The Mamur Zapt & the Return of the Carpet

by Michael Pearce

  The men fanned out. They knew the structure of a Mameluke house and worked through systematically. The main reception rooms opened off the courtyard, and there were various recesses in there where a man could hide. The other rooms on the ground floor were either servants’ rooms, mostly cluttered around the main entrance, or storerooms. It took the men almost no time to work through them all.

  Georgiades looked at Owen inquiringly. Nearly the whole of the upper portion of a Mameluke house was given up to the harem. There were no proper bedrooms in the Western sense of the word. Any room which was not being used for anything else would serve. Beds were just a few cushions, a pillow and a padded blanket, which was rolled up in the daytime and put in a cupboard.

  The Mamur Zapt’s traditional right of entry extended, uniquely, to harems but it was not one to exercise without thinking about it.

  “There’s no alternative,” said Owen.

  Georgiades shrugged and ran up the stairs, closely followed by his delighted men. As they spread through the upper part of the house there were startled shouts and screams.

  McPhee remained below.

  “I’ll see no one gets out this way,” he said, a little straightly.

  Owen followed his men upstairs. The first room he came to, the main room of the harem, extended through the whole first floor of the house, from the old latticed windows at the front to the small oriels at the back. It was dark and cool, so dark that at first he could not see anything at all. Then his eyes picked out various women on divans, sitting bolt upright with shock.

  Afterwards, when Owen was questioned at the club, he had to admit that he took in very little. He was looking for the man and as soon as he saw the harem was occupied he knew it was unlikely the man would be there. He had scanned the room to make sure and that had been that.

  Required to furnish more detail, he had been at a loss. No, they were all dressed. They had not been wearing veils, true. No, he hadn’t noticed their faces, it had been dark. What had they been doing? Chatting, as far as he could see. Oh, and one or two were embroidering or sewing or something.

  “Sewing! You are a great disappointment, Owen!”

  No, he had seen nothing erotic, or particularly exotic for that matter, either. His impression was they they were just having a good gossip.

  “They must have been bored to death!” said someone.

  “And you did nothing about it, Owen!” said someone else. “I begin to have doubts about you.” Etcetera.

  What he did not tell them was that he had seen someone he knew. He had been about to move on up to the next floor when his eye had picked out a face against the gloom.

  It was Nuri’s daughter, the one he had met at the party.

  Her face had been rigid with anger.

  “You!” she said. “What are you doing here? Don’t you know it’s forbidden?”

  “I’m looking for a man.”

  “Here? You must be mad!”

  “He came in.”

  “Into the harem?”

  “Into the house,” Owen admitted.

  “He has not been in here,” she said. “Nobody has come in here. No man would come in here.”

  “I am sorry, then,” said Owen, turning away.

  “You don’t just go bursting into people’s houses like that!” she said.

  “Not even if the man we’re looking for may have had something to do with the attack on your father?” asked Owen.

  Georgiades appeared from upstairs and shook his head. He glanced round the room and pointed to a small door which Owen had taken to be the door of a kazna, a large cupboard in which such things as bedclothes were kept.

  “Does that go anywhere?”

  “Why not go in and find out?” said Zeinab.

  Georgiades’s hand was almost on the handle when the door opened of its own accord.

  “What is the meaning of this?” said a harsh, unpleasant voice which struck Owen as oddly familiar.

  Georgiades fell back.

  A man came into the room, short, stocky, bare-chested, dressed only in red silk pantaloons.

  It was Guzman.

  Chapter Nine

  “You have offended the Sirdar,” said Garvin. “You have offended the Khedive. You have offended the Agent. And you’ve bloody offended me.”

  He picked up a piece of paper from his desk.

  “I’ve even had,” he said, “a letter of complaint from the Kadi about your desecrating religious property.”

  He put the letter down.

  “It takes some doing to offend all the powers of Egypt in the space of about two hours, but by God, Owen, you’ve done it. The Army, the Khedive, the Kadi—Not to mention me. And for what?”

  “We’ve got the grenades.”

  “Not all of them. And you missed the man.”

  “How was I to know it was Guzman’s house?” muttered Owen.

  “You could have asked,” said the pitiless Garvin. “The meanest beggar in the street outside would have told you. Instead, you went charging in. In fact, you spent the whole -afternoon charging round, like a sort of lunatic McPhee. If I want a McPhee as Mamur Zapt,” said Garvin, “I’ll get a real one.”

  This was proving even more uncomfortable than Owen had expected.

  “But I don’t,” Garvin continued. “I really don’t. The Mamur Zapt isn’t supposed to work like that. He’s supposed to work behind the scenes, off-stage. Not front stage at the opera. The bloody comic opera!”

  Owen felt this hit home. He sat there smarting but judged it best to keep quiet. Garvin obviously expected some reaction. When none came he was slightly off-put. His glare became half-hearted.

  “It was a mistake, wasn’t it?” he said, still aggressively but with rather less vehemence. “Raiding that Syrian? I thought it would be. The trouble with a raid is that it either works or it doesn’t. If you don’t wrap everything up it kills off all the leads. I told you it would be better to put a man on the shop!”

