The Mamur Zapt & the Return of the Carpet

by Michael Pearce

  “We’re going to have a job, aren’t we?” he said. “Almost any ground is dangerous! However—” he leaned forward and gently touched Owen on the sleeve in a gesture that was very Arab—“I’m not always so unreasonable!”

  He thought again.

  “It’s the gun,” he said. “That’s what makes me think it must be a ‘club.’ And one of the more professional ones. Ordinary fellahin like Mustafa don’t get near such things. If they bought a gun—if they could afford to—it would be of the pigeon-shooting sort. A shotgun for scaring the birds. A rifle that came with Napoleon. Not the latest issue to the British Army.”

  “Could you buy one? If you had plenty of money? If you were that other-man-with-a-grudge, for instance?”

  Mahmoud shook his head. “Not unless you knew somebody.”

  “You can’t rule that out as a possibility.”

  “You can for Mustafa. He’s never been out of the village.”

  Mahmoud brooded a little.

  “And that’s the problem,” he said presently. “You see, if you can get hold of a gun like that and you want someone killed, why go to Mustafa? There’s a gap. Between the professionals behind the scenes and the very far from professional man who’s supposed to do the actual work.”

  Two shoe-shine boys came round the corner and launched themselves immediately at their feet. They both tucked their feet under their chairs and Mahmoud waved the boys away.

  “And there’s another thing,” he said. “The hashish.”

  “They gave him too much.”

  “Yes.”

  Mahmoud looked at Owen.

  “You know what I think?”

  “Tell me.”

  “It all sounds terribly amateur.”

  “Yes,” said Owen. “Like me.”

  Although Owen had told Mahmoud about the article in al Liwa he had kept back one piece of information. Now, as they walked back towards the centre of the city, he said:

  “I know someone who was at the meeting, in the village. This person hates Nuri, is a Nationalist, is, I would say, a bit incompetent and from what I have heard would be quite likely to sympathize with Mustafa.”

  “You should join the Parquet,” said Mahmoud, surprised. “Who is he?”

  “The person who wrote the article in al Liwa.”

  “Whose identity you have already checked.”

  “Yes,” said Owen. “Ahmed.”

  ***

  One of the Mamur Zapt’s privileges was a box at the Opera. At first Owen had been a little surprised. But no, it was not an imaginative bribe. It was a perfectly genuine prerequisite of office and Owen soon began to make regular use of it. Although he came from a musical family and a Welsh village with a deep-rooted musical culture, he had never been to the opera before he came to Egypt. Soon after taking up his position, however, he went to a performance of Aïda, which had been written, of course, specially for the Opera House at Cairo, and was hooked. He went to every new performance during the season. Indeed, he went several times and had recently made a resolution to cut down his attendances at the Opera House to twice a week.

  Coming back from the Opera House that evening he passed an Arab café in which some young men were sitting. They were in high spirits and had probably been drinking. As Owen approached, one of them said something to the others and there was a burst of derisive laughter, almost certainly at Owen’s expense. Then, as he continued past, one of the others, in an obvious attempt to outdo, leaned out into the street and shouted something abusive almost directly up into Owen’s face, cursing, as is the Arab custom, not Owen himself but his father.

  Without stopping and, indeed, without thinking, Owen at once replied that he would certainly have returned the compliment had his addresser only been in the position to inform him which of his mother’s two-and-ninety admirers his father had been.

  There was an instant of shocked silence behind him and then, almost immediately, the rush of feet.

  Owen cursed his over-ready tongue. One thing the Agent would not tolerate was brawling in the street with Egyptians.

  The footsteps came up to him and he braced himself.

  And then a hand was placed gently on his arm and a voice said politely: “Please, please. I am so sorry. I did not think for one moment that you knew Arabic, still less the correct Arabic abuse. We are all very sorry. Please come and join us for some coffee and let us try and convince you that we are not as boorish as we appear.”

  Two contrite young men looked at him pleadingly. Owen could not resist and went back with them to the table where a space was quickly made for him.

  The rest of the café looked on with approval, having -enjoyed, in typical Arab fashion, both the abuse and the courtesy.

  The men apologized. They were, they explained, filling in time before going to a party. They had been talking politics and one of their number had been carried away. It was not said, but Owen guessed, that the topics had included the British in Egypt. The conversation turned tactfully in another direction.

  They inquired how Owen came by his Arabic and when he mentioned his teacher it turned out that two of them knew him. This reassured Owen, for the Aalim was not one to waste his time with fools.

  Indeed, they were far from fools. They were all journalists, it appeared, working for the most part on arts pages. One of them was introduced as a playwright.

  Owen said he had been to the Arab theatre but found the plays excessively melodramatic.

  “That’s us,” said one of the men. “All Arabs are melodramatic.”

  “No, it’s not,” said the playwright. “We’re dramatic. It’s the plays that are melodramatic. They’re just bad.”

  “Perhaps you will improve the standard,” said Owen.

  “Gamal’s latest play is good,” one of the men said.

  “Is it on somewhere? Can I see it?”

