Mamur Zapt and the Return of the Carpet

Owen drank up his coffee.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I am afraid that is a problem I cannot help you with.’ He stood up to go. ‘If you will excuse—’

‘The Khedive wants reports.’

‘Reports?’

‘Daily. On the progress you are making in tracking down Nuri Pasha’s killers.’

‘That is a matter for the Parquet.’

‘And the Mamur Zapt. Or so you said.’

‘Security aspects only.’

‘Security,’ said the Turk, ‘is what the Khedive is especially interested in.’

Owen pulled himself together.

‘If the Khedive would genuinely like reports,’ he said, ‘then he shall certainly have them.’

‘Send them to me,’ said Guzman. ‘Directly.’

‘Very well,’ said Owen. ‘I’ll see you get them directly from the Agent.’

‘The Khedive has spoken to the Agent. Directly to me. With a copy to the Agent.’

Owen found the Turk watching him closely. He put on a charming smile.

‘Of course,’ he said.

‘Good!’ said the Turk. ‘See to it.’ And walked out.

McPhee swore softly to himself.

‘See to it!’ he reported. ‘I’ll bloody see to him. Just wait till I get to Garvin!’

‘He’s very confident,’ said Owen. ‘He must have got it fixed already.’

‘I’ll bloody unfix it, then. Or Garvin will. We can’t have the Mamur Zapt reporting to the bloody Khedive or where the hell will we be?’

Owen was thinking.

‘Gorst must have agreed.’

‘The stupid bastard!’

There was little liking among the old hands for the liberal Gorst.

‘If he has agreed,’ said Owen, ‘Garvin will find it hard to get him to change his mind.’

‘Stupid bastard!’ said McPhee again. He got up. ‘I’ll go straight to Garvin.’

‘Don’t let it worry you too much,’ said Owen.

McPhee stopped and turned and opened his mouth.

‘If the Khedive wants reports,’ said Owen, ‘he can have them.’

He winked deliberately.

‘All the same,’ said McPhee, soothed, ‘it’s the principle—’

Walking back down the corridor Owen thought that it was doubly advisable that no students should get into Abdin Square.

‘Yes,’ said Mahmoud. ‘The Khedive has been on to us, too.’

They were sitting outside an Arab café in one of the small streets off the Place Bab el Khalk. The café was tiny, with one dark inner room in which several Arabs were sitting smoking from narghilehs, the traditional native water pipe, with its hose and water jar, too cumbersome to be carried around so hired out at cafés. Outside in the street was a solitary table drawn back into the shade of the wall. The café was midway between the Parquet and Owen’s office off the Bab el Khalk: on neutral ground.

‘Reports?’

Mahmoud nodded. ‘Daily.’

‘Why is he so worried?’ asked Owen.

Mahmoud shrugged. ‘Perhaps he’s scared. First Nuri, then him.’

‘There have been others,’ said Owen. ‘Why this sudden interest?’

‘He knows something that we don’t?’ offered Mahmoud.

‘If he does,’ said Owen, ‘he’s not going to tell us.’

‘He has his own people,’ said Mahmoud.

‘Guzman?’

‘And others.’

A forage mule made its way soporifically towards them. Its load was so huge as almost to span the narrow street. Owen wondered if they would have to move, but at the last moment the mule was twitched aside and the load, bowing almost to the ground, grazed the table.

They were meeting at Mahmoud’s request. Later that morning he had rung Owen proposing a coffee before lunch.

Mahmoud waited until the mule had passed on down the street and then said: ‘I have been checking on the gun.’

‘Find anything?’

‘Part of a consignment missing last March from the barracks at Kantara. They suspected a sergeant but nothing was ever proved. All they could get him for was negligence – he was in charge of the store. He’s done six months and is due out about now.’

‘Probably sold them,’ said Owen.

Mahmoud nodded. ‘That’s what they thought.’

‘No lead?’

‘He wouldn’t talk.’

‘He won’t talk now,’ said Owen, ‘especially if he’s due out.’

‘If he was told he’d be all right?’

‘Out of the goodness of his heart? No chance.’

‘If he thought he was just shopping an Egyptian—’ suggested Mahmoud tentatively.

His eyes met Owen’s.

He could be right, Owen was forced to admit. In the obscure code of the ordinary Tommy, shopping a mere Egyptian might not count.

‘Just worth trying.’

‘I was wondering—’ began Mahmoud, and then hesitated.

Owen knew what he was thinking. It would have to be an Englishman and would probably need to be army rather than civilian.

‘Would you like me to have a go?’

‘It might be best,’ said Mahmoud.

Owen lunched at the Gezira and then, unusually, went back to his office. Late in the afternoon, when the sun’s fierce heat had softened, he went again into the Place Bab el Khalk.

He was in a light linen suit and wore a tarboosh, the pot-like hat of the Egyptian, on his head. With his dark Celtic colouring and the years of sunburn he looked a Levantine of some sort. He carried an Arabic newspaper.

