A Cold Touch of Ice

by Michael Pearce

  ***

  Zeinab, thought Owen, was being difficult this evening. What was more, he was pretty sure that she was being difficult deliberately. It was the custom on the day after a wedding for friends to go and present their congratulations. This was usually an exclusively male occasion since the friends of the bridegroom—and it was a case, naturally, of the bridegroom only—would all be male and he would receive their congratulations alone.

  Owen, however, had had the bright idea of taking Zeinab with him—she knew Mahmoud well, after all—and Mahmoud had leapt at the suggestion, believing that it would provide his wife with an easy introduction into the new social world that she would enter. He wanted her, he said, to feel at ease both in the traditional Muslim world of her family and his, and in the Westernized, cosmopolitan world of the successful professional in which he worked; although, in the latter case, preferably not too much at ease.

  Zeinab, though, was being a bitch. For one thing she seemed to be deliberately trying to upstage the shy girl who now appeared before them, probably for the first time in public without her veil. This was relatively easy to do for it was probably also the first time that Aisha had met the daughter of a Pasha, and Pashas were still viewed by many in Egypt as beings from another world. Aisha seemed stunned by this dazzling apparition, so fashionably—and immodestly—dressed (and, now Owen came to think of it, wasn’t there something deliberate about that, too?), speaking so boldly even before the men, and dropping in references at every turn to Princess this and Princess that.

  ‘Do you know Princess Fawzi, my dear?’

  ‘I’ve read about her in the newspaper,’ Aisha managed bravely.

  Who hadn’t? The Princess was notorious for her loose and shocking behaviour. Only last week she had ridden a bicycle round the Bab-el-Louk.

  ‘I’ll introduce you to her.’

  Mahmoud looked very unhappy.

  ‘I don’t think—’ began Aisha.

  ‘Nonsense, my dear! I’ll get her to arrange something. I know! A picnic. She’ll like that. On the river. Just the three of us. Oh, and,’ said Zeinab with a defiant glance at Owen and a toss of her head, ‘Prince Narouz, Prince Rashid and Prince Yasin.’

  The Princes Narouz, Rashid and Yasin were, among a host of dissolute younger relatives of the Khedive, certainly the most dissolute.

  Mahmoud had gone pale.

  ‘It’s very kind of you,’ said Aisha hurriedly, ‘but—’

  ‘Not at all, my dear,’ beamed Zeinab. ‘I’ll get her to send you an invitation tomorrow.’

  ‘I, really—’

  ‘Even if she does send you an invitation, you don’t have to go if you don’t want to,’ said Owen.

  Zeinab glared at him.

  ‘She certainly does! This is a Royal Invitation.’

  ‘I’ll have to ask my husband,’ said Aisha desperately.

  ‘But why, my dear?’ asked Zeinab sweetly. ‘No other woman does.’

  Mahmoud looked as if he was about to faint.

  ***

  ‘Why are you being so awful?’ demanded Owen, the moment he could get her out of the house.

  Zeinab broke away from him and ran on ahead.

  He caught up with her and tried to take her arm. She shook him off.

  ‘An insipid, useless creature!’ she raged. ‘A mere child, with no mind of her own!’

  ‘You shouldn’t have treated her like that.’

  ‘Why do you take her part?’ shouted Zeinab, and burst into tears.

  Owen was used to Zeinab’s tempers but this one promised to break all records.

  Everyone in the street was looking at them. Doors began to open, shutters were flung back. He could sense the sudden interest behind the harem windows.

  ‘For God’s sake!’

  Zeinab tore herself away and ran off up the street.

  She came to a stop just outside a heavily populated café and stood there sobbing loudly.

  Heads in the café turned, chairs were eased back, people began to stand up.

  Owen caught up with her and tried to take her in his arms.

  She half pushed him off, then fell against him.

  ‘Leave me alone!’ she shouted.

  And now the chairs were definitely being pushed back, and there were concerned cries, and a few angry ones.

  An Egyptian woman and an English man! Jesus!

  ‘Come on, now, come on!’ he whispered urgently.

  ‘Brute!’ shouted Zeinab.

  Everyone in the café was getting up.

  He looked around desperately.

  And then, by the grace of God, an arabeah came into view.

  ‘Here! Here!’

  He bundled Zeinab inside and then jumped in himself.

  ‘Just get moving!’ he said to the arabeah driver.

  The driver shrugged, assuming that this was just another of those Cairo incidents—the woman had probably discovered she was having a baby, or something—and cracked his whip.

  Owen held Zeinab close. After a moment or two the violent crying stopped, giving way to the occasional choked sob.

  ‘What is all this?’

  Zeinab just burrowed her head in his chest.

  ‘Where to?’ said the arabeah driver.

  ‘The Ismailiya,’ said Owen.

  The driver nodded. That was where all these classy bits came from. But they had babies like everyone else.

  ‘Let’s not go to the Ismailiya,’ said Zeinab.

  ‘Where shall we go to, then?’

  ‘The river,’ said Zeinab. ‘Let’s go to the river. It will be nice there. Nicer than anywhere else when it’s hot like this.’

