The Donkey-Vous

by Michael Pearce

  “These are evil days,” said the snake charmer, shaking his head.

  “They are indeed,” Mahmoud agreed. “And we must stand out against the evil.”

  The snake charmer did not reply.

  “I remember that day the Englishman was taken,” Mahmoud declared. “He too was sitting at the top of the steps. And then he came down them, I think. Do you remember?”

  “I think he came down.”

  “Was one assisting him?”

  “No. But he was talking to one.”

  “They came down the steps together?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then you heard the bells again?”

  “Yes.”

  “And after that, as before, the man was gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Old man,” said Mahmoud gently, “the bells ring many times. The wedding camels go up and down the street, and that is good, for weddings are enjoined in the Book, that Allah might bless with children. Do you not hear the bells many times?”

  “I do.”

  “Then why do you remark on them now?”

  “I heard the bells,” said the old man after a moment.

  “I am sure you heard them.”

  “They came when I was troubled.”

  Mahmoud deliberated. “Is it,” he added, “that usually when you hear them your heart is happy?”

  “That is true. My heart is happy.”

  “But not when the old man with the stick was taken. Then your heart was not happy.”

  “I was confused. I did not know what had happened. I could not understand.”

  “I remember you were confused when I spoke with you.”

  “I was troubled. I knew that bad things were going on. And then the bells! I was confused.”

  Mahmoud looked at Owen.

  “Imagine an old man,” he said softly, in English, “blind. He creates his world and it is orderly. It has to be. And this one day, suddenly, it is not orderly. And he remembers. He remembers especially the discrepant things.”

  “Are the bells discrepant?”

  “They were discrepant with the bad things he knew were happening. And,” said Mahmoud, “they are discrepant to me, too, for if Moulin had come down the steps and was standing right by the wedding procession, the kidnappers would hardly have chosen that moment to kidnap him. Not with all those potential witnesses. Not unless the wedding was part of it.”

  He turned back to the snake charmer.

  “And then it happened again,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “The Englishman came down the steps. And again you knew that something bad was happening. And again you heard the bells.”

  “I was confused,” said the old man, “troubled. And then I heard the bells.”

  ***

  “It would be possible to check,” said Owen. “Possible, not easy.”

  “Perhaps you—I have no standing in this case. Officially.”

  “OK. I’ll check.”

  “If I were you,” said Mahmoud, “I wouldn’t check with the donkey-boys.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “Because,” said Mahmoud, “if anything happened at the foot of the steps, and it did, they must have seen it.”

  “Weddings,” said Owen, “weddings. Do you remember their jokes about weddings? I thought it was because one of them, Daouad, wasn’t it, was getting married?”

  “Cheeky!” said Mahmoud. “It would have been cheeky of them. But typical!”

  “I’ll check,” said Owen.

  “Don’t talk to anyone too closely connected with the front of the terrace!” Mahmoud warned him.

  Owen endured, on this occasion, Mahmoud telling his grandmother how to suck eggs.

  “We don’t want another Farkas,” said Mahmoud, rubbing it in.

  “I’ll look out for the postcard-seller too.”

  They pushed their way back across the street.

  “Even so,” said Owen, “it wouldn’t have been easy.”

  “It would have been easy to take him. The problem was always getting him away.”

  “You reckon they put him in the palanquin?”

  “Yes. Surround him when he gets to the foot of the steps, throw a blanket over his head and bundle him into the palanquin. Then you can take your time.”

  “Might have been seen bundling.”

  “It would have been very quick. The camels would have blocked out anyone seeing from the street side. Mirrors, banners, people everywhere. A small man in the middle of a lot of big men.”

  “Possible,” Owen conceded.

  “Why did they come down the steps? That’s still the question.”

  They parted when they got to the other side of the street.

  “I’ll get on with that checking,” said Owen.

  “Palanquins are not that easily come by,” said Mahmoud. “You could start there.”

  ***

  Owen put Nikos to work on the palanquin, Georgiades to work on the weddings. They operated in complementary ways. Georgiades would shamble through the crowd, chatting to all and sundry, young and old, beggar and businessman, inviting confidence with his soulful eyes and sympathetic manner. Nikos shrank from the messy business of individuals and pursued the abstract and organizational. Whereas Georgiades would have set about tracing the palanquin by going first to the user and then deciding where a person like that was likely to go to get his hands on a palanquin, Nikos immediately went through a list of palanquin suppliers.

  The Georgiades way would probably have worked better in the present situation but they did not have a known person to start from. Owen hoped that if he picked up the “wedding” the other might follow. Cairo was a personal city. Set any group to walk along the street and at least one of its members was sure to be recognized by at least one of those who witnessed it.

  Nikos, confronted with what he regarded as a simple organization problem, was ticking along happily. Once he had taken on a problem, however, his mind refused to let it go and he was still thinking about Zawia and the Senussi.

  Midway through the morning, and through his pursuit of the palanquin, he stuck his head in at Owen’s door.

