A Cold Touch of Ice

by Michael Pearce

  ‘Fahmy’s worried that he might be posted.’

  ‘Well,’ said Fahmy defensively, ‘it could happen, couldn’t it? Especially these days.’

  ‘Egypt’s not going to get involved in the war. The British will see to that.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want him to go to the war,’ said Fahmy.

  ‘Then you can look on the British as a blessing,’ said Hamdan wryly, but with a quick look at Owen.

  Owen laughed.

  ‘That is not how we are usually seen,’ he acknowledged.

  The slight note of tension that had crept in seemed to ease.

  Mahmoud brought it back again.

  ‘Sidi Morelli was Italian,’ he observed, as if casually.

  ‘He was one of us,’ said Abd al Jawad quickly, almost reprovingly.

  ***

  Afterwards, Mahmoud took him to the spot where Sidi Morelli had been found lying. It was no more than twenty yards from the coffee house, but around the corner and along the Nahhasin. The Nahhasin was quiet at that point and almost deserted. There was a group of shops further along but here there were only houses, and they were the old, traditional ones which presented a blank wall at ground level containing only a door. The windows were higher up, at the level of the first storey, and tonight, at any rate, they were without lights. The street was dark and Owen could quite see how someone might have stumbled over Sidi Morelli.

  He suddenly realized that that was the point of them being here. Mahmoud had wanted to see it as it had been the evening before, at the time when Sidi Morelli had been killed. It wasn’t exactly a reconstruction, although Mahmoud, trained, like the Parquet as a whole, in French methods of investigation, favoured reconstructions. It did, though, enable him to see it as it had been, and to check on one or two things: the witness’ story, for example, of how he had come to find the body.

  Times, too. Owen guessed that they had retraced Sidi Morelli’s movements pretty exactly. Their arrival at the table might had been arranged to coincide with the moment when Sidi Morelli had reached it the previous night. Similarly, their departure might well have coincided with his. He had got up and left the table, shaking hands, as was the Arabic custom, with everyone else in the coffee house and then set off round the corner and along the Nahhasin towards his house.

  And exactly here, where a little, dark alleyway ran off between the houses, someone must have been waiting for him. They had probably been standing in the darkness of the alleyway and then, as he had passed, reached out and pulled him into the shadow and strangled him; so quickly and efficiently that he had not had time to utter a cry or make a sound loud enough to catch the attention of those seated in the coffee house not twenty yards away. And then they had fled, almost certainly up the alleyway.

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Mahmoud. ‘Except that there were some porters further along the alleyway hauling up a bed and they claim that no one passed them.’

  He led Owen down the alley. At its far end the blank walls of the big houses of the Nahhasin gave way to tenements. From some of the upper storeys came the weak light of oil lamps. They could see the window through which the bed had been hauled. Its frame was still out and beneath it, on the ground, there were still some bulky objects awaiting their turn to be lifted.

  ‘There would have been a lamp up there,’ said Mahmoud, ‘and possibly one on the ground, where they were working.’

  ‘Pretty dark,’ said Owen, looking round, ‘even so.’

  ‘But narrow,’ said Mahmoud. ‘They are sure they would have seen him. Still, I think it more likely that he escaped along here than that he went down the Nahhasin. I asked the men who found the body and they were positive that they had met no one coming away from where Morelli had been killed. The alleyway seems somehow much more likely.’

  They retraced their steps.

  ‘It all happened in about five minutes,’ said Mahmoud. ‘From the time he left the coffee house to the time they found him.’

  ‘How was he killed?’

  ‘Strangled.’

  ‘Not garotted?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Quick, then.’

  ‘No money was taken,’ said Mahmoud.

  ‘No money? But then—?’

  ‘He was killed for some other reason.’

  Owen didn’t like the sound of that. He hoped that Mahmoud would soon find a reason, some private, personal motive, rooted in family, perhaps, or in business. The alternative opened up too many disquieting possibilities. ‘One of us’ Morelli may have been; but had he been ‘one of us’ enough, at a time when war was placing such a new, heavy stress on old identities and relationships?

  ***

  There was a reception at the Abdin Palace that evening and Owen, as one of the Khedive’s senior servants, was bidden to be there. Although there were plenty of other Englishmen in the Khedive’s service—the whole British Administration, nominally, for a start—he was, in fact, one of very few Englishmen present, an indication of the chill that had come over the relationship between the Khedive and the new British Consul-General. The absence was all the more marked because the reception was for someone who was to all intents and purposes an honorary Englishman.

  Slatin Pasha had entered the Khedivial service some thirty years before and had been appointed governor of a province in the Sudan. During the Sudan uprising he had been taken prisoner and had been a slave of the Khalifa for eleven years. His famous escape, made with the help of the British Intelligence, had led to him becoming the darling of the British public. He had paid many visits to Windsor and been showered with honours by the Queen, including a knighthood. He was just the man you would have expected the Consulate to turn out for; and yet no one was there.

  Slatin was very keen on honours and the reception was in recognition of him collecting yet another one a short time before, this time from Austria. Slatin was himself an Austrian and had naturally been pleased. All the same, he was not entirely happy about this evening.

