The Snake-Catcher’s Daughter
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Control, though, was another matter. Debate in the Arab world tended to be conducted at voice top anyway, and in the press the normal temperature was feverish. Cairo had taken to newspapers late but with gusto and there were hundreds of them. Each faction had at least two newspapers (two, because any group in Cairo could be guaranteed to split at least two ways) and they vied with each other in the extremity of their views and the vehemence with which they expressed them. Even the weather reports were fiercely disputed.
How to distinguish the normal incandescent from the potentially explosive? Owen usually did not try. After a year or two’s experience he developed a sixth sense which alerted him to passages likely to bring rival communities to blows. The rest he left well alone, on the assumption that readers were more interested in the violence of rhetoric than in the violence of action: an approach, however, which his superiors did not always understand.
The real value of the newspapers (to Owen) was that beneath the hyperbole it was sometimes possible to detect new concerns and growth of feeling. They were sometimes, despite everything, a useful source of intelligence. Another, of course, was the gossip of Cairo’s café culture. What better, then, than to combine the two? Where better for the Mamur Zapt, the Head of Political Intelligence, to sit than in a well-populated Arab café with all his intelligence material to hand? So, at least, argued Owen; and turned to the sports pages.
He became aware of someone trying covertly to attract his attention. It was a man at an adjoining table. His face seemed familiar, although it took a little while for Owen to place him. Not one of his agents but a man who sometimes gave his agents useful information. A Greek, with the dark suit and pot-like red tarboosh of the Effendi, or office worker.
‘Have you heard about Philipides?’ he said.
‘Philipides?’
‘He’s coming out tomorrow.’ Misunderstanding Owen’s puzzlement, he said: ‘It may not be in the Arab papers. It’s in the Greek ones.’
‘What’s special about Philipides?’ asked Owen.
The man smiled, obviously thinking Owen was playing with him.
‘The Mamur Zapt, of all people, should know that,’ he said.
He put some milliemes out for the waiter.
‘Garvin ought to be interested,’ he said. ‘Or so they say.’
He went off through the tables. Owen sipped his coffee and searched his memory. The name meant nothing to him.
On the other side of the street he saw someone he knew and waved to him. The man waved back and came across. His name was Georgiades. Another Greek, but this time definitely not an Effendi. No tarboosh, an open-necked shirt, casual, crumpled cotton trousers held up by a belt over which his stomach bulged uncomfortably. He pointed proudly to it.
‘See that?’ he said. ‘Another notch! Rosa’s cutting down on the food. It’s been a struggle for her. All Greek women are taught to fatten their husbands up but she’s decided she’s had enough. It’s fattening the goose for killing, she says. She and her grandmother are at loggerheads again over it.’
He sat down at Owen’s table and mopped his brow. There were dark patches of sweat beneath his armpits, on his chest, on his back and even on the thighs of his trousers.
‘Does the name Philipides mean anything to you?’ said Owen.
The Greek thought for a bit, then nodded.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Owen, ‘but someone’s just told me the Mamur Zapt, above all, ought to know. Above all. That’s why I’m wondering.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Georgiades, ‘but which Mamur Zapt?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You or your predecessor?’
‘There was a gap,’ said Owen. ‘McPhee stood in.’
‘No,’ said Georgiades. ‘Before.’
‘There was something about corruption, wasn’t there?’
‘There was.’
‘And Philipides was something to do with it?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Can you give me some details?’
Georgiades considered.
‘I think perhaps you ought to ask Garvin,’ he said.
3
‘Philipides?’ said Garvin, musing. ‘So he’s out, is he?’
‘Does it interest you?’
‘Not much. They’ve all got to come out sometime.’
‘My informant thought it should interest you.’
Garvin shrugged.
‘I can’t think why.’
‘Is there a chance he might be looking for revenge?’
‘I put him inside, certainly. But he can hardly complain about that. He was as crooked as they come.’
‘Is there any reason for him to have a particular grudge against you?’
‘Not really. The Parquet handled it all. I was just one of the witnesses. Mind you, I set the traps.’
‘Perhaps that was it.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so. There was nothing special about it.’
‘It caught him,’ Owen pointed out.
