The Donkey-Vous

by Michael Pearce

  “Business among the bazaars. What is your business, Captain Owen? It’s obviously something to do with the police, but Daddy says you’re not a proper policeman. Gerald says you’re not a proper soldier either. So what are you, Captain Owen?”

  “Obviously not proper.”

  “He is the Mamur Zapt,” said the dragoman, who had just followed them out of the shop.

  “So I gathered,” said Lucy. “But what exactly, or who exactly, is the Mamur Zapt?”

  Owen hesitated.

  “I see,” she said. “You don’t want to tell me.”

  “It’s not that,” he said. “It’s just that it would take some time.”

  “Which just now you haven’t got.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Then you must tell me some other time,” she said. “This evening, perhaps?”

  Mrs. Colthorpe Hartley turned determinedly away and Lucy was obliged to follow her. She gave Owen a parting wave over the dragoman’s shoulder.

  “Tonight at six,” she called.

  The shop was dark and cool and full of subtle smells from the lacquered boxes, the sandalwood carvings, heavy embroideries and spangled Assiut shawls which lined its walls. As Owen’s eyes became used to the light they picked out more objects: flat, heart-shaped gold and silver boxes set with large turquoises and used to hold verses from the Koran, old Persian arm amulets, Persian boxes with portraits of the famous beauties of Ispahan and Shiraz, old illuminated Korans. The precious stones and jewelry were kept in an inner room, better lighted and down a step. A gentle-faced Copt looked up as Owen entered.

  “Où est le propiétaire?”

  “Elle est en dedans.”

  Elle? A silver-haired woman came out of an inner recess.

  “Madame Tsakatellis?”

  “Oui.”

  “Are you the owner?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was expecting to speak to your husband.”

  “He is dead.”

  “Dead? I am sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  Light began to dawn.

  “Of course! You are the elder Mrs. Tsakatellis. I am so sorry. I think the person I am trying to see is your son.”

  “My son is dead too.”

  “The Monsieur Tsakatellis who owned the shop?”

  “Both have owned the shop.”

  “The second one stopped owning the shop only a short time ago?”

  “That is correct.”

  “I am the Mamur Zapt. I have come about your son.”

  “It is a little late.”

  Owen acknowledged this with a slight inclination of his head.

  “I am sorry. I did not know. Did not the police come?”

  “They came,” said the woman dismissively, “and did nothing.”

  “I am sorry.”

  “Now you have come,” said the woman. “What is it you wish to know?”

  “I want to know what happened.”

  “Why do you want to know? It is not,” said the woman bitterly, “for Tsakatellis’s sake.”

  “It has happened again. And it may be the same people.”

  “So now you take an interest. How many people have to be taken,” the woman asked scornfully, “before the Mamur Zapt shows an interest?”

  “There are, alas, many such cases in Cairo. I cannot follow them all. I had thought Tsakatellis might have been restored to you.”

  “Why should he have been restored?”

  “Have you not paid?”

  “No.” The woman looked him straight in the face. “I do not pay. Even for my son.”

  “Most people pay.”

  “If you pay they will come again. If not to you, to another.”

  “All the same,” said Owen gently, “it is hard not to pay. When it is one’s own.”

  The woman was silent. Then she said: “For the Greeks life is always hard.”

  She called to the Copt.

  “You wished to know what happened. Thutmose will tell you.”

  The Copt came down into the room and smiled politely at Owen.

  “Tell him!” the woman directed. “Tell him what happened the night your master was taken.”

  “I wish to know,” said Owen, “so that I can help others. I am the Mamur Zapt.”

  “There is little to tell,” the Copt said softly. “That night was as other nights. We worked late. It was nearly midnight when we closed the shop. There was a little bookkeeping to do so I stayed behind.”

  “You have a key?”

  “The master left me his key.”

  “He must have trusted you.”

  The Copt bowed his head in acknowledgement.

  “And then?”

  “And then I did not see him again, nor suspected anything till the servant came knocking on my door.”

  Owen looked at Madame Tsakatellis.

  “When Tsakatellis did not come home,” she said, “at first we thought nothing of it. He often works late. When he had not come home by one I began to wonder. When he had still not come home at two I went to his wife and found her crying.”

  “She knew something,” asked Owen, “or she guessed?”

  The woman made a gesture of dismissal.

  “The woman has silly thoughts. She thought Tsakatellis might be with another woman. What if he was? A wife has to get used to these things. In any case, Tsakatellis was not like that. I sent a servant in case he had stumbled and fallen or been attacked and was lying in the road. The servant came back and said he had found nothing. I sent him out again to wake Thutmose.”

  “I knew nothing,” said Thutmose. “I came at once.”

  “We went out again,” said the woman, “and walked by every way he might have taken. When the dawn came we began to suspect.”

  “The letter was delivered to the shop,” said Thutmose. “When I saw it, I guessed.”

  “Who delivered it?”

  “A boy. Who ran off.”

