The Snake Catcher’s Daughter mz-8

by Michael Pearce

  “It won’t make them look so good if the case is a real shambles.”

  Paul smiled.

  “We’ve already tried that,” he said. “I tried to get them to appoint some real duds to carry out the investigation, the likes of Mohammed Isbi. Said how greatly we respected his judgement, how much he had our confidence. Any case presented by him would be sure to have our support.”

  “Well?”

  “They wouldn’t wear it, of course. They’re not that daft. They know he’s as thick as a post.”

  “So who have they appointed?”

  “Their best and brightest. Mahmoud.”

  Mahmoud el Zaki was one of Owen’s oldest friends. The two were actually very much alike, young men on the rise. They had met on one of Owen’s earliest cases, which had turned out to be one of Mahmoud’s first cases, too, and since then their careers had kept a parallel course. They were both self-sufficient, not exactly loners-Owen was quite gregarious-but standing a little apart from their fellows.

  They were both to a certain extent outsiders: Owen because he stood outside the charmed circle of those who had been to public school and the ancient universities, and because of the ambiguity of the post of Mamur Zapt, responsible to the Egyptian and British Administrations; Mahmoud because he, too, was not by birth a member of the Egyptian elite. His father, a first generation graduate and, like Mahmoud himself, a lawyer, had died young while establishing a position and Mahmoud had inherited both the family’s expectations and its lack of wealth and social connections. He had had to work hard to rise, to do it all himself. There was quite a lot in common between him and the Welsh grammar school boy from an impoverished Anglican family; not least a tendency to define for oneself a social identity by siding with the suppressed Nationalist opposition.

  Mahmoud was in fact formally a member of the new Nationalist Party, which did him no harm in the Parquet but which left him politically and socially uneasy when it came to encounters with representatives of the Egyptian elite. He was, for example, completely at sea when it came to talking to Zeinab. This was, however, only partly because she was the daughter of a Pasha. Like most educated young Egyptians, Mahmoud had hardly ever met a respectable young woman and did not know exactly how one should behave. Besides, he wasn’t completely sure that Zeinab was respectable and when they met usually finished up looking down between her feet with embarrassment.

  He and Owen were sufficiently close for Owen to be able to ring him up and say: “Hey, about this Garvin business; can we have a talk?”

  “Yes, yes!” cried Mahmoud at once. “Come right over!” Then he thought again. “Um, well, perhaps you’d better not. Not here, at any rate.”

  “Lunch? Marsalis?”

  “Yes, yes!” said Mahmoud, eager to make amends. “Today! This afternoon!”

  “Right, then. One o’clock.”

  One o’clock found him in a little street just off the Mouski, far enough down to be away from the clangs of the trams in the Ataba-el-Khadra, not so far down as to be completely within the purview of the old part of the city where the cafes tended to be pavement ones and you squatted on your haunches around a large tray on the ground and dipped your bread in; all very well, but not good for weighty conversation.

  Mahmoud jumped up at his approach and threw his arms around him, Arab style.

  “It’s been so long!” he said enthusiastically (about a week). “What have you been doing?”

  “As little as possible,” said Owen.

  “I know! The heat! It’s been impossible in the courts. Two witnesses collapsed yesterday. Mustapha Kamil”-one of the senior judges-“said he’d have to bring the sessions to an end early if things didn’t improve. I’d be against that, though,” added Mahmoud seriously. “It would merely add to the backlog. We’re six months behind as it is.”

  Mahmoud was a strong believer in hard work and efficiency. He and Garvin were birds of a feather.

  “It can’t be long before the sessions end anyway, can it?”

  “Two weeks. But really, there’s so much still to get through, we ought to extend it.”

  “That would be popular!”

  He sometimes thought Mahmoud was a bit unyielding. A broad smile spread over Mahmoud’s face, relaxing the intensity.

  “It doesn’t stand a chance!” he said.

  The waiter took their orders.

  “At any rate,” said Mahmoud, “it will give us plenty of time to settle the Garvin affaire.”

