The Girl in the Nile

by Michael Pearce

  “We’ll try to find out. We are trying to find out. Only—”

  “What was the name of that play?” demanded Zeinab, disregarding his patter. “The one Narouz met her at?”

  “New Roses in the Garden. Pretty dreadful, too, according to Narouz.”

  “But I know that play,” said Zeinab. “It’s Gamal’s latest. We received an invitation.”

  “Did we?”

  “Yes. You didn’t go.”

  Owen enjoyed Zeinab’s artistic friends. And he liked Gamal, whose acquaintance he had first made when working on one of his earliest cases as Mamur Zapt. At the time Gamal had written a number of plays but none of them had yet actually been produced. Since then several had reached the boards. The audiences, though, had been confined to the especially perceptive.

  “It would have been the opening night,” said Zeinab. “I couldn’t go, so I went to the second night. You couldn’t go either. You were down in Minya Province running after that Gypsy girl.”

  “No I wasn’t!”

  This was an old charge. Quite unjustified.

  “While I was left in Cairo. Alone,” said Zeinab, unforgiving.

  “This is beside the point.”

  “No it isn’t. Because if you had not been down in Minya chasing that Gypsy woman you would have been at the theater. And then you would have met Leila. So,” said Zeinab, “it’s all your fault.”

  Owen was silenced for a moment. Then he recovered.

  “So it is. You’re right. If I had not been chasing that Gypsy woman I could have gone to the party and chased Leila.”

  “You will not deflect me,” said Zeinab, “with your perverse remarks. I intend to find out whether she was there that night and who Leila was.”

  ***

  Mahmoud, adopting more orthodox procedures, was also trying to establish Leila’s identity.

  “So,” he was saying to the Prince’s chauffeur as Owen arrived, “you picked the two girls up from the salon and took them to the river at Beni Suef?”

  “If that’s what they say, yes.”

  “It’s not what they say, it’s what you say,” said Mahmoud sternly.

  The man shrugged, confident in the power of the Prince to protect, at least against the Parquet. A confidence which Mahmoud had anticipated and which he had invited Owen along to undermine.

  “This is the Mamur Zapt,” he said. “Be careful how you answer.”

  The man flinched slightly.

  “I shall answer as I please,” he said, but less boldly. Something of the Mamur Zapt’s old aura still clung to the post. To it was added a certain unpredictability these days because of its British incumbency.

  “You picked the two girls up?” Mahmoud repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “That is better. And now you are speaking with your own voice. Let us keep it that way. You took them to the river at Beni Suef?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. And there you waited till the dahabeeyah came in. At which point you put the women on board. Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “But,” pursued Mahmoud, “there were three women, were there not?”

  “If you say so.”

  “I would like to hear you say so. With your own voice.”

  “Three women, then,” said the chauffeur.

  “So where did this other woman come from?”

  The man hesitated.

  “Tell us the truth,” said Owen, speaking for the first time. “And remember that we may already know it. Remember, too, that we do not have to ask you here. I may take you back to the Bab el Khalk and ask you.”

  “I picked her up too,” said the chauffeur.

  “Of course. And where did you pick her up? Not from the salon, was it?”

  “No. I had picked her up first, before going to the salon. She was waiting for me.”

  “And waiting for you where?”

  “I was to pick her up by the Souk Al-Gadira.”

  “By the Souk Al-Gadira? Did you not pick her up from a house?”

  “No, effendi”—the chauffeur was being polite now—“the souk there is where four roads meet. The streets are narrow and twist and turn and it is not advisable to take a car up them. Not a car like this one.”

  There was a note of reverence in the chauffeur’s voice. All the time he talked he kept his hand on the bonnet, partly for reassurance—he was less confident than he seemed—and partly as a caress.

  “So where did you meet?”

  “At the junction of the Sharia el Garb with the Sharia el Hakim. I was told she would be waiting for me.”

  “Who told you?”

  The chauffeur looked very unhappy.

  “Effendi,” he whispered, “I—I do not think I should say.”

  The Prince, then.

  “Had you been to the spot before?”

  Eventually they brought him to admit that he had either collected the girl from or returned the girl to the spot on several occasions over the last two months.

  “And did you ever go with the girl to her house? Think before you speak.”

  Never. The chauffeur swore on the Book. He had always delivered her to the same spot. Always. He had stayed in the car. She had never asked him to accompany her home. He would have been reluctant to accede if she had. Who knew what might befall the car if left unattended? “Effendi,” said the chauffeur earnestly, “there are bad men abroad.” Worst; there were small boys. It was clear that, for the chauffeur at least, cars had priority over women.

  The chauffeur, then, had no idea where the girl lived? He had not. He was prepared to swear it on the Book.

  Nevertheless, Owen thought he might be speaking the truth.

  Mahmoud tried one last way. Had the chauffeur ever picked up the Prince from the neighborhood? Or delivered him to a house in that vicinity? He stopped the chauffeur wearily before he got to the Book.