  If we’d done that, thought Owen, we would not have got the grenades.

  Perhaps Garvin guessed what he was thinking, for the glare returned, defying Owen to make his objection.

  Owen sat there impassively.

  Satisfied, Garvin relaxed.

  “It was my fault,” he said unexpectedly. “I shouldn’t have let you.”

  Now it was Owen who was off-put. He found himself wanting to demur.

  Garvin was taking no notice, however. He was following his own train of thought.

  “Maps!” he said suddenly. “Maps!”

  “What?” said Owen, startled.

  Garvin turned to him.

  “Maps,” he said. “That’s what you need. You need to build up your own set of maps. The Mamur Zapt is different from the police,” he went on. “The police are interested in catching the criminal and punishing him. You’re not interested at all in seeing he gets punished, and not even interested, really, in him getting caught. What you’re interested in is seeing that certain things don’t happen. You may have to catch people, you may have to keep them in prison, but that’s all incidental. You may be able to do your job without it. In fact, it’s better if you do do your job without it. You’ve got to anticipate, to know in advance what’s going to happen and then to stop it. To do that you need information. Contacts. Maps.”

  He looked at Owen.

  “I shouldn’t have let you raid that Syrian, should I?” he said. “We should have used him to help you build up one of those maps. Syrian connections throughout the city. It would have been worth it.”

  “Even at the price of a box of grenades?”

  “Even at the price of a box of grenades,” said Garvin seriously. He considered a moment. “At the price of something going wrong at the Carpet, though—” He broke off. “Well,” he said, “it’s never straightforwa
rd in this business.”

  “Did I tell you,” he asked, “that the Old Man wants you to be in charge of security arrangements for the Carpet?”

  “Still?”

  Garvin smiled wintrily. “I would think so,” he said.

  As Owen went out Garvin said: “The Carpet’s always a pig. There were riots all over Cairo when I was doing it.”

  Owen knew the words were meant encouragingly.

  ***

  Nikos came in, unusually agitated.

  “There’s a woman to see you,” he said.

  “What sort of woman?” asked Owen. “Do you want me to come out?”

  It was rare for a woman to come alone to the Mamur Zapt’s offices, or, indeed, any other offices for that matter. Usually if a woman had business with an office she sent a man on her behalf or a male relative. In the few cases where she came herself she came accompanied. Occasionally, though, a countrywoman would come to see the Mamur Zapt with a petition. She would wait self-effacingly outside, not venturing to come in, hoping only to catch the Mamur Zapt as he went past. Owen had left strict instructions that if a woman was seen waiting like that then he was to be informed. He would go down to her as soon as he could.

  “No,” said Nikos. He hesitated. Then he made up his mind. “I will bring her along to you.”

  Owen sat back surprised. He had very few visits of that sort.

  Nikos ushered in an elegant woman, dressed in Parisian black. She wore a short, European-style veil but had bound her hair in an expensive scarf so as to reduce the offence to Islamic susceptibilities.

  Owen rose automatically from his desk. Nikos withdrew. The woman came further into the room and lifted her veil so that Owen could see her face. It was Nuri’s daughter, the one he had seen the day before, Zeinab.

  “I wanted to see you,” she said. “I thought I could be of some use.”

  Owen drew up a chair for her.

  He felt unusually awkward.

  For one thing, he had never before spoken to a young Egyptian woman alone. Arab Egyptian, that was. He had spoken to French Egyptians, Italian ones, Greek ones, but never previously to an Arab one. Even the Greek ones were pretty difficult to get to know. The Levantines were nearly as traditional as the Moslems where their women were concerned. Especially their daughters. Their wives were often restive and it was relatively easy to find a married woman with a taste for adventure. Their daughters, whether they had a taste or not, were seldom given the opportunity to indulge it. Young, single girls were kept as in purdah. And this was all the more true, of course, of Arab ones. You simply never saw them. Very occasionally you might meet a very Europeanized one in the most advanced of circles, as, indeed, he had done, but even there they hardly ever detached themselves from the crowd. Your only chance was someone as Europeanized, independent, unconventional and strong-minded as Nuri’s daughter evidently was. If, of course, she was single.

  For another thing, there was this unfortunate business of the harem.

  “I really must apologize,” he began. “I had no idea you were—” And stopped.

  “A member of the harem?” she finished for him icily. “I am not. Any more than you are one of Guzman’s eunuchs.”

  There was a delighted intake of breath in the corridor. Owen wondered who was listening. Indeed, now he noticed it, there was such a silence along the corridor that probably everybody was listening.

  He got up and shut the door. That made it almost unbearably hot, so he turned on the fan. That levitated the papers on his desk. He made a grab at them and weighted them down with a couple of files. Some of them, however, escaped on to the floor.

  He felt he was being excessively clumsy; in all ways.

  He looked up and found large dark eyes regarding him with definite amusement.

  “Anyway,” he said firmly, pulling himself together, “I am sorry.”