  “Is it the Garvin affair?” asked Owen. “Or is it the Philipides affair?”

  Mahmoud shrugged.

  “It’s the corruption affair. That’s the only way to look at it. We don’t make any judgements until we’ve had another look at the evidence.”

  “Where are you going to start?”

  “With the original sub-inspector. That’s ultimately where the charges came from. His name’s Bakri.”

  “Mind if I sit in?”

  “Not at all.” Mahmoud hesitated. “But as a friend,” he said, “a colleague. Not as an official observer.”

  “I thought that had been agreed?”

  “It has and it hasn’t. What’s been agreed is that your status must be informal. But the people making the agreement were not-well, they were politicians, not lawyers. ‘Observer’ expressed what they thought they meant. But there is no provision under the legal system for an observer. In a case like this I think it’s important to keep to the letter of the law. So, no observers. But as a friend and colleague you are most welcome.”

  “Doesn’t it amount to the same thing?”

  “In practice, with you, yes. But the judicial system must be free, and be seen to be free, from political interference. It’s a question,” said Mahmoud firmly but, looking at Owen, a little anxiously, “of principle.”

  Mahmoud was strong on principles.

  “There must be no British finger in the scales,” he said determinedly.

  Abdul Bakri was still a sub-inspector.

  “No, it didn’t go through,” he said. “Then or later. When you’re involved in something like this, you know, they don’t forget. People don’t like it.”

  “Those who were involved at the time may not have liked it,” said Mahmoud. “But they’re all gone, surely?”

  “No one likes it,” said Abdul Bakri dispiritedly. “When you’ve done it once, whoever’s your boss after that thinks you’re going to do it again.”

  “It will only worry them if they’ve got something to hide.”

  “We’ve all got something to hide,” said Abdul Bakri. “Everyone bends the rules at some time.”

  Mahmoud, who never bent the rules, was shocked into silence for a moment.

  “It’s your mates, too,” Abdul Bakri went on. “They don’t like it.”

  “They’re the ones who benefited!”

  “Well, I don’t know about that.”

  “They didn’t like having to pay for promotion, surely?”

  “Well, at least you knew where you were. Forty pounds would get you an inspectorship. All you had to do was to save up. Cost you a bit, of course, but then you wouldn’t want everybody becoming an inspector. The point is, if you could find the money, you were all right. There was none of this funny business of people deciding how good you are. You see, that sort of thing makes it really chancey. You might have served in the force for twenty years and then someone comes along and says: ‘No, you can’t be an inspector because you’re too lazy’ or not clever enough. Now, I don’t call that fair at all. Whereas if all you had to do was find the money, it couldn’t go wrong, could it?”

  “I see,” said Mahmoud. “And you’re still a sub-inspector.”

  “That’s right,” said Abdul Bakri, aggrieved. “Spoiled my chance of promotion, that’s what he did, Garvin effendi!”

  “You could have said nothing,” Mahmoud pointed out.

  “Fat chance of that!” said Abdul Bakri. “He had me in his office and he said: ‘Forty pounds, Abdul Bak
ri? What’s that for?’ Well, I tried to put him off, but he said: ‘It wouldn’t be, by any chance, to purchase an inspectorship, would it?’ Well, after that…‘I know all about it,’ he said. ‘So you’d better just tell me.’ There wasn’t much I could do, was there? He had me.”

  “Did he remind you of your rights?”

  “Rights?” said Abdul Bakri incredulously. “Look, let me tell you, a sub-inspector’s got no rights. Not in the police force, he hasn’t.”

  “Attempted bribery is an offence,” said Mahmoud severely.

  “Don’t I know it! That’s just what Garvin effendi said. He said, ‘It’s prison for you, my lad, if you don’t do what I say.’ I said, ‘What about the money?’ He said, ‘You’ve had that.’ Well, I mean, forty pounds is a lot of money, it was all I had. It wasn’t really mine, either. I mean, it was Leila’s jewellery and she hadn’t been too pleased in the first place. If it had gone for good, well, she’d have killed me. Prison, I didn’t mind; well, at least you’ve got food and a roof over your head, haven’t you, but to have Leila forever on my back- ‘Well, all right, effendi,’ I said, ‘I’ll do what you want!’ ”

  “And what did Garvin effendi want?”