  ***

  Owen went down to the souk himself. The man he was looking for, a Greek, was sitting at a table outside a café, deep in conversation with three Arabs. From time to time, almost absentmindedly, he reached into his pocket and produced a sweet, which he gave to any small boy who happened to be near. There were, naturally, quite a lot of small boys near.

  The Greek was deep in a dramatic tale of misadventure.

  “And then, by God, it pulled out to miss a donkey and I looked, lo, and it was coming straight towards me! I threw myself against the wall and prayed. And God must have heard my prayers, for it passed by me leaving me unharmed.”

  “God is great!” said the rapt audience.

  “Unharmed,” said the Greek, “but not untouched. For as it passed, it reached out and caught my sleeve and rent it. And I stumbled and would have fallen had it not been for the wall.”

  “God is indeed merciful!”

  “He is indeed!” agreed the Greek.

  “Such things ought not to be,” said one of his hearers.

  “That is true. And do you know what I believe to be at the root of the problem?”

  His listeners shook their heads.

  “Speed,” declared the Greek. “That’s what it is. People are trying to go too fast.”

  “True. Oh, very true.”

  “It is the curse of the age.”

  “What is wrong with donkeys?” asked one of the men.

  “That’s what I say. God put man in the world. He put donkeys in the world. But he did not put cars!”

  “That is true,” said his hearers, impressed. They volunteered their own embroiderings of the theme.

  The Greek could not, however, put the incident out of his mind.

  “It was a mighty car,” he said, “and painted green.”

  “Green?” said one of the small boys, all of whom had been following the conversa
tion as closely as the men.

  “Yes. And that is not right, either. For green is the color of the Prophet and—”

  The small boy, however, was not interested.

  “I have seen a green car,” he said. “It comes down here.”

  “What sort of car?”

  The boy described it.

  “The very car!” declared the Greek. He slipped the boy two large boiled sweets and turned to his friends across the table.

  “Be warned!” he said. “Lest you, too, be crushed and defiled! Guard your footsteps! Look over your shoulder!”

  Etcetera, etcetera. His hearers enjoyed every minute of it. Cairenes liked a good alarm.

  The Greek, satisfied with the effect of his story, rose from his seat, shook hands all round and prepared to depart. At the last moment he caught sight of Owen, who had taken up position at an adjoining table, and raised hands to heaven.

  “My friend!” he declared. “And I had not seen you!”

  Owen rose to greet him and they embraced like longlost brothers. The Greek was persuaded—needed no persuasion, really—to sit down. More coffee was called for. The Greek’s friends at his previous table watched benignly; and the phalanx of small boys switched support.

  The Greek continued to feed them with sweets. And then, after he and Owen had been talking for some while, he crooked his finger and called over the boy who had seen the car.

  “My friend has in interest in our car,” he said. The small boy swelled with the pride of implied shared possession.

  “It is a good car,” he said.

  “Sadly, though—and this is the way of the world as you will find out when you grow up—my friend is less interested in the car itself than in some of the people it carries. One in particular.” He winked at the boy. “Did not the car, when it stopped here, pick up a fine young woman?”

  “I don’t know about fine,” said the boy. “It picked up Leila.”

  “There!” said the Greek to Owen. “I knew it! And he even knows her name!”

  “Leila Sekhmet,” said the boy.

  “And she lives near here?”

  “Just up the street.”

  “Show me the house,” said the Greek, “and if it should happen that on the way we meet a sweet-seller…”

  It did so happen. The Greek purchased a bag of sweets, well, not so much a bag as a twist of newspaper, distributed some of the sweets among his retinue of small boys and gave the rest to his guide.

  “It may be that future conversation could benefit us both,” he said.

  The boy led them up one of the dark streets to a place where the houses were tall and thin and so closely packed together that door followed immediately upon door. He stopped outside one of these.

  “Leila lives here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who does the house belong to?”

  “Mrs. Rabaq.”

  “And who is Mrs. Rabaq?”

  “Leila’s aunt.”

  The Greek knocked on the door. After some moments it was opened by an elderly woman servant.

  “Please announce me to Mrs. Rabaq,” said the Greek. “Tell her we come about Leila.”

  The woman stood still.

  “Who are you?” she said.

  “This is the Mamur Zapt,” said the Greek, indicating Owen.

  The woman’s eyes swept over him.

  “I shall not tell her that,” she said.

  She stumped away. They heard her steps going up the stairs. It was a while before they returned.

  “She will see you.” The woman hesitated. “She is very old,” she said, “and no longer understands things clearly. But she will see you.”

  The room was closely shuttered and very dark. The only light was from a dim kerosene lamp standing on a low table. There was a sofa in the middle of the room on which an old woman was sitting. She had pulled her veil right over her face so that they could not even see her eyes.