  “It might not be Senussi,” he said.

  “Might not be Senussi!” Owen was enraged. “Christ, you tell me now, when the whole place has got itself in an uproar about the Senussi.”

  “What I was thinking,” said Nikos equably, “was that it might not be the Senussi themselves but an associated sect. Other sects have religious centers too which they call by the same name.”

  “Like what sect?”

  “The Wahabbi. There has always been a link between the Wahabbi and the Senussi. They are very similar. Both are extremely fundamentalist. And that brings me,” said Nikos, “to another point. I was going through the files of the dragomans yesterday.”

  “Mahmoud and I went through them.”

  “Yes,” said Nikos, unimpressed. “And what I found was that Abdul Hafiz is a Wahabbi.”

  “I think we noted that too,” said Owen.

  “Yes. Well, it fits, doesn’t it? The Wahabbis are very fundamentalist, just the sort of people to be infuriated by anything to do with gambling. And all the more so if the gambling is anything to do with foreigners, since, like the Senussi, they object strongly to foreigners. Suppose Berthelot was right, and the reason why they picked Moulin was that they had learned that the Khedive intended to build a gambling salon and wanted to frighten him off? Abdul Hafiz might have been the way they learned.”

  “Berthelot swears he kept things very quiet.”

  “OK. Suppose they heard about it another way. Quite possible, because there are Wahabbis close to the Khedive. Abdul Hafiz might have been the man they put in to keep an eye on things. Also to take a hand. Remember what the
strawberry-seller said. Either Abdul Hafiz or Osman was on the terrace at the time Moulin disappeared.”

  “The flower-seller thought it was Osman.”

  “I think it was Abdul Hafiz. The strawberry-seller remembered it because it surprised him. That rings true to me. He was surprised because Abdul Hafiz was not the sort of man who normally talked to people like the postcard-seller. That was because he was a Wahabbi. Strict people like that object to profane images, all the more if they’re the sort of images the postcard-seller was carrying around.”

  “I don’t see how the postcard-seller fits in.”

  “Nor do I. A minor figure, I should think. Perhaps he was the link with the men who were actually going to do the kidnapping. Perhaps what Abdul Hafiz was doing was telling him to give them the go-ahead.”

  “If it was Abdul Hafiz. Mahmoud thought it was more likely to be Osman. Osman is more Western, more the sort of man you would expect to be au fait with internal arrangements at Anton’s. And he’s got the religious background, if that’s significant. He was at El Azhar.”

  Nikos was not the only one who could pick things up from files.

  “Yes,” said Nikos. “I saw that too. But that was a long time ago and there’s nothing on the files to suggest either that he’s had anything to do with El Azhar since or that he is strongly religious. From what you say he’s the other way around, if anything. Westernized and secular. That doesn’t fit.”

  “It fits with what Mahmoud thinks. He thinks it was done just for the money.”

  “Osman does very nicely out of the tourist trade. He wouldn’t want to damage that.”

  “It was Berthelot who thought there might be a religious or moral explanation.”

  “I think that’s more likely. If it was just a straight money job they’d want to do it the easy way. Why go to the trouble of picking somebody off the terrace at Shepheard’s? More risky, much more likely to go wrong. You’d do that only if you wanted to be conspicuous, to strike a blow which you wanted everyone to see. That makes the religious explanation more likely.”

  “Or the nationalist one,” said Owen.

  ***

  Nikos went back to the palanquins. Georgiades now appeared. He, too, had been thinking of other things.

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

  “Leave what?”

  “The Tsakatellis business. Do what the girl said. Keep out of it.”

  “I haven’t made up my mind.”

  “You see,” said Georgiades, settling down comfortably—Owen suspected he just wanted to come in out of the heat—“there are two views. Either we can do as the girl said, stay out of it, on the grounds that we’ll only make matters worse. Or else we might feel that matters were coming to a head anyway, that the mother’s money will soon run out, that they’ll have to bring the old lady in, and that she’s likely to put the stopper on the whole business.”

  “Which do you advise?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Thank you,” said Owen. “That’s where I was too.”

  “I don’t like leaving it,” said Georgiades. “I feel worried about that family being on its own. Perhaps it’s because they’re Greek. They ought to have a man about the house. That girl is taking on too much.”

  “What girl is this?”

  “Rosa. She’s a good girl. I’ve been talking to her a lot. In between the dancing. She’s worried about what will happen to them. Suppose the father doesn’t come back? Suppose he’s already dead? She’s tough enough to have asked herself that. A real Greek girl. She says the old grandmother isn’t what she was. And the mother isn’t the sort of person to run things. Besides, she’s got the boys to bring up. They need a man about the house, Rosa says. Things can’t go on the way they are. We’ve got to do something.”

  “So?”

  “So what I’ve done—”

  “Done?”

  “—is to put someone on the house. It would be nice to know about the next payment. There aren’t many servants in that house and they’d almost certainly send one of them. It will be one who’s closer to the mother than to the grandmother, closer to the girl, too. I’m backing the second houseboy.”