He chose a tea-stall on the eastern side of the Place and perched himself on a stool. The tea-seller brought him a glass of Russian tea.

From where he sat he could see along the Sharia Taht er Rebaa to where the massive battlemented walls of the Mosque el Mouayad rose on the left. One or two little bunches of black-gowned figures were already beginning to spill out on to the Sharia. From somewhere behind the Mosque came a confined noise which, as he listened, began to settle down into a rhythmic chanting.

‘Wa-ta-ni. Wa-ta-ni. Wa-ta-ni.’

The tea-seller came out from the other side of the counter and looked uneasily down the street.

‘There will be trouble,’ he said.

On the pavement behind him a barber was shaving a plump, sleepy-looking Greek. The barber put his razor in the bowl beside the chair and came out on to the street also.

‘Yes,’ he said, peering towards the Mosque, ‘there will be trouble.’

The Greek opened one eye. ‘What trouble?’

‘Students,’ said the barber, wiping the soapsuds off his hands on to his gown.

‘Again?’ said the Greek. ‘What is it this time?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the barber. ‘What is it this time?’ he called to a bean-seller at an adjoining stall.

The bean-seller was serving some hungry-looking students with bowls of ful madammas, red fava beans cooked in oil and garlic.

‘What is it this time?’ he asked them.

‘We don’t know,’ said the students. ‘It is the students of el Azhar, not us.’

‘They are going to Abdin Square,’ volunteered one of the students, ‘to demonstrate against the Khedive.’

‘Much good that will do,’ said the bean-seller. ‘They will just get their heads busted.’

‘Someone has to,’ said the student.

‘But not you,’ said the bean-seller firmly.

‘You sound like my father,’ said the student.

‘Your father and I,’ said the bean-seller, ‘are men of experience. Learn from us.’

‘Anyway, I cannot go with them today,’ said the student. ‘I have my exams tomorrow.’

‘Have not the el Azhar students exams also?’ called the Greek.

The students shook their heads.

‘They’re not like us,’ they said.

Owen guessed them to be engineering students. Engineering, like other modern subjects, was studied at the Governmental Higher Schools. At el Azhar, the great Islamic university of Cairo, the students studied only the Koran.

The students finished their bowls and left. The bean-seller began clearing away his stall. At the far end of the Taht er Rebaa a crowd was coming into view.

‘You carry on shaving,’ the Greek ordered. ‘I don’t want you running away before you’ve finished.’

‘Who is running away?’ said the barber. ‘There is still plenty of time.’

‘I am running away,’ said the bean-seller. ‘Definitely.’

At this time in the afternoon the Place Bab el Khalk was fairly empty. A few women, dressed in black and heavily-veiled in this part of the city, were slip-slopping across the square, water-jars on heads, to fetch water for the evening meal. Men sat in the open air cafés or at the street-stalls drinking tea. Children played on the balconies, in the doorways, in the gutter.

The bean-seller apart, no one appeared to be paying much attention to the approaching demonstrators, though Owen knew they were well aware of them. When the time came, they would slip back off the streets—not too far, they wouldn’t want to miss anything—and take refuge in the open-fronted shops or in the houses. Every balcony would be crowded.

He could pick out the head of the column distinctly now. They were marching in disciplined, purposeful fashion behind three large green banners and were setting a brisk pace. Behind them the Sharia was packed with black-gowned figures.

Some of the more nervous café-owners were beginning to fold up chairs and tables and move them indoors. Obliging customers picked up their own chairs and took them into the shops and doorways, where they sat down again and continued their absorbing conversations. There were no women on the street now, and children were being called inside.

The barber wiped the last suds from the Greek’s face with a brave flourish.

The Greek felt his chin.

‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘What about here?’

‘Perfect,’ said the barber.

‘Show me!’ commanded the Greek.

The barber reluctantly produced a tin mirror and held it before him.

‘It’s lop-sided,’ complained the Greek. ‘You’ve done one side and not the other!’

‘Both sides I have done,’ said the barber, casting an uneasy glance down the street. ‘It is just that one side of your face is longer than the other.’

The Greek insisted, and the barber began to snip and scrape at the offending part.

The tea-seller lifted his huge brass urn off the counter and took it up an alleyway. Owen felt in his pocket for the necessary milliemes.

The procession was about a hundred yards away now. At this stage it was still fairly orderly. The students had formed up into ranks about twenty abreast and were marching in a disciplined column, though with the usual untidy fringe around the flanks, which would melt away at the first sign of trouble.

The barber dropped his scissors into a metal bowl with a clang and hurriedly pulled the protective cloth from off the Greek. The Greek stood up and began to wipe his face. The barber threw his things together and made off down a sidestreet. As he went, the Greek dropped some milliemes in the bowl.

Owen folded his newspaper and stepped back into the protective cover of a carpet shop. The shop was, like all the shops, without a front, but the carpets might prove a useful shield if things got really nasty.

The Greek came over and stood beside him.

‘Not long now,’ he said.

