The Girl in the Nile

by Michael Pearce

  “Yes, they always work that stretch of the bank. Anyway, they found the body and hid it under a boat.”

  “Farag and Libab! I saw them there that morning!”

  “Yes.”

  A thought suddenly struck him.

  “Abu, did you see anyone else that morning? You see, the body was hidden under a boat nearby and later in the day someone came to fetch it.”

  Abu shook his head.

  “I saw no one with a body,” he said.

  “Perhaps not with a body. That is not to be expected. It would have been moved by night. But someone down there. Perhaps talking to the boatman.”

  “I saw many people,” said Abu, shaking his head.

  “Did you, perhaps, see a fiki?”

  “Why, yes,” said Abu, “I did.”

  ***

  This early in the morning there was still a tinge of freshness in the air, especially so close to the river. Some storks were wading in the shallows. They moved a little further out as Owen and Mahmoud approached but did not fly away.

  A little beyond them the boatman was already at work. A small brazier was burning and from it came the pungent smell of boiling tar.

  The boatman looked up as they arrived. He recognized Mahmoud but not Owen.

  “Effendi,” he said politely.

  “Greetings, Mohammed Farkas,” said Mahmoud. He went and stood among the boats drawn up on the bank. “Remind me, Mohammed Farkas,” he said, “which boat was the girl’s body hidden under?”

  The boatman’s face fell.

  “This one, effendi.” He indicated it with his hand.

  “Ah, you’ve moved it.”

  “It has been on the water, effendi.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Mahmoud sat down on the upturned hull.

  “This is my friend,” he said, indicating Owen. “He is the Mamur Zapt.”

  “I have told you all I know, effendi,” said the boatman in a low voice.

  “Not quite all, I think.”

  “What else is it you wish to know, effendi?”

  “You told me that after the beggars had spoken to you, you did not go near the boat because you were afraid. And that when you next looked under the boat, two days later, the body was gone.”

  “That is true, effendi.”

  “Well, yes, but not the whole truth.”

  The boatman was silent.

  “Tell me, for instance: when did the fiki come?”

  “Fiki?” said the boatman, swallowing.

  “We could fetch him if you liked. But will that be necessary?”

  “No, effendi,” said the boatman sadly.

  “When, then?”

  “In the afternoon, effendi.”

  “He surely did not take the body then?”

  “He came to see that it was there. Then he came again in the night.”

  “You saw him?”

  “Effendi, I—I was sleeping.”

  “Where were you sleeping?”

  The boatman indicated one of the boats.

  “There? Then I think you saw him. Did you not see him, Mohammed Farkas?”

  “Yes, effendi,” the boatman said reluctantly.

  “Did he speak to you?”

  “No, effendi.” The boatman gathered up courage. “And I did not speak to him.”

  “The less you knew about it, the better? That was it, was it?”

  “Yes, effendi.”

  “Well, that was wise of you. And now you are going to be wiser still. For the Mamur Zapt is right beside you. He has heard what you have said, so when I ask you about the fiki again, in the Great Court, you will repeat what you have said and not pretend you did not say it.”

  The boatman went pale.

  “Effendi,” he pleaded, “he will have me killed.”

  “The fiki? I do not think so.”

  “No, not the fiki.”

  “Who, then?”

  ***

  Owen had to hurry back to the Bab el Khalk. He had barely settled himself in his chair when Nikos stuck his head in.

  “Someone else to see you,” he said. “You’re popular today. Though I don’t think it will last. Prince Narouz.”

  “Prince Narouz!” Owen leaped to his feet and hurried to the door, hand outstretched in greeting. “What a relief to see you!”

  “Relief?” said Narouz, taken aback.

  “I feared—Your Highness, do sit down! I am afraid my office is a little spartan. This chair, for instance—” Owen shook his hand. Then, seeing a goggle-eyed Nikos still at the door: “Coffee! Coffee for His Highness!”

  “Coffee!” snapped Nikos, pulling himself together. He disappeared down the corridor. They heard his voice in the distance. “Coffee!”

  “Coffee?” said Narouz, bewildered.

  Owen took him by the arm, held him at arm’s length and inspected him affectionately.

  “You’re all right!” he said fervently.

  “Of course I’m all right. Why shouldn’t I be?”

  Owen shook his hand as if he could hardly believe his eyes.

  “You’re safe!” he said. “That’s the main thing. Your well-being, Prince, must always be my highest consideration.”

  “Well, thank you,” said the Prince. “I am, naturally, gratified. But why exactly—?”

  Owen returned to his desk and sat down.

  “We should have warned you before, Your Highness. I realize that now. We have been watching them for weeks. But we did not wish to alarm you unnecessarily and it was only yesterday that it became clear.”

  “What became clear?”

  “That you were to be the target.”

  “Target!”

  “And then we heard of your sudden call to Alexandria! I don’t mind telling you, Prince, now, that for a moment I was in despair. I had to act quickly. Not too quickly, I hope?” he said, smiling solicitously.