  “It was a little unexpected,” she said.

  “It was a mistake,” said Owen. He felt an urgent need to explain. “We were chasing a man. One of my people thought he came into the house.”

  “Perhaps he did,” she said cooperatively. “It’s a favourite trick in Cairo for pickpockets being chased to run into the courtyard of an old house. There’s usually a second entrance. They run in one and then straight out the other.”

  “My man’s experienced,” said Owen. “He ought to have looked out for that.”

  “How could he? Unless he had run into the courtyard himself.”

  “He had to be careful. The other man had grenades.”

  “Yes,” she said, “so I heard.”

  It must be all over Cairo now, he thought bitterly.

  There was a little silence. Then she said: “But that didn’t stop you from sending your men in.”

  “No.”

  “I was in the house,” she said. “So were others.”

  “It was a risk,” he admitted.

  “Yes,” she said. “It was. For us!”

  “I had to take it,” said Owen.

  The dark eyes regarded him soberly. Then, suddenly, again there was the flicker of amusement.

  “How definite of you!” she said drily. “And how British!”

  Owen began to feel like McPhee again.

  “I am sorry,” he said again.

  Then, feeling that he was being unnecessarily defensive: “You were in the house. I take it you were visiting?”

  “Yes,” she said firmly. Relenting, she added: “I wasn’t really visiting them, but since I was in the house I thought I’d better call on them. It means so much to them when someone calls. They lead such boring lives.”

  Owen wondered if she had been seeing Guzman and felt an unreasonable pang of jealousy.

  “You remember that girl? Leila? The one my father made pregnant?”

  “Mustafa’s wife’s—”

  “So that’s his name, is it?” she said. “Yes. That one. Well, my father is not such a monster as you think. He always looks after the women. He asked Guzman to take her in as a washerwoman. Guzman is an old friend of his. They worked together for the Khedive even before my father became a minister. I was coming to see how she was.”

  “I thought she was staying with relatives?”

  “She is. She comes in daily. They live not far from here. They are very poor. They couldn’t manage if she didn’t work.”

  “Mustafa spoke of others providing. Did he mean your father?”

  “Surely not,” she said. “He would never accept anything from my father. That’s why my father had to be indirect.”

  Sometimes it seemed to Owen that the whole of Egypt was bound together by intricate, interlinked systems of obligations, favours and rewards, subtle reciprocities, often to do with family, which connected people in unexpected ways. It was an immensely powerful moral system and if you lived in Egypt you could not escape its pressure. “This is my brother’s son,” Yussuf had said one day, presenting a grubby little urchin, and Owen had known that he was expected to do something about it. McPhee had found the boy a place in the stables and Yussuf’s standing with his family had been saved. For someone like Nuri the system’s imperatives probably counted for more than those of the courts.

  “I wanted to see you,” said Zeinab, and then broke off.

  “Yes?” said Owen, expecting it to be something to do with her father.

  “It’s about Aziz.”

  “Aziz? The Syrian?”

  “Yes. The one whose house you raided yesterday.”

  “And rightly, too, this time,” said Owen. “That’s how we came upon the grenades.”

  She waved a hand dismissively.

  “You know him, too?”

  “His wife. She is Raoul’s wife’s sister.”

  Owen remembered Raoul from Fakhri’s party and felt another pang of jealousy. He wonder
ed what, among this web of relationships, was the nature of Raoul’s relationship with Zeinab.

  “She came to see Raoul this morning. She is very worried.”

  She hesitated.

  “And what precisely is she worried about?” asked Owen, remembering the face he had seen at the door.

  “Aziz has been foolish,” Zeinab said. “She is worried that now you have found out about him you will pursue him. He will make another mistake and then you will put him in prison.”

  If only it was so simple, thought Owen. Out loud he said: “If he deals in grenades he must expect to be in trouble.”

  “He would like to stop. He only began it because he needed the money.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  “Yes, but in his case it was different. When he first came to Cairo, about ten years ago, he worked very hard and built up a legitimate business. Then one of his partners suddenly pulled out leaving him with huge debts. He had young children and did not know where to turn. The chance came up, he took it, it helped—”

  “And then he couldn’t stop,” said Owen.

  “He can stop. He wants to stop. Only…”

  “Only what?”

  “He’s frightened.”

  “Of me?”

  “Not of you. His wife is frightened of you.”

  “Thanks. What’s he frightened of?”

  She looked at him carefully, as if making a judgement. The decision was reached.

  “One of the clubs.”

  “Which?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Zeinab pushed back the edge of the scarf where the heat was making it stick to her face.

  “I know only what she told me,” she said. “That’s why she came to see Raoul this morning.”

  “And Raoul told you to come and see me?”

  “No,” she said. “Raoul does not know I am seeing you. She talked to me afterwards. I decided to come and see you.”

  Owen considered.

  “What would Raoul’s advice have been?”

  “The usual, I expect,” she said. “To pay and keep quiet.”

  “But you thought differently?”

  “I am sorry for the woman,” she said. “She is expecting another child. She has had two miscarriages already.”