Michael Pearce - The Snake Catcher’s Daughter

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 ofTombs? 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!”