The Spoils of Egypt

by Michael Pearce

  The men, however, showed no disposition to run away. They seemed stunned.

  The sun had only just come up when the constables began to lead them shuffling back to the house. In its light Owen could see their faces. He knew the men of Der el Bahari very well.

  ***

  Hens there were in abundance pecking about the yard, so they had boiled eggs for breakfast. Marbrouk studied Owen’s prisoners without comment and announced that after breakfast he was going to see his lawyer.

  When the breakfast things had been removed, Miss Skinner went down with Nuri to interview the man who had been captured earlier. He was sitting in the dust with his back against a wall; behind which, unknown to Miss Skinner and Nuri, stood Owen and Georgiades.

  ‘The lady would like you to answer some questions,’ said Nuri softly in Arabic, ‘and if you take my advice you’ll answer them quick.’

  ‘I’m not saying anything,’ said the man.

  ‘Don’t answer, and I’ll cut your balls off.’

  ‘If I do answer, Marbrouk will cut my balls off!’ protested the man.

  ‘Ah!’ said Nuri, ‘but I shall cut your balls off first.’ He turned to Miss Skinner. ‘He says he will be delighted to answer any questions you may ask, my dear.’

  ‘Oh, that’s very kind of him! Do tell him that, won’t you?’

  ‘She says that in her country men’s balls are a favourite dish.’

  ‘They are?’ said the man, shaken.

  ‘Yes. And she personally relishes them. So watch your step. What would you like to ask, my dear?’

  ‘I want to ask him about Abu and Rashid.’

  ‘Abu and Rashid?’

  ‘Two men who were killed at Der el Bahari.’

  ‘That is a strange thing to ask, my dear. However…’

  He turned back to the man.

  ‘She wants to know about two men. Their names are Abu and Rashid. Or rather, were. They were killed at Der el Bahari.’

  ‘Never heard of them.’

  ‘I am sure he will remember them.’

  ‘She says you are a liar.’

  ‘They were supposed to have been killed in accidents. It was on the site Mr Parker is excavating.’

  ‘Two of Parker Effendi’s men.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘Just recently.’

  ‘She says she likes them with sauce on.’

  ‘I wasn’t even there!’

  ‘Where were you, then?’

  ‘I was down at Cairo—’

  ‘Ah! So you know about it?’

  The man was silent.

  ‘What happened to them?’ asked Miss Skinner.

  ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t there, I tell you!’

  ‘You heard. What did you hear?’

  ‘It wasn’t an accident, was it?’ said Miss Skinner.

  ‘It wasn’t an accident, was it?’ The man did not reply. ‘Was it?’ said Nuri softly.

  ‘No,’ said the man at last.

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘They were prying,’ said the man hoarsely. ‘They were sticking their noses in where they shouldn’t.’

  ‘So they were killed?’ said Miss Skinner. Her voice went quiet.

  ‘I wouldn’t bother too much about it, my dear,’ advised Nuri. ‘Who were these men, anyway?’

  ‘I’d asked them to do something for me.’

  ‘You should have asked me,’ said Nuri reproachfully.

  ‘No, no. These were—ordinary men. Workmen. Porters. Diggers.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Nuri briskly, ‘there’s not much to worry about, is there?’

  ‘It was my fault,’ said Miss Skinner.

  ‘Nonsense, my dear!’ said Nuri. ‘How could it have been?’

  Chapter Twelve

  Owen had more important things on his mind: Zeinab. He knew she had been playing with him. That did not mean, however, that things were not serious. It was quite possible that Nuri was planning a political marriage for her. And it was, unfortunately, not quite out of the question that Zeinab would go along with it.

  She was her father’s daughter, after all. There were limits to her independence of mind. Owen suspected that marriage might be one of them. It was so deeply rooted in family and culture that, however emancipated you might be, when it came down to it you might revert to pattern.

