The Mamur Zapt and the return of the Carpet mz-1

by Michael Pearce

  But the old man could get down without his aid. He kept asking Owen what he wanted. Owen explained lamely that he was looking out over the roofs in search of a thief. The old man shook his head, whether in disbelief or commiseration at the world’s iniquity. He kept touching Owen’s arm. He was obviously puzzled. Something about Owen, the accent, perhaps just the bodily presence, told him that Owen was a foreigner.

  Owen apologized again, excused himself, and descended to the ground. Half way down he met a black-veiled woman carrying a bowl for the old man. She shrank back against the wall as Owen passed.

  Little streets, so little they were hardly streets, ran off from the piazza on every side. There seemed nothing to tell one from another. It came over Owen how pointless it was trying to intercept a man in this maze.

  He made his way back to the Syrian’s shop.

  McPhee arrived at almost the same moment.

  “Like looking for a needle in a haystack,” he said. “Useless!”

  One of the men who had been with Georgiades on the roof came out of the shop carrying a large box.

  “Thank Christ for that!” said McPhee. “At least we’ve got something.”

  A moment later Georgiades himself appeared. He was mopping his face with a large blue handkerchief.

  “The next time we do this,” he said to Owen, “it had better be in the cooler part of the day.”

  “You didn’t get him,” said Owen.

  Georgiades shook his head regretfully.

  “No,” he said. “What a waste! After running over the roofs of half Cairo!”

  He looked down at the big box.

  “We got this, though,” he said. “When I got close to him he put it down and ran.”

  The Syrian came out of the shop with the man from the consulate in attendance.

  “ This your property?” asked Owen, indicating the box.

  “Yes,” said the man from the consulate.

  “I have never seen it on my life before,” declared the Syrian solemnly.

  “It’s a box of grenades,” said Owen.

  “You heard my client,” said the man from the consulate. “He has never seen this in his life before. You have made a mistake.”

  “And so have you,” said McPhee, taking the Syrian by the arm. “What are you doing?” said the man from the consulate, stepping between them.

  “Taking him to the police headquarters,” said McPhee.

  “You cannot do that,” said the man from the consulate. “He is a Syrian citizen.”

  “Caught redhanded,” said McPhee indignantly, “with the arms in his possession.”

  “He knows nothing about the arms!” said the man from the consulate. “Someone else had put them there!”

  “Oh, yes,” said McPhee sarcastically. “Who?”

  “I don’t know,” said the man from the consulate. “It’s not my job to find out. It’s your job.”

  "We have found out,” said McPhee.

  “I don’t know about that,” said the man. “It would have to be tested in a court.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m planning,” said McPhee.

  “A Consular Court,” said the man.

  “A Consular Court?” said McPhee incredulously. “The man’s been caught with arms in his possession.”

  “A Mixed Tribunal, then.”

  Even when a foreigner could be proved to have transgressed against the law of his own country he had the right to be tried by his own Consular Court. Where there was a dispute between foreigners, or between foreigners and Egyptians, the case was heard by a Mixed Tribunal, on which the majority of the judges were foreign. But that applied only to civil cases, and it had yet to be established whether this fell into that category. It almost certainly did not.

  “Anyway,” said the man from the consulate, “you certainly cannot arrest him.”

  “We’ll see about that,” said McPhee grimly, producing a pair of handcuffs.

  “I protest!” said the consular official. “My client is a native Syrian and is outside your jurisdiction.”

  Owen was tempted to let McPhee go ahead. At any rate, it might give the Syrian a shaking. But it was not worth the trouble. They would have to release him at once.

  “Leave him for the time being,” he said to McPhee. “We shall be taking this up,” he said to the official.

  It was possible, in certain circumstances, which included a threat to security, to expel a foreigner from the country; but it took a long time.

  “I shall be taking this up, too,” said the man. “This is a gross invasion of Syrian territory. I shall be lodging an official complaint.”

  “Do!” said Owen.

  The consular official took the Syrian by the arm and they went back into the shop. McPhee was purple with fury.