  “You have the letter?” Owen asked Madame Tsakatellis.

  She went back into her recess and came back with a piece of paper.

  Greetings. We have taken your man. If you want to see him again you must pay the sum of 20,000 piastres, which we know you will do as you are a loving woman. If you do not pay, you will not see your man again. Wait for instructions. Tell no one.

  The Wekil Group

  “Who was the letter addressed to?”

  “It was meant for her.”

  “But Thutmose brought it to you?”

  “I took it from her. She was useless. I sent a man to tell the police. A man came from the Parquet.”

  “He found nothing?”

  “He did nothing. After a while he went away and we did not see him again. Nor anyone else. Nor you, until now.”

  “And did the instructions come?”

  “No.” The woman lifted her head and looked Owen levelly in the eyes. “They must have known I had sent for the police.”

  “It may not be so.”

  “It is so. I killed him. That is what she thinks.”

  “They take fright,” said Owen, “for many reasons. That may not have been the reason.”

  “It would have happened anyway,” said the woman, “for I would not have paid.”

  There was little more to be learned, as the man from the Parquet must have found. He would have made inquiries to check if anyone had seen Tsakatellis on his way home, but the streets would have been deserted and even if someone had seen him it was unlikely that they would come forward. Cairenes did not believe in volunteering themselves for contact with the authorities. He would ask Mahmoud to check the Parquet records but he thought it unlikely that whoever had conducted the initial investigation had found anything of interest.


  One last question.

  “Did Tsakatellis have enemies?”

  The woman made a crushing gesture with her hand.

  “The world,” she said.

  Sometimes people used kidnapping as a way of settling old scores.

  “But no one particular? Who had sworn revenge?”

  “Tsakatellis had no enemies of that sort.”

  “A husband, perhaps?”

  “No,” said the woman definitely.

  The only question, then, was what had brought Tsakatellis to the notice of his potential kidnappers. Some display of wealth, perhaps? Unlikely. The Greeks kept themselves to themselves. They worked hard, made money and did not flaunt it.

  “What else did Tsakatellis do?” he asked. “Apart from work?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Church?”

  “Ah, well, but—”

  “Did he serve on committees?”

  “No.”

  “Do things for the community?”

  “What community?”

  “Are not the Greeks a community?”

  “We have friends,” the woman said, “but not many. Tsakatellis’s father had been ill for a long time before he died. The business had to be nursed back. Tsakatellis worked long hours. Had done so since he was a boy. He had no time for other things.”

  “I was wondering how they came to hear of him.”

  “I have asked myself that. Why Tsakatellis? Why not Stavros or Petrides?”

  “And what answer did you come to?”

  “I came to no answer. Except this. There is no reason. You lead your life. Then one day God reaches down and plucks you out. And throws you into the fire!”

  “It is not God who does these things. It is man.”

  “That is a comfort. With man there is always the possibility of revenge.”

  ***

  Nikos was waiting for him when he got back to the office.

  “It’s come,” he said.

  “What’s come?”

  “The second note.”

  “Telling them the arrangements for paying?”

  “Yes.”

  Owen hung up his sun helmet and poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher which stood in the window where the air would cool it.

  “What does it say?”

  “They’re to put the money in a case. Berthelot’s to take it to Anton’s at about midnight and check it in to the cloakroom. He’s then to go on into the salon and stay there for about two hours. While they’re counting, presumably. When he comes out they’ll give him a receipt. On the receipt will be an address. That’s where he’ll find Moulin.”

  “Anton’s. Is he in it?”

  “Probably not. They’re just using his place, but the cloakroom people have got to be in it.”

  “They’ll only be in part of it, though, the moneypassing bit. Still, that’s responsible.”

  “Incidentally,” said Nikos, “they don’t tell Berthelot how to get to Anton’s.”

  “They know he already knows?”

  Nikos nodded.

  “Interesting. I thought that young man didn’t get around.”

  “He gets around and they know it.”

  “That, too, is interesting.”

  “Yes. They’re usually well informed.”

  “It doesn’t sound like a student group.”

  “Nor an ordinary Nationalist group either,” said Nikos. “Certainly not a fundamentalist Nationalist group. These people know too much about tourists.”

  Owen drank another half glass of water. One glass was really his ration. When it was hot you needed to take in a little liquid often, not a lot at once. He put the glass down and went on through into his own office. Nikos followed him in with an armful of papers.

  “Are you going to leave it alone?” he asked.

  “Why not? I want the poor bastard free as much as the French do. It’s only money, after all.”

  “Well, yes,” said Nikos, “but…”

  “I know what you’re going to say. Sometimes it’s not just money. It’s just money only if you’re willing to play ball. If you’re not willing it gets nasty. As in the case of the other poor bastard, that Greek shopkeeper, Tsakatellis, whom they killed.”

  “That’s not what I was going to say,” said Nikos. “What I was going to say was that this is the first time they’ve taken a tourist. If you let them get away with it, it might become a habit. And then a lot of people might get interested.”

