The Point in the Market

by Michael Pearce

  The Point in the Market

  A Mamur Zapt Mystery

  Michael Pearce

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2005, 2017

  First E-book Edition 2017

  ISBN: 9781464208881 ebook

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.

  Poisoned Pen Press

  6962 E. First Ave., Ste. 103

  Scottsdale, AZ 85251

  www.poisonedpenpress.com

  info@poisonedpenpress.com

  Contents

  The Point in the Market

  Copyright

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  More from this Author

  Contact Us

  Chapter One

  ‘Effendi, Effendi, there is excitement!’ panted the small boy. ‘Over there in the Camel Market!’

  The small boys had already done pretty well out of Owen that morning. They had found a body tucked beneath the carpeting of a fiki’s booth and had pointed it out to him with relish. He had told them to find a policeman, at which they had been a little surprised, for they had been under the impression that he was a policeman. However, they had readily proceeded to the obvious explanation that the Mamur Zapt was too grand a chap to be bothered with ordinary bodies and had run off to find one of the constables patrolling the Market.

  Then they had found a dead baby lying among the fodder for the camels and had tried that out on him but with a similar lack of success.

  And now there was this ‘excitement,’ whatever it was. There did indeed seem to be something going on over on the other side of the Market and he went across.

  There was a ring of men, growing larger with every minute, and in the middle of the ring was a donkey and two men. One of the men was a Levantine, dressed in a dark suit and wearing a tarboosh, the little, pot-like red hat which was the Egyptian badge of office; the other an ordinary fellah in the usual blue gown. They seemed to be arguing.

  Owen was annoyed, because if this was all it was then one of the Market constables ought to have been able to sort it out, and there were three of them in the crowd, just standing by and watching it. But then he saw that there were some soldiers nearby, not really part of the crowd but formed in a separate detachment, and wondered what the hell was going on.

  ‘But I didn’t bring him in to sell him!’ cried the villager, almost weeping. ‘I was going to take him to the barber, that’s all!’

  ‘That’s right,’ said the donkey-barber, standing in the front row of the crowd and recognisable by the clippers in his hand and the pile of clippings at his feet. ‘He’d just got to me.’

  ‘He’s here, isn’t he?’ said the Levantine. ‘And we need him.’

  ‘But I need him too!’ cried the villager. ‘Brothers,’ he appealed to the crowd, ‘I need a donkey to work my land!’

  ‘You don’t need a donkey,’ said one of the constables helpfully. ‘You need a buffalo.’

  ‘Yes, but I haven’t got a buffalo. I can’t afford one. So I use a donkey.’

  ‘Sell the donkey and buy a buffalo,’ said the Levantine, taking out a bundle of notes and waving them in front of the villager’s nose. ‘With this!’

  The villager’s eyes followed the notes hypnotically.

  ‘How much is that?’ he whispered.

  ‘Fifty piastres. Fifty whole piastres! Buy a buffalo!’

  The villager recoiled.

  ‘It wouldn’t buy a buffalo!’

  ‘It wouldn’t buy a donkey, either,’ said one of the villagers behind him. ‘Don’t have anything to do with it, Ibrahim.’

  ‘I won’t!’

  ‘I don’t have to buy,’ said the Levantine, nettled. ‘I can just take.’

  ‘I’d like to see you!’

  ‘Just try it!’ said one of the villagers.

  The constables shifted uneasily. The soldiers, who were Egyptians, ostentatiously fingered their rifles.

  There were some Australian soldiers among the crowd, newly disembarked and here in the Market sightseeing.

  ‘Hey!’ said one of them. ‘You can’t do that! Take the man’s donkey. Just like that!’

  ‘I have powers to commandeer,’ said the Levantine smoothly. ‘We need both. Camels for the Camel Corps, donkeys for the Transport Corps. We pay compensation. It’s a fair price.”

  The Australians looked at each other.

  ‘If it’s for the Army…’

  ‘And a fair price….’

  ‘It’s not a fair price!’ cried the villager. ‘He was paying seventy five in the village!’

  ‘And that’s not a fair price, either,’ said one of the villagers. ‘A hundred would be about right.’

  The Levantine shrugged.

  ‘Seventy five is all I am empowered to offer,’ he said, ‘and that only for a really good animal. It’s a fair price and the one I agreed with your omda,’ he said to the villager.

  ‘Seventy five plus the bribe you paid to the omda,’ said one of the villagers bitterly.

  The Levantine appeared not to hear him.

  ‘All right,’ he said to the obstinate donkey-owner. ‘I’ll make that fifty into seventy five. That’s fair, isn’t it?’ he appealed to the crowd.

  ‘No,’ said the donkey-owner, ‘I want to keep my donkey.’

  ‘That,’ warned the Levantine, ‘or nothing.’

  ‘I need my donkey.’

  ‘Nothing, then.’

  The Levantine made a sign with his hand and the Egyptian soldiers moved forward.

  The crowd behind the villager surged. Some of the men were holding sticks, others, stones.

