The Mamur Zapt and the Men Behind. Michael Pearce

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СКАЧАТЬ the moment he gets in office.’

      ‘The attack, at any rate, was genuine.’

      ‘Was he much hurt?’ asked Nuri, with pleasure rather than concern.

      ‘Bruised a little.’

      ‘Oh dear,’ said Nuri.

      ‘That, actually, was why I’ve come to see you. There have been a number of such attacks recently. I wanted to be sure that you were all right.’

      ‘Thank you. As you see, I am clinging to life with the skin of my teeth. How is Zeinab?’

      Zeinab was Nuri’s daughter and a more than close friend of Owen.

      ‘She is very well, thank you. She reinforces my concern.’

      ‘Have you any particular reason for concern?’

      ‘No. It is just that this could be a time for settling old scores.’

      A few years before, Nuri Pasha had been the Minister responsible for carrying through the prosecution and subsequent punishment of some villagers who had attacked a party of British Officers, wounding two and killing one. The punishment, on British insistence, had been exemplary; and Nuri had never been forgiven for it.

      Nuri shrugged his shoulders.

      ‘It is never not a time for settling old scores,’ he said. ‘That is one of the things one just has to get used to.’

      ‘Has anything come up?’

      ‘Not out of the ordinary.’

      ‘Threats?’

      ‘As always.’

      Nuri passed him a note. It read: ‘To the blood-sucking Nuri: The people have not forgotten. Your time is coming. Prepare, Nuri, prepare.’

      Owen passed it back.

      ‘You have been receiving notes like this for years.’

      ‘And ignored them,’ said Nuri, ‘confident in the assumption that the Egyptian is always more ready to tell what he is going to do than actually to do it.’

      ‘A reasonable assumption. In general. However, just at the moment I think I would avoid testing it.’

      ‘Have you a suggestion?’

      ‘How about a holiday? The Riviera? Paris?’

      Nuri, a total francophile, shook his head with genuine regret.

      ‘Circumstances, alas, keep me here.’

      Owen could guess what the circumstances were. Nuri was another of the ever-hopeful veteran politicians. Owen thought, however, that he might be disappointed this time, along with Ali Osman and Abdul Maher. He was too identified with the old regime. There was a need, after Patros, for someone who could satisfy the Nationalists—satisfy, without giving in to them.

      ‘Would you like a bodyguard?’

      ‘The police?’ said Nuri sceptically. ‘Thank you, no. I feel safer without. I have, in fact, taken certain steps already.’

      Nuri directed Owen’s attention to two ruffians lurking in the bougainvillaea behind him. They were Berbers from the south and armed from head to foot. They beamed at him cordially.

      ‘I have no fears should there be an attack on me at close quarters. And when I go out I take two Bedawin with me as well. They are excellent shots and used to people attempting to shoot them in the back. No, the only thing that worries me is a bomb.’

      ‘Surely there is no question of that?’

      ‘There have been rumours,’ said Nuri.

      There were indeed rumours. Cairo was full of them. Owen’s agents brought fresh ones in every day. They came from the Court, from the famous clubs—the Khedivial, frequented by Egyptians and foreigners, the Turf and the Sporting Club, frequented by the British—from the colleges and university, from the cafés and bazaars.

      The ones from the Moslem University of El Azhar and the colleges were the most alarming but it was there that the gap between rhetoric and reality was at its greatest. Or so Owen hoped.

      The ones from the Court were alarming in a different way, for they were almost exclusively concerned with the current manœuvring about the Khedive, with who had his favour, who didn’t, who might be in, who was definitely out. There seemed to be no sense of anything beyond the narrow confines of the Court, no awareness of the impact the delay was having on the country at large.

      The rumours from the Club were testimony to the general jitteriness. Owen tended to discount them, not because they were insignificant—in certain circumstances they might be very significant indeed—but because he felt he knew them already and understood them.

      It was the rumours from the cafés and bazaars that he gave most attention to, for they were a gauge of the temperature of the city. It was from them that he would learn if things were getting out of hand, if there was a danger of things boiling over.

      At the moment he did not get that feeling. The city was tense, certainly, and, given its normal volatility, there was plenty of potential for an explosion. In a city with over twenty different nationalities, at least five major religions apart from Islam, three principal languages and over a score of minor ones, four competing legal systems and, in effect, two Governments, the smallest spark could set off a major conflagration. Owen always had the feeling that he was sitting on a vast, unstable powder-keg.

      But he didn’t have that feeling more than usual. There was trouble in the city, yes, there were incidents, dozens of them, but he felt they would all fade away—in so far as they ever could fade away—if only the Khedive would stop his bloody dithering and form a new Government.

      Until that happened he just had to hold on and damp things down. On the whole he thought he would be able to manage that. The Pashas were no great problem. After the attack on Ali Osman they would all be prudently keeping out of sight. The demonstrations, the stone-throwing, the attacks on property, they could all be handled in the normal way.

      Even that following business was all right, so long as it stayed at following. It was only if it went beyond that that he would worry.

      As in the case of Fairclough.

      The attack on Fairclough, simply as crime, did not concern Owen. Investigating it was not his business. Nor was it, curiously, that of the police. In Egypt investigation of crimes was the responsibility of the Department of Prosecutions of the Ministry of Justice, the Parquet, as it was known.

      What concerned Owen as Mamur Zapt were the political aspects of the affair. The Mamur Zapt was roughly the equivalent of the Head of the Political Branch of the CID in England. Only roughly, because the post was unique to Cairo and included such things as responsibility for the Secret Police, a body of considerable importance to some previous Khedives when they were establishing their power but now significant only as an intelligence-gathering network.

      Fairclough as the near-victim of some private quarrel or dispute did not interest him; Fairclough as the near-victim of СКАЧАТЬ