A Cold Touch of Ice

by Michael Pearce

  ‘Make way for the ambulance!’

  Somehow it forced its way through the mass of people and drew up alongside the coffee house. A short, thickset, youngish man, Egyptian, but dressed in a suit not a galabeah, began organizing things.

  ‘It is good that you are here, Kamal,’ Mahmoud said affectionately.

  ‘I had just got here. I was still shaking hands—’

  He seemed, for all his efficiency, bewildered.

  The body was lifted, passed over the heads of the crowd and laid in the back of the ambulance.

  ‘To the death-house,’ instructed Mahmoud. ‘Not to the hospital.’

  The crowd watched sombrely. Many of them were weeping. Owen was surprised; not at the crowd, for if there was anything that drew a crowd in Cairo, it was an accident or a fatality, but at the extent, and sincerity, of the feeling.

  ‘Sidi Morelli, Ibrahim!’ The man beside them shook his head as if in disbelief.

  Everyone here, thought Owen, appeared to know everyone else.

  Ibrahim Buktari seemed suddenly to have aged.

  ‘I shall go home, I think. Excuse me!’

  He shook hands with Owen.

  The efficient young man whom Owen had noticed earlier appeared beside them. He put his arm round Ibrahim Buktari’s shoulders and led him gently away.

  Mahmoud touched Owen’s arm.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘We shall have to end our evening early. Another time, perhaps.’

  ‘Of course!’

  The crowd was breaking up.

  ‘I have work to do,’ said Mahmoud.

  ‘Work!’

  ‘He did not collapse. He was strangled.’

  ***

  In Cairo at that time investigating a crime was not the responsibility of the police. Nor, most definitely—with the exception of political crime—was it the responsibility of the Mamur Zapt. When a crime was suspected, it was reported to the Department of Prosecutions of the Ministry of Justice, the Parquet, as it was known, and the Parquet would appoint one of its lawyers to conduct an investigation. Ordinarily the appointment would come first. Mahmoud being Mahmoud, however, he had seen a responsibility waiting to be taken and had been unable to resist taking it, with the result that by the time—the following afternoon—that he was actually appointed to the case, he had already been pursuing his inquiries for some hours.

  A bearer had brought Owen a message from him about midway through the morning asking him to come to the Morelli house. Owen had been a little surprised, for it was not normally the habit of the strongly Nationalist Parquet to involve the Mamur Zapt in its investigations, and this was particularly true of Mahmoud, who, despite their friendship, did not believe that there should be a Secret Police at all, let alone that it be headed by an Englishman. However, Owen knew that he wouldn’t have sent for him unless it was important and, as there was nothing particularly to detain him in his office, set out almost at once.

  When he arrived at the house Mahmoud was somewhere else in the building and he was received by the dead man’s widow, Signora Morelli; and this was another surprise, for he had not realized, the evening before, that the dead man was Italian.

  ‘Italian?’ said Signora Morelli. ‘Of course we’re Italian! And Egyptian, too. We’ve lived in this country for forty years. In Cairo for thirty. In this very house! Everyone knows us here. Our children grew up here. This is the place they look upon as home. We, too. We have made our lives here, we were happy here—

  ‘And now this! How can it be? How can they do this to us? He was their friend, everybody knew him. Everybody loved him. He used to go there every night, to that café, and play dominoes with Hamdan and Abd al Jawad and Fahmy Salim. Every night! For years and years. They were inseparable. People made a joke of it. They were the four corners of the house, people said. Take one away, and the coffee house would fall down. That’s what they said. And now—now they have taken one away.’

  She poured it all out.

  ‘And it is all because of this stupid war. It must be! There can’t be any other reason. He never did anyone an injury.

  ‘This stupid war! But it’s not our fault. We were against it from the start, we were appalled, like they were. And they said: “No, no, Sidi,”—that is what they called him, Sidi—“you cannot be blamed. The politicians are mad. They always are. They are mad here, too. No, no, Sidi, you are one of us.”