  One of the things Owen loved about Zeinab (yes, loved) was the largeness of spirit which had put her at odds with many of the patterns of the society in which she moved. Nevertheless, he could sense how great were the pressures on her. Perhaps now she had had enough.

  In this society above all a woman could not exist on her own. What she needed, she might well feel now, was a more regular position.

  And what position could he, Owen, offer her? Wife to a junior Captain in the British Army? That might be an improvement on mistress but it hardly compared with wife to a Pasha at Court and possibly a Princess.

  Suppose he married her and then he was killed? Well, he was a soldier and that kind of thing happened to soldiers. Where would she be then? Or what when he retired? England? Somehow he didn’t see Zeinab settling down to a quiet life in the Surrey countryside. Egypt? But then he wouldn’t have a place, not as a retired Captain, and he couldn’t see her in some expatriate limbo either. Whichever way he looked at it, it didn’t seem very promising.

  But Marbrouk! Well, he reckoned he might be able to put a stop to that. Marbrouk was certainly up to something and with any luck Owen would be able to land him in jail.

  Perhaps not jail: Marbrouk was a Pasha, after all. Force him to leave the country, maybe.

  The trouble was, Nuri might be in it, too. Daggers drawn he and Marbrouk might be over Miss Skinner, but hand in glove they almost certainly were on other things. Owen suspected, too, that Nuri might have more need of Marbrouk than Marbrouk of him. It was Nuri, when all was said and done, who was surrendering his daughter.

  But that wasn’t really it. The real question was should he ask Zeinab to marry him.

  A sudden thought struck him. Suppose he did marry her and they didn’t like it. The Administration, at the top, was fairly liberal in its attitudes. Paul, for instance, preferred Egyptian society to expatriate or Army society. But when it came to marriage they might think differently. They might post him back to India.

  By this time he had arrived at Zeinab’s door and had still not made up his mind.

  ‘I was thinking about marriage,’ he blurted out, as soon as he got through the door.

  ‘Oh?’ said Zeinab, drawing her knees up in front of her on the divan and hugging them. ‘Which one? The Postlethwaite woman? Miss—what was her name—Colthorpe Hartley? Or that gipsy girl, perhaps?’

  ‘You,’ said Owen.

  ‘Or the Italian girl? The one from Alexandria, Francesca?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘Is this a proposal?’ asked Zeinab. ‘It doesn’t sound very romantic.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking things over—’

  ‘How very British of you! Marriage is an affair of the head, is it, not of the heart?’

  ‘Of course it’s of the heart. But that’s straightforward—’

  Zeinab interrupted him.

  ‘But this is interesting!’ she said, resting her chin on her knees and looking at him wide-eyed. ‘The heart is straight-forward? All my life I have been reading Stendhal and Flaubert and La Rochefoucauld and to them it is not straightforward at all!’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Perhaps it is as in the opera,’ offered Zeinab. ‘The hero is simply swept away by his passion.’

  ‘Yes, that’s about it.’

  ‘And you,’ purred Zeinab, ‘you are like this? Swept away by passion?’<
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  ‘Yes. Now look, let’s get back to the point—’

  Zeinab, disconcertingly, burst out laughing.

  ***

  ‘And did you find it?’ asked Owen.

  Miss Skinner looked at him sharply.

  ‘Did I find what?’

  ‘What you were looking for. When you broke into the house.’

  It was the evening after they had got back from Heraq. Owen had allowed Miss Skinner a decent siesta in which to recover from her experiences and then had gone round to her hotel to hear her account of them; and, this time, a truthful explanation.

  She received him outside on the terrace, largely deserted now that the tourists had gone and free, too, from the vendors and tumblers and beggars who had been jostling in front of it when he last came.

  ‘I accept,’ she said, ‘that I owe Mr Marbrouk an apology.’

  ‘I think,’ said Owen, ‘that the Parquet will want more than an apology.’

  ‘The Parquet? Surely there is no need—’

  ‘I think that remains to be seen. It depends rather upon your explanation.’