  ‘Hey—’ began one of the Australians.

  The soldiers stopped. Villagers were one thing, Australians another.

  Owen pushed his way through the crowd.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘that will do!’

  The constables twitched to attention and stepped forward.

  ‘You have no power to requisition animals on a private basis,’ Owen said to the Levantine. ‘It must be done through the village headman.’

  ‘I—’ began the Levantine.

  ‘Take your donkey and go,’ Owen said to the villager. ‘Quickly!’

  The man needed no urging. He seized the donkey, perched himself feet up on its back, and headed off.

  The Levantine shrugged and turned away. Owen could see now that he had assembled quite a substantial herd over beyond the makeshift tents.

  The Camel Market itself was almost empty, denuded of virtually all its stock. Only a couple of sucking mothers were left with their infants. One of them was no more than a day old, still a fluffy little white ball. Owen couldn’t see h
ow something so endearing could grow up into the ugly, morose, bloody-minded beast that it did. But, of course, he reflected, some might say that was true of human beings too.

  The crowd was dispersing now, going back to the rows of figures squatting on the bare earth behind their heaps of corn, cucumbers, or onions, or crouched beneath ragged pieces of cloth stretched between sticks, selling kohl bottles, lurid cottons, copper pots, or the celluloid beads, scarlet to suggest the coral of Bedawin jewellery, favoured of the herdsmen.

  Owen felt a touch on his arm. It was one of the Australians.

  ‘We’re looking for the Wagh el Birket,’ he said.

  I’ll bet, thought Owen. The Wagh was one of the most notorious districts of Cairo.

  ‘You’re quite a bit out of your way,’ he said. ‘If I were you, I’d take an arabeah. Over there!’

  There was a row of them, little, open-fronted, single-horse drawn carriages, the taxi of Cairo, fly-blown, worn, and smelling strongly of horse urine. The six Australians somehow succeeded in piling into two of them.

  ‘Ten piastres,’ Owen called after them. ‘Don’t pay more!’

  They would. The Australians had only started arriving in Egypt a month ago but they were already wildly popular because of their open-handedness. Not just, to be fair, their open-handedness. There was a general openness about them. They talked in natural, easy terms to the Egyptians, without any of the stiffness or distancing of the British. They were a breath of fresh air, Owen reflected.

  He looked around him. The Market was quiet now. He walked across it for one last time and then headed for his office, leaving behind him the Levantine with his herds, the figures crouched behind their piles of vegetables or huddled beneath their makeshift tents, the small boys playing now in the empty spaces of the Camel Market, throwing camel pellets at each other, the baby in the berseem, and the body beneath the carpeting of the fiki’s booth.

  ***

  The war was in its sixth month now and the slouch hats of the Australians were not the only thing that was different on the streets of Cairo. Prices had risen sharply, especially the prices of basic things, like paraffin, which was widely used in the poorer quarters for cooking. Ordinary people were complaining bitterly; and yet Cairo seemed well to do as never before. The shops in the Ismailiya, the fashionable European quarter, were doing a roaring trade. The great hotels were full. Normally—that is, as Owen was learning to say, before the war—at this time of year, when the Cairo Season had just about ended, they would be half empty.

  But although they were full, he reflected as he sat in the Long Bar at Shepheard’s that evening with Curtis, they were full with a different sort of people. Instead of the bright young things in bright new dresses, fresh out from England, and their circles of swains, drawn chiefly from the officers messes of the various British garrisons, tailored a little too perfectly to be ordinary human beings, the place was full of businessmen. It was hard to find an unoccupied corner. Which was why he had got landed with Curtis.

  He had discovered a sofa and arm-chair behind some potted palms and had settled down to wait for Zeinab. Zeinab was, as usual, late, and when Curtis had appeared through the palms and asked anxiously if he might…? Owen had had no alternative but to agree with grace. Curtis, pink-faced and pink-ginned, had slid into the chair opposite and then, unfortunately, proceeded to engage him in conversation.

  This was, perhaps, fair enough, except that Curtis had insisted on talking about work, first his own—he had come out from England, he told Owen, to help manage Supplies (whatever they might be)—and then, at too great length, about Owen’s, about which he knew very little but had melodramatic notions.

  ‘I suppose you’re here on duty?’ he said.

  ‘Well, um—’

  ‘Got to keep an eye of them. They’re everywhere.’

  ‘Ye-es?’

  ‘Spies.’ He looked around meaningfully.

  Owen’s heart sank. That was another of the changes that had overtaken the city. Whereas before the war people had talked about sex and sport, now they talked about spies.

  He looked across the vestibule at the dark-suited businessmen.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think they’re mostly just people on the make.’

  ‘Don’t I know it!’ said Curtis. ‘Remember, I have to deal with them!’ He leaned forward towards Owen and dropped his voice:

  ‘But is that true of all of them? That Greek, for instance—he looks a shady customer.’

  ‘They’re all shady,’ said Owen.