  Nikos always took a detached view of cases which were merely individual. On the other hand, he had a keen eye for political essentials.

  ***

  Six o’clock that evening found Owen himself on the terrace at Shepheard’s waiting for Lucy Colthorpe Hartley. Quite how he came to be there he was not certain. He had not had time to say no when Lucy had made the appointment; and would he have said no if he had? On the grounds that he was poor and they were tiresome, he made it a general practice to steer clear of the fishing fleet, as the young ladies were called who arrived in scores for the Cairo season in search, it was alleged, of husbands from among the ranks of wealthy young army officers. Besides, he considered himself more or less bound to Zeinab. On the other hand, meeting Lucy Colthorpe Hartley for a drink was hardly work, although he had said that it was when Zeinab had suggested he pick her up at six after her visit to the hairdresser’s. He decided to salve his conscience by asking Lucy some work questions when she arrived.

  If she arrived at all. It was already five minutes after six, which by Owen’s standards was being late for an appointment. Perhaps she wouldn’t come, in which case he would feel a complete fool. He hoped no one would see him.

  At that moment his friend, the Consul-General’s aide-de-camp, went past with a visiting foreign worthy. He gave Owen a wave behind the worthy’s back. Owen returned the wave half-heartedly.

  Garvin went past talking to an Adviser from one of the Ministries. He interrupted his talking to give Owen a smile of recognition. Some hope, thought Owen bitterly, that no one would see him. Out here on the terrace he was as conspicuous as—

  Well, as Moulin must have been. And how the hell had he disappeared from the terrace without anyone seeing anything?

  Owen looked down the steps. There was the snake charmer as on the day of Moulin’s kidnapping, squatting so near to the steps as to be virtually sitting on them; there were the donkey-boys playing one of their interminable games within two yards of the foot of the steps. If Moulin had gone down the steps they must have seen him.

  And if he hadn’t gone down the steps? The only place he could have gone was back into the hotel. To do so he would have had to pass the Reception clerk and the people on the desk swore that he hadn’t. There were two of them, they were some of the brightest people on the hotel’s staff, the desk was public and busy, they had to be and were alert—hell, one of them was even on Owen’s own payroll!

  All the same, they could have missed him. It was a busy area and they might have been busy. Also, they could only see what passed them. Reception was actually inside the hotel, in the foyer, and the people on the desk couldn’t see out on to the terrace itself. Suppose something had happened between the table where Moulin was sitting and the entrance to the hotel: Reception would not have seen it, the snake charmer couldn’t have seen it, and donkey-boys, well, they might or might not have seen it.

  But, surely, if anything had happened on the terrace someone would have seen it? Someone at a neighboring table? The tables were, after all, only a few feet apart. If there had been a struggle or anything of that sort—well, there couldn’t have been. The Colthorpe Hartleys, who had been at the very next table, would certainly have seen it.

  But suppose the incident, whatever it was, had been smaller in scale, apparently trivial? Suppose it had occur
red at a time when their attention had been distracted, perhaps deliberately? That was a possibility. He would have to ask Lucy Colthorpe Hartley if anything like that had occurred.

  Owen was sitting at a table a little further into the terrace than either the one Moulin habitually occupied or the one the Colthorpe Hartleys had been sitting at that day. The table was right at the front of the terrace, so close to the railing that the street-vendors touched his foot as they poked their wares through the bars. Hippopotamus-hide whips, splendid red tarbooshes, and filmy ladies’ underwear jostled for his attention. A long brown arm with a snake coiled around it was suddenly thrust in his direction; and in an instant a whole pack of postcards of scantily dressed ladies fanned itself open in the air before his astonished eyes.

  “Gracious, Captain Owen!” said Lucy Colthorpe Hartley. “I did not know you were such a connoisseur.”

  “Friends of yours?” he asked, recovering quickly.

  “Intimate,” she replied, sinking into a chair. “Abdul here greets me with a different nosegay every day.”

  A beaming vendor, rather darker than the others, laid a bunch of sweetly smelling flowers on the terrace beside her.

  “They don’t last long,” she said, “but for a while they brighten up the room.”

  She fumbled in her purse for some token piastres.

  “Allow me,” said Owen.

  Lucy put a restraining hand on his arm.

  “Certainly not!” she said. “You are interfering with long-established custom. What you can do, though,” she added, peering into her purse, “is help me count up the necessary milliemes as I seem to have run out of piastres.”

  “That’s enough. A little money goes a long way here.”

  “You’d better have a talk with my father. He doesn’t seem to think so.”

  “I’m sure he won’t mind the flowers.”

  “No. But he did mind the turquoises. I took them in to Andalaft’s as you suggested, Captain Owen, and he is going to find someone to make them up for me.”

  “Do you have other regulars among the vendors, Miss Colthorpe Hartley?”

  “I have a faithful following,” said Lucy, “which I attribute more to misplaced hope than to my personal charms.”

  “They follow you wherever you sit?”