Owen. “If you’re not holding it properly the barrel jerks upward.”

  “If the shot went upward,” said Mahmoud, “how did it hit the lemonade-seller?”

  “Could have ricocheted.”

  “Off what?”

  Mahmoud moved back to where Nuri Pasha had been standing. Owen took up the position they had guessed at for the assailant.

  “Off the statue,” said Owen. “Maybe.”

  They went over to the statue of Ibrahim Pasha and examined it.

  Mahmoud put his finger on a mark.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  They became aware that a small crowd was watching them with interest.

  “I think your half million is beginning to arrive,” said Owen.

  “It’s unreal to reconstruct without a crowd,” said Mahmoud. “It’s impossible with one.”

  He walked across the Place to where Fakhri might have observed the scene from his arabeah. For a moment he stood there looking. Then he walked slowly back to Owen.

  “Just fixing it in my mind,” he said, “before I talk to them.”

  Two heavily laden brick carts emerged at the same time from adjoining streets and then continued across the Place abreast of each other. A car coming out of the Sharia el Teatro was obliged to brake suddenly and skidded across in front of two arabeahs which had just pulled out of t
he pavement. All three drivers jumped down from their vehicles and began to abuse the drivers of the brick carts, who themselves felt obliged to descend to the ground, the better to put their own point of view. Other vehicles came to a halt and other drivers joined in. Some Passover sheep, painted in stripes and with silver necklaces around their necks, which had been trotting peacefully along beside the Ezbekiyeh Gardens, abandoned the small boy who was herding them and wandered out into the middle of the traffic. In a moment all was confusion and uproar. The Place, that is, had returned to normal.

  “That,” said Mahmoud resignedly, “is that.”

  ***

  The two had taken a liking to each other and Mahmoud, unusually for the Parquet, invited Owen to be present at his interrogation. It took place in the Police Headquarters at the Bab el Khalk. They were shown into a bare, green-painted room on the ground floor which looked out on to an enclosed square across which the prisoner was brought from his cell.

  He looked dishevelled and his eyes were bloodshot but otherwise he seemed to have completely recovered from his heavy drugging. He looked at them aggressively as the police led him in. In Owen’s experience a fellah, or peasant, caught for the first time in the toils of the alien law tended to respond either with truculent aggression or with helpless bewilderment. This one was truculent.

  After the preliminaries Mahmoud got down to business.

  “Your name?”

  “Mustafa,” the man growled.

  “Where are you from?”

  “El Deyna is my village,” he said reluctantly.

  El Deyna was a small village on the outskirts of old Cairo just beyond the Citadel.

  “You have work in the fields,” said Mahmoud. “What brought you to the city yesterday?”

  “I came to kill Nuri Pasha,” said the other uncompromisingly.

  “And why did you want to kill Nuri Pasha?”

  “He dishonoured my wife’s sister.”

  “Your story will be checked,” said Mahmoud.

  He waited to see if this had any effect on the man but it did not.

  “How did he dishonour your wife’s sister?”

  Mustafa did not reply. Mahmoud repeated the question. Again there was no response. The fellah just sat, brawny arms folded.

  Mahmoud tried again.