  ‘Don’t I know it! You can’t do a thing here without a bit of—’ He nodded his head significantly and rubbed the tip of his finger against his thumb. ‘Even the Government offices!’

  Owen felt moved to defend the offices.

  ‘You’re got to see it as they do,’ he said. ‘It’s not so much a bribe as a present. It changes the nature of the relationship. Moves it from being purely commercial to something more friendly. Less cold, less hard, more personal. They find us very abstract and distant.’

  He suddenly thought of the Levantine and the villager’s donkey. That hadn’t been very abstract or friendly.

  Curtis was nodding his head.

  ‘I know,’ he said, touching finger to thumb once more. ‘It smoothes the way.’

  Owen sighed inwardly.

  ‘But it’s not that so much,’ said Curtis, looking round again. ‘It’s the talk! No one here’s got any idea of keeping his mouth shut about things. You don’t need to bribe them—they’ll spill it out anyway! Cairo leaks like a sieve.’

  That was certainly true. It always had been. If you wanted to find out what the Cabinet had discussed that morning, or what the Consul-General had said to the Khedive—sorry, High Commissioner to Sultan—that had changed, too, or, indeed, what you had said to your wife in private last night, then the place to go was the Bazaar area.

  ‘Take that man, for instance,’ said Curtis, looking at Abdul, the bartender. ‘I’ll bet he could tell you a thing or two.’

  Owen hoped he could. That was what he paid him for. Although, of course, others might be paying him as well.

  ‘And what he can hear, others can,’ said Curtis. ‘I’ll bet there’s more than a few of them in here. I must say, I don’t envy you your job. They’re everywhere!’

  Owen glanced at his watch. Where the hell was Zeinab?

  ‘The trouble is,’ confided Curtis, ‘that there are so many foreigners here. It’s not like at home. You can’t trust people.’ He looked balefully at the inoffensive Greek, who seemed deep in a conversation about cotton futures. ‘Even the Egyptians. Especially the Egyptians. They’re all pro-Turk. And what’s bad is that so many of them are in influential places.’

  Zeinab at last appeared, tall, slender, and veiled, as was usual with Egyptian women.

  ‘My wife,’ said Owen.

  ***

  They were going on to a reception at the British Agency given to mark the arrival of the new High Commissioner, and Owen was feeling nervous. It would be the first public engagement he had taken Zeinab to since she had become his wife, and he wasn’t sure how that, or Zeinab, would be received. There was a social divide in Egypt between the British and the Egyptians. Members of the British Administration didn’t marry Egyptians. Except that Owen had.

  They were ushered up the steps by Cavasses dressed in splendid scarlet and gold and then into the ballroom. The new Commissioner, MacMahon, was standing just inside the door to receive them.

  The Senior Cavass announced the guests as they appeared.

  ‘The Mamur Zapt and—’ he hesitated: this was a new one—‘Mrs Mamur Zapt,’ he recovered confidently.

  The Oriental Secretary was standing by MacMahon’s side, muttering explanations.

  ‘Captain Owen. Head of the Sultan’s Secret Police. And Mrs Owen. Mrs Owen is the daught
er of Nuri Pasha, a former Minister of Justice and a very old friend of ours.’

  MacMahon bent forward and greeted Zeinab warmly. They moved on.

  Owen knew exactly what Paul Trevelyan had done, and was grateful. By establishing the terms on which the High Commissioner had received Zeinab, he had made it difficult for other people to do otherwise.

  He helped Zeinab to a glass from the tray proffered by a red-fezzed, red-sashed suffragi, took one for himself, and then looked around. Over by the French windows a very tall man with a booming Scottish voice was talking to an elderly Egyptian woman. There weren’t many Egyptian women at the reception but Labiba Latifa was exceptional in more ways than one. She was the widow of a former Dean of the Medical School and well known in Cairo society for her charitable work, especially in the field of public health. The man was Cairns-Grant, the senior pathologist at the Hospital and himself internationally known. Owen took Zeinab across to them.

  ‘Zeinab!’ said Latifa, taking her hands in her own, ‘I was so delighted when I heard!’

  ‘So ye’ve married?’ said Cairns-Grant. ‘Well, it’s a good thing for both of you. You’ll live longer, did ye know that?’

  This was the easy bit. The medical community stood to some extent on its own, outside the normal British community, and relations with Egyptians were not subject to the same constraints.

  While they were talking, he considered his next step.

  Cunningham, the Financial Adviser, had come in with his wife just before Owen and was standing apart from the others. Cunningham was the senior British official after the High Commissioner. In a society as hierarchical as the British expatriate community, this mattered. It meant that, in the absence of MacMahon’s wife, his wife set the tone for the British society.

  He took Zeinab across and introduced her.

  He saw Mrs Cunningham studying her. The women, he thought, would be harder than the men. He could see she couldn’t quite make Zeinab out. The veil concealed her features. She wasn’t the only woman in the room wearing a veil with European dress—there were a number of Diplomatic wives—and she spoke perfect French and English.

  ‘I’m Margaret,’ Mrs Cunningham said suddenly.