  They got out at the embankment and began to walk along beneath the palm trees. Below them the water glugged at the bank.

  ‘Let’s get in a boat,’ said Zeinab.

  ‘We’d need lights—’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of going anywhere,’ said Zeinab.

  They found a felucca at the water’s edge and climbed into it and lay down. The gentle rocking of the boat was very soothing, and so was the quiet slap of the water against the bank, and the gentle, regular nudging of the felucca against its mooring post. After a while they lay back and looked up at the stars.

  ‘What was all that about, then?’ said Owen.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Zeinab.

  It had been about something, though. Surely she wasn’t jealous? Not of that kid, surely?

  Then a thought came to him. Had Nuri told her about Trudi?

  ‘I met your father,’ he said cautiously.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes, at the Continentale.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Zeinab. ‘He was seeing somebody about a new railway.’

  New railway?

  Chapter Eight

  All sorts of things were tied to the railings of the terrace at the front of the Hotel Continentale: monkeys (for sale as pets, and also the dog-faced baboons which, clad in little red jackets looking suspiciously like military ones, would shortly be performing with the entertainers in the street); dirty postcards of astonishingly abundant ladies; great, extravagant plumes of ostrich feathers; equally extravagant bunches of roses and carnations; little singing birds in cages; hippopotamus-hide whips and fly switches smelling of new leather; men’s braces and ladies’ suspenders woven ingeniously through the railings; bead necklaces; green eye-shades; slippers with curled-up toes—and, of course, the usual cast-down donkeys of the donkey-boys and the tired horses of the arabeahs waiting patiently for custom.

  As well, this time, as two enormous camels, their heads grinning over the railings at the people sitting on the terrace, their jaws dripping a green saliva from the clover they were chewing.

  ‘Do you like them?’ said Trudi von Ramsberg enthusiastically, as she came down th
e steps.

  ‘Up to a point,’ said Owen, much less enthusiastically.

  ‘They’re racing camels, of course.’

  ‘So I see.’

  She looked at him curiously.

  ‘You know about camels?’

  ‘A little.’

  When he had first arrived in Egypt he had been posted to the desert patrol and had spent his first few months operating against gun-runners and smugglers; not exactly a good training for policing in Cairo but one which the authorities believed a good training for Egypt.

  ‘I thought you might not.’

  ‘Being merely an ignorant Arabist of the city, you mean?’

  She laughed.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Why do you need racing camels?’ he asked, puzzled.

  ‘I don’t. I couldn’t resist them, that’s all. I’ll have others with me for the journey, of course.’

  He was still puzzled. Racing camels were not something you purchased on impulse. They cost an arm and a leg.

  ‘You must be rich,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I am, I am! And stupid, too. And you,’ she said, ‘are sur-prisingly knowledgeable for a mere Arabist of the city.’

  They had come in from the south that morning, she said, and she was about to take them over to the Mena Hotel, on the other side of the river, where she was assembling what she needed for her expedition. She invited him over there for dinner the following evening. And then she made one of the camels kneel, perched herself on the huge saddle which was about as big as a ship, took the leading rein from the other camel in her hand, and set off down the street past the surprised parasoled ladies and the impressed tarbooshed men.

  ***

  After the glare and hustle of the street, the inside of the hotel was soothingly dark and calm. The receptionist was sitting behind his desk, his head bent over the hotel register, a fan whirling on the ceiling above.

  ‘A German? I think that would be Mr Scharnhorst. We have a number of Germans staying with us, of course, but I think Mr Scharnhorst would be the one you want.’

  ‘A businessman, is he?’

  ‘A banker.’

  Had Zeinab’s father been on the scrounge for money again? It would have to be a foreign bank. All the other banks knew him only too well.

  ‘Do you know the name of the bank?’

  ‘The Dresden, I think.’

  ‘I believe Nuri Pasha was meeting some other people, too.’

  ‘Sidki Bey,’ said the receptionist.

  From the Khedive’s office.

  ‘And Mr Meck.’

  The Minister of Finance. Perhaps that was it. It was not Nuri who was doing the asking. The Khedive was equally in need of money. And the same consideration about it having to be a foreign bank would still apply. But what was Nuri doing there? The Khedive would hardly need him as a go-between.

  ‘There was another man, a Turk,’ said Owen.

  ‘Ah, yes, Mr Gurnik. From the Turkish State Railways.’

  This was more possible. Zeinab’s father was on the Board of Egyptian Railways; a post, alas, more honorary than remunerative.

  ‘You have no idea of the subject of the meeting, I suppose?’

  The receptionist smiled.

  Owen smiled, too.

  He picked up the menu card for that evening and appeared to be studying it.

  ‘How long will Mr Scharnhorst be staying?’ he asked, without raising his eyes.

  ‘A week, I think. It is a little uncertain.’

  ‘And Mr Gurnik?’

  ‘The same, I believe.’

  Owen put the menu card down; only now, inside it, was a hundred-piastre note.

  The receptionist tidied the menu card away.

  ‘Something to do with a purchase, I believe,’ he said, his eyes dropping back to the register, ‘of a railway.’