‘I’ve caught lots of people,’ said Garvin. ‘That doesn’t mean to say they all want revenge. No, if there was anyone who wanted to get his own back, it wouldn’t be him.’
‘Who would it be, then?’
‘His boss.’
‘Who was?’
Garvin grinned.
‘Guess,’ he suggested.
‘The Mamur Zapt?’
‘You’ve been talking to someone.’
‘Georgiades. He suggested I talk to you!’
Garvin was amused.
‘Prudent fellow,’ he said.
‘What’s it all about?’
‘It’s straightforward, really. It was not long after I moved here from Alexandria. There was a lot to sort out. My God, you’d never believe how much there was, they were back in the last century –’
‘McPhee here then?’
‘No, that was later. He came because of this. Anyway, one day I got home and found a small parcel on the hall table. I opened it and found a pair of diamond earrings. I was a bit surprised, thought my wife had been buying things; hell, we hadn’t got much money in those days, so I asked her about it when she got back. She didn’t know anything about the parcel. Anyway, I asked around and found that it had been brought by one of Philipides’s orderlies. So the next morning I had Philipides in and asked him about it. He said, big mistake, it was meant for someone else, the orderly had got confused. Anyway, I let him have the earrings back and thought no more about it.’
‘And what was Philipides at this time?’
‘He was a police inspector in the Abdin district and had the name of being the Mamur Zapt’s right-hand man. I didn’t put the two together though till some months later when I heard that one of my own officers had been pawning his wife’s jewellery to raise money to purchase promotion. Well, as you can imagine, I had him in. It took a bit of time but eventually I got from him that Philipides was demanding the money as the price of the Mamur Zapt’s recommendation.’
Garvin looked at Owen.
‘It was significant in those days. The Commandant then was Wainwright and he didn’t have a clue. The Mamur Zapt just twisted him round his finger. What the Mamur Zapt said, went. Well, I was pretty shocked, I can tell you. I hadn’t realized things were as bad as that. I made some discreet inquiries and found that it was quite an accepted practice. But what the hell was I to do?’
‘If the officer had confessed –’
Garvin gestured impatiently.
‘Yes, but, you see, I couldn’t go to Wainwright. I was just a new boy in those days and Deputy Commandant carried no clout. Wainwright took the Mamur Zapt’s word on everything.’
‘Yes, but if you had the evidence –’
‘It wasn’t enough. If it came to it, the Mamur Zapt could disown Philipides. Say it was nothing to do with him. I had to show there was a connection between the two.’
‘So how did you do it?’
‘Set a trap. I told the original officer to let Philipides know that he had confessed to me and then I tapped the telephone lines between Philipides and the Mamur Zapt.’
‘Telephone?’ The telephone system in Cairo was still in its infancy and largely consigned to Government offices; at the time Garvin was referring to, it would have been younger still.
‘Yes,’ Garvin replied, ‘The Mamur Zapt had one of the earliest ones.’
‘Did it work?’
‘Up to a point, yes. Philipides rang him that afternoon and said enough to incriminate the pair of them. I took it all down and showed it to Wainwright the next morning.’
He walked over to the window and poured himself some water from the earthenware pitcher which stood next to the shutters of all Cairo offices where it would cool.
‘Even then it wasn’t simple,’ he said. ‘Wainwright just wouldn’t believe me. I had to go to the Consul-General. Over his head. That made me popular, I can tell you! In the end, I got the C-G to agree but it took three weeks to persuade Wainwright to suspend the two.’
‘By which time –’
‘No, they couldn’t very well destroy the evidence. They tried intimidation first, put a lot of pressure on the officer. I had to give him an armed guard. I was terrified he would give way. They tried it on me, too.’
Owen smiled.
‘Yes, well, that didn’t get them very far,’ said Garvin. ‘But it was pretty unpleasant. I carried a gun with me all the time. Then they tried to discredit me. They dredged up the earrings. Said that I was in the habit of accepting presents and only made a fuss this time because I wanted more. Fortunately, I’d told Judge Willis all about it the day it happened. It just shows you can’t be too careful.’
He pushed the shutters slightly apart to encourage a breeze. Normally they kept the offices dark and cool but the prolonged hot spell had made them like ovens.