  They all roared with laughter.

  “Alas, no!” said Gamal. “But when it is put on I shall send you a special invitation.”

  Owen said he had just been to the opera. They asked him how it compared with opera in Europe. He was obliged to admit that the only opera he had seen had been in Egypt. Two of the journalists had seen opera in Paris. They thought Cairo opera provincial.

  The conversation ran on merrily. Some time later Owen glanced at his watch. It was well past two. Opera finished late in Cairo; parties started even later, evidently.

  The thought occurred to one or two of the others and they rose to go. Owen got up, too, and began to say his farewells. His acquaintances were aghast that he should be leaving them so early. They insisted that he came to the party with them.

  Owen was taking this to be mere Arab politeness when the playwright linked his arm in Owen’s and began to urge him determinedly along the street.

  “A little while,” he coaxed, “just a little, little while.”

  “We want you to meet our friends,” they said.

  The house was a traditional Mameluke house. It went up in tiers. The first tier was just a high blank wall with a decorated archway entrance. Above this a row of corbels allowed the first floor to project a couple of feet over the street, in the manner of sixteenth-century houses in England. And above this again a triple row of oriels carried out into the street a further two feet. There was no glass, of course, but all the windows were heavily screened with fine traditional woodwork.

  Through the archway was a courtyard with a fountain and some people sitting round it. They belonged to the party, but most of the guests were inside, in a mandar’ah, or reception room, opening off the courtyard.

  The mandar’ah had a sunken marble floor paved with black and white marble and little pieces of fine red tile. In the centre of the floor was a fountain playing into a small shallow pool lined with coloured marbles like the floor.

  A number of peo
ple stood about the room in groups, talking. Other groups reclined on large, fat, multi-coloured, leather cushions. Some had Western-style drinks in their hand. Quite a few were drinking coffee. All were talking.

  At the far end of the room was a dais with large cushions. This was where the host normally sat, along with his most honoured guests. There was a group on it now, sprawled about on the cushions, all talking animatedly.

  Two of Owen’s acquaintances went off to find their host. They returned leading him triumphantly.

  He was Fakhri.

  He recovered at once, grasped Owen’s hand in both his own and embraced him.

  “It would take too long to explain,” said Owen.

  However, his friends were determined to explain, and Fakhri got the general picture.

  “But we have met already!”

  “You have?”

  Fakhri bore Owen away.

  “Whisky?” he said. “Or coffee?”

  “I would say coffee but I have had so much already—”

  “Whisky, then. For me also. After such surprises—”

  “Sorry,” said Owen.

  “Such nice surprises. I take it you are not on duty?”

  “Far from it,” said Owen, with conviction.

  “Then enjoy your evening. Come! I will introduce you—”

  But another group of guests arrived, who solicited Fakhri’s attention. Owen went off to find his acquaintances. The playwright was in a little group about the fountain. Owen started across to join him.

  The party was Western-style. That is, women were present. There were Syrians, Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Tripolitans and Levantines generally; there were scarcely any Egyptians. None were unattached. That would have been flouting convention too far.

  One of them Owen recognized. It was the girl he had noticed at Nuri’s. She looked up and caught his eye.

  “Why,” she said, smiling, “le Mamur Zapt.”

  Fakhri appeared, hot and bothered from greeting three lots of guests simultaneously.

  “You know each other?” he said. “Captain Carwall—” he mumbled the word “—Owen.”

  “What?” said the girl.

  “Owen.”

  “I know,” said the girl. “Le Mamur Zapt.”

  Fakhri looked at Owen a little anxiously.

  “Pas ce soir,” said Owen.

  “Ah!” said the girl. “You are Mamur Zapt only sometimes. That is imaginative.” She turned to Fakhri. “Don’t you think,” she asked, “that it is one of the weaknesses of the British that they can usually be only themselves?”

  “It is one of their strengths,” said Fakhri. “They never doubt that they are right.”

  “While we doubt all the time. Perhaps. But it is a weakness, too. The world is not so simple.”

  “Cairo is not so simple, either,” said Fakhri, with a sidelong glance at Owen.

  He slipped off to greet some new arrivals.

  “I saw you the other day at Nuri’s,” said Owen.

  “My father,” said the girl.

  “Nuri is your father?”

  “Oui.”

  He considered her. Something in the face, perhaps? A strong face, not a pretty one. But the figure was willowy, unlike Nuri’s barrel-like one.

  “You must take after your mother.”

  “In more ways than one.”

  “How is she?” asked Owen. “The attack on your father must have been a great shock.”

  “She is dead.”

  “I am sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  The girl looked out into the courtyard where the fountain caught the moonlight.

  “I think they loved each other,” she said suddenly. “They never married, of course. She wouldn’t go in his harem.”

  Seeing that Owen was trying to work it out, she said: “My mother was Firdus.”

  She saw he was still puzzled.

  “The courtesan. You wouldn’t know, but she was famous.”

  “And obviously beautiful.”

  The girl regarded him sceptically.

  “She was, as a matter of fact. But that is not one of the things I have inherited from her.”