  Miss Skinner was silent for some time. Then she roused herself and looked Owen in the eye.

  ‘You are quite right,’ she said. ‘An explanation is required. I have been remiss, perhaps, in not taking you into my confidence. But since I had such doubts—such grave doubts— about the zeal with which the Egyptian Government was approaching the whole issue—’

  ‘The illegal export of antiquities?’

  ‘The export of Egypt’s priceless treasures, whether legal or illegal. It seemed to us, back at home in Boston, that nothing was being done and that unless something was done, quick, Egypt’s marvellous heritage would soon be dissipated forever. The Egyptians seemed helpless, the British seemed content to stand by while the world flocked in to despoil. So my Society—’

  ‘Your Society?’

  ‘The Society for the Preservation of the World’s Treasures. It is based in Boston but we draw support from all over America: Concord, Worcester…and then my uncle, of course. Well, we decided that if no one else was going to tackle the problem of Egypt’s despoliation, we would. We raised funds to send an emissary—’

  ‘Yourself?’

  Miss Skinner bowed.

  ‘And I must say that when I arrived, my worst suspicions were confirmed. The slackness of the Administration, the incompetence of the investigating authorities—oh, I am sorry, Captain Owen, but then as you told me, you are not in fact a member of the police—the narrow terms of reference of Customs—well, I was shocked. And so, I am afraid, I decided to play a lone hand.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Yes. And I feel now that perhaps I was in error. I should have taken you into my confidence, at least a little.’

  Miss Skinner smiled at him winningly.

  ‘Thank you. I presume that your, er, investigations led you to Der el Bahari. Why was that?’

  ‘We had heard rumours—some of us had been approached.’

  ‘Back in Boston?’

  ‘Yes. There are always agents, you know, touting things to rich men.’

  ‘And some of these things were associated with Der el Bahari?’

  ‘That is correct.’

  ‘Most notably, of course, the Calf?’

  ‘Ye-es. Just rumours, of course.’

  ‘But apparently with sufficient substance in them to make you take them seriously?’

  ‘It was just a lead, a possible lead,’ said Miss Skinner modestly.

  ‘Which you followed up.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Successfully?’

  ‘Only to the extent of uncovering more rumours.’

  ‘You did not find the Calf itself?’

  ‘Oh no.’ Miss Skinner laughed. ‘Rumour, I suspect, is the only substantial thing about that particular entity.’

  ‘You doubt if there is such a thing?’

  ‘I’m afraid I do.’

  ‘Then,’ said Owen, ‘what were you looking for when you broke into Marbrouk’s house?’

  Miss Skinner went still.

  ‘Other things,’ she said after a moment. ‘Although the Calf may be fictitious, it doesn’t mean that everything is. I was sure that Marbrouk abstracted some things for himself. Why, you yourself—’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘The leopard cub. The—’ Miss Skinner stopped. ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

  ‘No,’ said Owen.

  Miss Skinner was silent for a long time. At last she raised her eyes.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I was looking for the Calf.’

  ‘The rumours were true?’

  ‘I couldn’t be sure. The Der el Bahari people were so secretive, hostile. I felt they were protecting something. But I couldn’t get near it, no matter how I tried. I offered money but they weren’t interested. That puzzled me. I thought that surely if they wanted to sell it—’

  Miss Skinner broke off.

  ‘But then it occurred to me. They weren’t interested because they had already sold it. The only thing that was at issue was getting it into the hands of whoever it was who had bought it. And that particular trail of thought,’ said Miss Skinner, ‘led me to Mr Marbrouk.’

  ‘Their local Pasha. The man they knew.’

  ‘A crook,’ said Miss Skinner, ‘but a crook they were used to dealing with. They had, of course, supplied him with similar things on previous occasions.’

  ‘And so you became interested in Marbrouk’s transport arrangements?’

  ‘Yes. Which were Parker’s transport arrangements.’

