Michael Pearce - The Snake Catcher’s Daughter

One evening when Owen got home he found a girl in his bed.

“Hello!” he said. “What’s this?”

“I’m a present,” she said.

“Who from?”

“We can go into details later.”

“A member of the British Administration is not allowed to accept presents,” he said, stuffily.

And not altogether honestly. For the Mamur Zapt, Head of Cairo’s Secret Police, was not, strictly speaking, a member of the British Administration but a member of the Egyptian Administration; and whereas the British, under Cromer’s strait-laced regime had not been allowed to accept bribes, the Khedive’s servants had always taken a more relaxed view.

“All the world knows about your Zeinab,” said the girl, pouting.

Owen rather hoped that all the world did not know about Zeinab and was more than a little surprised that the girl did.

“Ah, yes, but she is not a present.”

“I don’t need to stay a present,” said the girl.

“Off you go!”

“Like this?” demanded the girl, pulling the sheet back. Underneath she was completely naked.

“If that’s the way you came.”

The girl, rather sulkily, rose from the bed and picked up a dress that was lying across a chair. A European dress, but was she European? Such questions were on the whole unprofitable in cosmopolitan Cairo. A Levantine, say, and a beautiful one.

Owen began to wonder if perhaps he should make more of an effort to get to the bottom of this attempt to bribe him. Bottom, as a matter of fact, was exactly what he was contemplating just at this moment…

“Oh yes?” said Zeinab belligerently when he told her.

“Oh yes?” said Garvin, the Commandant of the Cairo Police Force, sceptically.

“Oh yes?” said everyone in the bar when he happened to mention it. “What happened next?”

“She put on her veil and left,” said Owen with a firmness which did not altogether, unfortunately, dampen speculation. “Leaving her honour behind her?” suggested someone.

“I wouldn’t have thought so.”

Leaving behind her, actually, a small embroidered amulet, the sort of thing you could pick up in one of the bazaars. Inside it was a single quite respectably sized diamond. Perfume stayed on his fingers long after the girl was gone.

“So that is why you told everybody,” said his friend, Paul. Paul was ADC to the Consul-General and wise in the ways of the world; wise, at any rate, in the ways of protecting your back.

Owen nodded.

“People must always be attempting to bribe you,” observed Paul.

“Not so much now,” said Owen. “When I first came, certainly.”

He had been in post for nearly three years.

“And it has taken them all that time to find out?” said Paul, marvelling.

“That I couldn’t be bribed?”

“That you weren’t worth bribing.”

“Someone,” Owen pointed out, hurt, “has apparently still not found out.”

“Yes,” said Paul. “Odd, isn’t it?”

The next morning one of the orderlies came in great agitation.

“Effendi,” he said, “the Bimbashi’s donkey is not here.”

Owen laid down his pen.

“Someone’s stolen it?”

“No, no. It has not been here all morning. The Bimbashi has not come in.”

This was unusual. McPhee, the Deputy Commandant, always came in.

“A touch of malaria, perhaps,” said Owen, picking up his pen again. “Send someone to find out.”

A buzz of excited chatter outside his door told him when the someone returned.

“Well?”

“Effendi,” said the orderly, with a long face, “the Bimbashi’s not there.”

“He has not been there all night,” put in another of the orderlies.

“Hm!” What members of the Administration did in the night was their business and it was normally wisest not to inquire. McPhee, however, was not like that. He was very puritanical; some would say undeveloped. He was the sort of man who if he had been in England would have joined that strange new organization, the Boy Scouts. After some consideration, Owen went in to see Garvin.

Garvin, also, took it seriously.

“He’d have let us know if it was work, wouldn’t he?”

“It can hardly be play,” said Owen.

“He won’t be sleeping it off, certainly,” said Garvin. Owen thought that the remark was possibly directed at him.

“What I meant was, that he’s not one to let his private life interfere with his work,” he said, and then realized that sounded unnecessarily priggish. Garvin tended to have that effect on people.

“What was he doing yesterday?” asked Garvin. “Was it something he was likely to get knocked over the head doing?”

Apparently not. The office had been quiet all day. Indeed, it had been quiet all week. The weather, hot always, of course, had been exceptionally so for the last fortnight, which had brought almost all activity in Cairo, including crime, to a standstill.

“You’d better get people out looking for him,” said Garvin.

Owen didn’t like Garvin treating him as just another deputy. The Mamur Zapt reported-in form, of course-to the Khedive and it was only for convenience that Owen was lodged in the police headquarters at Bab-el-Khalk. However, he quite liked McPhee and wasn’t going to quibble.

Garvin, in fact, was genuinely concerned and wasn’t doing this just as an administrative power game.

“Get them all out,” he said. “They’ve got nothing better to do.”

It was now nearly noon and the sun was at its hottest, and this was therefore not the view of the ordinary policeman. If turned out now they would probably make for the nearest patch of shade.

Besides, what were they to look for? A body? There were thousands of places in Cairo where bodies might be lying and usually it was simplest to allow them to declare their presence later-in the heat it would not be much later-by their smell. There was, however, an easier solution.

“You all know the Bimbashi’s donkey,” said Owen. “Find it.”

“Look for a donkey?” expostulated Nikos, his Official Clerk. “You can’t have the whole Police Force out looking for a donkey!”

“Why not?”

“It sounds bad. Have you thought how it would look in the pages of Al-Lewa?”

Owen had not. He could just imagine, though, what the Nationalist press would make of it. The newspapers would be full of it for weeks. He stuck doggedly, however, to his guns. Nikos changed tack.

“How much are you offering for information?” he asked practically.

“It’s McPhee, after all.”

“Five pounds?”

“Good God, no!” said Owen, shocked. “We’d have the whole city bringing us donkeys if we offered that. One pound Egyptian.”

“I thought, as it was an Englishman-” suggested Nikos.

“One-fifty.”

“And in the police-”

“Two pounds,” said Owen. “We’ll make it two pounds. That is my limit.”

“It ought to be enough,” said Nikos, who believed in value for money.

Word went out to the bazaars by methods which only Nikos knew and Owen sat down to await results. They came by nightfall.

“What the hell is this?” said Garvin.

Owen explained.

“It’s like a bloody donkey market,” said Garvin.

Owen went down into the courtyard to sort things out. Nikos watched with interest. Believing that decisions should be taken where knowledge lay, which certainly wasn’t at the top, Owen enlisted the aid of the orderlies, whom he stationed at the entrance to the courtyard.

“You know the Bimbashi’s donkey,” he said. “All the others are to be turned away.”

Within an hour the usual torpor of the Bab-el-Khalk was restored.