  “It makes you lose heart,” said Georgiades.

  “We’ve got the grenades anyway,” said Owen.

  “Not all of them,” said Georgiades.

  “What?”

  “Haven’t you looked?” He flipped back the top of the box. Three grenades were missing.

  McPhee swore.

  “When did he take them?” asked Owen. “Or were they missing before?”

  “I think he took them when he left the box,” said Georgiades. “He seemed to fumble inside the box. The lid was open when I got there.”

  McPhee and Owen exchanged glances. Three was enough. Enough with the Carpet coming on.

  “Got nowhere,” said Owen.

  “Could be worse,” said McPhee. “At least we’ve got these. You did well,” he said to Georgiades.

  Georgiades shrugged. He was as disappointed as they were.

  One of the constables shouldered the box and they started off along the street. Owen felt too depressed to say anything.

  They had just turned the corner when there was a shout behind them. A small boy came running up.

  “Ya effendi!” he hailed Owen.

  “What is it?”

  “I bring a message,” he panted, “from Abdul Kassem.”

  Owen turned sharply. He had forgotten about Abdul Kassem.

  “What is it?”

  The boy hung back.

  “He said I would be well rewarded,” he said.

  “And so you shall,” said McPhee, bending down to him. “How much was spoken of?” “One piastre,” said the boy.

  “Oh-h!” said McPhee, affecting incredulity. “A whole piastre?”

  “Half a piastre,” admitted the boy.

  McPhee fumbled in his pocket. “Here is a half piastre,” he said, “which you shall have when you have spoken. The other half I might let you have if I think you have told me correctly.”

  The boy nodded.

  “Abdul Kassem says: Come quickly.”

  He held out his hand.

  “Is that all?” asked McPhee.

  “Yes,” said the boy.

  “Come quickly? Where to?”

  “Give me another piastre,” said the boy, “and I will take you.”

  They found Abdul Kassem waiting outside an old Mameluke house in the Haret el Merdani. Soon after they had separated he had had the same idea as Owen. He had remembered that there was a ruined mosque nearby with its tower still standing, had climbed up that and then had had a good view of the rooftop chase. He had seen Georgiades closing on his man, watched the man stoop and do something to the box, and then had seen the man run off in the direction of the Mosque Darb el Ahmah, whose distinct turquoise cupola had stood out among the other rooftop features. He had descended from his own tower and run to the mosque, arriving just in time to see the man slip out of the mosque itself and cross the square in front of it. While on the tower he had had a good look at the man and was sure that this was the same man. No, he had not been carrying anything, not in his hands, but Abdul Kassem thought he had something stuffed in the front of his shirt, for it bulged and hung rather than billowed. He had followed the man down a sidestreet and seen him slip through the door of this house. A
nd then he had sent the boy.

  “Good work!” said Owen.

  McPhee was looking at him.

  “OK,” said Owen. “In you go!”

  The great gate of the house was slightly ajar, probably to let a breeze blow through the courtyard. McPhee threw it wide open and the men rushed in. A porter, asleep in a recess of the entrance, opened his eyes as they went past, and then jumped up.

  The men fanned out. They knew the structure of a Mameluke house and worked through systematically. The main reception rooms opened off the courtyard, and there were various recesses in there where a man could hide. The other rooms on the ground floor were either servants’ rooms, mostly cluttered around the main entrance, or storerooms. It took the men almost no time to work through them all.

  Georgiades looked at Owen inquiringly. Nearly the whole of the upper portion of a Mameluke house was given up to the harem. There were no proper bedrooms in the Western sense of the word. Any room which was not being used for anything else would serve. Beds were just a few cushions, a pillow and a padded blanket, which was rolled up in the daytime and put in a cupboard.

  The Mamur Zapt’s traditional right of entry extended, uniquely, to harems but it was not one to exercise without thinking about it.

  “There’s no alternative,” said Owen.

  Georgiades shrugged and ran up the stairs, closely followed by his delighted men. As they spread through the upper part of the house there were startled shouts and screams.