  “I thought for a moment,” said the Prince slightly diffidently, “that I was being—well, arrested.”

  “Oh, Prince!” said Owen, shocked. “Surely not!”

  “Well, they said I was being held.”

  “Held safe. Guarded. Protected,” Owen assured him.

  “Well…” The Prince was silent for a moment. “And what, exactly,” he added, “am I being protected from?”

  “A terrorist group. We have had our eye on them for some time. But it’s only recently that we have begun to suspect…It’s the Agreement, you see. A last, desperate attempt to stop it being signed.”

  “The Agreement? But I’m nothing to do with that.”

  “But, Prince, you are! You’ve been party to the discussions, you’ve attended the sessions—”

  “Only some of them. And, anyway, I’m only there to make up the numbers on the Khedive’s side. He doesn’t trust anyone else—”

  “Well, there you are!” said Owen. “His right-hand man.”

  “But—”

  “Heir to the throne. What better means of offering a dreadful, horrible warning to the Khedive?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s been building up,” said Owen. “We should have spotted it. Your name—”

  “My name?”

  “You’ve seen the newspapers?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “The radical pamphlets? The illicit handbills?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Your name,” said Owen, “everywhere!”

  “But surely—”

  “You have become identified—in the popular mind—with all that is widely hated in Egypt at the present time, a symbol”—where had he heard this before?—“of all that the revolutionary movement is fighting against.”

  “My God!” said the Prince. “Have I?”
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  “It will blow over. It will take a day or two, a week or two, perhaps, but it will blow over. But meanwhile, for the sake of your own safety—”

  “I’ll leave at once,” said the Prince. “I’ll catch the next boat.”

  “No! Too dangerous!” said Owen hastily. “For the next few days it’s absolutely vital that you stay where we can protect you.”

  “Army Headquarters?”

  “I think your own house would do. It will be heavily guarded, I assure you. The one thing, though, that I absolutely insist on is that you must not go out.”

  “You don’t think France would be better?”

  “We couldn’t guard you. No, Prince, you’re safer under our direct protection. In a few days it will all be over.”

  “Well,” said the Prince doubtfully, “if you really think so.”

  “I do. And now it remains for us to make sure that you get home safely, I have ordered an escort—”

  “Oh, good,” said the Prince.

  “Mounted.”

  “Mounted? On camels? But—”

  “There will be guards traveling in your car. Heavily armed guards. You need have no fear.”

  “I am not so sure about that,” said Narouz.

  ***

  For some time Owen had been observing—from a safe distance—the rump of a particularly large, mangy and clearly flea-ridden camel. He stirred restlessly.

  “Why,” he asked Georgiades, “have you brought me here?”

  “Because,” said Georgiades in injured tones, “this is where it all starts.”

  Owen looked round. They were in a large open compound on the edge of the town, just where the quarter gave onto the desert. Scattered around the compound were some two dozen camels, all hobbled by the knees in the desert way. And over beside a wall was a row of about a dozen donkeys, their tails flicking continuously at the flies.

  “Here?”

  “Here. It was, in fact,” said Georgiades, “the donkeys that gave me the idea.”

  “I don’t remember any donkeys,” said Owen cautiously.

  “I suggested, if you remember, that what the fiki may have done was to tack a couple of donkeys on the back of the funeral procession and use them to pick up the arms from the kuttub. Well, I checked up on that. And that,” said Georgiades, “brought me here.”

  “He picked up the donkeys from here?”

  “He picked up the whole funeral procession from here. The fiki has the name in the neighborhood of being a great fixer. If you want anything arranged, be it a wedding or a funeral, a house move or just your latrines emptied, you go to him. And he comes here.”

  “He comes here?” said Owen, surprised. Animals, in Egypt, represented capital, and there was a lot of capital here for a humble fiki.

  “No. It belongs to a big camel contractor. Camels are his main business. The donkeys are just a sideline. The fiki, though, is his local man-on-the-spot. That is, for his less legitimate business.”

  At the far end of the compound some men were sitting on the ground around a brazier drinking tea. Two of them stood up and began to saunter across towards them. Georgiades pulled Owen back into the doorway.

  “What is his less legitimate business?” asked Owen.

  “Let me tell you about his legitimate business first. He buys camels in Syria and Palestine and then has them driven across the desert to the Canal. He picks them up at Kantara and then brings them here, where he sells them off.”

  “For food?”

  Camel meat took the place of beef for the poorer Egyptian.

  “Yes. That is his legitimate business. But it doesn’t take much imagination to see that if you are regularly bringing camels into the country and across to Cairo, you can also bring other things.”

  “Such as arms?”

  “And hashish. They put the hashish in little cylinders which they get the camels to swallow. Then when they slaughter them they extricate the cylinders.”

  “So the slaughters are part of it?”