‘Next, they said it was political.’
‘Political!’
‘Yes. They said it was all a trick to get Egyptians out and British in. They made great play of that when it came to the trial, and the Parquet was content to let it run because they wanted to make their own political point. They gave me a real grilling. Went on for days. Apart from the officer, and he was my subordinate, I was the chief witness, you see. To the telephone conversation, anyway, and that was crucial, because it was only that, really, that tied the Mamur Zapt in. In the end, though, it suited them to go for a conviction.’
‘Which they got.’
‘Yes. Well, I say “got”. Both were found guilty and sent to jail but the Mamur Zapt was released almost at once on compassionate grounds. He knew too much about all the people involved. The politicians were dead scared that if they didn’t look after him, he would spill all the beans.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Enjoying a fat pension in Damascus.’
‘It sounds as if he’s got it all worked out,’ said Owen. ‘I’ll bear his example in mind.’
‘There are other examples, too, you might bear in mind,’ said Garvin. ‘Wainwright got the push shortly after. I got promotion.’
‘Thank you. What about McPhee?’
‘That bum!’
‘How does he come into it?’
‘Well, they needed a replacement as Mamur Zapt. The one thing he had to be, in the circumstances, was honest.’
‘Well, he is that,’ said Owen.
‘I managed to get it made temporary. The price was that when they filled the post he got moved sideways to Deputy Commandant. I’m trying to make that,’ said Garvin, ‘temporary, too.’
In this hot weather, Owen liked to sleep outside. He had a small garden, which the house’s previous occupant, a Greek, had developed in the Mediterranean style rather than the English, more for shade than colour. It was thick with shrubs but there was a little open space beneath a large orange tree and it was here that Owen disposed his bed, not too far in under the branches in case creepy-crawlies dropped on him during the night, but not too far out, either, where the moonlight might prevent him from sleeping.
This morning he awoke with the sun, as he always did, and at once reached his hand down for his slippers, tapping them automatically on the ground to dislodge any scorpion that might have crept in. Then he slipped them on and made for the shower. The water came from a tank in the roof and was still warm from the previous day’s sun. He was just reaching out happily for the soap when he heard the slither behind him and froze. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the tail disappearing into the wall.
‘Jesus!’ he said, and dispensed with the shower for that morning.
The snake catcher came that afternoon. He was a gnarled, weather-beaten little man with snake bites all over his hands and carrying a leather bag and a cane.
‘Another one?’ he said. ‘It’s the hot weather that’s bringing them out.’
‘I didn’t see what sort it was,’ said Owen, ‘I just caught a glimpse of the tail.’
He took the snake catcher to the showerhouse and pointed out the hole. The snake catcher sniffed at it and said: ‘Yes, that’s the way he came, but he doesn’t live there.’
He went round to the back of the showerhouse and showed Owen the hole where the snake had got out. A slight, almost imperceptible track led into the undergrowth.
‘Not been doing much gardening, have you?’ said the snake catcher. ‘He’s all right in there.’
He followed the trail in carefully.
‘There he is!’ he said suddenly. ‘See him? Down by that root.’
It would be just the head and eyes that were visible. Owen couldn’t see anything.
The snake catcher stood and thought a bit. He was working out where the tail was.
After a while he put down the leather bag beside Owen and circled round behind the snake. This was the tricky part, he had told Owen on a previous occasion. The next bit was more obviously dramatic but this bit was tricky because the tail would often be coiled around roots or undergrowth and it was not always easy to tear it loose.
Owen liked to watch a craftsman at work. He took up a position where he could see.
The snake catcher began to move cautiously into the undergrowth, peering intently before him. He came to a stop and just stood there for a while, looking.
Suddenly, he pounced. The snake came up with his hand, wriggling and twisting. He threw it out into the open. It tried at once to squirm away but he cut off its escape by beating with his cane. The snake came to ground in the middle of the clearing.
The snake catcher crept forward and then suddenly brought the cane down hard on the snake’s neck, pressing it in to the ground. Then, holding the cane down with his left hand, he reached out with his right hand and seized the snake with thumb and forefinger, forcing the jaws open. He dropped the cane and held out the skirts of his galabeah so that the snake could strike at them. He let it strike several times. Yellow beads of venom appeared on the cloth. When he was satisfied that all the poison had been drawn, he opened his bag and dropped the cobra inside. Snake catchers hardly ever killed their snakes.