  “He said, ‘Who have you been dealing with? Have you been talking to Philipides direct?’ And I said, No, it had all been done through Philipides’s orderly, Hassan. So he said: ‘Right then, you tell Hassan that you’re a bit worried about going on with it because you’ve heard that Garvin effendi knows all about it.’ ‘Effendi,’ I said, ‘have you got it right? The first thing Hassan will do will be to tell Philipides.’ ‘That’s right!’ said Garvin effendi, and gave that little smile of his. Anyway, I did what he told me and Hassan went as white as a sheet and rushed off. The next day, he was back with the forty pounds, well, thirty-nine pounds, in fact, and said, ‘Here you are, we don’t want to know any more about it.’ ”

  “Thirty-nine pounds?”

  “That bastard, Hassan, was taking his cut. Got his fingers burnt that time, though, I can tell you. Garvin effendi said, ‘You go to Hassan and tell him you want all the money or else there’ll be trouble. And tell him he’s got to bring it to you at the police station tomorrow morning.’ Well, I did, and Hassan didn’t like it, but he brought the money. But what he didn’t know was that Garvin effendi had got two men in the next room listening in. So, he had him cold,” said Abdul Bakri, “and after that the thing just rolled.”

  “Are we going to talk to Hassan?” asked Owen, as they walked back.

  “We can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he disappeared.”

  “Fearing the worst?”

  “Or because of intimidation.”

  “Yes,” said Owen, “I gather there was a lot of that going on.”

  “On both sides,” said Mahmoud, “judging by Abdul Bakri’s account.”

  “Well, I had to say something. So I said something came over me at the full moon. I thought my husband was a pig and wanted to engage in unnatural practices with me. ‘What sort of practices?’ she said.”

  “I don’t think we need go into this,” said Selim uneasily.

  His wife, however, enjoying the opportunity, thought otherwise; and did with relish.

  “And then I said I thought he was an ox,” she said happily. “Not from the point of view of getting on with his work uncomplainingly but because of his stupidity-”

  “Look, Aisha,” Selim began.

  “I complained how often my husband beat me. Because of the times when I was possessed, that is. And then I asked her if she knew of an Aalima who could cast out the spirit from me. ‘It sounds as if your husband is the one who needs to see her,’ she said. ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘my husband is kind and patient and thoughtful and generous, hard-working and considerate-”’

  “Aisha, if you don’t-!”

  Over the heavy veil the big eyes looked at Owen demurely.

  “ ‘I am the one possessed’, I said. ‘That I could ever think of him otherwise!’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’ve got a cousin in the Gamaliya and she knows an Aalima’, so we went to the cousin and she said she would speak to the Aalima. And the Aalima agreed to see me. ‘What is your trouble?’ she asked. And I said, ‘Every full moon I think my husband is a pig.’ ‘A pig?’ she said. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘a pig.’ ”

  “Aisha-”

  “ ‘Why is that?’ she asked. ‘Because he wishes to engage in unnatural practices with me. Or, at least, that’s what I imagine. When I’m possessed.’ ”

  “Aisha-”

  “ ‘What sort of unnatural practices-?’ ”

  “All right, all right,” Owen broke in. “We’ve got that bit.”

  “You wait till you get home!” said Selim.

  “None of that!” said Owen. “Or you don’t get paid.”

  “Yes, but, effendi-”

  “Did the Aalima agree?”

  “Well, she said she’d just held a Zzarr and ordinarily she wouldn’t have another one for several months. However, it had raised a lot of interest in the neighbourhood and since it had been held, quite a few women had come forward, so that she thought that perhaps she’d better hold another one as otherwise it wouldn’t be fair-”

  “Did she give you a date?”

  “Next week sometime. She’ll let me know. I’ll need time to prepare, you see.”

  “Prepare?”

  “I have to purify myself. No sex beforehand and none for a month afterwards-”

  “A month!” said Selim, aghast.