  ‘And he thought he was one of them, too; I thought I was. This is our home, this is our country. Why should it turn on us? We have loved it, we have worked for it. We thought we were Egyptian too.

  ‘And now this. How can it be? How can they turn on him? What harm has he ever done them? What harm has he ever done anybody? Why should they turn on him, their friend, the man who has lived among them for years? How can people be like that?’

  Mahmoud had come in and was standing by the door expressionlessly. He caught Owen’s eye and Owen followed him out.

  ***

  ‘I see,’ said Owen. ‘So that’s why you called me.’

  ‘No,’ said Mahmoud. ‘We don’t know yet that it was a political crime.’

  ‘Then—?’

  He led him off through the house. It was tall and thin, rather like Mahmoud’s own, and, like that one, had an inner courtyard. They went across the courtyard and out through a door on the other side. It led them into a great, cavernous, hall-like building which seemed to serve as a warehouse. It contained a bewildering diversity of goods: divans, tables, rugs, great copper-and-silver trays, a lot of brassware—there was a whole corner of the elegant brass ewers called ibreek which the Arabs use for pouring water over the hands, along with the tisht, the quaint basins and water-strainers that went with them. There were, too, oddly, piles of clothes: finely embroidered shirts which might have belonged to sheiks, lovely old Persian shawls, hand-worked as close as if they were woven, filmy rainbow-coloured veils worn by dancing girls.

  Mahmoud led him across to a huge stack of bales of raw cotton. The stuff of one of the bales had been torn, probably in transit, and through the tear there appeared the gleam of something black. Mahmoud pulled more of the cotton aside, put in his hand and tugged. Even before it came out, Owen knew what it was: the barrel of a gun.

  Chapter Two

  Only four of the bales had guns concealed in them. When they had opened them all, they found a total of fifteen rifles and six revolvers; numbers which Owen found puzzling. Gun-running or gun-using? The numbers were too small for the former and large for the latter—there were assassination attempts all the time, but they seldom involved more than two or three people.

  And then there was another puzzle: where they had been found. In the house of an Italian. Gun-running in Egypt at the moment was from the Sinai peninsula to Tripolitania, from the Turks to their allies fighting against the Italians. What sort of Italian was it who would be arming enemies against his own kind? He could think of plenty of people who might for one reason or another, for profit or for patriotism, be running guns; but the one national group that wouldn’t be, just at the moment, was the Italians.

  But then, neither would they be smuggling guns in order to prepare for some armed raid or assassination attempt. It wasn’t from foreign nationals that such attempts came; it was from nationalistically-minded Egyptians.

  One thing, however, was clear.

  ‘It looks,’ he said to Mahmoud, ‘as if I’ll be joining you in your investigations.’

  ***

  Sidi Morelli had been an auctioneer. For some reason that Owen could not fathom, many of the auctioneers in Cairo and Alexandria were Italian. The counting at auctions was often done in Italian: uno, due…Strangely, that was not always so at the auctions conducted by Sidi Morelli himself, whose business included both an up-market end, based upon hired premises in the Europeanized Ismailiya Quarter, and a down-market end held in a tente
d enclosure close to the Market of the Afternoon, where proceedings were conducted totally in Arabic.

  When Owen went there the following day he found a few people poking round the various lots stacked at one end of the enclosure while the sundry Levantines who normally assisted Sidi Morelli stood about uncertainly. An auction had been scheduled for that morning but then, since instructions had been lacking, had been abandoned.

  ‘No, I don’t know when it will be held,’ one of the Levantines was saying to a rather crumpled-looking Greek. ‘Yes, I know you’re looking for cotton, and, yes, we do have some in our warehouse, but the Parquet are crawling all over it and I don’t know when they’ll be finished.’

  ‘It’s raw cotton, is it?’ said the Greek.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And slightly damaged? That’s what the man told me last week.’