  ‘It won’t do, Owen, it won’t do,’ he said, looking around him. ‘It’s bad if His Lordship wasn’t invited to something like this.’

  ‘Perhaps he was invited and just didn’t come.’

  ‘Then that’s bad, too. Countries should come together in Egypt even if they have their differences elsewhere.’

  ‘Not always easy,’ said Owen.

  Slatin looked at him in his sharp, bird-like way.

  ‘Especially it is not easy for people like you and me,’ he said.

  Owen suddenly wondered about Slatin. He was the most Anglophile of Anglophiles; and yet he was also Austrian. If the two sides started pulling apart, how would he react? Which would he choose?

  ‘Dilemmas, dear boy, dilemmas!’ said Slatin, and scurried away.

  And how far would their common service to the Khedive, to Egypt, that most cosmopolitan of countries, containing so many different nationalities, be able to hold the strain?

  ***

  Across the room he saw Ismet Bey talking to—this was surprising, you hardly ever saw a woman on an occasion like this—a tall, blonde woman, about thirty. No veil, either; she must be foreign.

  Later in the evening, one of the German attachés caught him by the arm.

  ‘Come over, Owen. There’s someone I’d like you to meet.’

  It was the girl.

  ‘Fräulein von Ramsberg; the Mamur Zapt.’

  ‘Ah, the Mamur Zapt!’ said the girl, as if she knew about Mamur Zapts.

  ‘Fräulein von Ramsberg has just completed a crossing of the Sinai desert. On camel.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ said Owen.

  ‘But you yourself, who have lived so long in this part of the world, have no doubt made similar journeys?’ she suggested.

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I do occasionally go out o
f Cairo. Reluctantly,’ said Owen.

  The girl laughed.

  ‘You are a city man. Well, there are different sorts of Arabists. I am a desert one.’

  ‘I do admire people like yourself who make these long, arduous journeys.’

  This wasn’t entirely true. In fact, it wasn’t true at all. He thought they were crazy. He had done some camel-riding, which he had found most uncomfortable, and quite a lot of horse-riding, especially in India; but on the whole he preferred sitting in cafés.

  ‘Fräulein von Ramsberg has a request to make,’ said the attaché.

  ‘I wish to make a journey, and I wondered if you would give me a firman.’

  A firman was a kind of permit.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I want to go west out of Cairo and then drop down to the top of the Old Salt Road.’

  ‘That’s quite a journey!’

  She laughed.

  ‘That’s the kind of journey that I like.’

  Her English was very good.

  ‘Well, rather you than me.’

  ‘You wouldn’t like to come with me?’

  ‘No, thanks!’

  ‘A pity. Just the firman, then.’

  ‘Actually, you don’t need a permit to go there.’

  ‘Nevertheless, a letter of some kind from you would, I am sure, be of great help.’

  ‘If you wish. But I don’t think it will help much down there.’

  ‘Does not the word of the Mamur Zapt strike terror into men’s hearts in even the most remote parts of Egypt?’

  ‘I very much doubt it. When are you setting out?’

  ‘At the end of the week.’

  ‘Well, I’ll get it to you before then. And perhaps in return you would like to accompany me on one of my sorts of expedition?’

  ‘I very much would,’ said Miss von Ramsberg.

  ***

  ‘You great dope!’ said his friend, Paul.

  ‘Dope? Why?’

  ‘Agreeing to give her a letter of recommendation.’

  ‘It’s just a letter!’

  ‘It will have your name on it, won’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s not even a firman!’

  ‘That’s something we ought to think about introducing,’ said Paul. ‘A firman for people like her.’

  ‘People like her?’

  ‘What do you think she wants to travel in Egypt for?’

  ‘She likes travelling. She’s just crossed the Sinai peninsula—’

  ‘Yes, I know. Another of these great camel-riders. Pain in the ass, all of them. They upset the local tribes, get killed or kidnapped, and then you’ve got to spend a lot of time—and money!—looking for them.’

  ‘She seems to have managed it all right without any of those things happening.’

  ‘Oh, sure! Competent, too. Well, if she’s so competent, how come she lost her way?’

  ‘Lost her way? I didn’t know that.’

  ‘The Sinai is one of those areas which, being a border region, does require a firman. When she applied for hers she had to specify a route. Which she then did not follow.’

  ‘Well, hell, all kinds of things—’

  ‘She didn’t make any attempt to follow it. She didn’t go anywhere near it. Instead she followed the route that Saladin took against the Crusaders.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Which is likely to be the route if anyone else was invading Egypt.’

  ‘Invading!’

  ‘It would take the Turks a matter of days to get to the border.’

  ‘She’s not a Turk, she’s—’

  ‘A German. Yes, I know. And the Germans are building the railways which are going to help them get to the border.’

  ‘Paul, you don’t mean—?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  The Mamur Zapt’s remit was confined to Egypt and he did not follow very closely what was happening beyond its borders. He thought, however, that Paul was making too much of this. It was unlike him to be so alarmist; but perhaps now that he was working so closely with Kitchener, as his Oriental Secretary, some of Kitchener’s own alarmism with respect to anything beyond his borders was rubbing off on him.