  “At least. You’ll just have to ask Leila.”

  “It’s the wrong time of the month for her.”

  “Oh dear,” said Aisha.

  The city drooped in the heat. From about mid-morning the streets were deserted. Even the Ataba-el-Khadra, the square where most of Cairo’s tram routes terminated, and which was normally bustling with people, seemed empty. The drivers of the trams clanged their bells half-heartedly, and departed half empty. No one wished to travel if they could avoid it.

  The tourist season was at an end now and outside the big hotels the ranks were full of arabeahs. Their drivers dozed in the shade beneath their vehicles and did not even bother to look for custom. The donkey boys below the hotel terraces played endless games with sticks and white stones. Their donkeys slept on their feet. Even in sleep their tails twitched continuously against the flies.

  During the season, the street in front of the main European hotels was crowded with hawkers selling everything from souvenirs of the tombs to dirty postcards. Now all the hawkers had gone, as had the tumblers, and acrobats, the musicians and the people with performing monkeys. Only a solitary, blind snake charmer remained. Hearing Owen approach, he began to play on his flute. The snake rose slowly from its basket.

  Did snakes have ears? Owen wondered. He couldn’t remember ever having noticed any. He couldn’t see any on this one, either. Perhaps they were sunk in or something? He would have liked to have looked more closely, but then again, he wasn’t sure he wanted to look too closely. His friend the snake catcher had said they always removed the poison fangs before selling them on but Owen didn’t want to be the first to find an exception.

  “Have they got ears?” he asked the snake charmer.

  The charmer stopped in mid-trill.

  “Ears?” he said incredulously. “Of course not!”

  “Well, then, how do they hear the music?”

  “Look, are you trying to catch me out?” said the snake charmer angrily, blaring a short blast on his flute.

  The snake’s head stopped its rhythmic swinging and hung in the air. It certainly seemed to be responding to the music; but perhaps there was some other cue it was responding to? The old man’s swaying, for instance? Or perhaps vibration was picked up in a different way.

  The charmer stopped playing and the snake returned to its basket. The old man replaced the lid crossly and stumped away. Owen would have liked to have asked him more questions but this was clearly not
the occasion. He would have to ask someone else. His own snake catcher, for instance. Or perhaps that girl.

  He had been thinking about the snakes as he had been walking along. Because that was the bit that needed explanation. He could understand what had happened at the Zzarr. They hadn’t wanted McPhee to see the ceremony so they had drugged him. But why put him in the cistern with the snakes? Were snakes something to do with the Zzarr? Had some religious significance, perhaps?

  There was only one way to find out. He wasn’t a McPhee, interested in ceremony for its own sake, nor did he wish to do a McPhee, poke his nose in where he wasn’t wanted. But he was beginning to feel that a lot of the questions he was asking could only be answered by knowing more about what went on at a Zzarr and the best way of finding out was to go to one.

  He could treat it as a reconstruction of the crime, perhaps. Mahmoud, with his background in French law, would like that. The Parquet, steeped in the French judicial system and trained to apply French criminal procedures, were keen on reconstructions. He was not sure, though, that simply going to a Zzarr would come into that category.

  And ought he to be wasting his time on that sort of thing, anyway? Oughtn’t he to be concentrating on the Mahmoud investigation? But the pace in that was set by Mahmoud and he was having to juggle the time he spent on that against the demands of the other things on his plate. Owen reminded himself that he was just an observer; if that.

  No, he had to leave the initiative to Mahmoud. The McPhee business on the other hand was clearly his responsibility and he ought to get on with it. Not because of McPhee himself-they might all be having a peaceful time if it had not been for that blockhead-but because of the danger of it spilling over into communal violence. And was there someone behind it all? It did look a bit like it.

  He decided to go and see the witch.

  Chapter 6

  She was not exactly pleased to see him.

  He had left it, deliberately, as late as he could so that she would not have time to cancel the Zzarr or rearrange it in another place. The outer courtyard was already full of people and there were lamps inside the house. Musicians were tuning up.