  ‘Yes, it’s slightly damaged. That’s why we’ve got it and why it’s not going to the cotton market.’

  ‘Do you think I could go to your warehouse and take a look at it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t if I were you. Not just at the moment. As I said, the Parquet are all over the place—’

  ‘The Parquet? What are they doing there?’

  ‘I told you. Our boss has just died and—’

  ‘Do you think there’s any chance of a reduction?’

  ‘For the cotton? Look—’

  ‘Yes. You know, to get rid of it. Not have it hanging about on your hands. While they’re working out the estate.’

  ‘Look, he’s only just died!’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘No!’ said the Levantine in a fury. ‘No!’

  The Greek moved away.

  ‘These bloody Greeks!’ the Levantine said to Owen. ‘They’re so bloody sharp, they cut themselves!’

  An Arab dressed in a dirty blue galabeah came in under the awning.

  ‘Louis,’ he said to the Levantine, ‘is there any chance of the angrib?’

  He pointed to a rope bed in one of the lots.

  ‘Sidi said I could have it if you didn’t sell it this time, and I’ve got a customer waiting.’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said the Levantine. ‘If it’s not gone twice there’s no reason to suppose it would go the third time.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  The Arab called a porter, who picked up the bed and walked out with it across his shoulders.

  The Arab hesitated.

  ‘If I sell it, you know—’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Louis.

  ‘I wouldn’t like the Signora—’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘We let the stallholders have the stuff we can’t sell,’ the Levantine said to Owen.

  The Greek returned.

  ‘I’m looking for a baby-chair, too,’ he said.

  ‘Baby-chair!’

  ‘You know, one of those high chairs that kids can sit in.’

  ‘We don’t have any baby-chairs.’

  ‘It’s for when they get big enough to sit up at table.’

  ‘Yes, I know what a baby-chair is. But we don’t have any. Not here. We wouldn’t have any. People around here sit on the floor. Babies too.’

  ‘Oh!’

  The Greek seemed cast down.

  ‘Maybe our other place—’ said the Levantine, relenting.

  ‘Other place?’

  ‘We’ve got a place up in the Ismailiya. That’s where we put the better-quality stuff. It’s brassware, antiques, mostly, but occasionally we get some European furniture. You could try there.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said the Greek gratefully. He hesitated. ‘You don’t think they’d have any cotton?’

  ‘No!’ The Levantine almost shouted. ‘It’s only the better-quality goods. Everything else comes here. Cotton comes here.’

  ‘Yes, I see. And when—?’

  ‘Look,’ began the Levantine again, desperately.

  ***

  Owen went out into the huge square beneath the Citadel in which the Market of the Afternoon was held. All round the edges of the square camels were lying and among the camels were great cakes compounded equally of dates and dirt. The Market itself was up on a raised platform. You climbed the steps and found yourself in a kind of giant village market, where the stalls were often mere pitches, with the owner sitting on the ground and all his goods spread round him in the dust. Potential customers would crouch down and finger the goods; and the dust came in handy for writing out the bills.

  The goods in the Market of the Afternoon were different from those in the bazaars. They were for the most part copper or brass and almost entirely second-hand, the copper pots often worn with the use of generations. Everything here was for use, although the use was sometimes a little strange: the manacles for the punishment of harem women, for instance. Yet among the worn and battered goods you could occasionally find things of value, brass bowls inscribed with Persian hunting scenes, finely wrought candlesticks for standing on the ground, intricately chased scriveners’ pots, one of which had been acquired here once by none other than the Mamur Zapt.

  In the centre of the Market was a restaurant area, the restaurants consisting often merely of large trays on the ground, with meat and pickles in the middle. Customers sat round on the ground and dipped their hands in.

  It was at one of these that Owen found the Arab who had collected the angrib from the auction room.

  ‘Sold it yet, then?’