  “Why?”

  “The cook and the first houseboy were with the grandmother before the mother came. The second houseboy used to take Rosa to school. Mind you, from what I’ve seen of him I wouldn’t say he’s one who could keep a secret. He’s more the sort who blabs it all out. Still, my money is on him.”

  “Was there anything else you needed to know before making your decisions?” asked Owen tartly.

  “Just telling you,” said Georgiades, retreating.

  ***

  The following day they came together.

  “Yes?” said Owen.

  “The weddings,” said Georgiades.

  “Yes?”

  “There was one.”

  “One or two?”

  “One definite. At roughly the time Colthorpe Hartley disappeared. One possible, when Moulin went.”

  “We’ve got the snake charmer as well.”

  “I thought you wanted independent corroborations.”

  “I do, really.”

  “The trouble is, there are a lot of weddings. Why should one stand out?”

  “But you think you got corroboration in the case of Colthorpe Hartley?”

  “That seems pretty definite. An arabeah-driver was coming in and had to wait. He was bringing someone back to the hotel. There was someone coming out of the hotel and he thought he might be there to pick them up, kill two birds with one stone. He wasn’t. By the time the wedding procession had got out of the way and he’d drawn in, the person had gone off in one of the other arabeahs. That kind of thing tends to stick in an arabeah-driver’s mind.”

  “What about the person who came out of the hotel?”

  “Checked with them. They confirm. When they got to the steps, the camels were still there, blocking the thoroughfare, so they walked along to where the arabeahs were standing and took one of them. The driver vaguely remembers something blocking the steps but by the time he had pulled out it had gone.”

  “The person who came out of the hotel: they saw the camels. Did they see anything else?”

  “A little group of people, that’s all. No struggle, no one being held or supported. No bundle that they can remember.”

  “Were they able to identify any of the people?”

  “They wore masks. Jesters’ masks.”

  “Did you get the person in the incoming arabeah?”

  “Yes. They didn’t see anything. The crowd was pretty thick. They think they might have seen a camel. They confirm, though, that the arabeah had to wait.”

  “What about when Moulin was taken?”

  “That’s harder to get information on. It’s too long ago. Several people thought they might have seen something. But then again, they might not have. There was a strawberry-seller and a flower-seller—”

  “Oh God!” said Owen with feeling.

  “You know them? I didn’t get a great deal out of them—”

  “No,” said Owen, “you wouldn’t.”

  “—but there was someone else who was a bit more forthcoming.”

  “Not a filthy-postcard-seller?”

  “No,” said Georgiades. “What made you think of that?”

  “Someone else who’s got a pitch there. I’m looking for him.”

  “This was a Turkish Delight seller. He had a tray which he had put down just for a moment—just for a moment, effendi!—and one of the camels in the wedding procession stepped in it and spilled all his stuff in the dust. It was so bad he had to go to a pump and wash it. That must have been bad. Anyway, when he got back from the pump the place was in turmoil because Moulin was missing. The Turkish Delight seller was really fed up, I
can tell you. Not only had his Delight been messed up but he had missed most of the excitement. That’s why it stuck in his mind. Or perhaps he’s inventing it all to compensate.”

  “Any corroboration?”

  “Oh, lots. He’s told his story a lot of times now and everyone in the street can repeat it word for word. What is less clear is whether they’re remembering the event or just the story.”

  “You got nothing, then?”

  “By the time you get this far,” said Georgiades, “the facts have gone forever and these are just stories.”

  “Well, OK, you’ve got something. Did you get anything on the palanquins?” he asked Nikos.

  “Thirty-eight palanquins were hired for weddings that day,” said Nikos.

  “Which day? Which one are we talking about?”

  “The day Colthorpe Hartley disappeared. In addition to that, there would of course be private palanquins. I’ve assumed that it was a hired one, not a private one. I also assumed it would be one of the cheaper ones. That cut the number down. I’ll check them all but I thought I would start on the basis of probability.”

  Nikos liked not only to have a system but to explain the system to those less fortunate, which, in his view, generally included Owen and Georgiades.

  “OK, OK,” said Owen. “So what did you find?”

  “Well, I’ve got a list of names.”

  “Some of them would have been hired anonymously, surely?”

  “No. Under false names, perhaps, but never anonymously. Not often under false names, either, since you’re expected to give a friend’s name when you go along. “I’m a friend of Mustapha,” or something like that, and Mustapha will be a mutual acquaintance. A palanquin represents a substantial sum of money, especially if it’s ordered with camels and the owner is careful about hiring. He generally knows who he’s hiring to, even with poorest customers.”

  “So the names might be real.”

  “They’d have to be real.”

  “Couldn’t you hire under someone else’s name?”

  “You’d run the risk of the person being asked, “I’m Mustapha, I’m a friend of Ali.” Well, they might ask Ali, and he’d say, ‘Which Mustapha?’ and that way they’d check. The whole business is very personal.”