  ‘Parker was part of it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Something came into Miss Skinner’s mind and made her change it. ‘Yes, he was part of it,’ she said determinedly, ‘although how great a part he played, I do not know.’

  ‘Transport led you to Heraq,’ said Owen.

  ‘Yes. And to the Pasha’s house, I’m afraid. For that I do owe an apology—not just to Mr Marbrouk but to the Egyptian Government.’

  ‘And did you find it?’ Owen asked again. ‘The Calf?’

  ‘No,’ said Miss Skinner, looking at him thoughtfully.

  ***

  As they were brought in, Owen scrutinized their faces. One was the one he had already recognized: the man he had talked to in the street on his way back from Vittorio’s studio. There were other faces, though, which seemed half familiar. Perhaps he had seen them outside the Continental Hotel.

  ‘You have much to tell me,’ he said to them when they were all finally assembled in front of his desk. They shuffled and looked down, except for the one he had spoken to previously, who, confident in their relationship, looked him straight in the face.

  Owen addressed himself to him.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’ve put me in a pretty pickle, haven’t you? What am I going to do with you now? Attacking a woman, a Sitt, moreover! Worse than that, a foreign Sitt I can’t explain things to.’

  ‘We wouldn’t have hurt her,’ said the man.

  ‘Well, wouldn’t you? You might have killed her by that tram.’

  ‘We didn’t push her in front of it,’ the man protested. ‘We pushed her against it.’

  ‘Well, that was enough, wasn’t it? She might have fallen between the wheels.’

  ‘We had to bring it home to her. We had tried scaring her off before.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes, at the hotel. We tried to frighten her. We thought: “Sitts will be frightened by bits of mummy.” But she wasn’t.’

  ‘Maybe she didn’t recognize it as a warning.’

  ‘We told her to go home. We said that if she persisted in sticking her nose into things, very soon she would get it busted.’

  ‘You actually said that to her?’ />
  ‘Yes. But she is a woman of fortitude. She said: “You have something I want. I will pay you well for it, better than anyone else. Why don’t we talk about it?” But we didn’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Because you had already sold it.’

  ‘Well, yes. We had already got a deal. We didn’t want anyone messing it up at this stage. Besides, the Pasha…’ The man fell silent.

  ‘The Pasha?’ Owen prompted.

  ‘The Pasha said she was a foolish woman but a dangerous one, and that we should try to scare her off.’

  ‘This was in Cairo, was it? Before she went to Der el Bahari? Before even the bus?’

  ‘Yes, effendi.’

  ‘How did he know she was dangerous?’

  The man shook his head. ‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘Except that when he spoke to us it was as if she was already known to him.’

  Owen went across to the window and poured himself a drink from the large earthenware pitcher which stood on the sill, as in all Cairo windows, to cool. The water was as hot as if it had just come out of the hot water tap.

  ‘But then at Der el Bahari she was attacked again,’ said Owen. ‘Can you tell me about this?’

  ‘No. I was still up here at the time.’ He looked at the others. ‘We were all up here, I think.’

  The other men nodded.

  ‘Nevertheless, you may have heard something.’

  The man shrugged.

  Another man, gaining in confidence because of the relaxed, familiar nature of the exchanges—it was getting trapped in bewildering formal bureaucratic processes that ordinary fella-hin feared, not so much the punishment itself—chipped in.

  ‘It was the same down there,’ he said. ‘They didn’t try to kill her. They thought killing a Sitt would be a dangerous thing. The Government would bear hard upon us.’

  ‘It certainly would,’ said Owen.

  The men nodded their head approvingly. Back in the village, they had shown wisdom.

  ‘They just pushed her into one of the chambers. If no one found her it would look like an accident. And if they did find her, well, at least she would know better.’

  ‘She was still seeking the Calf?’

  The man nodded. ‘She offered money again. But by then we didn’t need money. What was causing the problem was exchanging it for the Calf.’