  “Leila is my niece,” she said. “What has happened to her?”

  She had spoken in Arabic and Owen replied in Arabic. He fell naturally into the courteous, familiar mode used to address the elderly.

  “We do not know that anything has happened to her, mother,” he said. “But we fear.”

  “I fear too,” said the woman. “I always fear.”

  “We fear that an accident may have befallen her.”

  The woman drew her breath in sharply. Then she stood up.

  “I will go to her. Tell me where she is. I will go—”

  She swayed and put out her hand. Owen caught her and eased her gently back on to the sofa.

  “When the time comes, mother,” he said soothingly. “If it comes. But it has not come yet. At the moment it is just that she is missing.”

  “She is always missing,” said the old woman querulously. “It is not right. She comes and goes as she pleases. My sister’s daughter. We were never like that. Our father would never have allowed—”

  She put her hand to her head.

  “Leila!” she said and burst into tears.

  The servant, who had followed them into the room, put her arms round her and comforted her.

  “It is time you went to bed,” she said.

  She helped the old woman up and led her across the room. At the door the old woman shook herself free.

  “Wait!” she said. “Who are these men, Khadija? Why are they here?”

  “It is nothing, mother,” said the servant. “Come!”

  She led her out through the door. “Do not go,” she said over her shoulder to Owen and the Greek. “I will come down shortly.”

  They waited quietly. The furniture was old, the furnishings sparse.

  They heard the servant returning. She went on past the door of the room. When she came back it was with a tray, coffee cups and sugar.

  “Be seated.”

  She came back again, this time with a brazier and coffeepot. She stirred the ashes and placed the coffeepot in the middle.

  “That is proper,” she said with satisfaction. “That is the way it used to be.”

  She poured them some coffee.

  “So,” she said to Owen, “you’re the Mamur Zapt, are you?”

  “That is so, mother.”

  He addressed her in the same way as he had her mistress, with the deference due to age.

  “What has she done wrong?”

  “Leila? I do not know that she has done anything wrong. Except, perhaps, that she has stayed out too late at night.”

  “She has certainly done that. But does the Mamur Zapt interest himself in things like that?”

  “I think she is dead. And the Mamur Zapt does interest himself in things like that.”

  The woman had not bothered to pull her veil across her face. She stared at Owen with large, unblinking eyes.

  “How did she die?”

  “I think she may have drowned.”

  “Drowned? How could she have drowned?”

  “She was on the river. In a dahabeeyah.”

  “I do not understand. How could she have been on the river? In a dahabeeyah?”

  “Did you know nothing of it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nor who she was with?”

  The woman gave a little hard laugh.

  “It is that, is it? No,” she said, “no. No, she never told me. And I thought it best not to ask.”

  “You did not approve?”

  “How could I? It was wrong to leave her family in the first place, wrong, having come here, to go on leading the life she did.”

  “What sort of life was that?”

  “When she was a child she was a pretty little thing. Her father doted on her. We all did. I, her mother. The only child, although a girl child. Her father took her wi
th us when we went to France. And that was a big mistake, for there she saw and was seen.”

  Among the men she was seen by was a young man from another rich Alexandrian family and when they all returned to Egypt he somehow succeeded in gaining access to her.

  “He said to her: ‘Let us be free, as the young in France are free.’ And she was thrilled by that, for she found it hard to come back to a woman’s life in Egypt after tasting life in France. Before, she knew no better. Now, she wanted holiday all the time.”

  The young man’s intentions had been honorable and he had asked his father to obtain her as a bride. His father, however, had had other ideas. Perhaps Leila’s family had not been quite good enough for him. Perhaps it was just that he had already made other plans. Marriages in middleclass Egyptian families were made by the father, usually without reference to the son or daughter, and sometimes without even reference to the mother. Anyway, the boy’s father had refused.

  Leila’s father had somehow got to hear of it and in her case, of course, the consequences were worse. Her father, lax before, now kept her immured. She was not even allowed to receive female visitors.

  Leila had both pined and rebelled. Somehow she again made contact with the young man. And one night they had eloped.

  “What happened next I do not know,” said the servant, “but a year later she came to our house here and threw herself into the mistress’s arms and begged her to take her in. Of course she said yes. Leila was her sister’s child. Besides, she had none of her own and Leila had always been a favorite. And I thought at first that it was good, because my mistress had lost her interest in life and I thought this might renew it.”

  She lifted the pot, stirred the ashes and then replaced it. The action seemed to break her train of thought, for afterwards she did not resume speaking, seemed to forget she had been speaking and sat waiting passively. Owen realized suddenly that like her mistress she was old.

  “You thought that at first,” he prompted gently, “but afterwards you changed your mind?”

  She came back with a start.

  “Not at first. She was so glad to be with us and we were so glad to have her. The mistress fussed over her—still does—and they were like mother and daughter. And Leila needed a mother. But then—” She broke off.