The head of the procession entered the Place. Owen’s professional eye picked out among the black gowns several figures in European clothes. These were almost certainly not students but full-time retainers of the various political parties, maintained by them to marshal their own meetings and break up those of their rivals.

As the column marched past, the students seemed to become progressively younger. El Azhar took students as young as thirteen, and some of the students at the back of the column could have been no more than fourteen or fifteen.

The procession was now strung out across the Place, the bulk of it in the open space in the middle and the head approaching the street which led up to Abdin Square.

An open car suddenly shot out of a street at right angles to the procession, cut across in front of it, and stopped. In it was McPhee.

He stood up and waited for the marchers to halt. The four armed policemen in the car with him leaned over the side of the car and trained their rifles on the front row of the demonstrators.

The procession hesitated, wavered, and then came to a stop. Those behind bumped into those in front, spread round the sides and formed a semi-circle around the car.

McPhee began to speak.

The crowd listened in silence for a brief moment and then started muttering. One or two shouts were heard, and then more, and the chanting started up again. The crowd began to press forward at the edges.

Owen saw the first missiles and heard the warning shots.

Then, to the right, came the sound of a bugle and Owen looked up, with the crowd, to see a troop of mounted policemen advancing at the trot.

This was the pride of the Cairo Police: all ex-Egyptian Army cavalry men, all with long police service, experienced, tough and disciplined, mounted on best quality Syrian Arab stallions expertly trained for riot work.

They advanced in three rows, spaced out to give the men swinging room.

Each man had a long pick-axe handle tied to his right wrist by a leather thong.

At an order the handles were raised.

And then the troop was among the crowd. Handles rose and fell. The crowd opened up, and there were horses in the gaps, forcing them open still further. They split the crowd into fragments, and round each fragment the horses wheeled and circled, and the sticks rose and fell.

Whenever a group formed, the horses were on to them.

Students fell to the ground and either scrabbled away from the horses’ hooves or lay motionless. All over the Place were little crumpled heaps.

And now there were very few groups, just people fleeing singly, and no matter how fast they fled, the horses always outpaced them.

All this while, McPhee had stayed in the car, watching. Now he signalled with his hand, and out of the street behind him emerged a mass of policemen on foot.

They spread out into a long, single line and began to work systematically across the Place.

Anyone who was standing they clubbed. Behind them, in an area of the Place which steadily became larger, there was no one standing at all, just people sitting, dazed, holding their heads, or black gowns stretched out.

The last groups broke and fled, harried by the horses.

‘Very expertly done,’ said the Greek.

A student darted in among the stalls and tables close by them, a rider in hot pursuit. The student threw himself on the ground behind a stack of chairs. The horse halted and the policeman leaned over and hit the student once or twice with his stick. Then he rode away.

The student got to his feet, panting and sobbing. He looked back across the Place and saw the line of foot policemen approaching. In a second he had shot off again.

He reminded Owen of a hare on the run, the same heaving sides, panicked eyes, even, with his turban gone and his shaven head, the hare’s laid-back ears.

Another student rushed along behind the row of deserted street-stalls. He brushed right past Owen and then doubled back up an alleyway.

‘That one!’ snapped Owen. ‘Follow him! Find out where he goes!’

Georgiades, the Greek, who was one of Owen’s best agents, was gone in a flash.

The student was Nuri Pasha’s secretary and son, the difficult Ahmed.

The tea-seller put the urn back on his stall with a thump. Without asking, he drew a glass of tea and handed it to Owen.

‘Watching,’ he said, ‘is thirsty work.’

The only students on the square now were walking in ones and twos, sometimes supporting a third. Around the edges of the square, though, the foot police were still in action, prising out the students from their hiding-places among the stalls and chairs. Owen was pleased to see that McPhee had them well in hand. It was only too easy for them to get out of control in a situation such as this.

McPhee, helmetless and with his fair hair all over the place, was plainly enjoying himself. His face was lit up with excitement. It was not that he was a violent man; he just loved, as he would have put it, a bit of a scrap. Strange, thought Owen, for he was a civilian, an ex-teacher. On second thoughts perhaps it was not so strange.

He was using a cane, not a pick-handle. He had a revolver at his waist but had not drawn it throughout the whole business, even when he had been threatened in the car.

He was driving slowly round the square now, ostensibly chivvying the students, in fact, Owen noted, calling off his men.

At the far side of the Place the Mounted Troop had reformed and was sitting at ease, the horses still excited and breathing heavily, pick-handles now hanging loosely again from the riders’ wrists.

Georgiades reappeared.

He spotted the tea-seller and came up to the stall.

‘Here is a man who deserves to be favoured of Fortune,’ he said, ‘the first man back on the street with his tea.’

‘I shall undoubtedly be rich,’ said the tea-seller, ‘but not yet.’

He made Georgiades some mint tea. The Greek took the glass and stood casually by Owen.

‘See how our friend is already rewarded!’ he said to Owen. ‘Heads are the only thing damaged on the street today.’

‘And my head not among them,’ said the tea-seller.

He took the lid off the urn, looked inside and went to fetch some more water.

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