‘What will you do with it?’
‘Dispose of it through the trade. Some shops want them. Charmers. Some people buy them for pets.’
‘You’d need to know what you’re doing.’
‘Most people don’t,’ he said. ‘That’s why there’s always a demand for new ones. They die easy.’
‘It’s not the other way round? The owners that die?’
‘We take the fangs out first. That makes them safe. The poison flows along the fang, you see. The trouble is, they use the teeth for killing their food. Once they’re gone, they don’t last very long.’
‘What about milking?’ asked Owen, displaying his newfound knowledge.
‘It’s all right if you know what you’re doing. There is a sac behind the fangs where the poison is. You let it strike – that’s what I was doing – until the sac is drained dry. Then you’re all right for about a fortnight.’
‘If you had a lot of snakes,’ said Owen, thinking about the cistern where they had found McPhee, ‘you’d have to know each one.’
‘Well, you would know each one, wouldn’t you, if it was your job.’
They walked back to the house.
‘Do you know a snake catcher over in Gamaliya?’
‘There are several. Which one?’
‘He’s on the Place of Tombs side.’
‘Abu?’
‘That’s the one. He’s got a daughter.’
The snake catcher smiled.
‘He’s got a right one there!’ he said.
‘She seems to know a lot about it.’
‘Oh, she knows a lot about it, all right. She wants to be one of us. Take on from him after he’s gone, like. But it won’t do. She’s a girl, isn’t she? We’re a special sect, you know. The Rifa’i. You’ve got to be one of us before you’re allowed to do it. It’s very strict. Got to be, hasn’t it? And we don’t have women. It would confuse the snakes. Anyway, it’s not a woman’s job.’
‘How come she knows so much about it?’
‘Watched her dad. He let her see too much, in my opinion. He wanted a boy, you see, and then when one didn’t come he got in the habit of treating her as one.’
‘Well, she seems a lively girl.’
‘Yes, but who’d want a daughter like that? What a business when it came to marrying her off! You might have to pay her husband extra.’
When Owen arrived at her appartement, Zeinab wasn’t there. She arrived half an hour later.
‘Well, what do you expect?’ she said. ‘If you think I’m going to be waiting for you half naked in bed every time you drop in, you’d better think again.’
Zeinab had, unfortunately, not forgotten the business about the girl. It had been a mistake telling her. For some obscure reason she blamed him.
‘And, incidentally, what happened to that diamond?’
Owen fished in his pocket and took it out. Zeinab inspected it critically.
‘Cheap!’ she pronounced. ‘They’ve certainly got you worked out, haven’t they?’
Owen put the stone back in his pocket.
‘Is that a good idea?’ asked Zeinab. ‘Going around with it in your pocket?’
‘It’s all right,’ Owen assured her. ‘It’s safer there than in the Bab-el-Khalk.’
Zeinab began to feel motherly feelings.
‘Yes, I’m sure, darling. But is it a good idea all the same? Oughtn’t you to give it to someone? If you keep it, you see,’ she said, pronouncing the words very slowly, as to an idiot, ‘they may say you’ve deliberately kept it.’
‘I’m keeping it as evidence.’
‘Yes, but –’ said Zeinab, motherliness struggling against exasperation.
‘I’ve booked it in,’ Owen assured her.
‘Did you book the girl in, too, while you were at it?’ asked Zeinab tartly.
Owen overtook McPhee just as he was going up the first steps of the Bab-el-Khalk. He put an arm round him solicitously.
‘How are you feeling, old chap?’
‘Better now, thanks.’
‘You still look a bit groggy.’
‘I’m shaking it off. It was a big dose, I suppose,’ McPhee admitted.
‘Yes … and in this heat … Look, old chap, why don’t you take a few days off? Go and look at some monasteries somewhere … Sinai …’
‘I don’t like –’
‘I can look after it all for a few days. It would do you good. Better to shake it off completely, you know, not go on struggling against it … This heat.’
‘Well thank you, Gareth. I’ll think about it. Yes, I’ll think about it.’