  ‘We can’t be sure, of course,’ Paul said now, softening slightly, ‘but just in case she is, we oughtn’t to go out of our way to encourage her!’

  ‘It’s just a letter!’

  ‘Can you write it in such a way as to lead to information coming back as to where exactly she is?’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘She’s in Cairo for the best part of a week. It would be interesting to know what she’s up to while she’s here.’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact—’

  ***

  He had given her a choice of two places: the Semiramis, which had a dining room with a romantic view over the river, and the Mirabelle, which was a French restaurant in the noisy Arab Mouski. She chose the Semiramis; Owen would have chosen the Mirabelle.

  ‘But then I am romantic,’ she protested.

  ‘Is that what brought you out to these parts?’

  ‘Yes. But not in the way that you think. There are two sides to being a romantic, the side that gets you bowled over by the moon on the water, and the rebellious side. It was that other side that led to me coming out here.’

  ‘Who or what were you rebelling against?’

  ‘My family. The life they were charting for me—the life of a rich woman in Germany. My family are’—she grimaced—‘respectable. We have an estate. The men for generations have been soldiers, the women, soldiers’ wives. Which means you spend your whole life in boring garrison towns. And then you retire to your boring estate. And it is all so predictable.

  ‘My brothers knew from the start that they would be soldiers. For a long time I thought I would be a soldier, too, and joined them in their horse-riding. But then they went off and it suddenly became apparent that all there was for me was marriage to some absolutely dreadful man.

  ‘I bought time. I said I wanted to travel. Some relations took me out with them to the Bosphorus. And then I looked around.’

  ‘And took up camel-riding instead of horse-riding?’

  She laughed.

  ‘It looks like that,’ she admitted. ‘And maybe there’s some truth in it. I sometimes think I took it up only in order to outdo my brothers. They are both great riders, horse-riders. I wanted to be not only a better rider, I wanted to be a different one.’

  ‘At any rate, to ride to a different tune.’

  ‘That is so. That is exactly so.’

  ‘It is hard, though, especially out here,’ he said, thinking of Zeinab, ‘to be a woman and to be independent.’

  ‘Less hard than you think, if you’re a foreigner. There are no people from home to order me around and the locals don’t know what to make of me.’

  ‘But on your travels—’

  She shrugged.

  ‘I carry a gun. In fact, though, the Bedu have never bothered me. It’s only in the towns that there has ever been any trouble. And then it’s usually been only from interfering officials. In the desert, at least you can get away from all that. There’s space, there’s freedom. You can choose your own route.’

  ‘As you evidently did in the Sinai.’

  She gave him a sharp look.

  ‘You do do your homework,’ she said. ‘You have been making inquiries?’

  ‘No. I just heard.’

  ‘Well, it is not important. Is it important to you?’

  ‘Not to me. To the authorities, perhaps.’

  ‘The authorities!’ she said contemptuously.

  They went out on to the verandah and stood looking down at the river. While they had been dining, the moon had risen. The leaves of the palm trees along the
bank had turned silver and immediately below them the water was full of silver sparkles, too, where some men had waded out into the river to fill their water-bags. As they watched, the wind stirred the palm leaves and a long silver ripple ran out from the shore right across the river.

  ‘Let us go for a walk along the bank,’ she said. And, later:

  ‘It is a pity you are not coming with me,’ she said.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Effendi,’ said the warehouse foreman, almost weeping, ‘on my oath, I did not know. Am I a genie, to see what lies hidden inside the bales?’

  ‘Did not they seem heavy? Heavier than usual?’

  ‘If they did, Effendi, the camels did not tell me.’

  ‘The porters, then; did not they remark on it?’

  The foreman looked at the warehouse porters, great, bull-necked men, who would think nothing of carrying a piano single-handed.

  ‘They remark on much, Effendi. Too much. But they did not remark on this.’

  Owen thought it likely that they wouldn’t even have noticed.

  ‘Where did the bales come from?’

  ‘Sennar, Effendi.’

  ‘Sennar? That is a long way.’

  ‘It is. But, Effendi, on their way they pass through Assuan, and there they are sorted into different lots. Most go on to the cotton markets, but some are rejected, and it is those which come to us.’

  ‘So the guns could have been put in either at Sennar or at Assuan?’

  ‘They could, Effendi. They would not have been put in during the march, for the camel men would not have it. But—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Effendi, why were they put in? And why,’ he said, distressed, ‘were they sent to us?’

  ‘That is what has to be looked into.’

  Owen asked for the names of the firm’s agents at Assuan. The foreman gave them to him.

  ‘But, Effendi, they may know nothing about it. Do you know the great traders’ market at Assuan? It is by the river. The caravans come in and camp and unload their goods. The bales would have stood as unloaded, waiting for another caravan, one of ours, to pick them up and carry them on. There are many people in the camp, Effendi, hundreds, if not thousands, and they walk around freely. Anyone might have come to the bales in the night.’