  The Arab pointed out beyond the stalls to where a man was loading a donkey. The donkey already had panniers hanging down on either side but now the man put the bed across its back; and then he climbed up on top himself.

  ‘I’ll let the Signora have the five percent,’ the Arab said to Owen.

  ‘The Signora? You reckon she’ll be taking it on?’ asked the man crouched next to him.

  ‘Her or someone else.’

  ‘They won’t be like Sidi Morelli,’ said his neighbour definitely.

  ‘No. He was one of us.’

  ***

  It was a phrase that recurred whenever people spoke of Sidi Morelli. Owen heard it again that evening when he returned with Mahmoud to the coffee house at the end of Mahmoud’s street, the one to which Sidi Morelli had been carried when he died, and where he had been in the habit of going every evening, punctually at six, to play dominoes with his friends.

  They were sitting there now at their usual table, the table that Owen had seen them at that evening. The dominoes had been spread out on the table but they weren’t really playing.

  Mahmoud made straight towards them. They seemed to know him and stood up to shake hands. Mahmoud introduced Owen, first as a friend, and then, scrupulously, feeling that they should know, as the Mamur Zapt. They looked at him curiously but acceptingly. To be someone’s friend was sufficient to invoke the traditional Arab code of hospitality.

  Sidi Morelli had been a friend, a long-standing one. The four of them had first started meeting, they explained, ten years before.

  ‘Hamdan and I were sitting here—’

  ‘With the dominoes.’

  ‘—when he came across and asked if he could join us.’

  ‘The dominoes were all in use, you see.’

  ‘Well, of course we said yes.’

  ‘But that was only three. However, just at that moment Fahmy came in—’

  ‘Whom he seemed to know—’

  ‘He used to come to me for ice,’ Fahmy explained.

  ‘And so then there were four of us and there have been four ever since.’

  There was a little, awkward silence.

  The patron came across, carrying two water-pipes. Behind him his small son struggled with a third. They put the bowls down on the floor beside the three men. The patron looked enquiringly at Mahmoud and Owen. They shook their
heads.

  ‘He never smoked either,’ said Abd al Jawad sombrely.

  The patron touched him commiseratingly on the shoulder, then went off for the coffee pot.

  ‘How can it be?’ said Fahmy suddenly, plainly still distressed. ‘Doesn’t God look down?’

  ‘He looks down,’ Hamdan chided him, ‘but he does not always interfere.’

  ‘He sees further than we do,’ said the third man.

  Hamdan and Abd al Jawad were, it transpired, shopkeepers. Fahmy kept an ice house just round the corner. They all lived and worked within three hundred yards of the coffee shop.

  ‘Have you been to the Signora?’ Hamdan asked Abd al Jawad.

  ‘Yes. I said that we would wish to do what we could. Of course, it will be in the Italian church.’

  Fahmy picked up one of the dominoes. He put it down again, however, aimlessly.

  ‘It’s not the same,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You know no reason?’ asked Mahmoud.

  They shook their heads.

  ‘He had no enemies,’ said Abd al Jawad.

  ‘People always say that, but—’

  ‘He had no enemies,’ Abd al Jawad insisted stubbornly.

  Mahmoud let it rest.

  ‘He was no different that night?’

  ‘No different.’

  ‘Tell me how it was.’

  ‘Well, he came, and sat down as usual, and we played—’

  ‘What did you talk of?’

  ‘Fahmy’s nephew, and would he marry.’

  ‘It happens, you know, Mahmoud,’ said Abd al Jawad, with an attempt at humour.

  ‘He has just returned to Cairo,’ Fahmy explained.

  ‘Where had he been?’

  ‘In the Sudan. He is a soldier.’

  ‘Fahmy was worried that he might marry someone unsuitable while he was there.’

  ‘We told him that he was much more likely to marry someone unsuitable back here in Cairo.’

  ‘And that the only thing to do was to get him properly married beforehand.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hamdan. ‘In case he was sent away.’