  “I don’t know,” said Owen. “Is Ahmed your brother?” he asked.

  “Half-brother. His mother was a woman in the harem.”

  “We met him at your father’s that day.”

  “C’est un vrai imbécile, celui-là,” said the girl dismissively.

  “He doesn’t like the British.”

  “You can’t expect originality from him.”

  Owen laughed.

  “He doesn’t seem to care greatly for your father, either,” he said.

  “Naturally,” said the girl. “None of us do. We are angry for our mothers.”

  “You are,” said Owen. “Is Ahmed?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Ahmed is just angry,” she said.

  Then she looked hard at him.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Interested,” said Owen.

  “Surely you don’t think—” She began to laugh. “It’s too ridiculous,” she said.

  “Is it?”

  “If you knew Ahmed—” She broke off. “Why,” she said, “you sound just like the Mamur Zapt.”

  And turned on her heel and walked away.

  Owen rejoined the group around the playwright. They were talking now about the way in which old parts of Cairo were being torn down to make way for new buildings in the European style. Was this progress or was it deterioration? The debate continued happily and vehemently.

  A little later in the evening, or morning, Fakhri detached him.

  “I would like you to meet one of my colleagues,” he said, and led Owen over to a little group in one corner. Two earnest young men were addressing a somewhat gloomy middle-aged man, who looked up with relief when he saw Fakhri approaching.

  “Mon cher!” he said.

  They shook hands and embraced.

  “I have been here all night and not had a word with you!”

  “It was good of you to come,” said Fakhri. “Have you put it to bed?”

  The man glanced at his watch.

  “The first copies will be coming off in an hour,” he said. “I shall have to go soon.”

  “Not before you have had some more coffee,” said Fakhri, and clapped his hands.

  A splendid suffragi, or waiter, in a spotless white gown and a red sash around his middle appeared at once with a coffee-pot.

  “You need it to keep awake,” said Fakhri. “Anyway, why do you have to be there? Can’t they manage without you?”

  “No,” said the man gloomily. “It will all be wrongly set, the columns won’t be straight and some of it is bound to be transposed.”

  “They used to be all right,” said Fakhri. “Well, fairly all right.”

  “They were always hopeless,” said the man, “and now they’re worse.”

  “Daouad always sees the gloomy side of things,” Fakhri said to Owen. “However, it is true that things are not easy for him.”

  “Not easy,” said Daouad, roused. “I’ll say they’re not easy! You don’t know what problems are!” he said to Fakhri.

  He turned to Owen.

  “There’s no direction! Not since Kamil died. They’re all at each other’s throats, el Gazzari, Jemal, Yussuf, Abdul Murr. And I’m in the middle! If I print something that Jemal likes, el Gazzari won’t have it. If I put in one of Gazzari’s huge sermons, Jemal comes to me and says it has to go or his people won’t distribute it.”

  He gulped his coffee.

  “That’s why I have to be there,” he said to Fakhri. “It was all right when I left the office but who knows what they’ve done since? They’ll have pulled articles out,
pushed articles in—”

  Fakhri patted him on the shoulder. “Only a man like you could cope,” he said.

  Owen knew now why Fakhri had introduced him. Daouad was the editor of al Liwa.

  “Working to so many people is impossible,” he said sympathetically.

  “It is,” Daouad agreed fervently.

  “And they are so extreme! They won’t compromise at all.”

  “Not one bit,” agreed Daouad.

  “I don’t know how you manage. Is there any sign of someone getting control?”

  “That might be worse,” said Daouad gloomily. “If it’s el Gazzari, I couldn’t go on. I can’t even talk to him. And Jemal wouldn’t be much better. They never listen to me!” he complained to Fakhri.

  “They couldn’t do without you,” said Fakhri.

  “What about Abdul Murr?” he asked.

  “He’s got more sense,” Daouad conceded. “I could work with him.”

  “I would have thought there was a chance of Abdul Murr,” said Fakhri. “In the end both Jemal and el Gazzari must see that things can’t go on like this. Someone has to be in charge. Abdul Murr is a reasonable man. They can both work with him, even if they can’t work with each other.”

  “He’s too moderate for both of them.”

  “It may have to come to that,” Fakhri insisted. “There has to be compromise. Even they must see that!”

  “They might see it,” said Daouad, “but others won’t.”

  “If they see it, the others will have to.”

  Daouad pursed his lips. “There are others who are even more difficult,” he said. “Compared with them, el Gazzari and Jemal are reason itself.”

  “Then,” said Fakhri, “you certainly do have problems.”

  “Fakhri doesn’t really care if I have problems,” Daouad said to Owen. “He’s on the other side.”

  “There are lots of other sides,” said Fakhri. His cheeks crinkled with laughter. “Anyway,” he said, “of course I am! I like to hear of your problems. It makes me forget mine for a little.”

  “How I envy you. Fakhri,” said Daouad. “There’s only one boss in your place and that’s you. In my place there are ten bosses and none of them is me.”

  “I can’t believe there’s anyone worse than Jemal and el Gazzari,” said Owen.