  McPhee remained below.

  “I’ll see no one gets out this way,” he said, a little straightly.

  Owen followed his men upstairs. The first room he came to, the main room of the harem, extended through the whole first floor of the house, from the old latticed windows at the front to the small oriels at the back. It was dark and cool, so dark that at first he could not see anything at all. Then his eyes picked out various women on divans, sitting bolt upright with shock.

  Afterwards, when Owen was questioned at the club, he had to admit that he took in very little. He was looking for the man and as soon as he saw the harem was occupied he knew it was unlikely the man would be there. He had scanned the room to make sure and that had been that.

  Required to furnish more detail, he had been at a loss. No, they were all dressed. They had not been wearing veils, true. No, he hadn’t noticed their faces, it had been dark. What had they been doing? Chatting, as far as he could see. Oh, and one or two were embroidering or sewing or something.

  “Sewing! You are a great disappointment, Owen!”

  No, he had seen nothing erotic, or particularly exotic for that matter, either. His impression was they they were just having a good gossip.

  “They must have been bored to death!” said someone.

  “And you did nothing about it, Owen!” said someone else. “I begin to have doubts about you.” Etcetera.

  What he did not tell them was that he had seen someone he knew.

  He had been about to move on up to the next floor when his eye had picked out a face against the gloom.

  It was Nuri’s daughter, the one he had met at the party.

  Her face had been rigid with anger.

  “You!” she said. “What are you doing here? Don’t you know it’s forbidden?”

  “I’m looking for a man.”

  “Here? You must be mad!”

  “He came in.”

  “Into the harem?”

  “Into the house,” Owen admitted.

  “He has not been in here,” she said. “Nobody has come in here. No man would come in here.”

  “I am sorry, then,” said Owen, turning away.

  “You don’t just go bursting into people’s houses like that!” she said. “Not even if the man we’re looking for may have had something to do with the attack on your father?” asked Owen.

  Georgiades appeared from upstairs and shook his head. He glanced round the room and pointed to a small door which Owen had taken to be the door of a kazna, a large cupboard in which such things as bedclothes were kept.

  “Does that go anywhere?”

  “Why not go in and find out?” said Zeinab.

  Georgiades’s hand was almost on the handle when the door opened of its own accord.

  “What is the meaning of this?” said a harsh, unpleasant voice which struck Owen as oddly familiar.

  Georgiades fell back.

  A man came into the room, short, stocky, bare-chested, dressed only in red silk pantaloons.

  It, was Guzman.

  CHAPTER 9

  “You have offended the Sirdar,” said Garvin. “You have offended the Khedive. You have offended the Agent. And you’ve bloody offended me.”

  He picked up a piece of paper from his desk.

  “I’ve even had,” he said, “a letter of complaint from the Kadi about your desecrating religious property.”

  He put the letter down.

  “It takes some doing to offend all the powers of Egypt in the space of about two hours, but by God, Owen, you’ve done it. The Army, the Khedive, the Kadi- Not to mention me. And for what?” “We’ve got the grenades.”

  “Not all of them. And you missed the man.”

  “How was I to know it was Guzman’s house?” muttered Owen. “You could have asked,” said the pitiless Garvin. “The meanest beggar in the street outside would have told you. Instead, you went charging in. In fact, you spent the whole afternoon charging round, like a sort of lunatic McPhee. If I want a McPhee as Mamur Zapt,” said Garvin, “I’ll get a real one.”

  This was proving even more uncomfortable than Owen had expected.

  “But I don’t,” Garvin continued. “I really don’t. The Mamur Zapt isn’t supposed to work like that. He’s supposed to work behind the scenes, off-stage. Not front stage at the opera. The bloody comic opera!”

  Owen felt this hit home. He sat there smarting but judged it best to keep quiet. Garvin obviously expected some reaction. When none came he was slightly off-put. His glare became half-hearted.