‘It goes on, doesn’t it,’ he said to Garvin as they passed in the corridor, ‘this heat? Could do with a bit of fresh air. Wish I was at the coast …’
‘The coast …’ murmured Garvin reflectively.
Getting rid of those two would get rid of half the difficulty, he told himself. By the time they came back they would have forgotten all about it. He had no intention whatsoever of trying to find out what had happened to McPhee at the Zzarr. As far as he could see, all that had happened was that they’d slipped him something to make sure he didn’t see what he wasn’t supposed to see. It had been a bit nasty putting him in the cistern with all those snakes, though. Still, you could look at it another way, if the girl was going there regularly to milk them, she’d be bound to find him. And then, he’d have woken up anyway once the drug had worn off. Christ, what an awakening! No, the whole thing was best left alone. If, of course, it could be left alone …
The first indication that it couldn’t came not, as he had half-expected, from rumblings in the Gamaliya but from the press. There was a paragraph in one of the fundamentalist weeklies about Christian interference in local religious rites. No details were given but the McPhee incident was obviously being referred to.
Owen was a little surprised. He had expected, following the visit from Sheikh Musa, grumblings at the local level but, given the secrecy of the event and the unwillingness of Sheikh Musa to give it publicity, he had not expected it to reach the press. A couple of days later there was another reference to it, in the Nationalist press this time and with more detail. And then a day or so after, it was picked up yet again, more fiercely, in a sectarian paper which was critical of both the offender – now named unequivocally as an Englishman – and of the local religious authorities.
It was clear that the tip-off had not come from Sheikh Musa. Who had it come from, then? Owen sat back and thought. Was there something after all in Garvin’s supposition that someone was trying to set up McPhee?
This looked very like an orchestrated campaign. He thought about it a little more and then decided to test if it was by inserting a mild spoke in their wheel. He would excise all press reference to the incident for a week or two. It wouldn’t stop publication entirely since there was a large and thriving underground press in Cairo, but it would force someone’s hand if they were trying to mount a campaign. They would have to take the greater risk of illicit publication, and he could have the printers watched in the hope of picking up anyone new who came into the market.
It seemed to work, for after about a week the references in the press died down. He waited for the approaches to the underground printers. Then one morning he came in to the Bab-el-Khalk to find Nikos waiting for him.
‘There’s been an attack on a Coptic shop in the Gamaliya,’ he said.
Owen hardly needed to ask where it was.
‘Near the Place of Tombs? Right, I’ll go there.’
The Copts, the original inhabitants of the city – they had been there long before the Muslims arrived – were Christians, and were usually the first targets of any religious unrest.
He found the shop easily enough. There was a little knot of people standing in front of it. There was no broken glass. Shops in the traditional quarters, like the houses, did not have glass windows. They were open to the street. Instead, though, there were bits of wood lying everywhere. At night, the shopkeepers drew wooden shutters across their shops and these had obviously been broken open.
He couldn’t at first make out what kind of shop it was. All he could see, scattered about on the ground, were little gilt cylinders. Puzzled, he picked one up. It had three thin metal rings attached to it.
‘It’s for women to put on,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘It keeps the veil off the face.’
Seeing that Owen still did not understand – he knew little about technology and even less about female technology – he demonstrated by fitting it on himself. The cylinder went across the nose and the face veil was suspended from it. The rings held the cloth away from the nostrils and the mouth to allow passage of air.
Owen shrugged.
‘At least with this sort of stuff you don’t get much broken,’ he said.
‘It’s not the damage,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘It’s the – I’ll never feel the same again. We’ve lived here for twenty years. We thought we were liked by our neighbours. We thought we liked them. Now something like this happens!’
‘It’s not the neighbours, Guptos,’ said one of the bystanders quietly.
‘It’s someone in the Gamaliya,’ said the Copt bitterly. ‘Don’t tell me they came right across the city just to break up my shop!’
Owen went inside with him. At the back of the shop were some stairs which led to an upper storey. Some children, huddled on the stairs, peeped down at him.
‘It’s the effect on the kids,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘We’ve always let them run around, play with who they like. They’ve got friends … Now my wife is afraid to let them out of her sight.’