Michael Pearce - The Snake Catcher’s Daughter

“Not quite right in the head?” said the woman.

“Permanently afflicted-”

“There’s nothing wrong with my head,” declared the woman firmly.

“Hush, woman!” said Osman unhappily.

“There may be with yours!”

“Don’t let it worry you, Amina,” said Owen.

“Amina?” said the woman.

Back at the Bab-el-Khalk, severely cast down, Osman was ready to confess. None of his female relatives, the mock-Amina-for whom, win or lose, he had committed himself to buying a necklace-least of all, unfortunately, was possessed or weak in the head. There never had been anyone possessed. It was just a story he had made up knowing the Bimbashi’s interest in such things as Zzarrs.

Even that, Owen pointed out, was untrue. He had not made the story up. Someone else had; and given it to him to use to entrap the Bimbashi.

Osman was silent. The worried lines on his forehead, however, indicated that he could see big trouble ahead.

“So who was it who spoke to you, Osman?” asked Owen pleasantly.

Osman took a deep breath.

“Effendi, I do not know.”

“What a pity you do not know!” said Owen. “It could have saved you a lot of distress.”

“A man spoke to me in the suk,” tried Osman bravely.

“Whom you did not know and whom you could not recognize if you saw him again.”

“That’s right, effendi,” said Osman thankfully.

“And out of the goodness of your heart you decided to entrap the Bimbashi?”

“Well, it wasn’t just out of the goodness-” admitted Osman.

“How much did they pay you?”

“One hundred piastres.”

Owen looked at him severely.

“I will give it back, effendi,” said Osman despondently.

“But how will you give it back, Osman, if you don’t know the man and would not recognize him if you saw him?”

“Perhaps I would recognize him,” said Osman, “and I might see him in the suk.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what I will do, Osman. You have raised your hand against the Bimbashi and that is a serious offence, for which I am going to send you to work in the gangs mending the levees along the river. However, I shall postpone your departure for a week or two and if meanwhile you should happen to see the man who spoke to you and are able to point him out to me I might be prepared to take things no further. Oh, and, Osman, no one need know that you had pointed him out to me.”

Osman looked at him thoughtfully.

Where, Owen asked himself, could he find out if another Zzarr was being held in the immediate future? It was not something he could discover through his usual intelligence sources. Why was that, he wondered? He suddenly realized that all his sources were to do with men. The Islamic world was severely bifurcated between a public world and a private world. The public world was occupied only by men. This was the world he knew and his agents were concerned with. It was a world rather like that of the army, in which all the players were men and all the initiatives were masculine.

Women belonged to the other world, the private world. They existed behind walls, behind closed doors. When they emerged into the public world, they carried the walls with them in the form of their black, shapeless garments and heavy veils. The Zzarr was part of that private world. Worse-from his point of view-it was part of a subdivision of that world, a subdivision from which men were excluded. There was another world within the private world which belonged to women only.

It would be no good asking his agents. They were all men. Nor could he ask the orderlies. The Zzarr was something women kept from their husbands. They might have a vague idea, but it would be at the level of rumour and gossip. He could not even go to Sheikh Musa. The religious authorities took care to keep their distance from such things. They were obliged to tolerate but could not recognize.

He remembered, a few months before, witnessing one such women’s ceremony. It had taken place in a mosque, now abandoned but to which women still came for their own special purposes. The purpose of this particular ceremony had been to establish whether a child would grow up dumb. Mothers came and held their babies to a special part of the wall. If they cried-and they usually did, their mothers made damned sure of that-prospects were favourable.

The religious authorities knew very well that such practices went on. They did not condone them but knew they could not stamp them out. They were part of an incredibly resilient female underworld.

About which Owen knew virtually nothing. That was all right, people were entitled to their secrets and he wasn’t one to go prying into them like McPhee. Mamur Zapt he might be, but he had a decent British sense of reticence.

On the other hand, he wanted to get in touch with the person who ran the Zzarr; the witch, or whatever she was. Witch! Owen winced. That would look good in the newspapers: Mamur Zapt out hunting for witches! He could write the editorials himself.

Yes, the fact was, he had a gap in the information system. His informants were all men. He needed to have some women.

But how could he find them? Women were kept well away from him, why, he could not think, and the only one he knew at all well was Zeinab. He could ask her, but she was not exactly a person he could employ as an agent. It wasn’t just that she would be certain to take a line of her own, never mind what the instructions were. The problem was that she was a member of Cairo’s social elite and had far more in common with sophisticated Parisiennes than with her sisters in the suk.

He could ask Georgiades’s Rosa, even though she was still only about fifteen. She was as sharp as a knife, an implement which she had made clear she was ready to use should her husband step out of line. Georgiades had been a changed man since his marriage. The trouble with Rosa, though, was that she was Greek. There was certainly a very strong Greek female culture. Unfortunately, it was not the same as the traditional one of the suks.

There was a nice girl he had recently met. In fact, she was the one he’d gone to the abandoned mosque to meet. The problem was that she was too nice. She was much too kind and gentle.

That could not be said of another of Owen’s acquaintances. That gipsy girl was just the sort of person he needed. Unfortunately, she had left town in a hurry a few weeks before, just ahead of the police.

No, it wouldn’t do. He would have to recruit women by the ordinary means. Nikos handled all that side. Nikos? Women? That wasn’t going to work. He would have to put aside the issue of recruiting women for the moment.

But what about the Zzarr? He mentioned it tentatively to Zeinab.

“I’ve no time for that superstitious stuff,” she said dismissively. “Women are never going to get anywhere while they go on believing that sort of rubbish.”

“Gareth,” said his friend, Paul, the ADC, “does the name Philipides mean anything to you?”

They were at a reception at the Abdin Palace. Owen, splendidly uniformed, had just mounted the grand staircase lined by the Khedival royal guard, even more splendidly uniformed and carrying lances. Owen did not greatly care for such occasions-for one thing, they served only soft drinks-but he was here at the express invitation of His Royal Highness the Khedive and one did not disregard such invitations. The British were punctilious in observing the forms of Khedival rule. Substance was another matter.

The Khedive, too, was punctilious over observance of the forms. They were all he had left.

“I think he does it just to provoke,” said Paul. “This evening, for instance: why so splendid an occasion just to mark the arrival of the Turkish ambassador?”

“Past relationships, I suppose,” said Owen. The Khedive had once been a vassal of the Sublime Porte and Egypt was still, in the view of Constantinople, part of the Ottoman Empire. “Past,” asked Paul, “or future?”