  ***

  Owen wormed his way along the bar, not of the hotel now but of the Gezira Sporting Club, where, it being a Friday and the Muslim sabbath, and consequently a day of rest, British officials were gathered in force, and came up alongside Saunders. Saunders was the senior man in Railways and, unusually in the Administration, a soldier. The Egyptian State Railways was still run by the army, which had set the railway system up in the first place, at the time of the Occupation, and had been running it ever since. When he saw Owen, he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper.

  ‘I’ve had another one,’ he said.

  ‘Another—?’

  ‘Threatening letter.’

  He gave it to Owen.

  ‘Same writing,’ said Owen, glancing at it.

  ‘Not found him yet?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  He put the letter away.

  ‘There’s something I wanted to ask you,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘You’re not thinking of selling off anything, are you? Part of the railways?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nor buying anything? Some other railways?’

  ‘No,’ said Saunders, mystified.

  ‘There aren’t any other railways to buy, are there? I mean, not in Egypt?’

  ‘Well, there’s the Khedive’s private line, I suppose.’

  ‘Private line?’

  ‘Yes. It runs from Alexandria to Mersa Matruh. Along the coast.’

  ‘From east to west?’

  ‘Yes. But, look, that line’s not for—’

  ***

  ‘He wouldn’t do it!’ said Paul. ‘He couldn’t do it! We wouldn’t let him.’

  ‘I’m not sure we’re in a position either to let or not let him,’ said Owen. ‘It’s his property, after all. And he is the ruler of the country, when all’s said and done.’

  ‘Yes, but we can’t have that! All it would need then would be a link line eastwards and then the Turks could ship people straight to Tripolitania!’

  ‘But it is their country, Paul, and it is his line.’

  ‘We’ll have to find some way of stopping it.’

  Paul hurried away, leaving Owen staring unhappily at the bubbles in his glass.

  ***

  Owen was sitting in his office next morning when he heard shouting in the yard. A moment later, an agitated orderly came running along the corridor.

  ‘Effendi! Effendi! There’s a wild man outside!’

  In the yard a group of orderlies surrounded, at some distance, a stocky, bare-footed man who stood glaring at them, his hand on a short, curved sword in his belt.

  ‘What is all this?’ demanded Owen.

  The ring of orderlies broke apart and let him in.

  ‘You wanted to see the boss,’ said the senior orderly. ‘Now here he is!’

  The man looked at Owen suspiciously.

  ‘He’s not the boss!’

  ‘Foolish fellow!’ said the senior orderly angrily. ‘Do you not know the Mamur Zapt?’

  ‘Mamur Zapt!’ said the man, alarmed. He began to back away. The ring retreated with him.

  ‘What is it you want?’ asked Owen.

  ‘You’re not the one.’

  ‘Who is it, then? Whom are you seeking?’

  The man continued to back away. The ring behind him opened and he found himself up against the wall. He looked desperately towards the gate.

  ‘Come, friend,’ said Owen. ‘Whom is it you seek?’

  ‘The fat one,’ said the man reluctantly.

  ‘Ah! Go and see if Georgiades is in,’ Owen said to one of the orderlies, ‘and if he is, tell him to come down.’

  ‘He promised me beer,’ said the man. ‘And money.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘I said I was not to be bought. “Who is talking of buying?” he said. “But should a man who sees a piece of g
old walk past it with his face averted?” I thrust him away. But this morning I thought that perhaps there was merit in what he said. And, besides, the beer was all finished.’

  ‘These are powerful reasons. And he will be here shortly. All right, you can go back inside,’ he said to the orderlies.

  They withdrew reluctantly.

  The man prised himself off the wall and came forward.

  ‘Are you truly the Mamur Zapt?’ he said curiously.

  ‘The same. And who are you?’

  ‘Ali. I am a driver with one of the caravans.’

  ‘I see.’

  That explained it. The man was plainly of the desert and not of the city. His skirts were short and tucked up under him, his legs were bare and blackened by the sun, but darker, anyway, than those of the northern Arabs. He had tribal scars cut in his cheeks and wore a white turban. His eyes were slightly bloodshot.

  Owen led him into the shade and they both crouched down against a wall.

  ‘Well, Ali, you are far from home.’

  ‘I am; and, to tell the truth, I do not like it much here. But my cousin was getting married, and I said to myself: is it right that she should be alone among strangers when there is a man of her family in town? So I went to the wedding, and there were men there that I could drink beer with. And it was there that the fat man found me.’

  Georgiades was coming into the yard now.

  ‘You have discovered, I see,’ he said to Ali, ‘the man who is the source of much of the beer in Cairo.’

  ‘He is?’

  Ali looked at Owen with new respect.

  ‘And some, I daresay, will flow in your direction once we have talked a little.’

  ‘It is thirsty work, talking,’ said the driver.

  ‘It is. But for the talk to be clear, it is best if the beer comes after and not during the talking. Ali is one of the drivers with the caravans that come to the Morellis’,’ he said to Owen, ‘and he was with the caravan that brought the guns. Tell him what you told me,’ he said to Ali.