  “It was a mistake, wasn’t it?” he said, still aggressively but with rather less vehemence. “Raiding that Syrian? I thought it would be. The trouble with a raid is that it either works or it doesn’t. If you don’t wrap everything up it kills off all the leads. I told you it would be better to put a man on the shop!”

  If we’d done that, thought Owen, we would not have got the grenades.

  Perhaps Garvin guessed what he was thinking, for the glare returned, defying Owen to make his objection.

  Owen sat there impassively.

  Satisfied, Garvin relaxed.

  “It was my fault,” he said unexpectedly. “I shouldn’t have let you.” Now it was Owen who was off-put. He found himself wanting to demur.

  Garvin was taking no notice, however. He was following his own train of thought.

  “Maps!” he said suddenly. “Maps!”

  “What?” said Owen, startled.

  Garvin turned to him.

  "Maps,” he said. “That’s what you need. You need to build up your own set of maps. The Mamur Zapt is different from the police,” he went on. “The police are interested in catching the criminal and punishing him. You’re not interested at all in seeing he gets punished, and not even interested, really, in him getting caught. What you’re interested in is seeing that certain things don’t happen. You may have to catch people, you may have to keep them in prison, but that’s all incidental. You may be able to do your job without it. In fact, it’s better if you do do your job without it. You’ve got to anticipate, to know in advance what’s going to happen and then to stop it. To do that you need information. Contacts. Maps.”

  He looked at Owen.

  “I shouldn’t have let you raid that Syrian, should I?” he said. “We should have used him to help you build up one of those maps. Syrian connections throughout the city. It would have been worth it.” “Even at the price of a box of grenades?”

  “Even at the price of a box of grenades,” said
Garvin seriously. He considered a moment. “At the price of something going wrong at the Carpet, though-” He broke off. “Well,” he said, “it’s never straightforward in this business.”

  “Did I tell you,” he asked, “that the Old Man wants you to be in charge of security arrangements for the Carpet?”

  “Still?”

  Garvin smiled wintrily. “I would think so,” he said.

  As Owen went out Garvin said: “The Carpet’s always a pig. There were riots all over Cairo when I was doing it.”

  Owen knew the words were meant encouragingly.

  Nikos came in, unusually agitated.

  “There’s a woman to see you,” he said.

  “What sort of woman?” asked Owen. “Do you want me to come out?”

  It was rare for a woman to come alone to the Mamur Zapt’s offices, or, indeed, any other offices for that matter. Usually if a woman had business with an office she sent a man on her behalf or a male relative. In the few cases where she came herself she came accompanied. Occasionally, though, a countrywoman would come to see the Mamur Zapt with a petition. She would wait self-effacingly outside, not venturing to come in, hoping only to catch the Mamur Zapt as he went past. Owen had left strict instructions that if a woman was seen waiting like that then he was to be informed. He would go down to her as soon as he could.

  “No,” said Nikos. He hesitated. Then he made up his mind. “I will bring her along to you.”

  Owen sat back surprised. He had very few visits of that sort.

  Nikos ushered in an elegant woman, dressed in Parisian black. She wore a short, European-style veil but had bound her hair in an expensive scarf so as to reduce the offence to Islamic susceptibilities.

  Owen rose automatically from his desk. Nikos withdrew. The woman came further into the room and lifted her veil so that Owen could see her face. It was Nuri’s daughter, the one he had seen the day before, Zeinab.

  “I wanted to see you,” she said. “I thought I could be of some use.”

  Owen drew up a chair for her.

  He felt unusually awkward.

  For one thing, he had never before spoken to a young Egyptian woman alone. Arab Egyptian, that was. He had spoken to French Egyptians, Italian ones, Greek ones, but never previously to an Arab one. Even the Greek ones were pretty difficult to get to know. The Levantines were nearly as traditional as the Moslems where their women were concerned. Especially their daughters. Their wives were often restive and it was relatively easy to find a married woman with a taste for adventure. Their daughters, whether they had a taste or not, were seldom given the opportunity to indulge it. Young, single girls were kept as in purdah. And this was all the more true, of course, of