  “Yes, and the fiki another part. He arranges for the distribution once they get here. You see,” said Georgiades, “that was another thing that struck me. Distribution. Even small parcels of arms are heavy. They’ve got to be carried. Donkeys are the obvious way of carrying them. And that brings us back to here. Donkeys are the clue to it all.”

  The two men had reached the camels now and were checking their saddlebags.

  “So the fiki gets the arms here,” said Owen, “and then distributes them by donkey. Does he distribute the hashish too?”

  “The lot. He’s into most things round here.”

  “And do you know who he distributes them to?”

  “That’s what has taken the time,” said Georgiades. “I had to find a driver I could bribe.”

  “But you’ve found one?”

  “Yes. It cost a lot.” Georgiades gave Owen a sideways glance. “You’re going to have to square this with Accounts.”

  Owen winced.

  “It’s audit,” he said. “They send someone over from England. He doesn’t always understand the way we do things here.”

  “It’s in a good cause. Anyway, I got a lot of information from him, but of course he didn’t do all the deliveries himself so it took him a bit of time to find out the other ones. However”—Georgiades tapped his pocket—“I have now got a list.”

  The two men, having checked the saddlebags, walked away again.

  “Let me have a look.”

  “It’s just deliveries. They might be arms, they might be hashish or they might be anything else. Even ordinary things like pianos. But mostly its fringe illicit. Radical literature, for example.”

  “Pamphlets?”

  “And handbills. The lot. Anything bulky that has to be transported around the place.” Georgiades dropped his voice to a confidential whisper. “Let me give you some advice. Arrest all the donkeys in town. That’s the way to break the radical press.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Your friend Hargazy, for instance,” said Georgiades.

  “He uses these donkeys?”

  “A lot.”

  “And the fiki organizes it for him?”

  “For him and others. He’s a busy man. As we have noticed.”

  He took the list out of his pocket and gave it to Owen.

  “There’s one on the back that will interest you.”

  Owen turned the page over.

  “Narouz!”

  “Narouz, question mark.”

  “Why ‘question mark’?”

  “Because I’m not sure he’s in the same category as the others: someone being delivered something.”

  “Then why is he here?”

  “The driver reports that one day he was delivering a load with the fiki and they met Narouz. It seemed to be by appointment. He mentioned it because he had been impressed.”

  “Where was this?”

  “You’ll be surprised.”

  The two men approached again. This time they unhobbled two of the camels and goaded them, protesting, to their feet. Then they took them by their lead ropes and headed out of the compound.

  Georgiades watched them until they were halfway down the street and then touched Owen’s arm.

  “These ones we’ll follow,” he said.

  As they threaded their way through the narrow streets, the people sitting in the shade of the open doorways did not give them a second glance. In this part of the city there were camels coming and going all the time, carrying wood, carrying water, carrying green fodder for the cab horses in the center of the town.

  At this time of day, too, there were few people about. The sun was at its hottest and most people had retreated inside. The little stalls with their tomatoes and cucumbers and gherkins were deserted, apparently abandoned to whoe
ver cared to pillage them. Only sometimes, underneath the stalls, in the shade, the owner was sleeping.

  Following the soft pad of the camels along the sandy street, Owen could feel the sweat running off him. When it was so hot, the slightest motion set the moisture trickling.

  They came to narrower, darker streets where the houses were high and kept out the sun. This was a residential area and there were few shops. The houses had their shutters closed. Everyone was indoors at their siesta.

  They crossed a broader street which seemed vaguely familiar. Owen looked down it. At the far end it broadened out into a crossroads in which there seemed to be a large market.

  “The souk?”

  “Al-Gadira,” said Georgiades.

  The camels padded on.

  And then, as the houses became smaller again and moved further apart, and the shade suddenly dwindled and they became conscious again of the oppression of the sun, they came to an open square.

  The camels crossed the square and came to a stop outside a low building on the opposite side which Owen recognized at once.

  The Police Station! The station he had come to on that first afternoon when all this business had started, the station from which he had first learned about the body on that sandbank.

  “This is it,” said Georgiades.

  “It?”

  “The place where the fiki met Narouz.”

  In the shade in front of the building a man was lying. He stood up as the camel drivers reached him. It was the corporal, Ibrahim, he of the pole. He saw the camels, went up the steps of the building and shouted to someone inside.

  After a moment the District Chief emerged. He greeted the drivers and then walked over to the camels.

  He stood for a moment looking and then bent down beside one of them. Owen saw him put his hand up under it and begin to palpate the animal’s lower stomach.

  The camel, never the most tractable of beasts, stood this for a moment and then began to sit. The Chief ducked nimbly out of the way and said something, smiling, to the camel drivers.

  He moved on to the second camel. This was less tolerant and snatched its head back and tried to bite at him. The camel driver cursed and heaved its head round with the rope.

  The camel then shied round and the Chief had to dodge swiftly out of the way of its hooves.

  He seemed satisfied, however, and waved the camels on round to the rear of the building. Then he went back inside.